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Studying the demise of historic civilisations

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Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#221

Post by mannykannot »

dalbasal wrote: post #132
bilbo0s wrote: post #32

Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? Serious question. It just seems that a lot of entries on this list are actually part of the same civilization. In the same way that I would consider the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire to be really all a part of the same Western Civilization. But maybe my thinking is totall…

No matter how you define or name these things, your definitions will still be arbitrary. Polity. Empire. Civilization. It's like defining species, or musicals genres. There's obviously a there there, but it's not discreet. Civilization or polity don't really have discrete meanings or beginning/end dates. Did Cyrus' civilization really end when Alexander beat the Persian imperial armies? Most of the political structur…

While the physical and temporal scope of a particular empire, and the civilization it ruled over, have sometimes been co-extensive, that does not mean that the definitions are arbitrary or interchangeable. My understanding is that 'civilization' refers to a social organization in which populations, economic and political activity are concentrated in cities, and is independent of which political entity is running the show. In ancient times, civilization did come and go in various regions (e.g. the Indus valley and the Amazon basin), while in the last thousand years, empires have come and gone while the civilizations they fought over have endured.

To be clear, the world did not switch uniformly from one mode to the other. In the Nile and Yangtze valleys, for example, civilization has persisted through several millennia of political change. Cyrus' empire did end with Alexander's invasion, but the underlying civilization of the region remained.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#222

Post by agent008t »

coldtea wrote: post #185
remarkEon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...it would make a difference. It sure would. If I wanted to design a system to throw society into abject chaos, basically permanently, I can’t think of a better way than a rule of “make it impossible to build something for your children”. That idea is anti-family, it’s anti-civil-society, and it’s anti-civilization.

> That idea is anti-family, it’s anti-civil-society, and it’s anti-civilization. As if family is not about loving and preparing your kids for life (and being good citizens etc), but padding their bank accounts so they don't have to work...

If you do the latter, your family will not be wealthy within a few generations, just by dividing the wealth among your children.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#223

Post by hutzlibu »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #212
remarkEon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...it would make a difference. It sure would. If I wanted to design a system to throw society into abject chaos, basically permanently, I can’t think of a better way than a rule of “make it impossible to build something for your children”. That idea is anti-family, it’s anti-civil-society, and it’s anti-civilization.

Inequality fueled the French revolution. Getting rid of aristocracy led to modern democracies. Most European countries have steep inheritance taxes to prevent going back to oligarchy.

"Most European countries have steep inheritance taxes to prevent going back to oligarchy."

Which has the problem of course, that the really rich have ways of not beeing affected by those laws too much. Which is not too hard, when the tax-laws are ridiciously complicated with many exceptions for good connected lawyers and many countries on this planet who welcome any people and money as long as they get a small share.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#224

Post by agent008t »

marssaxman wrote: post #31
glerk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point of accumulating wealth over this short life if I can’t leave anything to my children?

What is the point of accumulating wealth over this short life?

For one, society benefits from it.

You generally get wealthy by providing goods and services to others. The more you satisfy people's wants and needs, the wealthier you get. The wealth means that these people now owe you.

If you accumulate wealth instead of consuming it, you never take them up on it. You are basically acting altruistically - instead you use their IOUs to provide even more goods and services for others (not yourself) by managing your wealth instead of consuming!

I think it is actually an amazing feature of our civilisation. Wealthy people generally don't use their wealth to build massive monuments to themselves - they tend to invest it into economically productive enterprises that make society wealthier overall.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#225

Post by scottLobster »

Mbioguy wrote: post #193
retsibsi wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country... Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious pr…

This. I'm gonna cut to the chase: that line is probably the most fascist thing I'm going to read all day, and excepting you, Hacker News has failed to call it out. This idea that war can somehow mythically rejuvenate the ethos or spirit of a country isn't unique to fascism though. It was also common in the jingoist imperial western european powers, and partly used as justification for aggression against neighbors and…

I think you're straw manning a bit there. It's not illogical to say that severe national challenges help rejuvenate society in the long run. You can even see it locally when the power goes out for a few days in a hurricane, and all of a sudden neighbors who barely knew each other for 10 years are pooling resources and talking.

War is horrific in the short term, but everyone on this site has benefited from it in some form. Much of the internet came out of military research, as did flight, as did satellites, as did many nautical advances, the list goes on.

Whether those benefits are worth it and on what scale could be the subject of a dissertation, but we don't want to become the Eloi any more than we want to be the Morlocks.

Just because the concept can be twisted into pointless war mongering by fascists doesn't make it less true. For my part I think climate change alone is going to provide enough national challenges.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#226

Post by dagaci »

dalbasal wrote: post #218
dagaci wrote: post #194

Many of these great "empires" were simply extended looting machines, once they ran out of looting opportunities they collapsed in the same way that a Ponzi collapses when it run out of new "investors". While things were good, it was all golden, glitter and glam, and many tall buildings. Loot of course takes many forms, gold, silvers, the work of serfs, the work of slaves, monopolies on trade routes, monopolies on tra…

The bronze age civilisations of the middle east (Akkad, Hati, Egypt) didn't follow this pattern. Egypt, for example, was a Nile + delta empire for most of the three kingdoms/periods. It's only towards the end of the new Kingdom that they expanded into nearby Canaan, and fought frontier wars against hittites along the Phoenician coast (eg, the famous battle of kadesh). Rome definitely did have an expansion imperative.…

Egyptian Civilization was sustained because of the Nile delta productivity. Literally all the nutrients gathered over 1/4 of the of the African continent are deposited nowhere else along the river route but in Nile delta, this unique phenomenon of nature meant this area is extremely resilient and can withstand any level of exploitation.

Egyptian Civilization continued for over 3000 years (what we know about) which is ridiculous.

Egyptian Civilization lasted so long only because of the Delta productivity and ended when Greek and Roman conquest resulted in Egyptian grains being wholesale shipped northward out of the country by force ending the trade southward probably causing famine, and destroying the internal economy and culture which was centered there.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#227

Post by dak1 »

hungryhobo wrote: post #46
dak1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The script has changed considerably over time between different dynasties, and different areas have had mutually unintelligible languages, even if sharing similar script. For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese, and Korean and Vietnamese both used to use Chinese characters, but they are all separate languages. Similarly, numerous "dialects" in China are less mutually intelligible than many different We…

honestly this is just not?true. the Chinese script have evolved, but one can still look at inscriptions from thousands of years ago and understand it. it might be hard for people to understand different dialects in China but they all use the same writing system, standardized in the Qin dynasty. Same with the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean. A native Chinese speaker would have little problem reading…

That's no different than saying the English alphabet is just a modified version of the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, and that with a dictionary and a bit of training you could use that too.

'ȝ' becomes 'g', 'Ð' becomes 'D', and we still use 'æ' today, which is also a rune, and they even used 'W'!

Also, the number of characters in Chinese has also drastically changed over time. So while many characters have a 1:1 lineage, far more characters simply did not exist 1 or 2 thousand years ago.

The only commonality is that they are based on pictographs and have a traceable etymology, although that's true for all languages.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#228

Post by aikah »

ptah wrote: post #160
bilbo0s wrote: post #32

Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? Serious question. It just seems that a lot of entries on this list are actually part of the same civilization. In the same way that I would consider the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire to be really all a part of the same Western Civilization. But maybe my thinking is totall…

"Western civilization" is not a useful concept so is falling out of use

It's called the "west" in opposition to the eastern block during the cold war. And yes it's a useful concept because it exists and is well defined.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#229

Post by dalbasal »

mannykannot wrote: post #221
dalbasal wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter how you define or name these things, your definitions will still be arbitrary. Polity. Empire. Civilization. It's like defining species, or musicals genres. There's obviously a there there, but it's not discreet. Civilization or polity don't really have discrete meanings or beginning/end dates. Did Cyrus' civilization really end when Alexander beat the Persian imperial armies? Most of the political structur…

While the physical and temporal scope of a particular empire, and the civilization it ruled over, have sometimes been co-extensive, that does not mean that the definitions are arbitrary or interchangeable. My understanding is that 'civilization' refers to a social organization in which populations, economic and political activity are concentrated in cities, and is independent of which political entity is running the…

Take turkey....

Did the Byzantine/Roman civilization end when the ottomans took over? Social organization changed, but not wholesale. social organization in which populations, Economic and political activity continued, concentrated in cities. Greek remained a major language, as did many Greek laws.

Incidentally, why was Rome/Byzantine civilization Greek speaking in anatolia? Because it had been Hellenised long before Rome conquered it. ..and language isn't everything. Before the Greeks were others, notably the hittites, a great civilization.

What I mean by arbitrary is that whether your chart shows continuity of a civilisation or not depends on how you define the term. One chart will show continuity from the bronze age to the present (or maybe until 1908). You could make that case. The cities mostly remaining occupied and the political organization probably had a lot of continuity. Another chart (like this one) will have Hittite, Hellenic, greco-roman, Byzantine, ottoman, etc. Civilisations lined up one after the other

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#230

Post by viach »

dagaci wrote: post #194

Many of these great "empires" were simply extended looting machines, once they ran out of looting opportunities they collapsed in the same way that a Ponzi collapses when it run out of new "investors". While things were good, it was all golden, glitter and glam, and many tall buildings. Loot of course takes many forms, gold, silvers, the work of serfs, the work of slaves, monopolies on trade routes, monopolies on tra…

>> Loot of course takes many forms, gold, silvers, the work of serfs, the work of slaves

Gas, oil, fresh air, ...

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