Ancient World Review

Currency & The Collapse Of The Roman Empire

Comment: This is an interesting lecture. I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but there's no doubt that "coin debasement and inflation helped lead to the demise of the western Roman empire," to quote from The Money Project. Rome's economic problems led to the debasement of its currency and the resulting inflation led to shortages, decreased trade, increased taxation, widespread poverty and the depopulation of once productive parts of the empire in the west. These problems, in turn, seriously weakened the frontier which was eventually overrun by Germanic tribes.

If nothing else, the history of inflation in ancient Rome proves that any unit of exchange can be debased. These days, a lot of people think we could solve our monetary problems by switching to a gold and silver based currency. According to this view, precious metals have "intrinsic value" which makes them immune or at least resistant to inflation. Unfortunately, the idea that gold and silver currencies hold their value as opposed to fiat currencies is flat-out wrong. You can see this by looking at historical gold and silver prices, then comparing them to a chart of the historical value of the dollar. The "value" of gold and silver varies just as much as the value of our fiat currency, so where is the "intrinsic value" in these charts?

The main problem with the Roman monetary system is that it was controlled by the emperors themselves. Faced with finite gold and silver reserves, they turned to "clipping" or reducing the metal content of their coins in order to pay the army and fund all their other projects:

"By decreasing the purity of their coinage, [emperors] were able to make more 'silver' coins with the same face value. With more coins in circulation, the government could spend more. And so, the content of silver dropped over the years." -- "Currency and the Collapse of the Roman Empire," The Money Project.

The Money Project has an interesting series of graphics illustrating the correlation between the deaths of Roman emperors and the debasement of the coinage. The record shows a steady decline in the silver content of Roman coins over the centuries until there wasn't much left except "a negligible coating of silver" by around 300 AD. This correlation doesn't imply that the debasement of the coinage had any direct bearing on the deaths of all these emperors or vice versa, but it does show the steady economic decline of the empire as its leaders desperately tried to cope with the problem:

"By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the denarius was only about 75% silver. Caracalla tried a different method of debasement. He introduced the 'double denarius', which was worth 2x the denarius in face value. However, it had only the weight of 1.5 denarii. By the time of Gallienus, the coins had barely 5% silver. Each coin was a bronze core with a thin coating of silver. The shine quickly wore off to reveal the poor quality underneath."

Gallienus (218-268 AD) ruled during The Crisis of the Third Century, "a period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague, and economic depression," according to Wikipedia. Rome never developed a stable political  system or a stable economic system and the shine was wearing off the empire as well as the denarius.

Related: Taxes Brought Down The Roman Empire, And They'll Do The Same To America. This is an interesting article, but taxes alone didn't bring down the empire.

Malaria And The Fall Of Rome

Video from 2016.

"Today in the west, most people have forgotten how deadly malaria used to be, although there were serious malarial epidemics in many parts of Italy as recently as the 1950s. But each year, mainly in Africa, it still kills over two million people, most of them children. While there are several mentions of a disease sounding very similar to malaria in historical documents from Roman times, there has never been any hard evidence of its presence ... "But last year [2010], for the first time, a British scientist proved conclusively that the most dangerous type of malaria was a killer in imperial Rome."" Source: BBC (2011).

Note: The evidence shows that a serious malaria epidemic swept through Italy around the same time as the collapse of the western Roman empire. For instance, some researchers believe that Alaric, the famous king of the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 AD, died of malaria:

According to Forbes (2016), "Alaric could have become infected with malaria anywhere in his Italian travels, even in Rome while he was sacking it. The disease was well known in ancient times and wasn't fully eradicated from Italy until 1970. But Calabria, in Italy's toe where Alaric died, 'was classified as the most affected region, with active transmission foci concentrated especially along the coasts and the valleys of its broad streams,' the researchers write. 'A fatal form of malaria contracted during his stay in Calabria seems to be the most probable cause of the king's death.'"

Comment: Malaria outbreaks could have had a major effect on the readiness of Roman legions during the barbarian invasions, but the empire had already been seriously weakened by decades of civil war, political corruption, religious upheavals, administrative division and general mismanagement. By the fifth century, the money and power had already been transferred to the east and the western half of the empire was just a rotten husk waiting to collapse. It wouldn't have taken much to bring it down.

The Drought Theory Of The Collapse Of Classic Maya Civilization

Video from 2015. Ancient Apocalypse was a 2001 BBC documentary series.

Note: "Dick Gill [featured in the documentary] was a most unusual person to put forward a bold new theory explaining the collapse of Mayan civilisation. When he started his hunt for clues, he was actually a banker." Source: BBC (2011). Gill spend a considerable amount of time investigating his theory that a major drought led to the collapse and believed that he had found conclusive evidence that this is what had happened:

"The drought theory holds that rapid climate change in the form of severe drought brought about the Classic Maya collapse. According to the particular version put forward by Gill in The Great Maya Droughts ... '[Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores ... provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD 800 to 1000 ... the most severe in the last 7,000 years ... precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)

The drought theory seems to be widely accepted now. LIDAR scans support the theory, according to Wikipedia, and Gill's evidence is apparently pretty solid -- I haven't found any sources questioning the evidence itself. Still, it's possible that drought may not be enough to explain what actually happened.

"David Webster, a critic of [Gill's] megadrought theory, says that much of the evidence provided by Gill comes from the northern Yucatán and not the southern part of the peninsula, where Classic Maya civilization flourished. He also states that if water sources were to have dried up, then several city-states would have moved to other water sources. That Gill suggests that all water in the region would have dried up and destroyed Maya civilization is a stretch, according to Webster, although Webster does not have a precise competing theory explaining the Classic Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)

Earthquakes may have played a big part in the collapse as well:

"A study published in Scientific Reports in 2016 showed that between 750 and 900 a cluster of four earthquakes affected the wet tropical mountains south of the Yucatán lowlands, which are not vulnerable to drought, and include such important cities as Quirigua and Copán. These earthquakes left detectable destruction in several Maya cities and led to the abandonment of Quirigua. The study hypothesizes that repeated destruction combined with declining trade with the Maya kingdoms of the Yucatán lowlands to propagate the collapse to the southern part of the Maya realm." (Wikipedia)

Related: Scientists Measure Severity Of Drought During The Maya Collapse

Archaeological Park & Ruins Of Quirigua

"Inhabited since the 2nd century A.D., Quirigua had become during the reign of Cauac Sky (723–84) the capital of an autonomous and prosperous state. The ruins of Quirigua contain some outstanding 8th-century monuments and an impressive series of carved stelae and sculpted calendars that constitute an essential source for the study of Mayan civilization." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.

Note: Quirigua, like so many other Mayan cities, was abandoned during the possibly drought-related Classic Maya Collapse that occurred between the 8th and 9th centuries AD. The city may have collapsed due to a decline in trade and it also appears to have been damaged by earthquakes, but I'm not sure if the quakes happened during the period of the terminal decline in Mayan civilization:

"The local bedrock is a hard red sandstone, which the inhabitants used in the construction of monuments and architecture. This local sandstone is very strong and not prone to shearing or fracturing, allowing the sculptors at Quiriguá to erect the tallest freestanding stone monuments in the Americas. Quiriguá was built directly over the Motagua Fault and the city suffered damage in ancient times as a result of major earthquakes." (Wikipedia)

Scientists Measure Severity Of Drought During The Maya Collapse

Video from 2015.

"'The role of climate change in the collapse of Classic Maya civilisation is somewhat controversial, partly because previous records are limited to qualitative reconstructions, for example whether conditions were wetter or drier,' said Nick Evans, a PhD student in Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences and the paper's first author. 'Our study represents a substantial advance as it provides statistically robust estimates of rainfall and humidity levels during the Maya downfall.'" Source: Archaeology News Network.

Note: Researchers found that "annual precipitation decreased between 41% and 54% during the period of the Maya civilisation's collapse, with periods of up to 70% rainfall reduction during peak drought conditions, and that relative humidity declined by 2% to 7% compared to today."

No one really knows what happened to the Classic Mayan civilization. A number of theories have been proposed, but the drought theory is one of the more plausible. According to Wikipedia, "[c]limatic factors were first implicated in the collapse as early as 1931 by Mayanists Thomas Gann and J. E. S. Thompson. In The Great Maya Droughts, Richardson Gill gathers and analyzes an array of climatic, historical, hydrologic, tree ring, volcanic, geologic, lake bed, and archeological research, and demonstrates that a prolonged series of droughts probably caused the Classic Maya collapse. The drought theory provides a comprehensive explanation, because non-environmental and cultural factors (excessive warfare, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, less trade, etc.) can all be explained by the effects of prolonged drought on Classic Maya civilization."

Ten Civilizations Or Nations That Collapsed From Drought

"Drought is the great enemy of human civilization. Drought deprives us of the two things necessary to sustain life--food and water. When the rains stop and the soil dries up, cities die and civilizations collapse, as people abandon lands no longer able to supply them with the food and water they need to live. While the fall of a great empire is usually due to a complex set of causes, drought has often been identified as the primary culprit or a significant contributing factor in a surprising number of such collapses. Drought experts Justin Sheffield and Eric Wood of Princeton, in their 2011 book, Drought, identify more than ten civilizations, cultures and nations that probably collapsed, in part, because of drought. " Source: Weather Underground (2016).

Barbarians - The Goths

"Visigoths and Ostrogoths were ... the product of a ... convulsion occasioned by the inroads of the Huns," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised). "As a direct result, two separate Gothic groups crossed the Danube in 376 [invading Roman territory], their victory at Hadrianople in 378 paving the way for a more ordered coexistence with Roman power after 382. These two groups were definitively united by Alaric (395-411) to create the Visigoths, but only after being joined by a third large contingent: the survivors of Radagaisus' attack on Italy in 405-6."

Comment: The Gothic invasion of Rome was triggered by the Huns, who were themselves responding to the expansion of Gothic tribes into the east. The Huns drove all the way to the Danube, triggering a complex chain of events which led to the unification of the Germanic tribes under Alaric and their crossing into the territory of the Romans, who by that point had been so seriously weakened by civil war, official corruption and economic problems, among other things, that they were unable to defend their frontier.

Christianity Is Becoming A Third-World Religion

1707 years after Galerius's Edict of Toleration ended the persecution of Christians which started under Diocletian, the religion that once exercised absolute dominion over the West is rapidly disappearing from Europe. That's not very surprising, though. Even the United States is becoming less religious and Christianity as an institution has been in decline for a very long time now.

The history of Christianity has been one of schisms and fragmentation, a long process of disintegration caused by theological disputes and church corruption. When the Catholic church lost its monopoly during the Protestant Reformation, Christianity as a unified institution (1) ceased to exist. Protestantism itself went through a long chain-reaction of schisms with the result that there are now hundreds of Christian denominations in the world.

(1) Early Christianity wasn't a single movement with a unified belief system, but this gradually changed after Catholicism became the official religion of Rome and the church began its centuries-long process of stamping out "heretical movements." Very roughly speaking, and taking into consideration the fact that the eastern and western churches of the time had distinct differences, Christianity survived as a near-monolithic religious institution for about a thousand years before it started to fragment.

Video from 2016.

The rise of science and the spread of secularism accelerated the decline of Christianity in the West. Some denominations have attempted to "adapt to the times" by dropping or "interpreting" their mythology and transforming themselves into little more than progressive social-work institutions, but these congregations are in rapid decline. Conservative churches which preach a defiant fundamentalism are thriving in the United States and Christianity is apparently exploding in the Third World.

According to Chuck Colson, "the percentage of the world's population that is, at least by name [emphasis added], Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.

"But at that point, only one-fifth of the worlds Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. The typical Christian will be a woman living in a Nigerian village or in a Brazilian shantytown."

Video from 2016.

After almost 2,000 years, the historical trajectory of the rise and fall of Christianity is becoming clear. The religion originated in the Near East, spread into the Roman empire, rose to the height of its power in medieval Europe, then began to fragment and decline. Despite its best attempts to suppress literacy and scientific inquiry, Christianity simply couldn't survive the transition to the modern world that it worked so hard to prevent.

Religion in general is no longer believable to educated people. In Europe, even the church's own leaders don't seem to believe its teachings anymore, a sure sign that the religion is in its last stages in countries like Britain, where many churches are being closed, turned into historical museums or converted into mosques. As a result, Christianity is dying off in the West and thriving in the Third World. It will survive in the form of die-hard fundamentalist sects and the various syncretic mixtures of Christianity and native superstition now spreading through places like South America, Asia and Africa.

Video from 2010.

Christianity is finished in Europe and declining in the United States, but it will continue to thrive in its original form as a pre-scientific, pre-literate religion in the primitive regions of the world.

Related:

Why There Is No Way Back For Religion In The West.

Is Religion Dying Out?

Activists Demand More "Social Justice" In Medieval Studies

"A group of medieval studies scholars is threatening to boycott next year's International Congress on Medieval Studies to protest the rejection of sessions proposed by 'Medievalists of Color.'" Source: Campus Reform.

"Conference organizers, however, insist that workshops like 'How to Be a White Ally in Medieval Studies 101' and 'Toxic Medievalisms' were rejected based on standard criteria such as lack of intellectual justification." (See below)

Comment: Aided and abetted by cowardly administrators and leftist academics (is there any other kind?), the Cultural Marxists have almost completely destroyed the Liberal Arts programs at most universities in the West. They've even been trying to worm their way into traditionally immune STEM fields.

These parasites have been going after Medieval Studies for some time now:

"A growing concern among Medieval Studies scholars is that the field is too dominated by white, male scholars who appreciate its link to Christian values and the fact that it’s been somewhat resistant to identity politics changes seen in other humanities departments." Source: College Fix (2017). (Emphasis added)

The Social Justice Warriors are trying to undermine any field dominated by whites, especially white males seen as being "too sympathetic" to Christianity. That's what's really happening here. It's all part of the general assault on "whiteness" and men and Western Civilization. And the SJWs can't stand it when they're faced with any kind of resistance. They keep protesting and protesting until they get their way.

In the case of the International Congress of Medieval Studies, the July 19 Campus Reform story quoted at the top of this article makes it sound like the conference organizers still have the sense to resist the demands for idiotic workshops like "How To Be A White Ally In Medieval Studies," but according to a statement (PDF) I found on the ICMS' website (dated July 20), it sounds like the steering committee is ready to cave in:

"We are also willing to reconsider all four of the rejected sessions proposed to be co-sponsored by the Fellowship of Medievalists of Color for the 2019 Congress, should we be contacted by the sponsoring groups who proposed them."

If this keeps up, it won't be long until Medieval Studies programs have been transformed into discussion groups about white privilege, gender fluidity, BLM activism, postmodernism and the politics of intersectionality. The best professors will leave or take early retirement. Enrollment, such as it is, will drop as the best programs are systematically undermined. This pattern has repeated itself endlessly with other schools all around Europe and the United States.

Luckily, the universities don't have a monopoly on knowledge. If you're interested in the Middle Ages, you can learn just as much, if not more, about the period through a program of self-directed reading. There are still a lot of good history books out there, especially the ones written before the SJW blight started to spread its poison through the system, and you won't have to take a mandatory diversity-training workshop before you're allowed to read them.

Related: The Unbearable White of Medieval Studies.

Tombs Of 24 Inca Nobles Discovered In Peru's Valley Of The Pyramids

The rest of this series can be found here.

"Archaeologists in Peru have uncovered an extensive Incan burial site inside an adobe pyramid in a coastal desert valley far from the Andean heart of the empire." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"Two dozen cave-like tombs with human remains and pottery from the Incan culture have been unearthed so far at the Tucume Archaeological Site, Jose Manuel Escudero, director of the archaeological team working there, said on Thursday."

Note: "Archaeologists working in the ruined city of giant pyramids have discovered one of the largest sites of human sacrifice in South America." Source: The Telegraph (2006).

"So far, the team has uncovered the remains of 119 men, women and children as young as five who were hacked to death outside a temple.

"Archaeologists believe that the sacrifices reached a bloody crescendo in the final days of the city, as its rulers struggled to stave off catastrophe at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors, who arrived in the area in the 1530s. The pyramid city has been abandoned ever since.