How a 3,000-year-old wave of innovation shaped the world
It came from a surprising source.
Starting around 3,000 years ago, a wave of innovation began to sweep through human societies around the globe. For the following millennium, the continued emergence of new technologies had a dramatic effect on human history.
This era saw the advancement of the ability to control horses with bit and bridle, the spread of iron-working techniques through Eurasia that led to more complex and cheaper weapons and armor, and new ways of killing from a distance, such as with crossbows and catapults. On the whole, warfare became much more deadly.
During this era, many societies were consumed by the crucible of war. A few, though — the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, and Han China — not only survived but thrived, becoming mega empires encompassing tens of millions of people and controlling territories of millions of square miles.
So what drove this cascade of technological innovation that changed the course of history?
We are a complexity scientist, Peter Turchin, and a historian, Dan Hoyer, working since 2011 with a multidisciplinary team to build and analyze an extensive database of past societies. In a new paper published in PLOS One on October 20, 2021, we describe the main societal drivers of ancient military innovation and how these new technologies changed empires.
In A.D. 1, many world areas were dominated by massive empires, each encompassing millions of people.
A database for human history
The store of knowledge about the past is truly enormous. The trick is to translate that knowledge into data that can be analyzed. This is where Seshat comes in.
The Seshat Databank is named after Seshat, an ancient Egyptian goddess of wisdom, knowledge, and writing. Founded in 2011 as a collaboration among the Evolution Institute, the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, the University of Oxford, and many others, Seshat aimed to systematically gather as much knowledge about humanity’s shared past as possible.
Then our team formatted that information in a way that allows researchers to use big-data analytics to look for recurrent patterns in history and test the many theories aiming to explain such practices.
The first step in this process was to develop a conceptual scheme for historical coding information ranging from military technology to the size and shape of states to the nature of ritual and religion. The database includes over 400 societies across all world regions and ranges from roughly 10,000 B.C. to A.D. 1800.
To trace the evolution of military technologies, we first broke them down into six key dimensions:
- Hand-held weapons
- Projectiles
- Armor
- Fortifications
- Transport animals
- Metallurgical advances
Each of these dimensions was then further divided into more specific categories. Altogether we identified 46 such variables among the six technological dimensions.
For example, we distinguish types of projectile weapons into slings, simple bows, compound bows, crossbows, and so on. We then coded whether or not each historical society in the Seshat sample wielded these technologies. For example, the earliest appearance of crossbows in our database is around 400 B.C. in China.
Of course, humanity’s knowledge of the past is imprecise. Historians may not know the exact year crossbows first appeared in a particular region. But imprecision in a few cases is not a severe problem given the staggering amount of information in the database. The goal is to discover macrolevel patterns across thousands of years of history.
The Seshat Databank places technological innovation in specific societies at specific times, as seen in this map showing the spread of mounted cavalry through time from its origins in the Eurasian steppes.
Competition and exchange drive innovation
In our new paper, we wanted to find out what drove the invention and adoption of increasingly advanced military technologies around the globe during the era of ancient mega empires.
Utilizing the massive amount of historical information collected by the Seshat team, we ran a suite of statistical analyses to trace how, where, and when these technologies evolved and what factors seemed to have had the most significant influence on these processes.
We found that the primary drivers of technological innovation did not have to do with attributes of states themselves, like population size or the sophistication of governance. Instead, the biggest drivers of creation appear to be the overall world population at any given time, increasing connectivity among large states — along with the competition that such connections brought — and a few fundamental technological advances that set off a cascade of subsequent innovations.
The invention of horse bits and other bridle parts — like this one from 7th- to 8th-century B.C. Italy — gave people more effective control of horses, which had knock-on effects for the development of mounted warfare.
Let’s illustrate these dynamics with a specific example. Around 1000 B.C., nomadic herders in the steppes north of the Black Sea invented the bit and bridle to better control horses when riding them. They combined this technology with a powerful recurved bow and iron arrowheads to deadly effect. Horse archers became the weapon of mass destruction of the ancient world. Shortly after 1000 B.C., thousands of metal bits suddenly appeared and spread within the Eurasian steppes.
Competition and connection then grew between the nomadic people and the larger settled states. Because it was hard for farming societies to resist these mounted warriors, they were forced to develop new armor and weapons like the crossbow.
These states also had to build large infantry armies and mobilize more of their populations toward such collective efforts as maintaining defenses and producing and distributing enough goods to keep everyone fed.
This spurred the development of increasingly complex administrative systems to manage all these moving parts. Ideological innovations — such as the major world religions of today — were also developed as they helped unite larger and more disparate populations toward a common purpose.
Within this cascade of innovation, we see the origins of the world’s first mega empires and the rise and spread of world religions practiced by billions of people today. In a way, these critical developments can all be traced back to the development of the bit and bridle, which allowed riders better control of horses. Each step in this line has been long understood. Still, by employing the full range of cross-cultural information stored in the Seshat databank, our team could trace the dynamic sequence tying all these different developments together.
Of course, this account gives a greatly simplified explanation of very complex historical dynamics. But our research exposes the critical role of intersocietal competition and exchange in the evolution of technology and complex societies. Although this research focused on the ancient and medieval periods, the gunpowder-triggered military revolution had similar effects in the modern era.
Perhaps most importantly, our research shows that history is not “just one damn thing after another” — there are indeed discernible causal patterns and empirical regularities through the course of history. And with Seshat, researchers can use the knowledge amassed by historians to separate theories supported by data from those that are not.
This article was originally published on The Conversation by Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut. Read the original article here.
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