Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Mankind has always divided our history into several discrete periods, variously known as ages, eras, epochs or dispensations. These periods provide us with context for the trajectory of humanity, usually delineated with some great event that marks an upheaval in the state or direction of civilisation. These ages can be short, often described by the reigning monarch of a state, or incredibly long, such as the geological periods used by your everyday chronostratigraphic-geochronologists.
In Western thought the broadest periods of human history have traditionally been divided using the metallic system: denoting what material the people of that era used. Traditionally these are the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. In contemporary scientific thought the former two have been replaced, creating the "Three-Age System " of the Stone Age, Bronze Age & Iron Age, followed with some interpretation of the "Modern Age". The distinction between the earlier and newer models is clear: the early model presents civilisation as declining: from the precious metals down to more base metals. The modern model inversely presents a civilisation on an upwards trajectory, increasing with the material's strength (sometimes a "Copper Age" is placed between the Stone and Bronze too, following the trend). This reversal in the way we saw our own history seems to have changed during that period of great intellectual upheaval of the 16th-17th centuries with the Protestant Reformation and Ages of Discovery & Enlightenment. It is an understandable shift when viewing the changes occurring at that time. The post-classical era saw European civilisation live within a decaying world of great wonders from the Roman and earlier worlds. In academic circles study of the classics was of the highest regard, culminating with the explosion of the arts during the renaissance. After this Europe began to reach and exceed the philosophical, social & technological heights of the classical civilisations, at least from their perspectives, and so the view of history as a slow decline became untenable and was eventually inverted. But this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, by the time of the scientific and industrial revolutions Western civilisation had shifted the "success criteria" of civilisation so far from that of classical civilisation (and mediaeval) so as to fit with their protestant and scientific worldviews, making what amounts to "progress" in our minds merely a idealisation of our current aims, rather than following a universal pattern. What, after all, would the Romans say of our advances in terracotta mosaics, entrail divination or adherence to classical architecture? I can't imagine they'd be impressed.
However the old structure of metallic ages can be made acceptable to moderns when described in a more neutral sense: that of the metals used for metallurgy. Each metal is of course stronger than the last although less precious. However they also become more and more difficult to extract from the environment as we go through. Gold can be found in its pure form readily in the natural environment as can silver (although historically more geographically localised), although nowadays the easy-to-access stuff has already all been extracted. Bronze in turn is an alloy of copper and tin, both easy to extract but disparate in their distributions and requiring the knowledge and ability to melt these metals of higher melting point. Iron in turn is much harder to extract, and cannot usually be found in a metallic form naturally, as well as having a much higher melting point. In fact iron was not actually melted regularly until rather recently, instead being heated up and forged with a hammer & anvil, rather than the melt-and-cast methods used to create bronze (and potential gold/silver) tools. There is much evidence of ancient people's using Gold & Silver far before they had access to better metals, although their use is generally restricted to decorative and ceremonial tools. The first alloy created was that of "Electrum", a gold-silver alloy. Electrum provides a slightly stronger material that retains the beautiful qualities of both its parent metals, but can be used in small practical tools.
The first to devise this metallic system of the ages was Hesiod, one of the earliest recorded poets. But he also provides us with another age missing from the standard set: the "Heroic Age" set between Bronze and Iron. Hesiod says that this era was when many of the Greek legends occurred, along with destruction of the silver cities, the retreat of the Gods and spirits from mundane life, and the formation of modern (to the 7th century BC) identities. However, when the Roman poet Ovid redefined the ages in the 1st century AD, he omitted this incongruous age and regarded it as merely a transitional time between Bronze & Iron. This does ring true when we consider the era in its historical context. The end of the Bronze Age saw a collapse in the established world order and the rise of previously weak peoples. One of these peoples was of course the Greeks themselves: making this era of change one of great importance (and pride) to the Greeks. It was therefore natural for Hesiod to include mention of it in his historiographic analysis even when it lacks the definite beginning or end and the defining cultural features of his other ages.
Another question is that of the "modern era". What age do we currently live in? It is surely not still the Iron Age, although Iron and Steel remain the foundation of tool-making until very recent history. I will tackle this question in a later part, but we can gleam an idea from the Book of Daniel and the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar:
Thou, O king, saw and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible.Daniel then interprets this dream as pertaining to a succession of four "kingdoms". First one of gold who ruled over nature, then one of silver who was inferior to the last, then one of bronze who ruled over the whole world, and then one of iron who subdued all things. Then comes the Kingdom of Clay & Iron which is destroyed by a great stone. Daniel interprets this stone as a future Kingdom of Heaven, later interpreted by Christian scholars as the reign of Christ. I correlate these "Kingdoms" as the ages of mankind described by the Greeks, with the Iron Age of the Greeks and the Romans slowly giving way to the Clay Age around two thousand years ago, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Christ and the "rock upon which the church shall be built". This final "Age of Christ" is indeed how we define our own age today, with our years counting from the birth of Jesus in 1AD.
And so this provides us with our five definitive ages of man, and in the next part I shall describe the nature of these ages and their defining features, as well as discuss the events which (like the life of Christ for our current age) delineate one age from the next.
