Journal of Social Computing 2022, 3(2): 119-127 https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2022.0001

Open Access | Issue | Published: 01 June 2022

Scale, Information-Processing, and Complementarities in Old-World Axial Age Societies

Show Author's Information Hide Author's Information Ian Morris^¹(

)

1 Department of Classics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2145, USA

Keywords:

scale, information-processing, Axial Age, ancient Greece

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Morris I. Scale, Information-Processing, and Complementarities in Old-World Axial Age Societies. Journal of Social Computing, 2022, 3(2): 119-127. https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2022.0001

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Abstract

Recent cross-disciplinary work on quantifying historical dynamics has made major contributions to scholarship. However, efforts to specify relationships between scale and information-processing always run a risk of shoehorning messy realities into overly rigid categories. In the case of the first-millennium BCE “Axial Age” in the Old World, networks of collective computing were structured more by cultural systems than by polities, and to understand the relationships between political scale and collective computational abilities, scholars need categories flexible enough to clarify the complementarities between political and cultural systems.

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Scale, Information-Processing, and Complementarities in Old-World Axial Age Societies

Show Author's information Hide Author's Information Ian Morris^¹(

)

1 Department of Classics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2145, USA

Abstract

Keywords: scale, information-processing, Axial Age, ancient Greece

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Received: 05 August 2021

Revised: 01 March 2022

Accepted: 03 March 2022

Published: 01 June 2022

Issue date: June 2022

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Darcy Bird, Tim Kohler, and David Wolpert for their patience and encouragement, as well as thanking them and anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments.

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The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).