Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

“CURT DOESN’T KNOW HISTORY, HE NEEDS TO READ A BOOK”

to: @Gareth Martin

I thought you were going to present some counterfactuals. But no.

I’m tracing the evolution of truthful speech on the one hand and competing forms of speech on the other. The premise is that this is because of accidents of western origin.

Now, you can try to make some argument or other, but in general you’ve made two false ones.

THE CODE OF HAMMURABI
The code of hammurabi like the inquisition for that matter, were attempts to standardize punishments between heterogeneous groups within the “empire”, so that retaliation cycles (feuds) did not scale between those groups.

THE PHOENICIAN GROUP STRATEGY
The phoenicians originated either as southern semites on the southern persian gulf, or in situ from earlier northern semitic survivors of the climate crisis. It appears the latter but it is nearly impossible to separate out their genetics, other than to say that lebanese are an old people. same problem with greek aristocracy. We don’t have samples from enough individuals yet to know.

As far as we know they survived by pastoralism and fishing, but because they had the location and sufficient skill and organization, they were able to discount the shipping cost of Tin from the afghanistan route, and copper from the european route, and there is some evidence of local tin mining. So they capitalized in the ‘arms trade’ of the day (bronze was to the ancient world what oil is today. Waterways are still the cheapest method of transportation of heavy goods. They leveraged this wealth to create a coastal trading empire of city states.

Agrarian societies are more expensive to tovern than naval (as the romans discovered when expanding into europe) because land is slow and costly to cover quickly but can be covered by foot soldiers rather rapidly (at 20m per day).

So phoenicians like athenians and the british and unlike the persians and the germans and the spartans could concentrate wealth in capital with higher returns. But like jews, palestinians, and gypsies today they could not resist armies. They played Switzerland for the ancient empires precisely because they DIDN”T have capable armies, but were too useful as transporters. This utility ended when they competed with rome, that was, like the USA a combined marine and army power engaging in trade where possible, rule where possible, and predation where possible.