Daily Archives: July 14, 2024

Top Tens – Philosophy & Science: Top 10 Books (7) Robert Anton Wilson – Prometheus Rising

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(7) ROBERT ANTON WILSON –

PROMETHEUS RISING (1983)

 

Rivalling Terence McKenna as the most trippy entry in my top ten – indeed, Robert Anton Wilson might well be summed up by his own fictional creation “Operation Mindf**k” in the Illuminatus Trilogy.

To quote his bio from Wikipedia, “Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic…not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything”.

He was also recognized within Discordianism – that Western zen – “as an Episkopos, pope and saint”, something which permeates both his philosophical and fictional writings, the latter of course including the Illuminatus Trilogy which went a long way towards earning him this entry (as well as earning its own place in my Top 10 SF Books).

Not to mention he was an editor for Playboy magazine, something which earns my respect and indeed reverence alone – which only increases from the book he wrote while editor, Ishtar Rising or at it was originally titled, The Book of the Breast, apparently originating from a bet that he could write a whole book on, well, breasts. In fairness, it’s a little deeper than just a book about breasts – and almost earned this spot.

Although it was a close call with Ishtar Rising or Book of the Breast, I ultimately had to go with his Prometheus Rising for this entry. I’m a fan of icebergs – as in the meme representing ever deeper and wilder layers to something – and this book might well be styled as an iceberg of the human mind or consciousness, taking the reader on a progressively deeper and wilder trip through Timothy Leary’s “eight-circuit model of consciousness”.

Indeed, the whole of Wilson’s writings might be regarded as one iceberg or another, or perhaps one big iceberg – a hoot as you go tripping through ever deeper levels.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Empires (Special Mention) (8) Phoenician & Punic Empires

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Carthaginian dependencies and protectorates through the Punic Wars (public domain image – Wikipedia “Ancient Carthage”)

 

(8) PHOENICIAN & PUNIC EMPIRES

 

The Phoenicians rose to prominence among the Canaanites after the Bronze Age Collapse as the thalassocracy par excellence to dominate the Mediterranean and to influence classical Western civilization.

They earn special mention as with one notable exception they weren’t really an empire. Indeed, they weren’t even really a single ‘nationality’ or state, but an agglomeration of city-states like Sumer before them, located on the Levantine coast (mostly in modern Lebanon) – with the most prominent being Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos.

Of these, Tyre rose to become the richest and most powerful, famed for its purple dye that became synonymous with imperial chic – particularly through its use by the Roman emperor. Under its ruling priest Ithobaal from 887 to 856 BC, it even took a shot at expanding its territory to other Phoenician states, coming the closest the Phoenicians ever did to a unitary territorial state.

So if the Phoenicians didn’t really have an empire or even a single state, why the special mention at all?

Well, firstly there remains the history of Phoenician maritime and mercantile power, indeed the sole such power in the region for several centuries – arguably the precursor of what might be styled as economic neo-imperialism.

Interestingly, they combined maritime power with proto-industrialism. Like the Greek city-states which rose in parallel with them, they had few natural resources – apart from the lumber (or cedar) for which they were famed – so they specialized in craft, construction, and manufacture, for which they were also famed in contemporary literary works from the Bible to Homer.

With that maritime and mercantile power came cultural influence, best known of which is the oldest verified alphabet, but the full extent of their influence on classical Western civilization is still being discovered – for example, the “orientalization” of “Greek cultural and artistic conventions”.

However, “as a mercantile power concentrated along a narrow coastal strip of land, the Phoenicians lacked the size and population to support a large military”, and hence “increasingly fell under the sway of foreign rules” from “neighboring empires – except for their colonies, which brings me to my next point…

Secondly, there was the history Phoenician colonization, overlapping and in rivalry with classical Greek colonization – similarly founding colonies and trading posts, mostly of limited size but of impressive range throughout the Mediterranean coastline. The Greeks may have eclipsed them in the eastern Mediterranean, but the Phoenicians continued to predominate in the western Mediterranean, not least one colony founded by Tyre known to history as Carthage. Which brings me to my third point…

Thirdly, there was that one notable exception to the Phoenicians not really being an empire and that was the empire of the Phoenician colony that effectively took over the other colonies in the western Mediterranean and eclipsed the original Phoenician city-states, even Tyre as the city-state that founded it – Carthage and its Carthaginian or Punic empire.

Like the power that rivalled and ultimately destroyed it as the predominant power in the western Mediterranean – Rome – Carthage was an imperial republic. Before it lost out to the Rome that it mirrored as a republic – as it also mirrored the maritime and mercantile power of the original Phoenician city states – Carthage gradually expanding its economic and political hegemony across the western Mediterranean through a network of “colonies, vassal states and satellite states” that “controlled the largest territory in the region”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Wars (Special Mention) (3) Bronze Age Collapse

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Sea Peoples in their ships during battle with the Egyptians – relief from the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu (public domain image – Wikipedia “Late Bronze Age Collapse”and “Sea Peoples”)

 

(3) BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE

 

Styled as World War Zero by some historians.

The Bronze Age Collapse – or more precisely Late Bronze Age Collapse – was the widespread societal collapse of Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization in the 12th century BC, argued to be worse than the collapse of the western Roman Empire or even the worst case of societal collapse in human history.

Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece – the Greeks of the Trojan War – were among the most famous casualties, ushering in the Greek Dark Ages for a few centuries.

However, they are among about a dozen ancient civilizations that collapsed or declined – foremost among them the Hittite Empire that collapsed in Anatolia, while Egypt’s New Kingdom and the Assyrians clung on by the skin of their teeth, in decline or weakened. “Almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”

I don’t know much about the finer details of the Bronze Age Collapse, but then neither does anyone else ultimately, as it remains the subject of argument and theory.

However, war is often cited as the main culprit, typically at the hands of the mysterious and to some extent still hypothetical “Sea Peoples”, seaborne raiders to rival the more usual horse blitzkrieg of nomadic herding tribes in civilization-crushing effect.

I certainly think war played a major part, hence this special mention, although am less clear whether it was the cause of the collapse or an effect – with the latter involving the Sea Peoples and others effectively moving into the void left by collapsing civilizations.

Interestingly, the Sea Peoples are proposed to include a number of ethnic groups – one of which is identified as the ancestors of the Philistines faced by the Israelites in the Bible. The Israelites themselves rose in the vaccuum left behind by the retreat or collapse of Hittites, Egyptians and Assyrians – so that the Bible itself has origins in the Bronze Age Collapse, as does that other landmark of western culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Apart from Sea Peoples and war, other causes are proposed for the collapse – political fragmentation or rebellion within societies, drought or famine, natural disasters such as earthquakes or volcanic eruption, plagues, and the collapse of trade for manufacture of bronze (or the emergence of iron among adversaries).

Or a combination of all of these – “the civilizations could have endured any one disaster, but not multiple at the same time, especially not when they were feeding into one another”.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)