THE 3 AGES OF CIVILIZATIONS

THE LIFE OF CIVILIZATIONS

"The evolution of weapons cause the extintion of civilizations in ages of World Wars"

As organisms, civilizations live and die, when through war, another civilization conquers and colonizes the previous civilization. So we can talk of an organic cycle of life in civilizations, and in the organs of those civilizations, including art, which act as the “mind-brain” of historic civilizations.

We said that cultures resemble living systems. They go through the same cycles of birth, reproduction and death. Cultures are born as organisms do, out of a single or a few prophetic or legislative individuals-cells, that reproduce their ideas into many “believer-minds”. So Christianism is born out of the mind of Jesus Christ that first expands into 12 disciples, which expand themselves into thousands of Roman believers, that expanded into billions of other minds. While America is born of the mind of a few legislators that craft a constitution latter expanded into more laws, obeyed today by all American citizens. When the religious or legal culture reaches maturity it often reproduces in another zone of space-time, creating a daughter civilization or colony. Finally, when its ethic laws and networks of information, and the energy they control, decay and become obsolete, the culture dies and a new, more evolved civilization destroys the old civilization. A new cycle of history starts.

Similarly if we consider technological civilizations, based not in verbal laws, but in monetary and military systems, first a weapon is discovered, and reproduced by a small horde, which becomes an army, which conquers a nation and becomes a ruling aristocracy, that imposes its customs, and controls with the icon-weapon the civilization.

In both kinds of civilizations (Human-Artistic civilizations or Metal-scientific civilizations) either an ideology or book of ideas, (a network of human information) or a species of metal, money or weapons, becomes the language of power which defines the civilization.

Ideas and metal-instruments together shape History. For that reason Historians, when they focus on military systems of power, divide history into the Age of Bronze, the Age of Iron Empires, the Age of Chivalry (Middle Ages), the European Age of Gunpowder (Modern age), or the Atomic Age. There is also the Christian Age and the Buddhist Age of South-Asia, when they focus on the cultural component of the civilization or the age coins, or the age of paper money and stocks, or the age of e-money (new species of money), when they focus in monetary information...

At the same time a civilization develops the ideas and machines which carry that civilization to success, it eliminates previous civilizations. In this manner, successful civilizations reproduce their “genetic ideas and machines” into other regions of the Earth, creating colonies, daughter cultures and eco[nomic]systems.

Like a human child, the daughter civilization is often a more evolved species where the ideas and instruments of the previous civilization are improved. Civilizations inherit and improve on, like children do, their parental civilizations, often extinguishing them. So the Assyrians were defeated by the Persians who had copied and improved its weapons, iron and cavalry. Yet Persian art, even behavior would be similar to Assyrian art and behavior. Genetic continuity in civilizations is not racial but cultural, of structures and ideas, of icons, machines and modes of life. For example, in Arabia stirrup cavalry brought an empire-civilization that expanded West till Al-Andalus (the South of Spain). That stirrup civilization migrated to America and colonized the southwestern states, giving origin to the “Old Far West” civilization, with horse and cattle ranching. In that territory, the horse civilization flourished between the 17th and 20th centuries, when the fundamental icon-species of the culture, the horse became extinguished as a form of transport by the car, a more efficient metal-species. The example shows the dynamic quality of the life of civilizations. They are born, reproduce and become extinct through the “genetic evolution” of objects and words, which bring as much diversity to cultural evolution of its species, products and ideas, as genetic memories bring to the body.

And in the same manner biologists can scientifically organize the data they have about species through genetic information and instruments. Thanks to the memorial remains of history, the historian can study the birth, reproduction and extinction of evolutionary history and its civilizations.

Civilizations also die. One day another civilization with more efficient ideologies of man, or better machines, comes along and destroys the old civilization. As in “animal feeding”, once the new civilization has destroyed the old civilization, it reforms the energy cells=citizens of the dead civilization to its image and resemblance. Let us again bring the biological comparison. A hunter feeds on the energy of a victim's body that becomes in part wasted (killed) and in part “transformed” into cells of the predator. This also happens in civilizations: part of the “human energy” is wasted by war, and the remaining humans are “transformed” into believers of the predator civilization. The Spanish perhaps killed some 70% of the Indians and the rest became “Christians”. It is the death of the civilization. Because when ideas and instruments change, the civilization changes. The iron civilization of Rome is not the same as the Middle Ages civilization of stirrup weapons imposed by German warriors. The Roman civilization had been destroyed by "stirrup animetals" of the Germanic civilization. Again such "civilization" is not the Gunpowder civilization of Italy during the Renaissance. Gunpowder wiped out chivalry and a new civilization was born. Nor is Amon-Egypt the same as Greek-Christian Egypt, or Arab-Muslim Egypt. The verbal ideology changed, and the Egyptian civilization became extinct.

It is now clear the difference between religious civilizations and metal-civilizations. Religious civilizations could exist for ever, if there were no wars to extinguish their cultures. That is the goal set by the prophets in their messages of love. And yet, because metal exists, all religious civilizations of the past 5000 years have been corrupted and periodically extinguished by war. Some of those cultures resurrect, when the wave of death and war recedes. Some do not come back again. The Christian and Islamic civilization, the Jewish culture has survived many cycles of death, and the words of Moses, Christ and Mhmd, have resurrected. But each wave of death, corrupts a little bit more the initial messages of the prophets with rituals of war and money. So we find today that those cultures are basically built around inquisitions and churches, corrupted by rituals of Go[l]d, and little is left of the initial mandates of the prophets. Many other human cultures based in human senses have died away, and its artists have expressed those deaths, in their baroque ages of art.

If we apply those ideas about biology of civilizations we can represent any civilization with a bell curve of existence, that indicates in a graphic of populations how the word religion or icon-weapon of a civilization (both often reproduce together) is born, develops, (colonizes other territories), and finally dies away; substituted by a daughter civilization, or a new culture, with a more evolved weapon or religion. We can also use the bell curve of social existence to the entire life of mankind, in the age of metal.

If we consider the entire wave of Metal-History as a single civilization also with 3 periods, its young, epic age, its classic, humanistic age, and its decadent, industrial age, we can talk of the Bronze and first iron empires of Asia, as the age of epic war. The period of European infantry, and Asian cavalry (from Greece to renascence) as the age of maturity of history. And the age of the industrial evolution, as the age of extinction of history.

Each of those ages is divided by a clear discontinuum of evolution of the two functions of metal, energy-metal or weapons, and informative-metal or money. Man adapts himself to those changes, which are symbiotic and help the evolution of our societies, in a first age, but as metal reproduces in greater numbers, it suffocates the evolution of human history and the human mind, till with the arrival of science, the human mind becomes obsolete, and men become worshippers of the minds of machines.

We talk thus of 3 clear discontinuums of evolution of metal, that mark metal-history.

- YOUTH OF HISTORY: The Age of Wor[l]ds. From -2800 BC, to -500 BC. Age of Bronze weapons, and bartering. Since money is still scarce, in the form of bars of metal, words still are the main language of communication of mankind. Writing becomes sacred. However bronze and then iron give enormous power to warriors that end controlling all Neolithic societies. Priests are displaced from power. Women become systematically repressed. Gods become warrior Gods, without compassion. It is the age of Mesopotamic Empires, the age of Asia. The age of verbal thought reaches its baroque age, towards 500 BC, in the work of Lao Tse, Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, that reach the height of human verbal understanding of the Universe. Yet a new language of information, coins appears, and human verbal thought looses power.

- MATURITY OF HISTORY: The Age of coins. (500 BC, 1600 AD). It is the Age of Iron weapons and coins. Mankind still rules, and learns how to control with ethic behavior, the power of weapons. Yet Money starts to be a common language of power, and challenges verbal ethics. Words are displaced by money as the language that controls the acts of human societies. This means that verbal thought and ethics is no longer the center of the human mind, but humans become shallow in their perception of verbal-temporal reality. The human intelligence displaces to the eye. So art becomes realistic (Greek Art) and mathematics appears as a new language of understanding of the Universe. Both coin accountancy and Mathematics come together, in the Asian Greek coast where the first monetary empires and mathematicians appear. After the brief return to an ethic age, in the Middle ages, the renaissance again imposes money as the language of social power.

- OLD AGE OF HISTORY. The Age of machines. (1600 AD till extinction). It is the third age of mankind, and the first age of the new predator species that displace us, the machine. It is the age of science, of digital languages, of massive reproduction of money, the language of information of machines, now in the form of paper-money and electronic money. Wor[l]ds become obsolete. There is so much money that all things can receive monetary values, and human verbal values are no longer effective. There are so many weapons, due to the industrial reproduction of them by company-mothers, that ethics and social power become obsolete, and national armies control directly [dictatorships] or indirectly through weapon-companies (democracies) our societies. The objective of mankind is to evolve machines through acts of work=reproduction of machines, and consume=test and evolution of machines. The decadence of mankind is hidden because paradoxically as humans loose interest in verbal thought, in a non-fiction logic understanding of reality, companies of machines can convince and indoctrinate man easily. Fiction literature dominates this age. Men no longer understand the meaning of social survival, of truth, and the organic nature of our Universe...

The 3 ages of History can be analyzed in more detail because each of those ages is in itself a sub-civilization divided in smaller periods. We talk in fact of 7 sub-cycles divided by great eras of war.

Very few civilizations survive the periodic arrival of massive wars, after the discovery and reproduction of new weapons. Even the American civilizations that were isolated from European warrior masters, at the end died away when the Spaniards and Anglo-Saxons arrived. The Paleolithic culture of North-Indians that had survived almost unchanged during more than 10.000 years was extinguished in a few centuries, and even if some of its genetic content both in race and customs still remains, it is self-evident that today that civilization has died.

History has become metal-history, and human cultures have become submissive to metal-cultures. But not a single metal-culture survives the tree of science for too long. There is in fact a cycle, of around ±800 years, or 10 human lives, that marks with massive war the evolution of metal and war-fare. And so we talk of the 7 cycles of metal-history since the first bronze armies arrived to Mesopotamia and destroyed the Genesian paradise, depicted in the “Genesis”, the oldest book about the tragedy of History written by mankind.

We know the cause of cultural death, which is war, and since wars have come to History in certain ages, after the discovery and massive reproduction of a new weapon, we can trace a series of waves of existence, of the great civilizations of history, that have gone through birth, growth and extinction. Indeed, the discovery and massive reproduction of weapons carried by hordes of symbiotic warriors, have shaped the history of civilizations, killing them off periodically. We call those ages of massive reproduction of weapons, a “biological radiation”, borrowing the concept from biology, where biological radiations of top predator species are the main cause of extinction of weaker species. So happens with “radiations” of top predator metal weapons that cause the extinction of humans and our civilizations.

Historic ages are conclusive about the extinctive process of carbolife and human civilizations in the hands of weapons. The Neolithic, with the discovery of copper tools put an end to the Paleolithic hunters. It started the age of metals. Copper appears in the upper Neolithic and displaces the stone cultures of the Paleolithic. But copper is not very strong, and its capacity to extinguish=kill human species is mild. Next bronze appears, and swords become perfect “energy=lineal species”, able to cut and kill human bodies with ease. With bronze the first social castes of hard warriors take control of history. They expand worldwide. And wherever they go, they extinguish previous human cultures. They establish hierarchical societies, controlled by metal masters backed by weapons. Hierarchies are then implemented through legal codes, epic, rhetoric art, social and religious rituals, built around the Top Predator “icon weapon”, and the warrior caste, that “self-considers itself”, chosen of God, to govern and pray over the other human beings.

Bronze weapons brought the first empires around -3000 BC. After the age of bronze swords, comes the age of Indo-European hordes with war chariots (from ±2000 BC until ±1500 BC). They radiate from the Eurasian steppes and erase or control the Indian cultures, the Chinese Neolithic, the Middle East, and Western European cultures. Iron is discovered. And the sword of iron carries new hordes to power, coming from Turkey and Europe, (Hittites, Assyrians, Greeks, Celts, people of the sea). Then it comes the radiation of cavalry brought by Scythians. Then the radiation of stirrup horses brought by the Huns. And finally the radiation of complex machines of war -the radiation of gunpowder- which in 1200 AD starts the modern world, in Europe. These radiations bring history to the modern age; the European age, based on the power of its gunboats and artillery. During ±800 years each new radiation of Top Predator weapons and its warrior hordes control the world.

In the age of metal it is clear that humans are evolving a new kind of atomic species of higher density than carbon. Weapons are discovered, and then radiate in great numbers during a period with a median duration of 800 years. We talk for each of those 800 years a new species of “metal-civilizations” in which the warrior hordes that control the weapon become Top Predators of human cultures. Then a new weapon appears, and the previous horde and weapon become submissive to the new Metal masters. So the arrival of new weapons show the fractal zones of History:

There are three ages in all radiations of weapons, represented in the graph by a bell curve: birth of the weapon and elite-caste of the civilization; expansion of those weapons, and final extinction by other metal weapon and horde of warriors. The old weapons then might continue, but within the elite caste of the civilization, that our curves show, they will be rare and considered obsolete.

Let us consider those great cycles of War and its civilizations in the Historic record:

Bronze Age: Lineal Bronze starts the first empires recorded in History. In ±2850 BC: the first Bronze sword armies appear, taking to power, God-pharaohs and Semite Lugals. Egypt becomes unified. History registers the first Mesopotamian Empires. We consider the arrival of Bronze, probably in Egypt, the beginning of the Paradox of History [Max. Metal Goods=Minimal human goods]. Rhetoric, epic art to the service of power starts also with palaces and tombs, such as the pyramids. And yet for most humans life did not improve, as they were enslaved by warriors and worked in those huge monuments to the arrogance of man. In fact in those cultures where bronze weapons arrived latter, human goods, and sensorial pleasures develop more.

For example in the Indus without metal abundance, the quality of housing was the highest in old civilizations. Then it plummets after Aryan charioteers invade India. Aryans only improve architecture in “palaces” and “death tombs”. Also in Egypt, only as the initial wave of warriors recedes, we see the end of Pyramid construction, and a higher quality of life for the common people (VI dynasty). Tombs now are smaller, full of lively drawings of animals and farmers; and priests regain power over warrior kings, promoting the reproduction of food, and human goods.

Chariot Radiation (Wheels of bronze). It is the age of the Middle Empire, in classic historiography. The first wave starts around ±2000 BC: A World wide invasion of Indo-Europeans with chariots from the northern planes destroy all civilizations. It is the extinctive phase of Sumerian cultures, when Genesis is written, and the parable of the tree of science, understood by the most intelligent verbal artists of the age. Charioteer Hordes conquer Sumer and Akkad. The first Hittites empires appear. In Egypt it signifies the end of the old empire and the beginning of the Middle Kingdom.

A clear prove of the Paradox of History, of the fact that where less weapons there are, better is life, is Crete: There the charioteers cannot arrive due to geographical conditions (a sea island). So in Crete there is a continuity of a culture based on human goods, that makes of Crete the richest, most sophisticated civilization of the west in this age.

The same radiation of Charioteer Hordes will erase the Eastern cultures. From 1500 till 1000 BC. in the first Veda Period, nomadic chariot Aryans and its “sacred cows” conquer India, impose a brutal metal-racism (castes), against Neolithic Goddesses, women, and the poor. The old culture survives longer in the South.

Charioteers also found the Shia dynasty in China, degrading and partially assimilating the Tao culture of the living Universe proper of Neolithic China. In China, the chariot arrives perhaps, after transferring its weapons to Mongolian tribes (about 1500 BC, Shang dynasty). The depth and richness of the Neolithic (fully grown and densely populating the South by the V millennia BC), allows the Tao-Neolithic culture of the sentient Universe to survive partially. But the Ch'in dynasty and its radiation of iron weapons forbids all non-technological books under death penalty about 300 BC. Then the wisdom of Taoism that understood so well the dual nature of the Organic Universe, and its Yin-Yang beings will be lost at philosophical level. Though it will inform the basic arts of classic China.

China proves again that less metal allows more complex human thought. China alone among Eurasian nations preserves the dual linguistic essence of the human wor[l]d: a verbal language, and a visual expression of the game of Energy-Information on its writing words. But in the west, verbal thought is simplified in Cananean civilizations, coming from Egypt (Hycsos?), with a proto-alphabet that reduces writing to a few verbal symbols.

Iron Radiation (about 1200 BC). The Germanic people (Celtic hordes) start mass production of iron swords. Again the chain reaction of war and destruction starts, with warrior waves that move west to Iberia and east to Greece and Asia. Its is the age of the Great Invasions of “People of the Sea”. Ramses II and III fight invaders but can't prevent the collapse of the Middle Empire in Egypt. Also the Hittite Empire collapses. Hittites flee and teach Assyrians the use of iron.

In 1150; the Dorians destroy Micenas. And again where the Dorians do not arrive, (Peninsular Athens, coastal Turkey) the Greek civilization of Cretan tradition flourishes and gives birth to the best cultures of the Iron discontinuum.

Cavalry Age (600 BC - 400 AD). Around 560 BC the first Cavalry Radiations take place carried by the Scythians that pass the technique to Indo-Europeans. They destroy all the Classic empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Around 539-525 BC. the Persians destroy the Assyrian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian Empires, but copy their systems of military repression. As a consequence of better cavalry grounds, and iron metallurgy, from now on metal history displaces its center of gravity from verbal Empires on the crescent fertile ruled by Semite [S]words and Go[l]ds (Assur, God of war; Baal Go[l]d of trade) towards Northern Aryan tribes (Rome, Master of war; Greece master of “Coins”). The dominance of the social Wor[l]d is substituted by the dominance of the individualistic I=eye. Good and Evil, verbal values, are substituted by beauty and ugliness, which are values of light perception.

In the age of Iron, the Greeks introduced coins which ended the dominance of bartering in trade (verbal, Semite traditions), and started digital accountancy. The higher complexity of coins and iron will prove irresistible. It is the expansive age of Indo-European empires, that now use metal species in a far more efficient manner to impose restrictions of freedom to the people, taxed in coins, and levied to serve the armies of the metal master. Systems of “total” war, that only Assyria had essayed before, now become natural to entire empires, which summon up all the previous metal-advances (horses, iron, mathematical war analysis), into the Total Army, with infantry (Phalanx), cavalry, war Machines and logistics (Macedonian and Roman Empires).

The new age in which iron and mathematical languages, through coin accountancy becomes dominant is felt by prophets of the Wor[l]d as a fundamental regression of Human Ethics. The word denounces that decadence, and praises social evolution and love. Such verbal reaction gives birth to the highest prophets of love of mankind (Lao, Plato, Buddha, cycles of Jewish prophets that culminate with Christ). Some of them talk of the end of the “Jen Age” in wor[l]ds of Confucius: the age of Human harmony and Love.

Around 400 BC, the radiation of iron reaches massive size with the great Celtic Invasions; that transfer her weapons to Rome. Rome becomes an empire of iron, Coins and mathematical war. So happens in China with the Chin and Han dynasties that unify the nation after massive massacres (6 million dead). How does an 800 year cycle structures a given civilization? Let's consider a paradigm, the Roman Civilization-empire, which lasted 797 years:

In the graph, the end of Civilizations occurs when new radiations of weapons cause waves of global wars. As the eco[nomic]system expands the weapons radiation to all warrior tribes of the Earth, old civilizations become extinct, and adopt the new icon-weapon and military aristocracy. The only anachronism is America, where isolation delays the arrival of waves of iron weapons till the Spaniards. Between two of such radiations of wars, civilizations do evolve into human cultures of the Wor[l]d. Yet a new wave of weapons and technology will destroy them. The Roman cycle is accurate; 798 years between the fall of Rome to the iron Gauls, and the fall of Rome to the stirrup barbarians in 410.

Rome is fundamental to understand the Western World, since it is the origin of all myths and alibis for further Warrior empires, that could seize power, pretending to reinstall a new Rome. Rome is the parallel to Assur, the master of war of the Verbal, Bronze age. Because gold-iron races die, but its products and its rituals continue, there is in fact a continuity of rituals from Assur to Persia, to Macedonian empires, to Roman, to European empires. So much for racial superiority: the race dies in wars and Holocausts. The product, the iron weapon, stays. It gave origin to European ideologies, rituals and icons of warrior and trader civilizations from Britain to Nazi Germany, from Imperial eagles to civil architecture.

Cavalry Age. The Middle Ages. Stirrup=horse Radiation. (400 AD, 1200 AD). The Huns, Nomad warriors able to shoot with arrow bows while galloping, thanks to the stirrup -discovered probably in Korea- and the Germans who add iron protections, annihilate the Roman-Christian Empire of Human Goods, plummeting once more the standards of life of mankind. Around 317-589, the Huns break China between North and South into sixteen warrior kingdoms, controlled by Huns and Turks. In 430 History registers the invasion of India by the White Huns. Their civilization is built around the “horse man” that sees himself “higher” than the rest of humans, just because he is mounted into his horse... So much human arrogance. Barbarians crass the level of Human Goods of Roman Europe, but slowly they become converted to social love by the Christian Oikoumene religion.

The verbal age of Christianity, once the Aryans are “civilized”, returns to Europe (High middle age) in a society based on ethics. In Italy and Spain, priests of Islam and Christ had more power, that its warrior allies, and allowed a new age of human goods and art. They initiate the Renaissance, and the culture of Al-Andalus, the summit of the two main religions of mankind, Islam and Christianity. Both flourish before the radiation of gunpowder, annihilates this re-birth of human sensory, ethical, and artistic cultures. Those final days of social religions left the great cathedrals, optimistic buildings full of light, looking upwards to God, built by the collective effort of the people that, unlike the Romanic churches no longer fear the violence of barbarians. Gothic cathedrals seem to confirm a wealthy mode of life in the lower middle ages with less wars. Population doubles in Europe; cities grow. In the Eastern World the old cultures of the sentient Universe (Taoism and Buddhism) reach a new apogee (Gupta, Song empires).

Gunpowder Age (1200 AD, 1945). Unfortunately the Chinese Taoists discover gunpowder. Mongols learn its technique in the assault of Beijing, spreading its use to the western world. In 1204 the looting of Byzantium by the Venetians opens the East to Italians who soon will have the first cannons, the “lombardas”. In 1222 the Mongols defeat the Russians in Kalka and invade Germany. Soon gunpowder is known to German people. In 1258 Hulagu massacres Baghdad. It is the end of the Muslim Empire. In Europe the gunpowder wave soon explodes into massive civil wars, of which the 100 years war, is the most well known. It brings poverty, and scarcity of Human Goods, that provoke massive famines and allows the expansion of the black Pest, that multiplies death among Human beings.

Sub-wave. Reproductive Phase T/2 (about 1600). In the very middle point of the 800 years radiation, appears Ballistics (science) and companies of Gunboat Reproduction. The gunpowder radiation becomes a professional system of reproduction of weapons by company-mothers, and scientific fathers, that create the present world of machines of war. Europe becomes top predator of the World, by perfecting cannon balls, and inventing in order to measure their trajectories the science of Ballistics, later called physics (Galileo). Companies of Gunboats create new Empires (British-French Empires), that massacre or enslave 80% of mankind (the third world).

In 1945 the last cycle starts, the cycle of computer-researched weapons, that brings first Atomic weapons, based in pure light energy. It is a new threshold of weapons evolution that opens for the first time in History the possibility of the extinction of our species by massive explosions of atomic weapons. Or development of robotics. It is the human baroque.