I wish to thank Andrey Korotayev for, inter alia, pointing out to us
a few days ago that South Arabia was not the only place in the peninsula
where the Plague of Justinian pushed states (and chieftainships, defined
by anthropologists as polities differentiated, like states, only somewhat
less so, and mark you, I have read the list ANTHRO-L for years without
ever seeing them get less nebulous than that) over the edge of nonviability
by suddenly and drastically curtailing their resource base. Perhaps the
majority of sites which were loci of settled agriculutre, howbeit marginal,
were so affected and perhaps reverted, perhaps adopted de novo, the segmented-
lineage/acephalous sort of association.
That, as Andrey Korotayev also tells us, within two generations this
adaptation had become Time-Immemorialized Tradition - the Arabs, since
the Beginning of Time, had never known the yoke of kings, you see - is
hardly surpirising. Traditions may a priori be presumed Recent, unless
they prove fictitious, of course. (Cf Hobsbawm & Ranger, The Invention
of Tradition, 1990.)
The undermining of states occurred wherever the pandemic reached. Those
which survived became flabby. The same was true in the smallpox-measles
pandemics of the second-third centuries throughout the Eurasian landmass,
and also in the Black Death of the fourteenth century et seq.
All three of these world-historical disasters contributed to the
revolutionizing of religious beliefs. Even to social revolutions, in
Bohemia, for example, in 1415-1433; and on a much vaster scale in China
(1351-1368).
Ia the Rise of Islam *necessary* to socially construct the superpower
Empires of the Near East as "conquest-bait"? I think one should ask the
Avars, Kutrigurs, Utigurs, etc, that question; and the answer will be
*no*. But did the rise of Islam facilitate this intuition, which was
also present in the Byzantine government about the Persians, once the
Persian government had empirically vaildated it about the Byzantines?
This remains to be investigated.
Secondly. Did the Rise of Islam, qua religiously-bonded Arab national
cause unifying segmented-lineage/acephalous societies constitute a more
effective conquest device than the pre-Plague monarchies and chiefdoms?
Certainly, the irrigated-agriculture regions, trading-cities, and oases
experienced higher mortality rates than the hot and dry regions. This
is because the microorganisms thrive in warm and moist climates, most
especially where dense concentrations of humans exist. Put enough people
together, and the toll from septacaemic and pneumonic variants of the Plague
increases relative to that from the Bubonic. For the former two, the first
symptom is death.
Before Andrey Korotayev brought these issues to our attention, the
foregoing two had been unaskable questions. Congratulations, Andrey Korotayev;
the more unaskable questions, the better.
Daniel A. Foss