6. Symphony
Of Emergence
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System Cycle, System Return: The 'Axial' Transition
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| 6.3 System Cycle, System Return: The 'Axial' Transition | ||||
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System cycle, system return… Soon we are in the first great medieval, mideonic, period. We can do what History does to history, leapfrog 2400 years, to find ‘system return’ reflected in the Old Testament and general Axial period. Passing on very quickly with a marker laid down, and having witnessed the ‘birth of civilization’, or the Urban Revolution, in the rapid advance of Egypt and Sumer, whose separation is mostly an illusion of relative starting points that has truncated the Neolithic, we are now in the centuries after -3000 when we see the first crystallization of the Sumerian-to-become-Mesopotamian and the Egyptian worlds. The pyramids get bigger and bigger for a while. And then the process stops. By and large, fundamental advance is gone by -2000. After Sumer, the effect of sequential stabilization from Akkad to the Assyrians is very notable, but leaves higher civilization in a frozen state very quickly, as the centuries pass in a stabilization of the original and rapidly created new traditions. Note, this is not a law. Nothing in our account prevents ‘free action’ filling the medievalizing gap with fresh advances. Civilization is advancing on many fronts. But somehow these worlds are stuck on their sources. The long centuries of Egyptian civilization, especially, seem like grandeur in stone, as the form and circumstance of its birth condition its outcomes very clearly. The next phase will show the clear grounds for what we are about, and give us a glimpse of this aspect of our analysis. In a bird’s eye view, we pass dynasties of the Egyptians, the rise of Babylon, the Hittites, the world of Ugarit, the endless frontier corners, the Hittites, and Assyrians, the Indus, and the Shang, and the entry of many nomadic invaders into the feast of civilization where they will in perhaps be at the right place and the right time to experience the next period of cyclical phase. Although our theory is about rise, rise, rise, and not rise and fall, in fact, by -1200 we see a world coming to pieces, in the midst of the vast expansion across Eurasia of the most chaotic proto-capitalism, the spread of war and slavery, and the inability of the earlier zones of first advance to perform any new gestures different from what they have already done. We need to change gears for a moment, from the sequential-cyclical to the parallel. We must beware of confusing the earliest onset with the cataclysmic breakdown that occurs across the ancient world ca. -1200. We cannot attribute rise and decline, as such, to eonic cycles, although it might well happen that way. And it is not the same as the ‘Iron Age’, whose beginning is much earlier and still diffusing in an independent fashion. The new technology of iron will greatly influence what comes, but it cannot be called the causative factor of the changes that come. It is important to be clear that this advance is not reasonably seen as technology generated, although the influence of new iron weapons is a clear co-factor in the equalizing trend that suddenly sweeps across the whole field. But the basic issue is clear, the next cycle, or system return, comes ‘on schedule’ in a broad swath across Eurasia, a remarkable synchronous phase... |
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