Constitutional Law
Part 2: “What Were They Thinking?”
Digression: “A History of Government in 6 Revolutions: From the Paleolithic to Philadelphia”
Pg 136. “Death of a Civilization”
PANEL 1
A side view of an underwater tectonic plate pushing under a continental plate, dragging the land with it. An ancient Greek galley floats on the water.
NARRATION:
The Mycenaean Greeks were no strangers to natural disasters.
PANEL 2
The continental plate stretches in and down as it is dragged by the underwater plate. There’s a big sound effect STRETTTCHHH. Magma is pumping up into the mountains. The ship floats on.
NARRATION:
What with the African tectonic plate constantly shoving itself under the Aegean Sea…
PANEL 3
The land springs back with great energy. Enormous waves toss the ship into the air, and the mountain spews lava in a massive eruption. There’s a big sound effect SPROING-OING-OINGGG.
NARRATION:
Life had always been a roiling mess of earthquakes, volcanoes, and even tsunamis.
SHIP VOICE:
Mondays…
PANEL 4
Two fishermen in a small wooden boat look up at a towering wall of tsunami wave about to hit them.
NARRATION:
Life got a little harder around 1250 B.C. That’s when the region got rocked by what’s called an “earthquake storm”—decades of severe quakes, one after the other, as built-up pressure unzipped and popped along the whole subduction zone.
FISHERMAN:
Erekthos* must have woken up on the wrong side of the seabed!
FOOTNOTE:
* “Earth shaker”—the local Athenian version of Poseidon.
PANEL 5
The two fishermen, completely drenched, cling to the sides of their capsized boat. The sea around them is now flat and calm.
FISHERMAN:
Welp…
Back to work.
NARRATION:
Still, they were used to such things.
PANEL 6
A group of people, seen from the knees down, stand on cracked and parched earth, with only a few green shoots here and there.
NARRATION:
Unfortunately, just before 1250, BC, the sea surface temperature had cooled dramatically. That meant less evaporation, pumping less moisture into the air. That meant way less rain.
This part of the world had never been all that rainy to begin with. But now—in just a few years—the whole region went bone dry.
ROBED MAN 1:
Umm, Sky God?
ROBED WOMAN 1:
Crops are failing, yo!
ROBED MAN 2:
Did you not notice all our sacrifices?
ROBED WOMAN 2:
Ahem. You elites did do the rites right, right?
ELITE MAN:
It’s just a dry spell.
We have grain reserves, we can wait this out.
NARRATION:
It wasn’t a drought, but long-term climate change. It would be arid for hundreds of years.
PANEL 7
A view of the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea, and the Black Sea, showing arid lands of Greece, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, and Libya.
NARRATION:
Famine came fast.
By 1250 BC, everywhere you went, crops were failing year after year after year after year after year.
Grain imports stopped coming.
From Athens to Anatolia, from Cairo to the Crimea, everyone’s grain reserves were exhausted. The great storerooms lay bare.
Kings reached out to each other across the seas for help, but they were all in the same boat.
Aid never came.
Their cities starved.
MYCENAEAN KING:
Help!
CYCLADEAN KING:
Send food at once! Hurry!
ANATOLIAN KING:
Help, my brothers!
HITTITE KING:
It’s a matter of life and death!
CANAANITE VOICE:
Doesn’t your cousin Joe work for the Pharaoh? Think he could hook us up?
EGYPTIAN KING:
Sorry, fellas.
Gold I’ve got, but grain I’ve not.
PANEL 8
A stylized map of artificial waterways and reservoirs.
NARRATION:
But what about their civic institutions? Wasn’t the whole point of the Institution Revolution that we could organize large populations to solve really big problems like this?
And if water was the problem, cities and states had been coming up with solutions since the dawn of the Bronze Age. Reservoirs… irrigation systems… canals… dams… cisterns… they’d re-routed rivers… a few had even built early aqueducts to bring water from far away.
Yes, this arid climate was a new problem, seemingly out of nowhere. But surely the sophisticated institutions of these great civilizations responded with some nifty new ideas…
…right?
PANEL 9
Mycenaean elites are gathered around a table in a modern conference room, complete with modern furniture, whiteboard, fire alarm, central air, electric outlets in the conference table, and large windows. There’s an open box of donuts on the conference table, and mugs of coffee. One of the priestess officials is smiling and licking her chops as she looks at her donut instead of paying attention. Someone has written in bold red letters on the whiteboard “KEEP DOING WHAT’S ALWAYS WORKED!”
NARRATION:
Not really.
Usually, the systems, structures, and stability of institutions are a blessing.
But when the world is changing, they easily become a curse.
The records left by the Mycenaeans and other Bronze Age governments suggest that they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see that they had to adapt if they were to survive.
WANAX (standing at the head of the table):
Our ways are the best ways. The right ways. The only ways.
Any new approach would be wrong.
THOUGHTFUL PRIEST/OFFICIAL:
But taxing the farms isn’t filling the granaries like it used to…
RAWAKETAS (angrily leaping to his feet and smacking the table):
THEN WE MUST TAX THEM HARDER!
BALDING PRIEST/OFFICIAL:
Yes! And we must make more sacrifices to the gods! Perform our rituals more perfectly!
KEYBEARER PRIESTESS:
None of this is working.
WHY ISN’T IT WORKING?
NARRATION:
Institutional arthritis had crippled these societies—just when they needed to be most nimble.
PANEL 10
A footpath leads through grass to abruptly end at a huge stone wall blocking the way.
NARRATION:
To put it another way:
The institutions which had once opened the way to great civilizations, had now hardened into a figurative wall athwart the path to new solutions.
Which is when the real walls went up.
PANEL 11
High fortress walls atop the Acropolis glow ominously in the last light of sunset. All around is in deep shadows of red and violet, as the burning torches of a mob ascend the slopes on two sides.
NARRATION:
About 1250 BC, the Mycenaean cities began throwing up gigantic walls to protect their hilltop palace complexes. These were massive fortifications, constructed from blocks of stone that each weighed many thousands of pounds! Even atop little Athens’ Acropolis, the walls reached as much as 27 feet high.
Inside those walls, they built large, vaulted storerooms for grain and supplies. The palaces were planning to hold out for a long time.
Why? …and why now? We know they weren’t being attacked by outside invaders.
All the evidence suggests that the ruling elites were defending themselves against their own people.
WHY?
MOB VOICE 1:
Why are we feeding the gods when we’re the ones who are starving?
MOB VOICE 2:
The volcanoes don’t care what our priests do.
MOB VOICE 3:
Why should our elites have power? They don’t do anything with it!
MOB VOICE 4:
Sure they do. They take what we grow, and re-distribute it to their own bellies.
MOB VOICE 5:
Meanwhile, we’re burying our children.
MOB VOICE 6:
When they aren’t already buried under the rubble.
ELITE VOICE 1:
Higher!
ELITE VOICE 2:
Thicker!
ELITE VOICE 3:
Faster!
ELITE VOICE 4:
Stronger!
ELITE VOICE 5:
Thank the gods for slave labor.
ELITE VOICE 6:
Our only water supply is those springs down below! Protect the access shafts at all costs!
ELITE VOICE 7:
WHY ISN’T THIS WORKING??
MOB VOICE 7:
What good are the gods?
MOB VOICE 8:
What good is government?
MOB VOICE 9:
Burn it down.
MOB VOICE 10:
BURN IT ALL DOWN!
PANEL 12
A frightening scene. The sky is red, the fortress walls are red, the hillside is red. Everything inside the walls is aflame. Great billows of noxious smoke pump into the air above the fortress. Flames appear high in the smoke like many demonic eyes and mouths. The yellow light of the flames shows a small secret door, out of which panicked people are running. One has three arrows lodged in his back. Another man is losing his balance as he skids down the hillside. A frightened elite woman looks back over her shoulder as she darts away, awkwardly holding an infant to her chest. A single blackened tangle of a dead tree punctuates the hillside.
NARRATION:
In the face of famine, destruction, and popular uprisings, the great Bronze Age institutions held out for as long as they could.
They lasted fifty years.
Around 1200 BC, all at once, the palaces of Mycenaean civilization went up in FLAMES.
Every single one of them.
Some palaces burned so hot, it transformed the very rock itself.
For ages after, their hillsides lay strewn with bronze arrowheads and the lead shot of slings.
Yet it was only the temples and government buildings that burned. Only the institutions. In all the destruction, ordinary people’s homes were left alone.
Contrary to what you may have heard, this wasn’t a natural disaster.
Before the flames came, the earthquake storm had already ended.
Palaces burned even in places which hadn’t experienced any quakes or volcanoes.
The cities didn’t gradually fail, either. They suddenly fell.
And there’s no evidence that the sudden violence came from foreign invaders.
There’s also no evidence that any elites survived.
PANEL 13
A patch of ground covered with countless shards of broken pottery, broken stone, and other detritus. A spent arrow lies in the rubble, pointing to a child’s toy horse with wheels. The only color is a fragment of a fresco showing part of a young boy’s face.
NARRATION:
Well… not every single palace burned.
For what it’s worth, the palace at Athens managed to escape the flames.
No—it was utterly demolished.
ANGRY VOICES:
Smash it all!
Smash it to bits!
Then smash the bits!
NARRATION:
Debris poured down the shafts connecting to the springs below, forever choking off the top of the Acropolis from its water supply.
PANEL 14
The interior of a home. There are no people. A pot bubbles on a flame, beside a knocked-over stool and a dropped wooden ladle spilling liquid on the floor. Herbs and garlic ropes hang from the walls by an alcove where small figurines rest on a shelf. Other shelves contain pottery, plants, and an oil lamp. A child’s doll lies limp against a wall. A distaff with the beginnings of spun yarn lies discarded on the floor.
NARRATION:
In the ensuing power vacuum, opportunistic raiders ravaged the coasts, countrysides, and what was left of the cities.
Everyone fled, abandoning entire towns and villages.
Many had to escape in such a hurry, they left their cooking pots still bubbling on the fire!
PANEL 15
A view of the plain of Athens from the mountains to the east. A group of raiders from all around the eastern Mediterranean are trekking through the cleft. A Scythian points to the distant Acropolis, while an Egyptian and a bronze-armored warrior look on. In the rear of the troop is a bare-chested warrior with a horned Mycenaean helmet. There are several others wearing helmets and armor of boar tusks, and one of these has an eye patch. The leader wears a lion’s head and pelt like a helmet, and a bronze breasplate and greaves. All are armed.
NARRATION:
Except—once again—Athens.
For whatever reason, raiding parties left Athens alone.
LEADER:
Athens? Nah. Waste of time.
Worst soil in all of Attica.
EYEPATCH RAIDER:
And that’s saying something!
PANEL 15
A view of the plains around the Acropolis, with purple and blue mountains away in the distance. Clusters of people are arriving from all directions. The top of the Acropolis is still encircled by its fortress walls, but there’s no hint of any buildings still standing up there.
NARRATION:
Many fleeing peoples took to the hills and became shepherds.
Others sailed away to far-off lands, where they might settle as common farmers.
Refugees from all over found their way to Athens.
GROUP 1 VOICES:
But Daaad, this place sucks!
It’s safe. We’re staying.
GROUP 2 VOICES:
You lot are from Thrace, eh? Mind if a few of us Trojans join you?
Don’t see why not.
GROUP 3 VOICES:
Lots of open land here for us to put down new roots.
Just don’t settle on top of that big rock. Ain’t no water up there.
They say it’s haunted, too!
GROUP 4 VOICES:
Naxos!
Anyone around here from Naxos?
GROUP 5 VOICES:
We managed to save our hearth fire, thank the gods.
GODS?
Don’t tell us you still believe in gods.
PANEL 16
Blank white.
NARRATION:
Soon Greece was largely depopulated.
And now—not just in Greece, but across all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean—the trade routes dried up.
Those who had migrated to Athens found themselves in a whole new world.
A small world, without cities… without government… without gods.
No kings. No priests.
No temples, no taxes, no trade.
Without bureaucracies and trade, nobody needed to keep written records any more.
So they didn’t.
Within a generation, the Greeks completely forgot how to read and write.
Soon, they forgot that writing had ever even been a thing.
To the eyes of history, which only sees what is written, their world abruptly went dark.
PANEL 17
With a large sound-effect SNAP! a panel of pure black cuts off the last words of the previous panel. The black continues far down to the bottom of the page.
NARRATION:
Athens remained dark…
…for five hundred years.
CODA:
Next: Democracy is born in darkness
.
If you would like to learn more about Mycenaean Athens, the Bronze Age Collapse, and the ensuing dark age, here are just a few suggestions to get you started:
Books:
Nezameddin Faghih and Ali Hussein Samadi, eds., Institutional Inertia: Theory and Evidence, Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2024.
Robin Osborne, The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World, Vol. II: Athens and Attica, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Ian Rutherford, Hittite Texts and Greek Religion: Contact, Interaction, and Comparison, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Guy D. Middleton, ed., Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean, Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2020. (A variety of different interpretations of the latest evidence.)
Eirini M. Dimitriadou, Early Athens: Settlements and Cemeteries in the Submycenaean, Geometric, and Archaic Periods, Los Angeles: UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2019.
Alexandros Mazarakis Ainian, Alexandria Alexandridou, and Xenia Charalambidou, eds., Regional Stories towards a New Perception of the Early Greek World, Volos: University of Thessaly Press, 2017.
Esther Eidenow and Julia Kindt, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Eric H. Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Barbara A. Olsen, Women in Mycenaean Greece: The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos, New York: Routledge, 2014.
Jonathan M. Hall, A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200-479 BCE, Malden: Blackwell, 2007.
Jeremy McInerney, The Folds of Parnassos: Land and Ethnicity in Ancient Phokis, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.
Ilias Arnaoutoglou, Ancient Greek Laws: A Sourcebook, London, Routledge, 1998.
Susan Langdon, New Light on a Dark Age: Exploring the Culture of Geometric Greece, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.
Paul Rehak, ed., The Role of the Ruler in the Prehistoric Aegean: Proceedings of a Panel Discussion Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America with Additions, Liège: Université de Liège, 1995.
Chester G. Starr, The Birth of Athenian Democracy: The Assembly in the Fifth Century B.C., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Articles:
Graham Braun, “Women in Mycenaean Greece: The Linear B Textual Evidence,” The Ascendant Historian, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2020): 6-19.
Aynur-Michèle-Sara Karatas, “Key-Bearers of Greek Temples: The Temple Key as a Symbol of Priestly Authority,” Mythos: Rivista di Storia delle Religioni, Vol. 13 (2019): 1-48.
Cécile Boëlle-Weber, “I-Je-Re-Ja, Ka-Ra-Wi-Po-Ro, and Others: Women in Mycenaean Religion,” in Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean MacIntosh Turfa, eds., Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World, New York: Routledge, 2016.
Brandon L. Drake, “The Influence of Climatic Change on the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Greek Dark Ages,” Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 39, No. 6 (June 2012): 1862-1870.
Martin Finné, Karin Holmgren, Chuan-Chou Shen, Hsun-Ming Hu, Meighan Boyd, and Sharon Stocker, “Late Bronze Age Climate Change and the Destruction of the Mycenaean Palace of Nestor at Pylos,” PLoS One, Vol. 12, No. 12 (December 2017): 1-18.
P. Petrakis, “Writing the Wanax: Spelling Peculiarities of Linear B wa-na-ka and Their Possible Implications,” Minos: Revista de Filología Egea, Vol. 39 (2016): 61-158.
Florian Ruppenstein, “The End of the Bronze Age in Attica and the Origin of the Polis of Athens,” in Nikolas Papadimitriou et al., eds., Athens and Attica in Prehistory: Proceedings of the International Conference, Athens, 27-31 May 2015, Archaeopress, 2015.
Manuel Regueiro y González-Barros, Michael Stamatakis, and Konstantinos Laskaridis, “The Geology of the Acropolis (Athens, Greece),” European Geologist, No. 38 (November 2014): 45-52.
Jonathan M. Hall, “The Rise of State Action in the Archaic Age,” in Hans Beck, ed., A Companion to Ancient Greek Government, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Barbara Tsakirgis, “Fire and Smoke: Hearths, Braziers, and Chimneys in the Greek House,” British School at Athens Studies, Vol. 15 (2007): 225-231.
Christina Aamodt, “Priests and Priestesses in Mycenaean Greece,” Ph.D. diss., U. Nottingham, 2006.
Stavroula Nikoloudis, “The ra-wa-ke-ta, Ministerial Authority, and Mycenaean Cultural Identity,” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 2005.
Kevin T. Glowacki, “The Acropolis of Athens Before 566 B.C.,” in Kim J. Hartswick and Mary C. Sturgeon, eds., ΣΤΕΦΑΝΟΣ: Studies in Honor of Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1998.
Feel free to offer more suggestions in the comments!