Does inequality cause social collapse?

Measuring the rate of inequality across hundreds of archaeological sites around the world by looking at the distribution of house sizes, and checking if there is a relationship between inequality and how long a site survives, you find that:

No! In fact, there is a slight positive correlation between the rate of inequality and site duration. Looking at the correlation between duration and housing sizes across different periods, the study finds that this positive correlation is also not causal.

It's simply that peaceful, stable societies increase in "scale," "complexity," and inequality over time.

Names of ships in the 4th century BC Athenian fleet:
"Freedom", "Democracy", "Victory" History of the Athenian navy:

https://x.com/lefineder/status/1910380155811385747

Looking at the average distance traveled by Roman letters in the Latin West over time, we can see how the fall of the Western Empire led to a breakdown of movement, trade, and communication across the Classical World.

In the 380s, the avg letter traveled more than 1,500 km from sender to recipient. In subsequent decades after the collapse of the Rhine front, the loss of Britain, and North Africa, the avg distance traveled by letters shrank by half.

The letters themselves tell of the difficulties faced by the writers in sending them.🧵 Sidonius Apollinaris, writing in the 450s, tells of the difficulties of sending letters across what was once a unified empire but is now separate kingdoms:
"Divided as we are between different kingdoms, we are held back from more frequent exchange of correspondence"

The effects of Tennis on French history. Multiple French monarchs died during Tennis matches. Also:
"at the suggestion of a certain Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin — whose name would later be famous in another connection — they moved to the jeu de paume, the large indoor tennis court nearby"

"Yet again tennis plays a significant part in French History"

Under the Qing dynasty, China experienced a massive expansion in population, growing from 50-150 million persons in the Ming Era to around 400 million by the mid 19th century.

The main reasons for this extraordinary expansion🧵 Was first its military expansion, by 1760, the Qing, under the "Ten Great Campaigns of conquest," had incorporated a massive amount of new land.

Between the late medieval era and 1800, literacy rates in Britain increased from 5% to over 60%.

This happened despite virtually no state investment in Education in a bottom-up process motivated by individual interest in acquiring literacy and Protestant religious zeal in spreading it. Before the mass establishment of a public education system, the average male during the early industrial revolution had, on average, 1 year of schooling.

Balkan Mining activity in the Bronze and Iron.

Mining first started in the 4th millennium BC and suffered major disruptions toward the end of Old Europe around 3000 BC and in the late Bronze Age with the collapse of Mycenaean civilization. The Copper Age civilizations of Old Europe.

Unable to defend itself from Umayyad incursions, the independent Duchy of Aquitaine surrendered to Charles Martel, who turned back the Umayyad at the Battle of Tours.

Aquitaine was worth to the Franks much more than the sum of its people; it contained valuable silver mines, in particular the Melle mines, which became the most productive source of silver in the Carolingian empire.

Isotope analysis of Carolingian coins shows that before the 750s, most of the silver in coinage came from recycled Byzantine silver, while afterwards most came from Frankish mines, with Melle supplying the largest share.
The mining work has created a network of over twenty kilometers of tunnels.

"A single mass killing of more than 140 children and over 200 camelids directed by the Chimú state, c. AD 1450."

Cuts transecting the child's sternum and displaced ribs suggests that "the chest had been cut open, perhaps to extract the heart." For most skeletons "No other evidence of perimortem trauma was observed" indicating the extraction of the heart was done on live victims.

As Spanish chronicler Cristóbal de Molina described "children had their live hearts taken out, and so the priests offered the beating hearts to the huacas to which the sacrifice was made."
Children were brought from across the region to be sacrificed next to the Chimú capital.
"Variability in forms of cranial modification and stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen suggest that the children were a heterogeneous sample drawn from multiple regions and ethnic groups throughout the Chimú state."

There is a notion that largely peaceful hunter-gatherers are pressed into violent conflict due to population pressure and resource scarcity, but if you check with HGs, 'why are they fighting?' They would often respond It's about Women and Vengeance.

In a sample of 111 conflicts between Australian aborigines whose proximate reason can be discerned, 58% were about Women, 28% were about revenge, and a minority were about territory or material plunder; "Territorial conflicts, if not totally absent, remain negligible: this motivation appears only in three occasions...The two main causes of conflicts are retaliation and, above all, rights over women." When Napoleon Chagnon told the Yanomamo, a relatively war-like Amazon tribe, that American academics think that they fight over "game animals and meat," they laughed and responded: "We do like meat, we like women a whole lot more!"

Rates of physical aggression in children tracked since infancy are highest in the youngest ages and then decline over time.

As Saint Augustine would put it: "The feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant’s mind. I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby. He could not yet speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother’s milk. Who is unaware of this fact of experience?" There are also significant sex differences in physical aggression between girls (pink) and boys (blue) that are present since age 2.

Technological innovation has largely been driven by a small elite.
"drawing on patent records linked to census data. We document that the rise of innovation during Sweden’s industrialization can largely be attributed to a small industrial elite belonging to the upper-tail of the economic, educational, and social status distribution." Half of all Swedish inventors came from a highly elite background, and another third from the upper middle class.

2% of Hungarians have surnames ending in "y"; they were adopted in pre-modern times by elite families, signifying their origin. These "..y" surnames are still highly overrepresented among Hungarian elites.

"29% of all Hungarian prime ministers since 1848 came from a ...y named family", 43% of Austro-Hungarian PMs, and one French President whose father belonged to the lesser Hungarian nobility, Nicolas Sarkozy. Also, two of the ten Hungarian Nobel-laureates had a ..y surname. This study tracking elite surnames among skilled professionals and academics in Hungary shows that "social mobility rates under communism were the same as in the subsequent capitalist regime."

The abolition of slavery was advanced by Capitalists and industrialization.

British MPs who were industrialists or were sons of industrialists were the most supportive of anti-slavery bills. For other elites, there was "no correlation between attitudes towards abolition and being a merchant, a member of the landed elite or aristocracy, or having attended Oxford or Cambridge." The most common occupation of the signers on the 1806 Manchester anti-slavery petition, one of our earliest surviving anti-slavery petitions, was related to manufacturing.

East Asians are closely related populations that were still admixing with each other in the Late Roman period.

Let's look at the genetic history of Japan:
It was first inhabited by 'Jomon' hunter-gatherers from Korea. Half of this ancestry was replaced 2300 years ago by a population that introduced rice agriculture into Japan, ultimately from North-East China.
Then, around 300 AD, another large migration of farmers with 'Han-related' ancestry replaced most of the ancestry of Kofun-era Japan, such that modern Japanese derive just 10% of their ancestry from Jomon HGs.

These large-scale farmer migrations from the region of north-east China also affected the Korean peninsula (whose genetic history is still not as clear). We know that in the historical period, there were still people with high rates of Jomon ancestry in South Korea; one skeleton from a 300-500 AD funerary complex had 33% Jomon ancestry, while modern-day Koreans only retain 5% Jomon-related ancestry.

In some sense, East Asians could be said to have only "truly" separated from one another in the Late Han period, and before then had extremely close ties bolstered by mass migrations, birthing parallel cultural and state developments. During the early medieval period, all three East Asian civilizations were using Chinese numerals and characters and shared the most influential religion in their state, Buddhism.
(Which became the state religion in Japan in the Nara period, and in Korea under the Goryeo Dynasty. In China, it was never the official religion, but possibly the one with the most adherents under the Tang dynasty.)

The grand destruction of sedentary steppe areas of Eurasia by the invention of cavalry and the coming of Scythian-Cimmerians.🧵
"In the steppes of the North Black Sea and Azov Sea, as in the other steppe areas of Eurasia, the Iron Age corresponded with the transition of the Eastern European inhabitants from sedentary, pastoral agrarian people to nomadic, animal breeding tribes. By the 9th century B.C. the numerous steppe settlements including surface and subterranean dwellings used by the Bronze Age population had disappeared." Scythians would later ravage the Near East
"Scythians ruled Asia for 28 years and devastated everything through their violence and overindulgence. They laid everybody under tribute but as if that were not enough they raided and robbed everything each people had" - Herodotus

Germans accounted for 19% of the ministers in the Russian Empire, despite being around 1% of the empire's population.

Most of these Germans were 'Baltic Germans' incorporated into the empire during the conquests of the Great Northern War (1720). Only 80 years later, we already see that Germans have risen into positions of high prominence in the Committee of Ministers of Alexander I. Detailed origin of ministers.
The other non-foreign non-Baltic German ministers are probably Volga Germans brought in by Catherine the Great.
"The six ministers of German descent were either two or three generations removed from their families' immigration to the Russian Empire."

Linear B tablets mention Women taken as war captives from Anatolia, showing Mycenaean Greeks were raiding the region of Troy.
"These descriptions often use the word lawiaiai, ‘captives’, which is the same word used by Homer to describe women seized by Achilles."

Note that the Iliad begins with Achilles' rage about Agamemnon not handing him a captive woman (Briseis). The Mycenaeans were very familiar with the coasts of West Asia, and many places there are referenced in Linear B tablets.

Greco-Roman writers were the first to use coordinates of latitude and longitude to map places, and the first to lay down geometrical treaties specifying how to project regions onto maps.
This transformed Geography from a mere itinerary, schematically displaying places, into a real science based on mathematical principles.

Ptolemy's Geography, written around 150 AD, gives the coordinates of 8,000 different places, on top of being a monumental achievement in pre-modern mapping, when these coordinates are compared to modern Greenwich coordinates, a tight correlation is seen (0.98) between the numbers, indicating a remarkable degree of accuracy.
Comparison of Ptolemy’s longitudes and latitudes with real values.
ancientportsantiques.com/ancientmaps/cl…

Jokes from the "Philogelos", the oldest surviving joke book (dated 4th century AD).🧵
208. Someone asks a cowardly boxer, ‘Whom do you have a fight with today?’ With a polite gesture in the direction of his opponent, he answers, ‘With that dear sweet gentleman over there.’

A Frankish Odyssey.
Around 279, Emperor Probus defeated the Germanic people in a series of wars. As part of the peace agreement, Germanic groups were resettled throughout the empire. This included a group of Franks who were resettled in the region of Pontus on the coast of the black sea, but almost as soon as they were settled, the Franks rebelled.

Taking control of a fleet stationed in an Euxine harbor, they sailed out of the black sea into the Mediterranean, pillaging their way through Anatolia, Greece, and North Africa. They ravaged the famous city of Syracuse in Sicily and tried to take Carthage, but were repulsed. Eventually, they reached and passed the Pillars of Heracles into the Atlantic Ocean.
From there, they coasted from Hispania to Gaul, passing the British Channel until they returned to the shores of their home. Here's Edward Gibbon's description of the odyssey from his history:
"Of all the barbarians who abandoned their new settlements, and disturbed the public tranquillity, a very small number returned to their own country....The successful rashness of a party of Franks was attended, however, with such memorable consequences"