Saturday, February 1, 2014

A tendency toward stasis in tectonically quiescent ancient civilizations

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498514279/Impact-of-Tectonic-Activity-on-Ancient-Civilizations-Recurrent-Shakeups-Tenacity-Resilience-and-Change

This post has been revised and incorporated in a published book as of August 2015 (link above)


A tendency toward stasis in tectonically quiescent ancient civilizations

Eric R. Force (eforce@email.arizona.edu)

In other posts I have addressed different ways to quantify the apparent spatial relation of active tectonic boundaries with "great ancient civilizations"—i.e. great cultural complexity.  The transect approach brought with it some clues to the meaning of the spatial relation, as viewed from a continental-scale perspective. There is another way to consider and quantify this relation and it too carries some clues to the dynamics of the relation—actually a converse approach, the lack of dynamics for civilizations in quiescent tectonic settings.
            The descriptions of ancient civilizations in previous posts have noted the static character of some of them.  Many authors have commented on this phenomenon—the ability of some ancient civilizations to maintain essentially the same character and the same trappings, even the same catch-phrases, for thousands of years (2).  This property of stasis is difficult to quantify except by this length of time that a civilization remains essentially the same.
            In most cases the length of duration of civilizations can be given within a few hundred years or less.  Of course a beginning date is commonly approximate; all attributes may not emerge at once and we may not know what each date is.  Ending dates are commonly more exact but the result of a large variety of causes, some internal but some external, with limited implication on the vitality of the civilization.  So the precision of a civilization’s duration may be greater than the hypothetical accuracy of measures of its stasis.
            Other questions intrude also; some situations might seem ambiguous.  For example, some long-lived ancient civilizations were subject to repeated invasions from outside, each founding a new ruling dynasty.  Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia are prominent examples.  In all three, the invaders did not cause important cultural discontinuities; matters eventually returned to normal even while the invaders were still in power.  The conventional way of treating these situations is to bring them under the umbrella of a single civilization, and for our present purposes this would seem appropriate, as stasis has been maintained.
Far more debatable are cases where a new civilization arises where a previous one had been, especially where the newcomers revere aspects of their predecessors (as with Mycenaean  re later classical Greek civilizations), and cases where an advanced culture is forced to migrate (as with the Phoenicians and Carthage). In these cases I’m inclined to separate the entities as most aspects of stasis are destroyed. 
With these qualifications in mind, let’s ask whether civilization longevity is related in any way to distance from active tectonic boundaries.  The data form table 1. For this purpose I have retained my 2008 separation of Assyrian and other ancient Mesopotamian civilizations (3).  I have also added four ancient cultures that are very complex but generally omitted from lists of “great ancient civilizations” in order to increase the number of cases to seventeen.
            The resulting plot (figure 1) strongly suggests some relationship. Since the distance measurement varies over several orders of magnitude, a logarithmic scale for distance is plotted (4) against scalar values of duration.  Plotted this way, the points suggest a linear relation, although with considerable scatter, as might be expected from a proxy variable, especially one subject to the vagaries of history. The line easily survives tests of statistical significance, however, (5) and seems to intersect the distance axis at about 10 km. And it’s gratifying to see that all the ancient civilizations can be treated as a single population with no exceptions.
            It appears that civilizations that are little-related to active tectonism have a tendency to persist as distinctive entities for long time periods. But what should we conclude about the shorter-lived civilizations?  Since they acquired the characteristics of “great ancient civilizations” in shorter time periods—in some cases much shorter—we could conclude that they were more dynamic.  But the shorter-lived civilizations most commonly met their end in being conquered by another great ancient civilization (6), in a sort of whole-cultural analogue to the game of leapfrog.  In other words their whole cultural environments were more dynamic.  Either way, or both ways, we have an indication of more dynamic cultures in the more active tectonic environments. 
            The longer-lived ancient civilizations in more quiescent tectonic environments commonly acquired their essential character in a relatively short time at their beginnings, and simply kept that character through a long middle age or a senescent period.  Takeovers were by far less complex cultures that transferred headquarters to the conquered civilization and eventually acquired its essential character, permitting cultural stasis.  Thus this converse case of tectonic inactivity is also a cultural phenomenon.
            It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that active tectonic environments serve to force the pace of change in cultures that find themselves there; it’s as if they were taking stimulants.  This conclusion from this posting is consistent with entirely independent evidence presented in previous ones.  A summary of this evidence and suggestions for further researches indicated by nagging questions are in other posts (7). 
           
Notes

1. April 2, 2014 and Mar. 4, 2014

2. Examples--Fagan 2004 (see especially p. 382, 433, 470), Machinist 1986, Braudel 1998-2001.  Fagan points out that differences in tendencies toward stasis vs. dynamism exists in more-complex cultures of all sorts, and it would be interesting to see whether this dichotomy corresponds to tectonic environments generally.  I can see that a few examples--the Lapita people, the Maori, the tribes of the NW coasts of North America--seem promising in this regard.

3. The status of Assyria relative to Mesopotamia is complex (May 8, 2014), but for this purpose keeping Assyria separate is desirable as it increases the number of cases, unlike my post of April 2, 2014 which gives random distribution the benefit of the doubt. 

4.  That is, the importance of a 1-km difference decreases with distance.  A good but somewhat curved line results if scalar values are used on both axes.

5.The relation seems to take the form:  civilization duration proportional to the log of distance (minus10 kilometers) from the pertinent plate boundary.  The plot for 17 sites (fig. 1) has an R-squared variance of .5877 (fairly large), but an F significance (via the test ANOVA) of 0.00021 (i.e. an association of the variables is statistically supported at much better than 95% confidence, which would correspond to an F significance of 0.05). I would not care to suggest, however, that the intersection of the line with the distance axis at 10 km implies that a civilization built within 10 km of a plate boundary would last less than a year.

6. The Mycenaeans and the Indus-Saraswati civilizations may be exceptions, and of course the Romans being the last ancient civilization are an exception by definition.

7. Aug. 29, May 10, and Apr. 13, 2013 respectively





Table 1.--Distance-duration data for ancient old-world civilizations, from previous postings. Distances are from originating sites.

Civilization (or component)
Dates
Duration (yrs)
Approximate distance (km) from plate boundary
Carthaginian
530-146 BC
  384
    10
Etruscan
800-100 BC
  700
  155
Roman
510 BC-AD 565
1075
  130
Mycenaean
1600-1150 BC
  450
    25
Greek
800-197 BC
  603
    10
Minoan
2200-1450 BC
  750
    60
Trojan
2300-1200 BC
1100
    20
Hittite
1750-1200 BC
  550
  110
Phoenician
1400-585 BC
  815
    40
Hebrew
1100-334 BC
  766
    15
Assyrian
1814-612 BC
1202
  100
Mesopotamian
3200-550 BC
2650
  195
Persian (Achaemenid)
550-331 BC
  219
    33
Indus
2550-1750 BC
  800
    90
Aryan
1500 BC-AD 414
1914
  100
Egyptian
3100-31 BC
3069
  400
Chinese
1500 BC-AD 1800
3300
1500




Figure 1 (from Force 2008)



References

Braudel, F., (written 1969, published in French 1998) 2001, The Mediterranean in the ancient world:  Penguin, London, 408 p. (translated by Sian Reynolds)

Fagan, B. M., 2004, People of the earth (11th ed.):  Prentice-Hall.

Force, E. R., 2008, Tectonic environments of ancient civilizations in the eastern hemisphere:  Geoarchaeology v. 23, p. 644-653

Machinist, P, 1986, On self-consciousness in Mesopotamia,  In The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, edited by S. N. Eisenstadt, 183-202. SUNY Press, Albany