First Greeks - Minoan Hieroglyphic Scripts - Phaistos Disk
Late Bronze Age c. 1700-1177 BC
For some reason I didn’t realize I would have to be condensing thousands of years of human history - give or take a few hundred, just to glean some inklings into the trade underpinnings of these empires and civilizations that I’ve barely heard of throughout my entire 40+ years on this spinning globe.
Even as I write these words I stand on the shoulders of indecipherable Vitalik posts, Rabbit Hole Recaps, Messari, and just a ton of great crypto writing.
Yet, can we do more? Is this not the moment to shine? To truly grasp at the fire brought down by the Gods and thrust into our trembling hands? Maybe it’s in the water lately, but the world’s trading systems could really use a severe kick in the ass.
Not in the hands of those who have no plans mind you, but in the hands of those who have chosen to slowly leave the Trad-Fi world since 2009 in hopes of free(r) trade.
A chance to compete against the best in the world at increasing your bags, and shaping the future of tech, culture, and human history. Now of course this does also lead to armed machinery, robot dogs, and orbs that scan your retinas for proof-of-person, but at least we have these things to complain about now.
So when was the last time we encountered such a drastic shift in technology that drastically changed the futures of humans?
The Bronze Age of course.
They are trading gold, silver, copper, tin, and then finally bronze.
Copper + Tin = Bronze (at least that’s what Valheim taught me).
They are also trading finished goods.
You can also apparently make Bronze from Arsenic. Arsenical Copper.(Yummy)
90% Copper + 10% Tin = Bronze
Copper comes from Cyprus.
The Cyprus name actually translates to ‘Copper’
I promise you a crash course on the ancient markets and G8 of the Ancient World to enlighten your day, and hopefully give you something to talk about as we await crypto to provide us with the monetary Ark. Floating us through to safety on the other side of this leveraged hell - the fiat-backed world monetary system.
Just remember also that these people from the Bronze Age actually existed in some form, and unlike Marvel Movies, DC Comics, and the entire product suite of WoC; I can happily inform you that the stories of lives actually lived are much more interesting. These civilizations all kicked ass.
"Look at him. Look below. He crouches in caves. He is at the mercy of beast and weather. He eats his meat raw. If you mean something by this, enlighten me with your wisdom. Tell me why you refuse to give man the gift of fire." - (Prometheus)
Eric Cline I believe said that humans are really good at measuring seconds, minutes, hours, days, but we have a lot of trouble with years, decades, centuries and millennia.
The Bronze Age spans different times for different cultures and mythos. Generally accepted as happening roughly between 3300 BC to 1200 BC.
Achilles, and Hector, Ajax, Hercules, Hammurabi, the Shang and Zhou dynasties. All in all there were eight, or nine separate regions of the Bronze Age Mythos, but we will focus more on the classics from whence the classics came. We’re trying to learn here, and quickly. Trying to apply the machinations of ancient G8 trade practices with the current macro situation in Crypto.
I would recommend that anyone crazy enough to read this will understand that I’m trying to solve the macro effects of developed cultures when applied to the lens of global trade; and the methods used to exchange stores of value. Whether you’re a Bitcoiner, Eth-head, Solana glass eater - all are welcome, even Eric Wall.
So much has happened already, yet we strive to reconnect to our ancestors, generationally we are much closer the further we go backwards especially in regards to our attitudes and the consequences of large-scale global trade.
This was the Age of Heroes - The Bronze Age.
Battles were in the hundreds, and thousands. We were thousands of years away from even the Romans. If you were great, people might talk about you for a thousand years.
Egypt the prototypical dominate culture at the moment is controlling Southern trade via it’s dominance of the Nile. The Aegean peoples of the Trojan War Era are in the NW of the map below. Note: Babylon where Hammurabi writes his ‘eye for an eye’ Code of Hammurabi on stone tablets. The Roman Twelve Tablets are 1300+ years away from being written.
What does this have to do with Crypto?
Well, we’re going to look at the geo-political situation of the ancient G8 (quickly), and I’m going to summarize the cultures as fast as I can - and then we’re going to go blazingly fast into solving the new crypto meta with our fantastic insights and erudition. I use big words so you don’t think this is an AI writing this.
Also since everyone in Crypto/TradFi has the attention of a goldfish, we will attempt to condense this into Crypto/Reader’s Digest-level knowledge chunks. This will be an observation of the late Bronze Age in how it relates to the governance, and monetary challenges of Crypto.
I’ve tried to include all the best photos I can find for these ancient empires. Everything in this article is official either through my stock photo accounts, or free images. I find the aesthetic fascinating. Feel smarter just reading about these peoples that seemed so indecipherable when I was younger.
When you marry all the ancient civilizations with the Greek mythologies that we were so familiar with growing up. Yet, at that time there were approximately eight, or nine mythologies going on and we know so little about almost all of them. The simplest explanation or Occam’s Razor of the age would be that the Gods of old were probably just oral storytelling of the oldest stories of even this day when humanity started with the precious metals (gold, silver, copper) and has come full circle to energy (bitcoin, computer power, data). We harnessed the power of the final forms of the metals in the microprocessors and physical technology we use to power jet engines, rockets, computers, and lasers.
Bronze Age Civilizations listed by Mythology
There is so much alpha in reading what happened over these time periods of empire and power.
Tin was what oil is today. Tin + Copper = Bronze Tech.
Only recently have we been able to slowly decipher how the Bronze Age civilizations were running their massive empires, with little to no technology.
How old is the Bronze Age?
The Bronze Age predates Jesus by > 3000 years.
it pre-dates the Jewish faith. Although Abraham pops in around 1800 BC
Hinduism 2000 BC
Zoroastrianism just makes the cut.
Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, Shinto, Sikhism all come AFTER the Bronze Age.
I will make you a promise that you will be able to apply some of this knowledge towards a greater understanding of human behavior, get up to speed on the G8 of the ancient world, and impress your AI at parties.
We haven’t known a lot about the Bronze Age for a long time, mostly due to the fact that we had all these artifacts that we couldn’t read, or decipher their meaning.
What do you think all those liberal art majors were doing when your parents were going to college? The world is getting faster, but we are gaining some knowledge along the way from our past.
What we did know about the ancient G8 civilizations is that they needed Bronze - since this was the superior technology to build your army. Iron was around, but apparently the process was painstaking and difficult at the time. People didn’t know how to work the Iron in an efficient, cost effective manner. (sound familiar?)
Maybe TradFi is the Bronze and Crypto is the Iron?
Maybe crypto is the obvious math that everyone needs to harness - to finally level up to sanity when it comes to our technological systems.
These people were insanely smart, and playing the highest stakes of poker there is - your life.
The best way to have a leg up on the competition was to have the latest Bronze Weaponry and Armor.
Bronze comes from Tin and Copper. There was plenty of Copper, but the ancient world minus China had no idea where the Tin was. It came from the East.
You could only get it via trade!
And thus the Bronze Age really was the Trading Age.
A lot of the world’s tin turned out to come from small anarcho-syndicates in the mountain ranges! Who knew they were so woke? They probably hated DAOs.
Adding to the mystique is the fact that the mining industry appears to have been run by small-scale local communities or free laborers who negotiated this marketplace outside of the control of kings, emperors or other political organizations, Frachetti said.
"To put it into perspective, this would be the trade equivalent of the entire United States sourcing its energy needs from small backyard oil rigs in central Kansas," he said. (article)
Libertarians Rejoice!
(Ain’t no Tin in the Mesopotamian ‘Champagne Room’. RED is the tin deposits.)
You need to understand that these places were over 2000 miles apart. I’ve included the map above so you can get your bearings on where the hell this is in the world.
The markets for purpose of Crypto and TradFi comparisons are extremely complex.
You have to play a brutal run of diplomacy where you don’t get wiped out of existence. Thinking ahead through all the potential proposals, knowing full well that circumstances could chance in an instant.
The ultimate test of Game Theory - Bronze Age Edition.
I did also find this crazy scientific article with this in it:
However, it is striking that all four chosen subregions show the same sharp Early Neolithic demographic peak∼4000–3500 BCE and then a decline, another peak at the beginning of the Bronze Age ∼2000 BCE, a Late Bronze Age decline ∼1000–800 BCE, a subsequent peak in the Late Iron Age ∼250 BCE, and then a decline in the later Medieval period ∼1250 CE at the end of the sequence. The particular cross-regional consistency at these points in the overall time series suggests an exogenous factor of some kind. (paper)
The paper uses this in the lens of geological epochs - interesting.
What is more interesting is the data is about Holocene fluctuations in human populations.
ELI5: The Holocene is right now, but human history is small from a geological point of view. The demographic, and radiocarbon dating shows mass immigration of peoples into other cultures and lands. These are the points in time when human history massively changes. I’m going to try and distill this all down for you so you don’t have to do what I’ve done. (pray for me)
Basically the coastal people seem to get screwed, and the mountain people do well.
This happened with the Mayans apparently.
Should we all move into Mad Max mountain fortresses?
Yes, and yes. It seems we are all doomed unless we get this governance thing going and override the monetary powers that be with a superior system; all while avoiding unnecessary taxes, world collapse, and benevolent dictators.
Don’t you worry dear crypto degenerate - we’re going to learn from our mistakes!
I know that was a bit of a tangent-filled introduction - but there is so much stuff that happened here! Just to tie a quick bow on the coastal people getting screwed and the mountain people always winning in most of human history - choose wisely where you leverage your real estate.
The Collapse of the Bronze Age
"…He left the fire burning in the first cave, with children staring at it wide-eyed, and then went to every cave in the land…" the legend says. It was a true gift and an important resource, that before was unknown to mankind. He also taught mankind agriculture, writing, medicine, mathematics, and science. His deeds enabled the birth of global enlightenment and progress on earth, but they also had serious negative consequences. (more on Prometheus)
This feels a bit like my first Roman article, but I’m trying to build up a foundation so that you can jump into the Bronze Age crypto takes. It’s the last time I’ve witnessed a missed Era, Epoch, Age, Period. We know so little, but can learn so much from ancient trading data. Funny to after reading this back you could use the Prometheus story as a metaphor for Satoshi bringing Crypto the masses. Just replace fire with crypto.
The point is we are learning a lesson from a middle distant age, and a recent Bronze Age, but in the shortened time span that is hyper-realized humanity (aware of history and scale).
The data available about the scaling of human commerce, and inter-regional trading apparatuses are almost beyond our reach.
How do you go from writing on stone tablets —————> Lx blockchains?
The cuneiform and hieroglyphs were the slowest possible written receipts of our entire existence. The spoken languages were going through massive change, and all traders would speak multiple languages and dialects. In an earlier Roman article I shared the chart of Roman hand counting for trading up to 10000 with only your hands!
Human improvement is not a linear direction, nor is it untraceable. Any roleplaying game will break the attributes down into the basics like:
Strength
Agility
Toughness
Intelligence and so on…(I’m getting somewhere with this I swear)
Other improvements might be as a group of humans.
For example in gaming, a corporation/faction in a future game like Star Atlas might have attributes for groups/orgs:
Trading Talent
Ability to harness the supply chain. Extensive networks with efficient transport and successful in a healthy, competitive market. This according to books like Atlas Shrugged would be where you get your mega steel, mega starships, mega Musk Mars program.
Diplomacy Talent
Keep the peace. War resets the economies, but usually does more damage than it solves. Don’t push away problems in times of relative stability. Take advantage of opportunities of direct access to large powers that might sometimes be behind a curtain of access.
Knowledge Talent
Microchips, The Wheel, Blockchains, Religion, History, Computers, AI, Industrialization and more.
Activating Shared Human Knowledge Re: Trade
We can learn from this age due to it’s parallels to present day G8 style politic.
We perceive the world as disconnected from itself, but actually the world has never been so close together. In ancient times we did not have the acceleration of communication time.
I’m trying to abstract the ideas as much as possible to deal with the burgeoning explosion of software tech.
With AI, blockchains, phones/computers - we have to get the politicking right.
This is why I write so much about DAOs.
DAOs are powerful like an NFT - just the word bestows the abstracted idea of what is possible to achieve.
Most businesses can only be allowed certain limitations in shareholders, IP rights, paper contracts, distribution and execution of business, and so on. I know this also because one of my first ever crypto calls was to a lawyer about corporate structure options.
Let’s look at the players on the board during the last massive history event.
Introduction to Ancient Traders (G8)
Talking about the G8s of the ancient world.
If every father had children at 50 we would be about 106 fathers away from the beginning of the Bronze Age.
The time period with the most agreed upon history is approximately 65 generations - our chosen time of 1200 BC to take a look at the trading and general political situation.
Let’s start with a brief intro to the G8 of the ancient world - the Minoans and Mycenaeans are counted as one people for simplicity and argument. Basically referred to as the Aegean.
Aegean
Egyptians
Hittites
Babylonians
Assyrians
Canaanites
Cypriots
Mitanni
(diver with an ‘oxhide’ shape ingot denoting where the metals came from.)
Photo Credit: Cemal Pulak, Texas A&M University
The Minoans (Aegean)
Ancient Cretans. Probably the first European link in the chain of humanity. The minotaur and Theseus (founder of Athens) mythology comes from these people. Eventually the Mycenaeans adapted their culture and took over, the Minoans were probably the last direct link to the cultures of the Stone Age and the original myths of humanity that have been replayed ad infinitum. The volcanic eruptions of the Thera volcano probably hastened the famine, pestilence, and war that ended the Bronze Age. Literally hundreds of years of poor soil, earthquakes, and war.
Minoans have no iconography of kings, and it is presumed that a group of elite families ran the civilization. Decentralized to a fault it seems, and probably why they lost to the Mycenaean invasion around 1450 BC. At this point they become basically one people - the Aegean. Classic crypto mistake - unable to scale.
(By Jebulon - Own work) Bull-Leaping Fresco found at Knossos.
The Minoans built large and elaborate palaces up to four storeys high, featuring elaborate plumbing systems and decorated with frescoes.
Rhyton seen above in an image from Wikipedia. Rhytons were conical containers used to drink libations in the Bronze Age. Many of them were in the shape of an animal head.
The Mycenaeans (Aegean)
(the real Mount Olympus) Achilles looked upon it.
The evolution of the Mycenaeans could be contrasted with the slow push of Ethereum to flip the MCAP of Bitcoin. It seems pretty clear that the Mycenaeans were going to win, but the Minoans were the original OGs from King Minos/Satoshi.
The reason the Mycenaeans and the Minoans are lumped together is due to the ancient story of King Aegean committing suicide after fearing that Theseus his son had died. Theseus had forgotten to raise the white sails, and thus the black sails drove King Aegean to jump in the sea - to this day called the ‘Aegean Sea’.
(By: Alexikoua)
In the end we always go back.
This is where your Achilles and Agamemnon come from. If you have heard these names it is originally from this aforementioned Age of Heroes.
Odysseus, aka Ulysses, aka the book written by James Joyce that loosely parallels the Trojan War. Everything is a trope in a trope that ends up originating from the Bronze Age.
The Mycenaeans are the Ethereums of the future. I’m not even an Eth-head and you would be blind not to see it coming with the ongoing problems of Bitcoin’s decentralization, and glut of gatekeeping neckbeards. Bitcoin will survive, but Ethereum is bound to pass it at least in the meantime.
The Mycenaean’s trade was based on importing raw materials such as metals, ivory, and glass and then exporting finished goods made from those materials. The age old economic rule of a solid manufacturing base, but the risk of becoming too separated from the raw materials and hence larger collapse. Mycenaean products were seen as far as Spain, Ireland, England, and Germany. They also dealt in opium - hence our drug history is also pertinent in this time. Even the ancients liked to get high.
(Mycenaean Citadel Map)
Mycenaean Greece was dominated by a warrior elite society and consisted of a network of palace-centered states that developed rigid hierarchical, political, social and economic systems. At the head of this society was the king, known as a wanax. (Wikipedia)
King Agamemnon leader of the Greeks from the Trojan War was a Mycenaean, as was Achilles.
Egyptians
(Ramesses II being a boss)
Leaders starting calling themselves ‘Pharaohs’ in this time period.
Around 1279 BC, Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great, ascended the throne, and went on to build more temples, erect more statues and obelisks, and sire more children than any other pharaoh in history.
Egyptians at this time had just established the Pharaoh system, and worshipped a God very similar to Zeus named Amun. They very likely derive from an earlier God.
I know all the Americans probably visualize themselves as the Aegean people. The descendants of the original Greeks; the dudes from the movie ‘300’ jumping on the Mayflower and playing for the land of the free. Nope. At least not in my opinion.
The Americans and the Egyptians have an unfortunate governance comparison: they both loved to lie to their people for the greater good of the nation. Egypt stunned scholars with their tales of victory in the official records, but over time realized they knew a good puff piece when they saw it. Hittite records later showed that ancient rulers knew not to let a good draw go to waste. Focusing on the positives and keeping the morale high, guiding the citizens to a shared ethos from ruler down.
Trade was robust, and the middle class of scribes, scholars, early nobles allowed for a large centralized bureaucracy to flourish and allow rampant growth, yet just like in present day America and China - large bureaucracies can give and take, with large civil wars caused during this time due to rampant corruption and low revenue/food production years.
Please remember that correspondence is done via stone tablet at the moment, or worse by word of mouth. Official narratives play hard.
Egypt had the best food security, the most secure internal transport system (Nile), and an extensive trade network that most other nations didn’t even know existed, or had direct access.
They were Team Egypt World Police. In a few hundred years massive wars would break out with the Sea peoples (most likely Aegeans). Egypt would be extremely damaged by the Greek Dark Ages, but would be the only culture listed here to survive continuously to the Iron Age.
Hittites
(Hittite drinking cup in the shape of a fist)
The law codes of the Hittites provide very specific fines or punishments that are to be issued for specific crimes and have many similarities to Biblical laws found in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. In addition to criminal punishments, the law codes also provide instruction on certain situations such as inheritance and death.
The Hittites without getting to deep into it - spoke the oldest known Indo-European language. This is counterpoint to Judeo-Christianity being known as the source of all languages. The truly divine religions would have languages stretching back to the original Gods - or at least they hoped. With the Hittites comes the uncomfortable truth that Yiddish et al. might be a side branch of linguistic history that got really big. Similar to if Polygon got bigger than Ethereum.
It’s more cool if your religion also has a Layer 1 language it’s based off of.
Hittites were a threat to the Egyptians as the tin mines were under their control. The only other tin was all the way in present day Uzbekistan, Britannia, or farther as it only formed in certain mineral deposits. (You can see the map of Bronze Age tin at the top of this article)
Basically everyone in academia has been arguing over who’s language is older, more OG. There was great pride in knowing your ancestor’s language, or religious language was derived from even older languages all the way to the beginning, or so you hoped.
Yeah, it gets kind of weird in the Bronze Age.
The ancient Greeks were aware that their language had changed since the time of Homer (about 730 BC). Aristotle later identified four types of linguistic change: insertion, deletion, transposition and substitution. (sounds a lot like coding)
Babylonians
The educated guys. They applied logical reasoning to medical endeavors, but if that didn’t work they took the gloves off and applied a dose of exorcism. Curses were a big deal back in the day and you had to get those demons cleansed out. Very advanced culture. Remember this is Bronze Age - 3000 BC to 1100 BC!
Astronomy, literature, mathematics, medicine, and art.
They were so revered for their history that many religious texts refer to Rome as Babylon - since Babylon was the pinnacle of ancient times, Babylon was the perfect civilization - the advanced culture. There’s a whole rabbit-hole about seven hills, and certain ancient cities, but we’re not going to go there.
Rome hasn’t even happened yet, and the knowledge acquired already is astounding.
Hammurabi, famous today for his early code of laws turned a small town into a major city-state. The empire pretty much collapsed after his death 1750 BC.
(Babylonian medical recipe concerning poison) - Wikipedia
The Babylonian system of mathematics was sexagesimal, or a base 60 numeral system. From this we derive the modern-day usage of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 (60 × 6) degrees in a circle.
Assyrians
The militant boys. More into the autocratic nature of rule. Babylon came in and vassalized them by force in the 1750s BC. An entire monarchy had to exist subservient to the Babylonians.
I consider myself a reasonably educated man.
I’ve read a few books here and there, and then so on, and so forth, but the Assyrians blow my mind. They pull the full dream build of climbing the empire ladder.
City State —-> Territorial State —-> Empire
Assyrians blow up the Mitanni, known as the Hurrian Kingdom. The politics get dire, and desperate.
Assyrians worshipped Ishtar/Inanna (same God, different name used by different cultures).
Ishtar ‘the Queen of Heaven’
This is one of the earliest known Gods that was worshipped at this time. God of Love, War, and Fertility.
Mitanni
A kingdom stretching from northern Syria to southeast Turkey. The Mitanni were an interesting buffer kingdom stuck between three major powers. You had the Hittites in the North, the Egyptians in the South, and the Assyrians to the East.
This must be somewhat how Korea feels, and this is the dynamic they eventually fell prey to as the Assyrians eventually just annexed the kingdom after a series of crisis involving succession.
This led to a death spiral as future rulers traded more and more of the original Mitanni kingdom for power-broking deals with the Assyrian rulers. Kind of like if Japan had just bought out the state of California and just kept buying all the way to the Atlantic. They might be a great metaphor for the Ethereum Wars, where the dominate dApp or L2 might eventually buy away the previous crypto superpower.
Or the lack of current bitcoin utility besides a store of value allowing Ethereum to erode the Bitcoin kingdom.
(A letter from a king of Mitanni to the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep III., 1370 BC)
( bead in the name of King Aga of Kish 2600 BC - written to his Gods.)
You’re looking at the earliest writings in human history as we finally start to translate hundreds, and thousands of early language variations.
MAP: Below Egypt in Orange, NW is the Aegeans in the water(Greece), Purple is the Hittites, Red the Mittani, Babylonia in the Yellow. Just to get a sense of where everyone was.
They found 400 tablets from 1350 BC. These are letters to and from the kings of that time period. I can’t read it either.
The conflict between the Assyrians and the Babylonians
In a crypto context the left and right of crypto merges in the pseudo-anonymous middle. The liberal idealism mixed with the conservative pragmatism can unite in an age of prosperity, or bog down in a cold war of frozen communication and stagnant research. The Assyrians and Babylonians had serious beefs with each other. There isn’t enough room in this already large article to tackle this, but let’s just say the Babylonians were the Democrats, the Assyrians were the Republicans - and the Republicans wrecked the Democrats after a short age of prosperity after Hammurabi’s reign.
Shipwreck Tangent
This article shows how we have made significant progress in understanding the geopolitical skills and strategies at the time. Geochemical analysis enables researchers to trace the origins of metals. It is very difficult to find specific examples of positive world trade networks. i.e. free markets.
This size would be size and you would end up with spheres of trade influence. This is very similar to the blockchain project space. Bitcoin, Ethereum, this is what happens when software eats the world.
We are all components in a new world trading paradigm, we are more free digitally now than physically. Payment rails are competing with each other as the data farms very much have become a commodity to feed AI appetites. Public data monetized into large data sets to be fed into super computers - what could possibly go wrong? (need mech suit).
With AI starting to pay dividends it’s going to be very important to wield the best logic money can buy.
10 tons of copper and ton of tin. Lost to the ocean.
Could have outfitted an army of 5000 soldiers, with:
swords
shields
grieves
helmets
Furthermore, just to flesh it out a bit.
Most Ivory was from Hippos not Elephants.
Private merchant importing olive oil, beer, and grain.
Corporate tax exemptions in Bronze Age as well.
The point is international trade is happening for many hundreds, if not thousands of years.
7 nations go out of existence, Egypt barely hangs on.
Nothing close in devastation worldwide again until the Roman Empire collapsed.
(map credit is Kaniewski et al. 2011)
The Lessons in a Bronze Market Collapse
I haven’t mentioned Troy in this piece, and I find it fascinating that only recently we were able to agree that Troy actually existed, and where it existed.
Troy is probably always remembered because it represents the analogy of the style of the end of the Bronze Age. It is the bible for all intensive purposes of all the nations of the Bronze Age as they were most likely on either side of the conflict. The reason all of the nations are so confusing to remember from the books, and the movies is that this is what a healthy free market looks like. (lots of actual traders)
The Greeks and co. were angry at King Priam of Troy for cutting off a trade route to tin(bronze). It was done in a tactically boring matter of deals, and sub-deals. Influence was the commodity used to get the bronze. Hence the ten year Trojan War that spawned the Odyssey, multiple names for the same Gods and the greatest trick you can pull on a vain monarch. Spy networks were also born during this time.
It seems like resources were drying up and the soil records show drought, and famine. Literal stone tablets with text saying things like ‘We are lost by famine!’.
All the sea nations (Aegean) couldn’t adapt fast enough to the changing trading landscape and crops had been terrible for decades. The point being that in times of recession markets react similarly even in the Bronze Age. It’s not about who won, or lost, it’s about the lessons in international power dynamics within a free market system. If the trade stops - we’re all doomed.
(Hittite tablet mentioning ‘Wilusa’ their name for Troy)
A Bronze Arms Race and the End of Part I
I would like to say this is also somewhat analogous to crypto entering international payment markets. In the Bronze Age you really could just go and slap a bag of gold on the table and be able to pursue an opportunity. I would imagine it was a very exciting time, or maybe I’m just imagining that they all look like Brad Pitt and Eric Bana. I picture an Egyptian Queen shorting markets from afar with the Nile dominating trade in the region.
The hardest part of this whole article was breaking down the nations, and players. This is merely a taster’s pack, and there is plenty to learn about our past. AI is going to help a lot in translating and cross-referencing all the different languages, dialects, correspondence, and plethora of new data we uncover each and every day the world holds it together.
The crypto comparisons can be a bit vague at times, but the trade is what really greased the wheels for an epic time period in humanity.
We have another shot to learn from our history of trade and human interaction.
If there is enough interest I will write a part II. If you have survived to this point I commend you. I hope you learned something, I certainly did.
- Bob