David Reich Southern Arc Paper Abstract

How are pastoralists more "flexible" than agriculturalists?

They can move out of their homeland or organise military campaigns more easily than agriculturalists, which being bound to their soil and harvests. In Mesopotamia, we have the description of such a situation, which the people of Tripolye-Cucuteni experienced in Eastern Europe as well, in all likelihood: At first the pastoralist tribals came to burn the fields down and take the crops and animals. Whenever the Sumerians came with their army, they came too late. The damage was done, and the raiders were gone. The borderzone clans did so for many years, until the defense and supply of the inhabitants was completely ruined. In the end, they just needed to take the what remained, physically and mentally they were broken already.

If you think about the huge settlements of Tripolye-Cucuteni, they were very hard to storm by any sort of raiding party, even larger alliances of steppe warriors. But they always had allies on the steppe, which kind of protected their front yard. When the pressure from the East pushed their allies into their territory or away, they had to defend on the steppe, and that was hard to do. Because the enemy was more mobile and quicker. The pastoralists can hurt the farmers all day, but the armies of the farmers can't do the same as easily.
And even in a worst case scenario, the pastoralists can flee with their flocks, but the farmers can't.

Even worse than regular farming is civilisation, because the more complex a structure, the harder it deals with damage and downgrading. Like what do people of an urban centre do, if the farmers from around their city being captured and killed, or fled, or turned against them? The tribal, pastoralist warrior can just move on, doing what he did before, but the urban people mostly died.

So the disadvantage the farmer already got, being multiplied by "civilisation" and urban settlement. It's only an advantage if it can scale up or create advantages which the more simple, small scale and clan based groups can't copy. Like top-level, next-level military organisation and equipment. But on a smaller scale, once the organised, large scale resistance of a state being broken, the local inhabitants of a civilisation being usually just easy prey for tribal people.

This is also why in the Balkans Vlachs and Albanians did fairly well after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but other Romanised people did not.

The pattern in Mesopotamia and Tripolye-Cucuteni being pretty similar. They tribal groups could have many lost battles and setbacks, but the more settled down and civilised groups just one. One bigger lost battle or setback and they were done. Because there is no way to come back once hte complex structures, the fields and harvest being lost. The fortified centres on their own are not defensible without supplies.
 
The wheel was mosta likely invented in Mesopotamia and used first of all in the making of pottery.

I don't know where the wheel and iron metallurgy were invented or how they came into use of the Hittites.

In terms of wheels- wagons- iron use on the steppe; and in burial kurgans, both are found in Yamnaya and Afanasievo and both share R1b-Z2108+

800px-Yamnaya-related_migrations.jpg
 
I don't know where the wheel and iron metallurgy were invented or how they came into use of the Hittites.

In terms of wheels- wagons- iron use on the steppe; and in burial kurgans, both are found in Yamnaya and Afanasievo and both share R1b-Z2108+

800px-Yamnaya-related_migrations.jpg

There are cultures which copy and those which invent. That's true even today. Yamnaya people were pretty good at copying. As I said, I know of no invention which benefitted the world for which they can be given credit except the domestication of the horse and using wagons to follow their herds to new pastures.

How can you possibly compare that to the accomplishments which came out of the Near East?

I'm not saying that to insult the steppe peoples; I have their genes in my body too, and our family y and mtDna are steppe derived.

It's just fact. I don't argue with facts because the truth is inconvenient in some way. If, in prosecuting a case, I come across exculpatory evidence, I don't bury it, I send it to the defendant as the law and my own honor require.

People should apply the same standards in the study of genetics, ancient or modern.
 
They can move out of their homeland or organise military campaigns more easily than agriculturalists, which being bound to their soil and harvests. In Mesopotamia, we have the description of such a situation, which the people of Tripolye-Cucuteni experienced in Eastern Europe as well, in all likelihood: At first the pastoralist tribals came to burn the fields down and take the crops and animals. Whenever the Sumerians came with their army, they came too late. The damage was done, and the raiders were gone. The borderzone clans did so for many years, until the defense and supply of the inhabitants was completely ruined. In the end, they just needed to take the what remained, physically and mentally they were broken already.

If you think about the huge settlements of Tripolye-Cucuteni, they were very hard to storm by any sort of raiding party, even larger alliances of steppe warriors. But they always had allies on the steppe, which kind of protected their front yard. When the pressure from the East pushed their allies into their territory or away, they had to defend on the steppe, and that was hard to do. Because the enemy was more mobile and quicker. The pastoralists can hurt the farmers all day, but the armies of the farmers can't do the same as easily.
And even in a worst case scenario, the pastoralists can flee with their flocks, but the farmers can't.

Even worse than regular farming is civilisation, because the more complex a structure, the harder it deals with damage and downgrading. Like what do people of an urban centre do, if the farmers from around their city being captured and killed, or fled, or turned against them? The tribal, pastoralist warrior can just move on, doing what he did before, but the urban people mostly died.

So the disadvantage the farmer already got, being multiplied by "civilisation" and urban settlement. It's only an advantage if it can scale up or create advantages which the more simple, small scale and clan based groups can't copy. Like top-level, next-level military organisation and equipment. But on a smaller scale, once the organised, large scale resistance of a state being broken, the local inhabitants of a civilisation being usually just easy prey for tribal people.

This is also why in the Balkans Vlachs and Albanians did fairly well after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but other Romanised people did not.

The pattern in Mesopotamia and Tripolye-Cucuteni being pretty similar. They tribal groups could have many lost battles and setbacks, but the more settled down and civilised groups just one. One bigger lost battle or setback and they were done. Because there is no way to come back once hte complex structures, the fields and harvest being lost. The fortified centres on their own are not defensible without supplies.

These are the cycles of civilization. There's a civilized core, and the "barbarians beyond the gates", in a nod to St. Augustine. I wouldn't call those people of the periphery "flexible"; I'd call them predatory. They prowl the perimeter to see what they can scrounge. So long as the core, an agricultural core, is strong, the barbarians are held off and civilization continues to advance. When the core starts to decay, as seems to be their fate in all situations, the people of the periphery come to pick at the carcass, telling themselves how superior they are, and a new Dark Age begins. Bronze Age Greece, with all its advancements, fell so far they even forgot how to read and write, and at the hands of people who are probably somewhere in my own blood line. Do you think that makes it all right with me? Think where we'd be today if we hadn't had to start all over again from scratch so many times. Think of all the suffering which could have been avoided.

No matter the cultures involved, it's always the "civilized core" for which I'm rooting.
 
These are the cycles of civilization. There's a civilized core, and the "barbarians beyond the gates", in a nod to St. Augustine. I wouldn't call those people of the periphery "flexible"; I'd call them predatory. They prowl the perimeter to see what they can scrounge. So long as the core, an agricultural core, is strong, the barbarians are held off and civilization continues to advance. When the core starts to decay, as seems to be their fate in all situations, the people of the periphery come to pick at the carcass, telling themselves how superior they are, and a new Dark Age begins. Bronze Age Greece, with all its advancements, fell so far they even forgot how to read and write, and at the hands of people who are probably somewhere in my own blood line. Do you think that makes it all right with me? Think where we'd be today if we hadn't had to start all over again from scratch so many times. Think of all the suffering which could have been avoided.

No matter the cultures involved, it's always the "civilized core" for which I'm rooting.

A civilisation might go in the completely wrong direction and heading towards a dead end though. E.g. many of the early, pre-IE civilisations were more or less theocracies and priest states. If they developed an autocratic regime, it tended to be despotic and cruel. Just compare, as a prime example, some of the Near Eastern states and their laws with that of the Hittites. Its not like the Hittites did everything right or were such nice guys, but in comparison...

Bronze Age Greece is peculiar, because it was already Indoeuropean when it fell. But much of the later ethos and ideas, which developed in Greece, came up from the fusion of what we might call Indoeuropean spirit and Levantine-Oriental one. I don't think its by chance that such great progress happened in Greece, in the borderzone, and neither North nor South East of it. Because the fusion created had something of a complementary character in comparison to both sources.

If we would have had to start with Minoans, without the IE impact, would they ever have created what the historical, ancient Greeks did?

The Romans and Etruscans too, being at the borderline, to some degree.

Even if talking about the civilisations, from a rather technical and cultural point of view, rather than a moral or ethical one, or a biological and evolutionary, we will still see that the fusion of "Barbarians" with more "civilised people" can sometimes create something more advanced on the longer run. Looking at the descendants of the Indoeuropeans, this is most certainly true, because most of the successors, after the fusion, reached higher heights than their non-IE predecessors on the longer run.

And I think a huge problem of the older civilisations, the pre-Indoeuropean ones, being the (too) strong religious and theocratic aspect. In comparison to those, with some notable exceptions, the priests had much less of a say in the classical IE people, and I think that was something which stimulated progress, rather than limiting it.

The pastoralist warriors brought a different ethos, a different ruling class and aristocracy into the game, than the first centralised, more religious and theocratic, civilisations.
 
There are cultures which copy and those which invent. That's true even today. Yamnaya people were pretty good at copying. As I said, I know of no invention which benefitted the world for which they can be given credit except the domestication of the horse and using wagons to follow their herds to new pastures.

How can you possibly compare that to the accomplishments which came out of the Near East?

I'm not saying that to insult the steppe peoples; I have their genes in my body too, and our family y and mtDna are steppe derived.

It's just fact. I don't argue with facts because the truth is inconvenient in some way. If, in prosecuting a case, I come across exculpatory evidence, I don't bury it, I send it to the defendant as the law and my own honor require.

People should apply the same standards in the study of genetics, ancient or modern.

Since R1b-Z2103>Has been found in ancient Latins as well as Bell Beaker, Corded Ware, Armenians, Sarmatians, Sintashta, Potapovka, and Hajji Firuzz-Iran. Z-2103>Z2108 must have had a word for wheel.
The German language has a word for wheel. I have shown an example of an ancient wagon and the ydna was Q it was burried with, regardless of where the wheel was invented.

English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, originally spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England.[3][4][5] It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated from Anglia, a peninsula on the Baltic Sea (not to be confused with East Anglia in England), to the area of Great Britain later named after them: England.

Hittites also used horses, wheeled chariots, and iron(Battle of Kadesh as an example).
From what cuture in the Near East, did they get the concept of wheel, iron, and Dom2 horses from? As a side note I found the word wine in Hittite interesting since it is close to the region where the early phylogenic strain of Yersinia Pestis in Yamnaya Z2103>Z2108 are found.

The English word "wine" comes from the Proto-Germanic *winam, an early borrowing from the Latin vinum, Georgian ღვინო, "wine" or "(grape) vine", itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European stem *win-o- (cf. Armenian: գինի, gini; Ancient Greek: οἶνος oinos; Aeolic Greek: ϝοῖνος woinos; Hittite: wiyana; Lycian: oino).[53][54][55] The earliest attested terms referring to wine are the Mycenaean Greek 𐀕𐀶𐀺𐄀𐀚𐀺 me-tu-wo ne-wo (*μέθυϝος νέϝῳ),[56][57] meaning "in (the month)" or "(festival) of the new wine", and 𐀺𐀜𐀷𐀴𐀯 wo-no-wa-ti-si,[58] meaning "wine garden", written in Linear B inscriptions.[59][60][61][62] Linear B also includes, inter alia, an ideogram for wine, i.e. 𐂖



The Hittite language was a distinct member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family, and along with the closely related Luwian language, is the oldest historically attested Indo-European language,[4] referred to by its speakers as nešili "in the language of Nesa". The Hittites called their country the Kingdom of Hattusa (Hatti in Akkadian), a name received from the Hattians, an earlier people who had inhabited and ruled the region until the beginning of the second millennium BC and spoke an unrelated language known as Hattic.[5] The conventional name "Hittites" is due to their initial identification with the Biblical Hittites in 19th century archaeology.
 
No matter the cultures involved, it's always the "civilized core" for which I'm rooting.

I agree, I also enjoy the fruits of a civilized core--however sometimes things turn out different.

Some have compared ancient Rome with the first attempt at a European Union. In the end civil war - backstabbing in the senate--Brutus (maybe also corruption, morale decay in family and community?)led to a drastic decline in Romes population--people leaving Rome.
 
Why are you so confident that it is "political"? What if this is reality, and you are just allowing your own biases to fool yourself?

I don't really care if PIE originated north or south of the Caucaus mountains. I just want the raw data to look at it for myself, and hopefully so are most people.

But it's quite clear that academia always wants a "spin" on things. Imagine if these guys could disprove something, something Nazi, Aryan something, etc...
 
A civilisation might go in the completely wrong direction and heading towards a dead end though. E.g. many of the early, pre-IE civilisations were more or less theocracies and priest states. If they developed an autocratic regime, it tended to be despotic and cruel. Just compare, as a prime example, some of the Near Eastern states and their laws with that of the Hittites. Its not like the Hittites did everything right or were such nice guys, but in comparison...

Bronze Age Greece is peculiar, because it was already Indoeuropean when it fell. But much of the later ethos and ideas, which developed in Greece, came up from the fusion of what we might call Indoeuropean spirit and Levantine-Oriental one. I don't think its by chance that such great progress happened in Greece, in the borderzone, and neither North nor South East of it. Because the fusion created had something of a complementary character in comparison to both sources.

If we would have had to start with Minoans, without the IE impact, would they ever have created what the historical, ancient Greeks did?

The Romans and Etruscans too, being at the borderline, to some degree.

Even if talking about the civilisations, from a rather technical and cultural point of view, rather than a moral or ethical one, or a biological and evolutionary, we will still see that the fusion of "Barbarians" with more "civilised people" can sometimes create something more advanced on the longer run. Looking at the descendants of the Indoeuropeans, this is most certainly true, because most of the successors, after the fusion, reached higher heights than their non-IE predecessors on the longer run.

And I think a huge problem of the older civilisations, the pre-Indoeuropean ones, being the (too) strong religious and theocratic aspect. In comparison to those, with some notable exceptions, the priests had much less of a say in the classical IE people, and I think that was something which stimulated progress, rather than limiting it.

The pastoralist warriors brought a different ethos, a different ruling class and aristocracy into the game, than the first centralised, more religious and theocratic, civilisations.

What a bunch of nonsense. The Greeks created the West, not just some fusion. They thought very poorly of their neighbours as well. Which leads me to think they were indeed aware of themselves, being primarily monolithic in ancestry, mostly descended from pre-indo European people from Neolithic communities. To the Greeks people from the north were half-animal and only fit to be slaves. They believed their neighbours to the east should be conquered and treated like plants and animals.
 
What a bunch of nonsense. The Greeks created the West, not just some fusion. They thought very poorly of their neighbours as well. Which leads me to think they were indeed aware of themselves, being primarily monolithic in ancestry, mostly descended from pre-indo European people from Neolithic communities. To the Greeks people from the north were half-animal and only fit to be slaves. They believed their neighbours to the east should be conquered and treated like plants and animals.

You do realise that I'm not talking about Greeks in the later periods, but Mycenaean Greeks, and also how those developed in the Dark Age to classical era Greeks.

Take for example some aspects of the Greek religion, philosophy, ethos, tribal and early state organisation - or the Greek Alphabet. We can see in many of their creations aspects of either the Indoeuropean North or the Anatolian-Levantine East. They created their own specific culture and identity, but a lot of it being based on influences coming from at least two directions and them being on the crossroads.

How they thought of the Northern or Eastern Barbarians in later periods, doesn't change that.
 
What a bunch of nonsense. The Greeks created the West, not just some fusion. They thought very poorly of their neighbours as well. Which leads me to think they were indeed aware of themselves, being primarily monolithic in ancestry, mostly descended from pre-indo European people from Neolithic communities. To the Greeks people from the north were half-animal and only fit to be slaves. They believed their neighbours to the east should be conquered and treated like plants and animals.
Yeah I tend to agree that the Neolithic folks get undersold. They set the stage for whatever happened in Crete and mainland Greece during the Bronze Age.
 
What a bunch of nonsense. The Greeks created the West, not just some fusion. They thought very poorly of their neighbours as well. Which leads me to think they were indeed aware of themselves, being primarily monolithic in ancestry, mostly descended from pre-indo European people from Neolithic communities. To the Greeks people from the north were half-animal and only fit to be slaves. They believed their neighbours to the east should be conquered and treated like plants and animals.
Yeah I tend to agree the Neolithic farmers seem to be undersold. Why did pre Greek civilization begin in two areas where there was minimal IE admixture? How come it didn’t start in the Helladic NE where there was much higher Steppe?
 
You do realise that I'm not talking about Greeks in the later periods, but Mycenaean Greeks, and also how those developed in the Dark Age to classical era Greeks.

Take for example some aspects of the Greek religion, philosophy, ethos, tribal and early state organisation - or the Greek Alphabet. We can see in many of their creations aspects of either the Indoeuropean North or the Anatolian-Levantine East. They created their own specific culture and identity, but a lot of it being based on influences coming from at least two directions and them being on the crossroads.

How they thought of the Northern or Eastern Barbarians in later periods, doesn't change that.

What difference does it make? Every country today has guns, does that make them Chinese influenced cultures? Also get your facts straight Anatolia was genetically and culturally different from the Levant. So stop conflating the two. Do you say Nordic-Spanish culture because they share some similarities?
 
A civilisation might go in the completely wrong direction and heading towards a dead end though. E.g. many of the early, pre-IE civilisations were more or less theocracies and priest states. If they developed an autocratic regime, it tended to be despotic and cruel. Just compare, as a prime example, some of the Near Eastern states and their laws with that of the Hittites. Its not like the Hittites did everything right or were such nice guys, but in comparison...

Bronze Age Greece is peculiar, because it was already Indoeuropean when it fell. But much of the later ethos and ideas, which developed in Greece, came up from the fusion of what we might call Indoeuropean spirit and Levantine-Oriental one. I don't think its by chance that such great progress happened in Greece, in the borderzone, and neither North nor South East of it. Because the fusion created had something of a complementary character in comparison to both sources.

If we would have had to start with Minoans, without the IE impact, would they ever have created what the historical, ancient Greeks did?

The Romans and Etruscans too, being at the borderline, to some degree.

Even if talking about the civilisations, from a rather technical and cultural point of view, rather than a moral or ethical one, or a biological and evolutionary, we will still see that the fusion of "Barbarians" with more "civilised people" can sometimes create something more advanced on the longer run. Looking at the descendants of the Indoeuropeans, this is most certainly true, because most of the successors, after the fusion, reached higher heights than their non-IE predecessors on the longer run.

And I think a huge problem of the older civilisations, the pre-Indoeuropean ones, being the (too) strong religious and theocratic aspect. In comparison to those, with some notable exceptions, the priests had much less of a say in the classical IE people, and I think that was something which stimulated progress, rather than limiting it.

The pastoralist warriors brought a different ethos, a different ruling class and aristocracy into the game, than the first centralised, more religious and theocratic, civilisations.

You mean rulers like Hammurabi? Surely you can't be serious.

You think the Hittites were somehow superior to the other empire builders of the Near East. That's just plain silly.

"When Mursilli was king in Hattusa, his sons, brothers, in-laws, family members, and troops were all united. He controlled the enemy land with force, took away their power, and made them the borders of the sea. He went to the city Aleppo, destroyed Aleppo, and took the deportees from Aleppo and its goods to Hattusa. Afterwards he went to Babylon and destroyed Babylon. He took the deportees from Babylon and its goods to Hattusa. Hantili was cupbearer and he had Harapshili, Mursilli's sister, as wife. Zidanta stole up to Hantili and they committed an evil deed: they killed Mursilli and shed his blood. (Van de Mieroop, 120)"

"
Hantili was Mursilli's brother-in-law. Zidanta was Hantili's son-in-law. They conspired to assassinate Mursilli and take the throne, in which they were successful. Hantili then reigned as king for approximately 30 years (c. 1526-1496 BCE) but seems to have accomplished little in that time. Zidanta, having grown tired of watching Hantili enjoy the kingship while doing little else, assassinated him and murdered his heirs. Zidanta then became king after Hantili and ruled for ten equally uneventful years, until he was assassinated by his son Ammuna. Ammuna ruled for 20 years (1486-1466 BCE) and, in that time, proved a worse king than his three predecessors."

After a Dark Age, they regrouped and competed with Egypt but were in their turn conquered by Assyria.

I see nothing in them other than just another people bent on empire by conquest, loot and slaves.

As for the Greeks, I have absolutely no idea what you mean by an Indo-European "spirit" having contributed to the greatness of Greece, unless you mean a more militarized culture. Other than that more militarized culture, perhaps their practice of initiation of young boys by older men, polygamy and the sequestration of their women, and a rather silly collection of gods, which the Latins also adopted, I don't see what they contributed which was of such value. All the valuable things came from the Minoans.
 
I'm happy to see Razib Khan does indeed have confidence in David Reich and Nick Patterson.

And I'm glad that Razib Khan said basically the same things I've written here and validated the point I was trying to bring across. But hey I'm only a layman and thus the words of Khan weigh more. My approach is we should respect scientists who are considered experts in their field and we should trust them but not blindly. When reading their conclusions, and suggestions we need to apply common sense and critical thinking. At the same time, we need to consider that they're the experts. Thus we ought not behave like smart-asses or knowing all. And therefore be careful not to come across as disrespectful or dismissive of the expertise of leading geneticists, such as Reich. In addition, in order for laypeople to be able to criticize or challenge scientific conclusions in a serious way they have to be SCIENTIFIC LITERATE, in the first place.

Anyway, what I'd like to make you aware of, Jovialis, is the fact that science isn't as free as we might think. Sometimes the issue with scientific studies isn't the bias or political view of the involved researchers but rather the political pressure they have to face and work under.

According to Bruce Beutler, professor of immunology at the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA, USA), peer pressure in its various forms is a particular problem for science. “It is not unique to research, but in science it goes very much against the grain of what's trying to be accomplished,” he said. Yet scientists themselves must take some of the blame for perpetuating a system that can stifle original thinking, Beutler contends. “Scientists like to present an image to the outside world as being very iconoclastic and sceptical. Yet they have a complete conformity of opinion on certain things, and they do victimize people who differ from them.”............

This article was from 2005 and corresponds to what Razib Khan in 2022 is pointing out.

Here's the thing, scientists that rigorously apply the scientific method, thus strictly follow where the evidence leads them, are exposed to the pressure not entirely to follow or talk about the scientific results when they undermine the PC narrative. The truth of the matter is, that political correctness is a serious hindrance and poses a big problem for science.

For instance, the SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS is that race is not a biological reality but a social construct whereas the data, the genetic research says otherwise. David Reich tried to set the record straight.


in a recent op-ed in The New York Times, “How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of Race,” the geneticist David Reich challenged what he called an “orthodoxy” in genetics. Due to concerns of political correctness, he argued, scientists are unwilling to do research on—or, in some cases, even discuss—genetic variation between human populations, despite the fact that genetic variations do exist. “It is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races,’” he wrote.

‘I am worried,” writes Harvard geneticist David Reich in the New York Times, “that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/genetic-science-does-not-support-racial-quotas/

Nonetheless, Reich felt the heat and massive pressure after he admitted that there are genetic differences between human races, even though he puts the word race in quotation marks.

For this gentle warning alone - and as proof of its correctness - the top researcher took such a beating that a week later he had to explain himself again in the "New York Times": "How To Talk about 'Race' and Genetics".


The piece was widely circulated, drawing condemnation from some social scientists who were appalled by its implications and praise from people who believe that discussion of racial differences has become taboo

In his op-ed, Reich explicitly acknowledges that race is a social construct. At several places in the text, he goes to great pains to distance himself from racism, and to point out that traditional ideas of race are contradicted by genomic data (including his own work). For instance, he notes that the ways different people and societies think about race are inconsistent:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/reich-genetics-racism/558818/


Obviously, Reich couldn't resist the immense pressure, condemnation, and outrage that he resorted to relativizing his statement about the biological reality of race.


The point is that there are good and rational reasons for people to lose confidence in scientists or scientific studies. Hence not everybody who has a critical attitude toward scientists can be dismissed as an anti-science or a lunatic conspiracy theorist. There are several articles where scholars who know what's going on behind the scenes are voicing their concerns about the politicization of science. We should take these concerns seriously and not brush them off.
 
I think steppe people/pastoralists are being shortchanged a bit LOL It might be appropriate here to mention that the largest contiguous empire in the world was that of the Mongols (as "steppe" as they come).

I don't think these civilizations are as organic as meets the eye. I doubt "Such and such people created democracy" or "My people are responsible for civilizing Europe." They are unsustainable pyramid schemes, essentially, that have a very definite organization and more or less the same structure and life cycle across them all. One rises to great heights, then the resources start "disappearing" and then degeneracy ensues. Almost like magic, a new one pops up a stones throw away that has elements of the former, but adapted to the new population. And so it's gone across the world.

That kinda tells me the common people have little to do with it.
 
I think steppe people/pastoralists are being shortchanged a bit LOL It might be appropriate here to mention that the largest contiguous empire in the world was that of the Mongols (as "steppe" as they come).

I don't think these civilizations are as organic as meets the eye. I doubt "Such and such people created democracy" or "My people are responsible for civilizing Europe." They are unsustainable pyramid schemes, essentially, that have a very definite organization and more or less the same structure and life cycle across them all. One rises to great heights, then the resources start "disappearing" and then degeneracy ensues. Almost like magic, a new one pops up a stones throw away that has elements of the former, but adapted to the new population. And so it's gone across the world.

That kinda tells me the common people have little to do with it.

The Mongols were not Indo-European-speakers nor even West Eurasian for that matter.

They were not invincible since the Mamelukes of Egypt defeated them in battle.
 
Yeah I tend to agree the Neolithic farmers seem to be undersold. Why did pre Greek civilization begin in two areas where there was minimal IE admixture? How come it didn’t start in the Helladic NE where there was much higher Steppe?
Why do people who are not English or German use the language of a inferior warlike people t(Angles)o promote their cultural language(Afro-Asiatic one example,) and perceived achievements. They write books and laws using the language of the Angles, and derive their income using the language, with no mention of them or their cultural history.
 
You mean rulers like Hammurabi? Surely you can't be serious.

Yes, e.g.:
In comparison with The Code of Assura or the Code of Hammurabi, the Code of Nesilim also provided less-severe punishments for the code's violations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_laws

They were less cruel and inhumane in their punishments, as well as more concerned about the individual, more generally speaking. This is something I have read multiple times in various secondary sources on the Hittites.

You think the Hittites were somehow superior to the other empire builders of the Near East. That's just plain silly.

Their strength was also their weakness, because their rulers were not as much god-given as those of the local Oriental empires, and their structure was more federal and aristocratic, in comparison. This resulted in more inner tumult and conflicts, a weaker cohesion. Basically the quotations your brought up just proved that.

As for the Greeks, I have absolutely no idea what you mean by an Indo-European "spirit" having contributed to the greatness of Greece, unless you mean a more militarized culture. Other than that more militarized culture, perhaps their practice of initiation of young boys by older men, polygamy and the sequestration of their women, and a rather silly collection of gods, which the Latins also adopted, I don't see what they contributed which was of such value. All the valuable things came from the Minoans.

The Greeks had a unique free and logical spirit, a specific approach to art and life, which was no longer bound by as much superstition and religious restriction. I highly doubt the Minoans were the same, but its very unfortunate we don't know more about them and their writings (Linear A) being still not really fully deciphered.
 

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