Recreation of the Bronze Age systems post collapse

[Deleted member 67076]

Would it be possible to recreate the Bronze Age Systems (Palace economies, highly centralized and stratified states, widespread international trade and diplomacy, relatively heavy urbanism, etc) in the aftermath of the Bronze Age Collapse rather than the Dark Ages that followed?

If so, how would this be accomplished?

 

[LSCatilina]

Palatial trade and economy already began to decline in the Late Bronze Age, and the rise of non-palatial exchanges might be as well a cause than a consequence of the crisis. Not that the existence of centralized and stratified polities couldn't deal with this (I mean, just ask Phoenicians and Néo-Assyrians for that matter) : the Late Bronze Age crisis shouldn't be over-exagerated, as it was as much a societal change than a political reshuffle (with climatic changes in the background).

Now, could we have a stronger palatial economy remains? Possibly, but it didn't do much good for post-Ramsessid Egypt, and the general raise of domanial economy in the mediterranean basin.

 

[Saphroneth]

The term "dark age", while evocative and technically correct, doesn't necessarily mean "this is a period that's bad". It's a historical term, which today more or less means "period when there are fewer historical sources" - that is, the period is "dark".


Anyway.

Would it be possible to recreate the Bronze Age Systems (Palace economies, highly centralized and stratified states, widespread international trade and diplomacy, relatively heavy urbanism, etc) in the aftermath of the Bronze Age Collapse rather than the Dark Ages that followed?

The reason why this might be quite hard is that the Bronze Age systems were as they were because they'd built up over time - complexity had developed on complexity and with the assumption of its presence. Once the collapse has happened, you can't really rebuild on the ruins because the original building-up was an incremental process.

 

[Saphroneth]

To give a specific example, take paper money - specifically, modern "the money is worth exactly what it says" paper money.
That only makes sense in a world where there's confidence in notes to have full value instead of being accepted at discount.
But that only makes sense in a world where notes come from central banking authorities with a good communication system and with a strong likelihood of survival.

There's several more steps and inferences in the chain, but what it ultimately comes out as is that for modern paper money you need a fairly modern society - it wouldn't work in the same form without a lot of the built-up infrastructure.