My offhand reference in the open thread to continuity of devotion to the Babylonian God Tammuz to the 10th century elicited a fascinating email from a long-time reader about paganism in modern Afghanistan, which I will paraphrase below. But, before I go on, I should mention also the inhabitants of the Mani peninsula in the southeast Peloponnese were Greco-Roman pagans until the 870’s A.D. The reason for this persistence is simple: the Mani peninsula is very isolated. The premodern world was not like our world today with global media and interconnected trade networks. Presumably, these pagan villagers interacted only a few times a year with outsiders. The Christian church might send a priest (there is evidence of churches as early as the 4th century in the region), but without the force of the state, the locals could continue to practice their indigenous religion without much interference.

This is a good introduction to the story I will pass on. Apparently, my reader, who wishes to remain anonymous and so sent an email, was a translator in Afghanistan. Some of the officers he worked with told him a story about a strange Afghan militant they captured in 2001. This man was nominally a Sunni Muslim Pashtun. But, in his isolated valley, the inhabitants believed that the sun was a jewel vommitted by a dragon every morning. In the evening the dragon swallowed the jewel (which slipped under the flat earth). The militant joined the fight against the Americans, whom he thought were Germans because he believed they came to steal the jewel, and therefore usher in an age of darkness.

My informant says the Afghan officers were quite disturbed that this man had such rich and sincere pagan beliefs despite his Islamic identity. He was not Nuristani or one of the more exotic groups, but a Pashtun.

I think the existence of beliefs and people like this even in our modern globalized world, where semi-pagans know who “Germans” are, should make it more comprehensible why down to the 800s and 900s there were pockets of belief in literal Bronze age gods in the medieval world.

There is a narrative that Yelu Chucai, and advisor of Genghis Khan and his son, was responsible for the saving of much human life by making the case for taxation rather than extermination. The story told is that the Mongols toyed with the idea of driving peasants off their land so as to create vast pastures for their animals. Of course, peasants driven off their land would die of starvation. Yelu Chucai’s clearly correct argument was that peasants in place yielded  more rents than larger herds. The Emperor of China was always wealthier than the Shanyu of the Xiongnu.

But was this wisdom always known? Next week on my Substack I’ll be posting my interview with Dr. Kristian Kristiansen about the transition from Yamnaya to Corded Ware in Northern Europe (this week’s podcast is with David Anthony of  The Horse, The Wheel, and Language). A few years ago a notorious sensationalist piece came out based on some of Kristiansen’s assertions titled Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA. The title and assertion were ridiculous, but Kristiansen doesn’t deny that the Yamnaya were a militaristic people.

I posited to Kristiansen that the early Yamnaya did not have an ideology or theory of subjugation and subordination. That is, rather than conquering the native Neolithic societies the Yamnaya only saw the opportunity to replace them because that’s what human populations had been doing since time immemorial. Some of Kristiansen’s work involves highlighting the fact that in Western Europe the Yamnaya/Corded Ware seem to have engaged in mass burnings to clear the forest and transform them into pastures. As the Mongols imagined doing!

The near-total elimination of Neolithic paternal lineages is striking. Within a few centuries, the overwhelming preponderance of the lineages in Northern Europe was Indo-European. No native chiefs were co-opted into Corded Ware society. All the local elite lineages were all extinguished.

The world became less brutal when men could dream of being rich and lazy, living off the rents of their inferiors.

A very long piece in New York Times Magazine, He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? – Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal — even if that means destroying their discipline. There is obviously some self-interestedness from those who would defend Classics when they are Classicists. Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, both of whom I respect, don’t think much of the field (though both have some association with it).

I feel the piece tried to break it down into a binary when the reality is more complex.

My own comment would be to repeat Terrence:

“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”
“I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me”

One of Peter Turchin’s ideas which have had a major impact on me is that of a “meta-ethnic” identity, and how that fits perfectly with what we might term “world religions.” Meta-ethnic identity isn’t a fancy construct, but the name itself gives essential information. In the world of the Bronze Age human societies were scaling beyond tribe, but they lacked the ideological toolkit, or what Samo Burja calls “social technology,” to maintain institutional continuity. In Brotherhood of Kings the author outlines how Bronze Age Near Eastern polities established diplomatic relationships by extending the idea of biological kinship. There was no great creativity, and the analogy was imperfect enough to cause confusion (e.g., Egyptian ideas of status and kinship were substantively different from Levantine and Mesopotamian ones, which led to inefficiencies).

The development of religions which span ethnicities, and unite people in spiritual and ideological kinship and affinity, breaks the biological analogy enough to be flexible and portable. Common books and mythologies serve as transmission vehicles of meta-ethnic norms. As I have noted before, the reason that most of the world religions emerged between the period of 500 BC and 500 AD (give or take a few centuries and definitions) is that this was the period of social technological innovation. Once the major players shook out, ideological oligopolies stabilized into a new equilibrium. There may even have been structural reasons in relation to the scaling of human civilizations that mean the number of world religions was never going to converge upon one (e.g., I believe that Islam is best thought of as an offshoot of Christianity which emerged almost accidentally from the perspective of the principals; perhaps in the pre-printing press world Christianity simply ‘outran its supply lines’).

But though the horizontal nature of meta-ethnic identities seems to have obtained an equilibrium, there has been a great shift in their vertical impact, from the top to the bottom of the social hierarchy. In 360 A.D. Julian the Apostate renounced Christianity, the religion in which he was raised, and embraced Neoplatonism and Late Antique Paganism. This was feasible at the time because Christianity identity had not become solid among the Roman elites, who were still in the main nominally pagan, though there was a vociferous rising Christian minority. But over time Christianity swallowed the Roman elite, so rulers who may privately have had little sympathy or piety would never have engaged in apostasy.

But why? The Reformation and the conundrum of Akbar tell us why. Richard Eaton argues in India in the Persianate Age that Akbar wanted to leave Islam behind for much of his life. By the end, he even innovated and created his own pantheistic religion. He and some of the later Mughals (e.g., Dara Shikoh) were clearly influenced by the Brahmins and other Indian religious thinkers in their circle and felt keenly the tension between world-normative Islam, and the assimilative power of the Indic religious tradition. Just like Julian, Akbar was raised as a conventional follower of a monotheistic religion but became emotionally and intellectually invested in something different, and more ancient. But Akbar never went as far as Julian, who clearly wished to marginalize Christianity in a way that Akbar could never marginalize Islam. The reason is that Julian’s elites were religiously plural, and their identity was still weak and new. By the time of Akbar the Islamic military elites that the Mughals relied upon could imagine no other religious identity than world-normative Islam, to which they were bound by family and cultural ties (e.g., most were Turk, Afghan, and Persian, not Indian converts; Akbar would have been unable to build his rule around Hindu Rajputs alone).

By the 16th century in much of the world meta-ethnic identities have percolated down from the elites to the ruling class. One reason the Reformation happened in much of Europe is that the nobility and proto-bourgeoisie were quite open to the religious change, as winds of reform were blowing through late medieval Westen Christianity. In contrast, the peasantry was less relevant. The little information we have indicates that in places like Denmark and England the rural peasantry was not enthused about changing their folkways through the Reformation commanded from on high, and imposed by elites and sub-elites. But they did eventually change.

The point here can be illustrated by a 17th Cambodian king who converted to Islam. His nobles overthrew him. Similarly, when the Hohenzollern’s became Reformed Christians in the 17 century, the people whom they ruled remained Lutheran. They would not convert. Confessional meta-ethnic had percolated and suffused mass identity by the 17th century in much of the world so that elites could not control it, dictate it.

Today we are far beyond that. The collapse of religious identity in the 1960s in the United States was unpredicted. Its stabilization in the 1970s and 1980s was unanticipated by secularization theory as well. But it’s subsequent collapse again in the 1990s and into the 21st century was also not anticipated (Samuel Huntington’s last work was written in the 1990s and published in the early 2000s, before the research was in about secularization, leading to some erroneous conclusions about the power of religious assimilation). Bottom-up dynamics are hard to model* and occur through information and communication channels which elites and scholars may not have access too (think conspiracy theories).

Meta-ethnic identity emerged during the Iron Age to add solidity to the political structures of the period. They were tools for the elites operationally, no matter the sincerity with which most people held to them. Though peasants had nominal affinities, their deeper beliefs were often animist, and their most important affiliations were in the local community. But with the printing press and thicker more pervasive political and cultural institutions, elite identities became popular identities. Elite control faded away, as popular passions took over.

In the 1990s many of us had delusions about what the internet would do. How information would illuminate and enlighten. What has really happened is that information production and consumption are now driven by popular passions in totality. Meta-ethnic identities emerged to foster social cohesion and stability. Today their protean uncontrolled nature may actually lead to the collapse of societies, as passions are unleashed with no conscious direction and guided by no initiated cabal. The information does not aid humans, it is now parasitic upon our minds and the infrastructure that we created to facilitate it’s spread.

* Is this true? Any modelers in the house? That’s my impression.

James J. O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire is a poorly edited book laced with a tendentious thesis: that Justinian ended a glorious period of multicultural amity and synthesis. The poor editing shows insofar as the book is far too long, and the author is given to prosaic flourishes. The thesis is shoehorned into contemporary sensibilities. In hindsight, the Gothic Wars were a total disaster, but obviously that was not Justinian’s intent.

Obviously Boethius plays a major role in the book. But perhaps more interesting in our current age is Cassiodorus. While Boethius died, and also contributed a philosophical work which influenced early medieval thinkers, Cassiodorus spent his last decades preserving the cultural inheritance of the ancient world. Cassiodorus’ life spanned an enormous cultural distance. He was born in the late 5th century when Rome was still a large city, albeit under Gothic rule. The Gothic hegemony over the West Roman domains can be thought of as analogous to the Arab conquests of the Near East of the 7th century: the fundamental underlying structure of society remained unchanged. It was the wars of the 6th century which wore Italy down to the point where Rome was a shadow of itself by the end of Cassiodorus’s life.

One can make their own judgments of whether Cassiodorus succeeded or not. But he was conscious that something was happening in the West, and he had to do something. A new age of barbarism was being born. Civilization’s locus was moving to the east.

About half a decade ago Steven Pinker wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. There were many criticisms of the book, but on the whole, I think it pushes forward an argument that is a reasonable description of reality: descriptively, violence has declined over the Holocene.

Why? Carl von Clausewitz asserted “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” I think this gets at an important aspect of the “modern way of war”, and the instrumental use of state and social violence: they exist to reinforce a particular social order. And order tends to go along with peace.

I do not think Clausewitz would have correctly described the world 10,000 years ago. In War before Civilization, the author describes a world of great brutality during the early Neolithic. Peter Turchin has criticized Pinker on these grounds, arguing that violence peaked during the early Holocene, during the transition from a world of hunters and gatherers, to a world of farmers. During the Neolithic, war is often best understood not as diplomacy, but pure eliminationist competition. Animal conflict between rival troupes.

Neolithic farmers, who probably had tribal confederacies, engaged in violence against hunter-gatherers. But except for the more dense societies of the coastal fringes, on the whole, the relationship was probably similar to that between European settlers and Australian Aboriginals: they perceived the indigenous European Mesolithic people as vermin or pests, not as other societies which could be bargained with, or absorbed (though the latter did occur). This probably explains the relatively long period of genetic segregation, as there were strong barriers between mixing between the two populations.

As we come closer and closer to the modern age, war became less about elimination, and more about diplomacy, co-option, and absorption. War was a preamble to the next stage of negotiation.

When Genghis Khan conquered northern China he wanted to turn it into pastureland. This would mean a famine to remove the human population of the region. His Khitai advisor, Yelu Chucai, who was stepped in Confucian learning, argued that taxation of the native population would be much more profitable than the Mongols and their allies engaging in primary production through pastoralism. The key to preventing genocide was convincing warlike elites that rents were easier and more profitable than acquiring more land which one had to toil oneself. That is, acquire people, not just land.

I write this in the context of trying to understand the genetic history of India. Why is it that Indo-Aryans contribute at least ~15% of the ancestry on the Gangetic plain, while the later Turco-Muslims contribute almost none? The answer here ventures into ideologically fraught territory because many Hindus take the word of Muslim chroniclers at their word that the predations upon the local population were marked by great brutality and killing.

The northwestern fringe of southern Indian was quite populous during the Indus Valley Civilization period. It was far larger in territory than Mesopotamia or Egypt. In contrast, the Eurasian heartland was always thinly populated. Then, and now. The number of Sintashta descended Indo-Aryans was originally small. It was always reasonable to suppose that their demographic impact was very small. Perhaps like that of the Magyars in Hungary. Ten years ago when the first evidence emerged that India was reshaped by Holocene admixtures I simply refused to believe it at first due to the demographic heft of the region.

So what happened? I think we need to understand that it is likely the early Sintashta warriors did not have Yelu Chucai whispering in their ears. They were horse-warriors par excellence, while the Eurasian oikoumene was relatively underdeveloped compared to what it would be later. There is evidence from Europe that early farming societies underwent massive demographic collapse due to endogenous forces (and perhaps exogenous climate shocks). There is no reason this could not be true elsewhere. Second, aside from the cultural toolkit of farming practices being underdeveloped, ideological justifications for social cohesion were primitive.

When the original Indo-Aryans arrived as agro-pastoralists into a semi-barbarized post-Indus Valley village society I believe they saw pastureland for their cattle and horses! Though some sort of priesthood probably survived, and transmuted into Brahmins (who assimilated many Indo-Aryan priests and shamans), there were no learned advisors handing out ancient traditions of yore. The Indo-Aryans saw an animal battle for resources, and despite their small numbers they “squeezed” the local peasantry (the mtDNA indicates very few Indo-Aryan females, so these were muarading males). This was not an organized ideological genocide, it was simply niche displacement.

In contrast, 2,000 years later when the White Huns arrived from Central Asia, they established themselves as the warrior elite of an already organically elaborated society, with a clear and distinct ideology of self, and local sub-elites which were in place to extract rents from the populace. The Indo-Aryans were more like the Dark Age Greeks, with Odysseus, a “king” still doing some of his own farming and shepherding.

The Turco-Muslims were different in that they had another alternative ideology. They were not uncooked barbarians, they had already been cooked by Islam. They were not absorbed into India because they maintained connections with Iran and Turan, and were part of the broader Dar-ul-Islam. They were in India, but not of India. But, the institutional structures of India were useful for the purposes of extracting rents. India was rich, which for most of history meant rich in people.

The Turco-Muslims came out of a milieu where they were originally slave soldiers of Iranian rulers who lived richly in sumptuous cities. Eventually, they invariably overthrew their masters and moved into the palaces themselves. Unlike the Mongols or their own ancestors, these were not people who had just come out of the tents. They did not have to be educated in the fact that maintaining the mechanisms of the old order would be more profitable than creating from anew.

All this is relevant because some people, Muslim and Hindus, assert that the Turco-Muslims engaged in massive killings and persecutions. The Turco-Muslims themselves claimed to have engaged in incredible violence against the unbelievers, styling themselves ghazis, warriors for the faith. Modern South Asian Muslims implicitly agree with the decimation when they assert that their ancestors were West and Central Asian. Both these contentions are false. The Turco-Muslims, like the Teutonic Knights and Sword Brothers in the Baltic, were proximately motivated by a desire for wealth and leisure. This is clear because the same people spread west out of the fringes of Khorasan, taking over Iranian and Arab polities one after the other through violence. But in the westward movement, there was no religious rationale given, because the Turks were Muslim, and those whom they conquered were mostly Muslim (though the Seljuqs presented themselves as protectors of Sunni Islam, overthrowing the Shia Buywids).

Obviously, this was not the case in India. An idealistic rationale presented itself to mask their avaricious behavior, and they promoted that rationale.

Second, genetically the data is clear that very little ancestry in South Asian Muslims is exogenous. Almost all the ancestors of South Asian Muslims were residents of South Asia 1,000 years ago. Many of the upper-class Muslims who claim West Asian ancestry actually descend from upper-caste Hindus. This is clear when you look at the true Y chromosomal lineages of Syeds, those who claim paternal descent from the lineage of Muhammad’s clan.

From the perspective of Hindus, 30% of the people of the Indian subcontinent are now Muslims. This is a traumatic fact for them. Additionally, between 1200 and 1750 AD Muslims were dominant across most of the subcontinent, and engaged in a project of cultural imperialism and hegemony which left psychic scars on the Indian elites, and physical scars on the architectural landscape. To be entirely frank, a project of coercive, brutal, and violent, conversion to Islam by Turks is in some ways more reassuring to many Indian elites than the fact that there was a softness to the support for native Indian religious views in many parts of the subcontinent. As it is, Hinduism remained the overwhelming religion in the heart of Turco-Muslim power in the upper reaches of the Gangetic plain, with Islam made particular headway in the margins and fringes of South Asia.

The bigger picture here is that human societies and cultural systems evolve, and become more robust. The gap between the Han and  Suit-Tang was more than 300 years. The “handoff” between the Ming and Ching (Manchus) was nearly immediate. The Chinese ideological system of rule became more efficient, more effective, over time. The ideological system of domination and control was perfected. The Manchus placed themselves on top of machinery that they inherited roughly intact from the Ming. This is not to say that they could not employ genocidal brutality. The Oirat Mongols were the last great nomadic polity. To “solve” this problem the Manchus in the 18th century engaged in a program of extermination against the Oirat led Dzhungar confederacy. By some estimates, 90% of the Dzhungars died, whether through direct slaughter, or, more often, starvation.

Of course, the Manchus were not ideologically oriented toward genocide. It was simply an instrument. Nor do I believe that the peoples of the Neolithic and Bronze Age were ideologically oriented toward genocide. The question would not make any sense. Rather, the extermination of other groups was simply an instrument of existence in their lives. They died. Or their enemies died.

The interests of the German peasant-warrior flooding into the Roman territories were to drive off the local peasants and their landlords. The interests of the tribal elite was to increase the number of people whom they ruled and could extract rents from, as well as maintaining the position of some of the older elites as service nobilities and candidates for positions within the Church. Similarly, the English settlers in the New World consistently behaved in a more brutal manner toward the native peoples and attempted to push into the interior far more vigorously, than anything the British crown wished to countenance. In an economic and political world of stability, the British crown would do better, but the interests of the American colonists was toward more aggressive dynamism.

It was the emergence of complex multiethnic imperial systems, along with class stratification and divergence of interests, that the reflex toward genocide declined. A “flat” world is a violent world.