Alashiyan Descent - Introduction
Elucidating decline and fall.
Update - August 2024: Alashiyan Descent is no longer an active project on this Substack. The ideas for articles I originally had listed under this label when planning would have been severely constrained in quality and length had I not allowed each one to flourish in its own right. A consistent motif of this Substack throughout its existence has been experimentation, but not all experiments with writing will be wildly successful. Moreover, it has been changes to my work ethic and approach in recent months that have finally led to steady improvements in my productivity, including the frequency of new pieces here. Please consult the ‘about’ page for updates on any current projects I have for writing on this website.
In the Late Bronze Age, the island we know as Cyprus was host to a kingdom called Alashiya. It was a major source of copper, one of the two raw materials driving the era, for most of the surrounding city-states, kingdoms and empires. We can suppose the kingdom, or at least the individuals running the copper trade therein, became staggeringly wealthy as a result, augmented by the presence of other Cypriot exports in excavations across the Eastern Mediterranean. If it was possible to measure the GDP per capita of the region’s polities during this period, Alashiya would likely rank near the top. In other words, it was a lynchpin of a very globalised and interdependent world.
Then, fairly suddenly and for reasons we do not yet fully understand, that world came to an end. As far as we know, these civilisations had little idea they were about to collapse until the very end. Alashiya seems to have experienced a less harsh fall than some of its contemporaries, comparable to the crippling of Assyria and New Kingdom Egypt, but likely at the cost of drastic social and economic change on the island. Meanwhile, the ostensibly far stronger Mycenaeans and Hittites essentially vanished as a result of their catastrophes. The Alashiyan descent is a microcosm of the Bronze Age collapse, which is itself a microcosm of the decline and fall of civilisations throughout history. The gamut of potential causes of the Bronze Age collapse might have been present on Cyprus, yet simultaneously there remains much mystery as to what the sharp decline meant in practice.
Today, there are plenty of discussions and some deeds to the effect of civilisational decline. A certain nihilism has pervaded the missions, symbols and most other components that once enabled Western cultures to flourish. The potential causes of the decline, as well as the labels they are grouped under, are too numerous and subjective to list effectively; some can be substantiated more than others. We could start discussing atomising neoliberalism or the fallacies of various concepts here, but that would both be getting ahead of ourselves and no different from many quotidian political games. Whilst it is true that civilisations are not immortal, our general inability to act upon our apparent foresight is equivalent to the Bronze Age peoples’ lack of the same quality. It invites the chance of a fall on the scale of the Mycenaeans or Hittites, a markedly worse fate than even that of the Western Roman Empire. Wishing for this collapse, whether indirectly or outright, ranks somewhere between folly and utter madness.
What the West needs is a renewal to ward off any developing sense of nihilism, akin to how the Phoenicians, despite their great degree of continuity with the previous age, flourished following the fall of the Canaanites and surrounding empires. This is an extraordinarily tasking endeavour, but is the best-case scenario for the transition from one phase of civilisation to another, regardless of when that takes place. However, an advantage of living in modern times is the greatest degree of hindsight, that is to say access to history, ever recorded. Too many are misconstruing or ignorant of the fact that history, divorced of its contemporary contortions in all directions, always has much to teach us. Yet the first stage of finding a path to renewal must involve using our hindsight, so that we may learn from the past appearances of these sentiments of decline which must be overcome once again.
Therefore, the project I am calling Alashiyan Descent, named after our introductory microcosm, will explore the themes of decline and fall which punctuate human history. It will demonstrate how the abstract notions being dealt with have manifested themselves through time to make them and their lessons a little more concrete in the minds of readers. Additionally, it will attempt to show that our present woes are a little less unique than we might initially think, although our abundance of technology remains an obviously significant factor in any modern challenges. The seeming omnipresence of decay and collapse in the modern news cycle will be treated here either as a reflection of an ongoing historical moment or event we are aware is unfolding around us, or as simply algorithmic white noise. We cannot truly predict the future of these happenings, so expect contemporary topics to be addressed far less than historical ones.
Ultimately, hindsight from history can be a means by which the defence of civilisation can shift from a reactive to a proactive force. Of course, proactivity will not be merely a rear-guard defence, but a return to the continuous building up of civilisation. By heeding the successes and mistakes of our forbears, we might just become able to reach for a future with a renewed tether to the past. Since the nature of time forbids a perfect reversal of what has already transpired, the only way out of a descent is through. The result of such a journey remains to be seen.