Themiclesian Dark Ages

The Themiclesian Dark Ages (昏古, m′rjing-ka′) is a historical period in Themiclesia spanning c. 800 to 385 BCE. 17th-century historians named the period "dark" because of a want of historical records that originate or credibly describe the period, though this want has gradually been supplemented by archaeological findings.

Name and definition

The term "Dark Ages" (昏, m′rjing) was first applied to Themiclesian history by the 17th-century historian Lord Prjêng (平君), whose phrase "dark" meant "obscure". In Prjêng's diction, there seemed to be relatively little pejorative or degenerate connotation. The obscurity of the period is understood as the lack of received history between or bridging two comparatively well-understood traditions, namely Themiclesia's description in Achahan and Gojun- and Jun-era literature, dating from the 12th to the 8th century, and the emergence of reliable annals in 385 BCE.

In Prjêng's time, the earliest mentions of Themiclesian in Menghean historiography dates to the 10th century BCE. Brief descriptions by Menghean historians consisted of the "light" on Themiclesian history for some time. However, since about 700 BCE, explorations to the west were no longer mentioned in texts, inspiring Prjêng to call the subsequent centuries "dark". In the 1700s, more information about ancient Themiclesia was found in Maverican epics, though they were not dated until much later. The more recent discovery of Achahan texts referring to Themiclesia and predating Menghean texts has further expanded the protohistoric period and accentuated the lack of materials describing the period.

The period preceding the Dark Ages is conventionally called the Protohistorical Period because Themiclesia is referenced, particularly for its mineral deposits, in multiple external sources. Deposits of lapis lazuli and turquoise, identified to be in Themiclesia, are found in Maverican epic poetry, Achahan tablets, and Menghean narratives both historical and legendary. The range of references, compiled during the "historical revolution" of 1750 – 1850, appears to confirm that the mineral deposits were already broadly known in the ancient world. Yet in these references, there is no uncontroversial information about cities or even humans living in Themiclesia, contrasting with archaeological findings that suggest multiple cultures capable of copper metallurgy already existed in Themiclesia.

The historian A. Gro says that:

The research of the Dark Ages is dominated, fortunately or unfortunately, by a single question: how did Meng culture, one of many, come to dominate Themiclesia by 385 BCE?

History

Arrival of Meng people

Menghean histories provide that a sudden shortage of new lapis lazuli and turquoise, valued in Meng states for their association with the mythologized Heaven, has disrupted ritualistic activity in the 10th century BCE. Though unclear to comptemporaries, this shortage was created by the collapse of the Achahan state, whose merchants then ceased to transit the Lapis Road that bridged Meng states at its east and mineral deposits in Themiclesia in its west. Explorers were therefore sent between that time and the 8th century to re-discover the mineral deposits and re-open the trade route. However, the Menghean canon does not explicitly state if and when these efforts came to fruition.

Archaeologically, metal tools of Menghean affinity have been found at various sites associated with the Lapis Road, and the oldest examples date to the 15th c. BCE. Formerly, scholars cited these findings in support of the theory that the intensive settlement of Themiclesia should be construed independently of the Meng demand for blue gemstones. Subsequent research discredited this conclusion because the source of mundane tools is deemed an unreliable indicator of the identity of its final users. However, it does support the notion that trade of the Lapis Road did not entirely cease when the Achahan culture collapsed; rather, long-distance crossing became less frequent, while segments of the route remained in active use. This means that some artifacts with Meng affinity could still have been indirectly imported to Themiclesia, which in turns may explain the scant but obvious existence of Meng artifacts there.

The prevailing view in recent years is that Meng explorers probably appeared in western Themiclesia around 900 BCE. This conclusion is supported by the appearance of a new mining technique, found in ′Ar and Nim, previously unknown to the region. Though widely cited, a minority of scholars hold that alternate intepretations are viable. Meng settlement in Themiclesia occurred considerably later, probably in the first half of the 700s. A larger body of evidence, including agricultural practice, construction style, bronze metallurgy, and funerary customs, are used to support this dating; nevertheless, earlier settlements have not been studied exhaustively, and an earlier date thus cannot be ruled out. Furthermore, there appears to be a transitional style of building technique that existed between about 800 and 600; scholars have not yet concluded whether this represents a nativization of Meng communities, or if native communities are imitating Meng practices, further complicating the identity of the builders.

8th to 6th century

The motives and character of the earliest Meng settlements are not conclusively described. Into the 7th century, a number are clearly associated with the extraction of gemstones, having taken up agriculture near to the site of extraction. Some sites are connected with rudimentary working of larger chunks of lapis lazuli, though the work of setting them to finished products seems not to have taken place in Themiclesia. Fields tilled by Meng farmers are often associated with bone or shell tools, worked with techniques novel to the region. Only a few settlements are characterized by irrigation work, suggesting that farming was not yet prevalent, so naturally-irrigated land was still widely available. Some communities show clear signs of influence by non-Meng communities in the Menghean north, such as leaf-shaped blades. On the other hand, other settlements are distant from known extraction locations and appear to be exclusively agricultural.

The distribution of settlements in Themiclesia in the early 4th c. BCE; yellow dots for settlements mentioned in the first 50 years of the Springs and Autumns of Six States, black for archaeologically confirmed cities

While there appears to be some overlap between the appearance of the first Meng people in Themiclesia and occasional records in Menghean histories of sending emissaries to seek lapis lazuli ore, the last Menghean record regarding such a mineral-driven expedition is dated to 757 BCE. Subsequently, nothing in received Menghean histories until the 1st century BCE can be readily identified as a reference to contemporary events in Themiclesia. This gap contrasts with a steady supply of lapis lazuli and turquoise exported over the Lapis Road to Menghe during this time period, the quantity of recovered artifacts with Themiclesian stones increasing after 500 BCE.

There are two mutually-incompatible theories advanced to explain this incongruence. The "Lost Contact" theory proposes that the expeditions may have reached Themiclesia and established extractive operations, but trade over the Lapis Road was intercepted by any one of several cultures along the road, so no Menghean merchant was able or required to wend to Themiclesia, a trek of 4,000 kilometers. The "Normalization" theory argues that regular traffic over the Lapis Road provided a steady supply of gemstones, so there was no longer any noteworthy shortage of the material. Historians also comment that while early Meng historians had an interest in peripheral cultures, Themiclesia was never described in great detail, indicating that contact was infrequent and non-political.

In comparison to the paucity of verifiable settlements in the 8th century, some settlements grew considerably during the 7th century while new ones appeared. Higher estimates restrict the total number of Meng people living in Themiclesia to no more than 5,000 around 650 BCE, and a lower bound is usually not presented. Despite this, sites which exhibit affinities to Meng culture still account for a disproportionable quantity of farmland, though pastoral culture, receiving new attention, diversified during the 7th century. Religious sites of larger scale appeared in that century and centred on megaliths usually identified with land deities in the State cult of Themiclesia. The funerary practices of early settlements is not very well preserved in the archaeological record; many elements are at odds with contemporary Menghean burials, and some archaeologists interpret these as signs of nativization.

The theme of nativization received strong attention from the archaeological community since the late 1800s, as part of the effort to establish a distinct Themiclesian culture that does not attribute most of itself to Meng originals. Over time, this attitude has somewhat faded, though elements of native culture visible in Meng culture is still emphasized recently.

The earliest walled settlement in Themiclesia is tentatively dated to about 550 BCE. Archaeologists believe this to be a significant development in both the structure and function of settlements:

Building a wall that encloses a settled area reveals quite a lot about how the settlement's residents conceived of their locality and their government. In the first place there must be a defensive demand, and there then must exist a central authority of some kind that can organize expertise and labour to build the walls.

5th century

An explosive growth period was evidenced between 500 and 450 BCE, evidenced by much-larger scale of mining for lapis lazuli and settlements around such mines. The larger settlements of the mid-5th c. BCE are estimated to contain 1,000 or so individuals, and they began to display signs of new power structures and specialization. At the same time, new settlements were predominantly Meng-cultural, and new population in existing settlements were also associated with them. This phenomenon may have been associated with the expansion of the Lapis Road, which then saw more merchants travelling longer lengths on the route, or even its entire length, rather than trade between cities and nomadic groups, the norm in the two previous centuries. This change in the mercantile practices was archaeologically discovered when a Meng merchant's body was discovered in 1941, carrying with him only finished goods characteristic of 5th-century Meng states, suggesting that the diffusion of merchandise had become more direct. Nevertheless, the function of nomadic groups persists into this period.

Some scholars propose to divide the known settlements in Themiclesia into the "native or nativizing group" and the "Meng or Meng-affinity group", based on architectural and funerary practices as a means to trace the expansion or recession of cultural influence in early Themiclesia. This has not received universal support from those who believe that nativization and evolution towards Meng practices are concurrent phenomena occurring in the same settlements. Since the 1970s, some have also proposed that a teleological outlook on the question of how did Themiclesia become Meng-dominated is not warranted, and that all cultural groups, including Meng, have experienced systematic growth and recession during the Dark Ages.

The expansion of Meng culture in the 5th century is associated with a range of rapidly-occuring phenomena in historiographic terms. Oracular plastrons began to be inscribed in the 5th century, and bronze vessels with inscriptions longer than a single grapheme appeared. For the most part, these bronzes were of a very low artistic quality compared to examples found in 5th-century Menghe. Some historians believe this "5th-century migration" is closely related to the genesis of received texts that began to appear in the early 4th century; those who subscribe to this belief consider Themiclesia to have entered a literate age since about 450 BCE. However, others point out that there were still signs that a variant of Proto-Chikai may still have been spoken in some areas to facilitate trade with nomadic groups on the Dzhungar plateau.

While the Antiquities of Themiclesia suggest that some family trees, particularly those of rulers, extend into the Dark Ages, very little evidence is available to confirm their accuracy. Antiquities provide that a total of 12 rulers came before P.rjang the Sixth, who was the first Tsjinh ruler whose coronation is datable to 295 BCE, but this is contradicted in the Six States, which provide 22 figures given periodic sacrifices associated with rulers instead. Former K.rang is often supposed to have led the Tsjinh people during the Dark Ages during the late 7th or early 6th centuries; however, recent scholarship suggests he lived in late 6th century instead, given his connection to commerce. There are also voices that defend the reliability of rulers' family trees, principally with the argument that this information was socially and politically relevant ("the very thing that constitutes social life in the Dark Ages") during much of the Dark Ages and is evidenced to have been written down frequently on oracular plastrons.

Transition to Antiquity

The late 5th century and early 4th century is marked by an increased degree of "horizontal organization" within and between cities. Colonies in the sense of later colonial period, that is controlled by metropolitan patrons, did not yet exist, new cities states founded in this period were small but mainly autonomous. While the clan had been, to this point, the primarily form of social organization, relationships between clans became more political than commercial at the end of the Dark Ages. Geographic politics is sometimes said to have originated at the very end of the Dark Ages when single-clan settlements became multi-clan cities, some of which began as group of nearby settlements or arose around marketplaces. Until this point, single-clan settlements were often governed by parental or pseudo-parental right and moved as a whole if farmland or pastures around it had exhausted. Cities, which often reached 3,000 or more residents, were large enough that control over it and its economy was shared between clans, creating political relationships beyond the kinship group.

The conventional end of the Dark Ages is placed at 385 BCE, when the Six States begins transcribing Sjin's oracular records; this fact, however, is not accompanied by noticeable social changes. Characteristics of the end-Dark Ages remained current and visible into the Archaic Period, where cities often had distinct quarters for specific kinship groups, and politics are thought to have occurred between leaders of kinship groups. Scholars of religious history often posit that the recognition of non-kinship deities assisted the process of urbanization, where priesthoods became important, and perhaps initial, inter-clan institutions. Indeed, oracles seemed to suggest that more sacrifices were being dedicated to non-kin deities at the very end of the Dark Ages.

Culture

The cultural development of the Dark Ages had been considered in light of the unidirectional radiation of Meng culture in Themiclesia from merchants and settlers; however, since 1952, this has come under strong challenge from archaeolgists. They provide that cultural assimilation in Themiclesia, in the context of the Dark Ages, was bi-directional, where native groups absorbed and adopted Meng culture and vice versa. They cite several examples of settlements where aboriginal culture, identified with the late Lithophone and Sarcophagus cultures, gradually became more apparent in Meng lifestyle. According to this school of thought, Themiclesia in the Dark Ages could be construed as a cultural convergence, rather than displacement of native cultures by Meng culture, and this latter impression arises out of the preservational and topical biases of extant historical writings.

The historian C. Larter asserted in 1957 that:

The idea that Themiclesia was colonized by Meng settlers who acted under royal orders to civilize local barbarians is unhistorical and chauvinist. Today, we can securely attribute this view to 5th- and 6th-century historians who wished to emphasize the cultural legitimacy of Themiclesian political institutions by connecting them to or viewing them as exponents of those of ancient Menghe. We see, in at least three examples, where ostentatious display of native lifestyles and cultural materials was a symbol of power and sacredness in early Meng settlements. This is not only true in the Dark Ages but too in the Archaic Period, where royal burials contrast with common burials by their inclusion of aboriginal cultural materials and funerary customs.

There is no evidence that Themiclesian polities in the Dark Ages or the Archaic Period conceptually categorized populations into "Meng" and "barbarous" groups, and such reified cultural identities and the contrast between them cannot be plausibly dated to even the Classical Period. Only at the very end of the Tsjinh hegemony do we see a discernable attempt to align the courtly Tsjinh elites with Meng, and that is on the level of a political comparison between the Meng empire, which dominated southern Menghe in its first stable empire, and the Tsjinh hegemony, which had subdued competing political authorities in Themiclesia by 256 CE and was seeking a cultural or moral justification for said subjugation. The power of Meng culture, now orthodox in Menghe, was that rationale the Tsjinh court utilized to explain its dominance.

A prominent example in this new view, which dominated historical circles in the 1960s through the 1990s, is the economy of the stone chime. Stone chimes capable of making sounds are found in contexts implying ceremonies of native affinity, and they are associated with rich burials and loci of power. Stone chimes were not manufactured by Meng settlements until after the Dark Ages, indicating that access to stone chimes, and by extension to native societies, was associated with high social status amongst Meng settlements. Larter's arguments have largely been accepted by other historians, especially after specialists in the Six States recovered events and themes suggestive of native culture associated with the earliest concepts of nobility from the Six States.

However, in 1981, Martin Sak made a countervailing argument that:

While Larter and his followers have made convincing, and as I say conclusive, arguments about the economy of early cultural materials, it does not wholly address the archaeological evidence we see. What we see is that most bronze artifacts are made by Meng techniques and employed in a way connected with Meng culture, nearly all excavated texts are in the Meng language, and most burials exhibit more Meng affinity than native affinity. All the known states by the end of the Classical Period spoke Meng language. The radiation of Meng culture is a real historical event, rather than a mistaken impression arising under preservational and topical biases.

It does not challenges the importance of native cultural to early Meng elites or the solid conclusions drew about their mentality, but the reality is that Meng culture has become dominant in Themiclesia in later times, and in saying so I do not at all imply that Meng people held native cultures to be inferior to their own. There is strong evidence that early Meng people treated natives with respect, intermarried with them, traded with them, and lived with them generally peacefully. I wholeheartedly reject the narrative of civilization by cultural conquest, but that does not change the reality that Meng cultural radiated, while native cultures, both Lithophone and Sarcophagus, waned in terms of the number of settlements, their population, and the amount of material remains they generated.

In response, Larter wrote in 1982:

Sak cloaks the same, archaic binary understanding of cultural groups in Dark-Ages Themiclesia with a specious and pseudo-objective interpretation archaeological data. He regards anything in Themiclesia similar to contemporary artifacts found in Meng cultures in Menghe as evidence for the expansion of Meng culture, and anything that was once present but then absent in Themiclesia as the same for the recession of native culture. This is a good improvement from the traditionalist thinking of the conquest narrative as a policy, which he rightly rejects, but he succeeds only in reconstructing a human, conscious policy of conquest as a unconscious process of conquest. Sak's objective is to find out about why the winner won and loser lost, in his recent monography about Dark-Ages Themiclesia.

B. Tjek asserted in 1985 in an attempt to reconcile Larter and Sak:

Sak's analysis is heavily founded upon geography and statistics, making a convincing case that "object-forms identified as Meng in cultural affinity" have gradually made their way from Meng sites into native sites and there disrupted the production of "object-forms identified as native in cultural affinity". This I accept. He draws the conclusion that Meng technology and culture have therefore been preferred to native alternatives. This I do not accept. I am of the opinion that Sak was innundated by the sheer number of archaeological findings he consulted in his survey of all of southern Themiclesia and overlooked logical imperfections that render his conclusions suspect.

We should strive to understand that some object-forms are interchangeable. A beetle-spade, the type that Lithophone culture is known to use, is interchangeable in the context of tilling eath with the coin-spade associated with Meng culture. If the coin-spade form was more effective than the beetle-spade form, then it stands to reason that the coin-spade was adopted and beetle-spade forgotten in native sites, and we receive this as a reduction in the number of blades of the beetle form and increase in the same of the coin form. This is not to say that Meng culture has spread to this native site—only the sterile, uncultural shape of a spade physically more effective at moving earth has. How do we know this? Because Meng agricultural practice does not spread with the shape of its spade, and certainly not the Meng festivals associated with agriculture. Rather than understanding this as a waning of native culture like Larter believes Sak does, we instead argue that this testifies to native cultures' resilience and ability to adapt to new technology, enhancing—not diminishing—the quintessential elements their culture.

On the other hand, we can also pursue a finer understanding Larter's arguments about the economy of stone chimes in early Themiclesia. If we could re-animate the music Meng people played on native chimes, and they turned out to be native tunes, we can say that Meng settlements have incorporated native music into their cultural lives. Unfortunately, that remains a fantastical proposition. Yet the clear association of such chimes with sumptuous burials, their prominent place in musical ensembles in the Archaic Period, the importance of chimes as gifts between Meng settlements, etc. all persuade us to believe that access to native culture was emblematic of early Meng elites, and the material objects associated with native culture were displayed meaningfully and ostentatiously.

Historiography

Some criticize the idea of a "dark age" is inappropriate, as it would imply that a more highly developed society has degenerated and lost its own history during the period. Benedict Charleston presented in 1909 that the "light" at the earlier end of the dark age are only fortuitous records of limited significance and intimated that the phraseology serves to "extend Themiclesian nation's history deeper into antiquity". He points out that the Ostlandic people were not said to have existed only because a foreign traveller noticed that the place called Ostland exists. Some Themiclesian historians oppose Charleston's arguments and point out that the earliest records nevertheless contain concrete clues about the settlement and history of the dominant culture in the modern day, and it would do injustice to a nation's histories if only that of its dominant culture is studied.

Records

Impressions and mud tablets

An ostracon bearing what is thought to be a personal name, attached to a jar containing grains

The earliest evidence of writing in Themiclesia predates the Dark Ages and are identified as seal impressions from Proto-Chikai and Achahan merchants, spanning the 15th to 10th centuries BCE. These impressions are, for the most part, personal names and terms for materials. They are not considered writing per se, but in combination with the much fuller corpora of similar writings in those cultures, linguists consider these impressions to be part of those systems.

For much of the Dark Ages, residents of Themiclesia made impressions similar to those found in Achahan characters on pottery jars and mud tablets. These tablets rarely betray complete thoughts and instead are heavily inclined towards symbols and numerals. Larger tablets tend to be inventories listing multiple goods, while smaller tablets, often with holes punched, are usually interpreted as labels attached to larger containers. These tablets tend to be discovered in communal storage areas, where the contents and ownership of opaque containers would logically be displayed; outside of communal contexts, large private warehouses, some containing thousands of urns, are also associated with tablets and labels. The lack of private names on some of these stores has been interpreted as a sign that the contents were owned by a single figure, perhaps an embryonic kingship.

The linguistic affinity of such tablets have been disputed since their discovery in 1957. On one hand, some consider these labels wholly alingual—representing things only on the basis of pictorial likeness rather than human language. On the other hand, labels from the Dark Ages are paralleled by similar labels from the 600s CE, when they were certainly considered to be legible. A key issue in interpreting these labels is the interchangability of the symbols used: the symbol for "fish", for example, looks similar in both Achahan and archaic Meng scripts; the labels found in Themiclesia showed a mixture of both scripts. In inventories, which sometimes contain personal names and what appear to be grammatical particles, there is limited evidence that both languages may have been used. Some linguists believe that Meng affinity can be gleamed in tablets that place numerals after nouns they modify, since in the Proto-Chikai language they occur in another order, but others argue that the positioning of numerals is not sufficiently specific to diagnose the sequential characteristic of true writing and, if that is true, affinity to any language.

Oracular inscriptions

Divination by heat-induced cracking of tortoise shells or animal bones dates to the Neolithic period and was present across a geographically expansive area in eastern Hemithea; however, the practice of inscribing texts onto the oracular media developed millennia later after the technique itself and is far from universal. In Themiclesia, the practice is associated with Meng settlers and has been attested in Themiclesia since the 8th c. BCE. The vast majority of used scapulae (tortoise plastrons are rare in Themiclesia) are not inscribed. Comparable the situation in ancient Menghe—royal divinations tend to have longer inscriptions, while non-royal ones are rarely inscribed. The oldest specimen of an inscribed divination platron is tentatively dated to around 625 BCE. For the first two centuries, inscriptions rarely encompass complete thoughts and are mostly names, numerals, and materials. Inscriptions grew in length initially in the southwest and the in the north in the 400s.  

Unlike Menghean tablets, Themiclesian ones are rarely dated, so the periodization of the discovered tablets relies principally on stratigraphy from the site of excavation; as the digging for oracular tablets predated scientific archaeology, a considerable corpus of tablets, not provenanced, remain undatable. Even when dated, typically only the date in the Hexagenary cycle is specified, and the chronologization of tablets remains an active field in research. The earliest oracular tablet dated with confidence was probably inscribed in 401 BCE, and this conclusion is possible because of a reference to a solar eclipse following the transit of Venus. The Springs and Autumns of Six States, widely thought to be a transduction of oracular tablets, starts in 385 BCE and spells the canonical end of the Dark Ages.

Multiple written traditions

It has been proposed that there may have been multiple traditions of writing in Dark Ages Themiclesia, where the skill and custom of creating and maintaining written materials was restricted to particular contexts.

Scholars have argued that there are multiple and drastic preservation biases in remote Themiclesian history, because writings in some contexts are made in materials with superior longevity. For example, the oracles of the 4th and 3rd centuries are almost quotidian in nature, but they are preserved in good condition and are transparent to modern scholars. A. Gro says:

It is an error to assume that divination took up the entirety of all human life in Themiclesia, but that is the conclusion that some 18th- and 19th-century historians have arrived at, because the oracular medium is the best-preserved one.

Similarly, oracular and vanishingly-rare bronze inscriptions were thought to be the only writing dating to the Dark Ages until 1924, when clay tablets bearing Achahadian characters were unearthed. As oracular and bronze inscriptions were carried out exclusively in Meng characters, and the study of history in the 19th century was dominated by the pursuit of the written and preferably unearthed word, they have led some scholars to think that Meng culture were dominant in the Dark Ages, with aboriginal cultures and Dzhungar influence castigated as nebulous or even speculative. The more modern consensus is that Meng people were a minority in Themiclesia until the end of the Archaic Period in 100 CE.

B. Sak, following Gro, says:

It demands attention that writing was strongly accultured and associated with specific media during the Dark Ages and subsequent Archaic Period. There are no Achahadian oracular inscriptions in scapula or plastron or Meng characters on baked clay tablets or seals. We must consider the possibility that Achahadian survived in Themiclesia as a lingua franca as labels and seals continued to be written in Achahadian down to the 3rd c. BCE, while Meng writing was restrictively to cultic purposes introduced from Meng. A relic like the Achahadian language in commerce is not unusual in the ancient world. Writing remained contextual and priestly in the Archaic Period, as literature in the modern sense had not been committed to writing, a practice that probably did not predate the beginning of the Common Era.

Known polities

The definition of a polity during the Dark Ages remains contentious, and reliable evidence attesting to political activities is nearly absent. Rather than the concept of a state or city-state, most historians prefer to describe the politics of the period in terms of clans, families, the possessions they held, and the relationships they had with each other. There is little suggestion of territorial exclusivity on any level broader than the clan's holdings until the middle of the Archaic Period. Concentrations in unearthed emblems or monograms, division of labour, and walled cities are clues that have led historians to reconstruct societies in Themiclesia.

See also

• Themiclesia