You can see that around 5000 BCE, the population curve starts to pick up and increases at a regular pace until about 1000 BCE. From 1000 BCE onward, the curve becomes steeper until about 500 BCE.
At around 500 BCE, world population goes from steeply increasing to decreasing.
Two questions:
What happened around 500 BCE that broke the steep curve?
Whatever happened to break the steep increase, how come population growth didn’t become steep again until about the 1500s?
I’ll bet big bucks that it’s a statistical artifact, from one estimate that happens to be high. Population estimates for the past are extremely iffy.
If you take out that one unusually high data point from -500 the curve smooths out.
And if you go into the World Population article, the table “Estimated world and regional populations at various dates (in millions)” shows no such anomaly.
I don’t know, but if you look at the graph there’s one point at about 500BC that’s well out of line with the ones around it, and if you take out that point the curve is much smoother.
I suspect that the graph was put together using data from multiple sources, and some sources give higher values than others, possibly because the researchers used different methods or assumptions. In 500BC most of the world’s population would be in places that didn’t have written records, so any figure is going to be approximate.
The Persians were pretty friendly to conquered peoples, compared to other empires. I don’t think their rise would’ve been destructive enough to cause a measurable blip in world pop.
I agree with the other posters, the error bars on that graph for early times must be huge. I think the appearance of a blip is just an artifact of that error.
WHile the dip may not have been attributable to rise of Persia, they were only pretty friendly to conquered peoples in their own propaganda. They were good when it was necessary and very very very cruel when they thought they could get away with it,
I disagree. Its not just Persian sources, Herodotus records the conquest of Lydia and other places, and there as well the Persians are shown as having ruled with a light touch, with less of the city-sacking and forced migrations other empires engaged in, even against peoples that put up a strong initial resistance. And the archaeological record generally supports his telling. Even after the Ionians revolted, only one city was punished en masse, while the rest got off with a few executions.
Again, this is just friendly compared to other ancient empires. There was certainly plenty of death and destruction during the rise of the Persians, but they appear to have followed a policy of trying to keep the peoples and places they conquered alive and running as they had before, and just punishing the leadership for any resistance to being conquered.
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