Spoopy NYT article, seemingly an historical subject, but which appears to be comms:
"The Elites Were Living High. Then Came the Fall."
Some quotes of pertinent interest:
….a merchant in Emar….what is now northern Syria, sent a desperate letter to his boss…."If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger.”
…..a state of famine, wars…..brewing, and…plagues….he was living through the last years of two wealthy cities…..
Although the rulers of the Bronze Age sometimes went to war, the true source of their power, like that of today’s biggest cities, was economic power secured through trade…The final decades of Ugarit and Mycenae tell us a lot about why cities fail — and who survives amid the ashes….
But the Bronze Age was also a time of extreme inequality. Cities were ruled by wealthy urban aristocrats who controlled trade, relied on various kinds of forced labor, and placed heavy tax burdens on their client states and agricultural villages. …the commoners…..felt the squeeze.
…..sumptuous palaces toppled and abandoned…..earthquakes….no written records…..
Until recently, historians blamed this collapse on marauders known as the Sea People….
Eric Cline, a classicist at George Washington University and author of “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed,” explained that there’s no evidence of invaders coming from the outside at Mycenae,so violence must have come from within….he concludes that the city’s lower classes may have gotten fed up and burned it all down…..
……the wealthiest merchants…..consolidated economic and political power, to stamp out competition from smaller city-states or independent merchants……
……plagues may have driven people into the hinterlands….
After the uprisings…..Smaller cities….emerged……unscathed……It was as if the fall of New York and San Francisco left room for Philadelphia and Oakland to take up the slack.
The merchants…..thrived in this new world…..business owners with no formal affiliations or political ties.With the collapse of the old kingdoms,they had the freedom to sail unknown seas.….settled in the territory that became Spain, Morocco and Tunisia.
……not an all-out collapse…..transformed the nature of political power in cities. Instead of a rigid, international power structure that controlled the whole eastern Mediterranean, there were local governments for each city-state.
…….writing all but disappeared…..anti-state protests….merchants……have stopped writing things down to evade the kings’ control.
…..They used a form of writing that was phonetic, based on sounds……
……“Invest in the local community, because no matter who is in charge at the top, local business are likely to survive,”…. ultrarich companies will survive….biggest traders….didn’t disappear,because they had political connections in the surviving cities…….Their fancy homes may have burned down, but they could afford to buy new ones.
Will we face a violent uprising in the wake of economic collapse? Perhaps, but today’s 1 percent might not suffer……local trade networks are no longer as robust…….“We really have demolished local manufacturing and supply systems,”…..a few elites bore the brunt of the suffering.”
These days, local traders and small towns depend on international supply chains…….Our survival still depends on sustainable local networks, and not tax breaks granted by kings.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/opinion/coronavirus-inequality-history.html