Well, I think the rats that spread the plague were imported from China over the silk road.
But those rats aren't here yet, only mice. And Khemetri is slowly spreading cats around. So given that mice are still a pest for our food stores, odds are the shamans will make sure they are settled in well once we notice how good they are at keeping pests at bay.
So we may have decent chances of blocking the rat-vector, or at least slowing the whole mess down.
We're probably not likely to be hit as hard by the plague, since due to Greater Sacred Forest we pay close attention to the ecosystem, we'd probably notice the skyrocketing amounts of vermin.
It helps that we have good sewerage systems so that cities aren't nearly so attractive to vermin as well.
Speaking of Governance, is there a chance that we could get a Legacy for having peaceful transition of government and zero civil wars for millenia on end?
We have those. All the Centralization and Hierarchy tolerances are those legacies.
I sure hope that they had an explanation in the library somewhere about smallpox, because some shamans couldn't even explain how it works, just that it works.
It doesn't matter if it's 'wrong', because we need a starting point to get anywhere.
IIRC we have long lost why it works, but we know it works and we know interrupting it has deadly consequences.
Athens did have a direct democracy. Of course, that was greatly helped by the fact that it indeed only covered the polis of Athens, while its empire were basically just subjects. If everyone can meet in the city, then this makes logistics far easier. This of course wouldn't be an option for us, as we are geographically too far spread out.
Also keeping in mind that Greek democracy was particularly elitist. It applied to Citizens of a given City, but most people living in a City were not Citizens.
It's a democracy accessible only to the educated upper class and the middle class tied to the upper class. There just wasn't much more that the social structures could support.
Which is the best we can do for now. Elites drawing from a wide spectrum of society at least makes sure that we suffer less systematic myopia. It's just a horrible mess to maintain in balance since all the various elites prefer the power in their hands instead of all the other elites(which led to the election crisis where we elected a nomad because the Oligarches were afraid of the Patricians).
Hmm. Perhaps as a compromise we should initally create assemblies for cities which will give middle-class urbanites some representation... an extension of the guilds idea.
We already have it. The new urban elite formed as a result and took control, then attempted to extend their power by assassination, oppressing and conducting economic warfare on those who threaten their dominance in society.
It's sort of semi-stabilized now however. Representatives of the middle class are now elites controlling the middle class through soft power.
They were, though. The entire goal of such historical palace economies was to concentrate as much wealth as could be siphoned off from the populace for a tiny elite minority.
This part is misleading, the Palace Economy is about
control and
power not material greed, by holding the flow of goods under central control, rationing, and distribution falls from the center.
This allows them to favor or disfavor parts of society more easily, which gives political leverage beyond martial force.
Palace/Manorial economies then, also thrived because they were amazing at coping with the strategic resource shortfalls common in the pre-modern age, by allowing the state to prioritize protecting strategic assets economically. They had trouble with geographical extent, but that element could be solved with converting to Manorial systems, trading off political power and stability for effectiveness.
The Free Market by contrast was an implosion waiting to happen for most of history, as the very definition of short term maxima, it's only the modern abundance of resources and massive connectivity which stabilized things and made it effective.
The elites don't actually derive much behefit from this reserve because they already have as much wealth as they could practically consume even without.
Speaking of which, there is probably a The Law (Bronze Age) megaproject. So we'll probably be doing the equivalent of a tier 3 megaproject while missing one of its components.
The Greater Sacred Forest helped lay the foundations of this sort of study fortunately. It's not fundamentally too different in concepts to the climate disruption, and can be approached in a similar manner.
We might get this kind of information once we set up a Free Press or something similar.
We're missing this information for multiple conditions that all need to be met:
-You need the communications to bring the information to the core
--We don't have this at all. The lack of long distance communications is such a huge problem that a free press can do basically nothing but write about local gossip and scandal because they can't reach the information. You aren't getting effective public reporters until at least railways, it's just too expensive to transport news.
-You need the institutions encouraged to extract, refine and pass information upwards.
--We do have this, multiple channels even. The Royal Audience allows for direct access to the King. The Priesthood gathers and relays spiritual concerns of the commons. The Associations gathers and relays issues plaguing specific trades. The Oligarchy handles traditional territorial disputes and crime. And the Blackbirds watch.
