[LINK] "Diplomacy among the aliens"

[rfmcdonald]

GNXP's Razib Khan has a extended review of a recent survey of what could be called the transnational cosmopolitan culture of the Bronze Age Near East.

[T]he details of our knowledge of the Bronze Age world are due to the work of modern archaeologists and philologists. Aside from a few references in the Bible to an offshoot kingdom, the Hittite Empire had been totally forgotten! Dead cuneiform, once deciphered, brought back a world which had lain dormant for thousands of years. There are many elements of these lost civilizations which we comprehend only in spare fragments. For example in the fourth millennium BC it seems from the archaeological record that Mesopotamian merchants had colonies which replicated their culture in toto in Anatolia, while Mesopotamian influences through diffusion are indisputable in pre-Dynastic Egypt. In the 3rd millennium this cultural hegemony waned, and Egypt seems to have sealed itself off from outside influence until the 2nd millennium, while the Mesopotamian stamp on Anatolian society diminishes. But without full-blown writing we can only conjecture as to the dynamics of this period of the expansion of Mesopotamian civilization. By the time the light of text illuminates the world Mesopotamian culture had retreated in its complete form to Sumer and Akkad.

As it turns out, many of the elements that united the different civilizations of the era--fictive and actual kinship, gift-giving as a proxy for trade and substitute for war booty, and solemn sworn before gods of different but not yet incompatible pantheons--are not only used today, arguably even cementing the general stability of Europe in its long 19th century, but are used in ways quite recognizable to us early 21st century types. Egyptians and Mesopotamians and Anatolians and Minoans all managed to come together to form a metacivilization, again with potential implications for our 21st century world.

My brief summary doesn't do justuice to Razib's essay. Go, read, now.