The End Is Always Near

by Dan Carlin

  * In fact, there are multiple words used instead of “tough” that in some contexts may mean the same thing. “Warlike” is a common example. Yet this defines toughness in purely military/violence terms. There are other potential aspects to this idea, such as emotional resiliency and the ability to withstand privation, which might constitute, in some combination, “toughness.”

  * This label was invented by the journalist Tom Brokaw for his 1998 book of the same name.

  * “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.” According to Lieutenant General James M. Gavin, Patton said this to officers in a wartime speech.

  * For more on what it takes to drop a bomb or have one dropped on you, see chapters 7 and 8.

  * In the 1930s.

  * Since Durant’s day, the view of the Medes has changed significantly. They are now thought to have been richer, more powerful, more organized, and more sophisticated than earlier historians gave them credit for.

  * Such comments may tell us more about the views of the mid-twentieth century than about the ancient Medes. Is it significant that Durant wrote this in the middle of the Great Depression?

  * Starr wrote this more than fifty years ago. Many modern histories argue that Spartan children were left to die by exposure, and if they didn’t, it proved they were tough enough to live. For more on views on children across societies and centuries, see chapter 2.

  * Dating this would be subjective, but 550–400 BCE isn’t a bad range to consider as the Spartan “heyday.”

  * This existed elsewhere, too. High-class people in Republican Rome thought commerce and money were beneath them. Money was what merchants and dirty people did. The Japanese samurai were that way as well; merchants were the lowest class in their society. Peasants were above merchants—at least they farmed the food you needed.

  * If we ignore the toughness aspect or “moral decline” idea completely, one might easily say that the ever-decreasing numbers of people in the Spartiate class (the group that composed the classic Spartan elite heavy infantry spearmen) was a bigger factor.

  * One member of the Greatest Generation offered this solution for bringing down the Soviet Union: “We should have been dropping Playboy magazines, blue jeans, and Elvis Presley records on them, and they’ll do it themselves.”

  * For more on the effects of disease on societies, see chapter 6.

  * In the movie Young Frankenstein, when Dr. Frankenstein sends Igor to fetch a brain for his creation, it is Delbrück’s that he wants. Then Igor drops it on the floor and grabs another brain labeled “Abnormal.”

  * For more on the ancient Germans, see chapter 5.

  * Again, two words sometimes used that in some cases represent the same thing as toughness (as we, and apparently Delbrück, are defining it).

  * It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “revenge of the nerds,” as the designers of much of this super-technical gear used by drone pilots probably weren’t playing quarterback in high school.

  * The tip-of-the-spear Western troops today that are in combat operations on the ground are just as tough as their adversaries, just as Roman elite units were in the days of the legions. The support elements and civilian populations at home might be another matter, however.

  * This is a similar dynamic to that of the latter stages of US involvement in Vietnam.

  * DeMause thinks child-rearing practices may indeed be capable of affecting a nation’s foreign policy.

  * To date, the discipline of psychohistory seems to have garnered scant interest from higher academic institutions, with its critics going so far as to call it a pseudoscience.

  * Critics of deMause say that rather than writing about standard child-rearing practices he has instead written a history of child abuse. Many of the terrible things he cites were done by parents of earlier eras often out of ignorance rather than malice. Much of his academic criticism focuses on the wide-ranging effects on history that he attributes to the way people were being treated while growing up. DeMause’s critics rightly point out that his conclusions are often based more on speculation than data. But, in his defense, how could one collect and interpret data about a subject like this?

  * Imagine popular culture offerings—movies, music, television—showing child abuse and sex with children in positive and provocative lights, some ancient society’s cultural value system combined with today’s modern media and marketing power.

  * Attitudes on beating children, as opposed to giving them a quick swat or light spank on the rear, started to change in the 1960s, and changed quickly.

  * There are still the occasional voices suggesting that society would benefit from a return to the old corporal punishment approaches.

  * British noblewoman and “Nine Day Queen” who lived in the mid-1500s.

  * This is complicated by the fact that many societies over time have allowed or encouraged girls to marry at puberty.

  * Antiquity is generally thought of as the period of human history before the fall of Rome in the fifth century CE.

  * Some Native American tribes, for example, considered it culturally appropriate for women and children to participate in the torture of war captives.

  * This varies widely, and many traditional societies fall on the opposite side of the spectrum, with mother and child almost literally joined at the hip, as they spend so much time in close proximity to each other.

  * Winston Churchill, a boy in the late nineteenth century, was raised this way. He had a wet nurse whom he called Womb, and she was the person he got all his motherly love from.

  * Most people today would think kids growing up on a family farm working to help their parents was not only okay but taught the value of hard work. So where does such labor cross the line into something twenty-first-century people would call abusive? We don’t want ten-year-olds working the register at McDonald’s, but we celebrate their picking beans for Mom and Dad.

  * Many native peoples have expressed the opinion that they prefer their traditional way of existence to the one offered by the more “advanced” societies that have subjugated them. Could this be their bias at work?

  * Some have suggested that, in order to create sustainable modern societies in the future, what we consider economic progress today might need to be reimagined. Could a “decline” in one aspect of a society’s development be part of an advance in another?

  * Monasteries and other church entities are examples, as were more local authorities like cities and bishoprics. Local warlords or rulers also filled this role in some places.

  * It’s hard to even imagine something comparable. What if we lost the Internet, not just for a while, but forever? Or what if spaceflight became something humankind was no longer capable of?

  * We have no problem imagining the plot as a science fiction or dystopian story. We can even contemplate the aftermath of nuclear war or climate disaster as an outcome we wish to avoid. But it’s very difficult for most people to seriously think about such things as ever happening. We innately consider civilizational collapse an imaginary situation rather than something that has actually occurred to people living before us.

  * Some of the more skeptical Greeks would say that tales like the Iliad were true in the main, but exaggerated by storytellers.

  * Achilles could easily be called an ancient Greek version of a superhero—he was the son of an immortal, after all!

  * Let the record show that locals in many places throughout history have figured out the value of tourist attractions connected to local history. The Christian Byzantines would buy up “relics” the locals in the Holy Land “found” all the time, then bring them home, and venerate them.

  * The Greeks of the classical era sometimes called the age of the Iliad stories the “heroic age” or the “mythical age.” It has echoes of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “First Age of the Sun” in his realm of Middle-Earth.

  * The Mycenaeans are traditionally thought
of as the Greeks of the Trojan War story.

  * The time period categorizations of early history that we all know came about in the nineteenth century when historians labeled certain eras of the past in order to make it easier to study them. That’s when people started using the terms “Stone Age,” “Bronze Age,” and “Iron Age.” These eras got subdivided further from that point—the Stone Age, for instance, was broken down to the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic. The Bronze Age is divided into early, mid, and late periods. But it’s not a neat rubric and doesn’t denote an equal pace of change in every location. The late Bronze Age crosses over into the early Iron Age, and different societies were in different places in the arc of “progress.” (Needless to say, the criteria is set by the designers, and this can influence how cultures and societies are rated and assessed. If you decide a society must have bronze to be advanced, does that mean no society without bronze is advanced?) When western Asia was in the early Iron Age, most if not all of Europe would still probably have better fit the criteria for the late Bronze Age. The further back in time you go, the more problematic dating specific periods becomes, and there is a lot of controversy about dates in the Bronze Age. But these specific eras are all human constructs; nobody alive in 1300 BCE knew he was living in the Bronze Age. It makes one wonder what label future historians might slap on our own age.

  * The Hittite Empire existed for about the amount of time the United States has been an independent nation.

  * Such as cultural collapse, revolutionary political upheaval, civil war, and others. Some of these can be classified as possible side effects of the other prime suspects listed.

  * And inconsistent. For every researcher demonstrating widespread destruction of cities, there will be others who counter with the many urban enclaves that survived and even prospered in this era. Cyprus, for example, may have thrived while other states around it suffered.

  * In the Hittite capital of Hattusa, for example, the royal fortress and major public buildings were apparently destroyed, but private residences were left untouched. This seems more like the deliberate targeting of the symbols of state power than the wild ransacking of a foreign army. Could it indicate domestic political upheaval or revolution rather than war? The mystery deepens . . .

  * This is a modern term. These peoples, their origins, and often what became of them are mysterious to us today. The Egyptians labeled them individually by tribe.

  * “Northerners from all lands,” they are called in one account. From Egypt’s vantage point, most peoples lived to their north.

  * Dates for Egyptian rulers can be difficult and have changed somewhat over the eras. In addition, some histories use reigns for dating while other date ranges use the ruler or historical figure’s birth and death.

  * This text is taken from the victory inscription of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III.

  * Bronze is made from a mix of copper and tin. Archaeologists often find the metals stored on board trading ships in the exact ratio needed to make bronze.

  * “Iron” is a weird word here, since it basically transformed into some grade of steel as manufacturing became better over time. The image of armies with hard iron weapons shearing through the soft bronze arms of an opponent is definitely myth. Bronze weapons were still made and highly prized for a long time after this era. Iron, after all, rusts very easily, and polished bronze is ornamentally beautiful.

  * Another theory put forward by the historian Robert Drews suggests that the sea peoples may have used new weapons and infantry tactics to overthrow the chariot-based military systems of the Bronze Age states.

  * Piracy was never uncommon in the premodern Mediterranean. More than a thousand years after the Bronze Age ended, the Roman Julius Caesar would be captured by pirates and held for ransom. Almost three thousand years later, the US president Thomas Jefferson had to send naval forces to deal with the Mediterranean Barbary pirates!

  * See more on this in chapter 5.

  * A sort of catchall term the Egyptians used for someone from the east and northeast of Egypt.

  * For more on disease, see chapter 6.

  * It is Egyptian records that allege this as a cause. Eventually, there would be Egyptian pharaohs of Libyan descent, after centuries of such migration and immigration had changed Egyptian society.

  * But, as usual, these results have been questioned by experts who have different theories.

  * These are some of the findings that experts have made regarding people’s migrations due to suspected drought or arid conditions.

  * As with the Richter scale for earthquakes, each step up on the Volcanic Explosivity Index represents a huge increase in power.

  * Some of the best potential data points for dating are astronomical events such as an eclipse. Since experts can often reverse-date these with precision, even far back into the past, any eclipse that can be synced up with contemporary records, accounts, or events can provide a hard, reliable data point to aid with dating other events.

  * There were eruptions in other locations farther from the eastern Mediterranean (Iceland, for example) but perhaps closer in time to the catastrophe that have also been implicated as possible contributors to the end of the Bronze Age.

  * Experts have found the huge amounts of expelled volcanic material underwater off the coast of Santorini.

  * Things like wave height, wave steepness, and the like come into play here. Some waves are more likely to be problematic for oceangoing vessels than others; near-breaking waves or waves with very steep faces, for example.

  * And some have suggested that Bronze Age Crete was the model for Plato’s legendary Atlantis.

  * Who, if the whole Trojan War legend has any truth at all to it, are a key people who sacked Troy a few centuries after this period. The Iliad’s King Agamemnon was the king of Mycenae.

  * For comparison, the Second World War killed between 70 and 85 million people. This number includes deaths in the Second Sino-Japanese War that began several years before the 1939 German attack on Poland.

  * “Eradicated” is a bit misleading. Smallpox exists in samples, and weaponized smallpox is a potential threat.

  * Dating is always suspect here, but assuming the standard dates used are close, this pharaoh would have been from a transitional era, perhaps born into what we today would call the late Bronze Age, dying sometime after its official end. Does the fact the pharaoh apparently had smallpox tie into the investigation here at all? Is this just smallpox taking its usual toll? Or could it be indicative of a larger outbreak? The Hittites thought they caught their plague from the Egyptians.

  * Sometimes the disease that caused an ancient plague can be known or identified from the documented symptoms, or from the testing of found remains, but often experts must guess at what disease was behind a given early historical outbreak.

  * Once the disease had been spread directly to the tribes first contacted by Europeans, natives themselves spread the new contagion into the continental interior.

  * A terrible outbreak of Ebola is a perfect example. It’s one of the greatest fears of communicable disease experts, yet even in their wildest nightmares such an event wouldn’t do the sort of damage one of the great plagues of antiquity or the Middle Ages did, in which large percentages of a given population were wiped out.

  * Famine and plague have a similar interconnected relationship to the one between drought and famine. Famine-weakened populations are more susceptible to disease, and epidemics can badly disrupt food production in agricultural societies, potentially causing famine.

  * In this part of the world.

  * Incredibly ancient. At the tail end of the Bronze Age in 1200 BCE, several Assyrian cities were already well over a thousand years old.

  * For example, an important copper mining locality was taken from the Hittites by the Assyrians. That would be like conquering and taking over an oil-rich region today.