THE RECENT PAST

The Nuragic culture and the Shardana

The Beaker people were traders, and while Beaker people in different places had many things in common, including the characteristic shape of much of their pottery, after which they were named, they had very different cultural and racial characteristics in different places.  For instance, the Beaker people in North Africa, like most Beakers, tended to be wealthy, and their wealth was based on mercantile trading (transporting goods by ship) as well as rich harvests of grain, and they were attracted to Sardinia by the rich silver mines on the Island.

At first the Beaker People had been foreigners in Sardinia, but within a generation or two there was no way to distinguish between Beakers and other Sardinians except that Beakers were usually traders, and in general wealthier.  Like all Sardinians they consulted with priests who lived and carried out their duties at the Nuraghe towers that dotted the Island.  During the day the priests, advised people  about every aspect of their lives, and at night they observed the positions and movements of the stars, looking for omens that could inform their advice.

The ship-owning merchants on Sardinia did very well, but then there was a spate of mutinies abord Nuragic ships, and the homesick mutineers inevitably returned home to raid Sardinian ports where they commandeer poorly guarded ships.  The shipowners consulted with priests at the Nuraghe and then responded by hiring mercenaries to guard the ships.  These marine mercenaries were supplied with horned helmets and big round shields to distinguish them from the bandits and this worked very well for awhile until some of the mercenaries commandeered a flotilla of ships and set sail for distant shores.

The Sardinian marines who had stolen the ships were known to the Egyptians as the Shardana, and after engaging the Shardana in battle the Egyptians themselves hired the Shardana to guard their harbors.

The Shardana were not the only seamen who turned to piracy and took to raiding the coasts of the the eastern Mediterranean Sea.  In particular experienced seamen who returned to Crete after long voyages, and being unemployed, sometimes joined together, stole ships, ad took to Piracy.  When the owners of the ships responded by keeping their ships in the harbor and hiring the Shardana to guard their ships the Pirates took to raiding the shoreline, and the richest shoreline was at Mycenae.

Meanwhile, most of the seaborne mercenaries back home on Sardinia continued to guard merchant ships for wealthy shipowners, but the Sardinian elites' long period of prosperity gradually came to an end as more Mercenaries began to steal ships and turn to piracy.  Eventually, Carthaginians invaded Sardinia and occupied part of the island, and more Sardinians fled to the mainland as their prosperity evaporated.

After a series of wars between Carthage and Rome, the latter took over the entire island, and that was the final end of the Nuragic culture, as such.

Incantations, ceremonies and religious prohibitions

Archaeologists have had a hard time explaining how Sardinians managed to be so expert in so many things, even though they used no written language.  In this regard we should note that they must have brought much of their knowledge from the Middle East.  Moreover, they must have learned about ship construction from both the Minoans and the Beaker people, and the Maritime Beaker people were expert long-distance traders.

Moreover. they were extremely superstitious people.  This might be viewed by modern people as a handicap, because their superstitions made them avoid changes in procedure or use of new methods.  For them, everything was magic, and the slightest deviation could interfere with the magic, but there was another side to the coin.  Accompanying every action with an incantation and considering every action to be a ceremony would ensure that no detail is amiss.  Moreover, such an approach also encouraged the practitioner to rehearse his procedures to ensure that he makes no mistakes when it comes to actual performance.  Thus, serendipity played no part in performance, and this prevented new inventions and discoveries from occurring.  But attention to detail ensured perfect preservation of knowledge and skills, and perfect performance.

Based on the example of the Nuragic Culture, we can see how belief in magic has been key to the success of hominins from the start.  Belief in magic is not just a biproduct of an overactive imagination, but a strategy for survival, and it was probably a factor in the survival of hominins from the very beginning, when teaching and learning behaviors became our specialty.

Contrary to what we may think, the specialty of our genus and species is not inventiveness.  For instance, chimpanzees rival us and may surpass us in inventiveness.  If you doubt that, take a look at a chimpanzee's nest in a tree -- they build a new one every night, and each nest is a new invention because no two trees are alike.  (This is not an inborne behavior, like a spider building a web.)

The problem is that  chimpanzees are often unable to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next -- a chimpanzee will not copy another chimp's actions, or a human being's actions, unless he can see a reason for doing so, whereas a human being often will, regardless of whether he can perceive an advantage in doing so.  This is what I call a learning behavior.

Other things that prevent chimpanzees from creating a body of knowledge are that their memories are too poor and their lives are too short.  And of course they lack a capability for language, which, along with teaching and learning behaviors, can transmit knowledge from one individual to another and from one generation to the next.

Homecoming at Mycenae, revolt on Crete

According to legend the Greeks built a wooden horse in which a team of Greek warriors were concealed.  The Trojans took the horse into the city, and The heroes who emerged from the horse at night opened the gates of the city.  It was all over.

That isn't exactly how it happened.  The whole region was in the midst of a drought, and there was insufficient food in the city.  Under these conditions the defenses gave way and the city was sacked.  It was all over, and nobody had planned for it.

Troy had been the richest city in Anatolia -- it had collected a toll on every ship that passed between the eastern Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.  Consequently, transport of the booty took precedence, and the Mycenaean army had to return home in small boats, as we see in the story of the Odyssey.

The returning soldiers, returning in their small boats naturally expected a glorious and triumphal homecoming.  But instead, they returned to silence and starvation.  Mycenae was also in the midst of a drought.  Especially with the homecoming of the troops, there was no food to be found.

The returning veterans knew what to do:  They scoured the countryside for food, as they had done throughout their years in the countryside around Troy.  This meant that tax collectors of Mycenae were unable to collect taxes in the form of foods, and the entire population was soon starving.  As in Troy. defenses gave way amid the shortage of supplies, and starving people streamed into the inner city and sacked it.

The drought lasted so long that Mycenae never recovered, and the palace complex continued to deteriorate because taxes could not be collected.  Ultimately the palace complex itself became no better than a small village, and the Mycenaean world, deprived of its titular head, fell apart into its constituent parts.

Drought conditions had also come to Crete and to other islands of the Aegean Sea, and this had led to rebellion and refusal to pay taxes.  It also prompted Cretans, who had a long maritime and seagoing tradition, to start building a fleet of fast, maneuverable boats that were designed for naval combat, and to set sail for distant places where conditions might be better.  Egyptians called the people who manned these boats "Peleset"

Since the Linear B script had been in use only on Crete and in Mycenae itself, the Mycenaean world entered into a dark age for the next two or three hundred years, until a new written form of the Greek language emerged, based on the Greek alphabet.

When this dark age comes to an end we find Greeks again fully in charge on Crete, but by that time Cretans had become Greeks.  Moreover, the linguistic switch had taken place throughout the Aegean Sea region.

Collapse of the Hittite Empire and the rise and fall of Israel

While the climate was drier than usual around the time of the Trojan war, clear across the Mediterranean, from the Iberian Peninsula to Anatolia, drought was extreme in central and southern Anatolia.  In those regions it was generally so dry that areas that had previously been farmed were good only for grazing livestock.  Livestock herders cannot be effectively taxed, and Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire was abandoned by the royal family and the elite.  By the time more normal climatic conditions returned the Hittite empire had been replaced by another regime whose power and wealth was based mainly on the herding of livestock.

They bever succeeded in breaching the city walls, but in the course of laying siege to the city and spending many years in the heart of the Hittite Empire.  Indeed, they never really departed from the scene, but simply established themselves in that region, and eventually became part of an alliance of peoples, the Phrygians, who replace the Hittite Empire.

The Phoenicians, the Philistines, and the rise and fall of Israel

The Phoenician city-states at that time were simply the northernmost of the Canaanite city-states, but these northern city states rose in importance with the destruction of the Mycenaean kingdoms and the Hittite Empire, and became the major mercantile power in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Meanwhile, the Peleset (the Cretan pirates) were defeated in battle with the Egyptians, who were in control of the southern Canaanite city-states, but settled in the region anywhere, and eventually gained control of the entire coastal region.  The Israelites knew them as the Philistines.  Meanwhile, the Sardinian pirates (the Shardana) founded the Kingdom of Hazor, somewhat further north along the Levantine coast.  Hazor was later defeated by Hebrew dissidents led by Deborah.

Subsequently the Phoenicians founded a string of outposts to resupply their merchant ships and facilitate trade throughout the Mediterranean Sea.  Incidentally, they invented a script (itself based on an obscure Sinaitic script) which inspired Syriac script, Arabic script and the Greek alphabet that eventually replaced forgotten Linear B script.

Again and again the Hebrews struggled to be masters of their own fate, but  they were frustrated by a series of conquering empires, including the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Roman Empire.

The Etruscans

At the same time that various cultures were developing on Sardinia, ending with the Nuragic culture, other cultural developments were occurring on the Italian Peninsula, just across the water to the east.  Among these cultures was the Villanova culture, which was very much like the Nuragic culture with respect to interest in looking for omens of every kind, including those based on movements of the stars.  This similarity between the Villanova culture and the Nuragic culture probably points to cross-cultivation between the two cultures and/or a migration of people from one to the other.

Then, just about the time that Carthaginians took over part of Sardinia, the Etruscan culture developed out of the Villanova culture.

The Etruscan civilization did not have a unitary government, but consisted of a number of city states, and one of those city states, perhaps attracted by salt mines near the mouth of the Tiber River, made the mistake of subjugating Romans to their rule and teaching them the arts of war and shipbuilding.  Subsequently, the Romans shook off their Etruscan king and set to work at conquering Etruscan city states that were so busy fighting each other that they neglected to deal with the upstart Romans.  The Romans conquered and sacked Etruscan city states until all of Etruria came to accept the superiority of Rome.

The Romans obviously despised the Etruscans, whose women ruled their households and whose men often spent their nights observing the stars and spent days and nights looking for omens of every kind.  Etruscan men were excellent seafarers, but Romans made better husbands, so Etruscan women were probably happy when Romans came marching into their cities and took over.

Tombstones are virtually the only place where the Etruscan language can be found today, so linguists are reduced to reading tombstones, and know very little about the language -- in spite of the fact that Etruscans had taught the Romans to read and write.

One peculiarity about the study of the Etruscan language is that the word for "father" does not appear on tombstones, and linguists do not know what it was.  This avoidance of the word that identifies a genetic father may be related to the deeply superstitious nature of the Etruscans and also to the proclivity of Etruscan men for going off to sea.  In other words, if a man is identified as a child's father, he may go off to sea -- such a belief might lead people to speak the word only in whispers, and this habit of avoidance could then become a sort of culturally sanctioned obsessive-compulsive syndrome.

When Romans came marching into Etruria, the Etruscan language quickly disappeared, no doubt because the Romans made Etruscans ashamed of their own language.  Since it was shameful to use the Etruscan language in the presence of Romans, and Romans were everywhere, women no doubt avoided teaching any fragment of the language to their children, and perhaps children were punished for using the language.

Etruscans had, at least early on, considered Romans to be barbarians, and Romans had perhaps accepted that judgement, and this enabled the Romans to learn many things from the Etruscans, including the engineering skills needed for the construction of arches and other structures and about military tactics, weaponry and military organization.  Even after the Roman conquest of Etruria the Romans continued to consult with Etruscans, on occasion, particularly with regard to divination and the interpretation of omens -- Etruscan priests were quite knowledgeable about such things.

Reconstructing grammar from tombstones

As the Etruscans became assimilated to Roman customs and adopted the language of the conquerors, they quickly forgot their own language.  One if the few places where the Etruscan language can still be found is tombstones.  One peculiarity of these inscriptions is their repetitious nature.  Words, phrases and sounds are repeated, and the repetition of word endings, representing the sounds with which the words end, is making it very difficult for linguists to decipher the language, because word ending are basic to the grammatical structure of the language, and Etruscans who composed the text on the tombstones often changed the word endings so as to come up with a string of like word endings.  These endings are often ungrammatical, but the linguists are so unfamiliar with the language that they don't know which endings are grammatically correct and which are not.

There may be some connection between the repetitious nature of tombstone texts, including repeating word endings, and the exotic pronunciations and styles that priests often use when performing their ceremonies.

As with Egyptian tombs, Etruscan tomb decorations often seem to express desires for the afterlife.  For instance, banqueting scenes were often painted on the walls of tombs, and side-by-side figures were sometimes carved in a sarcophagus that contained only one body.  The former may have indicated a man's desire to party with his friends, and the latter might have reflected a woman's desire to be rejoined with her husband in the afterlife.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

While the Romans were busy extinguishing almost every vestige of the originally superior Etruscan culture, Nebuchadnezzar was busy trying to extinguish the Jewish culture by transporting their elite to Babylonia, where thee Jews found an ancient Ziggurat that was so overgrown with weeds that the Jews called it the "Hanging Gardens" of Babylon, but instead of extinguishing the Jewish culture the simply transformed it and jump-started the Diaspora.

The Diaspora, which was destined to be accompanied by a full flowering of a radical transformation of Jewish culture, while it was jump-started by the Babylonian Exile, did not by any means mark the end of the old culture of sacrifice that was perhaps rooted in the sacrificial rites performed by the Egyptians.  Rather, the two Jewish cultures existed side by side as the temple was rebuilt again and again.  What really was the death knell of the old sacrificial culture was the success of the Diaspora, along with Romanization of the old sacrificial culture.  And let us not overlook the transformation on top of a transformation that was Christianity.

Eventually, Constantine adopted a Christian symbol on the shields of his warriors, and converted to Christianity himself.  And as the eastern half of the Roman Empir flourished under the banner of Christianity the western half declined as it was overrun again and again by "barbarians".

The Vandals had sacked Rome and then moved south through Spain to northern Africa.  And since northern Africa had been the breadbasket of Rome in earlier times the first thing that Justinian did when he set about to reclaim the western half of the Empire was to take back northern Africa from the Vandals.  But when he did so, he brought the Justinian Plague to Africa, and while the Romans were hard hit by the Justinian Plague, the Bantus of Africa were perhaps hit even harder.

The Bantu competitive edge

Very early fleets of merchant ships were based in Taiwan and the Philippines  -- specializing in carrying raw jade that was mined in Taiwan and mostly processed in the Philippines.  Later merchant fleets were based in Island Southeast Asia, and specialized in a spice trade with Sri Lanka and southern India.  Austronesian merchant ships also began sailing clear across to Africa.  This is how Africans obtained Austronesian, Southeast Asian and South Asian crops that grew well in parts of Africa.  The growing of these and other crops spread across Africa, and eventually to the Bantus.

The Bantus originally occupied only the southwestern corner of present-day Cameroon, near the present-day Nigerian border, but today about half of the people in sub-Saharan Africa speak Bantu languages, all descended from the language spoken by these ancestral people.  What was their competitive edge?

We might point to a confluence of farm crops, climate, agricultural knowledge, and iron-age technology, but their real competitive edge was based on language and communication:  The language that they spoke was superior to other languages of the time, at least in Africa, and their storytelling traditions and other aspects of everyday communication.  Unlike most contemporary peoples their storytelling focused on the present and future, rather than on the past.

Other cultural aspects of the Bantus were also superior:  their culturally based teaching and learning behaviors and cultural habits that enabled them to plan and execute the social and political structures of their tribes.  We ourselves should learn from them to control our destiny in these ways.

The Bantu expansion

 The original Bantus came into possession of three very important food plants (African yams, bananas and millet) about 3,500 years ago and quickly transitioned from a hunter-gatherer way of life to a settled life of cultivating those crops and others.

By a stroke of luck, perhaps, they came into contact with early pioneers of the African Iron Age, which seems to have been concurrent with the Iron Age in Anatolia, and they quickly learned to smelt iron and pound wrought iron into tools and weapons.  These skills were important, because iron tools were useful in loosening the soil so crops could be planted, in digging out weeds that robbed the crops of moisture, and in harvesting yams and other crops, as well as in clearing trees from land to make way for crops.

Fed by the high-energy crops that they grew, the Bantu population grew rapidly and spread first to the west, into present-day Nigeria and then northward along the course of the Niger River.  As they moved north they came into savanna country where yams and bananas did not grow well, but millet grew very well, and their population kept expanding.in that otherwise inhospitable region.

But other Bantus spread south, into the jungles of Equatorial Africa, where yams and bananas grew well if land was first cleared.  After crossing the jungles some of the Bantus continued south, and reached the Upper Zambezi Valley about 2,200 years ago, while others moved westward and arrived in eastern Africa about 2,000 years ago, where yams and bananas did not grow well but millet grew very well.

Bantu populations continued to expand in these various areas for another 500 years, during which time they came into contact with animal herders who had migrated from further north and come into contact with the indigenous Khoisan people of the region, who were hunter-gatherers.  These Khoisan people had controlled all of southern Africa at the time, but the animal herders had pushed them off their land, and forced them to move further south.

But the Bantus got along fine with the animal herders, and traded with them, exchanging root crops, iron tools, salt and other things that they obtained from their extensive trade network for meat, hides and other animal products.  Perhaps the Bantus avoided selling them their their best weaponry -- blades of hardened steel that were stiff and would hold a keen edge.

​

But then tragedy struck the Bantus -- the Justinian Plague.

Trouble in Africa and recovery of the Bantus

​​

When grain shipments to feed Roman soldiers arrived at African ports, the grain was accompanied by rats, fleas and bubonic plague. The plague was then passed on to flees that infested rats that were native to Africa, and spread throughout Africa, and especially to Bantu villages. The hunter-gatherers of Africa were less affected because they were less inclined to store food in their homes.

Like the population of the Roman Empire at that time, the Bantus were hard hit, because this was the first time they had been exposed to bubonic plague, and many villages were abandoned after the plague wiped out most of the people.  However, the Bantus eventually recovered, and as their populations again started expanding they increasingly came into contact with the Khoisan hunter-gatherers of southern Africa whose linguistic and genetic roots are deeper than those of any other people anywhere.  This is because of the long period of relative stability in southern Africa, going back hundreds of thousands of years.  These ancient people have click consonants in their speech which might have originated as imitations of the percussive signals that once enabled Homo sapiens hunting groups to communicate with each other.

By the way, modern Americans sometimes use simple signals reminiscent of the earliest percussive signals.  For instance, two short groans with the mouth closed and beginning with stops can signal dismay, but if the second groan begins with an aspiration, it signals confirmation.  "Oh, oh" signals that something has gone awry but "Oh ho!" signals discovery.  "Ah ha!" signals enlightenment and "Oh!" signals surprise.  Warnings and emergencies are signaled in a variety of ways.

The Bantus traded iron products for ivory, meat, hides and other resources that could be obtained by the Khoisan, intermarried with the Khoisan, and in some cases integrated some click consonants  into their own languages.  But as Bantu populations kept growing some Khoisan were forced to abandon their hunting grounds and retreat to hilly or drier areas that were less suitable for agriculture.

The Khoisan sometimes responded by raiding Bantu villages, and the Bantus responded in kind, and sometimes, as hostilities escalated, the Khoisan would join together in alliances to force the Bantus to abandon their villages.  In response to these escalations, Bantu blacksmiths began to fashion more effective weapons to counter the long spears of the Khoisan warriors.

The Bantus no longer used wrought iron to produce knives for their own use -- wrought iron blades would not hold a sharp edge, and could easily bend and break.  Instead, they used blades of carbonized steel that were stiff and would hold an edge.  After some experimentation the blacksmiths came up with a weapon design based on such a blade, by attaching the blade to the end of a stick of hardwood.  This weapon was known as an assegai. named after the hardwood that was used in its construction.

The long spears of the Khoisan warriors were no match for the assegai, except on hilly ground (which was usually unsuitable for agriculture), and the Khoisan were forced to retire to dry and hilly lands to the north and west of their favorite hunting grounds.

The final end of the Roman Empire

While the Bantus were busy taking over Africa the Arabs were busy taking over the Middle East, and while not all Arabs today are descendants of the Arabs who had come out of Arabia on a mission to convert the world to the Muslim religion, they did manage to convert much of the Middle East, south Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as parts of Africa.  Moreover, they conquered Anatolia and eventually Constantinople itself, which had been at the heart of the Roman Empire for over a thousand years.

But it could be argued that this wasn't really the end of the Roman Empire -- it had simply transformed it into a Muslim Empire which was, again, centered in Constantinople (renamed Istanbul).  What really marked the demise of the Roman Empire was World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire, the fourth iteration of the original Roman Empire, headed by the Roman Republic, gave way successively to rule by pagan Roman Emperors, then by Christian Roman Emperors, and finally to Muslim rulers who styled themselves as sultans.  This new version of the Roman empire came to an end after it joined in an alliance with Germany and the Austro Hungarian Empire against France, England, America and of course Russia.  (Germany, Russia and Austria had erased Poland from the map by dividing it among themselves in unequal parts but it was resurrected after World War I.)

Although the Chinese Empire struggled on until it was finally replaced by People's Republic of China, the Ottoman Empire (if I may contradict myself) and the Austro Hungarian Empire were the last of the great Empires of the Western World.  After that, the nation states of Europe were all unitary entities, except for relatively tiny Switzerland, which continued its own unique organization into cantons -- ironically, the Swiss had Napoleon to thank for that.  Even the Soviet Union and the United States were named as if they were unions of states but the inoperative nature of their names was demonstrated by the outcomes of their respective civil wars.