The graph shows the 7 cycles of war and extinction of civilizations and the weapons that caused them: bronze swords, chariots, iron, coins and mercenary armies, spur cavalry, gunpowder and Nuclear weapons. Each of those evolutions of weapons caused the extinction of civilizations in worldwide ages of War.
The 800 years cycle of war & weapons.
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 7 cycles of metal-history, since the first bronze armies arrived to Mesopotamia and destroyed the Neolithic paradise, a fact explained in the parables of Genesis, the oldest and most beautiful book about the tragedies of History, ever written by mankind.
Between those dark ages of warfare, it is possible to fit the parallel life and death of all the civilizations of human history, pointing out to a clear relationship between the massive reproduction of weapons, the ‘germs of historic organisms’ and the death of cultures in ages of war—the sickness produced by those ‘germs’. Unfortunately with the arrival of Industrial machines, the cycle has accelerated according to a decametric scale, to a 72 generational cycle of world wars, as the evolution of weapons becomes now a professional, industrial activity.
Art & culture: the subconscious collective mind reflects the life ages of civilizations.
Art is the subconscious mind of civilizations. Thus it goes through 3 ages between birth and extinction of a culture:
the young, lineal, energetic age of epic art, the classic, mature age of balance between energy and information and the baroque, decadent, informative 3rd age which precedes the death of the culture by new hordes of metal-masters.
Historical facts are conclusive about the extinctive process of human civilizations at the hands of weapons: 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 energetic=lineal species, able to cut and kill human bodies at ease. 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 and social and religious rituals, built around the top predator icon weapon and the warrior caste that considers itself chosen of God, with rights to govern and prey over all other human beings. Ever since, Animetal ideologies of history have imposed their subjective truths and myths with the power of technological death and rhetoric art. Yet at the same time art becomes shallow and corrupted, the best artists, whose essence is to be the wor(l)d and eyes of human thought, denounce that death in a baroque, ‘angst’ period of art, since art is to a social organism what the mind is to a biological organism. And so in the same manner our mind goes through 3 ± 1 ages, parallel to those of the body in his vision of reality, in a social organism art goes through the same 3 ± 1 ages, but in a longer scale—that of the life of the civilization and its multiple neurons, the human artists who perceive the society, as it is born in a young age of enthusiasm, matures and finally collapses in the angst of death:
Lineal Young Art: The Warrior, Epic Age of Civilizations.
Young art is lineal, epic, dramatic, simple, energetic, as the new weapons and conquering warriors that found the civilization are. The Greek and Roman hordes of hoplites and legionaries or the Middle Age hordes of stirrup horses leave cultural remains that follow those lineal forms, fostered by their military obsession with death: Greek Kuroi statues, Roman temples, Romanesque Christianity, Calvinist churches in the XVII, Egyptian pyramids in the Old Empire . . .
Classic Art: The Reproductive, Monetary Age of Civilizations.
After an age of total war, those metal masters, the elite of the civilization, evolve their cultural rituals and use cyclical money to control people in a milder way than did the hordes of warriors. It is the second horizon or trader, reproductive age of the culture, of maximal wealth, when it reaches its apogee. Lineal Greek Kuroi becomes the realist sculptures of Phidias. The simple, Romanesque cathedral grows in informative height and light, in the classic Gothic. It is the age of Athens, Augustus or nineteenth-century England. Often in this age, the civilization reproduces in other regions through empire-building. The austere republic expands into the Roman Empire. Inquisitorial Spain reproduces into Latin America. Puritan England expands its empire in multiple clone colonies.
Baroque Art: The Extinctive Age of a Civilization.
But sooner or later a new weapon=war radiation takes place and the civilization dies. It is its third horizon: the artistic or baroque age of maximal information and creativity in art. The culture looks inward, as it becomes constrained by a new horde of ‘barbarians ad portas’. We are now in the Hellenistic age of tortuous sculpture, when Macedonians and Romans dominate Greece, or the lower Roman Empire, when German warriors invade it. It is the fifteenth century of Christianity, the baroque, ornamental Gothic, when gunpowder and coins break the Church’s control on society. It is Post-WWII England, when the dollar and the atomic bomb have substituted the pound and the gunboat. So now England offers rock stars, bacon and Orwell, who show the decadence of the human wor(l)d at the end of the second Kondratieff cycle.
Bronze Age. 3000 BC
Lineal, bronze swords create the first empires recorded in history. Indo-European and Semite cattle nomads, from the northern and southern deserts of ice and sand, discover hard metal and plunge the Fertile Crescent, enslaving human beings, treated as cattle ever since by their animetal masters:
In ±2850 BC the first bronze armies appear, taking to power God-pharaohs and Semite Lugals. Egypt becomes unified. History registers the first Mesopotamian empires. Rhetoric, epic art to the service of power, substitutes temples with palaces and lineal tombs (pyramids), to glorify the warrior king. Yet for most humans, life did not improve. Farmers become enslaved by warriors and work extra hours to build those huge monuments to the arrogance of the animetal. In fact, in those cultures where bronze weapons arrived later, human goods and sensory pleasures develop more. For example, in China and the Indus, without bronze, the quality of housing is the highest of all old civilizations. Then it plummets after Aryan charioteers invade India. In Egypt, only as the initial waves of warriors recede, we see the end of pyramid construction and a higher quality of life for the common people (dynasty VI). Tombs now are smaller, full of lively drawings of animals and farmers, while priests regain power over warrior kings, promoting the production of human goods and social rituals, till new warriors arrive.
In the graph, we can distinguish those 3 ± 1 ages in the art of the old, bronze empires:
— Max. Energy: When the first dynasty of military warriors, coming from the south, unifies the country, art goes through a simple, lineal, epic age of empire-building. Arrogant warriors, obsessed by death, build pyramidal tombs of growing size and hieratic self-portraits of pharaohs, seen as gods by the power of the sword
— Classic, reproductive age (energy and form are in balance): After Egyptian pharaohs settle down, a pleasant life of wealth spreads to other social castes. It is the period of classic, realist art, epitomized by Dynasty V with its smaller tombs decorated with beautiful, realist paintings of human goods. It is the age of classic literature: works like ‘Sinuhe’, which narrates the transition between the classic and decadent, formal period.
— Max. Information: At the end of the Bronze Age, a period of disorder, corruption and new wars starts again, when foreign invaders with new chariot weapons take over the delta. Wealth plummets and the country enters a baroque age of war. A cult of death and the fantasy of resurrection dominates the culture. It is the age of ‘The Book of Death’ and the myth of Osiris brought to life by his wife Isis. The portraits of Horus, god of the dead, become popular, substituting the epic cult of Ra, the father of all pharaohs. Those 3 ± 1 ages and religious icons will become the recurrent ages of the two next Egyptian cycles (middle and new empires, in classic historiography).
Chariot Radiation (Wheels of Bronze: 2000 BC).
The first wave of charioteers, which develop the ‘cyclical, bronze wheel’, a more complex form than the lineal sword, starts around ±2000 BC. A worldwide invasion of Indo-Europeans with chariots from the northern planes destroys all civilizations. It is the extinctive age of Sumerian cultures, when Genesis and the parable of the tree of science and its go(l)den apples, understood by the verbal masters of the age, are written. Charioteer hordes conquer Sumer and Akkad. The first Hittites empires appear. In Egypt, it means the end of the old empire and the beginning of the Middle Kingdom.
A proof of the Paradox of History—the fact that with less weapons life is better—is Crete: There, charioteers cannot arrive due to geographical conditions (it is an island). So in Crete there is a continuity of a culture based on human, life-enhancing goods that becomes the richest, most sophisticated civilization of this age. Meanwhile, the radiation of charioteer hordes erases Eastern cultures. From 1500 till 1000 BC, in the first Veda period, nomadic, chariot Aryans and their sacred cows conquer India, imposing a brutal system of racism (castes), against Neolithic farmers, while the old culture of goddesses and fertile rivers survives longer in the south. Charioteers also founded, about 1500 BC, the S’hang dynasty in China, degrading and partially assimilating the Tao culture of the living universe, proper of Neolithic China. Yet in the south, the depth and richness of the Chinese Neolithic (fully grown and densely populated by the second millennium BC) allows the Tao culture of the organic universe to survive and flourish till about 300 BC, when the Ch’in dynasty brings iron weapons and forbids all nontechnological books under death penalty. 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. Thus, China proves again that less metal allows more complex human thought. China alone among all Eurasian cultures shows, still today, a clear comprehension of the organic nature of human societies, and for that reason it is the most successful culture of mankind in terms of survival.
Meanwhile in the West, metal masters keep simplifying human verbal cultures. Words become alphabets and legal codes that curtail the freedoms of human beings.
Birth, reproduction and death of civilizations.
Thus it is obvious that cultures resemble living systems. They go through the same cycles of birth, reproduction and death:
— Wor(l)d Cultures are born as organisms do, out of a single prophet or a few legislative ‘cells’ that reproduce their ideas into many believer-minds. So Christianity is born in the mind of Jesus Christ that first replicates his mind into 12 disciples, which replicate the Ethic Wor(l)d into thousands of Roman believers, further expanded into billions of other minds; while America is born in the mind of a few legislators that craft its Constitution, expanded into laws, obeyed and believed today by all American citizens.
— Then, when the religious or legal culture reaches its maturity, it often reproduces in another zone of space-time, creating a daughter civilization or colony.
— Finally, in its 3rd age, when its ethic laws and networks of information become corrupted by money and weapons or become obsolete to a new, more evolved civilization, the culture dies, substituted by the new one. And a new cycle starts.
Similarly, technological civilizations, based in monetary and military systems, are born when a new form of money or a weapon is discovered and reproduced in growing numbers by a small horde, which becomes an army, which conquers a nation and becomes a ruling aristocracy that imposes his customs and controls the citizens of the nation with the icon-weapon of that civilization.
Birth: The prophet, the weapon.
In both kinds of civilizations (Human, Artistic, Historic civilizations or Animetal, Economic civilizations) either an ideology or book of ideas, (a network of human information) or a species of metal, money, weapons or machines, becomes the language of power, which defines the civilization. Ideas and metal-instruments together shape History. For that reason scholars divide history into the Age of Bronze, the Age of Iron Empires, the Age of Chivalry (Middle Ages), the cannon age (Modern age) and the Atomic Age. Yet there is also the Christian Age in Europe or the Buddhist Age in Asia, when we focus on the verbal language of the civilization; or the age of coins, or the age of paper money and stocks, or the age of e-money, when we focus in the language of metal-information.
Reproduction: Daughter cultures.
At the same time a civilization develops and expands its ideas and metal-forms, 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 self-similar eco(nomic)systems. Like it happens in nature, the daughter civilization is often a more evolved species, where the ideas and instruments of the previous civilization are improved. So the Assyrians were defeated by the Persians, who had copied and improved their weapons, iron and cavalry. Yet Persian art and its animetal myths and customs would be similar to those of Assyria. For example, in Arabia stirrup cavalry brought a civilization that expanded West till reaching Al-Andalus (South Spain). That stirrup civilization migrated to America and colonized the South-West, giving origin to the old, Far West civilization, based in 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 carrier of goods and human beings by the car, a more efficient transport machine. The example shows the dynamic quality of the life of civilizations. They are born, reproduce and become extinct through the evolution of objects and words, the memetic elementsof all civilizations, equivalent to the genetic codes of biological organisms. Thus, in the same manner biologists can scientifically organize the data they have about species through genetic information; the bio-historian can study the birth, reproduction and extinction of history and its civilizations, thanks to memetic, cultural forms: the wor(l)ds and metal-instruments of each culture.
Death of civilizations. The artistic prophet.
Civilizations also die. One day another civilization with more efficient ideologies of social evolution or better machines, comes along and destroys the old civilization. Then, once the new civilization has destroyed the old civilization, it reforms the energy cells=citizens of the dead civilization to its image and likeness, as a predator does with the DNA-cells of his victims: A predator feeds on the energy of a victim’s body that becomes partially wasted and partially transformed into cells of the predator. This also happens in organic civilizations: part of the human energy is wasted by war and the remaining humans are transformed into believers of the predator civilization. The Spanish killed ±70% of the Aztecs and the rest became Christians. It was the death of the Aztec civilization. Now Mexicans are ‘Spaniards’, even if its genes are ‘Mongoloid’ and they love bashing, as all children do, their own parents.
Thus, 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. In this case, the verbal ideology changed and the old Egyptian civilization became extinct.
Therefore, the arrival of the first go(l)d and iron cultures, of which there is clear historical record, sets in motion the cycles of wars and holocausts that will rule Western civilizations. Indeed, the Iron Age was considered by Hesiode and other wor(l)d masters the fundamental discontinuum of ‘eviL’=death in history.
The Iron Age (1200 BC).
Hittites in Turkey and Germanic/Celtic tribes in the Balkans or Austrian Alps, not far away from where Hitler would be born (Hallstatt), start mass production of iron swords. A chain reaction of war and destruction starts with warrior waves that move west to Iberia and east to Greece and Asia. It is the age of the great invasions of people of the sea. Ramses II and III fight invaders, but they 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 Mycenae. Where Dorians do not arrive, (peninsular Athens, coastal Turkey) the Greek civilization, a daughter culture of Crete, gives birth to the most complex cultures of the iron cycle. In this age Canaan becomes the center of invention of monetary languages, substituting the civilizations of Mesopotamia, destroyed by charioteers.
The alliance of Phoenicians, traders at sea and Hapiru (wanderer in Sumerian)>Hicsu>Hebrew, caravan traders, develops the first global networks of trade and the go(l)d culture of Canaan that monopolizes banking and trade in the West. In the graph, we can see the three ages of the Canaanite culture, in its first eight-hundred-year cycle, of trade and financial power that ends at the hands of warriors who loot their wealth. Because the cycle will happen with the same three mimetic ages, in all the eight-hundred- and seventy-two-year cycles of the economic ecosystem and is still an ongoing process, it is worth mentioning its first fully recorded event that will be imprinted in the collective memory of mankind, as the Jewish culture becomes the dominant culture of the West and the origin of the myths of economics that pass today as a ‘science’. In that regard we must differentiate ‘biblical’ from ‘cyclical’ economics.
Biblical economics is the belief that go(l)d, money, is the invisible hand of God, which must not be argued scientifically. The result of this belief is, however, cyclical economics, the cycles of boom and bust, of peace and war, of people-castes of bankers and traders on top of societies, which are in the downturn cycle, killed by their slave workers and rival warrior tribes. And of those cycles of history, none is more telling of the consequences of not managing history with the tools of science but with the tools of metal, money and weapons, than the holocaust cycle:
— Young, energetic warrior age: It is the epic foundation of the Jewish ‘dual’ culture of live wor(l)ds vs evil go(l)d, of Moses vs Aaron, which coincides with the end of its last cycle, the baroque period of the Egyptian Holocaust: According to biblical myths, ‘Joseph, banker of the pharaoh’, shows his intelligence accumulating wheat in an age of famine and selling it at speculative prices. The Hapiru, wanderer or caravan trader in Sumerian, were already a culture of traders in the underdeveloped culture of Egypt. Since the name Joseph, as it is customary in ancient literature, should relate to a ‘patriarchal’ tribe or clan more than an individual. Speculation was already a form of making wealth and might be the reason why the caravan traders are expelled from the country. After expulsion, as in all cycles, there is a moment of ethical reflection: We can see in the myths of Sinai more clearly that duality of all animetal cultures: Moses, the ‘angst’ prophet of the Egyptian Holocaust and founder of the ethic wor(l)ds of Judaism, warns the people-caste that they will suffer throughout history for ‘their love of money’, while Aaron, the founder of their go(l)d religion, glorifies metal, building a golden calf. Unfortunately, Moses seems to lose the battle, since he is abandoned in the mountains and Aaron guides the believers of the golden calf to the plain, where they fuse with the millenarian trader culture of Canaan.
— Classic, reproductive, trader age with Solomon and Hiram of Tyros: The Canaanites create the first global economic ecosystem of trade based on metals, establishing the routes that will last three thousand years, by caravan and sea, from Great Britain to India, starting a millenarian trade in metal, weapons and slaves, from Iberia to India, origin of anti-Semitism—in this age, mainly against Phoenicians, who dominate those trades.
The ‘worldly’ religion of Canaan is simple materialism: Gold, due to its hypnotic power and resemblance of the sun god, is considered the symbol of power and go(l)dlike status that go(l)d believers offer to the banker priests of Baal, the most worshipped god of the region, whose temples act as the central bank of those cultures. Instead of the Aryan sword, it is now go(l)d that shows the ‘people of the treasure’ (Am Segullah) that they have been chosen as a superior culture, able to enslave all other people of the world (Talmud Millenarianism). Today Segullah, which means treasure and defines a ‘people-caste’ witha specific profession—the accumulation of their metal ‘idol’, their go(l)d—is wrongly translated as ‘chosen’. Since the original millenarianism has become politically incorrect, the original meaning of the go(l)d religion—to become chosen by go(l)d—is lost.
The dialectics between Yahweh and Baal, the human and material side of man, will however be the key to understand Western history. Indeed, the importance of the ‘treasure’ or ‘go(l)d cult(ure)’ in history cannot be stressed enough, as it would be one of the three poles of power in history, hand in hand with the (s)word/iron culture and the wor(l)d culture. Money, weapons and words are the three languages of social power and the three foundations of human cultures that lean toward the use of one or other of those three languages of power, of which the only legitimate one is the natural, biological language of human words. As societies that ‘live by the sword die by the sword’, so do those based on the slavery of man to go(l)d. Since ultimately, go(l)d brings also the demise of the treasure people, when a new warrior horde decides to loot the ‘temple’ of banker priests. It is the third, extinctive age of the go(l)d culture:
— The third extinctive age, holocaust cycle: This, first recorded economic cycle of the holocaust, happens at the hands of Assur, the rival god of death and war of the Assyrian, lineal, warrior culture. The most brutal of all cycles of animetal history will be rhythmically repeated, in the third age of all thecycles of war of history: Banker priests accumulate money without limit, through usury, slave trade, taxation or, in modern times, through the ‘sophisticated’ new forms of usury (bank-lending), slavery (part-time slavery or salary) and taxation (monopolistic speculation in the prices of things). Yet this process ruins the rest of the society. Then, the warrior leaders of the animetal culture loot and murder the banker priests and take their money.
Both compete to control the world with metal, but they use different styles. The banker enslaves humans, who will do anything for gold, today with salaries, in the past by buying them wholesale; the warrior kills them; and when both are not ab=using the people of the wor(l)d, they kill each other. And they never learn from the previous cycle, even if their best artists once and again denounce murder andgreed as the wrong values of human societies . . . We can see that final demise of the ‘people of the treasure’ in the third image of their art: the King of Israel kisses the feet of the Assyrian warrior king. And Ecclesiastes sentences the obvious fact that we are all humans made of flesh and animetal cultures are myths of vanity. And so, because ‘all is vanity’, Assur, the god of war, will also die: Around 560 BC, the first cavalry radiations take place, carried by Scythes that teach the horse to Indo-Europeans. They destroy all the classic empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Around 539–525 BC, the Persians destroy the Assyrian Empire, but copy its systems of military repression.
Monetary Age : mercenary armies (500 BC—AD 400).
The Roman Empire, paradigm of Western warrior empires, lasted 797 years, between the foundation of the Republic after the Gauls’ invasion and the fall of Rome to stirrup barbarians in 410.
As a consequence of better cavalry and iron metallurgy, from now on animetal Germans displace the center of ‘evil=anti-live history’, from the Crescent Fertile empires ruled by Semite (s)words and go(l)ds (Assur, god of war; Baal, go(l)d of trade), toward Europe (Rome and Greece).
Money becomes the main engine of war, with the discovery of a metallic cycle of in-form-ation, the coin, which professionalizes ‘mercenary armies’. It will also impose visual and digital languages overwor(l)ds, changing the mind of mankind. The dominance of the social wor(l)d is substituted by the dominance of the individualistic I=eye: Go(l)d is now a visual language, as coins constantly provoke a ‘gold fever’, a visual fetish . . . Good and evil, verbal values, are substituted by beauty and ugliness, which are values of visual perception, as coins are. So when the Greeks translate the Bible, they sayinstead of ‘God saw that the world was good’, ‘that the world was beautiful’. Greeks had 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 an expansive age for European empires that now use metal species in a far more efficient manner to exploit people, taxed in coins and levied to serve the armies of their metal masters.
Systems of total war that Assyria had essayed before now become natural to Western empires. Macedonian and Roman empires put together all the weapons discovered in the previous cycles of war (horses, iron, chariots, geometrical war, coins), creating the mercenary army (Phalanx, legion). This new age in which iron and mathematical languages, through coin accountancy, become 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 and cycles of Jewish prophets that culminate with Christ). Confucius talks of the end of the Jen age of human harmony. But the hope of resurrection of the wor(l)d is short-lived. Around 400 BC, the radiation of iron reaches massive size with the great Celtic invasions that transfer their weapons to Rome, while Epirus in the South teaches Romans the power of coins to create mercenary armies. 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).
In the graph, Rome is the origin of all the rituals and icons of future European warrior empires that seize power, pretending to reinstall a ‘new Rome’. Because animetal races die, but their weapons, money and rituals of trade and war continue, there is, in fact, a continuity of warrior symbols and customs, from Assur to Persia, to Macedonia, to Rome, to European empires. So much for racial superiority: the race dies in wars and holocausts. The product, the iron weapon or the coin, stays. So Rome gave origin to European ideologies, rituals and icons of warrior civilizations from the Franks to Nazi Germany, from imperial eagles to lineal art and military architecture. Thus, Rome also continues the brutal fight for total power between the dominant ‘banking/go(l)d culture’ of the West, the people of the treasure, and its dominant warrior culture (the Indo-Europeans). Indeed, Rome wants to control also money, but the millenarian know-how is on the hands of the Phoenician-Jewish coalition. So Rome first exterminates the Phoenicians in Cartage and then tries to exterminate the ‘people of the treasure’ in Canaan.
It is at this point when Jesus of Nazareth, master of the wor(l)d, tries to reform the religion of banker priests, preaching love and justice, but when he believes he can throw the banker priests from the temple with his mass of r=evolutionaries, he is killed within a week by the eternal alliance of the sword (Pilate) and go(l)d (Caiphas, descendant of Aaron).
It is a repetition of the confrontation between the spiritual father of Jesus (Moses) and the genetic father of Caiphas (Aaron). And again go(l)d wins over the wor(l)d. And again the prophecies of the holocaust take place. The Romans, amidst an economic crisis, provoked by the evasion of capital on luxury trade, attack the center of global trade, the Jewish Kingdom. But they fail to exterminate the banker priests, who flee to Babylon with most of their go(l)d, leaving behind the zealots at Masada, the lower class of believers and peddlers who die always in the holocausts, as bankers move with capital to a new nation and the sword revenges on their poor. When Titus enters the Solomon Bank/Temple, go(l)d is gone and the revenge means the holocaust of the lower, energy class of Jewish farmers. The possession of Talmud means now death penalty. So the ‘people of the treasure’ converts to Christianity and the Old Testament, forbidden in earlier Christianity that had purified Judaism, back into a religion of love and ethics, is adopted again, along with measures that will give exclusive banking rights to the ‘treasure people’. It might be coincidental, but now Christianity becomes, with the new go(l)d, the dominant culture of Rome. And so finally, the battle for cultural supremacy in Europe—between Rome and Judea, weapons vs go(l)d—is won by Judaism, which becomes ever since the go(l)d culture of the Western world, at a very steep prize for its lower castes.
Stirrup Age. Middle Ages: AD 400–1200.
I Lineal, warrior Age: Kairuan VII c. II Age: Classic, sensorial: Corduba, X c. 3rd, formal ‘angst’ age: Alhambra
Romanesque; Lineal, Epic Classic gothic Chartres; Formal, Ornamental: Saint Chappel
But all comes to pass. So soon a new metal cycle, called the stirrup, will bring down the once mighty Roman and Ch’in empires. The stirrup was discovered probably in Korea, which today again is the most advanced nation in war machines, hand in hand with Israel, both manufacturing the first robotic terminators that ‘protect’ their ‘walls’, from the influence of Neolithic Islam and ex-Communist North Korea (now a military inquisition, no longer a science of human social evolution, called Socialism). Around 317–589, the Huns, nomad warriors able to shoot arrows while galloping, thanks to that stirrup, 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. The Huns and the Germans, who add their iron expertise, armoring their horses, annihilate the Roman-Christian Empire, which had renewed a paradise of love and human goods. They plummet once more the ethic and living standards of mankind. Their civilization is built around the horseman. He sees himself higher than the rest of humans, just because he is mounted onto his horse. So much human vanity. Now Christianity, the resurrection of the wor(l)d that had converted the Roman Empire into a religion of love, becomes further corrupted into an inquisition of warriors that ‘crusade’ with swords for conversions. Yet, once the epic youth of warfare passes, during the High Middle Ages, slowly those barbarians convert to the Christian Oikoumene of social love. Europe returns to a society based on ethics in those Low Middle Ages. In Italy and Spain a new age of human goods and art flourishes. In Al-Andalus, the three main religions of the West, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, live in harmony. Those final days of social religions left great cathedrals, optimistic buildings full of light, looking upward to God, built by the collective effort of a happy people who, unlike the Christians of the epic age of the stirrup, hurdled in closed Romanesque churches, no longer afraid of the violence of Germanic tribes. Now they pray together. Gothic cathedrals seem to confirm a wealthy mode of life in the lower Middle Ages with fewer 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).
The main culture of this age is Islam, which spreads over the old Neolithic civilizations: Egypt, theFertile Crescent, Indus Valley and Bengal. Perhaps for that reason, it is today still resisting its conversion to a technological civilization.
In the graph, we use two architectural examples from Islam and Christianity, mosques and cathedrals, to show the parallelism between both human cultures, whose art goes through the same three styles and 3 ± 1 ages of all civilizations:
— Energetic, epic youth (simple, lineal forms): In the beginning of the Middle Ages, cathedrals and mosques are flat, simple, lineal, similar to fortresses, acting as refuge against invading hordes.
— Classic, reproductive age: In the lower Middle Ages, they grow in height and light toward their informative God, reaching a classic, harmonic beauty, as the Western world enters a long period of peace and growth of human goods and social love.
— Extinctive, informative baroque: As gunpowder brings back the four riders of Apocalypse, temples become ornamental, baroque, losing their ‘higher’, informative, mystique feeling.
Indeed, all those cultures will flourish till the radiation of gunpowder annihilates them. Then again, the cycles of ‘death’ extend over Europe, as weapons and money multiply together at the hands of go(l)d and sword masters. And again the process causes holocausts of traders and massive famines, poverty and plagues. On the one hand, gunpowder gives power to warriors, who expand their kingdoms and reduce the power of the church. But gunpowder weapons and mercenary armies cost money. So kings increase taxation, which is collected by the ‘Am Segullah’; moneylenders, who continue with their traditional monopoly on slaving and banking, now expanded to the rest of the Roman Empire. Now taxes are imposed in money and so peasants have to borrow go(l)d from moneylenders, who establish an 80 percent of annual interest. This means peasants steadily lose their land, as they can’t pay. And the ‘people of the treasure’ become increasingly wealthy. When monetary taxes are also imposed on the aristocracy with similar rates, warrior aristocrats start losing their lands and organize pogroms, whose objective is to enter synagogues and burn the ‘books of deeds’4. The protection of kings who need taxes and monetary credit from the moneylenders, named ‘untouchable slaves of the crown’, doesn’t deter peasants and aristocrats. Courts ask for lower interest rates and the end of the banking monopoly of moneylenders. This happens in Italy, where Christian bankers soon compete, diminishing rates and the economy flourish. Other countries notice and expulsions and massacres of the ‘Am Segullah’ (people of the treasure) multiply. It is a brutal lesson of economic ecosystems: an excess of taxation and usury chokes the economy; yet when lending flourishes with just rates, it spurs growth and investment.
The Cannon Age: AD 1208–2008.
The age of chivalry and harmony among the ethic gods of the ‘Book’ ended when the Chinese Taoists discovered gunpowder and the first clocks appeared in Europe. Metal jumps in energetic and informative quality. Mongols learn to manufacture guns, after conquering Beijing, and spread their use to the Western world. Thirty million will die in this hundred years war discontinuity, between the fall of Beijing and the Battle of Niebla, in which Spaniards manufacture the first modern cannon. In 1204 Venetians loot Byzantium, opening the East to the Italians, who soon build the first gunboats with ‘bombardas’. It is also the Renaissance age, or age of Italy and Spain, which lasts four hundred years, between its youth and baroque age.
In 1222 Mongols defeat the Russians at Kalka and invade Germany. Soon Germans also learn how to make gunpowder. In 1258 Hulagu massacres Baghdad. It is the end of the Muslim Empire.
In Europe, gunpowder provokes an age of civil wars. It is the Hundred Years’ War in France, and the Spanish ‘Reconquista’, continued in America, where the ‘animetal’ culture reaches new heights ofeviL≠Live, when ‘conquistadors’ murder over half of the native population. In Europe war causes poverty and scarcity of human goods, provoking massive famines and the expansion of the black pest that kills one-fourth of the European population. Then, Europeans expand worldwide their new weapon, thanks to the power of its gunboats and artillery. In the middle point of the eight-hundred-year gunpowder cycle, around 1600, Galileo writes a treatise on ballistics, measuring the parables of cannonball trajectories. It becomes the foundational book of physics, the science of energy and machines and weapons of death.
From then on, the biological comprehension of time as change, extinction and evolution will besubstituted by the abstract measure of time as ‘movement, energy’, measured by ‘clocks’.
Thus clocks meant the birth of mechanism, the present religion of mankind, which must not be confused with the scientific, experimental method based on facts, collected with any language orsensory experience, including the languages and senses of man. The experimental method wasdiscovered by Aristotle. On the other hand, ‘mechanism’, which in bioethic terms—the humanist perspective of this book—should be called ‘scientific racism’, is the ideology that we must observe the universe with machines, because our senses and brains are deemed inferior. It is obviously different from the experimental method, which accepts logic as a proof and also human, sensorial experience. It is proper of physicists and as such it was born with Galileo, an artisan who manufactured telescopes and clocks in the Venetian Arsenal, where he worked on ballistics.
Those historical elements of the birth of physics as a theoretical derivation of the art of ballistics, weapons-making and mechanist construction of machines, which never come to the light in texts about ‘physical theories’ of time and the cosmos, are however essential to understand the denial of biological time by physicists and their indifference to death in history, as humans are considered ‘inferior species’ to those machines. Indeed, mechanist science postulates that knowledge cannot be based on human senses and verbal languages, but only on sensory machines, clocks that measure time with numbersand telescopes that measure space, which are deemed more accurate.
It might be certain, but provokes a constant evolution of temporal and spatial machines, from clocks to computers, from telescopes to cameras, which make obsolete our human minds. At the same time, VOC, the first ‘company mother’, starts mass production of gunboats, the first industrial machines, and invents paper money, creating the modern economic ecosystem. So weapon companies now substitute warriors; scientists substitute priests and industrial money substitutes loving words as the new energetic, informative and reproductive networks of history, changing the evolution of this planet, fromthe creation of a human wor(l)d based on life into the creation of a go(l)d of metal.
Now economic nations will substitute religious civilizations, becoming the new superorganisms of history that accelerate the evolution of metal, ushering history in its age of death, the age of the machine, shortening the cycle of technological evolution to eighty years.
The long, medium and short wave of technological evolution.
This web provides an in-depth analysis of the cycles of technological evolution at 3 levels - the long wave of warrior civilizations of 800 years; the medium wave of modern industrial nations of 80 years and the short wave of eight years – the decades – considered in ‘future magazine’. Since the wave of evolution of technology, of machines, is accelerating and now enters in its last age, the singularityage, with clear negative consequences for Gaia and mankind, the species the technological wave of death of civilizations is extinguising.
The origin of the model is the science of complexity, which considers the Universe and all its parts, modeled with the laws of biology – evolution, theory of information and theory of organisms.
In that regard, those 3 waves have in the deepest, scientific analysis, (given but the most advanced sciences of the XXI c. Complexity, Theory of Information and Systems Sciences, in which I am a pioneer), a simple reason d’etre/law of existence:
‘All organic systems of the universe increase their amount of information towards the future’.
And since History and economics are born out of the activity of man, an organism, and machines are evolving organisms, history and economics obey that law.
In the XXI century we have realized that all organic systems of the Universe are modelled with 2 ‘arrows’ of future, energy, the arrow that physicists study, and information, the arrow studied by biologists. Those arrows are related in organic systems that combine them, by two type of processes, expansive, energetic, death processes; and informative, implosive, warping, life, creative, formal processes. Many consequences derives of creating ‘Dual’ models of reality based in the combiination of those processes. The main one is the existence of ’3 ages’ in all life systems:
- Youth, the age of energy when the process starts; maturity the age of balance between energy and information and old age, the age of information, when we warp and acquire more wrinkles, more form.
Those 3 ages also ocurr in complex social organisms, as cultures and civilizations are.
And in machine systems, as the graph shows. Since new energies are first used as bombs, in the energetic youth, then applied as transport machines and finally evolved into the most complex forms, weapons.
And so in our technological cultures, also the human generations of founding physicists that discover the machine, mature, reproductive industrialists that convert it into a transport system and finally military politicians, which use the machine after the crash of the market as a weapons, adapt our culture to the new God of Mankind…
(Bio-History is a new science which uses the models of Complexity, Biology and Theory of Organisms to model history as the eusocial evolution of mankind. This post, written with the terminology of Bio-History, the longest of this web pretends to give a glimpse to the key elements of this science.
