Our second fiber, wool, as readers may already be aware, comes from sheep (although goat and horse-hair were used rarely for some applications; we’re going to stick to sheep’s wool here). The coat of a sheep (its fleece) has three kinds of fibers in it: wool, kemp and medullated fibers. Kemp fibers are fairly weak and brittle and won’t accept dye and so are generally undesirable, although some amount of kemp may end up in wool yarn. Likewise, medullated fibers are essentially hair (rather than wool) and lack elasticity. But the wool itself, composed mostly of the protein keratin along with some lipids, is crimped (meaning the fibers are not straight but very bendy, which is very valuable for making fine yarns) and it is also elastic. There are reasons for certain applications to want to leave some of the kemp in a wool yarn that we’ll get to later, but for the most part it is the actual wool fibers that are desirable.
Sheep themselves probably descend from the wild mouflon (Ovis orientalis) native to a belt of uplands bending over the northern edge of the fertile crescent from eastern Turkey through Armenia and Azerbaijan to Iran. The fleeces of these early sheep would have been mostly hair and kemp rather than wool, but by the 4th millennium BC (as early as c. 3700 BC), we see substantial evidence that selective breeding for more wool and thicker coats has begun to produce sheep as we know them. Domestication of course will have taken place quite a bit earlier (selective breeding is slow to produce such changes), perhaps around 10,000 BC in Mesopotamia, spreading to the Indus river valley by 7,000 BC and to southern France by 6,000 BC, while the replacement of many hair breeds of sheep with woolly sheep selectively bred for wool production in Northern Mesopotamia dates to the third century BC.1 That process of selective breeding has produced a wide variety of local breeds of sheep, which can vary based on the sort of wool they produce, but also fitness for local topography and conditions.
As we’ve already seen in our discussion on Steppe logistics, sheep are incredibly useful animals to raise as a herd of sheep can produce meat, milk, wool, hides and (in places where trees are scarce) dung for fuel. They also only require grass to survive and reproduce quickly; sheep gestate for just five months and then reach sexual maturity in just six months, allowing herds of sheep to reproduce to fill a pasture quickly, which is important especially if the intent is not merely to raise the sheep for wool but also for meat and hides. Since we’ve already been over the role that sheep fill in a nomadic, Eurasian context, I am instead going to focus on how sheep are raised in the agrarian context.
While it is possible to raise sheep via ranching (that is, by keeping them on a very large farm with enough pastureland to support them in that one expansive location) and indeed sheep are raised this way today (mostly in the Americas), this isn’t the dominant model for raising sheep in the pre-modern world or even in the modern world. Pre-modern societies generally operated under conditions where good farmland was scarce, so flat expanses of fertile land were likely to already be in use for traditional agriculture and thus unavailable for expansive ranching (though there does seem to be some exception to this in Britain in the late 1300s after the Black Death; the sudden increase in the cost of labor – due to so many of the laborers dying – seems to have incentivized turning farmland over to pasture since raising sheep was more labor efficient even if it was less land efficient and there was suddenly a shortage of labor and a surplus of land). Instead, for reasons we’ve already discussed, pastoralism tends to get pushed out of the best farmland and the areas nearest to towns by more intensive uses of the land like agriculture and horticulture, leaving most of the raising and herding of sheep to be done in the rougher more marginal lands, often in upland regions too rugged for farming but with enough grass to grow. The most common subsistence strategy for using this land is called transhumance.
Transhumant pastoralists are not “true” nomads; they maintain permanent dwellings. However, as the seasons change, the transhumant pastoralists will herd their flocks seasonally between different fixed pastures (typically a summer pasture and a winter pasture). Transhumance can be either vertical (going up or down hills or mountains) or horizontal (pastures at the same altitude are shifted between, to avoid exhausting the grass and sometimes to bring the herds closer to key markets at the appropriate time). In the settled, agrarian zone, vertical transhumance seems to be the most common by far, so that’s what we’re going to focus on, though much of what we’re going to talk about here is also applicable to systems of horizontal transhumance. This strategy could be practiced both over relatively short distances (often with relatively smaller flocks) and over large areas with significant transits (see the maps in this section; often very significant transits) between pastures; my impression is that the latter tends to also involve larger flocks and more workers in the operation. It generally seems to be the case that wool production tended towards the larger scale transhumance. The great advantage of this system is that it allows for disparate marginal (for agriculture) lands to be productively used to raise livestock.
This pattern of transhumant pastoralism has been dominant for a long time – long enough to leave permanent imprints on language. For instance, the Alps got that name from the Old High German alpa, alba meaning which indicated a mountain pasturage. And I should note that the success of this model of pastoralism is clearly conveyed by its durability; transhumant pastoralism is still practiced all over the world today, often in much the same way as it was centuries or millennia ago, with a dash of modern technology to make it a bit easier. That thought may seem strange to many Americans (for whom transhumance tends to seem very odd) but probably much less strange to readers almost anywhere else (including Europe) who may well have observed the continuing cycles of transhumant pastoralism (now often accomplished by moving the flocks by rail or truck rather than on the hoof) in their own countries.
For these pastoralists, home is a permanent dwelling, typically in a village in the valley or low-land area at the foot of the higher ground. That low-land will generally be where the winter pastures are. During the summer season, some of the shepherds – it does not generally require all of them as herds can be moved and watched with relatively few people – will drive the flocks of sheep up to the higher pastures, while the bulk of the population remains in the village below. This process of moving the sheep (or any livestock) over fairly long distances is called droving and such livestock is said to be moved “on the hoof” (assuming it isn’t, as in the modern world, transported by truck or rail). Sheep are fairly docile animals which herd together naturally and so a skilled drover can keep large flock of sheep together on their own, sometimes with the assistance of dogs bred and trained for the purpose, but just as frequently not. While cattle droving, especially in the United States, is often done from horseback, sheep and goats are generally moved with the drovers on foot.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.
1. On this, note E. Vila and D. Helmer, “The Expansion of Sheep Herding and the Development of Wool Production in the Ancient Near East” in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, eds. C. Breniquet and C. Michel (2014), which has the archaeozoological data).
August 17, 2024
QotD: Sheep and wool in the ancient and medieval world
August 16, 2024
QotD: American football
Jonathan David Morris, “Our National Pastime?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-04-23.
August 15, 2024
QotD: The bitter fruit of deinstitutionalization
Freddie deBoer, “We Closed the Institutions That Housed the Severely Mentally Ill and We Made It Dramatically Harder to Compel Them to Receive Care”, Freddie deBoer, 2024-05-14.
August 14, 2024
QotD: The solipsism of the American media
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-09.
August 13, 2024
QotD: The weird world of the Iliad
Homer (“Homer“) presents the gods as having unified identities, desires, and attributes, which of course you have to have in order to have any kind of coherent story but which is not at all the way the Greeks understood their gods before him (or even mostly after). The Greeks didn’t have a priestly caste with hereditary knowledge, or Vedas, or anything like that, so their religion is even more chaotic than most primitive religions. “The god” is a combination of the local cult with its rituals, the name, the myths, and the cultic image, and these could (and often did) spread separately from one another. The goddess with attributes reminiscent of the ancient Near Eastern “Potnia Theron” figure is Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, Demeter, or Athena, depending on where you are. Aphrodite is born from the severed testicles of Ouranos but is also the daughter of Zeus and Dione. “Zeus” is the god worshipped with human sacrifice on an ash altar at Mt. Lykaion but also the god of the Bouphonia but also a chthonic snake deity. Eventually these all get linked together, much later, primarily by Homer and Hesiod, but even after the stories are codified — okay, this is the king of the gods, he’s got these kids and this shrewish wife, he’s mostly a weather deity — the ritual substrate remains. We still murder the ox and then try the axe for the crime, which has absolutely nothing to do with celestial kingship but it’s what you do. If you’re Athenian. Somewhere else they do something completely different.
I also really enjoyed this book, and I think for similar reasons to you. Because you’re right, at the end of the classical world it wasn’t just the philosophers. One major theme in Athenian drama is the conscious attempt to impose rationality/democracy/citizenship/freedom (all tied together in the Greek imagination) in place of the bloody, chthonic, archaic world of heredity.1 It’s an attempt at a transition, and one which gets a lot of attention I think in part because people read the Enlightenment back into it. But my favorite part of the The Ancient City is Fustel de Coulanges’s exploration of the other end of the process: where did all the weird inherited ritual came from in the first place?!
The short version of the answer is “the heroön“. Or as he puts it: “According to the oldest belief of the Italians and Greeks, the soul did not go into a foreign world to pass its second existence; it remained near men, and continued to live underground.” Everything else follows from here: the tomb is required to confine the dead man, the burial rituals are to please him and bind him to the place, the grave goods and regular libations are for his use, and he is the object of prayers. Fustel de Coulanges is incredibly well-read (that one sentence I quoted above cites Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, “sub terra censebant reliquam vitam agi mortuorum“, plus Euripides’ Alcestis and Hecuba), and he references plenty of Vedic and later Hindu texts and practices too. I also immediately thought of the Rus’ funeral described by ibn Fadlan and retold in every single book about the Vikings, in which, after all the exciting sex and human sacrifice is over, the dead man’s nearest kinsman circles the funerary ship naked with his face carefully averted from it and his free hand covering his anus. This seems like precautions: there’s something in the ship-pyre that might be able, until the rites are completed, to get out.2 And obviously we now recognize tombs and burial as being very important to the common ancestors of the classical and Vedic worlds — from Marija Gimbutas’s kurgan hypothesis to the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the Yamnaya culture (Ямная = pit, as in pit-grave) — their funerary practices have always been core to how we understand them. But I’m really curious how any of this would have worked, practically, for pastoral nomads! Fustel de Coulanges makes it sound like you have your ancestor’s tomb in your back yard, more or less, which obviously isn’t entirely accurate when you’re rolling around the steppe in your wagon.
I’d also be interested to see an archeological perspective on his next section, about the sacred hearth. This is the precursor of Vesta/Hestia and also Vedic Agni, the reconstructed *H₁n̥gʷnis (fire as animating entity and active force) as opposed to *péh₂ur (fire as naturally occurring substance). I looked back through my copy of The Wheel, the Horse, and Language and (aside from a passing suggestion that the hearth-spirit’s genderswap might be due to the western Yamnaya’s generally having more female-inclusive ritual practices, possibly from the influence of the neighboring Tripolye culture), I didn’t find anything. I suppose this makes sense — you can’t really differentiate between the material remains of a ritual hearth and a “we’re cold and hungry” hearth, especially if people are also cooking on the ritual hearth so there’s not a clear division anyway. But if anyone has done it I’d like to see.
I don’t know enough of the historiography to know whether Fustel de Coulanges was saying something novel or contentious in the mid-19th century, but he seems to be basically in line with more recent scholarship even if he’s not trendy. But The Ancient City can be read as a work of political philosophy as well as ancient history!
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
1. And of course that tension is extra intriguing because the dramas are always performed at one of these inherited rituals, in this case the city-wide Great Dionysia festival, although it was a relatively late addition to the ritual calendar. Incidentally it’s way less bizarre than the Attic “rustic” Dionysia which is all goat sacrifices and phallus processions. (There’s also the Agrionia in Boeotia which is about dissolution and inversion and nighttime madness, and another example of “the god” being a rather fluid concept.)
2. Neil Price, in his excellent Children of Ash and Elm, says that the archaeological evidence seems to confirm this:
“Most of the objects [in the Oseberg ship burial] were deposited with great care and attention, but at the very end most of the larger wooden items — the wagons, sleds, and so on — were literally thrown onto the foredeck, beautiful things just heaved over the side from ground level and being damaged in the process. The accessible end of the burial chamber was then sealed shut by hammering planks across the open gable, but using any old piece of wood that seems to have been at hand. The planks were just laid across at random — anything to fill the opening into the chamber where the dead lay. The nails were hammered in so fast one can see where the workers missed, denting the wood and bending or breaking off the nail heads.”
August 12, 2024
QotD: The key attraction of video games to young men
That would explain video game escapism/addiction amongst men. It’s a little world where there are predictable rules and outcomes and one can succeed much easier than in the unpredictable real world with ever-changing rules.
I think this is a really important point deserving of more attention.
Yes. Video games are a drug aimed straight at the receptor that is male need for agency. They’re a superstimulus for it in exactly the same way that pornography is a superstimulus for desire.
I don’t have a policy prescription about this or anything. But it’s a connection that matters.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-05-06.
August 11, 2024
QotD: Greek and Roman notions of courage
I would not rate a man worth mention or account
either for speed of foot or wrestling skill,
not even if he had a Cyclops’ size and strength
or could outrun the fierce north wind of Thrace;
I would not care if he surpassed Tithonus’ looks,
or Cinyras’ or Midas’ famous wealth,
or were more royal than Pelops son of Tantalus,
or had Adrastus’ smooth persuasive tongue,
or fame for everything save only valour: no,
no man’s of high regard in time of war
unless he can endure the sight of blood and death,
and stand close to the enemy and fight.
This is the highest worth, the finest human prize
and fairest for a bold young man to win.
It benefits the whole community and state,
when with a firm stance in the foremost rank
a man bides steadfast, with no thought of shameful flight,
laying his life and stout heart on the line,
and standing by the next man speaks encouragement
This is the man of worth in time of war.This is not a daring courage, but a stoic (in the general sense) courage – the courage of standing a place in the line. And note for Tyrtaeus, that courage is more important than skill, or strength or speed; it matters not how well he fights, only that he “bides steadfast” “with a firm stance”. There is no place for individual exploits here. Indeed, when Aristodemus (another Spartan), eager to regain his honor lost by having survived the Battle of Thermopylae, recklessly charged out of the phalanx to meet the Persian advance at the Battle of Plataea, Herodotus pointedly notes that he was not given the award for bravery by the Spartans who instead recognized those who had held their place in line (Hdt. 9.71; Herodotus does not entirely concur with the Spartan judgement).
This was a form of courage that was evolving alongside the hoplite phalanx, where either shameful retreat or a reckless charge exposed one’s comrades to danger by removing a shield from the line. While, as Lendon is quick to note, there was still a very important aspect of personal competition (seeking to show that you, personally, had more bravery to hold your position than others), this is a fundamentally collective, not individual style of combat and it has values and virtues to match. Indeed, the Greeks frequently disparaged the fighting style of “barbarians” who would advance bravely but retreat quickly as cowardly.
And so the man who holds his place in the group and does not advance recklessly is the bravest of Greeks, but among the Crow Native Americans would seem a coward, while the bravest Crow who cleverly and daringly attacked, raided and got away before the enemy could respond would in turn be regarded by the Greeks as a reckless coward, unworthy of honor. These notions of courage aren’t merely different, they are diametrically opposed demanding entirely different actions in analogous circumstances!
The translator will call both of these ideas “courage”, but clearly when one gets down to it, they demand very different things. And these are just two examples. As Lendon notes (op. cit.), the virtus of the Roman was not the same as the andreia of the Greek, though both words might well be translated as “courage” or “valor” (and both words, etymologically mean “manliness”, lest we forget that these are very gender-stratified societies). Roman virtus was often expressed in taking individual initiative, but always restrained by Roman disciplina (discipline), making that system of military values still different from either the Crow or the Greek system.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
August 10, 2024
QotD: “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!Rudyard Kipling, 1919.
August 9, 2024
QotD: Celebrity fund-raising for foreign aid
Can you imagine a more perverse incentive? The poorer and more wretched are a nation’s people, the more likely celebrities such as Bono will convince Westerners and their governments to take pity on that country and to send large sums of money to its government. And because that country’s citizens are poor largely because their government is corrupt and tyrannical, the money paid in “aid” to that government will do nothing to help that country develop economically.
The cycle truly is vicious. Aid money naively paid by Westerners to alleviate Third-World poverty is stolen or misspent by the thugs who control the governments there. Nothing is done to foster the rule of law and private property rights that alone are the foundation for widespread prosperity. The people remain mired in ghastly poverty, their awful plight further attracting the attention and sympathy of Western celebrities, who use their star attraction and media savvy to shame politicians in the developed world into doling out yet more money to the thugs wielding power in the (pathetically misnamed) “developing world”.
If I could figure out a way to measure the long-term consequences of this new round of debt relief — a way that is so clear and objective that even the most biased party could not quibble with it — I would offer to bet a substantial sum of money that years from now this debt relief will be found to have done absolutely no good for the average citizens of the developing world.
It’s a bet I would surely — and sadly — win.
Don Boudreaux, “Faulty Band-Aid”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 2005-06-18.
August 8, 2024
QotD: The real reason modern music sounds the same
Fast forward a few years, though, and now they’ve got a pretty good idea of what “rock” is. More importantly, they’ve got a pretty good handle on what the market for rock is. At that point, they do what execs in any industry do. Why bother trying to find the hot new thing, when you can just make it yourself?
And that’s why two guys you’ve never heard of, Max Martin and a dude calling himself “Dr. Luke”, have written every #1 pop hit for the last 15 years. I’m sure they don’t work cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than scouting every bar band in America for a sound / look / stage act that might or might not pan out. Much easier to focus group a few traits, call up central casting, have them send over a made-to-order bimbo, and have him / her / xzhem front Dr. Luke’s latest computer-generated ditty.
And if everything on the radio all sounds exactly the same, that’s because it is exactly the same. Max Martin and Dr. Luke, and their zillion Mini-Mes at every level of the record biz, sometimes write songs for specific people — hey, guys, Katy Perry needs another ballad for her new album, hop to it! But mostly they write on spec, and shop it around. Different singers, different bands, different genres, doesn’t matter — this time it’s the two generic prettyboys in the “country” band Florida-Georgia Line singing it, but last time it was Katy Perry, the next time it’ll be the Backstreet Boys on their triumphant comeback tour, feat. Jay-Z and MC Funetik Spelyn. Same exact song, literally — it’s just that Kenny Chesney needed one more track on his album this time, and Taylor Swift didn’t, so now it’s #5 with a bullet on the “country” chart.
Severian, “Own Goals”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-21.
August 7, 2024
QotD: The crew of HMS Sheffield in the Falklands
May 4th 1982: As HMS Sheffield is abandoned and the fire spreads towards the Sea Dart ammunition. The remaining crew gather on the foredeck singing “Always look on the bright side of life”.
Now I have heard that story and I’ve always thought it were more than a little bit mythmaking. And yet, and yet. Someone I know (our fathers knew each other, he took a sister out a few times, we worked together for 6 months later on) was actually there. Running the flight control stuff from the next ship over:
Singing led by the FC that we had loaned to them. One of our Sea Kings closed on the fo’c’sle to pick up wounded and saw them all swaying from side to side with their arms outstretched. I learned why when he got back.
I’ll take that as being something that really happened then. Not for publication, not something published for home consumption, but something that actually happened. Young men, on a burning ship, not knowing whether they’d be lifted off before the fire got to the missiles and the kaboom of their little bits all over the South Atlantic. […]
We’re a weird, weird culture here in Britain. We will, and do, take the piss out of absolutely anything, including our own impending death.
Now, whether that’s quite what the economists mean by institutions that aid in economic development is another thing but it is indeed one of those institutions of that British culture.
It’s also wholly glorious but then I’m a Brit so I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Tim Worstall, “The British Are A Very, Very, Weird People”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-05-06.
August 6, 2024
QotD: Malicious idiocy
Perhaps we should make it an Olympic event, with male, female, and trans competitions. It would be more fair than the other competitions for running, jumping, lifting weights, &c. No single country would dominate the sport, at least to begin with; some of the smallest nations could excel. Or if they didn’t, malicious idiots could charge the field, accusing judges and timekeepers of racism and hate crimes, adding to the loathely spectacle: Citius! Altius! Fortius!
David Warren, “Off & running”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-11-22.
[NR: This QotD has become much more timely than it was when I scheduled it for today a few months ago.]
August 5, 2024
QotD: George R.R. Martin’s Dothraki rank with the lazy racial sterotypes of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” westerns
The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of a number of steppe and plains cultures … Mongols and Huns, certainly, but also Alans, Sioux, Cheyenne, and various other Amerindian tribes … seasoned with a dash of pure fantasy.
We may, I think, now safely dismiss this statement as false. What we have found is that the Dothraki do not meaningfully mirror either Steppe or Plains cultures. They do not mirror them in dress, nor in systems of subsistence, nor in diet, nor in housing, nor in music, nor in art, nor in social structures, nor in leadership structures, nor in family structures, nor in demographics, nor in economics, nor in trade practices, nor in laws, nor in marriage customs, nor in attitudes towards violence, nor in weapons, nor in armor, nor in strategic way of war, nor in battle tactics.
We might say he has added “dashes” of pure fantasy until the “dash” is the entire soup, but the truth is clearly the reverse: Martin has sprinkled a little bit of water on a barrel of salt and called it just a dash of salt. There is no historical root source here, but instead pure fantasy which – because racist stereotypes sometimes connect, in thin and useless ways, to actual history – occasionally, in broken-clock fashion, manages to resemble the real thing.
It seems as though the best we might say of what Martin has right is that these are people who are nomads that ride horses and occasionally shoot bows. The rest – which as you can see from the list above there, is the overwhelming majority – has functionally no connection to the actual historical people. And stunningly, somehow, the show – despite its absolutely massive budget, despite the legions of scrutiny and oversight such a massive venture brings – somehow is even worse, while being just as explicit in tying its bald collection of 1930s racist stereotypes to real people who really exist today.
Instead, the primary inspiration for George R.R. Martin’s Dothraki seems to come from deeply flawed Hollywood depictions of nomadic peoples, rather than any real knowledge about the peoples themselves. The Dothraki are not an amalgam of the Sioux or the Mongols, but rather an amalgam of Stagecoach (1939) and The Conqueror (1956). When it comes to the major attributes of the Dothraki – their singular focus on violent, especially sexual violence, their lack of art or expression, their position as a culture we primarily see “from the outside” as almost uniformly brutal (and in need of literally the whitest of all women to tame and reform it) – what we see is not reflected in the historical people at all but is absolutely of a piece with this Hollywood legacy.
But Martin has done more damage than simply watching The Mongols (1961) would today. He has taken those old, inaccurate, racially tinged stereotypes and repackaged them, with an extra dash of contemporary cynicism to lend them the feeling of “reality” and then used his reputation as a writer of more historically grounded fantasy (a reputation, I think we may say at this point, which ought to be discarded; Martin is an engaging writer but a poor historian) to give those old stereotypes the air of “real history” and how things “really were”. And so, just as Westeros became the vision of the Middle Ages that inhabits the mind of so many people (including quite a few of my students), the Dothraki become the mental model for the Generic Nomad: brutal, sexually violent, uncreative, unartistic, uncivilized.
And as I noted at the beginning of this series, Martin’s fans have understood that framing perfectly well. The argument given by both the creators themselves, often parroted by fans and even repeated by journalists is that A Song of Ice and Fire‘s historical basis is both a strike in favor of the book because they present a “more real” vision of the past but also a flawless defense against any qualms anyone might have over the way that the fiction presents violence (especially its voyeuristic take on sexual violence) or its cultures. No doubt part of you are tired of seeing that same “amalgam” quote over and over again at the beginning of every single one of these essays, but I did that for a reason, because it was essential to note that this assertion is not merely part of the subtext of how Martin presents his work (although it is that too), but part of the actual text of his promotion of his work.
And it is a lie. And I want to be clear here, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a regrettable implication. It is not an unfortunate blind-spot of ignorance. It is a lie, made repeatedly, now by many people in both the promotion of the books and the show who ought to have known better. And it is a lie that has been believed by millions of fans.
One thing that I hope is clear from this treatment is just how trivial the amount of research I’ve done here was. Certainly, it helped that I was familiar with Steppe nomads already and that I knew who to ask to be pointed in the direction of information. Nevertheless, everything I’ve cited here is available in English and it is all relatively affordable (I actually own all of the books cited here; thanks to my Patrons for making that possible, especially since getting materials from the library is slower in the days of COVID-19; nevertheless, the point here is that they are not obscure tomes). Much of it – Ratchnevsky on Chinggis Khan, Secoy and McGinnis on Great Plains warfare – were already available well before the 1996 publication of A Game of Thrones. 1996 was not some wasteland of ignorance that might have made it impossible for Martin to get good information! For an easy sense of what a dedicated amateur with film connections might have learned in 1996, you could simply watch Ken Burns’ The West, which came out the same year. I am not asking Martin to become a historian (though I am asking him to stop representing himself as something like one), I am asking him to read a historian.
Instead of doing that basic amount of research, or simply saying that the peoples of Essos were made up cultures unconnected with the real thing, Martin and the vast promotional apparatus at HBO opted to lie about some real cultures and then to put hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting that lie.
And I want to be clear, these are real people! I know, depending on where you live, “Mongols” and “Sioux” and “Cheyenne” may feel as distant and fanciful as “Rohirrim” or “Hobbits” or else they may feel like “long-lost” peoples. But these were real people, whose real descendants are alive today. And almost all of them face discrimination and abuse, sometimes informally, sometimes through state action, often as a result of these very lingering racist stereotypes.
In that context, declaring that the Dothraki really do reflect the real world (I cannot stress that enough) cultures of the Plains Native Americans or Eurasian Steppe Nomads is not merely a lie, but it is an irresponsible lie that can do real harm to real people in the real world. And that irresponsible lie has been accepted by Martin’s fans; he has done a grave disservice to his own fans by lying to them in this way. And of course the worst of it is that the lie – backed by the vast apparatus that is HBO prestige television – will have more reach and more enduring influence than this or any number of historical “debunking” essays. It will befuddle the valiant efforts of teachers in their classrooms (and yes, I frequently encounter students hindered by bad pop-pseudo-history they believe to be true; it is often devilishly hard to get students to leave those preconceptions behind), it will plague efforts to educate the public about these cultures of their histories. And it will probably, in the long run, hurt the real descendants of nomads.
But this is exactly why I think it is important for historians to engage with the culture and to engage with depictions like this. Because these lies have consequences and someone ought to at least try to tell the truth. With luck, even with my only rudimentary knowledge, I have done some of that here, by presenting a bit more of the richness and variety of historical (and in some cases, present-day) horse-borne nomadic life, in both North America and Eurasia.
Because there is and was a lot more to nomads than just “that Dothraki horde”.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part IV: Screamers and Howlers”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-08.
August 4, 2024
QotD: Canada’s “middle class”
There’s the “middle class” that’s constantly prioritized, flattered and fetishized by every campaign and candidate; critiques of people who come from such a privileged class they can’t possibly understand the concerns of normal people; sometimes bizarre pitches aimed at those who want a better future for their kids and just need a boost (camping, anyone?); and leaders who come from hardscrabble backgrounds — except that maybe they don’t quite.
But if class is an ever-present anthem running through campaign 2019, it’s a tune no one seems to know the proper words to, or they’re deliberately mumbling nonsense lyrics and assuming no one else will notice.
[…]
Then there is the electorally beloved — and conveniently poorly defined — “middle class”. Given all the campaign trail hot air devoted to lauding the values and hard work of this population and lionizing their noble struggles, you would think that at some point, other corners of the electorate would get ticked off about being ignored by politicians in favour of these golden children.
But they don’t, because pretty much everyone thinks that’s them.
Shannon Proudfoot, “The ‘family shame’ of Canadian politics: class struggle”, Maclean’s, 2019-10-04.
August 3, 2024
QotD: Grain farming and the rise of organized states
But you can tax grain farmers! You can assign them some land, and come back around harvest time, and there will be a bunch of grain just standing there for you to take ten percent of. If the grain farmer flees, you can take his grain without him. Then you can grind the grain up and have a nice homogenous, dense, easy-to-transport grain product that you can dole out in measured rations. Grain farming was a giant leap in oppressability.
In this model, the gradual drying-out of Sumeria in the 4th millennium BC caused a shift away from wetland foraging and toward grain farming. The advent of grain farming made oppression possible, and a new class of oppression-entrepreneurs arose to turn this possibility into a reality. They incentivized farmers to intensify grain production further at the expense of other foods, and this turned into a vicious cycle of stronger states = more grain = stronger states. Within a few centuries, Uruk and a few other cities developed the full model: tax collectors, to take the grain; scribes, to measure the grain; and priests, to write stories like The Debate Between Sheep And Grain, with immortal lines like:
From sunrise till sunset, may the name of Grain be praised. People should submit to the yoke of Grain. Whoever has silver, whoever has jewels, whoever has cattle, whoever has sheep shall take a seat at the gate of whoever has Grain, and pass his time there
And so the people were taught that growing grain was Correct and Right and The Will Of God and they shouldn’t do anything stupid like try to escape back to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty.
… turns out lots of people in early states escaped to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty. Early states were necessarily tiny; overland transportation of resources more than a few miles was cost-prohibitive; you could do a little better by having the state on a river and adding in water transport, but Uruk’s sphere of influence was still probably just a double-digit number of kilometers. Even in good times, peasants would be tempted to escape to the hills and wetlands; in bad times, it started seeming crazy not to try this. Scott suggests that ancient Uruk had a weaker distinction between “subject” and “slave” than we would expect. Although there were certainly literal slaves involved in mining and manufacturing, even the typical subject was a serf at best, bound to the land and monitored for flight risk.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
