The ‘bronze age collapse’ is instructive, when everyone learned to make iron, barbarians destroyed every hierarchy and the cities fell.
Not sure what your point is here—early iron-smelting cultures were not “uncivilized” in any real sense, they’re just understudied! We’ve even discovered entire sets of royal archives near Hattusa—the Hatti or Hittites being perhaps the most prominent early-iron-age civilization. Indeed, the Iron age itself may have enabled the formation of large, internally-peaceful ‘empires’ in the longer run—clearly a significant advancement in social organization!
Thank you for clarifying, in the long run, there was stability and we do not fully understand it...I believe that my assertion about the transition being messy and involving the collapse of bronze age civilizations rather than their persistence still stands though.
My point is that new developments upended the old social order, and cleared the way for the eventual rise of alternatives. Today, similar levels of destruction will be challenging to recover from, because infrastructure, once trashed, leads to things like the birth defect rate in Fallujah, not just empty space where new things can be built, and battlefields which yiels bumper crops.
Not sure what your point is here—early iron-smelting cultures were not “uncivilized” in any real sense, they’re just understudied! We’ve even discovered entire sets of royal archives near Hattusa—the Hatti or Hittites being perhaps the most prominent early-iron-age civilization. Indeed, the Iron age itself may have enabled the formation of large, internally-peaceful ‘empires’ in the longer run—clearly a significant advancement in social organization!
Thank you for clarifying, in the long run, there was stability and we do not fully understand it...I believe that my assertion about the transition being messy and involving the collapse of bronze age civilizations rather than their persistence still stands though.
My point is that new developments upended the old social order, and cleared the way for the eventual rise of alternatives. Today, similar levels of destruction will be challenging to recover from, because infrastructure, once trashed, leads to things like the birth defect rate in Fallujah, not just empty space where new things can be built, and battlefields which yiels bumper crops.