It All Happened Before!

WEll...none of the stuff in this thread is particularly true. The Huns didn't knock out Rome, Rome and its alllies beat the Huns (Chalons 451 IIRC) and Byzantium lasted for 800 years after the Arab thing and China had no trouble with the Huns...indeed the only Chinese record of people who seem to be Huns is that they drove them away.
So if anything is repeating, its errors about actual events.

The muslim invasion of the eastern empire did last longer, but it was Arabic invaders that defeated it as a major power and ultimately conquered Byzantium itself.
As for your point that China had no trouble with the Huns, that's not accurate. The Huns, or at least their predecessors or near relatives, were the reason the Chinese built the great wall. After which the Huns turned to Europe and caused before mentioned incidents with the Roman empire.
The Han empire fell not unrelated to this outside pressure.
The Huns not only invaded India, they conquered and ruled it.

I don't really want to stress this. I wrote this thread with too little time, and didn't make the points clearly.
I liked your response in my other thread, where a response will take some consideration.

The muslim invasion of the eastern empire did last longer, but it was Arabic invaders that defeated it as a major power and ultimately conquered Byzantium itself.

As the Roman Empire grew, it required more soldiers to patrol its borders and frontiers. This brought a high tax burden on a population that was decreasing because of plague and poverty, dependent of immigration. Likewise, Rome Emperors and the upper classes adopted increasingly luxurious and extravagant lifestyles at the expense of the tax paying citizens. This cause not only great resentment among the lower classes, but the upper classes became more self-centered and less concerned about social and political responsibilities. New artistic and cultural styles were not being created. People came to view life as futile and meaningless. Weakened politically, economically, culturally, and psychologically, the Roman Empire no longer had the strength or the desire to fend off the Germanic invaders.
As the empire started to weaken, farmers and laborers clustered around powerful regional landowners to whom they surrendered full allegiance in return for military protection.

Not Arabic invaders - the armies that conquered Constantinople were largely Turks in ethnicity. They probably had arabic allies, but they weren't Arabs by and large. The leaders were certainly Turks.

Your narrative is intriguing, but essentially none of what it narrates actually occurred.
For example, after 500 the eastern part of the empire under Justinian was able to defeat any barbarians it encountered and the Hagia Sophia was built, so new cultural forms were emerging.

There's also no sign of increasing luxury since Nero's Golden house was probably the peak of luxury and that happened 1400 years before the Empire finally was no more (and less than 100 years after Octavian set up the Imperial regime).

The fractioning of political authority probably peaked in the west in about 1000 AD, long after the Empire had been re-established as the Holy Roman Empire, so the narrative of people who "surrendered allegiance" actually belongs to a world structured by feudalism, not by tribal federations such as dominated the west in say 600 AD.

I too want to ask you not to put so much emphasis on details, but see the spirit of the idea. Which is civilizations run through a cycle that ends with apathy after which they are invaded by non-civilized cultures.

True enough, and I stand corrected on the 'Arabic' part. But the emphasis was on muslim invaders.

Was it the Space Invaders that blew up the Twin Towers? I thought it was Muslims. Am I mistaken?

As for your point that China had no trouble with the Huns, that's not accurate. The Huns, or at least their predecessors or near relatives, were the reason the Chinese built the great wall.

The Huns not only invaded India, they conquered and ruled it.

I too want to ask you not to put so much emphasis on details, but see the spirit of the idea. Which is civilizations run through a cycle that ends with apathy after which they are invaded by non-civilized cultures.

Is that what happened to the Ottoman Turks?

Their empire was carved apart by the 'civilised' west was it not?

Or the late medeival Spanish?

They just sort of faded into insignificance after expensive military blunders, but I don't recall them suffering a subsequent invasion, am I wrong?

What about the British Empire?

We pretty much realised the moral cost of being top dog and so gave most of it back (after some bickering in places).

In what way was classical Rome more civilised than the Huns, Goths and Vandals* anyway?

*None of whom were Muslims.

I think great cultures begin to fail and fall when there is too much power at the top. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The people lower down finally get the message say "enough is enough" and eliminate the despots and dictators

Bu by civilization I mean for example all of contemporary Western civilization, or all of ancient Mediterranean civilization, not just the Romans.
And you would be right in saying that Mediterranean civilization definitely lived on in the eastern Roman empire. But if only half of Western civilization falls, say Europe, wouldn't that be bad enough?

That claim is contentious - it may be the case that the Huns who invaded Rome were related to the:
Xiongnu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But there is not sufficient evidence to support this claim. That Mulan movie is not exactly historically accurate.

You want to give a source? I'm a history major, and this claim is certainly outside anything I have ever read or heard.

In the 4th and 5th centuries, the Gupta Dynasty unified northern India. (...) The empire came to an end with the attack of the Huns from central Asia.

Interestingly, after the fall of the Gutpas the invading Huns simply integrated into the warrior caste of Hinduism and ruled the regions locally. With the social structure of India intact, much of its culture survived. The ruling warriors, however, had no use for the peaceful and contemplative religion of Buddhism.

The events in history reflect the decisions, conditions, needs and dispositions of humans and forces involved, across time. That we see familiar themes across the ages only makes sense - after all, we are the same animal facing recurring issues (even if the environment and factors change).

(....)

So yea, it has all happened before - depending on how you look at it.

Those conquests are similar in that one people invaded and overpowered another. As with any invasion. However, even a brief study will illuminate significant differences.

As for the Huns being like the Muslims, I do not see the relationship. The Huns were an aggressive, nomadic peoples from the Asian steppes, while the Muslims are, by and large, settled and civilized people from the Middle East and Indonesia who do not typically live by the practice of aggressive military campaigns against neighbors. Further, modern Muslims are not a monolithic group - considering the plethora of Muslim dominated nations, they certainly do not compare to the Hunnish tribal organization.

In other words, it's a forced analogy. As I argued earlier, it would make more sense to compare the US to the Huns, even though this connection is also a bit silly.

The real pattern to examine is the relationship between relatively civilized people and relatively barbaric people - the pattern being that the civilized are overrun by the barbaric.

In the past, it was often the case the invaders were from the Asian steppes (Rome, India several times, ancient Mesopotamia several times, Greece leading to a dark ages, ect). But this is explained by the difficulty of permanently settled agricultural societies on the steppes as compared to the lush river valleys of Mesopotamia and India.

That civilizations with a - as you call it - lush culture get overrun by the lean and mean ones.

By your definition of civilization, Rome never fell since western Europe was never devoid of urban centers after the early Iron Age. There are plenty of cities in Europe that have been continuously inhabited since say 500 BC.

It seems your cyclic idea requires a clear fall, but that these don't ever seem to happen. Half of a fall is "bad enough"?...bad enough for what?

Except that what you're describing never happens because without Lushious culture you don't get enough people to overrun anything. What actually happens is that from time to time the elites of a unlushious culture get sucked into a Luschious culture. The basic civilization remains intact and there is some shifting around of the elites involved. This describes the valley of Mexico in the period 1200-1600 AD, the Maya in the Yucatan, China with the Manchus and about 50 minor regime changes in the Mediterreanean littorial over a 3-4000 year period and apparently the Huns and Guptas in India. So I think your great cycle amounts to the simple fact that elites and elite styles change from time to time.

Didymos Thomas, see post #35.





If you call the medieval ages and the political instability in China after the fall of the Han dynasty just 'shifting elites'. Similarly in India and Mesopotamian classical civilization.
I would say those civilizations did fall. A clear fall is near impossible, except if the entire population gets wiped out. The downfall of the stable political system is bad enough for the people who live under it.

And in todays western culture, luxury and hedonism are no longer elite-only concepts with the majority of the population remaining poor peasants, those are a mass phenomenon.

Okay so its "bad enough" if there is political instability. So political instability is bad. Political instability is the bad thing that occurs cyclically? How is political instability of the cyclic kind different from political instability of the non-cyclic kind? When the Aztecs were running straight and true and not hedonistically, they ritually sacrificed 50,000 people a year in the name of political stability. Instability in the Aztec Empire was probably better for everyone except the elite.
Now look at the world now. There is no significant instability and everyone is hedonistically happier than ever before. We seem to be far from any cycle involving hedonism and instability.