Revolutionary-Era Indochina

I've made a map to accompany my picture of Ho Chi Minh. You can read all about it, and access higher-resolution copies of this art, by subscribing to my Patreon.

Spruce Mountain

Making this post inspired me to draw one of the images I took, and so I did. You can get the full story on my Patreon, as always.

Basilica Cistern

The Basilica Cistern is my latest artwork, and I made my Patreon post about it public so everyone can see how I hook up my patrons: high resolution artwork (not the 1000xwhatever post directly above these words), plus a dive into the history and/or the art style of the work in question.

It's worth the price, so please, support the work I do and help yourself to some great artwork in the process.

Was the Indus Valley civilization a peaceful communist utopia?

I just found my new favorite YouTuber. I'm not alone out here in the history communistposting corner.

I suppose it makes sense. I used to see a lot of my fellow libertarians (yes, there once was a time) into history. But the type of person who was that trope is increasingly becoming communists these days as capitalism gets discredited. So hopefully my historical vanguardism... really is a vanguard.

As to the subject at hand, I've got a couple hunches from the available evidence. I don't think the Harappan civlization was completely equal, but I think the reverse of Stefan's "the craftspeople lived in the cities" hypothesis. I think it's likeliest that the merchants lived in the cities, and were part of... merchant collectives, basically, and the collective nature of their enterprises as well as the fairly regular proceeds from mercantile activities allowed them a relatively equal lifestyle. They may have been vertically integrated, directly employing the labor crafting their trade goods, and therefore giving both them and the merchants equal wages. Seventeen of these organizations as represented by the seals could be explained by the difficulty in establishing market dominance through fully voluntary means, and then alliances and cartels between some of them to bolster their ability to compete against the others. All of these would have evened out to a relatively egalitarian existence for those who lived in the cities, with the peasants in the countryside living lives less archaeologically visible to us. Those lives could have been the same minus some of the infrastructural amenities (no flushing toilets), but those infrastructural amenities are most of the wealth visible today so that one change would make them invisible to the spade.

The Ishtar Gate of Ancient Babylon

I've got a new post over on my Patreon that my subscribers should definitely go check out. It's about this beautiful piece of work, and I go into more detail about the history of it and how I reconstructed what it looked like. And, as always, I offer a much higher resolution version than the one presented here. For five bucks a month, it's practically a steal.

But, to run down the basics, this is a reconstruction of what the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon would have looked like in its original setting, with the Processional Way in the background.