Figuring Out the Past : a snapshot
“The 3,495 vital statistics that explain world history”, by Peter Turchin (the author of Ultrasociety and the Director of Sheshat database) and Daniel Hoyer (Senior Project Manager, Sheshat).
Following is a brief summary (with verbatim extracts) of the introduction:
“Figuring Out the Past turns a quantitative eye on our collective trajectory. Behind the fleeting dramas of individual factions and rulers, it looks for large-scale regularities. It asks how key social and technological innovations spread around the world, and it pinpoints outliers from the general trends.
“In a crisis of short-termism, our world needs somewhere to turn to for information about the relationship between past and future”. — The History Manifesto:
It “draws on a vast reservoir of historical data” from “Seshat: Global History Databank was founded in 2011 with the long-term goal of collecting and indexing as much data about the human past as can be known or credibly estimated.” “Much as contemporary economic data are used to test theories about the day-to-day evolution of economic systems, Seshat was created to test long-range hypotheses about the rise, workings and fall of societies across the globe.” “As of 2020, Seshat holds information on over 450 historic societies (polities)” for more, seshatdatabank.info
“Figuring Out the Past offers sections ranking societies, […] separated into eras (ancient, medieval, early modern and modern), along with rankings across the eras. It also traces the geographical spread of key technologies and social innovations, from mounted cavalry to coinage, to show where and when some of the most important breakthroughs took place, and how they diffused around the globe.”
“These figures show how much we all have in common, both with our ancestors and with each other. We all share the need to organise and maintain social cohesion among large and diverse populations. We all have to innovate to survive in changing physical and social environments, to bolster ourselves against the vicissitudes of natural disasters and to interact with neighbours (who may not have peaceful intentions). There is, moreover, a deep continuity in our symbolic lives. We all build glorious monuments to our own ingenuity and creativity. We all seem compelled to develop rituals to create a shared sense of identity. We all have ideals that we strive to live up to […] One truth that Seshat demonstrates is that, along with many unique milestones that were reached at different places and times, there are plenty of immutable patterns in our shared history. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And nothing makes this fact clearer than a close look at the data.”
Here are a couple of example screenshots (also note the table of contents on the left):
This is a pretty fucking awesome resource for data and history buffs with potential signals / lessons for our current trajectories :) Cheers!
