It Was Written.
What made the ancient empires successful?
Of course there are probably many factors, but last night, during the Sagittarius Super Moon, I was thinking about the answer to this question. People are usually aware of the fact that stars were used to navigate the land and the sea. What they usually haven’t considered is that: in order for a civilization to develop a technique like Astrology, they have to remain in the same place for a very long time.
Its crucial to recognize this difference. While the hunter-gatherer societies did well to spread themselves all over the globe, fixed civilizations were able to observe, catalogue, and attempt to make predictions about their surroundings. They made works of art that describe to us what their everyday lives were like. We simply do not have this information from hunter-gatherers, all we can do is make educated guesses about their routes and average diets. The empires and dynasties gave us our information about the past to use as blueprints. I think the question starting to emerge for me is: would now be a time to specialize as a hunter-gatherer, as it appears society is crumbling? Would it be more advantageous to tune into the mind of nomadic people? It appears the issue of outliers being absent from the data is an age-old dilemma.
Some of my friends will pick on me for being so interested in something like Astrology. They say the don’t believe in it. They say it isn’t real. I can agree, it is no more real than a sonnet by Petrarch or a composition by Beethoven. The language of Astrology is an art- it was never intended to be a science, but it did start out that way. In fact, Astrology and Astronomy were the same thing until Ptolemy tried to prove parts of Astrology were objectively true. The only part of Astrology that can be considered objectively true is that it is evolutionarily significant to humans. The greatest civilizations in history developed and used their own forms of Astrology. Some of those techniques map on to one another, which may be -in part- due to the trade routes, but perhaps also has to do with the fact that the stars were the same for everyone and no human hands could touch them.
As far as my research shows, Ancient Sumerians and then Assyrians catalogued information like recipes for potions (i.e beer!). In order to do that, they first documented which plants were poisonous and which were edible. There are other origin stories for the study of botany like the Chinese Emporer Shenong going around and nearly dying many times while sampling plants. But the point is: the ancient people were moving away from superstition and moving into this scientific method to make predictions. Ancient Sumer is also the civilization that began recording astrological information on clay tablets. They believed the lunar eclipses were omens that signaled the death of a king, for example. Whether or not the prediction ever amounted to anything at all, they still lived with the assumption that it did. That is what is important.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
