Explaining the Iron Age

Summary

Summary of "Explaining the Iron Age" Episode from History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett

Podcast Information:

• Title: History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
• Host/Author: Turpentine
• Episode: Explaining the Iron Age
• Release Date: February 12, 2025

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Introduction and Age Classification

The episode opens with Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett delving into the complexities of the Iron Age, a pivotal period marking the transition from the Bronze Age. Rudyard introduces a novel classification system for civilizational cycles, aligning them with different metal ages:

• Stone Age: Lasted millions of years, ending around 8,000 years ago.
• Copper Age: A transitory period where civilizations like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India began to develop, lasting longer in the New World.
• Bronze Age (Cycle One): Characterized by megalithic civilizations from the pyramids until the Bronze Age collapse.
• Iron Age (Cycle Two): Spanning from the Bronze Age collapse to the fall of Rome, leading to the rise of new empires across Eurasia.
• Steel Age (Proposed Cycle Three): Envisioned as the current civilizational cycle, underpinned by advanced steelworking essential for the Industrial Revolution and modern technology.

Rudyard remarks, "[...] the Bronze Age was Cycle one, the Iron Age was Cycle two. And you could make a decent argument Cycle three is the Steel Age." ([00:28])

Metallurgical Advances and Iron Working

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the metallurgical challenges and breakthroughs associated with iron working. Unlike bronze, iron is abundant but requires sophisticated smelting techniques that only emerged around a thousand BC. Rudyard highlights the complexities:

"Iron is everywhere. A significant amount of the Earth's crust is iron. But they didn't have the specific smelting techniques to produce iron until around a little bit before a thousand BC." ([07:05])

They explore the unpredictable carbonization process of iron, which occasionally produced steel accidentally. This variability led to a range of weapon qualities, contributing to historical myths surrounding the superiority of certain swords.

Societal and Military Shifts in the Iron Age

The introduction of iron fundamentally altered military technology and societal structures. Rudyard explains how iron democratized warfare, shifting power from aristocratic chariot armies to infantry equipped with iron weapons. This shift contributed to the collapse of established Bronze Age civilizations and the rise of new empires.

"With the introduction of iron, you saw the destruction of the civilizational order in the Middle East with the collapse of civilization in the Levant, in Syria, in Greece, in Turkey, around Iran." ([09:11])

The Iron Age also facilitated broader social changes, including the rise of democracies and the formation of universal empires, paralleling the earlier rise and fall of civilizations.

Regional Perspectives: Europe, Middle East, China, India

Europe and the Celts

Rudyard posits that iron working may have first developed in Europe, particularly around the Alps, aligning with the spread of Celtic migrations and their distinctive long-sword warfare.

"I think there's a probable enough chance iron was developed in Europe, someplace around the Alps. And that would make sense with the Celtic migrations." ([51:48])

Middle East and Persia

The discussion transitions to the Middle East, detailing how the Iron Age enabled the rise of the Persian Empire. Zoroastrianism, the Persian commitment to truth, played a crucial role in unifying a vast, diverse empire. Rudyard contrasts Persian values with Greek commercialism:

"They had a stronger religion, that being Zoroastrianism, that gave them this messianic sense of we are spreading the truth." ([64:33])

China and India

In China, the Iron Age saw the fall of the Zhou Dynasty and the unification under the Qin, leading to the Han Dynasty. India experienced the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization followed by the rise of Aryan cultures and the development of Hinduism.

"In India, they saw the rise of a new wave of civilizations that came about through the discovery of iron. And these are generally the first civilizations that we can draw direct causal changes for our civilization." ([25:54])

The Axial Age and Philosophical Shifts

Rudyard and Austin delve into the Axial Age, a transformative period where major philosophical and religious traditions emerged simultaneously across Eurasia. This era was characterized by a reaction against secularism and atheism, leading to the establishment of moral codes and the rise of influential thinkers like Socrates, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Zoroaster.

"The Axial Age was a conservative anti-merchant reaction, where in each case the nobility teamed up with the peasants and the religious institutions to shut down capitalism as a way to promote social stability." ([37:49])

They draw parallels between ancient societal struggles with modernization and contemporary issues, emphasizing the recurring theme of resistance against disruptive economic and social changes.

Modern Parallels and Concluding Thoughts

The hosts connect ancient patterns to the modern era, suggesting that current societal challenges mirror those of the Iron Age. They discuss the influence of market economies, the rise of oligarchies, and the ongoing struggle between tradition and innovation.

Rudyard reflects on the potential future classification of the current era as the Steel Age, heavily reliant on steel and advanced technologies:

"The entirety of the industrial world is completely dependent upon steel technology." ([04:02])

Austin and Rudyard conclude by contemplating the cyclical nature of civilizations, the impact of technological advancements, and the enduring relevance of historical patterns in understanding contemporary and future societal dynamics.

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Notable Quotes

• Rudyard Lynch ([00:28]):

  "Yeah. You have to. You must chill in order to go hard."

• Rudyard Lynch ([07:05]):

  "Iron is everywhere. A significant amount of the Earth's crust is iron. But they didn't have the specific smelting techniques to produce iron until around a little bit before a thousand BC."

• Austin Padgett ([51:48]):

  "Yeah, I think there's a probable enough chance iron was developed in Europe, someplace around the Alps. And that would make sense with the Celtic migrations."

• Rudyard Lynch ([37:49]):

  "The Axial Age was a conservative anti-merchant reaction, where in each case the nobility teamed up with the peasants and the religious institutions to shut down capitalism as a way to promote social stability."

• Rudyard Lynch ([04:02]):

  "The entirety of the industrial world is completely dependent upon steel technology."

• Rudyard Lynch ([64:33]):

  "They had a stronger religion, that being Zoroastrianism, that gave them this messianic sense of we are spreading the truth."

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Conclusion

In this episode of History 102, Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett provide an insightful exploration of the Iron Age, highlighting its critical role in shaping subsequent civilizations across Eurasia. By examining metallurgical advancements, military transformations, and socio-political shifts, they uncover the enduring patterns that influence both ancient and modern societies. The discussion underscores the cyclical nature of history, emphasizing how past innovations and societal responses continue to resonate in today's world.

Transcript

[Whatifalthist]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hi, Austin. How are you? Have you been attaining a mindset of inner self congratulation?

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. And inner chill and peace and Golden Age vibes?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. You have to. You must chill in order to go hard. So we've been out of the loop for a few weeks. I had about a week where I had a flu, and then Austin also the week before had a flu. So something's going along around. I know a lot of people who are sick, but today's topic is the Iron Age, where this is not something I ever would have made a video on. But now that Austin recommended it and this is his choice, I realize it's actually an incredible topic to cover. And it really spills in from the Bronze Age video we did last, where I was thinking through how to narrate this, because the Iron Age is basically civilizational Cycle two. So we're going to go from a time period where the Bronze Age world fell apart to one where it rebuilt itself into new empires that crossed Eurasia. And the way you could visualize this. And I think we should go into Stone Age, Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, because we're not to cover that anywhere else in this series. And it's an intellectual designation I see a lot of people use, but the Bronze Age was Cycle one, the Iron Age was Cycle two. And you could make a decent argument Cycle three is the Steel Age. So to go through each of these, the Stone Age was thousands of years ago. It ended something like 8,000 years ago. And the Stone Age lasted for millions upon millions of years. It's so much larger than all the other ages combined. The Copper Age was a relatively transitory time period where you saw civilization first develop in places like Mesopotamia or Egypt or India. And the Copper Age lasted longer in the New World, where they never broke through to bronze working. But the Bronze Age was mostly Cycle one. And Cycle One, I call it megalithic civilization from the pyramids until the Bronze Age collapse. Then the Iron Age was the Bronze Age collapse until roughly the fall of Rome. And you could call the current civilizational cycle, which is the Dark Ages and the fall of Rome, until our current civilization is the Age of Steel, because they just developed steelworking got more advanced in that time period. So you went from shorter to longer swords across the world. And at the same time, the industrial Revolution is fundamentally predicated upon steel, where there is a strong distinction between steel and iron. And the entirety of the industrial world is completely dependent upon steel technology.

[Austin Padgett]

And so we're technically in the Steel age right now based on that classification. And that was, I guess, if it evolved, it would hard to, it would be hard to mark next age based on metallurgy. Probably have to come up with a different categorization.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I made up the age of Steel. That was just something I thought of before. And I invented this classification as well. I invented the three ages of civilizational cycle and I also invented attaching them to different metals. And I'm using this as a, as an interesting tool, as a way to show how, how these things happen. And perhaps we'll develop a new synthetic metal, or maybe we'll find a new metal in the stars, where that's not unlikely. There's incredible rare earth minerals in space that we have the potential to use for industrial processes that are incredibly rare on Earth. So who knows, we could discover a new metal and then use it for space colonization in the next cycle.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And then you get into metals for computing or energy as a category or, or whatever. But yeah, it, it'll be interesting to see the new challenges, kind of disruptive challenges that we deal with today that are similar to 2000 years ago, plus when they discovered this.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Military technology is very heavily predicated upon the society. So if you look at a society's military technology, you can very easily see its government structure. And the Iron Age is that writ large. And interestingly enough, the history book that got me into studying history, which was the first history book I read, that being the History Channel's book, Mankind the Story of All of Us. I read that when I was 11 and that was why I got into history. And they had an entire chapter called Age of Iron which was about how the Iron Age completely changed Eurasia's social structure. So this is a well recognized thing among historians. And the example of this is that the Bronze Age period that we just got out of was a period with highly aristocratic warfare, where you saw chariots riding around giving small cadres of men the ability to have a complete dominance over larger groups of infantry. So you saw the rise of nations in the Middle Eastern world that centralized into this court of aristocratic countries, much like Europe was a few centuries ago. And then that order came crashing down. And so with the fall of the Bronze Age world, you saw the entire region except Mesopotamia and Babylon collapse out of state development. And then out of this, you came a New. You saw a new democratized society. And this was a trans Eurasian process. So we can either. Let's go west to east to show how the introduction of iron completely changed the social structure and then culminated in the creation of new empires that parallels the exact ones that paralleled the ones that came before the fall of the Bronze Age, which in turn fell. So with the rise of iron, you saw first the fall into barbarism, and then by the time of the birth of Christ, those barbarians had in turn formed new civilizations that had unified the entire continental region from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And just to get away from the iron a little bit and try and describe the rest of the dynamic that's going on isn't a. Because iron was around forever, they knew about it throughout the whole Bronze Age. It's just, it was, I, I don't know, it's. You had those centers of, of production and trade networks that bronze depended on, and you had a sophisticated system. So iron kind of. When that trade system breaks down, iron becomes more of a winning formula.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And then you're going to have, you know, very huge variations in quality because it depends on the level of carbonization, which, you know, how much carbon gets in the metal when you're smelting it. And that requires a very kind of accidental, almost chemical reactions. And so how much of it was just improving technology leading to the transition of iron versus the collapse of these bronze trade systems leading to the prioritization of iron, or is it like a chicken and egg thing?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I wanted to get into this because I've tried to research the origin of iron and it seems deeply convoluted and strange. And so I wanted to talk about this because, yes, you're right, that people knew about iron for as long as we have records where iron is actually one of the most common minerals on Earth, or for copper and bronze and gold, these are relatively rare substances. But iron is everywhere. You can even, like, they do this in New Jersey. You can even go into a random bog, get crap and dirt from the bog, and then burn the bog dirt until you have residual iron. So this is how places that don't have much natural iron can produce. And they used this in the Middle Ages to make swords and scythes and iron tools. So iron's everywhere. A significant amount of the Earth's crust is iron. But they didn't have the specific smelting techniques to produce iron until around a little bit before a thousand bc. And interestingly, or very interestingly, the first types of iron early civilizations used was asteroid iron because that has a different alloy that allows it to be produced easily. And so for the Hittites, a major part of their religion, what they called them sky swords. And they'd make the sky swords for the. The king so he would have iron from the heavens. And so these ancient civilizations, and this was something that occurred around the world, they would give their kings these sky swords that they believed were given to them by the gods centuries before that they could actually get iron itself from Earth.

[Austin Padgett]

That's one of the really fun things about iron is the carbonization process is so unpredictable that one out of every, you know, so many is accidentally going to produce steel. And then you just have this huge variation in the class of swords. And then also apparently there's a little bit of steel as a byproduct every time you smelt iron.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Interesting.

[Austin Padgett]

No matter what, there's going to be a little bit of byproduct of steel. So yeah, they would also use that for jewelry and tools and stuff. And if they got enough byproduct, they can make a whole sword out of that. So you have this huge range of metal qualities throughout the whole time that iron was available, which just creates some kind of fun variation and makes put some reality behind the myths and the specialty of different swords.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So do you think the way that they. That those sky swords, they could make them for centuries before actual iron. Is it in the process of going through the Earth, involve them burning up to coming out of the sky to the atmosphere and involved them burning up to a level that made something equivalent to steel naturally.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, right. The heating process of the fall itself. So it's basically already. That process was already done, so you just had to shape it, I guess.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Or I just made that up. But that sounds plausible and super cool.

[Austin Padgett]

So I choose to go with that. And not a lot of metallurgy experts in the.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There's going to be at least one guy. There's always. With the whatifalthist audience. There's always one guy who knows the most obscure thing. It's like, hey, I need a guy who knows. I'm just making this up. I need a guy who knows to how to make a Viking longship. And there'll be at least five guys in the audience who make long ships in their free time.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, there's at least 20 that have made a sword before.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And so trying to figure out the start of the Iron Age seems deeply convoluted and deeply silly. And it seems like there's A lot of propaganda where, for example, I've read a significant amount of older books that say that the invention of iron happened in Europe and that would make sense. Or iron working happened in Europe and that would make sense because in the Bronze Age collapse, we have records that the Phoenicia, that the sea peoples had iron swords, people they were fighting didn't. And that would signify a European start because the sea peoples. There's also further archeology that suggests the sea peoples, who probably came from Italy, they were in turn being batted down the peninsula by peoples coming out of northern Europe, that being the ancestors of the Celts who fought with long swords. And as an appeal, I have thought for months we should have the nickname white people being the men of the sword, because the sword is so integral to European history in a way that it's not in any other continent where European armies have been dependent on sword warfare. Between the Roman gladius in the Celtic longsword, the medieval sword. So I think white people can call themselves the men of the sword and fellow white people. And I know, I know you a viewer, I know you are probably white. Do you support calling white people the.

[Austin Padgett]

Men of the sword and you're including Italians in that?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And everything. Yeah, because it's funny because I guess when European powers rose, it was onto that period of sword warfare before it kind of went spear sword and then back to spear. But yeah, and then. And then there's so much mystery around the Iron Age because iron doesn't preserve well.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

So I mean, there could have been. And there could have been pockets because it doesn't depend on these big trade networks. You could have just had this random expertise popping up and you could have had real big variation in random groups of marauding people, actually had access to this at different times. And you'd expect even if it was very temporary.

[Whatifalthist]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

For example, one of the current narratives is that ironworking developed in Cyprus is a side effect of the Bronze Age collapse, where due to the breakdown of the complex trade systems you could have seen ironworking develop because they couldn't get the tin supplies that they normally received from Afghanistan or Britain and thus they defaulted back onto ironworking. Or they invented iron working to get around the trade imbalance. And when I looked this up, they said that ironworking was first developed in the Caucasus and in they call it the hilly flanks. It's the area around Kurdistan. Sorry, Kurdistan, not Kyrgyzstan, Kurdistan, Turkey, Northern Iran. And that this region made iron working. But then the issue implicit in that is that the social sociological changes that came about due to the rise of iron destroyed the pre established civilizations of the Middle east, where the invention of iron caused the breakdown of the old aristocratic order that caused the Bronze Age collapse. And it seems weird that I am leaning more so towards a European invention of iron because it fits in with if the Sea peoples, if the invention of iron allowed the creation of longswords, then what happens is that the Central Europeans bring iron down into the Mediterranean. The Sea peoples in turn adopt the long sword. That's their weapon they use against the Mediterranean Cyprus, which was in the middle of the Sea People conquests, they're the first locals to integrate it. And then it spreads outwards. And it would explain why the sociological changes that occurred with iron happened at that time and why the civilizations never came back together. And for those who didn't watch the Bronze Age collapse video, what happened is that the, at least the narrative I've established, and there's like three authors in this space, so is that the Sea People showed up, they punched a hole in the region, and then the population just never recovered because the locals didn't want to have, didn't want to have the governments in there in the first place, since they were largely parasitic. And what happens with the discovery of iron is that warfare goes from the chariot, which can ride circles around their opponents and just destroy infantry. Is that the biggest thing iron does is that it creates body armor. And the body armor for cheaply means that the chariot archers, it just knocks off the shields and the spear formations because you've armored the troops and so they can beat the chariots. And so with the introduction of iron, you saw the destruction of the civilizational order in the Middle east with the collapse of civilization in the Levant, in Syria, in Greece, in Turkey, around Iran. And this was also a trans Eurasian process where India and China also saw civilizational collapses at the same time. And so again my narrative is that the Europeans brought it in. It may have initially stemmed from the Middle east and then gone to Europe. And then this allowed the collapse of the earlier civilization in, in the Middle east to be sustained because iron gave the local population a military advantage that meant that the government, the chariot governments could never re establish. Did that make sense?

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I'm. I guess I'm trying to think of the connection to the Chinese Iron Age. Maybe it's a similar dynamic timeline or we'll get there with the Axial Age trends, because what are the trends that make that happen all at the same time or maybe different than the metallurgy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Interesting.

[Austin Padgett]

So more trade related. But yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The collapse of the Bronze Age order occurred in 1170 BC. The fall of the Zhou Dynasty occurred around a thousand BC. So that's a 200 year time frame. And the Zhou were themselves barbarian. The Zhou were frontier tribes fighting against the northeastern barbarians. So they were people who were fighting basically European peoples because the barbarians to the west of China, the Takarians and the ui, they were ethnically Aryan and so they were connected in that whole trade system. And there is the broader Scythian culture that stretched from the Middle east in Ukraine out to western China. So I could definitely see an iron working breakthrough in western Eurasia over the course of 200 years, rippling to the Cha, the change in social structure seen with the fall of the Shang dynasty and then that causing a social change in China because the, the Zhou, the Duke of Zhou himself was his job, was fighting against the kinds of barbarians who would bring iron.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. So it's kind of crazy because the knowledge is could pop up and disappear and it's really complicated. And there's that whole band that's connected so hard to trace exactly.

[Rudyard Lynch]

What happened in India is that the Indus Valley civilization, I believe collapsed a century before the Bronze Age collapse in the Middle East. So this is a multicentury thing. It's easy to classify as roughly the same like civilizational event 3, 4000, 3000 years later, but this was over the course of centuries real at the time. And one of the things John Key, who is a great writer on India, said is that we view the collapse of the Indus Valley as a single great event. But it's better to see it as Byzantium because Byzantium gradually fell over the course of centuries. But it was this up and down process that took a long time. And he said, he of course we don't know anything at the fall of the Indus Valley civilization. This is why I can insert theories in the ancient world, because there's so little authors on the space. But he said that it's just as probable that the Indus Valley civilization took centuries to fall apart. Then it was just destroyed in a single go by Aryan barbarians. And the thing I will say is that with all of these narratives and all of these wiggle room, the thing we know is that over the course of centuries you saw the rise of a new wave of civilizations that came about through, through the discovery of iron. And these are generally the first civilizations that we can draw direct causal changes for our civilization. And what that means is the Jews, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Persians, the modern Chinese and the modern Indians came out of the rise of the Iron Age. And so these are societies that we can still interact with today, where the Jews are still there, the Greeks are still there, all of those peoples are still there, and Indian and Chinese civilization is still fundamentally the descendant of that. India and China exist on the same civilizational cycle as Greco Roman civilization. It's just they survived where they formed in similar times, they developed cultural institutions at the same time, they hit the Axial age in the same time, they ossified at the same time, they experience a dark age at the same time. So India and China are as as if Greco Roman and Persian civilization survived and we still had the cultural institutions as we did 2,000 years ago.

[Whatifalthist]

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[Austin Padgett]

Were the common problems or situations that they were experiencing kind of like not only urban development but increasing specialization due to trade, because that would be something that links small.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is, this is the really cool thing at the civilizational cycles that no one's really discovered. And this is something I only teased out indirectly through Amory. So I guess I'm the inventor of this. With these civilizational cycles, you see very similar developmental issues occurring at the same time. So India, China, Greece, Persia, and I guess you could throw the Jews in as well. In a thousand B.C. they had seen civil complete civilizational collapse due to the, the Bronze Age collapse. Then after that they experienced the formation of new cultural molds that over time formed into new kingdoms. By the time you get to 700 B.C. you have the establishment of the new kingdoms and by the time you hit 500 BC you've already experienced social collapse due to the rise of trade and cities and new more advanced social institutions. You also see a reformation movement of the religion a few centuries beforehand between the Orphics and the Buddhists and the Zoroastrians. And then you see the Axial Age with thinkers like Socrates and Confucius and Lao Tzu and Zoroaster. Then you see the formation of, you see class warfare after that where you saw revolutions in India and Greece. And then you see the rise of universal empires, that being Persia, the Greeks, the mass, the Qin and the, the Mauriens occur at the same time. Then you see the fossilization into the larger empires, that being Rome and the Han on each side of it. And then you see a dark age starting in 200 A.D. after they experienced, they all experienced social fossilization into rule by a single ruling class with a unified ideology around 200 BC. And then you start to see the civilizational collapse with the entire Trans Eurasian Dark age starting in 200 AD. So these are very dense cycles that fit across Eurasia and no one seems to have figured this out.

[Austin Padgett]

And yeah, I was just wondering with, you know, connecting it and then imagining the increased trade systems because you have the Bronze Age societies like we talked about, where it's mostly just a lot of slaves or a High percentage of serfs and a small aristocracy. You still have some urbanization, but then when you get those increasing trade networks, you have an increasing percent of the population that's specializing in crafts or merchants and activities like that. And you said that that process is destabilizing to the social structure. And so then they're trying to figure out how to kind of control that process up to the point where you get like that process of larger empire formation. And it seems like it's almost the same continuous struggle we're dealing with today because it's, it's the original problems of civilization. And not just problems, but attempts of special interests to protect their, their interests against that change. Whether that's a financial interest or a power based interest or anything else.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Damn, you picked that up quick. This is the song that never ends. Goes on and on, my friend. Somebody started singing it. Now everyone does. And now we keep on singing it because. Because, because it is the song that never ends. That was a song people would sing in school and they'd sing. It's funny, it was actually relatively philosophically advanced for elementary school kids and they would sing it just for continuous processes that seem like they never end. So we had like a 40 minute bus. I grew up in a rural area where he had a 40 minute bus ride to get to the school because they made the school district way too big to feed off this low population density. And so we'd sing that song in school as a way to basically just joke about how long our commute was. And yeah, so whoa, man, everything is the same and yet nothing and yet connected and different, man, and yet. And inside that hippie BS is this sort of duality that you keep on seeing all these consistent patterns happen again. But it's never boring for the people involved because I could draw there's four historic time periods I compare our current society in, whether the English Civil War, the fall of the Roman Republic, the American Civil War, the French Revolution, but none of knowing. I've read books on all four of those wars, but knowing those wars does not make this era less interesting. So history is both. Each moment is its indivisible self. And yet all moments are also connected. And there's these sympathetic parallels between them. If you are a Hindu or a Buddhist, you see it as mind numbing and horrifying. And if you're a Christian, you see it as a cosmic duty for you to gradually make it better. And if you're a like pre Christian pagan, you see it as a glorious place for you where you can conquer as much as possible. So it's the same reality and you can choose to view it through certain lenses.

[Austin Padgett]

I choose to view it through the best lens, which is like destroying the bureaucracy and that, that perennial problem. And I'm wondering if what is this new category of the age we're getting into and how can we conceptualize it? Is the first shift like oh, now we have this 15% of people that are not farming but they're urban. And so it creates this destabilizing effect in the same way that people would talk about China developing middle class and that changing things back thousands of years ago, it was just that 15, 10% that would change things. And it was pretty recently that we went from like, say we got to like a 30% urban, 70% rural or actually even more than that for after the Bronze Age throughout to the modern period. And now we're at an extreme percent urban. So that seems like it made a big jump recently and it was stable for a while after that post Bronze Age increase.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You have no idea how much time I've spent thinking of the question you just asked. So we roughly approximate 100 BC in this cycle. So because Fabry's done a lot of good work on this where interestingly civilizational cycles are more similar among genetically similar people. So Europeans have more similar cycles to other European societies. Middle Easterners have more similar cycles to other Middle Eastern societies. And same with Chinese and Indian. And this is true even with Islam or Christianity. You can change the religion and the society will continue to have a similar evolutionary strategy. So the society that we are most close to is classical civilization in these cycles. And in the classical world they had the. So what happened was that you had the Roman Republic rise to power. Rome was a multi ethnic federated democracy. They seize control of the entire, the entire Mediterranean basin through two, through the two most horrible wars up to that time in history that the Greeks or the Europeans had their civilization collapse. Then they had become a sort of feudatory of the Romans who gave them their own self governing thing called the Aegean League. Then you saw the mass rise of. Then you saw the mass rise of oligopolies in these huge mega corporations where the average Roman was pushed into poverty due to over competition with these foreign slaves and globalization. As Roman culture crushed the older cultures, Rome collapsed in the political division between two political parties that hated each other. One of the political parties supported the deep state and the other was a populist. The other political party he got the populist who was a wealthy Tycoon got too wealthy, and so the other political party had him assassinated. Then this spiraled into civil wars. Roman religion also collapsed as the Romans experienced feminism and the breakdown of the traditional social structure.

[Austin Padgett]

I see where you're going here. Yeah, that's the thing, the oligopoly. Right. So ever since the merchants popped up, they've been hated. And all the propaganda. They were the lowest caste, like merchants were really unpopular in the Axial Age philosophy and religion. It was kind of like the theme of it. It was almost what they were addressing because they represented this new class that had time to think or produce the situations in which people had time to think in urban areas.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. It's a interesting continuation of that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It is. And that's a very good point that I'm surprised you noticed that, because that's something I only got from David Graeber. He wrote up the Axial Age really well, and his thesis on it is that the Axial Age was due to the rise of money, aggro of money, money systems. And watch. I'm gonna put this video right before the Axial Age video in our playlist. And so you can. Because they're so intertwined, because the Axial Age is the outgrowth of the Iron Age. But in short, what happened is that the Middle East, Europe, India and China developed money systems at the Same time around 500 BC that broke apart traditional tribal culture, because with urbanization and money, you could no longer rely on interpersonal tribal contacts of like your cousin or your baker or your neighbor to control all social relations. So this resulted in mass social breakdown with breakdown in families and religion. And there was a tremendous amount of atheism in the ancient world. We forget about this. But the period before the Axial Age, secularism and atheism were the normal social opinions to have. And then the Axial Age philosophers were these conservative reaction against that who established this moral code, pulling on the older tradition, and then they established these new moral codes, these new old moral codes. Where Confucius was saying we should go back 500 years to the moral code of the early Zhou, and he obsessively studied the moral code of 500 years earlier because he said it was more moral. Then the Dao Lao Tzu, he just hung out in the woods and studied a lot of paradoxes. Buddha said we need to short circuit our way out of reality. Hinduism, which developed out of Buddhism, said we need to reconnect with the old gods, but then throw in the Buddhist cosmology. And then what Plato and Aristotle were doing was actually they were seen as social conservatives in their context because the postmodern sophists had seized control of Greece. And the sophists didn't believe that there was an underlying reality. So what they were saying is that we need to return to the archetypal values that our gods represent. So that's what the Platonic. The Platonic forms are, an attempt to rationalize the ancient Greek polytheistic moral code. And so you're correct, in which each of these cases, the Axial Age was a conservative anti merchant reaction, where in each case the nobility teamed up with the peasants and the religious institutions to basically say we're going to shut down capitalism and the merchants within a certain degree as a way to promote social stability.

[Austin Padgett]

Yep. And that's what I call the bureaucracy is that attempt to shut down capitalism. And they've been trying to do that for the last 2000 years to the point where I think we're at a potential point of breaking through a lot of those rudimentary, repeatedly tried attempts for control because, like, it gets just more and more out of control. Even in North Korea, you know what I mean, with the. Their food system completely depends on gray market activity at this point. So you can't erase it. So a lot of those, like you said, a lot of those religions that appeared at that time were reactions against those merchants and they were able to turn, you know, the peasants against them because it destabilized the religion and everything. And part of this was all tied to writing too, because writing was spreading around, which enabled you to kind of compare along with the trade, to compare your gods to other gods and get a list of gods. And then you're kind of thinking about things in a little bit of a different way. So it's like you get the Reddit atheist reaction. Well, how can they both be true? And then people break down, oh my God. So you have all that going on also, which is helps you get the peasants on your side to shut down the merchants who are a threat to noble power.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Agreed. And in each case you have a figure arise who is able of sifting through the data to find an underlying unifying threshold against all the other independent belief structures. And so that's why after nihilism, you hit the Axial Age breakthrough in each of the major civilizations. And this point is kind is schizo enough. I wouldn't normally share it, but it fits inside the context where in the esoteric mystic tradition, Lucifer is the Lightbringer and Lucifer is the devil. Lucifer is the masculine form of Venus and the way that worked is that he was a Greco Roman God that was shoved into a Christian context. So Lucifer is the God of desire. And what that entails is sexual desire, addiction, greed, basically the ever present force of desire which the Buddha existed to stand against. And so the idea in that philosophic school is that Lucifer is a force that drives the world because people need to make money and have kids. But that Lucifer is innately addictive. And I've jokingly referred to modernity as the age of Lucifer because Lucifer is the Lightbringer. We have all of these artificial lights everywhere. Los Angeles, the city of lights. Lucifer is the God of illusion. What that means is that for example, an age of Lucifer would entail obsessive. The society is controlled by desire, which is, that's what commercialism is. It would be short term desire that would never be fulfilled and it would just amp up the desires. That's basically the hedonic treadmill. It would be completely artificial, it would teach lies and it would also be a place with ever present, basically lighting. That sounds a lot like the modern world. Oh, also Lucifer, masculine Venus, very feminine society.

[Austin Padgett]

That's funny. And it also is funny that we're at the point now where we're looking at the effects of looking at a smartphone all day or something and measuring our brains and being like, hey, that is destructive to your serotonin cycle.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

So it's not even a mystery. We know, we know about some of those trade offs.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

But yeah, hopefully we don't get the Antichrist and all that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I don't really, I don't. I'm not a big Book of Revelation guy. I don't think it was supposed to be in the original Bible. And it literally says in the book of Revelation, you shouldn't try to interpret me because you'll always get the result wrong.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Yeah, I mean I've heard a lot of things about it. Like he was describing what was about to happen with Rome.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Killing everybody. And I mean apocalypse has happened. So I think that's maybe that's.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

The lesson.

[Rudyard Lynch]

A lot of the book of Revelation is stuff that fits to that specific historic context where there's lots of stuff where they're talking like the coded message for Nero or the Romans. And also, let's be blunt. For like if you're a Jewish wise man in that time period and you meditate and you see images of destruction and they were taking psychedelics. If you take psychedelics and meditate and you see images of destruction, that's just a Reflection of how your entire civilization is going to be wiped out within a generation. I mean this is a society which was on the verge of something really, really bad. And if it's wise men were meditating and finding or they were doing spiritual exercise and finding destruction, that's a reasonable reaction because they were about to face a lot of destruction. Everything they knew was getting wiped out and they were forced to have a massive diaspora to leave their homes.

[Austin Padgett]

Who is this?

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Jews, keep in mind. Oh yeah, the book of Revelation was written. Oh right before the Judeo Christian wars that had the forced diaspora.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And who said the thing about what a society controlled by Satan would look like with artificial lights? And where did that come from?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I got that from Mark Booth's Secret History of the World. So he listed all the traits of Lucifer and I was the guy who developed. So I added up each of those independent things.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, and you came to that. Yeah, I think that's an interesting theme. Right, because even you have the, a lot of people on the right who will go with the framework of the book Sapiens where they view markets as this kind of purely disruptive force. But it's also like, it also is what can help build and advance culture and enable you to kind of reform it in, in better ways. And we look at like we look at the trade offs of having phones and the way that that can be addictive and mess up our serotonin cycle or we look at like food and how it makes us fat, but when you have too much. But we don't look at everything that's enabled by that and the fact that we can actually integrate the positive elements of it without the rest just through like learning how to deal with modernity. But so I don't think there's a tendency in this reaction, right, which par with the reason we're talking about it because it parallels the reaction of Plato and all these guys to increasing urbanization and market activity back in the day where it's like a threat to nobility. So they're, you know, and you look at this through the Renaissance where the noble Italians and the Milan and who are older aristocracy are just absolutely contemptuous of bankers and all this stuff. And it's easy to fall into that reaction with modernity, but for two reasons, because we haven't integrated a lot of those elements well. And two, it's the oligarchy. So when those interests form into the oligarchy, then it's easy to kind of blame that process on, you know, the quote unquote merchant Class, which is why even India put them as the lowest caste. It's like it was a common parallel.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The great success Western civilization faced, and this is what Spengar talks about, the Faustian character is that the west harnessed dark energies for something good. If you look at any given Western institution, it works because it understandably, it understands man's innate will to power and it works with it. Democracy, science, the Western military system, capitalism, all of these work because you pit different self interested factions together and then you force them to improve and to do better. And so when you look at the modern world's breakthrough, it was the harnessing of the power of desire and the power of human competition. Because for the axial age, the most advanced they could get philosophically was establishing uniform social codes based off social just follow your rules. If you follow the rules, society will work. That was the most advanced they could get, the population. But then the breakthrough to modern science which came, which came due to a series of different philosophic trends was we want to actively initiate and take from. We want to go out into chaos and improve through chaos.

[Austin Padgett]

That being the underlying theme. Yeah, exactly. You have to ride the wave. You have to like work with the ocean. You can't fight the ocean. And throughout all these periods, you know, it may seem callous to disregard some disruption or. And which is not what I want to do. I want to talk about how to make things even better. But trying to reacting to this process of disruption by closing yourself off has never ever worked in all of human history. Yeah, it puts you on maybe a 75 year, 200 year clock, but that's it, you're done. Like Sparta, that's what Sparta, Sparta. That was their role in Greece during this time. Right. Where they were the most conservative and completely rejected this, kept a strong slave class and avoided any sort of merchant activity basically except for the bare necessity far away they would talk about Plato, I think even would talk about if you're going to have a port city, keep it away from your main city, keep your port away from your city. None of this has ever worked. So yeah, that's a great point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

In Sparta is a great example which allows us to transition into the different political developments across the continent. And interestingly, and we always get the context wrong with the Greek philosophers where there's always very important details that are left out. Where they saw Plato as a religious figure and we see him as a philosopher. And also Plato was seen as a Spartan spy because he was advocating the Spartan social code in Athens. Would you rather Cover civilizations chronologically or would you rather go west to east or east to west?

[Austin Padgett]

Well, west to east is what we started on. I think so, yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So Europe was potentially the first place that developed iron. And there's a side tangent. There's a theory that Africa also developed iron independently. I don't know if that's true because there's so much lying and obfuscation around African prehistory. I could totally see, because their idea is that it came from the Sahel. And I think it would be more probable if, because we know that from genetics, there was a migration across the central Sahara in that time period, if iron was imported to Africa from the Mediterranean, because I don't know of any other population said Earth in the Sahel at that time. But I don't know. If I talked to an Africa expert and they gave me a good answer, I could believe it.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I read something about that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Also impressive.

[Austin Padgett]

And I also don't have a really.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Good opinion on it, but Europe, sorry, this is going to be. This could be construed, that one sentence could be construed as incredibly problematic, but. So I think there's a probable enough chance iron was developed in Europe, someplace around the Alps. And that would make sense with, with the Celtic migrations, because the Celts spread across Europe and around the time period as the invention of iron. And the Celts were the first people to really use long swords in a big way. Where the Celtic military strategy was that they charge in a battle with longswords and work themselves up into a fanatical frenzy. And then this crash in this, what was called the highlands charge back in the early modern period, it could destroy almost any army on Earth. And the only people who could resist it were the Macedonians and the Romans who built up their militaries to fight against it. And so the Celts conquered a huge cultural region from Ireland out to Turkey and Romania and Ukraine, most of Europe. And the Celts were the indigenous, the first Aryan conquerors of Europe in most of West Europe's genetics. Even today, as of Celtic origin, where you can look at a map and you can still look at certain genetic groups and it looks the same as the map of the Celts over 2,000 years ago. And the funny thing about this video is that each of the different sub regions we're going to talk about, there's already another video. So this is the connecting video across the ancient Europe video, the ancient Greece video, the Axial Age video, the Bronze Age collapse video, the ancient India video, the ancient China video. The future ancient Persia video, the ancient Israel video. This is like the Lego block that puts all those videos together.

[Austin Padgett]

Perfect. The thread through the Silk Road.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And the Celts, the. They had relatively. They weren't stupid or primitive, where when Caesar conquered Gaul, Gaul had 7 million people and Italy had 6 million people. But the Gauls were never. The Gauls and the Celts were never able to unify, partly for cultural regions and partly also, they were just further away from the center of civilization, which was the Middle East. And so over time, you saw the Celts get squeezed out as the Romans conquered north and the Germans conquered south, until those two populations divided almost all of the European subcontinent. Next, in Greece, you saw the breakdown of the old palace structure around Mycenae, where during the Bronze Age, Mycenae was a kingdom that controlled all of. All of modern Greece, or most of it. And then that couldn't survive because iron warfare gave spearmen the advantage. And you saw this transition in Greek history from chariots to spearmen. And you can't overstate the importance of the spear in Greek history, where Athens and Sparta are a great example, where Sparta is the most prototypical hoplite society, where the hoplite was this spear and shield formation, where all these Greek men would be in armor, covered head to toe in a lot of cases or nearly, and they would just have this hedgehog of spears. And this was the one thing the Greeks did really well. Or when the Greeks fought the Persians, the Persians were better at archers and cavalry and even a lot of naval warfare. But that one advantage the Greeks had in infantry, the Persians had no counter to because they had no good heavy troops. And so the Greek city state or the polis developed because each city state was a different hoplite war band. And democracy developed because there was an equality among the spearmen. And so in Sparta, as an example, you saw basically autocratic hoplite society where 90% of the population were the helot population who were serfs, and then the 10% who were part of the war band, they would rule them as aristocrats. In Sparta, they didn't have a currency. They cut themselves off from the world. They had no capitalism. They. You were not allowed to live with your wife until you were age 40. And they would have. They were pretty gay. Like, they would actually. They were actually gay. But then they would also have, like, they'd have naked men stand up in the town center, and they'd have others rate their bodies. And so this was a society where they thought stealing, and if you stole and then you Weren't caught. That was a moral virtue. And it was a society where they forced you to live in the military barracks for almost all of your adult life. There was no alternative to. To not being in the army.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. It was the total rejection of the trends we were talking about earlier. Yeah, the rise of merchants and trade.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Another good thing about this video is that I can leave out lots of other details. So like, if you want to learn about Athens, watch the Greece video. So Athens is like the polarity to Sparta. It had a lot of philosophers, it had a lot of artists. It had a colonial empire. If you do not know anything about Athens, you are a fool. And with Greece, you saw the percolating of the city state culture and you saw the polarity between Athens, Sparta and Thebes was. It was actually the biggest of those cities. For a lot of Greek history it was this oligarchy and I think it was an oligarchy or a monarchy. They alternated and they were more normie and they were more indicative of the entire Greek character. But then, interestingly, the Greek city state broke down where over the course of the Peloponnesian period, the Peloponnesian War, they brought cavalry and archers and the cavalry and archers finally killed the hoplites. And then as that occurred, the city state was dead. And Macedonia unified the entire Greek region under. Under a shared coherent state that then conquered Persia. Do you have any questions before I go to Persia?

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And Thebes was the biggest, like you said, city. It was also the biggest kind of trading city. It might have been the one least affected by conservative reactionary philosophy. And then Macedonia probably was like an interesting compromising force because they were more rural and. But also not into the reactionary philosophy. So they could be like semi acceptable to both.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And for the final touch on the Greeks, the ultimate culmination of Greek philosophy was philosophy. Where the greatest thing the Greeks produced was the philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, as well as their enormous conquests and cultural creations. And the Greek character was fundamentally aristocratic at its core. Where all the Greek projects ultimately tried to culminate in basically improving the lot of the slave owning class that dominated Greece. And so you see for the Greek philosophy, it's very abstract and not earthy because these guys built their identity off being gentlemen who would never have to actually work. So all of their philosophizing was in pure abstract because they wouldn't want to show that they were doing work by actually doing empiricism.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Because the whole context is you can only do this and spend all your day thinking because you've gotten to a point where there's a surplus where you don't have to do traditional work. So they directly associate thinking with not doing work.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

Even though, like there's a lot of cool work you can do when you're thinking.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Beyond farming or not, you know, old farming.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Their mental category. And keep in mind, almost all European aristocrats until even like World War I saw it this way. The English were weird. Where they thought aristocrats could work is that they put thinking war, government service in a different category than like running a shoe shop or like no respect.

[Austin Padgett]

For the bookkeeping or the capitalist.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And Napoleon said I can. He said the English are a nation of shopkeepers that's well to conquer them. Nietzsche and Hitler also called them a nation of shopkeepers.

[Austin Padgett]

Is this deriding of merchants. It's this constant Axial age to now theme.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So the Persians, Elon Musk is dumb.

[Austin Padgett]

You know, like running five companies doesn't. Isn't a very complicated thing to do.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah. I saw this meme and the meme was making fun of Elon Musk for being poor. And this meme is stuck in my head. They like showed him being as like this fat loser in his basement. And this means been stuck in my head for months because I'm like, if you want to deride Elon Musk for being a poor loser, your mental model of reality is so fundamentally wrong that I cannot believe we exist in the same reality.

[Austin Padgett]

That's why I think this Axial age reaction is finally breaking down. Because you just can't propagandize people into thinking Elon Musk is dumb or corrupt. Like are corrupt. Like you could, I don't know, the olive oil merchant to 3,000 years ago or something. So there's too much information out there. We've seen the rockets. I wasn't impressive.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I wasn't intending to make this video into libertarian like content, but sure, we could. We can go in this direction. But Persia, another anti libertarian society. So Persia came out of the wreckage of Assyria and Babylon, who were both Iron Age states, but they were an extension of the older Mesopotamian civilization. And you were finally able to unify Mesopotamia in the Iron Age, which had basically never happened before, where you saw first Assyria conquer the entire Fertile Crescent region from Elam, circling through Iraq, through Syria and then to Egypt. And that was because the Assyrians were stuck in the middle of the map and they were the first people to develop a. The Egyptians had a professional military, but The Assyrians had a really good professional military, and they were able to do empire building on a tremendous scale where it was very much like the Romans. What Assyria did on a purely political level was intensely impressive. But the problem as well is that Assyria, they were just brutal and they were operating out of a dying culture. So the only way they could get loyalty was through brutality because they didn't have another moral axis to pull on. And the Assyrians basically crushed the thousands of years of previous internecine Middle Eastern conflict where Babylon ruled briefly after the Assyrians. The Babylonians are known for being completely degenerate. That's just. They were the final point of Mesopotamian civilization before it fell. And then the Persians were able to take how the Iron Age had allowed the basically crushing of all these regional differences in the Middle east and build the first truly universal Middle Eastern empire. So the Persians conquered a region farther across than North America, and they were able to unify it more so because they had a stronger religion called. They had a stronger religion, that being Zoroastrianism, that gave them this messianic sense of we are spreading the truth. And Zoroaster, he was a shaman who saw his role as fighting as the forces of evil. And so in Persian culture, the greatest thing you had to do was tell the truth. And they said things are either truth or lies. And they said that they are the empire of truth. And in a similar concept to what we talked about beforehand is that in Persian culture, it was morally abhorrent to buy or sell. If you were an aristocrat, you had to get all of your food from your own land and all of your goods from your own land or borrow it from a friend. So when the Persians invaded Greece, what they said is that you are the men of lies, because your culture is based around commerce, and commerce is innately lies. He said. The Persian general said, see, you build the center of your society in the agora or the marketplace, because all of your words are lies.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. And yeah, there's a fear of becoming dependent on these new systems for various reasons, whether it's just insecurity that the last or that it threatens you or whatever it is.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I also just think that probably the introduction of the money economy promoted lots of stuff that was just not good. It's like, we'll probably have social media thousands of years from now. It's just a useful technology, but social media will have fundamentally changed its structure, right? Yeah, because nature. Greece, for example, they banned women from the agora because this was actually a Banning women from the marketplace was a relatively common thing in that time period. A lot of cultures did it because they said women innately gossiped, and so you have to keep them out of the marketplace. So the marketplace is only productive male activities.

[Austin Padgett]

And they didn't even know how much they spent yet. They just thought they were worried about the gossip.

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, women bought jewelry. We have records of women having jewelry back in the Ice Age, right?

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, classic. And like, the steel byproduct was jewelry. And like you said with the social media, what were we talking about there? Where things change or. Oh, they're bad, right? Yeah. So I'm sure you had a lot of situations like Jack and the Beanstalk situations, you know, irresponsible situations that really, like, ruined you. And yeah, just like people buying, you know, bad crypto alts or are losing their ship in the water and then their family starves because the shipping sank or something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I mean, it's also like, like, go to Africa and you'll see people like, you'll see like, oh, I sold this mangy, like, extinct this mangy endangered animal to you. Oh, there's prostitutes in the street. Oh, it's some guy selling drugs. Oh, it's some chill child sweatshop. Like, there's this whole. So there's this filter that societies go through, through commercialization, where we have had commercial economies in the European world for thousands of years. And so we've kind of learned to evolve these sort of subconscious behaviors that make market economies better. And they don't have that in a lot of other societies. It's why in Africa, for example, a big stoppage on their development is that they have a moral obligation to give money to their relatives. So if you make money, then everyone from your village, all of your uncles, that stuff, they'll try to mooch money off you, so you have no reason to make money. And this was really hard to get Africans to move past because it's so integral to their culture. And that used to be everywhere. But then over the course of thousands of years, like, the American character is like, lots of Americans would, like, literally rather freeze outside than ask someone for money. And that took thousands of years to.

[Austin Padgett]

Evolve, and we're kind of breaking it down pretty fast. Because when you break down all the cultural institutions and norms and the things that are not, you know, that the boomers were taught, were not taught to the millennial people, you can lose a lot of that, those instincts instantly. And you see that with a return. Now where people do, people kind of act like that in the US a lot of times.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, a lot. Christianity was the best religion ever in human history at suppressing envy because it had an individually focused moral code with an afterlife based off your moral actions. So Christianity was really good. Also, one of the best things Christianity had has is that Christ naturally subverts expectations. So if you're a Christian, you have to look at things on a somewhat deeper level than other religions because Christ is. Was an unemployed convict who died at the hands of a colonial empire. And so if you accept Christ's resurrection, you also have to accept that society frequently really screws up. And that degree requires a degree of introspection absence absent in other societies. And so the death of Christianity was the thing that resulted in people using the state to control society.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Lower trust. And then mastering envy is the key to society because it's like mastering Cain. And it didn't take very long for us to go from understanding that to teachers across the country saying if you don't have enough to share for everybody, don't eat candy or something. Right. Which is that African principle you're talking about.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. We have to actually talk about the Iron Age, though. So. So you have the Persian Empire develop and the Persian Empire wasn't. They went degenerate really fast. Where authors at the time said within the course of a single lifetime, the Persians went from the most honorable and brave and manly people to complete degenerates. And they never saw the develop of certain types of market economy that you had in Greece, India or China. And that's also part of the reason why the Middle east had a weird axial age. And another factor of that is that the Greeks conquered the entire Middle east. Because the Greeks had this economic and sociological revolution that the Middle east didn't have, which gave the Greeks an enormous advantage, which is how Alexander was able to conquer the entire the entire Middle Eastern region out to India. Because the Persians had the culture beforehand had kind of fossilized, and then the Persians put a sheen on top of it with their own new vigor. And then the Persians ran out of vigor. And there was nothing to stop the Greeks from taking over the region. But with the rise of the Iron Age, you saw the breakdown of the older Bronze Age social codes with new stuff mostly imported from outside, like Zoroastrianism or Greek philosophy or Judaism. And the Phoenicians came out of the Iron Age where on the coast of the breakdown of traditional authorities meant that people who were originally obscure in the Middle east could rise to new importance. And that included those two Peoples where the Jews were desert herder bandits in the old order and they took over modern Israel and then they formed a kingdom there. Then that developed the Abrahamic tradition. And the Abrahamic tradition only formed due to the sociological democratization where this tribe of desert bandits could get independence. The Phoenicians were also completely obscure until they were the only people who weren't wiped out in the Bronze Age collapse around the Levant. And then the Phoenicians created this trading empire that stretched out to Britain and they circumnavigated Africa and they had colonies all over the Mediterranean. So what the, the Iron Age did was it moved the centers of the Middle east away from Babylon and Egypt, who went more so into decline so that you could see formerly relatively obscure players like Assyria or Persia and Phoenicia and the Jews become historically significant.

[Austin Padgett]

That's super interesting too, because it almost feels like there's this parallel between, you know, how you have the constant back and forth between the nomadic cultures and the farmer cultures. Yeah, it seems like the introduction of iron was a big plus in the. Are the mountain people mountain slash nomad versus valley and farm? Yeah, it was a big plus to the mountain people or maybe the, the coastal people because it didn't choir as complex of civilization to maintain that, that bronze production, it could be more sporadic. So in this, you know, same way that the Mongolians could travel and supply themselves just with their own horses and drinking blood and milk and everything is the same thing with iron now you've given an advantage to the people outside of those trade networks.

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, that's totally true. It's funny. Why do people say no and then agree? I do that at least a few times a day.

[Austin Padgett]

Saying what?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I said no, that's true. And I meant to.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh yes, that's an upstate thing. Or at least we consider that an upstate New York thing. So it's probably Pennsylvania thing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I catch myself saying it multiple times a day and I have no idea why I would grammatically say no and then agree, oh, no.

[Austin Padgett]

The way we do an upstate is people say yeah, but they say it as if they're disagreeing with you. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do that in Pennsylvania. We use weird language.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, no, but like I just did it. So yes, that's completely true. And a great example of that is that the Assyrians destroyed themselves upon mountain and grassland people where the Assyrians fought a lengthy war against the Armenians, where they tried to drive the Armenians out of their mountain fortresses. And then it just Bled their entire society white because they really couldn't afford to fight a protracted war against Armenia. And then after that, war with the Armenians, the Sumerians. Not Sumerian, Cimmerian with a C. Like Conan. Conan the Sumerian. They were a tribe out of Ukraine and they were a form of Scythian. And they. They smashed up against Assyria and the Assyrians were only barely able to fight them off. And Dan Carlin writes about this really well where he says, we view Assyria as evil, but remember, they held the line for civilization against way worse things. And so you are correct that the Iron Age allowed the enabling of this wave of barbarian invasions.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, you know, what's a modern technological parallel?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Satellite Internet. Starlink. Right. It changes Internet from only fast Internet being in urban areas to kind of being able to do it anywhere. So that's going to give different regions.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Hugely comparative advantage that they didn't have before.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, you're right. So there's a point I want to touch here before we go to the Orient, where this time period of history, they perceive themselves as the Age of Aries. And Aries is the God of war. And so even if you don't believe in astrology, they did. And so it mattered to their society where the Age of Aries was supposed to be. Masculine defiance against the world and aggression and heroism. And so the heroic age across Eurasia occurred at the start of the Iron Age, because the Iron Age allowed a new expression of masculinity against the old bureaucratic empire empires. And so the Greek Heroic Age, as example, started at the start of the Iron Age. And so all the Greek myths were set. Then the Jewish Heroic Age under Solomon and David started the Iron Age. Zoroaster, the Persian Heroic Age, that was also started the Iron Age. And then China, India's Heroic Age under the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, when those are set, is also a thousand B.C. then in China, their Heroic Age is sort of the Zhou Dynasty. And so there was this period, the start of the Iron Age, where you had this manly, heroic culture. And then centuries later, people would try to imitate it. And so the Axial Age was the imitation of each society's memory of their own virility that they had the start of the Iron Age, because they remember that they were really manly when they first discovered iron. And then through iron, they could grow weak. So Amaury Duriancourt talks about the masculine revolution where you saw the. Around a thousand bc, the idea that a human can fight against nature, because beforehand the idea is the humans were stuck inside nature, and no matter what, we were an extension of the natural world. So in Greece it was the rationalist tradition. In Israel it was monotheism, and in Persia it was Zoroastrianism. And in each of them you posit a worldview where you are distanced from the world and you must influence the world. The logical philosopher has to parcel the world in a logically consistent form format. The Jewish monotheist separates the world between God and that which is not God. And you are. Your relationship with God is determined by you being away from God. And in the Zoroastrian tradition, there is the constant battle between good and evil. And this is what allows the Western tradition, because the Oriental tradition is based upon serenity and not upon harmony. And the Western tradition is based upon excellence.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And why were they based on those different things?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Because rice farming demands more conformity and warfare on the western half of the continent.

[Austin Padgett]

And they had those nice little rock gardens which are pretty peaceful. So that gets you thinking.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Herder peoples are also more predicated upon excellence. And there was more of a herder influence in the western half of Eurasia. It's funny, when I say Western, I'm including Islam in that too, if you folks didn't realize. And now to get to India and China, they also experienced civilizational collapses, or China, not so badly. But in India, what happened was that after the fall of the Indus civilization, you saw their new upswelling of the Aryans migrate into the region, conquered the local population, and you saw the new upswelling of the Upanishads and the Vadantas and all of these documents integral to modern Hinduism. And India formed its own states. They went through a period of Darwinistic competition with the establishment of their own culture. And this was a historic period. I'm glossing over, but I shouldn't. Where this was, I can say all that in a few sentences. But India went through its own civilizational cycle. They went through a philosophic reformation where they questioned the old Brahmins. Then the Brahmans constricted their power. There was the rise. You had aristocratic republics in India that were conquered. You had the powerful empires that were able to dominate more and more. You had the nobility fleeing into the jungles to become mystics and gaining incredible abilities if you had to walk on coals or live in caves for years on end. You had a period of atheism and agnosticism, which the Buddha. You had a period of class warfare where the lower castes murder the upper castes, and you Had Buddha rising out and then him forming a religion, and then that religion being taken in by the new dominant empire that unified the continent, that being the Mauryans fell. The old Brahmins adapt Buddhism into a new form called Hinduism. The Hindus beat, beat the Buddhists, take them out of India. India falls into a dark age. So I hope to convey in a minute the sheer depth of history I am leaving out.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that is. That's a lot of stuff going on. I guess I was just wondering what. Yeah, it's a really exciting period of history. Right. Because they're coming into this period where they have these increasing surpluses so that someone can go off and just wander in a cave and test their body. You know, you couldn't just test your body. You know, 5,000 years ago. Everything is just about survival. It's almost like when you get to the modern age and you start running for fun. That was what their version of that was like, can I go three weeks without food in a cave looking at the sun, just because I want to test it out?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So.

[Austin Padgett]

But yeah, and then I wonder, like with the Iron Age, why didn't someone invent this stuff and propagate it earlier since it was discovered for so long before it was common? And I'm thinking, if I lived back then, could I have figured out iron? Like, why not? And then you realize it's got to just be. It's got to be a scarcity thing where it's kind of just more commonly bubbling up to the surface at the same point where people have the luxury to go meditate in caves. Because going out physically, walking, digging, finding it, lighting the fire, burning it, melting it, it's all an investment for like a 1 out of 1,000 chance you're going to get the right result without even knowing what you're looking for. So it seems small, but it's all physical investment.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Iron. Iron requires the heating of metal or of metal up to a certain threshold. That's difficult for societies up to a certain range. So it involves the creation of, like, these charnels. Because if you look at. There's a lot of great documentaries at how you make Viking and medieval swords and you make these charnel ovens that heat up the air really hot. And they. I guess they hadn't thought of that. I mean, there's infinite things we haven't thought of. I'm so. This made me think of two things, this conversation. The first is that in the last few years, I find myself. I don't watch, like, new movies. I don't watch that much YouTube. I don't watch the new TV shows. I don't listen to the new music. So I realized I gradually filled my free time with reading more religious documents. And I thought, wait, am I my great great grandpa? Like, when your hobby is reading religious documents? Like, I'm like, society past a threshold of sucking, where I find this. Where, like, this is what I do in my free time.

[Austin Padgett]

That's funny you say that, because it's like, that's almost what you need. You need it to be, like, so bad that you give up on entertainment to start, really, to avoid the entertainment trap.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And then I understood.

[Austin Padgett]

Keep making it worse. Keep it. Keep. Hollywood woke.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And then I understood history, and I understood why so much of history was religious. And the other thing is that. What was my other point about early civilizational development? Oh, yeah. Our era of history does so many stupid things that they'll look back on us in a way similarly to why, like, we look back on, why didn't you invent iron earlier? They'll look at things we did and they'll be like, why did you folks do that?

[Austin Padgett]

Which is ironic because we're in the age where so many people are so arrogant about the past and modern knowledge and cautious because they're not feeling the consequences of action. So everyone's just run around making more mistakes than almost ever while looking down on people from the past.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I read a beautiful quote on that topic.

[Austin Padgett]

And the type of knowledge is funny. I. I made a meme about it one time where it was like, the modern. The modern person with a cell phone being like, There are over 400000 species of beetles. And then a colonial guy being like, don't take on debt or something. It's like the different types of knowledge.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So this was a quote I read. This book's absolutely good. The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas. And I think I found this quote. So one of the things Max Weber said about the modernity, and he was writing it a century ago, he said the side of the future would be specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart. This nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

[Austin Padgett]

Specialist without spirit, who without heart.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And then specialists without spirit, and then sensualist without heart. And this nullity imagines itself to have achieved greater than any civilization ever.

[Austin Padgett]

Right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Which I think is relatively accurate.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that's pretty good. When was that written?

[Rudyard Lynch]

This book was written, like, 1999. Very good. It's a history of Western philosophy and final country is China. And with China, you saw the Zhou Dynasty, and then you saw the fall of the Zhou Dynasty. No. So you get the fall of the Shang, the fall of the Shang Dynasty. They were a theocracy that was based in more of the river valley earlier civilizational tradition of priests who cluster around the river to control the irrigation system. So China started out similarly as a civilization to Babylon or Egypt. And then the Shang fall to degeneracy. And then through that, the Duke of Zhou, who was a frontier warlord, took over, made himself emperor, established the legal principle of the mandate of heaven. He then in turn spread too many feudal landlords across China. That collapsed China into a series of independent countries. These independent countries first fought aristocratic wars against each other in the spring and autumn period, and then fought more brutal wars in the Warring States period. And I'm simplifying an era which all of Chinese culture took place, where all of the things we talk about, the other civilizations happen. In China, they had agnosticism, social breakdown, nihilism, dominance by the aristocracy, the aristocracy in turn being persecuted. They had. The art of war was written. Confucianism and Daoism were developed. It was Chinese civilization. And through the Iron Age, you saw China move from a patchwork of independent duchies to a single unified country under chin. And so where I'll finish the Iron Age is around the time of the birth of Christ, where across Eurasia there are two great empires that are nearly the exact same size and have nearly the exact same population, those being the Roman Empire and Han China. And then in between are a handful of states like Persia and the Kusans and Armenia. And this was an order that had calcified into a certain way comparable to the Bronze Age order that fell apart 2,000 years earlier. And it faced similar social issues of pushing the institutions that had developed originally in the Bronze Age collapse to a point where they no longer made sense. And thus the cycle came back around only for that civilization to fall again and for it to restart.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's funny to think of the Axial Age because it's just. It's such an exciting time, it's such a disruptive time. But they were able to kind of like lock down that disruption. Like that rate of change didn't continue up as fast as it was going during the Age. Yeah, maybe that. Maybe they weren't ready for it. Maybe they weren't ready to just go full throttle, or maybe people were able to clamp down on systems of control. But, yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I think they weren't ready for it. Like, I can't imagine the Roman Empire having an industrial revolution. I just don't think that would have worked. Because keep in mind the Romans used the same word for innovative as for evil, sinister. And so change was seen as innately evil. So imagine shoving that society through the industrial revolution.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, right. Well, that's part of the product of the way the Axial Age went. I mean, it went the way it did. It makes sense. I just, I like to. If I imagine a lot of those areas at that time going in a different direction, then I start to picture like Babylonian steampunk, which sounds kind of fun, but yeah, Maga based.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay, so what's next episode, Austin?

[Austin Padgett]

Well, what about a deeper dive into Persians and the Achaemenid Empire and then the Persians? Is that overlapping too much?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I want to read at least another two books before we get to Persia.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay, well, you're the one reading the books here, so what do you think is a. I know it's my choice to pick it. I'm not going to say Copper Age.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I don't think I would do the discovery of science.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, perfect. That sounds fun.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay, follow your dreams, Austin. Bye.

[Austin Padgett]

All right, let's discover science later.

[Whatifalthist]

History102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ 102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.