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In the Shang Dynasty's defense, you have to admit the oldest known massive repository of a pristine written language being 'the inscribed turtle shells and bones used to perform ritual divinations about what sort of (often human) sacrifices are needed to placate a spirit for this or that occasion' is much cooler than 'accounting logbooks for temple estates'.
I am to be clear enjoying it thoroughly so far (first patreon I have felt legitimately tempted to back in at least a year), but Wyman's really not beating any academic historian stereotypes with Past Lives so far. 'Freed from a studio/Amazon demanding ad-friendly marketability, local podcaster instantly pivots to a series of social history case studies exploring what we can and can't know about various specific slaves throughout history. Episode 1 is about a woman whose sole textual existence is a bill of sale from the Assyrian soldiers who got ownership her and her daughter as their share of loot selling her for something fungible to split between themselves'
Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were just two of the thousands upon thousands of victims of the Assyrian Empire, most of whose names have been lost over the centuries. The Assyrian Empire was just one of the many aggressive polities that has produced victims by the thousands over the past several millennia: The Romans did no better in Gaul or Dacia. Alexander the Great razed Thebes on his way to far more expansive conquests. The crusaders who took Jerusalem in 1099 waded ankle-deep in blood, Timur Lenk left behind towers of skulls marking his conquests. Pizarro slaughtered the Inca by the score. The Nazis left behind millions of corpses. As long as grasping rulers and would-be warlords have sought to expand their power, common people have suffered the consequences, just like Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter.
But those ambitious politicians and conquerors didn’t do the dirty work themselves. They had underlings, generals and officers and common soldiers and bureaucrats, to enforce their will. Those underlings participated in acts that, by any reasonable standard of moral behavior, range from the merely distasteful to completely abhorrent. It would be comforting to think that those who murdered children, burned houses with the residents inside, committed acts of sexual violence, and enslaved the survivors were uniquely evil. It would be easier to believe that these participants had somehow forfeited their humanity somewhere along their path to organized violence. We would prefer to fool ourselves into thinking they formed a special class of malefactors separate from the farmers and shopkeepers and laborers who made up their societies as a whole. These ideas would be wrong. The agents of empire and conquest were not a marked group of sadists; they fit quite comfortably within the mainstream of the societies that produced them and benefited from their actions.
Patrick Wyman, Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future Substack, 2024
Evil acts are easily normalized
Historians love to talk about how move big rock but Patrick Wyman is the only historian who move big rock for real
There’s a person I think about from time to time. We don’t know his name, his exact age, or his precise occupation. But we do know when, where, and how he died: March 29th, 1461, near the village of Towton, in Yorkshire in northern England, the victim of a massive blow - probably from a poleaxe, a wicked axe blade mounted on a six-foot handle - that destroyed the left side of his face. It left behind only fragments of bone where his eye socket and cheek had been, and probably killed him instantly. His mutilated corpse was then stripped naked and thrown in a mass grave along with several dozen other similarly mangled bodies, where they all remained for the next five centuries.
“Because I spent so long working on the later Roman Empire and its political disintegration, I’m deeply wary of making too explicit a comparison between it and the present-day United States. It’s too easy to make an overdetermined, square-peg-into-round-hole type of argument simply because it’s available and I know it well.”
“But one area where the comparison makes a great deal of sense lies in the role of the frontier.”
“There are a lot of different ways of understanding the end of the Roman Empire in the west: barbarian invasions, internal dissension, economic collapse, some combination of the above, or a gradual slip into imperial senescence. The one that’s always made the most sense to me focuses on the imperial periphery.”
“The Roman Empire’s frontier zones were a space dominated by the Roman army, not just as a military force but also as a cultural and economic institution. When the people living beyond the frontiers - barbarians - interacted with the Roman Empire, they were really interacting with its army. Sometimes they fought it, sometimes they supplied it with food and supplies, and most often, they joined it. The result was a distinctive shade of frontier culture focused on the Roman military, but with a healthy dose of “barbarian” - wearing trousers, using Germanic words, and so on - mixed in. This culture encompassed both sides of the border, creating a zone of intense interaction stretching well into both the barbarian lands and the Roman Empire.”
“In the later stages of the Roman Empire’s existence in the west, it’s often hard to tell the difference between a force of rampaging barbarians and a Roman field army. Both drew their recruits primarily from people living beyond the frontier. They used the same kinds of swords and wore the same kinds of helmet: Even the famous Sutton Hoo helmet from 6th-century England is just a Roman cavalry helmet (a Spangenhelm) with a cool-looking mustachioed face mask added. Roman soldiers spoke a variety of camp Latin that was generously spiced with Germanic words. Plenty of barbarian raiders had served time in the Roman military; it’s not hard to imagine that some barbarian recruits into the Roman army had probably raided Roman territory at some point before they joined up. Even Roman soldiers recruited inside the empire’s boundaries were often descended from recently settled barbarian groups.”
“The upshot of all this is that rather than seeing a series of barbarian invasions that brought foreign invaders into the Roman heartlands, we should instead think of what happened as the transposition of frontier culture from the periphery to the imperial core. We can’t really draw a line between the “barbarian” and Roman military, because there wasn’t a firm distinction; the two bled into one another, and it’s easier to think of this as a militarized and ethnically distinct frontier culture. This culture, and people who had been brought up with it and molded by it, was what moved, not a distinct series of barbarian ethnic groups who were unfamiliar with Roman ways and practices.”
“The Roman frontier was a violent place. It was, after all, a militarized space. When the frontier and its military culture expanded into the formerly peaceful Roman core, violence came with it. A military aristocracy that derived its position from its war-making capacity replaced the Roman civic elite; where the latter survived, it assimilated to the new, militarized aristocratic culture. Armies tramped through the interior, sacking and burning cities like Rome and Carthage. It’s a safe bet that the average folks of lowland Britain, coastal Spain, and fertile North Africa didn’t welcome the sight of the frontier coming toward them; that meant violence, blood-stained swords, armored men rifling through their possessions, burning huts, and much more.”
“When we see Border Patrol agents wearing camouflage and helmets, carrying M4s with optics, rigged up like they’re about to go on patrol in Ramadi or the Korengal Valley (or deal with a migrant caravan in the southwest), that’s empire coming home. The viciousness of their handling of immigration during the Trump era, complete with threats of gunfire, concentration camps, and consistent dehumanization, has been a preview of their handling of American citizens. So too have been the various misdeeds of American soldiers overseas.”
“Even leaving aside the fact that the mishmash of federal agencies providing these paramilitary forces are stocked with veterans of overseas conflict - about 30 percent of Border Patrol agents are veterans, for example - the equipment and us vs. them way of approaching conflict are straight out of the imperial frontier. The fact that these paramilitary policemen aren’t actually soldiers isn’t as relevant as the ways of thinking about force and power, and who constitutes a legitimate target for violence, that empire produces. At this point, the periphery has entered the imperial core.”
“When we see armed agents of the state beating a Navy veteran with batons, tear-gassing moms in bike helmets and the mayor of Portland, and planning further deployments to Chicago and Albuquerque, I can’t help but think of that man who spent five centuries buried in a mass grave at Towton, of his old wound and crushed face. Is that where we’re heading? Is it inevitable that the tools of imperial war will be even more explicitly turned against people here at home?”
“All empires fall. When they do, the violence and terror they’ve wrought on others has a way of coming back around.”
I have, to be fair, a very strong sort of Omelas-flinch whenever someone starts waxing poetic about how egalitarian and non-coercive the governance of some past society was (especially a highly complex and intensively developed one), which does mean I should take my instinctive skepticism about the description of the Indus Valley civilization with a grain of salt.
That being said: trying to explain how nonhierarchal and noncoercive coordination and administration of large, complex institutions can work in practice by citing 'guilds' and 'kin groups' as helpful analogies is. lol. lmao, even.
