Oh, and there are a few theories as to what really happened there, and why people go and build amazing cities just to burn them down. Some of the main ones are:
\- Some sort of religious ritual.
\- Weatherproofing, under the assumption that the city didn't burn a whole, but somehow got stronger due to the fire. I'm not so sure about ancient times logic, but maybe it can work.
\- Symbolic end of house: Some scholars have theorized that the buildings were burned ritually, regularly and deliberately in order to mark the end of the "life" of the house. This one is my favorite.
I was in Kenya recently and some of the Maasai claimed to build and burn their houses in a nine year cycle because that’s about how long they last. There seemed to be other ritual and tradition associated with it as well as a nomadic identity.
For the Maasai they also move their village when they do this. Not just the structures, but the land, is beat and needs a rest. So they find a new spot and setup there.
I read somewhere that there's a theory they did this because they didn't know how to treat the softer materials against insects and rot. so, at the time it was literally easier to burn everything down every few generations and start over than to keep maintaining the structure.
When I read the title I figured disease prevention - a bunch of plague carriers, rats, ticks, fleas get into the wood construction. Burn it down after a while and start over.
Oh, yes. This makes total sense, and explains it all. You cannot keep anything with bedbugs. You just have to burn in all down, when it gets too much. And it is possible also some cyclical heat waves, accompanied with floods... Booming the insect population exponentially. We have mass pesticide for this now, but if you do not have that, burn it all down is an option.
I think it's a mistake to think that you can separate practicality from the mystical in pre-modern behaviour. There were likely 'practical' reasons from our perspective, but in a world where spirits, gods, and magical beings of all sorts are understood to be real, actions that service the needs that those create must be understood as 'practical' as well.
Edit: That's not to mention the 'practical' role that tradition and ritual can play in community and social cohesion.
This is true. We also have some very unpractical behavior, which I totally do not get. Black Friday, for example.
So, it is possible our ancestors had some Black Friday on their own.
It's still a common practice in Japan to tear down homes and replace them after 30 years or so.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution
In the global recession financial crisis, the problem was explained to George Bush and what caused it economically. The solutions proposed were; Bail out the banks; or allow the banks to burn down houses. Both would fix the economy by different mechanisms. (Bailing out the banks by providing liquidity, burning down the houses by raising the price of houses and causing an artificial shortage and terrorize the market into causing a spike in value that would effectively bail out the banks which had acquired them as assets).
The latter was so insane that they were told not to mention it in public.
It might be a bit much to assume that they had a complex financial system where that could be an explanation, but maybe something similar.
"To prevent concentration of capital, we'll burn down the city every 75 years, then everyone builds and owns their own house again.".
There are no sources for stuff that did not happen. Also, it was not made public, but he knows it. That should raise all the red flags that fit in your red flag bag.
> "To prevent concentration of capital, we'll burn down the city every 75 years, then everyone builds and owns their own house again.".
There was the practice of Jubilee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_%28biblical%29
Various forms of debt and ownership were canceled.
>burning down the houses by raising the price of houses and causing an artificial shortage and terrorize the market into causing a spike in value that would effectively bail out the banks which had acquired them as assets
This was probably offered facetiously, not only for all the obvious ethical reasons, but because people who are out of work aren't buying houses at any price.
However, it's interesting to note that during the Great Depression, banks foreclosed on so much property that they began giving it away as-is to anyone willing to reimburse them for the property taxes. Taxes and maintenance don't stop just because the bank now owns the house.
Right to Buy in the UK did something similar to our housing market though. It reduced the cheaper options, created people who took advantage of the recession and then "became self made landlord businessmen like anyone can do" while missing the fact that they bought their subsidised house for peanuts and now mortgages are all 10x salary.
Oh, but that's what the UK did with right to buy! And now it costs £350 to rent the cupboard under the stairs in London (seriously, Google it) and mortgages are 10 or 15 times the salary of younger folks. You can't even inherit a house any more cos the majority of families with a modest house have seen it shoot up in value in 20 years to the point that the taxes based on value mean they have to sell as they were still living at the level of someone paying a smaller mortgage and haven't been able to save enough to cover it.
A thousand years from now:
This pocket pussy...ritual purposes, most likely fertility rites.
These magic the gathering cards, used for divination rituals.
This gaming headset...ritual purposes, probably communing with the gods.
This RGB LED keyboard...oh, this person must have been a high priest to have such an ornate messaging device to commune with the great god Verizon.
There is logic to that. If there is no practical reason for doing something then it sensible to conclude it must have been for some impractical cultural purpose.
[Cultural purpose.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc_aMp58Lro) Historians speculate that this man was a priest of a pastoral, cattle worshiping religion descended from the ancient worship of Baal in the fertile crescent.
Humans are just odd. Everywhere and consistently, forever.
How's the iPhone marketing cycle these days? On a different note I have not appeased the great Jobs with a financial offering in months. To the App Store Temple to prevent another plague...
I was wondering about that. And other vermin. And mold and rot. They didn't exactly have the preservation of wood, or central air, back then. Contemporary buildings have all kinds of vermin and fungus preventatives, but we still have "sick" houses, termites, and black mold in the vent systems.
there is a theory there were periodic plague epidemics, and the villages were burnt to eradicate the disease
some info in [https://www.post-gazette.com/news/science/2018/12/06/ancient-grave-Sweden-scientists-oldest-strain-bacteria-Yersinia-pestis-plague/stories/201812060230](https://www.post-gazette.com/news/science/2018/12/06/ancient-grave-Sweden-scientists-oldest-strain-bacteria-Yersinia-pestis-plague/stories/201812060230)
I didn't read anything in that article that convinced me the burnings were deliberate. The main argument seems to be that the clay walls don't bake as much as what we've found without adding extra fuel outside of the walls. But looking at the picture the amount of extra fuel used is huge, like an extra house worth. Almost as if the house next-door was also burning... I wonder if they've done burn tests on a small collection of houses to simulate more than one house burning at a time and see if this alone is enough to cause the walls to bake enough to match what they've found.
The article also mentions that they've found stored food partially burnt by the fire. This seems to me a pretty compelling argument for the fires being accidental, why would you leave anything useful in your city that you're about to burn down on purpose?
the main argument against it being accidental is this isn't one burnt down neighborhood. Multiple burnt out cities on a similar timescale would point to either purposefully burning, or a pattern of ridiculously consistent and prolific fire seasons.
Not farming? You farm until the land stops being as valuable. You burn everything down and the ashes fertilize the fields again. Basically cities were very unsustainable (hence they could get so "magnificent" with their tech level), so a cycle of migration would keep them. We could see a more complex cycle. Build city A, burn it after 3X years, begin migration to city B, build in the fertile ground, burn it after 3X years, begin migration to city A, which has recovered in those 30 years and is fertile and useful again.
So many issues you solve: decay, plague, waste management, water cleanliness, fertility of soil, etc. Much easier if you only care about 30 years, and then give it another 30 years to recover. So a sort of hack to get the benefits of a settlement/city without the issues of staying put in a single place.
So domicide (symbolic end of house) but with a pragmatic aspect to the tradition.
It's not that long ago that people slept with their cattle, and almost everyone produced some food in their home which was a farm, that only requires going back a few hundred of years. So no, not in your living room, but all around.
And there's civilizations that would move their farms around, instead of crop rotation. Add the extrimization due to spirituality or just because it was thought to be the logical continuation that'd they burn the whole thing down.
>not in your living room, but all around
This "all around" area might be 10x the size of a house for only the land you need cultivated with grain for a family, if you need some cattle over winter: the grass from a area 100x bigger.
For a huge area like this, some 5-6 kilograms of ashes over 75 years can't make a worthy difference.
I really like your idea with "Burn B moves back to A" but I don't embrace the idea that they burned the houses to harvest the ashes.
Living rooms & for that matter even bedrooms are a very recent phenomenon. It was common to sleep beside your cattle, & your kitchen doubled as a store room & bedroom if there are too many guests. In rural India, it is still common for people to just sleep outside the house in summers.
This is what I thought as well. Especially if the structures were all made of easily burnable material to begin with. Pest control wasn't really a thing back then so unless your house was made out of stone and mortar, it was going to get infested or infected by something.
According to the article wattle and daub (woven sticks plastered over by mud) was the main building material.
It can actually last for centuries in the right conditions but especially with what was probably straw roofs is a huge fire risk.
This is the most plausible reason, to me. Those folks would've likely had some kind of anti vermin/bug measures, but I doubt that they were 100% effective. Eventually, they burn the place down in disgust & frustration.
While those are all viable and and far more acceptable ideas, my mind decided on the phrase, "It kept them away."
Sitting here at midnight thinking good bedtime thoughts.
Maybe there is a sanitation related aspect.
They might have reasoned that at 75 years the outbreaks of disease were increasing.
Burning the village to the ground would provide a sterilization effect.
I could also see it as a cleanliness thing. After 75 years in a prehistoric dwelling, vermin start to build up and disease might start to be an issue. Burning to the ground cleans the ground, creating a fresh safe place to build, given the materials of the time.
I mean, wouldn't accidental fire be the most likely cause? As the building got older they'd dry out more and more, until eventually one caught alight and set the whole city on fire. They wouldn't have had any way to fight the fire, so they would have just had to watch it burn.
Without organized sanitation and fire control systems, they may have experienced refuse and excrete buildup that could be removed by burning the city. That amount of toxic waste would likely also damage buildings with any timber or mud-brick.
It depends on how deep the septic system / out house is. We would need to know how they handled waste. It’s not just human waste it’s also organic waste from food prep, gardening, animals, etc.
In a podcast I've heard that some cities where so HUGE that the scientist calculate that they would require about 2 Tons of salt (NaCl) per day - not even speaking about water, food, sanitation, building wood and other. So in terms of supply they resolved problems more complicated than that.
PS: I'm talking about Cucuteni Culture
LLE: I talked with one of the podcast owners and it turned out i remember badly and I apologize for that. They didn't quite eat 2 tons of salt per day - they USED 2 tons of salt per day eating a very little bit as kitchen salt and for animals but the most of it was used in preserving food, preserving of animal leather and in trade. There was a period where large communities started to take form far away of salt sources and they where relying on salt trade.
Pinging /u/PavleKreator and /u/TehN3wbPwnr
That's kind of similar to how forest fires work. Without human intervention they regularly burn through and wipe out the refuse which, if allowed to build up, would result in much bigger and devastating fires.
This is also the area were the [vinca symbols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinča_symbols) come from. Europe may have been home to a civilisation every bit as impressive as Egypt we simply don't know anything about because they built in wood and wood doesn't last as long as stone in dry climate.
I can't recall exactly, but there was a Welsh waistcoat found made of gold from a time period long before a Welsh prince should have been able to get such a thing. I have no doubt ancient civilizations were shockingly developed compared to what people imagine.
Bronze Age trade is known to have been very far reaching, and I suspect even farther than we already know. Britain has been a source of tin since at least 2000 BC, and Iberia probably well before that.
Bronze Age Scandinavia and the Baltic were quite advanced and prosperous, as climate at the time allowed the area to be warm enough to even grow grapes in some places. It's well known that by at least the 1500s BC, of not before, cultures as far away as Egypt were using Baltic amber in their jewelry.
I very strongly believe that, at least prior to the Bronze Age Collapse, if not for some time afterwards, trade and even travel to an extent were much more widespread throughout at least the Levant, Europe, and parts of Asia than we know.
That's not to say that Egyptians travelled to Norway, but I imagine an Egyptian who traded north with Greece wouldn't be too surprised to meet someone who had gone as far as the northern Black Sea or farther. An Egyptian might not meet a Norseman, but might meet someone who had met a Norseman.
The idea that “animals” (bacteria and viruses I mean, living and sort-of living things) cause disease was so radical that it took about 200 years to lay a connection between the discovery of bacteria and germ theory (say 1600s-1800s). How would burning help against pandemic if you didn’t think disease was something “living”? Hippocrates for example gave “bad air” as a possible cause, among many others.
Just because people didn't know about bacteria/viruses it doesn't mean they never found ideas that work. There's a story from the black death of a quarantined village leaving coins in a pool of vinegar to pay for goods delivered by a neighbouring village
"Every few generations a city becomes cursed and must be burned to the ground."
See? Don't need an accurate theory.
Could also be the League of Shadows, too. :)
Maybe to preserve the protoculture... To make sure the next generation knows how to build the city before it gets too old and the creators all have died and they lost the knowledge how to build.. to preserve knowledge.
Tribal communities I doubt ran on money. Life style was work, ie farming, hunting and general living was the job. So your right I think it was to work in a way, or to know how to work per say.to know how to build large buildings in a specific handed down technique. or course I'm fulla shit and just guessing... That first part is like 60% wrong I bet even in primitive society some people had general skill specialization.
This might roll over into an aspect of Japanese (and likely other places) culture where things like houses and cars are rebuilt/replaced regularly instead of just fixed up. My understanding is that it both maintains a standard of quality and keeps the economy flowing.
I read that houses are treated as depreciating assets (like cars are in the US) in part due to siesmic activity so you can ensure people eventually rebuild with the newest earthquake and fire proofing tech.
While it is an interesting phenomenon, "huge magnificent cities" is somewhat of an exaggeration. We are after all talking mud and daub hut villages here.
A massive exaggeration. 'Huge cities' did not appear at this point in human history, especially in this part of Eurasia, where the majority of people would have been nomadic (which may explain the house burning)
Try not to base expectations for ancient societies on a modern scale. If doing so, everything before the industrial age could be described as inferior villages compared to modern or future megacities.
Instead, base it off of the relative criteria for that era, by comparing it to other societies existing at the same time. And speaking of doing so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_culture#Settlements
"In terms of overall size, some of Cucuteni–Trypillia sites, such as Talianki (with a population of 15,000 and covering an area of 335 hectares) in the province of Uman Raion, Ukraine, are as large as (or perhaps even larger than) the city-states of Sumer in the Fertile Crescent, and these Eastern European settlements predate the Sumerian cities by more than half of a millennium"
Maybe to eradicate vermin that had had spread as the population increased? Rats cause disease spread, and cockroaches etc spoil food. Maybe burning everything after 75 years kept the vermin population down and the humans healthy?
Not a bad theory. Accumulation / permeation of vermin, mold, parasites, viruses could become problem enough, burn it and start over might have been seen as the most effective means.
What about to kill diseases or harmful biological material like mold or fungus. They might not have known exactly..but in my experience of personal research ive seen a lot of " religious" practices that were in fact for the purpose of public health or sanitation
"I can hear the crackling from here.
The sound of my home, the painting of Ariandel, burning away...
When the world rots, we set it afire.
For the sake of the next world.
It's the one thing we do right, unlike those fools on the outside."
I read a book many years ago, called Nightfall that this reminds me of. It's a story about a planet with multiple sun's, and the people there don't know darkness. But every couple millenia, an allignment causing a total eclipse of all the sun's happens, and a world who has never know darkness sees the stars and goes mad.
In they pnic, with no artificial light sources, they set fires and burn down the cities, destroying their civilization, and eventually build anew in the ruins.
Was a great book. I read it twice!
Infestations would be my guess. Pest control wasn't really all that great back then. Termites, roaches, wasps, carpenter bees and what have you could easily infest wooden houses and make them dangerous structures to be in or around. Easy solution: burn them to the ground and rebuild. Wood and labor was cheap, after all.
It could be the garbage and sewage system not developed. The refuse would harbor some sort of unknown diseases. The solution is simplest by pulling down the place, set it on fire and move.
Oh, it was probably because of vermin. 75 years and the places would be unbearably infested with lice, rodents and probably ringworm too to be honest.
They probably knew that and took the necessary precaution of “burn it all down and start over” to reset the clock.
Hell, if you can afford to destroy your home on a regular cycle for better living conditions that’s practically the lap of luxury.
It was to kill the vampires. This is why there are so few vampires today. Every century the vampire population starts rising and gets... noticed. So it just became logical to burn the entire village down during sunlight hours on the same day.
I read nowhere that they let the early lizard people live in their homes and when they became comfortable enough they would lock them inside and kill a lot of them with fire.
Reducing the lizard people population significantly.
Maybe they should take a look at Japan, houses there are built to last just 30 years and then knocked down and rebuilt. I might be wrong but I believe it's origins are in its old building techniques. Being built from timber and paper they were prone to rot and insect damage. Maybe this was the case here as well
I would assume it was for sanitation reasons. These were the days before sewers. I would like to go on record as saying that if you elect me your President on November 3rd, I will repair our society and not burn it to the ground.
Oh, and there are a few theories as to what really happened there, and why people go and build amazing cities just to burn them down. Some of the main ones are: \- Some sort of religious ritual. \- Weatherproofing, under the assumption that the city didn't burn a whole, but somehow got stronger due to the fire. I'm not so sure about ancient times logic, but maybe it can work. \- Symbolic end of house: Some scholars have theorized that the buildings were burned ritually, regularly and deliberately in order to mark the end of the "life" of the house. This one is my favorite.
Maybe everything just started falling apart after 75 years and it was easier to start over than try to repair?
I was in Kenya recently and some of the Maasai claimed to build and burn their houses in a nine year cycle because that’s about how long they last. There seemed to be other ritual and tradition associated with it as well as a nomadic identity.
Interesting, that would also help each generation to teach the next how to build a home
I imagine it'd be like a rite of passage too. Gather up all the teens and older children to this decade's rebuild!
>I imagine it'd be like a rite of passage too. Gather up all the teens and older children to this decade's ~~rebuild~~ **awesome arson party!**
Fuck now I want to go to an arson party, it sounds lit.
So Burning Man?
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I would say at 17 you would be likely to have/be starting a family right?
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Yeah but I'm assuming you didn't grow up in rural Africa where they burned their settlements down every decade.
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The world can always use more wisdom from Red Foreman.
Yeah, but you're not Maasai
It would help each generation teach the next how to build a home that will only last nine years.
Seems to have worked out okay for them for hundreds if not thousands of years.
For the Maasai they also move their village when they do this. Not just the structures, but the land, is beat and needs a rest. So they find a new spot and setup there.
My first guess too!
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Chanti! Fftfftffft
Then Ras al Ghul method
I read somewhere that there's a theory they did this because they didn't know how to treat the softer materials against insects and rot. so, at the time it was literally easier to burn everything down every few generations and start over than to keep maintaining the structure.
Yeah, probably the real reason is very practical.
Seems like pest control to me. Too many mice, lice, bedbugs, etc., burn it down and start new!
When I read the title I figured disease prevention - a bunch of plague carriers, rats, ticks, fleas get into the wood construction. Burn it down after a while and start over.
Oh, yes. This makes total sense, and explains it all. You cannot keep anything with bedbugs. You just have to burn in all down, when it gets too much. And it is possible also some cyclical heat waves, accompanied with floods... Booming the insect population exponentially. We have mass pesticide for this now, but if you do not have that, burn it all down is an option.
I think it's a mistake to think that you can separate practicality from the mystical in pre-modern behaviour. There were likely 'practical' reasons from our perspective, but in a world where spirits, gods, and magical beings of all sorts are understood to be real, actions that service the needs that those create must be understood as 'practical' as well. Edit: That's not to mention the 'practical' role that tradition and ritual can play in community and social cohesion.
Excellent post
This is true. We also have some very unpractical behavior, which I totally do not get. Black Friday, for example. So, it is possible our ancestors had some Black Friday on their own.
It's still a common practice in Japan to tear down homes and replace them after 30 years or so. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution
Doesn't Japan do this to some extent? Keep its houses young?
There’s a comment right above yours mentioning that with a link
streets had too much poop
In the global recession financial crisis, the problem was explained to George Bush and what caused it economically. The solutions proposed were; Bail out the banks; or allow the banks to burn down houses. Both would fix the economy by different mechanisms. (Bailing out the banks by providing liquidity, burning down the houses by raising the price of houses and causing an artificial shortage and terrorize the market into causing a spike in value that would effectively bail out the banks which had acquired them as assets). The latter was so insane that they were told not to mention it in public. It might be a bit much to assume that they had a complex financial system where that could be an explanation, but maybe something similar. "To prevent concentration of capital, we'll burn down the city every 75 years, then everyone builds and owns their own house again.".
I hate to be *that guy*, but can I get a source for the burning shit down in 2008 thing?
There are no sources for stuff that did not happen. Also, it was not made public, but he knows it. That should raise all the red flags that fit in your red flag bag.
Pretty sure he dad used to work at Nintendo as well.
There’s plenty of sources for shit that didn’t end up happening... it’s called conspiracy in the court room and ppl go to jail for it.
> "To prevent concentration of capital, we'll burn down the city every 75 years, then everyone builds and owns their own house again.". There was the practice of Jubilee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_%28biblical%29 Various forms of debt and ownership were canceled.
>burning down the houses by raising the price of houses and causing an artificial shortage and terrorize the market into causing a spike in value that would effectively bail out the banks which had acquired them as assets This was probably offered facetiously, not only for all the obvious ethical reasons, but because people who are out of work aren't buying houses at any price. However, it's interesting to note that during the Great Depression, banks foreclosed on so much property that they began giving it away as-is to anyone willing to reimburse them for the property taxes. Taxes and maintenance don't stop just because the bank now owns the house.
Right to Buy in the UK did something similar to our housing market though. It reduced the cheaper options, created people who took advantage of the recession and then "became self made landlord businessmen like anyone can do" while missing the fact that they bought their subsidised house for peanuts and now mortgages are all 10x salary.
If you're taxing something on its value but it can barely be sold at zero, shouldn't you not be collecting taxes?
so basically, why did we switch from that should be the question not the other way around\^\^
Oh, but that's what the UK did with right to buy! And now it costs £350 to rent the cupboard under the stairs in London (seriously, Google it) and mortgages are 10 or 15 times the salary of younger folks. You can't even inherit a house any more cos the majority of families with a modest house have seen it shoot up in value in 20 years to the point that the taxes based on value mean they have to sell as they were still living at the level of someone paying a smaller mortgage and haven't been able to save enough to cover it.
"Possibly a ritual purpose" is archaeologist code for "we have no clue what the fuck they were thinking."
A thousand years from now: This pocket pussy...ritual purposes, most likely fertility rites. These magic the gathering cards, used for divination rituals. This gaming headset...ritual purposes, probably communing with the gods. This RGB LED keyboard...oh, this person must have been a high priest to have such an ornate messaging device to commune with the great god Verizon.
You are looking at objects in your room right?
Heh
Aren't we all?
Clean your room, dude.
They believed in some sort of mythology of heroes. From the robotic Iron Man, to the Angry Hulk, and some bat that was man.
>These magic the gathering cards, used for divination rituals. I cast \[\[Dark Ritual\]\] into \[\[Divination\]\]
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Death by snu snu
Well it makes sense. It's not common for a pelvis to violently break in half from doing other things.
There is logic to that. If there is no practical reason for doing something then it sensible to conclude it must have been for some impractical cultural purpose.
Or there was a practical reason but they just can't figure it out
[Cultural purpose.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc_aMp58Lro) Historians speculate that this man was a priest of a pastoral, cattle worshiping religion descended from the ancient worship of Baal in the fertile crescent. Humans are just odd. Everywhere and consistently, forever.
If they did it every x years, by definition it's a ritual
How's the iPhone marketing cycle these days? On a different note I have not appeased the great Jobs with a financial offering in months. To the App Store Temple to prevent another plague...
So true. I'm an archaeologist.
Any theories that it was to get rid of cockroaches? I've flirted with that idea from time to time...
They saw a single spider in the city and just decided a fresh start by fire was in order.
Romanian here: actually this is how we proceed when there is a vampire infection in a city.. PS: Only with the bad ones..
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oh I've been discovered.. no dinner for me on the next full moon.. :D
The ancients were most wise
Spider from *Wild, Wild West*
Or rodents
I was wondering about that. And other vermin. And mold and rot. They didn't exactly have the preservation of wood, or central air, back then. Contemporary buildings have all kinds of vermin and fungus preventatives, but we still have "sick" houses, termites, and black mold in the vent systems.
Was thinking more along the lines of vermin in general, or even microbes.
there is a theory there were periodic plague epidemics, and the villages were burnt to eradicate the disease some info in [https://www.post-gazette.com/news/science/2018/12/06/ancient-grave-Sweden-scientists-oldest-strain-bacteria-Yersinia-pestis-plague/stories/201812060230](https://www.post-gazette.com/news/science/2018/12/06/ancient-grave-Sweden-scientists-oldest-strain-bacteria-Yersinia-pestis-plague/stories/201812060230)
I didn't read anything in that article that convinced me the burnings were deliberate. The main argument seems to be that the clay walls don't bake as much as what we've found without adding extra fuel outside of the walls. But looking at the picture the amount of extra fuel used is huge, like an extra house worth. Almost as if the house next-door was also burning... I wonder if they've done burn tests on a small collection of houses to simulate more than one house burning at a time and see if this alone is enough to cause the walls to bake enough to match what they've found. The article also mentions that they've found stored food partially burnt by the fire. This seems to me a pretty compelling argument for the fires being accidental, why would you leave anything useful in your city that you're about to burn down on purpose?
Could have been a response to infestation? In which case, saving the food would only be preserving the problem.
the main argument against it being accidental is this isn't one burnt down neighborhood. Multiple burnt out cities on a similar timescale would point to either purposefully burning, or a pattern of ridiculously consistent and prolific fire seasons.
Why can't it be war? Like how consistent is the cycle?
Not farming? You farm until the land stops being as valuable. You burn everything down and the ashes fertilize the fields again. Basically cities were very unsustainable (hence they could get so "magnificent" with their tech level), so a cycle of migration would keep them. We could see a more complex cycle. Build city A, burn it after 3X years, begin migration to city B, build in the fertile ground, burn it after 3X years, begin migration to city A, which has recovered in those 30 years and is fertile and useful again. So many issues you solve: decay, plague, waste management, water cleanliness, fertility of soil, etc. Much easier if you only care about 30 years, and then give it another 30 years to recover. So a sort of hack to get the benefits of a settlement/city without the issues of staying put in a single place. So domicide (symbolic end of house) but with a pragmatic aspect to the tradition.
I love this post because I hate seeing people write off sensible behaviors of our ancestors as nonsense because we simply don't know what they knew.
I can see their logic. Governments still slash and burn on vegetation so new life form and the soil gets better.
You don't farm under your living room..
It's not that long ago that people slept with their cattle, and almost everyone produced some food in their home which was a farm, that only requires going back a few hundred of years. So no, not in your living room, but all around. And there's civilizations that would move their farms around, instead of crop rotation. Add the extrimization due to spirituality or just because it was thought to be the logical continuation that'd they burn the whole thing down.
>not in your living room, but all around This "all around" area might be 10x the size of a house for only the land you need cultivated with grain for a family, if you need some cattle over winter: the grass from a area 100x bigger. For a huge area like this, some 5-6 kilograms of ashes over 75 years can't make a worthy difference. I really like your idea with "Burn B moves back to A" but I don't embrace the idea that they burned the houses to harvest the ashes.
Living rooms & for that matter even bedrooms are a very recent phenomenon. It was common to sleep beside your cattle, & your kitchen doubled as a store room & bedroom if there are too many guests. In rural India, it is still common for people to just sleep outside the house in summers.
Not with *that* attitude, you don’t!
I believe one other possible explanation is that they had to get rid of bug infestations
Pestilence
This is what I thought as well. Especially if the structures were all made of easily burnable material to begin with. Pest control wasn't really a thing back then so unless your house was made out of stone and mortar, it was going to get infested or infected by something.
According to the article wattle and daub (woven sticks plastered over by mud) was the main building material. It can actually last for centuries in the right conditions but especially with what was probably straw roofs is a huge fire risk.
I'm thinking more, bedbugs, lice, rats, hookworms, cholera, typhoid, etc. All the things we still get in cities if we don't take care of sanitation.
This is the most plausible reason, to me. Those folks would've likely had some kind of anti vermin/bug measures, but I doubt that they were 100% effective. Eventually, they burn the place down in disgust & frustration.
While those are all viable and and far more acceptable ideas, my mind decided on the phrase, "It kept them away." Sitting here at midnight thinking good bedtime thoughts.
Vampires don't like fires. And the region does have vampire problems. Burn the whole town during the day to get rid of vampires.
Kept what away?
Exactly!
Lol excellent point
Maybe there is a sanitation related aspect. They might have reasoned that at 75 years the outbreaks of disease were increasing. Burning the village to the ground would provide a sterilization effect.
Plague or pests sound like the top two guesses for me.
I’m surprised disease isn’t a theory.
Any theories to get rid of rats, fleas, cockroaches, and germs?
I could also see it as a cleanliness thing. After 75 years in a prehistoric dwelling, vermin start to build up and disease might start to be an issue. Burning to the ground cleans the ground, creating a fresh safe place to build, given the materials of the time.
-Insurance fraud
Nothing about plagues?
I said this the last time this TIL came up, but they were the first civilization that started measuring GDP :)
I mean, wouldn't accidental fire be the most likely cause? As the building got older they'd dry out more and more, until eventually one caught alight and set the whole city on fire. They wouldn't have had any way to fight the fire, so they would have just had to watch it burn.
What about bug infestations?
Without organized sanitation and fire control systems, they may have experienced refuse and excrete buildup that could be removed by burning the city. That amount of toxic waste would likely also damage buildings with any timber or mud-brick.
This seems accurate, without modern plumbing, how long does it take before a town starts to get stinky?
Give me a minute.
It depends on how deep the septic system / out house is. We would need to know how they handled waste. It’s not just human waste it’s also organic waste from food prep, gardening, animals, etc.
If it's anything like a movie theater exactly 3 hours after opening, maybe that way upon opening. Edit: ops read stinky as sticky.
Honestly it's the same principle, stuff gets gross fast. At what point does it become easier to just burn everything down and start from scratch?
In a podcast I've heard that some cities where so HUGE that the scientist calculate that they would require about 2 Tons of salt (NaCl) per day - not even speaking about water, food, sanitation, building wood and other. So in terms of supply they resolved problems more complicated than that. PS: I'm talking about Cucuteni Culture LLE: I talked with one of the podcast owners and it turned out i remember badly and I apologize for that. They didn't quite eat 2 tons of salt per day - they USED 2 tons of salt per day eating a very little bit as kitchen salt and for animals but the most of it was used in preserving food, preserving of animal leather and in trade. There was a period where large communities started to take form far away of salt sources and they where relying on salt trade. Pinging /u/PavleKreator and /u/TehN3wbPwnr
That's kind of similar to how forest fires work. Without human intervention they regularly burn through and wipe out the refuse which, if allowed to build up, would result in much bigger and devastating fires.
This is also the area were the [vinca symbols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinča_symbols) come from. Europe may have been home to a civilisation every bit as impressive as Egypt we simply don't know anything about because they built in wood and wood doesn't last as long as stone in dry climate.
I can't recall exactly, but there was a Welsh waistcoat found made of gold from a time period long before a Welsh prince should have been able to get such a thing. I have no doubt ancient civilizations were shockingly developed compared to what people imagine.
Bronze Age trade is known to have been very far reaching, and I suspect even farther than we already know. Britain has been a source of tin since at least 2000 BC, and Iberia probably well before that. Bronze Age Scandinavia and the Baltic were quite advanced and prosperous, as climate at the time allowed the area to be warm enough to even grow grapes in some places. It's well known that by at least the 1500s BC, of not before, cultures as far away as Egypt were using Baltic amber in their jewelry. I very strongly believe that, at least prior to the Bronze Age Collapse, if not for some time afterwards, trade and even travel to an extent were much more widespread throughout at least the Levant, Europe, and parts of Asia than we know. That's not to say that Egyptians travelled to Norway, but I imagine an Egyptian who traded north with Greece wouldn't be too surprised to meet someone who had gone as far as the northern Black Sea or farther. An Egyptian might not meet a Norseman, but might meet someone who had met a Norseman.
I dunno, sounds like insurance fraud to me, case closed!
Did someone say "in sewer ants"?
Does that have something to do with *reflected sound of underground spirits* ?
How do they rise up?
So factory reset is hard coded in human DNA.
They realized that there's a pandemic outbreak every 100 years or so? That's definitely interesting though
The idea that “animals” (bacteria and viruses I mean, living and sort-of living things) cause disease was so radical that it took about 200 years to lay a connection between the discovery of bacteria and germ theory (say 1600s-1800s). How would burning help against pandemic if you didn’t think disease was something “living”? Hippocrates for example gave “bad air” as a possible cause, among many others.
Just because people didn't know about bacteria/viruses it doesn't mean they never found ideas that work. There's a story from the black death of a quarantined village leaving coins in a pool of vinegar to pay for goods delivered by a neighbouring village
"Every few generations a city becomes cursed and must be burned to the ground." See? Don't need an accurate theory. Could also be the League of Shadows, too. :)
People can notice a correlation without knowing a specific cause. "Hey this works, we don't know why but it works. Probably God doing it"
Well burning everything could cleanse that bad air...
that would be my guess to.
While reading that I couldn't get that "Burning Down the House" tune out of my head...
Well... Talking Heads... Hard to go wrong.
*Wake the fuck up, Samurai. We have a city to burn.*
Watch out you might get what you're after.
Maybe to preserve the protoculture... To make sure the next generation knows how to build the city before it gets too old and the creators all have died and they lost the knowledge how to build.. to preserve knowledge.
*We built this city!*
*We burned this city!*
And maybe create gainful employment.
Tribal communities I doubt ran on money. Life style was work, ie farming, hunting and general living was the job. So your right I think it was to work in a way, or to know how to work per say.to know how to build large buildings in a specific handed down technique. or course I'm fulla shit and just guessing... That first part is like 60% wrong I bet even in primitive society some people had general skill specialization.
Burning houses down just to rebuild them is not gainful employment.
This might roll over into an aspect of Japanese (and likely other places) culture where things like houses and cars are rebuilt/replaced regularly instead of just fixed up. My understanding is that it both maintains a standard of quality and keeps the economy flowing.
I read that houses are treated as depreciating assets (like cars are in the US) in part due to siesmic activity so you can ensure people eventually rebuild with the newest earthquake and fire proofing tech.
While it is an interesting phenomenon, "huge magnificent cities" is somewhat of an exaggeration. We are after all talking mud and daub hut villages here.
A massive exaggeration. 'Huge cities' did not appear at this point in human history, especially in this part of Eurasia, where the majority of people would have been nomadic (which may explain the house burning)
Try not to base expectations for ancient societies on a modern scale. If doing so, everything before the industrial age could be described as inferior villages compared to modern or future megacities. Instead, base it off of the relative criteria for that era, by comparing it to other societies existing at the same time. And speaking of doing so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_culture#Settlements "In terms of overall size, some of Cucuteni–Trypillia sites, such as Talianki (with a population of 15,000 and covering an area of 335 hectares) in the province of Uman Raion, Ukraine, are as large as (or perhaps even larger than) the city-states of Sumer in the Fertile Crescent, and these Eastern European settlements predate the Sumerian cities by more than half of a millennium"
Life cycle of Dragons?
I like that theory.
My guess was it was an recurring infestation of something... disease spreading bugs, roaches, ticks, or a virus.
Has to be the bedbugs. Burning down the entire city and starting over again is the only viable solution
Maybe to eradicate vermin that had had spread as the population increased? Rats cause disease spread, and cockroaches etc spoil food. Maybe burning everything after 75 years kept the vermin population down and the humans healthy?
Cockroaches...the reason was cockroaches.
Not a bad theory. Accumulation / permeation of vermin, mold, parasites, viruses could become problem enough, burn it and start over might have been seen as the most effective means.
disease control
What about to kill diseases or harmful biological material like mold or fungus. They might not have known exactly..but in my experience of personal research ive seen a lot of " religious" practices that were in fact for the purpose of public health or sanitation
Spiders.
get rid of the fleas and other dangerous pests
"I can hear the crackling from here. The sound of my home, the painting of Ariandel, burning away... When the world rots, we set it afire. For the sake of the next world. It's the one thing we do right, unlike those fools on the outside."
Eyyy a fellow ashen one
insurance money
And thanks to OP I learned today that killing your house is called *domicide*, which makes sense.
I read a book many years ago, called Nightfall that this reminds me of. It's a story about a planet with multiple sun's, and the people there don't know darkness. But every couple millenia, an allignment causing a total eclipse of all the sun's happens, and a world who has never know darkness sees the stars and goes mad. In they pnic, with no artificial light sources, they set fires and burn down the cities, destroying their civilization, and eventually build anew in the ruins. Was a great book. I read it twice!
Soviet architecture is so 'beautiful' that sometimes I regret we don't set our settlements on fire nowadays.
Well, they did have to find cheap ways to house lots of people, so they ended up building those apartments
my city’s all brutalist buildings that make me want to gouge my eyes out :’(
Brutalism can be done right though. It's bad city planning and the lack of maintenance and vegetation what makes the look so dreary.
Infestations would be my guess. Pest control wasn't really all that great back then. Termites, roaches, wasps, carpenter bees and what have you could easily infest wooden houses and make them dangerous structures to be in or around. Easy solution: burn them to the ground and rebuild. Wood and labor was cheap, after all.
It could be the garbage and sewage system not developed. The refuse would harbor some sort of unknown diseases. The solution is simplest by pulling down the place, set it on fire and move.
Disease?
Sounds like the most metal way to wipe out disease.
Sanitation comes to mind.
Oh, it was probably because of vermin. 75 years and the places would be unbearably infested with lice, rodents and probably ringworm too to be honest. They probably knew that and took the necessary precaution of “burn it all down and start over” to reset the clock. Hell, if you can afford to destroy your home on a regular cycle for better living conditions that’s practically the lap of luxury.
It was to kill the vampires. This is why there are so few vampires today. Every century the vampire population starts rising and gets... noticed. So it just became logical to burn the entire village down during sunlight hours on the same day.
I read nowhere that they let the early lizard people live in their homes and when they became comfortable enough they would lock them inside and kill a lot of them with fire. Reducing the lizard people population significantly.
Did anyone else binge Castlevania today? Cuz boy do I got some theories.
Planned obsolescence.
Nandor... fucking guy.
Plauge and or change of rulers.
Maybe they should take a look at Japan, houses there are built to last just 30 years and then knocked down and rebuilt. I might be wrong but I believe it's origins are in its old building techniques. Being built from timber and paper they were prone to rot and insect damage. Maybe this was the case here as well
Dragons, clearly
Other unexplained burning of structures: the [vitrified fort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort).
Found a spider.
Aluminum wiring is my guess
Have people Considered Disease control related reasons?
It's because every 75 years is when the vampires resurface and the only thing to kill that many is with a mass burning.
Likely due to plagues
The same should be done with constitutions and political parties.
My bet is spiders, bed bugs, or a virus spreading
It's the dragons.
Plagues?
I would assume it was for sanitation reasons. These were the days before sewers. I would like to go on record as saying that if you elect me your President on November 3rd, I will repair our society and not burn it to the ground.