lpetrich
Contributor
Seshat's home page headlines three projects:
The horse bit and bridle kicked off ancient empires – a new giant dataset tracks the societal factors that drove military technology at The Conversation
Some 3000 years ago:
Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution | PLOS ONE
Back to The Conversation.
The horse bit and bridle kicked off ancient empires – a new giant dataset tracks the societal factors that drove military technology at The Conversation
Some 3000 years ago:
notingThis 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 hardier 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 megaempires encompassing tens of millions of people and controlling territories of millions of square miles.
Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution | PLOS ONE
Thus showing the power of a comprehensive database of world history.We empirically test previously speculative theories that proposed world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding, as central drivers of military technological evolution. We find that all of these factors are strong predictors of change in military technology, whereas state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication play no major role.
Back to The Conversation.
This led the settled states to develop new armor and new weapons like crossbows, and to recruit and manage large armies of footsoldiers, including keeping them well-fed. This required administrative complexity and ideological support, including the rise of major world religions: SocArXiv Papers | Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat DatabankLet’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.
Thus showing what one can do with a comprehensive database of world history.Using a broad range of new measures of belief in moralizing supernatural punishment, we find strong support for previous research showing that such beliefs did not drive the rise of social complexity in world history. By contrast, our analyses indicate that intergroup warfare, supported by resource availability, played the most significant role in the evolution of both social complexity and moralizing religions. Thus, the correlation between social complexity and moralizing religion would seem to result from shared evolutionary drivers, rather than from strong direct causal relationships between these two variables.