bronze, iron, and digital

'..Great city-destroying quarrels begin with what turn out, to be, in retrospect, absurdly flimsy reasons. Modern historians will doubtless try to attach deeper causes to the quarrels—just as Hammurabi may have returned his shoes in a symbolic gesture of refusal, perhaps the braying hippo was a conventional cultural code for some other, economic quarrel. But our own experience suggests the reverse: people with money and power are annoyed when their shoes don’t quite fit; great powers come to grief over the noise a hippo makes, or is thought to make, even when the moat is nowhere near the palace.'