Pre-American industrial "evolution"

[mythusmage]

More like...

Year 193 to year 215: 10,000 bushels of grain annually.

Year 216: 5,000 bushels of grain.

Question: What happened?

Answer: After a thorough investigation we've learned that the district in question was hit by a series of late floods, which prevented planting until late in the season and limited yields.

An important matter to note is that upper class/lower class relations were not necessarily adversarial during all periods of history. Sometimes the PTBs actually had the plebes' best interests in mind.

And, in many cultures crops would be collected by the rulers for later disbursement. Our current system of distributing food didn't develop until later.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Hmm, I'd say that both are fair scenarios.

My point was simply that in most literate cultures the accounting isn't really dedicated to production so much as disbursement and income. The level at which you need a clerk isn't really on the level of production, where peasants are more than capable of keeping track of what's going on themselves, so much as at the level where you've got multiple levels of obligation to keep track of, performance to monitor, and action to document. As a result there's pretty nasty veil of ignorance and slant to reporting.

Afterall, neither of our reporting scenarios is going to say much about the really great years for the peasants of the far off district, since no peasant worth his salt is going to bring in more than he owes. The soonest yon scribe might hear about is when a junior merchant brings in more wheat for cheap.

All of which means that the writing don't do too much for progress since it misses a lot of improvements.

Which is what makes Monks keeping careful track of their own agricultural performance and innovations so super cool.

 

[fusangite]

Part of me wants to dive into this debate about the written record and state that the evidence people are using about writing originating as bookkeeping is highly problematic -- we're only applying this argument to cultures for which it was true, discounting India and other enormous swaths of the world, etc.

But the other part of me says, Quasqueton, have we answered your question?

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Amen Brother! Let's get up with Greek accountants!

At the least it's pretty telling that they picked up the alphabet from the people they were doing the most trading with.

There's actually some pretty interesting stuff tracing what parts of the Greek literary genres come from which genres of more practical writing.

Gotta love how the various accounts of Mycenean writing wind up being inventory records, and disbursements of grain to subjects.

In Search of the Trojan War has some great examples of Greek and Anatolian writing, especially correspondence. There's this one that's really compelling; an unfired clay tablet, found in an oven, of a king begging for reinforcement from his overlord.

Brad

 

[painandgreed]

Of course, Mayans and Nahuas (Mexica) had written languages. Although the Franciscans burned over 500 unique volumes of Nahua philosophy, history, astronomy and poetry, a handful did survive. They show a civilization working with sophisticated concepts and engaging in discussions about cosmology, virtue and various other things that low-tech high cultures wrote about in Egypt and Sumeria thousands of years before.

The idea that knowledge=tech is a common modern one but historically, has not generally been the case. Take a period like the early medieval ages where the Latin West lost philosophical and cosmological knowledge rapidly while at the same time making some of the most important technical advances in history like developing the heavy plough. -- And nobody wrote about these crucial advances that spread like wildfire through northern Europe.

In most literate/literary cultures, written documents are almost never used to store technological information. We're a very exceptional society in that respect.

Well, 500 codexes is no Library of Alexandria. They wrote aobut similar things that Egyptian kingdoms of thousands of years before because that's the level they were at. It's not that a written language is an instant ticket to technology but anything that helps generate and preserve information aids in the development of a society. Sure most of it is just record keeping. I bet most of our information generated today is mostly record keeping with financial data far outpacing technical data.

Sure there were inventions in the middle ages but it was not a time known for great advances in science. The heavy plow was a combination of devices, some of which like the moldboard were around since Roman times. I don't think it really spread like wildfire and didn't even spread until Northern Europe reached a level of development where it was useful to them. Had they not been dark ages, then there would have been much more advancements than there were.

It would be interesting to see what would have helped native Americans the most. If they could have been given either better crops, pack animals, or a written language soemtime in the distant past, which would have allowed them to advance the quickest. certainly domesticated animals or crops are the easiest to sustain as written language probably requires a certian level of advancement before it is deemed useful enough to maintain. However, I think that the written language allows for a greater level than better crops. Still, increasing crops increases the population which also allows for a greater generation of information over a long period of time.

 

[mythusmage]

...we're only applying this argument to cultures for which it was true, discounting India...

What era, what area?

 

[fusangite]

Uhh .. .

They did. But they stayed in the Copper Age and never really advanced further. In fact, they slid backwards.

(a) There is no such thing as a "copper age"
(b) The world would be a strange place if our sole measure of a culture was what kind of metal tools they used without reference to governance, culture or anything else
(c) What do you mean they "slid backwards"? There was copper being smithed in the Mexico Valley when Cortes arrived. Thanks to their encounter with Europeans, the people in that valley were soon making things with iron and whatever else was handy.

 

[fusangite]

painandgreed,

You seem to be positing some unilinear "progress" variable in which the kind of tools you make, the kind of literature you write, the accuracy of your science, the governance model you have and the system for distributing goods can all be encapsulated in one single measure. Civilizations just aren't like that. Whether you are using trendy modern spiral dynamics or old fashioned dialectical materialism, these theories simply don't reflect the complexity of culture.

Your theory that the "dark ages" slowed technological development is really outside the mainstream of historical thought today. The labour shortages caused by population decline, the famines resulting from the collapse of Roman distribution systems are seen increasingly as the causes of widespread water mill use and the development and use of the heavy plough which, like it or not, is an invention we have to credit to the "dark ages." I think you even acknowledge that you're really reaching when you suggest it was invented in the Roman period because its constituent components were.