Sumer
Historical record of regime survivals in Lower Mesopotamia shows all regimes collapsing from population size without regard to internal nor external factors.
We have seen damped oscillation in the lab, in a computer program and in the wild, but I have never seen it reported in humans. I imagine it happens but has never been noticed.
One thing humans do notice is when an empire falls. A civilization reaches a certain degree of development, and then barbarians sweep in killing, looting and burning so that the language and culture are extinguished or else another civilization comes in and does the same thing.
But think about that for a moment. It is said that in a battle the attacking force needs a ten to one advantage. But for an invasion at a distance things are even worse. Food, weapons and discipline must be maintained and brought along in an orderly way. Defections to a friendly village here or there must be minimal. Sanitation and health are important, likely more important than victory in the field. The defenders have their food in barns, more and better and heavier weapons they need not carry far, a well-established hierarchy and if the sides exchange germs, the immunologically inexperienced newcomers will come off worse. All this means an invasion should not succeed often, yet it does with regularity. How is that possible? The original civilization probably has a police force and palace guards equal to the arriving army.
One kind of data that can be amassed with reasonable confidence turns out to be the dates of the collapses; a lot of things change: the language, the religion, the government and so forth. What I have done was to look at the dates in lower Mesopotamia, Iraq. (My knowledge of Syria in upper Mesopotamia is not adequate.) I got together how many years (broken into 50-year intervals) each civilization survived. Then I calculated the chance of making it for another 50 years, the chance the survivors after 50 years had of making it to 100 years, now their chance of lasting to 150 years and so forth. I present it as a graph. If you have tears, prepare to shed them. I did make one tweak. The Ottoman Empire was ruled by an autocrat. But it was a lot of work, so he appointed a vizier to do the usual business. Beneath him, in early years, was a group of slaves, the Janissaries, recruited from the Balkans. They were the elite soldiers, the administrators and generally made things work. But the supply of them ran out after many years and from then on, they became a hereditary class. I count that as being two empires, although nominally they were the same empire.
Chance of surviving the next 50 years is on the vertical axis. Age of the empires in years is on the horizontal axis. In about 1574-1596, the Ottoman Empire changed the way they recruited the Sultan’s personal guard, the Janissaries. We count them as two empires changing then.
Fig. 32 12
You can look at that graph a long time. It covers all of recorded history into the 20th century, so the numbers aren’t going away.
First notice that the line is very clean. If there were a number of reasons a civilization might fall, all unrelated to each other, the line would be noisy. If there were hundreds or thousands of data points, that might smooth the line out. But since the graph covers 6,000 years the number of regimes is in the dozens. If the line is this smooth there can only be one or two reasons the civilizations fall, presumably related reasons.
One class of things that might bring down a civilization would be disasters coming from outside: overwhelming invasion, depopulating plagues, climate change. In that case, the outside threats would have nothing to do with the ages of the civilizations and the line would be level. It is not level.
Another kind of threat would be problems within the population itself such as the wrong technology, the wrong kind of government, the wrong religion, the wrong genes. In that case there would be a kind of selection in which the less favored civilizations would collapse first and what was left would be more durable. In that case the line would rise. It does not rise.
Therefore, civilizations are doomed because of something that is neither inside of the population nor outside. Consider: the most expensive thing I own is not in my house, nor is it outside my house. Obviously, it is my house itself. I say doomed. As any civilization ages, it gets more and more likely to fall. As it approaches 300 years, its chance of survival drops to zero. At least that is true in this place over this enormous span of time.
The only thing that can be at work is that, given a population big enough to maintain a civilization – or to administer it – fertility will eventually collapse. There is just no other possibility without invoking forces outside nature, and it is forces within nature that we must concern ourselves with. Nothing else permits prudent choices.
Look long and hard at this graph. In order to escape this doom, we must understand it. That means we must know the mechanism. That is where we are going.
I shall now talk about scripture. It may seem inappropriate to bring scripture into science or vice versa. If so, feel free to revile me and persecute me and say all manner of evil against me falsely. Also feel free to skip the rest of this chapter; I have given you your dose of data already. I hasten to say that you probably already have an opinion on scripture. Cling to it. You probably share it with your social group, which is of vital importance. On the other hand, if you want to understand the world, you must deal with English speaking people, and to have a clue about such people, you must read their most important document, The King James Version. So, don’t make any social change, but if you want to have a grasp of reality superior to that of a beast, get a copy and sneak off and read it. Skip the begats.
The Hebrews, whether a single enormous family or an alliance of tribes in the Holy Land, flourished for a time. They then split into Judea and Israel. At this point historical accuracy becomes pretty good. Israel was invaded by the Assyrians, the population deported and vanished from history. There is a suggestion in the book of Isaiah that had Judea come to their aid, they might have survived. No matter. Believe as you like. Judea, the tribe of Judah along with survivors from the tribe of Benjamin and some of the tribe of Levi survived for years. In time, they were defeated by the Babylonians and taken captive to Babylon. (Possibly a few were left behind to become the Samaritans.) All expectation should have been that Judea would have vanished as Israel did. But something happened most unexpected.
The direction I am going with this is: I assert that all of those Lower Mesopotamian civilizations died out because of infertility. It would be nice if we could go back and look at the last days of each of them and see just what the population looked like.
The unexpected thing that the Babylonians did was to recruit administrators from among the captive Judeans. Of course, administrator is high status. In the Old South, the prestige careers were the ministry, the military and farming. Pity there weren’t more capable administrators. That horrible fratricidal war might have been avoided. Nonetheless, the notion of going to your captives and recruiting leaders was most odd.
Part of the reason was that the Judeans were literate. I don’t know where Egyptian hieroglyphs came from, but they consisted of a host of beautiful little symbols, far more numerous than the sounds they represented. Each had a thematic as well as a phonetic meaning. Many represented more that one sound in sequence. The advantage of having extra symbols was that for a professional writing something and taking great care to make each symbol look just right, the extra symbols were shortcuts, saving time. Only a professional had need of them, so only a handful of people could read and write.
What the Israelites had done was to go through the hieroglyphs and select one for each sound, just a few dozen. If you already spoke Hebrew, and most children learn at least one language, it would only take an afternoon learn to put letters with sounds. It was an investment just about everybody was willing to make, so Israel was the first literate society on earth. Under the guidance of these administrators, Babylon outdid herself. If you believe all the stories, the Hanging Gardens were built, now apparently washed away by the meandering of the Euphrates, and the temple of Marduk, which proved impossible to maintain after the Judeans left and was ultimately dismantled under orders of Alexander the Great so it could be rebuilt from the ground up. It never was, but I suspect it looked like the temple at Jerusalem during Roman times, aggressive, brow-beating, totally intimidating.
So, the work the Judeans did for the empire was highly rewarding. One might marvel that children of the Babylonian administers did not take those jobs. I suspect that there simply were not enough of the young people to do the jobs, and the Babylonians well knew it.
The prophet Daniel was among the youths recruited. Late in his life, he was around at the time of the feast of Belshazzar. Belshazzar’s father knew he was under threat by the powerful Medes and Persians to the north. He had gone south to attend the dedication of a temple to a fertility god. A bit too little too late even if such gods were worth consulting. When he learned that the fearsome northern neighbors were on the move, he took his army north, met the invaders in battle and so died.
In that last feast, Belshazzar did not know that technically he was already king. Nonetheless, he made reasonable preparation. He threw a big feast for the big shots; he even took dishes that had been looted from the temple in Jerusalem, presumably not routine, since note was made of it. Then apparently somebody had written three of four words on the wall of the hall. It went unnoticed for a time. That is quite understandable. When I sit at leisure on my porch, I can just see a bridge in the distance, cars running back and forth. I can follow a car with my eye as it disappears from the visible arch. But when a car comes into view, I do not see it until it has traveled two or three lengths. I try. I can’t do it.
So, a few words might not be seen for a while. The king finally noticed and was terrified. He lost sphincter control. He asked somebody to read it for him, but nobody was that stupid. You only give your superiors good news. These were all the administrators. They had spent their careers working with Judeans and had not picked up the first word of the message, where apparently meant “weighed” or “counted.” Pray tell what else did an administrator do but count or have counted vital resources?
They called Daniel, who lowered the boom on Belshazzar and told him he faced disaster. So, if the king could not read the message, why did it frighten him? Maybe it was unexpected good news. Well, I suspect he needed but glance around the hall at his top assistants. They were not pinching the waiting maids, throwing food at each other nor lying on the floor while women poured beer into their mouths like you and I would (at one time). They were just waiting for it to be over. They were all old, far to old to turn back the invasion.
Babylon fell that night.
My historical dates come from a souvenir wall chart, hardly a peer reviewed scientific paper. I keep it because I do not like to feel like I am data shopping, and in hopes that a real expert will check me out. If so, I shall beg him to tell me whether the enormous treasure of cuneiform tablets from the area contain birth records.