Predictive History

Why the Steppes Kept Beating Civilization

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Open Eurasian steppe landscape showing the mobile pastoral environment

Settled civilizations keep losing to people they call barbarians. This is not a rare accident. From the Yamnaya expansions into Europe and South Asia, through successive Iranian, Turkic, and Mongol waves, mobile pastoral societies have repeatedly overrun denser, more hierarchical agricultural systems that possessed writing, monumental architecture, and elaborate bureaucracies. If civilization is defined by … Read more

Mandate of Heaven: How Early Civilizations Turned Sacred Imagination into Hierarchy

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Lascaux Cave Paleolithic paintings showing early human religious and artistic imagination

The conventional story of civilization is almost exactly backwards. We are told that hungry hunter-gatherers discovered farming, produced a surplus, freed an elite from labor, and that this elite then invented religion, art, science, writing, and law. Hierarchy came first; meaning followed as its servant. The evidence from the earliest urban societies does not support … Read more