Societal downfalls loom large in history and popular culture but, for the 99 per cent, collapse often had its upsides

No one walks among the wild goats and darting snakes of the mountain, its steppe where grew the succulent plants grew nothing but the reed of tears … Akkad is destroyed!

This lament is from the ‘Curse of Akkad’, a poem written about the fall of the Akkadian Empire, which reigned more than 4,000 years ago in the Near East. Yet it’s more myth than reality: despite the tragic language about a destroyed city, the capital of Akkad did not disappear. It was still occupied and, later, new kings took over its rule: the Third Dynasty of Ur. That empire fell too, eventually, and is also remembered through literature written years after its demise: ‘The malicious storm which swept over the Land, the storm which destroyed cities, the storm which destroyed houses … the storm which cut off all that is good from the Land.’ This natural disaster was apparently caused by Enlil, the god of the winds. Yet there’s no archaeological evidence for this.

In fact, as far as we can tell, life continued normally for citizens of Akkad and Ur. As the archaeologist Guy Middleton points out in Understanding Collapse (2017), the empires may have died, but the average person might not have even noticed.

Until recently, many archaeologists focused on revealing the cultural glories and dynastic power of such civilisations. The Akkadians left us cuneiform records (writing inscribed with reeds onto clay) and staggering ziggurats (massive, terraced, flat-topped temples). And Ur-Namma, the first king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, left us the earliest known legal code. This means that popular perceptions of many past empires, such as Rome or the Qin, focus on their great artwork and monumental achievements, such as the Colosseum or the Great Wall of China.

In recent years, many archaeologists and historians have taken a different approach, asking: what was it like as an ordinary person to live through these imperial collapses? You may assume that a collapse in the imperial superstructure meant that people went hungry and homeless, and that is certainly the picture in the poems of lamentation and sorrow. But the physical evidence of people’s health, for instance, shows something very different.

As a researcher who studies the causes of civilisation collapse to inform policy in the present, I believe this matters. In textbooks, museums and popular culture, history is often told as a tale of rise and fall. It is a story of human progress during the reign of empires and kingdoms, followed by regression and barbarism when these fade away. This is why we have the idea of imperial ‘golden ages’ of wealth, peace and cultural advances, followed by a descent into ‘dark ages’ marked by violence, poverty and stagnation. Yet this is history through the eyes of elites. Not only does this skew our understanding of the past, but it also shapes how we think about collapse in the present and future.

Many of us know of the brutality of life under empire, although we perhaps underestimate just how bad it could be. Armed men rounding up women to sell them into slavery or public crucifixions are today seen with dismay when done by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but, as the historian Walter Scheidel observed, these were a normal sight in Rome during its peak. The Roman Empire was also a pyramid scheme that was at war more than 90 per cent of the time between 410 and 101 BCE. In China, the Shang Dynasty sacrificed around 13,000 people over two centuries, and the Qin dynasty killed an estimated 1.5 million people to establish unified rule.

Yet, those who judge human progress only by technological advances and economic growth might believe these grim realities were for the greater good. Empires, in the typical telling, may have been harsh in their punishments and brutal towards their enemies, but also pacified their citizens, ensured security, and hence enabled far greater economic and social prosperity.

But did those citizens actually prosper under empire, and suffer when it vanished?

To answer that question we need to assess the wellbeing of populations thousands of years ago. This is tricky. Medical records are usually absent, and written documents are subjective, but we can get clues from the physical health of people’s bodies. For example, an approach called ‘osteoarcheology’ examines the bones of past people. Bones with fewer lesions (damage from trauma and infections) tend to suggest stronger skeletons, and less exposure to disease and violence. Teeth with fewer holes (caries) tend to suggest a better, less-carbohydrate rich diet. Most importantly, taller people usually mean healthier people, with better diets and less trauma from famine and disease.

Pharaohs and their wives were taller than men and women in the general ancient Egyptian population

Such evidence can shed new light on apparently dramatic collapses. Take the fall of the Late Bronze Age in the Near East and Mediterranean, which offers the archetypal tale of a golden age that descended into a dark age – a story told in popular trade books and various documentaries. In the space of a century or two, the Mycenaeans (the palace-dwelling overlords of Greece) fell apart and gave way to the Greek dark age, the pharaohs of the New Egyptian Kingdom lost power, and the Hittite Empire fractured into a set of squabbling rump states. Yet, despite being called a collapse, it was no apocalypse, nor even an entirely bad thing for citizens.

In Mycenaean Greece, kings were on average 6 cm taller than their peasant counterparts (172.5 cm, compared with 166.1 cm). Similarly, pharaohs and their wives (in a sample of 31 royal mummies) were taller than men and women in the general ancient Egyptian population. Once these empires fell apart, the heights of men began to grow across the Eastern Mediterranean, while the heights of women, which had been increasing slowly, accelerated.

It’s a surprising trend found even in perhaps the most famous imperial golden age of all: the Roman Empire, which arose after the Late Bronze Age collapse. When Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 CE, St Jerome mourned that ‘when the bright light of all the world was put out … the whole world perished in one city …’ Jerome gave voice to a view that has lasted for millennia: Rome’s fall as an epic catastrophe and setback for human progress. Yet the skeletons of its subjects paint a different picture. Before Rome’s rise, people across the Italian peninsula were growing taller, but this slowed dramatically under the empire: citizens were 8 cm shorter than they might have been if this prior growth had continued. Even during Rome’s golden age, those who lived beyond the empire were taller. There is a truth to the trope of the hulking, muscle-bound barbarian. After the fall, skeletons grow taller across continental Europe, and dental caries and bone lesions decrease.

There are various reasons why collapse could benefit human welfare. States often demanded tax in the form of grain. Without tax collectors passing by, people often had more to eat. More than that, without the pressure to grow tax crops, they often diversified their diet to include more animal protein, which beget stronger bones. A flight away from cities towards rural areas also meant less circulation of infectious disease. Finally, a more complex reason in at least some cases is a survivor effect. Some collapses did lead to population declines: sometimes death (which was obviously bad for those citizens) but, as we’ll see later, also because people moved.

Either way, this meant that workers sticking around became scarcer and more valuable labour: they could bargain with their employers for better wages. Which is why we see both heights and wages rise after the Black Death in the 14th century. Women’s heights appear to have decreased, but this is likely due to an earlier onset of menarche (the first menstrual cycle, which slows growth). Earlier menarche often occurs when girls experience better living conditions with more resources, counterintuitively resulting in lower long-term height. Hence the decreasing height of women is likely an indicator that they too were benefitting after the Black Death.

Perhaps the most neglected reason for post-collapse health boosts is that most states of the past were predatory, fuelling enormous inequality and impoverishing the masses. One review of 28 premodern states, from the time of Rome to 1947, found that they were on average more than three-quarters towards the theoretical maximum level of wealth inequality. That maximum is a situation in which one person owns all the surplus resources while everyone else is left with meagre subsistence (just enough to survive and reproduce). The most reliable effect of collapse was to level these wealth inequalities.

Collapse can bring increased violence and suffering, but this masks a more complicated reality

All this helps to explain why the adoption of agriculture and states were an enormous blow to human health. Not only did human height shrink but bones got weaker, teeth filled with more holes, and new infectious diseases such as influenza and the plague began as people were crammed together with animals. Men today are on average still shorter than their ancestors during the stateless ice age (or at least the male skeletons we’ve found in Europe; evidence elsewhere is sparse, but we have little reason to think that Europeans were especially tall).

Improved welfare after a state breaks down is not a purely ancient phenomenon either. That is clear when we look at the case of the collapse of Somalia in 1991. The Barre regime that had previously ruled the country fell apart; local warlords and traditional groups took the reins of governance. While there was increased conflict, it was not a nightmare for human wellbeing. Instead, almost every quality-of-life indicator in the country, from infant mortality to extreme poverty, improved. This wasn’t just Somalia experiencing a region-wide improvement due to better technology and aid. Its improvements significantly outstripped those of its intact, stable neighbours.

Empires start to seem far less defensible once we realise that they were not beneficial for the health and wellbeing of those living under them. But perhaps they provided peace at least: a civilisational refuge from violence? While it is true that collapse can bring increased violence and suffering, even this masks a more complicated reality.

The story of imperial rise and fall is not just a view of the past, but also the future. When we think of collapse in popular culture, it is usually portrayed as apocalyptic. That is especially true of ‘post-collapse’ fiction, such as Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) and the Mad Max film franchise, where gangs of armed, barbaric, patriarchal men roam a landscape of dilapidated buildings, preying on the occasional ragtag band of survivors. It is also evident in the actions of ‘preppers’ who prepare for the coming collapse by stockpiling guns, bullets and canned food in fortified bunkers.

Underpinning this idea of dark ages is an assumption about human nature. Without structures of authority, we will turn on each other in a bloody, selfish struggle for resources. Some call it ‘veneer theory’: strip back the thin veneer of ‘civilisation’ and people will resort to their base violent nature. The only way out is by granting an individual or small group the right to reign over the rest of us and enforce a ‘social contract’ of law and order. It’s an idea that was most famously espoused by the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but dates back thousands of years to ancient Vedic and Buddhist scriptures, as well as Zhou-era songs. That Hobbesian story is another pillar underpinning the rise-and-fall version of history.

Collapse does, undoubtedly, appear to result in many lost lives and an increase in violence. Many of the numbers seem harrowing. The city of Rome shrank by about 97 per cent, from around 1 million to around 30,000. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Late Bronze Age saw a population loss of up to 75 per cent in Babylonia, and 40 to 60 per cent across Greece.

Yet the numbers are highly uncertain and likely exaggerated. Ancient estimates of population loss usually rely on either examinations of genetics (a ‘bottleneck’, or quick reduction in genetic diversity, is one commonly used measure) or radiocarbon-dated estimates based on the age of artefacts that archaeologists find suggesting human occupancy (called ‘summed probability densities’). More recent guesses use other indicators such as written documents, including censuses, ideally combining many of them (written records, skeletons, burials and artefacts) to get a picture of what the population or loss of population could have been.

About 20 times more people were displaced rather than killed in Syria’s civil war

Unfortunately, each of these measures has limitations and all of them struggle to distinguish between people dying and people moving. The number of artefacts or skeletons in an area could drop simply because people move elsewhere. Similarly, genetic bottlenecks can occur when a population moves and splits off, creating less diversity. Even written records are unreliable. A reduction in census numbers could be simply that the state is not focusing on keeping good records, not that many people are dying. An empire is unlikely to prioritise counting its citizens during a time of civil strife. In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), Steven Pinker suggests that the An Lushan Rebellion in China of 755-763 CE cost 36 million lives. That was based on data from Matthew White, who later cut down his estimate by almost two-thirds, to 13 million, due to the problems with census data under the Tang Dynasty.

In other words, our estimates of mortality are uncertain, and it’s hard to tell if people were killed in the tumult of collapse or if they moved away from cities to rural areas, with their bones and buildings becoming less visible to archaeologists centuries later.

Logically, most people would move rather than die in the face of a civil war or outbreak of disease. That is what we see in the modern world. While the Syrian civil war may have killed around 656,500 people, it displaced about 14 million. In other words, about 20 times more people were displaced rather than killed. It’s a common finding across modern civil wars and state failures, and we have little reason to think that people in the past were different. For the city of Rome, much of the population left after the severing of the Cura Annonae: the provision of free grain. After a few sackings, multiple bouts of disease and no more free grain, migrating elsewhere must have seemed wise.

More than that, the murders and violence that do occur are not due to a Hobbesian war of all against all, with neighbours resorting to raids and the public falling into chaos. Instead, the violence of collapse is due to just a small slice of society: men of fighting age, usually those previously employed in the military or as mercenaries. Whether it be Germanic warriors or Byzantine soldiers fighting across the failing empire, or American and Iraqi combatants engaging in firefights in Baghdad, the picture of collapse is one of armed young men.

Most people tend to respond differently to disasters. Whether it be in a fire, flood or hurricane, humans tend to respond with altruism, ingenuity and camaraderie during a crisis. Gun-toting loners also don’t tend to handle catastrophes very well: instead, the survivors of crises tend to be those with lots of social connections.

The violence we see during collapse is not due to Hobbesian chaos, but rather it is usually a small group trying to build a new empire after a power vacuum opens up. One assessment of 3,539 skeletons in the Near East from 12,000 to 400 BCE found two key waves of violence (evident in fractures and punctures in skulls and bones). One was the creation of the first polities and states, like Uruk in the Near East, and another was the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, during the collapse of empires and assembling of new states. The violence of imperial collapse is the violence of imperial creation – and it is both exaggerated and misunderstood.

What is going on here? Why is the evidence so mismatched to the popular perceptions of collapse – whether it be in bestselling books like Jarred Diamond’s Collapse (2004) or famous post-apocalyptic fiction? To understand that, we need to look at how history has been handed down to us – the ‘1 per cent view’ of history.

‘The whole of Upper Egypt died of hunger and each individual had reached such a state of hunger that he ate his own children.’ That is how the failure of the Old Egyptian Kingdom in around 2181 BCE was described in one tomb. That tomb belonged to Ankhtifi, a provincial governor from the south of Egypt. The collapse is described as a cataclysm of disorder, civil war and cannibalism.

The tomb of Ankhtifi isn’t alone in seeing it as a catastrophe. The Admonitions of Ipuwer, several poems that were written afterwards, paint a similar picture. They are emblematic of a ‘lamentation literature’ that grieves the loss of a previous kingdom and ruminates over what fate befell it. This includes poems about collapse from across China and the ancient Near East.

These mournful descriptions rarely match the evidence. During the fall the Old Egyptian Kingdom, there are no signs of mass death or cannibalism (although there appears to have been a drought and increased conflict). Yes, the pharaoh and centralised government fell apart, but it was far from an apocalypse. Instead, grave goods and tombs for commoners become more common and richer. It is what historians call ‘the democratisation of religion’. There are also signs of emancipation. The Admonitions of Ipuwer spend more time decrying the rise of the poor than they do describing civil war: ‘the corn of Egypt is common property … Indeed, the poor man has attained to the state of the Nine Gods.’

There are sound reasons why these sources would exaggerate. The Admonitions of Ipuwer were written by scribes employed by the pharaoh during the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (2040-1782 BCE). They had every reason to make the fall of the government look disastrous. It was propaganda, to justify the ruler. Meanwhile, Ankhtifi’s tomb is an ode to his achievements as a governor. Exaggerating turmoil made him seem heroic.

Even at the height of Rome, 90 per cent of citizens lived rurally and left fewer traces in the archaeological record

Inaccurately rosy depictions of rulers and empires are commonplace throughout history. The public often remembers the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II as a prolific conqueror and ruler. Yet archaeology tells a story different from his official inscriptions. Ramesses boasted of trampling his neighbours in Libya and Nubia, yet the Egyptians appear to have been farming and living alongside them instead. Ramesses’s most famous military expedition, against the Hittites (the battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE), was bungled owing to the pharaoh’s incompetence. Ramesses simply covered up the evidence. As the archaeologist Nicky Nielsen points out: ‘When you realise that Ramses re-inscribed monuments dedicated to others – so that it appeared they were celebrating his achievements – you realise what a peddler of fake news he was … His name was often carved so deeply, it was impossible to remove it – thus preserving his legacy.’ Archaeological remains are often the remains of propaganda, the original fake news.

The distorting presence of propaganda can be seen not just in monuments, but even in the earliest documents of diplomacy. One of the first recorded peace treaties of the world (and the first of which we have copies of from both sides) is the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty (also called the Treaty of Kadesh, the Eternal Treaty or the Silver Treaty) that was struck by Ramesses II and Ḫattušili III (emperor of the Hittite Empire) in 1259 BCE. It is not a single document, but rather two, with each kingdom keeping their own copy. The two are identical save for one telling difference. The preamble in the Egyptian version written in hieroglyphs brags that the Hittites begged the Egyptians for peace, while the Hittite copy says the opposite.

Neither written records nor excavated monuments and buildings are a neutral window onto the past. The story of collapse has emerged via the point of view of its greatest victims: the 1 per cent, the most wealthy and powerful merchants, politicians, and priests of the past.

Writing and artefacts left to us are largely from the upper class. For most of human history, only a sliver of society could write, and they were inevitably in the employ of monarchs, merchants and priests. Similarly, the archaeological remains that tend to be most easily seen are cities and large monuments. Living in urban areas surrounded by statues, marble and bronze was not the life of most: even at the height of Rome, around 90 per cent of citizens lived rurally and left fewer traces in the archaeological record.

It is this 1-per-cent view that still lurks behind the language historians and archaeologists use to slice up the past. The time before states began writing is ‘prehistory’. The ‘Bronze’ Age emphasises that period’s technological advances, not its tyrannies. The rise of ancient Greece and Rome is dubbed ‘Antiquity’. The time when European colonisation destroyed a host of other peoples is the ‘Modern’ period. In Cambodia, archaeologists call the height of empire the ‘Mature’ Angkorian. For the Maya of the Yucatán, the height of warring city-states is called the ‘Classic’ period. And in Egypt we have the Old, Middle and New Egyptian Kingdoms interspersed with ‘intermediate periods’. These are not neutral descriptions: they praise empire and mourn or downplay its absence.

Historical experts are admittedly sceptical of terms like ‘dark ages’. According to the archaeologist Claudia Glatz, the entire idea of a late Bronze Age Collapse is ‘imperial rhetoric from beyond the grave’. In Against the Grain (2017), the anthropologist James C Scott makes the case that we should consider ‘praising collapse’, given the improvements in human welfare it can lead to. Even in the early 1970s, the Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen suggested replacing the idea of ‘intermediate periods’ with a ‘Post-Imperial Epoch’ (although he ironically called his own book The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt). While ‘dark ages’ (and even collapse) are increasingly passé for scholars, they are not for the public. The old imperial periodisations are still how history is taught in schools and universities.

This 1-per-cent view has skewed our perspective on collapse and history. What we need now is a history of collapse for the 99 per cent. Only with that can we truly understand what the rise and fall of empires meant, both for the people of the past and also for us today.

Collapse can happen. It carries costs and victims but also benefits and beneficiaries. In a globalised, interconnected world facing threats such as nuclear weapons, a future collapse is likely to be far worse, with far higher costs. Many states today are also far more benevolent than those of the past. While the fall of Somalia may have been good for much of the populace, the same is not likely to be true if Denmark fell apart. Think of it as the Somalia-Denmark rule: the more helpful a state is, and the more citizens rely on it, the worse the result if it collapses.

However, a 99-per-cent view of history suggests that empires and great power structures were rarely good for their subjects, and that their disappearance doesn’t create general chaos, but simply a battle of the few to regain power. Migration was not a horrible thing: it helped us navigate the disasters and collapses of the past. History isn’t a story of progress due to hierarchy and technology. And not all collapses need to be lamented with tragic poems. While we should not welcome or try to accelerate towards a future collapse, a 99-per-cent view of history is a reminder that a world with less domination and fewer rules may not be a bad thing. We don’t need to fear ourselves or the absence of rulers; we need to fear power and those who try to grab it.