by Dan Carlin
While child beating has gone out of fashion, corporal punishment is still practiced in some public school systems in the United States, and there are still people who defend its use as valuable (albeit not to the degree of severity we just talked about). The same cannot be said for some of the other kinds of abuse that many children of past ages were subjected to. For instance, some societies and cultures of the past held wildly differing ideas of what should and shouldn’t be okay sexually between adults and children.* It not only makes it difficult for us today to relate to those cultures and peoples but it’s hard to imagine that such cultural perspectives didn’t have a large effect on their reality. It wasn’t particularly uncommon in many cultures in past eras for children to be viewed as sexual objects and sometimes to be used as such. There are four-hundred-year-old accounts of sailors who encountered overtly sexual women on Pacific Islands, but some of these “women” were as young as ten. To us, such sexual relations may seem bizarre or even obscene, but what if the society these sailors existed in didn’t think so?
In other ages, antiquity for example, the mores were often very different from our own when it came to sex and children.* In the ancient Mediterranean, both heterosexual and homosexual sex between adults and children was in many places an accepted part of the culture. Would the children in those ancient cultures experience the same long-term adverse effects we would expect to see in children who had sex with adults today? If they did, one wonders how this might have affected how those societies developed. If they didn’t, that’s also interesting—one would have to wonder why.
Even parents who wanted to do the best for their children and were perhaps less inclined to outright beat them could do great damage to them by simply following the prevailing wisdom at the time—inadvertent child abuse, if you will.
One common practice throughout much of human history was to give children liquor or opium to relieve teething pain or to help them sleep. As recently as the 1960s, it wasn’t unusual for a doctor to prescribe sleeping medication for children, or for parents to rub whiskey on a teething infant’s gums. We know now these substances are harmful, but there were some people who recognized the problem even hundreds of years ago. The History of Childhood quotes a British doctor named Hume, who complained in 1799 of thousands of child deaths caused by nurses “forever pouring Godfrey’s cordial down little throats, which is quite a strong opiate, and in the end as fatal as arsenic.”
Once upon a time, it was considered good parenting to teach your children a moral lesson in right and wrong by taking them to witness public executions. To make the lesson really stick, parents sometimes beat their children as they watched, forever linking the spectacle with physical pain. And the practice of beating a child so he or she wouldn’t forget was done for other reasons, too. Anglo-Saxons sometimes beat kids so that they would recall a given day for legal reasons, such as presenting evidence at trial—physical violence as a kind of notary public service, or long-term reminder note.
In modern times, we worry about our kids’ exposure to simulated violence on television or in video games and whether it desensitizes them to real-life atrocities. But in many past eras it may have been actual violence, not the made-for-TV variety, that desensitized children to more of the same. Think of the children who grew up in cultures where they would have seen real-life killings and torture up close by the time they were five, six, or seven years old. In some cases, they might have even participated in it.*
If we heard of a modern child with such a bloody or violent upbringing, we would assume he or she would be a very damaged person in need of counseling and help. It’s hard to determine, though, if all children in all times and all cultures would be affected the same way by such experiences. It’s possible that people in earlier eras who grew up seeing animals butchered and people killed as a matter of course weren’t affected the way a person with modern sensibilities would be. Today we might assume certain things would hurt any human being at any time, but this may not be true. Actions don’t have to cause obvious harm to create a significantly different version of a human being. A child (either today or in the past) who has witnessed several very violent live public executions is going to be different from the other children in our society. Any modern child with the same life experiences would probably be prescribed some sort of therapy and perhaps medications for a long time.
After considering such heavy-duty abuse, you might think something like physical or emotional child abandonment would sound like a lightweight issue—but modern experts who deal with children have no doubt about the lasting negative impact that a lack of sustained contact between parents and children can have. The psychohistorians assert that such situations may have damaged a lot of children in the past. This seems like a no-brainer on the surface, but trying to determine how this might have affected the past on a macro scale is seemingly impossible.
In many past societies, parents and children had less contact than we are accustomed to today.* Even the bonding experience of a mother feeding her infant was something often farmed out. For thousands of years, in many societies and cultures, the human institution of the wet nurse was very popular. There are stories of wet nurses—women who breastfeed other women’s babies—in the Bible and going back to ancient Babylon. Roman wet nurses gathered at a place called the Columna Lactaria (the “milk column”) to sell their services. For mothers who couldn’t produce milk or had died in childbirth, the wet nurse filled a real need, especially when many such societies didn’t believe in giving infants animal milk.
Yet the practice often still meant sending children away from their homes to live with a wet nurse, sometimes for years. The casual giving away of children in past eras can astound; in various writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, children sometimes sound like litters of puppies rather than human beings. The mother-in-law of one nineteenth-century gentleman wrote about a baby that had been promised to another family: “Yes, certainly the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned,” she wrote, “and if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others.”
The trauma didn’t end with the sending away. After the child spent years bonding with the wet nurse, they were eventually returned to their biological parents, essentially ripping him or her away from the only parent he or she had known.* Sometimes the wet nurses were unkind to their charges, making returning home a blessing, but either way, the child was now faced with complete strangers. Lloyd deMause quotes a piece written by the chief of police in Paris in 1780 estimating that of the, on average, 21,000 children born in that city every year, only 700 were nursed by their biological mothers. (Marie Antoinette, writing in a letter to her mother, noted after her daughter recognized her as her mother in a room full of people, “I believe I like her much better since that time”—which suggests she hadn’t liked her all that much before.)
Children could also be seen much more like a commodity than a family member. Selling children was a profitable business (and there are parts of the world where it still occurs). Children were also farmed out for labor. The Middle Ages institution of the apprenticeship took kids as young as five or six to a neighboring castle or community to begin their working life. This wasn’t seen by parents as a form of punishment or abuse, but more like an internship in which the child would learn valuable foundational skills necessary for later adult success. And farm families since agriculture began have used every strong hand available to work the land and keep food on the table.* But seeing children as nothing more than easily exploitable low-wage labor was all too common. It wasn’t until the late 1930s in the United States that child labor in such dangerous industries as mining and manufacturing was outlawed. There was much more opposition to the reform attempts at the time than might be thought. But today the idea of sending a thirteen-year-old into a mine or a twelve-year-old onto an assembly line seems like one destined to stunt the child’s development.
It makes one wonder why our ancestors—many of
whom were perfectly smart people—didn’t see how damaging these practices were. Yet perhaps our concept of what constitutes “damage” is different from theirs. They were raising kids to live in their world, a world alien to us. Besides, who knows what child-rearing experts of the future will think about our current practices? Maybe our best practices now will be deemed abusive or damaging to children by future standards. In our defense, we could probably say that we did the best we could knowing what we know now—but that’s also probably what our ancestors would have said.
Chapter 3
The End of the World as They Knew It
The idea of “progress” is not without bias. Is transitioning from a hunter-gatherer society to one where humans live in cities an advance, or do we just think it is because that’s where we mostly live now?* If a society that is literate is supplanted by one that is not, is that a backward step in the progress of civilization? If the economic vitality and wealth of a society is reduced to a level far below its highs, is that necessarily a “decline”?*
Since human civilization first arose, societies have “risen” and “fallen,” “advanced” and “declined”—or so the histories written decades ago often said. More commonly now, historians refer to societies in “transition,” rather than use terms that denote forward or backward development. Continuity, too, is often emphasized, instead of the emphasis found in earlier historical accounts of hard breaks from a previous era.
So, did the Roman Empire “fall” to the “barbarians,” or did it transition to an equal yet more decentralized era, one with a more Germanic flair?
In the period after the Roman Empire disappeared in the West (the time formerly called “the Dark Ages”), many of the capabilities of the people who lived in its wake deteriorated. Eventually, those who lived in what formerly were Roman lands couldn’t repair or build anew the infrastructure that had previously existed. The aqueducts, monetary system, and trade routes were not what they had been. Literacy plummeted in most areas, and other groups and outlets began to perform some of the functions that formerly had been provided by an organized central authority.* What would we call it today if we could not emulate the technological, economic, or cultural achievements of our forebears?*
The 1968 film Planet of the Apes provides an instructive illustration of the inherent fallacy of the position that our version of humanity represents its final incarnation. In the movie, a bedraggled Charlton Heston (in a loincloth, no less) screams, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” In his character’s mind, the apes are beneath him, but to the apes, humans are the inferior species.
At the very end, Charlton Heston escapes, and in the final moments of the film, you see him riding a horse down a beach with a preverbal (i.e., inferior) human girl he’s rescued. When he rounds a bend, he’s confronted with the Statue of Liberty, from the bust up to the crown, sticking out of the sand at an angle, and we realize that the movie is set on earth in a far-flung future.
“You maniacs! You blew it up!” Heston bellows, his fist pounding the sand.
We moderns almost unconsciously consider ourselves exempt from outcomes such as this, which is one of the reasons why that final scene in Planet of the Apes is so effective.* It is unimaginable to us that we could have descendants who might live in a world more primitive than our own. Likewise, it was just as impossible for Romans living in the era we now label “antiquity” to envision a future in which the place they knew as “the Eternal City” would ever be a ruin.
The earliest piece of storytelling in the Western canon appeared around the eighth century BCE. The Iliad was supposedly composed by the blind Greek poet Homer, though historians have long thought its text was actually distilled from an oral storytelling tradition that was far older.
The Iliad tapped into a potent mix of dramatic elements that humans have shown an enthusiasm for ever after. The epic poem features facets of superhero films mixed with the J. R. R. Tolkien–style mythical golden age of a far-flung past. It’s the original and ultimate “sword and sandals” epic, an action-packed saga of gods, demigods, and swashbuckling heroes, where the “Greeks” leave their homeland to rescue the kidnapped oh-so-fair wife of a king and embark on a quest that leads them across the sea to fight a great war for a decade and eventually topple a powerful, glorious kingdom led by a rich and lofty monarch. The story has everything—magic and spearplay, dead characters that come back to life as ghosts, the gods fighting among themselves and taking sides with the mortals, sex and romance between star-crossed adversaries, bloody single combats, and heroic loss. It’s even got a sequel, if you consider the Odyssey to be such. But whereas our modern fantastic tales and epics are intended—and are taken by the audience—as fantasy, the ancient Greeks, Macedonians, and Romans often considered their versions more like history.*
One of history’s greatest military leaders, Alexander III of Macedon (known as “the Great”; 356–323 BCE), allegedly slept with a copy of Homer’s Iliad under his pillow, and he may have considered himself inspired by, and a direct descendant of, the story’s überhero, Achilles.* Before attacking the Persian Empire in 334 BCE, Alexander visited a site the locals said was the tomb of Achilles, and the classical writers say that he donned the “ancient” armor he found within.* To him, Troy was history from a long-gone great age, and he had the antique armor of a demigod to prove it.
Later scholarly opinion disagreed that the Iliad was history, however. Starting with increasingly skeptical and evidence-based academic approaches in the eighteenth century, historians trying to disentangle truth from fable considered the tale of the Trojan wars to be legendary. In the late nineteenth century, however, a German named Heinrich Schliemann, one of several people who believed in the existence of the ancient city and was actively looking for it, found the remains of one on a hill in modern-day Turkey. Over time it became clearer and clearer that the site Schliemann had found was indeed the location of the city at the center of the West’s oldest written tale. Somehow, through hundreds of years of oral storytelling, the Greeks had kept alive a distant memory of an advanced and prosperous time that existed on the far side of an intervening dark age.*
This discovery of “Troy” by an amateur (as most archaeologists were in that era) searching for artifacts caused an international sensation and helped jump-start the modern era of archaeological discovery. Digs, excavations, and fieldwork all over the Mediterranean and the Near East began to unearth and illuminate a world that was already ancient when the Athens of Pericles (495–429 BCE) and the Sparta of Leonidas (540–480 BCE) were young. Troy was but a tiny fraction of it. A snapshot from about 1500 BCE would show a multipower geopolitical landscape encompassing the whole region: ancient Egypt at its pharaonic height in the New Kingdom; the powerful and important Hittite Empire, controlling a large chunk of modern-day Turkey and down into Syria; Assyria and Babylon, strong societies in what is now Iraq; the Elamite people, occupying southwestern Iran; Minoa, a great maritime trading state based in Crete; and the Mycenaeans, who occupied Greece.*
It was an era of great cities, many of them crowned with ornate palaces, and urban life was at its highest level of sophistication so far seen. It was a golden age of wealth, power, writing, trade, military sophistication, and long-distance communication. This era, which modern history calls the Bronze Age (approximately 3000 to 1200 BCE), represents a high-water mark in the region’s development in many measurable areas. The last stage of the Bronze Age was the most golden of all.*
But the glory of the Bronze Age wouldn’t last. By the time of the Iron Age, the classical Greeks of Athens and Sparta were beginning to rise to levels of wealth, trade, and literacy that were comparable to the lofty heights of the previous era (in probably around 700 BCE-ish)—in fact, those earlier states and civilizations of the late Bronze Age could well have been represented to the Iron Age as Planet of the Apes represented ours. The remnants of their former greatness were nearly totally in ruins, and their history was relegated t
o myths and legend.
The “collapse of the Bronze Age” is a transformation on par with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but what caused it has become one of the great mysteries of the past, a whodunnit that casts historians in the role of detectives trying to determine a cause of death for one of humankind’s great time periods.
It apparently happened relatively quickly. That’s why words like “collapse,” “destruction,” and “fall” are often used when talking about how this literal end of an era concluded. Unlike the Roman Empire, there would be no “decline and fall”—the Bronze Age would tumble from its highs like a stock market crash. An older person alive in the regions most affected during the steepest dive (from about 1200 to 1150 BCE) would likely have seen a very different world than the one she had been born into.
Histories written a century or even a half century ago have relatively definite conclusions about the fall of the Bronze Age (and a hundred other subjects). Times have changed. Modern standards and methods in many fields have subjected any and all theories to acid tests that historians of the past never dreamed of. From dating technology to DNA sampling to a thousand other tools, modern researchers have resources that can unlock—or debunk—information as never before.
It is in the nature of such scrutiny that existing theories get shot down more easily than new ones garner support. The historian John H. Arnold pointed out that history is an ongoing process—it never can, nor will, reach its final conclusion, and revisions will always be happening, as more facts and data become available and older theories are modified or disproved.
One by one, modern researchers are debunking (or at least casting reasonable doubt on) many of the theories about the end of the Bronze Age. But though today’s experts have immeasurably more information about the time, they are less sure about what befell it than ever before.