Were Bronze Age states with Palace Economies have stronger state control than later Iron Age states? If so, what how did they manage that level of control?

by Seswatha

I asked a similar question last year but didn't get any answers. It seems from just Wikipedia, that a lot of Bronze Age cultures had palace economies, which seem to me to require some pretty extensive bureaucracy and control of the population. Yet, Palace economies disappear after the Bronze Age, right? And the the empires that replace them don't seem to regulate production and distribution of stuff anywhere near as heavily. So how exactly did the Bronze Age states manage this where later states didn't?

oudysseos

I'm not an expert in this area, but there are a couple of points that perhaps need clarification.

  1. The Bronze Age Collapse events are perhaps misleadingly named. Certainly a great number of cities show evidence of having been burnt or damaged in various ways, all at roughly the same time. Furthermore, the use of Linear B at Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns, Crete etc can't be attested much past 1190 BCE - but that only means that we don't have any surviving examples, not that they stopped using it all of a sudden. But perhaps they did - I have read that there is evidence to suggest a substantial drop in population at these sites as well, and maybe the pottery is less sophisticated. So clearly, the Greek mainland sites were very hard hit - but they weren't suddenly abandoned. Mycenae and Tiryns, at least, are supposed to have sent small contingents to Platea to fight the Persians.

And I don't think that you can call these misnomered Mycenaean states an 'empire', anyways. Furthermore, although it's true that Hattusa seems to have been destroyed during the Collapse period, Neo-Hittite states persisted quite well until the Neo-Assyrian Empire developed a true hegemony in the area, and Egypt, of course, didn't suffer anything like the damage that Greece, central Anatolia and the Levant did.

  1. The premise that later Iron Age states were less developed than Bronze Age Palace Economies I find puzzling. Certainly Athens by the Pisitratid period can be said to be a well-organized state. But we needen't wait even that long after 1200 BCE - by the 9th/8th centuries Greeks were colonising Western Anatolia, The Crimea, Sicily and Magna Graecia, and of those, Ionia developed many sophisticated and advanced city states.

I don't want to downplay the setback that Mainland Greek States suffered - clearly, it took 250 to 300 years for populations, trade and politics to recover. But the 'Dark Ages' were not universal to the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean suring LBA/Iron Age transition period.

Perhaps if you clarified what exactly you mean by 'Palace Economies', which ones and for what time period you are referring to, and which less-developed Empires you are referring to that supposedly replaced them less successfully, someone with more knowledge might be able to help you.