1177 BC: The vanishing of the first globalized world | Eric Cline: Full Interview

I'm Eric Cline. I'm an archaeologist and an ancient historian. I'm also the author of 1177 BC, and its sequel, After 1177 BC. The period that we're discussing today is incredibly important in the history of humankind. It's the late Bronze Age, in particular, which goes from about 1700 to 1200 BCE, or BC, if you prefer. This was a time where people were basically globalized around the Mediterranean in a way that is not frequently seen. And so what happened to them back then may have implications for us today. So it turns out to be a much more important period to study than one might expect, even though it's more than 3,000 years ago. [MUSIC PLAYING] In part one, we're going to take a look at the civilizations as they existed, and what happened, what occurred, to make them all collapse one after another in one set of decades. In the second part, we'll take a look at whether or not that could have been avoided, what led up to it, what do you do after you've collapsed, how resilient are you, and whether it has any implications, for us today? Most of the people that I talk to about this period, and I will go on and on about it at dinner parties and such, they say, I've never heard of this period, and I say, actually, you have. This is the New Kingdom period of Egypt. So I will ask them, have you heard of Hatshepsut, the famous female pharaoh? And they'll frequently say, yes. I'll say, have you heard of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh, who might have started monotheism? And they might say, yes. And then I'll go out in the lim and say, well, I bet you haven't heard of King Tut. And they're like, of course, I've heard of King Tut. I'm like, fine, that's the exact period that we're talking about here. So you see, you already do know this period. It's the second half of the second millennium BC. It's the New Kingdom period of Egypt. It's the time of King Tut and Akhenaten and all those other pharaohs. So this is a period that is actually more familiar to people. They just don't realize that they know it. The late Bronze Age covers about 500 years, 1700 to 1200 BC. And for most of that, life was pretty good, especially in the 14th and 13th centuries BC, that is in the time before the collapse. Now, in those centuries, it was very globalized. It was internationalized across the Mediterranean and into the ancient Near East. So everyone was in contact with everybody else. This is the period when I say the ancient G8 was in place. And by the G8, in that case, I mean over in Greece, you had the Mycenaeans and the Minoans, right? Think Trojan War. In what is now Turkey, ancient Anatolia, you had the Hittites. Over in Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers, modern day Iraq, basically, you had Assyria and Babylonia. Then elsewhere, you had Cypriot Sensai-Price Egyptians and Egypt Canaanites in Canaan. So overall, these people are in direct or indirect contact with each other on almost daily basis. The thing is, if they're not in direct contact with somebody, like Mycenaeans and Assyrians, who are quite far apart, they will be in contact with a common person. So indirect is not even that indirect. In fact, in what they had, which we call the small world network, if you are only three hops from anybody else at the most, or maybe less than three hops, like two hops for the Mycenaeans to the Hittites to the Assyrians, that's a small world network. And in the time period that we're talking about, that's what we've got. A colleague of mine, Susan Sheridan at University of Sheffield, has talked about this being a globalized Mediterranean. Now, why do we care about that? Because there aren't that many periods in human history where we've had such a small world network in place anywhere. Us today, obviously, yes, we've got a small world network all around the globe. Then back then, they had a small world network across the Mediterranean and into the Near East as well. And that's why I would argue that what happened to them might be a little bit more relevant to us today than one might think, because they are actually closer to us than one might think. In terms of commercial contacts, diplomatic contacts, and so on, they're more like us than one might expect, just walking around outside. In my book, what I was focusing on is the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. In part, because that's my specialty. That's what I know the best. It's also because they were not necessarily in contact with areas of the world that were further away. So for example, there may have been some contacts with India, with the Indus Valley, but they weren't that frequent. And as far as we can tell, they're not in contact with places like China. There are some indications, and I would give a caveat here. The wonderful thing

about archeology is that what people find tomorrow could completely change our understanding. So now, for instance, we think that there were maybe more contacts with Southeast Asia in the Iron Age after the collapse than we had thought before. So this is always changing. However, I limited myself to this area, basically from Italy on the West to Iran and Iraq on the East, if you want to put it that way, and from modern day Turkey down to Egypt. Again, that's my focus of specialty, but that is also the area in which this little globalized small world network functioned. None of the great civilizations, none of the G8, were self-sufficient at that time, and it's important to realize that. They each needed each other. So for instance, Egypt was the only place really that could supply gold to everybody else, because it was in control of the mines, Dana, Nubia and Sudan. Greece, on the other hand, was one of the areas that could provide the silver. Copper came from Cyprus. The tin, the tin's a bit of a problem. It comes from a variety of places, including maybe Cornwall, up in England, but the vast majority came over from Afghanistan, the Badakhshan region in particular. It's the same area where Lapis Lazuli comes from. And so these raw metals would travel hundreds of miles along the trade networks, and each of the different civilizations needed them. So they are trading with each other. Yes, it's commercial, but it's also the lifeblood, because we're in the Bronze Age here to make bronze. You need 90% copper and 10% tin. I mean, you can use arsenic if you want to, but you're not gonna live very long. Much better to use tin. What happens if the trade routes are cut and you can't get the tin anymore, which means you can't make your bronze, which means you're in real trouble. So they are trading for the raw materials. They're also trading for, I would say, commercial goods, but ones that you can eat and drink. So they're trading olive oil. They're trading wine. They're trading grain. And they're sending it around to each other. It might be a bit like Coles Tourneux Castle, but it's more like different wines from around the world, each have their own flavor. Same thing back then. Now, they're also trading and buying and selling and all of that actual objects. We have a couple of the written texts, for example, that talk about leather shoes being sent from Crete all the way to Babylon, to King Hammurabi, the famous King Hammurabi who wrote his law code, which has an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth in it. And those leather shoes made it all the way to him, but we're told he returned them. We're not told why he returned them, and I often wonder if they were too small or too last millennium or something like that, but we know that the actual objects are coming, along with the raw materials and the raw supplies. We know they're trading things like solid gold daggers inlaid with Lapis lazuli. These are obviously things that the kings are giving each other. So we have what we call gift giving at the highest elite levels. And then we've got commercial mercantile stuff at slightly lower levels. So we've got all kinds of things going on, but the end result is that they needed each other. They really did, they could not survive without each other. And so this globalized network is what rose them up to the highest levels, but it is then also what brought them crashing down at the end when all of that was cut. Now, along with all the commercial activities, and there is diplomatic, but diplomatic also involves marital connections because when the great kings, the G8, when they sign treaties with each other, when they made diplomatic advances, frequently they would marry each other's daughters to cement the treaties. So we know, for instance, that Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, the two pharaohs of Egypt in the 14th century BC, they each had multiple wives in their harems who were the daughters of the other kings. So we know that there are three Mitannian princesses that are in Egypt in the harems. We know that there are Babylonian princesses in the Egyptian hare. The one thing that's interesting is it was not reciprocal. The Egyptians did not send their princesses to the others. No

no, no. Those were sent to them, but it was not the other way around. But even so, exchanging one princess one way was enough to cement a new diplomatic treaty. And we know because of the tablets, especially including one set at the site of Amarna, which in Egypt was Akhenaten's capital city. We've got the archive there of his records and his father, Amenhotep III, writing to these kings. And we can see whenever there's a new king over in Mitanni, which is in Syria or a new king in Babylonia, they had to renegotiate the treaties with the Egyptian pharaohs and with those renegotiations came the new marriages. So we're talking diplomatic, commercial, marital, you know, it's not so different from today. We also need to give a definition basically of what we mean when we say everything collapsed. And I would argue that the world as they knew it back then did collapse after just after the year 1200, like 1177 BC. What collapsed was the network that was linking them all, this globalized small world network where they had commercial contacts and diplomatic contacts and all of that. That breaks apart, that collapses. And it's gonna take up to 400 years to get it back again. Now each of the individual societies that were part of that network, they were each influenced and some collapsed completely, others dealt with it. And that's where we get into kind of a gray area because some of my colleagues say, "Look, you're over exaggerating, this is clickbait. It's not collapse, it's transformation. " And I'm like, well, a divine transformation for me. And so we go round and round about this, but basically the way I look at it is the world that they had in place in the 14th century and the 13th century BC, that world goes away. And it goes away within just a couple of decades in the early 12th century BC. Life as they knew it basically changed. Now that doesn't mean the farmer out in the Hinterland of Anatolia knew that on Monday he was part of this and on Tuesday he wasn't, it's nothing like that, but it does mean that the international contacts, the dynastic marriages, they come basically to a screeching halt. And I frequently say that the comparison is to something like the fall of the Roman Empire, right? It was catastrophic for its day. Now there was about 1500 years between the collapse of the late Bronze Age and the fall of the Roman Empire. And it's been about another 1500 years since the Roman Empire fell, at least the Western half. And so I'm not saying that we're necessarily do for another collapse, but history does rhyme even if it doesn't repeat. So I'm a little wary that it might be, we might be do for it anyway. So it's all a matter of academic jargon to a certain degree. What do you mean by collapse? transformation? And I concluded after writing both books that it is yes, it's both a collapse and a transformation. It depends where you are and when you are and at whom you are looking. The thing that's changed over the last couple of decades is that the old explanation that people put forward for the collapse was too simple. It was almost simplistic, if you will. It was what we would now call monocausal. They were looking at one thing. Was it invaders? Was it this? Was it that? But they focused on one thing and one thing only depending on which scholar you talk to. Nowadays, we think it's a combination. It would be what I would call polycausal that it takes more than one thing to bring down this whole system. You need two of the explanations, three, four, something like that happening either all at once or in rapid succession. So you don't have time to recover from one catastrophe before the next one hits. And I think that makes a lot more sense than just saying, oh, the sea peoples did it or oh, there was a drought. How about if there were migrations? Because of a drought and so on. So that's kind of what has changed over the last couple of decades. And in part, it's because we have a lot more information now.

more data from a lot more sources and they're all pointing in various different directions which if you look at it at a hole, you go, okay, that's what's happening. It's a multitude of causes and that caused a domino effect for one thing and it also caused an exaggeration, where one thing was made much worse because of the next. So our thinking has changed in part because of the new data that we're getting. When I was first learning about all this, when I was in college and then in graduate school, I was basically taught that the collapse was caused by the sea peoples, this group that the Egyptians had mentioned that came not once but twice in the years 1207 and 1177 BC. The Egyptians, Merneptah and Ramses III were the two pharaohs 30 years apart. They both said that Egypt had been attacked by a coalition of invaders and they give us their names. It's us that calls them the sea peoples. It comes from a French Egyptologist that was studying these originally. But the Egyptians actually give us the names and we know that there are nine different separate groups that come sweeping across the Mediterranean and wind up attacking Egypt. So I was always told that these groups which are the Shardana, the Shekelesh, the Weshesh, the Eques, the Peleset, you know, these names that most people have never heard of, that they were the ones that were responsible for attacking all the G8 and bringing them down one by one, if you will. Now out of all those sea peoples, there's really only one group that we could identify. We've played around with the other ones. I mean, Shirdon or Chardana sounds a lot like Sardinia. So it may be that that's where they came from. The Shekalesh, that sounds a lot like Sicily. So maybe they came from there. But the earliest Egyptologists actually thought that that's where they went after they were defeated by the Egyptians and that they then gave their names to those islands. So we've flip flopped over the years. Personally, I think the sea peoples come from the Western Mediterranean and sweep across the Aegean and wind up attacking Egypt. But we still have the problem of, you know, who are they? Out of all the groups, the only one that we think we've really identified is the group called the Peleset. And the Peleset are the Philistines. Now the Philistines are mentioned in the Bible. We already know them archeologically. It really looks like they are Mycenaeans from Greece who have fled Greece and come over to the Eastern Mediterranean because Philistine pottery looks like degenerate Mycenaean. Meaning not that it's terrible, but it's Mycenaean pottery as if it were made in Greece, but it's made with clay that's local to Cyprus, Rhodes, the Levant. So it looks like the Mycenaeans come across. Now Ramses and Merneptah both say that they defeated the sea peoples. And in fact, Ramses III says, "I settled them in strongholds bound in my name. " Meaning he settled the defeated sea peoples in Egypt and in the region of southern Canaan, which the Egyptians controlled at that time. So I think we know where they went, even if we don't quite know where they came from. If I had like a million dollars, I would go looking for the origins of the sea peoples and try and settle that once and for all. But the one thing that we're quite sure, or at least I'm quite sure of now, is they were not single-handedly responsible for the collapse. In fact, I kind of agree with my colleagues who have suggested that they were as much victims as they were oppressors, and that they're more like a symptom of what's happening than they were the cause of it. I think there were a lot of other things involved, and I think the picture was a lot more complicated than I was first taught when I was an undergraduate in college. In some ways, the sea peoples are one of history's great escape goats. I mean, I think they're blamed for something they didn't really do. And indeed, I used to use the sea peoples to scare my kids at night to make them go to bed. You know, time for bed, and if you don't go to bed, the sea peoples are gonna get you. I mean, I think they're kind of the bogeyman of antiquity and kind

of unfairly blamed. I think some of the other explanations that people have now put forward, like drought and famine and all that, might have contributed to why the sea peoples were migrating in the first place. And I actually think a good parallel would be something like the dust ball in the 1930s in the United States, where the people were leaving Oklahoma and going to Texas and California to get a better life. Same thing, you could look at some of the migrants and the refugees today, the people fleeing from the Syrian civil war, for example, the people leaving and trying to get up into Europe for a new and better life. I mean, we're seeing some of the same things today. So I think that's really what the might, but the sea peoples were. They were migrants in search of a better life. If the sea peoples are not to blame for the collapse, then what is or what was? There have been a number of other suggestions that scholars have made over the years. And in my first book in 1177 BC, I went through the various suggestions, looking at the pros and cons for each. And in the end, I thought the answer was yes. It's all of the above. It's a perfect storm. It is, you know, all everything, you name it, everything everywhere, all at once. And it would have been hard to avoid. So I looked at what my predecessors had suggested and thought that there was merit to almost every one of them, but not on their own. You had to bring them all together into this series of unfortunate events, as Lemony Snicket once said. One of the possibilities is that there was a drought back then. This is not a new suggestion. It was actually made back in the 1960s by Reese Carpenter, who was a professor at Bryn Mawr College. He suggested that the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, that their civilization had come to an end because of a drought. But he didn't have any hard data to back his suggestion up. It remained a hypothesis. We now have the data that he didn't have. And we have it not just for mainland Greece, but we have it for an entire area stretching from Italy over to Iran today. So the evidence that we've got for drought, and by the way, it's not just a drought, it's a mega drought. It's 150 years at the minimum and 300 years at the maximum. So say from 1200 BC or 1250 BC down to 900 or 850 BC, I mean, it's a long, long time. Now, we find evidence for it all over the place. We find it in caves where the stalagmites stopped growing because they ran out of water. We find it in dried up lakes, dried up lagoons, dried up riverbeds, where when you take samples and you look at the pollen under a microscope, you can see that we get more arid plants, that it becomes a much harsher environment. If you look at the sediments at the bottom of lakes that still exist in Turkey, for example, you can see this as well. So it's not like we have data from one place and one type of source. We have it from a multitude of places. If you look at a map where we have scientific evidence of this mega drought at the end of the late Bronze Age, you've just got, it's peppered with red dots where we've got all of this information. So I would say it's beyond a doubt now. You cannot call it into question. There was a drought back then. It lasted for at least 150 and maybe 300 years. And that would have impacted pretty much anybody back then because, well, frankly, society, you can't survive. A drought that lasts that long. I mean, we have trouble surviving a drought today that lasts 10 years. So imagine one that's 10 times that or so. Anyway, so I think drought makes sense that was one of the big factors at that time. And it may have actually driven some of the other factors as well. If you've got drought, you've probably also got famine coming right on its heels because if you have a lack of rain, all your major resources and all that, people are gonna start starving. And it looks like that's what happened during the late Bronze Age collapse as well. Now, it can be actually pretty hard to find evidence of famine, unless like you find a mass grave, which we haven't found by the

way. But if they write about it, it in their text, then you can be pretty sure that there was famine. And we have that now, especially in recent years. There have been some texts that were found at the site of Ugarit, which is up on the north coast of what is now Syria. And the site of Ugarit were very important, Entropo, very important international port at that time. And there have been tablets that have been published fairly recently, like in 2016 in French. And then a couple of years later in English, in which they say there is famine in our city, please send us help. I mean, they come right out and say it. Now, we had others before that as well. We know up in Anatolia, for example, where the Hittites were. There are also tablets that talk about famine, starting as early as about 1250 BC. So a little bit earlier than we might have suspected. And they are writing and saying things like, famine is here in my lands. It's a matter of life and death. Please send grain. And they're asking people like the Egyptians to send relief. And in fact, we know from other texts that the Egyptians did send grain and dried fish and other things like that to help out the people in Ugarit and Anatolia and so on. So we definitely know that there is famine at that time. And it obviously comes hard on the heels of the drought. Now, if we pull the sea peoples back in again, I think this then explains why they might have started migrating in the first place. If they do come from the Western Mediterranean, like I think Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, there is now evidence that there is a drought in Northern Italy as well, where the Terramare culture was. And there's evidence for people leaving at that time in mass numbers. So it may be that that's where we should be looking for the sea peoples coming from and that they started their migrations because they were starving and there was a drought in their lands. In which case though, I mean, as the old saying goes out of the frying pan and into the fire, because the Eastern Mediterranean had a drought as well. I mean, it stretched all across the Mediterranean, but they couldn't have known that, at least not easily at that time. So they start migrating and they get to a place where it's just as bad, but there are also people already living there. So they are attacking at the same time as assimilating, they're just trying to get a new life for themselves. And I think that's what we see when they attack Egypt. But we also know from other tablets that they attack elsewhere. So we have to add other things in here as well. But for right now, I would say we've got drought equals famine, and then maybe that's gonna lead into migration and other things as well. Now it used to be that the only evidence we had for migrations or invasions, if you will, which is probably a better way to put it, is the evidence from the Egyptians, the inscriptions that Merneptah and Ramses, the third left us from 1207 and 1177. But now we've got other evidence as well, the same archives at Ugarit on the north coast of Syria that gave us the tablets talking about famine. They also mentioned invaders. Some of them have been known for quite a while. There's a fairly famous tablet that talks about enemies and ships having been sighted. And are they gonna come here or not? And their messages between the king or the governor on Cyprus over to the king of Ugarit. And you can see Cyprus on a good day from Ugarit, basically. So we knew about these enemy ships, but we didn't know who they were. Like it doesn't say the sea peoples or anything like that. It just says ships of the enemy. Well, the new tablets that have just been published from Ugarit also mention ships of the enemy, but they also mention that they've made landfall. And in fact, one particular text, which is written by the king of Ugarit, basically asking for reinforcements to be sent. He says, "The enemy has landed. "They have overrun one of my port cities "and they are now advancing on Ugarit itself. "Please send help. " Well, we know that

even if the help was sent, it wasn't enough or it was too late because the French archeologist, when they excavated Ugarit, starting back in the 1920s and even continuing until fairly recently, they found that Ugarit at that time period had been destroyed and had been destroyed by humans. There are bodies in the streets, there are arrowheads embedded in the walls. There is a meter of destruction, like three feet deep of destruction in that city. And it was then abandoned. It was abandoned for between 400 and 600 years. People buried hordes of precious metals and never came back for them. So that enemy, whoever they might have been, not only advanced on Ugarit, but destroyed Ugarit. The problem, once again, the scribe just says, the enemy, it doesn't say the shalim or the Sherden or the palescent or the washes. And I, oh, I would love to take that scribe and take him out back and say, come on. Why didn't you tell us who they were? Why did you just say the enemy? But that scribe might not have known who they were. Give them a break. But we can now say that there were invaders. There were invaders from outside. Whether they were sea peoples or something else, we can't know for sure, but we definitely have invaders at that time. There are a lot of destructions around the ancient Near East and the Aegean at this time of cities, both major and minor. There are discussions as to whether there are actually city-wide destructions and whether maybe just a cow kicked over a lantern like Mrs. O'Leary in Chicago. We're still debating exactly how many destructions and how destructive they were, if I could use the same word again. But the basic feeling is yes, there were invaders, there were destructions, but some of the destructions might not have been by outsiders. They might have been internal. It might have been an internal rebellion by the locals rising up, precisely because they're starving, because there's no water, there's no food, anything like that. And there are a couple of instances where we can see that. The site of Mycenae on Mainland Greece where the famous Lion Gate is, it has been suggested that its ultimate demise at this time was because of internal rebellion. We can't be sure of that, but it is a definite hypothesis. Another example might be the site of Hazor in ancient Canaan, which is today in modern Israel. And at Hazor, where we had two co-directors that were excavating and couldn't agree on what caused the destruction of the site. One said it was Joshua and pointed to the book in the Hebrew Bible that talks about Joshua conquering Hazor. The other co-director said, now wait a minute, at the site, the palaces burnt and the temples were burnt, but not the houses of the local people. And that looks like an internal rebellion, right? Palaces burnt, temples burnt, but not the people's houses. You have an invader from outside, they're gonna burn absolutely everything. But if you have the people's houses still there, doesn't that look like an internal rebellion? Well, it might. Now again, hard to decide, my point would be if the two co-directors can't decide who might have destroyed their site, pretty hard for the rest of us to decide that as well. But I would put this up as an example of maybe internal rebellion. So yes, we have destructions, not everywhere, but a lot of them. But we can't be sure if it's external or internal. We just know the city is destroyed. If we see a destruction at a site though, it might not be by humans. It could be by Mother Nature. I'm talking about earthquakes. Some of the sites that we see destroyed at the end of the late Bronze Age really seem to be destroyed by earthquakes. Now it can be difficult to determine if a destruction's by humans or by Mother Nature. Sometimes it's obvious. I mean, if you find bodies in the streets with arrowheads sticking out of them, it's probably humans and not an earthquake. But when you find bodies simply buried like under walls of collapsed houses, it could actually be either one. But if there are some symptoms

and we can usually tell when the city is hit by an earthquake because we'll have walls that are off-kilter, that shouldn't be, we'll have keystones slipped in an arch, things like that. And in some of the cases, we could say, yeah, this is most likely an earthquake rather than by humans. And if we take a look at those type of sites at the end of the late Bronze Age, it really looks like we have what's known as an earthquake storm. Now that's the name for it in antiquity. If it happens today, it's known as an earthquake sequence by seismologists. And the general idea is frequently that if you have a fault line, like the North Anatolian fault line that runs across Turkey, that if you have an earthquake and it doesn't release all of the pressure, you will have another earthquake sometime later nearby. It could be a week later, month year later, that will release more of the pressure. And if that still doesn't release all of the built-up pressure, you will have another earthquake and another and another. Basically, the fault line will unzip until all the pressure is gone. That can take up to 60 years, 60, 60 years. We see that today. It's been happening across Turkey since like the 1930s. But it also happened in antiquity. And it looks like it took place in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean from about 1225 to 1175 BC, in other words, spanning the late Bronze Age collapse. And so we can see bodies in a number of cities. There's a young teenage girl at Mycenae, for example, who tried to shelter in the doorway of her house. Normally, that's one of the safest places to try and shelter from an earthquake. But in this case, the whole house collapsed, and one of the stones fell and hit her in the head, probably killed her instantly. She was found with that stone still embedded in her skull. At other places, there are other bodies as well. And just to give you one more example, at the site of Troy, where the Trojan War took place, according to Homer, and we have nine cities, one on top of another, city number six is destroyed by an earthquake, not by humans. There's no bodies there, there's no arrowheads, anything like that. But the city is destroyed with giant rocks thrown around, and everything fallen with walls undulating. Pretty obvious, Troy six was destroyed by an earthquake. And so we can put that into the category as well. Now, if we're trying to kind of make a logical succession where we have drought, famine, migration, that works for all those, but we're do earthquakes fit into that. Well, you don't really fit earthquakes into that, they just happen, but it turns out that this is a very active seismic zone in this entire region. There are fault lines off the coast of Greece. There's a fault line coming straight up the Rift Valley, where you've got the Dead Sea and Lake Tiberias. There are fault lines across ancient Anatolia. And in fact, if you lay a map that shows all the earthquakes that have happened in modern Turkey since say the year 1900, and you've got all the earthquakes plotted, and you lay that on top of a map showing the cities that were either partially or totally destroyed at the end of the late Bronze Age, there's almost a one-to-one correlation. And so I think we have to add in earthquakes as one of the other possible stressors, drivers, factors that led to the late Bronze Age collapse. The other factor we should bring into the equation is that of disease. We haven't mentioned this up until now, but in terms of like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, where you've got drought and famine and earthquakes and all that, even today, you frequently have disease following on the footsteps. And I think we might have had that same situation back at the end of the late Bronze Age. Certainly we know this from some of the stories that have been handed down. For example, Homer in "The Iliad" in the first book talks about a plague sweeping through the Mycenaean troops that are besieging Troy. In the story of the Exodus

from the Hebrew Bible, we've got the 10 plagues. These might be memories, vague memories of what actually happened back then, but we do know, for example, that there was a plague that hit the Hittites earlier, about 150 years before the collapse, back in the time of my favorite Hittite king, Sufi Lulu-Luma I, who ruled about 1350 BC, and we are told by one of his successors that he and most of his immediate family died as the result of a plague that was brought to Anatolia, courtesy of Egyptian prisoners of war, and it absolutely decimated the Hittites. Now, that's a century and a half before the collapse. So we really can't say that that's part and parcel of it, but there is an Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses V, if I remember correctly, who ruled about 1140 BC, and we've got his mummy. And if you look at the mummy along the jawline and kind of on the cheek, there are pustules. He had smallpox and he probably died from it, and we're able to say this because we actually have a papyrus, the Turin papyrus. It's in a museum in Italy today in Turin, and it talks about the fact that Ramses and other members of his family died of the plague, which we would say is smallpox, and that they were buried in the Valley of the Kings, but most unusually, it took something like 16 months to bury them, they dug brand new tombs for them, and after they put the king and his dead relatives in, they dismissed the workmen who had dug the tombs, they gave him a month off at full pay, and then they closed the Valley of the Kings to everyone. It was like maybe the world's first quarantine at that time. So we do have evidence for plague a little bit after the collapse, but the collapse is gonna take most of the 12th century BC to fully form, and so somebody that dies of smallpox in 1140 is in fact part and parcel of the whole collapse. So I think we do have to add in disease in addition to everything else, earthquakes, migration, famine, drought, you name it. I think we've got enough there to justify the fact that we've got a poly crisis going on, that if you had one thing, you might survive it, two things maybe, by three, you're throwing up your hands going, enough, we can't take this anymore, and boom, everything collapses. One of the things that we've got in looking at all these multiple causes that might have led to the collapse is the fact that we've got, first of all, a multiplier effect going on, that is each one has got a bigger effect than it might have because of the others, but we've also got a domino effect going on, that is when one of these goes down or is dreadfully impacted, it would have affected the others much as today we can set up dominoes to all fall in a row. If you've got a supply chain shortage to put it in today's terms, if the tin is cut off and you can't make copper anymore, that's gonna affect pretty much all the civilizations, but if you've got something that affects cypress and the Cypriots, which is giving everybody the copper, then that is gonna have a domino effect on everybody else. So even just the news of one of them being affected might have had a domino effect on one or more of the others. Now, one of the questions that we wanted to ask is what would it have taken to have brought down this network? And so actually after I published 1177 BC, I was approached and got together with colleagues from the US Army Corps of Engineers and we ran scenarios through a computer trying to figure out which of the G8 or others in which order would it have taken for them to fall to collapse the whole network? For instance, if the Mycenaeans had gone down, would that have collapsed the whole globalized network? If the Minoans had gone down, would that have shattered the small world network? What did it take? And we know by looking back at it that it did collapse, it was shattered, but in what order and how important was the

collapse itself? Can we actually figure out who went down first and who went down last? Well, it turns out we can try and approximate that. We ran a couple of thousand scenarios through a computer and came up with two basic scenarios that would have resulted in the collapse. One is if the Hittites and the Egyptians both essentially collapsed at the same time, that would have brought down the rest of the network or if that city of Ugarit, the international port on the coast of North Syria, if that had collapsed at the same time as the Hittites, that would have been enough to disrupt the entire network and bring it down also. So those were the only two scenarios that actually resulted in what we could see. But over the two, one was preferable because the scenario with the Egyptians and the Hittites going down, we know that's not what happened. We know the Egyptians survived. The Hittites do not. Their society basically ends for all intents and purposes. The Egyptians, while they don't do well, they do muddle through, they coped and they kind of adapted, but they do survive the collapse. So we knew that scenario in which both went down at once didn't work. We know historically that's not what happened. That has left us with the scenario of Ugarit and the Hittites going down virtually simultaneously. That would have been enough to bring down the whole thing. But interestingly, the rest of them, the Assyrians going down, the Babylonians going down, whatever, none of that would have been enough to take out the entire network. So it does show that it's not easy to collapse a network and that I would say you're much more likely to be able to be resilient and overcome a catastrophe than you are to be taken down by it, but it really depends on how effectively you react to it. And if you are actually trying to survive the collapse, instead of ignoring it and denying it is happening, but that brings us to another question of whether they even knew they were collapsing while they were collapsing, did they? So what we're talking about at the end of this late run stage with the collapse is what is known as a systems collapse. This was a term that was invented by Colin Renfrew at the University of Cambridge in the late 1970s, but it basically describes what happens when you have one of these complex systems collapse. You've got your central economy collapses, your upper elite, the 1% go away. You've got the government, the centralized government collapses. You have all these hallmarks of what had made your society so vibrant and thriving, they now all go away. And along with that, you've got a huge decrease in population, both death and migration. And that's what we see at this end of the late run stage. So I think we're looking at a systems collapse. Now, it's not unique here. There are systems collapses that have happened elsewhere and elsewhere. The Maya collapse, follow the Roman Empire, the Harappan civilization in India, it happens. And in most cases, when you have one of these systems collapse, you have then a dark age that happens immediately afterward where you revert back to a lower level of socio-political economic functioning. You go a whole step backwards into what historians call a dark age. And you basically have to start all over again. Now, the thing is a systems collapse doesn't happen overnight. It can take up to a century to take place. So like life was very different in 1200 BC from 1100 BC and completely different in 1000 BC. So we're looking at a systems collapse and then we're looking at a dark age afterward. And in the dark age, that's when you try and regroup basically. And one thing that Colin Renfrew said is one of the hallmarks of a dark age is that they look back at the age that has just disappeared and consider it a golden age and they frequently tell stories about it. And you know, that's exactly what we've got with Homer and the

Iliad and the Odyssey and the story of the Trojan War and so on. So I do think we've got a systems collapse and I do think it segues right into what historians have called a dark age because some of the same things that we lose because of a systems collapse are the very same things that define a dark age. They lose, for example, the knowledge of how to put up big buildings. They lose writing, linear B in my Sydney and Greece is not used again after the collapse of the Mycenaeans. So what we've got then is in the years, in the centuries, after the collapse, say for 400 years, say from 1200 BC down to about 800 BC, four centuries. This is what historians have called the world's first dark age and they point to everything that I've just said. Now, that's kind of not fair, I would say, in a way because each of the different societies is affected to a different degree. Some actually did okay in the collapse. Others, like the Hittites, completely disappeared. And it's also an era of invention and innovation, in part because they had to, right? What's the saying, necessity is the mother of invention? If you're having trouble getting tin, for example, and you can't make copper, you might turn to another metal that you already knew about, but that you hadn't been exploiting yet because it was too difficult, too hard, didn't have enough, whatever, iron. Iron does not really come into use until during and after the collapse and it becomes a replacement for bronze. Now, that doesn't mean bronze completely goes away, but it does mean that iron takes its place. We also get the standardization of the alphabet at this time, which the Phoenicians bring across the Mediterranean. Now, the Phoenicians who come from central Canaan, what we would call today Lebanon, they're actually survivors of the collapse. They actually are among the people that do the best in the aftermath of the collapse in terms of resilience and transformation. And the Phoenicians standardize the alphabet. They don't invent it, it's already been around, but they standardize it, they bring it over to Greece and Italy, and it becomes the Greek alphabet Latin alphabet, which we're still using today. So the Phoenicians and the Cypriots, alphabet and iron, because the Cypriots, who had been the source for all the copper, now seem to be the first people to be using iron. We get the first bi-metallic weapons and tools where we've got like an iron blade and a knife, but bronze rivets in the handle and the Cypriots send them out to Greece on one hand and the Levant on the other. And they seem to have been very nice about it because they sent the technology as well, oh, you like this? Well, here's how you make it. And every country had iron ore, it wasn't like the copper in the tin. And we can see the development of iron working spread across the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. So I would say Cypriots with their iron Phoenicians with the alphabet and don't forget purple dye as well, they're doing the best. But that also means that our dark age might not be a dark age. And one of my colleagues has said that any age that sees the invention of iron and the standardization of the alphabet cannot be considered to be a dark age. It's an age of invention. And so what we archaeologists are trying to argue now is stop calling it a dark age, just like the medieval people don't want theirs to be a dark age anymore either. And now it's like late antique or the early Middle Ages. Same thing with us. We don't want a dark age now. What we wanna do is simply call it what it is. It's the iron age. It's when they start using iron. And that's got no pejorative sense or anything like that. It's just a fact. You had the Bronze Age, now you have the iron age. And so I think that actually is a better way to describe this. Now, I will admit that many of the societies do go back down to a lower level of socioeconomic political circumstances, like the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, on the Minoans on Crete. Others disappear

entirely like the Hittites. But, Cypriots do okay, Phoenicians do okay, Assyrians and Babylonians do okay. So we actually, we need to be specific here and differentiate between the different societies as to how well they did or didn't do. And then see if there are any lessons that we can learn from that. One of the other things to keep in mind, and which is at the basis of the debate between archaeologists and ancient historians as to whether we're looking at a collapse or a transformation at the end of the late Bronze Age, has to do with the idea of how much survived and how much didn't. In terms of the people themselves versus the societies that they make up. So, for instance, and this is a part of a problem too. All right, you take something like ancient Anatolia and we talked about the Hittite Empire. Well, there's actually a whole mess of different ethnicities that are living in Anatolia at that time. The Hittites, per se, might have been the overlords. They might have had the Empire, but the Luwians that are there would have said, I'm not a Hittite, right? The Trojans up in Troy, But we talk about this, you know, big entity. So when we get to the collapse and then the survival afterward, when I talk about a collapse, I don't mean that everybody dies. I mean, a lot of people do. The estimates in Greece, for example, or maybe as much as 40% of the population died or migrated between, say, the 13th and the 11th centuries BC. So, you know, a lot of people do die. It wasn't a wonderful time, but not everybody does. Same thing with Anatolia, with the Hittites, same thing with Mesopotamia and the Assyrians. So what we have to realize is there is some level of continuum that life does continue, but what changes is the political entities, if you will, the societal entities. So we no longer have the Hittites, per se, in Anatolia, but we do have some of the survivors, and we call them the Neo-Hittites down in North Syria. Others, though like the Etruscans, you do have new peoples moving into some areas, and we know this from the records, like the Frigens coming in, we know about their invasion, but you've got other people who are still farming in Anatolia that are basically looking over their shoulders saying, "Okay, who am I paying taxes to tomorrow? " Right, I'm still here. My Hittite government isn't here. So we do have to keep this in mind. Even in Greece, for example, nobody called themselves a Mycenaean after about 1050, but that doesn't mean that Greece was empty. It means that the survivors were just dealing with life and figuring out what to do after that. So this is where we still have our arguments in academia. What is a collapse? What is a transformation? Right, and where do the two meet? Where's the gray area? And that's why I kind of took, I wouldn't call it the easy way out, but I wanted my cake and to eat it too. And so in the sequel, I said, what collapsed was the network that connected them all? What transformed are the various societies? And they didn't always transform, some just coped, some adapted, but that's where you get the nuances. But you also have to realize too, that you're really talking about the whole group. And if you get down to the individuals, that's where it's, first of all, I'm gonna get very, very interesting. I mean, what I wouldn't give to have a time machine and go back and yeah, it'd be great to talk to the kings and the pharaohs. I'd also like to talk to the farmer in Messenia, living near Pilos and saying, so how did your life change after the palace went down? And that is nearly impossible to answer, unless you get lucky doing some archeology. But I do think we have to keep this in mind, the ethnicities versus the societies, the people versus the government, and just realize that we're frequently talking about the forest and not the individual trees. Because in part, that's all we can do.

(gentle music) One of the questions that I think is extremely relevant today comes in the sequel that I wrote, the after 1177 BC, which simply asks the question, what do you do if your society collapses? If the globalized network that you're a part of collapses, what do you do? How resilient are you? Now, resilience is a word that's bandied about today by lots of people, and that's part of the problem. It has different meanings for different people and in different situations. For me, resilience is how well you do in the face of adversity. How do you bounce back when something has gone wrong, sometimes very wrong? And I think there are basically three ways you can deal with it. And I get these from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They won the Nobel Prize back in 2007. They are the ones that put out reports on climate change every year or every couple of years. And they put out something back in 2012 that was dealing with resilience and mitigation that what do you do after disasters? They're more looking at things like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, that kind of thing. But in that publication, they had some definitions that I thought fit very well with the late Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath. And what they say is that when you have such an event, there are basically three things you can do. You can either just try to survive until tomorrow, which basically means that you're coping, right? You're trying to make it until the sun comes up again. But you could also do a little bit more. You could adapt. You could be looking to next week or next month and just saying a little bit longer term survival. So coping is just tomorrow, adapting is a little bit further out. But they also said there's a third thing. If you were to say this can never happen again, we can't let New Orleans be flooded by the next hurricane. We have to transform. We have to do something about it. They said that's the top of the heap, basically. Yeah, you can cope. Yeah, you can adapt. If you transform, that's now, that's where we're talking. And so I think that we can take a look at the G8 that was affected by the collapse and ask, how well did each of them do? Did they simply cope? Did they adapt? Or did they go the extra mile and transform? Or did they do none of the above and they disappeared? So I think we can actually rank them and then try to ask, although this gets very difficult, try to ask what made each of them resilient or not? What made them be able to transform, cope, adapt or not? And that's where it gets down into the nitty gritty and the weeds and is kind of a, yeah, we might say that, but it's gonna be hypothetical. But I think it's worth exploring because again, I think that's where we have lessons that might still be viable for us today. One of the things that we see in the aftermath and the collapse is basically a new world order. As each of the societies does or does not deal well in the aftermath, we can see new political systems popping up, for example. We can see new economic systems as they try and either grow back up from the ground like the Mycenaeans had to do. And again, we don't have Mycenaean society after about 1050 BC. We now have the Greeks going back to ground zero and trying to build everything back up. In other places, the huge empires that had been around, the Hittites, the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, some of them go away and are replaced by kind of a new world order. The Hittites, for example, up in Anatolia, they're replaced by smaller city-states and kingdoms. We've got some survivors whom we call the Neo-Hittites, the new Hittites in North Syria, but we've also got new groups, the Eartians, over in the eastern half of Turkey and

the Phrygians over in the western half of Turkey. They come on in and establish new, albeit smaller, kingdoms in the Iron Age. I think we see this especially though, down in the southern Levant, the area that today would be Israel, Palestinian territories, Jordan, part of Lebanon, because where we had the Canaanites in the Bronze Age and the Egyptian overlords, if you will, because the Egyptians basically ruled that area as part of their kingdom or empire, that all goes away at the end of the Late Bronze Age and it's replaced with much smaller city-states and kingdoms, which will sound familiar because we know them from the Hebrew Bible. We now have, after the collapse in the Iron Age, we now have the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah. We've got the kingdom of Edom, the kingdom of Moab, the kingdom of Ammon. All of these areas that we know from the biblical stories, they come into existence during these 400 years after the collapse. They are a reaction to what had just happened. And in fact, some scholars have suggested that maybe that's more than natural order of things, to have smaller city-states and smaller kingdoms and that the empires of the Late Bronze Age were, as one person has put it, a failed experiment that they tried and it didn't work all that well. I think I would disagree with that. I mean, that system survived for 500 years. I think that was pretty good, but it has no place now in the aftermath and we get all of these smaller city-states that are now flourishing. On the other hand, again, it's not all that cut and dried because what about the Assyrians and the Babylonians over in Mesopotamia? They're still there. They're now called the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians, the new ones, but they have survived the collapse, pretty much intact. They didn't do as well as the Phoenicians and the Cypriots who I would give a gold star rating to, number one, in my book, but I would give the Assyrians and Babylonians number two. They adapted, they almost kind of sort of transformed, but at least adapted, they've still got their government, they've still got writing, they're still writing, they've still got their religion, they've still got the king and all the government and all that, still got the economy. It's just things have changed slightly. And in fact, one of the things I think changed and I explore this in the sequel after 1177 BC is that they've lost their trading partners because that globalized network has broken down and some of the people with whom they'd been interacting are now basically gone. Like they can't interact with the Hittites anymore 'cause they're not there, there's no big Hittite king. Instead, what the Neo-Assyrians do after it took them a little while to come back also, they do have drought there for a while, but when they bounce back by the 10th and certainly by the 9th century BC, like halfway through the Iron Age, the Neo-Assyrians take over pretty much the entire ancient Near East. Basically all the areas they had been trading with and had commercial and diplomatic and marital ties back in the late Bronze Age, they've now just conquered. It's now part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire that stretches all the way to the Mediterranean Sea and down to Egypt in fact at one point. So we see things change and we do now see empires growing again, but for a different reason. The Neo-Assyrians are now taking what they need rather than trading for it. And this is when we also begin to see the rise and fall of civilizations. I mean in Hamilton, it talks about oceans, rise, empires, fall, that's basically what we've got here because yes, the Neo-Assyrians rise up and they're dominant for a while, but then they go down and collapse and the Neo-Babylonians take over for a while and then they collapse and turn and we're often running with the Persians and then

the Greeks and then the Romans and follow us up until today. But that's in part why I would again argue that the collapse of the late Bronze Age is so important and what happened after the collapse of the Bronze Age is perhaps even more important because it shows what happens if you are or not resilient, but it also set us on the path for what we've got today in the Western world. That is where everything comes from that we've got. I mean, yes, you can look back to Mesopotamia and Egypt and all that for some of the things that we've still got today, but out of the collapse of the late Bronze Age is gonna come Greece, archaic and classical Greece with the invention of democracy and so on. So we're gonna be on a, I wouldn't call it a straight path, but we can trace ourselves back to what happened 3,000 years ago to what we've got today. If we're ranking these societies as to how well they did in the aftermath of the collapse, I would put the Cypriots and the Phoenicians in the top category. They not only transform, but they're actually anti-fragile. Now, this is a phrase that Nicholas Nassim Taleb has used. In fact, it's the title of one of his books. And what he says is that anti-fragile is something that actually flourishes in an age of chaos. It takes advantage of the chaos. So one might actually say, you know, collapse is not always terrible for everyone. For some people, it's an opportunity. And in this particular case, for example, we see the Phoenicians from central Canaan. They spread out across the Mediterranean. One of my colleagues has called it a Phoenician lake. They take advantage of the fact that Ugarit has been destroyed and that the navies of some of the others, like the Hittites and the Egyptians, have either been destroyed or are not what they once were. So I would say both the Cypriots and the Phoenicians are actually anti-fragile. They are flourishing in this age of chaos. They do better than anybody else. So I put them up in my top category. The Assyrians and the Babylonians, they adapt, but they don't really transform that much because they don't need to. They simply carry on as they were, but they are better than the Egyptians, for example. Now, I would put the Egyptians in my category three. They are adapting a little bit, but more they're just kind of coping, if you will. They don't go down, they don't disappear. And in fact, that was one thing that I kind of changed from book one to book two. And the end of book one, I was like, "Ooh, Egypt is the only one that really survived. " And then book two, I'm a bit more nuanced. And like, no, actually there are others that survived better than Egypt. And I would put Egypt in the middle category three. They didn't do wonderfully, but they didn't do terribly. They're still there, but they have now withdrawn a bit from the international world because they are having problems back home, if I can put it that way. So this is into the third intermediate period, as Egyptologists call it. And at one point, we've got not just one, not just two, but three, and sometimes even four, people all saying that they are the pharaoh of Egypt at the same time, but in different areas of Egypt. Now to my mind, that's not a good system. Egypt is supposed to be one king, one ruler, one country. And we look back to the new kingdom period, right? King Tut, Akhenaten, Amenhotep III. And so in comparison to the way it had been, in what I would say is the glory days of the 14th and 13th centuries, Egypt in the 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th centuries is not even really comparable, but it's not terrible. And we do have some highlights. So for example, there's one guy PusinesPureness who is known as the Silver Pharaoh. His tomb was found in 1939, right before World War II. If it had been found at any other time, it would have made worldwide headlines because it's, I believe, the second wealthiest tomb in Egypt just behind King Tut's. But most of the stuff in the tomb is silver rather than gold. So that's kind of a high point. We also

have one of the pharaohs, a guy named Shishak, Shishak of the Bible, probably. He's Libyan, he's the founder of the 22nd dynasty. And he actually tries to recreate the good old days, leaves us an inscription where he went up to Israel and Judah and campaigned up there. And may have even conquered, for example, Megiddo where we find an inscription with his cartouche up there. So it's not terrible in Egypt, but it's not like it used to be. One Egyptologist said to me, actually, when I gave a lecture there, that that's not a fair comparison, that it's like apples and oranges. And you can't compare third intermediate period to the new kingdom period. And I'm like, well, maybe not, but I'm comparing the iron age to the Bronze Age in all the other societies. So I do think it's a fair comparison, but, so it turned out what I said to them is, these categories I'm putting the societies in, ranking them one, two, three. I said, it's just my gut feeling based on everything that I've studied, but, you know, I'm not the be-all and end-all here. You wanna present data that would persuade me to move them up or down. I'm quite happy to do that. So I will say now that you could put Egypt up in category two with Assyria and Babylon, and I'd still be able to sleep at night. But I'd also be quite happy to put them down into category four where they were like with the Mycenaeans and Minoans. So it's all fluid. And, you know, that's kind of the beauty of archeology in ancient history, is we put out a hypothesis and then we try and test it, and then we go and excavate and find something completely new next week that makes us rearrange it. And that's all good. It's called science. That's how we advance. That's how we progress. But for now, I'm gonna keep Egypt in category three. Category four, as I've just mentioned, is Minoans and Mycenaeans. They are just barely coping. They're not adapting. They're just coping. We see all the big palaces in mainland Greece. And even on Crete for that matter, Mycenae, Tyrans, Pylos, or Cominos, Knossos, they either are burned, invaded, internal rebellion, earthquake, you name it, they're all basically abandoned. And with them goes the writing system. Linear B, which we now know, is an early form of Greek that ceases to be used by about 1050 BC, because it was only being used by the scribes in the palaces to create inventories. What came into the palace, what went out of the palace? Though surprisingly, they never mentioned overseas. The linear B never mentions contacts with Egypt or the Hittites, whatever. It's a big problem, because I know from the archeology that they are in contact. At any rate, what we would have called the Mycenaeans and Minoans, it comes crashing down. And as I've mentioned, they had to rebuild from the ground up. They do it successfully, but it takes quite a while. And that's why I end after 1177 BC with 776 BC, which is the first Olympics. And by that point, everything in Greece is back up and running, and we're very quickly going to get them using the new Greek alphabet. We're gonna get Homer, we're gonna get Hesiod, we'll get Sappho, we'll get the Archaic poets and Greece is off to the races, but it has taken 400 years. So I put them in my category four, because they did just about as badly as you could possibly do and still survive. And then the last category, that's the Hittites. Don't be a Hittite. The Hittites do not do well at all, in part 'cause they've already got internal problems. We know that there was a schism in the royal family and that one part moved. We also know that the Hittite capital city, Hattusa, was actually already abandoned before the end came and that it was only partially destroyed afterward and probably from people that otherwise had nothing to do with anything, the Kaska from the Northwest that had already destroyed Hattusa a couple hundred years earlier, they came back. So I think the Hittites probably did it to themselves anyway, though it certainly didn't hurt that the sea peoples were on the shores of Anatolia. And they would have been a primary example of the domino effect. And remember that the Hittites and

Ugarit going down at the same time may have been what caused the collapse of absolutely everything. So I put the Hittites down there. I also put the Canaanites in Southern Canaan into that lowest category, because we really don't see them again after the collapse of the late Bronze Age. We do not refer to the Canaanites in the Iron Age by that name, we now call them by other names, the Judites, the Israelites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Edomites. And so I'm of two minds, either they were wiped out or they assimilated one of the two. And we've got both stories in the Hebrew Bible, look at the book of Judges versus the book of Joshua, is it a genocide or is it a simulation? Either way, I don't think the Canaanites in Southern Levant, coped or adapted or transformed or anything like that. And so I put them down in my bottom category. On the other hand, if you were to argue, as some of my colleagues have done, that the Edomites, the Israelites, the Ammonites and all those guys are actually Canaanites who have transformed, then I would say, okay, in that case, they should be up in category two. You know, again, it's all flexible. I only put this out as a suggestion for what we might think about doing. And I fully expect that my suggestions hopefully will start the discussions rather than end it. And I think that the new discoveries that we're making every day, every week, every month, every year, especially in biblical archeology, are going to get us to alter things just like we've altered. Now what we think caused the late Bronze Age collapse will be able to fine tune how everybody did in the aftermath. But I wanted to start the discussions and I think they're pretty interesting discussions, which again, have some bearing on us today when we are grappling with some of the same things that brought down the late Bronze Age network and that the survivors had to deal with in the aftermath. We look around today, we've got the same things here. This is where we have rheumidum maneuver and where I think investigations are going to go in the future, because even though I think we can rank these societies as to how well they each did, one of the difficulties is to try to figure out why they did, like why were the Cypriots and the Phoenicians able to be that much more successful than the Hittites, for example. So archeologists and ancient historians are now starting to try and answer these questions to grapple with the concepts. And we're getting a couple of interesting things. For example, it's now been suggested that maybe some of the societies were more fragile than they appeared and that they might have been more vulnerable to the stresses than they appeared to outsiders. Like the Mycenaeans, they had been over exploiting the lower classes and those lower classes might have been quite happy to see the palaces fall and even cheered and they may have been in all part of the internal rebellions. So it may be that something that looked very strong like the Hittites was actually weakened internally and the first big gust of wind came and knocked that tree over and boom, no more Hittites. But it also might have just been the luck of the draw. It might have been geographical luck. So I think that's where water comes into play because the Assyrians and the Babylonians are in my category two and they're right by the Tigris and Euphrates. And the Egyptians, of course, have the Nile. Now, those are three of the big four in the ancient world. I mean, my poor Mycenaeans and Minoans, they're not quite up there with the others. You know, the big two in the late Bronze Age are the Egyptians and the Hittites, but then Assyrians and Babylonians. So of those four, Egyptians, Hittites, the Syrians, Babylonians, the Syrians and Babylonians have the Tigris and Euphrates. The Egyptians have the Nile. The Hittites are the only one of those four without a major water source.

They're also the only one of those four that go down completely. I don't think that's a coincidence. And in fact, in talking to various people, I've heard time and time again that wars over water are gonna be what are fought in the coming century. And we can already see that in California with water, with Colorado, with Mexico and all of that. So I think in some ways, the fact that the Assyrians and the Babylonians were able to maintain their government and their religion and their writing systems and all of that might've been just luck of the draw. That they were so far inland that the sea peoples didn't get to them and they were on the two rivers, Tigers and Euphrates, so that the drought didn't impact them as badly as it did others. But having said that, we have written texts from the Assyrians that do talk about period of drought. They are Hitt. It's not that long though. It's like less than a century. And it came well after everyone else had been hit. So there is something there to be said for where you happen to be. So again, I think this is where we're gonna be looking in the future is how did these people manage to survive? Or why didn't they survive? Were they not aware that they were collapsing? And again, we have to keep in mind and actually say this at the beginning of the sequel. Most of our records are from the 1%. They're from the elite. We know how the kings did and the central authorities that were living high. We don't know as much about the 99% if you wanna call them that, about the farmers and the peasants out in the fields in Messinia in Greece or the Hinterlands in Anatolia. We don't really know their story that well, but we're learning it because archaeologists are now moving out and excavating the little villages, the little towns that are inhabited across the divide, Bronze Age and Iron Age. And so we're gonna get more evidence. answers. And again, that's what I love about archeology. It's not cut and dried. And if you will pardon the pun, it's not set in stone. It changes depending on the new discoveries. So everything you're reading in the books, not just my books, but the history books and all that, it's gonna be different to a certain extent within five years, 10 years, 50 years. I've already come out with the revised version of my first book and I have a folder in Dropbox of new articles that have already come out since 2021 that I need to take into account if we're ever able to do a third edition. It just keeps coming. It doesn't stop. And that is what is absolutely wonderful about it. In addition to all the other factors, whether it was luck in the draw, where you were situated or anything like that, the other factor to bring into account is how good were your leaders? That is, were they able to lead you through this time of turbulence and catastrophe? Did you have the right people in the right place at the right time or not? Now, I suspect that contributed a lot to this as well. So for example, when Egypt had three or even four people all saying that they were the Pharaoh at the same time in different parts of the country, that's not good leadership. It's not how you're gonna get through this. Similarly, the Hittite royal family had a schism at exactly this time and parted the ways. That was exactly the wrong time to do that. You needed a strong leader in place at that time. Now, the one or the two societies that do seem to have had the right people at the right place at the right time are the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The Neo-Assyrian rulers and the Neo-Babylonian rulers seem to have been the ones that got their societies through this. In fact, a couple of fairly well-known scholars, a seriologist have said that is why the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians held on for about a hundred years before everybody else, before they were impacted

to a certain extent by the collapse. They said it was because they had strong rulers in place that they were able to stave this off for a couple of decades or a century at most. So I do think that leadership is incredibly important because in part that leadership will determine how well you respond. So it's a number of factors that I think have to go into all of this. And again, that's where I think that even all this, even though all of this took place 3,000 years ago, it's relevant to today because we've got the same things. How strong are our leaders? How resilient are our societies? Do we have supply chain issues and so on? And I think we can look back to the Iron Age kingdoms and see if there's anything that we can learn from what they did or did not do and see if it's relevant to us today. Having studied all of this, what happens in the aftermath and all of that, I was again wondering what lessons could be learned from the late Bronze Age collapse and the aftermath. Was there anything that is of use to us today? And I did come up with seven things that I think are kind of common sense, if I may, that are things to remember, things to live by, things that will help us if we're ever going down that same path. So I think the first one is pretty obvious, that you need to have redundant systems in place. We talk about that all the time today, but I think it's incredibly important. You need to have a plan A, and if that somehow doesn't work, you need a plan B. And if that C. I just kind of like having a generator in place in case your electricity goes out. But I would say not just a plan A, B and C, you need a D, E and F as well. You need multiple redundancies in place and plans that you can go to if all of your major ones fail. And I think that is something that they needed to do back then and that we would still need to do today. The next couple I would say are, again, common sense. Be strong enough to resist invasion if you can. Know who your friends are and who they aren't. And also be resilient enough to go with the flow as you need to be. Don't be rigid, don't be just, you know, no, this is how we've always done it. But be prepared in case you're invaded. Be prepared to reach out to allies. And in that same tone, try and be as self-sufficient as you can, but not to the detriment of alienating your allies, I would say, because you're gonna need each other. So if you're gonna make it through this crisis, it's gonna be because you're leaning on each other. The other lesson that I think has a major takeaway from the Iron Age, and I will deliberately call it the Iron Age rather than the Dark Age, is to be innovative and inventive, right? The fact that in the aftermath of the late Bronze Age, they were innovative and inventive with Iron and the alphabet, I think, is precisely what we would need to be again here today. So we're talking, in part, this is what evolutionary biologists and others would talk about in terms of the adaptive cycle, that when you have a crash in one area, you then have an immediate era afterward where you are innovative and inventive. It's basically the rise and fall of empires, but here we've got a Mobius strip on its side, I would say, and I think that's where this would come into place. If you are crashing, if your society is coming down, one of the ways you can best be resilient is to be innovative, is to be inventive. So back in the Iron Age, what they did was turn to iron when they were having trouble making bronze. That actually, tin back then has been compared to oil today, petroleum gasoline, and their need for tin back then is much like our oil today, but I actually think it's changing now. So just like in the Iron Age, they change to iron. So what we need to be more worried about, I think in this day and age, are rare earths like lithium that are used in chips in computers and cars and microwaves and everything else. If something happens to the supply chain and we are not able to get that, I mean, and remember what happened during the pandemic, during COVID, which wasn't that long ago, that we had such supply chain issues, and all of a sudden there was problems getting everything from computers to cars, and we need to be innovative and inventive. We need to be looking already for substitutes that can take the place of

lithium or whatever. This needs to be not another dark age. When we go down, if we go down, and I actually think it's gonna be when we go down, we need to be prepared to turn on a dime and be innovative and see what we come up with next. If we're gonna survive the collapse of our society, which I do think is coming, I don't know when, but I don't think it's are we gonna collapse, I think it's when are we gonna collapse? And in this case, we're gonna need to be innovative and inventive. The other thing we need to do, and again, I think this is very relevant to today, is to prepare for extreme weather conditions. Now back then in the late Bronze Age, I was talking about a mega drought that lasted 150 to 300 years. That I believe would qualify as an extreme weather event. Today, we are also having extreme weather events. We see it almost on a daily basis now. And what I would say here, my rule of thumb is, look, prepare for extreme weather events, because then if they come, like intense hurricanes, then you're prepared. And if they don't come, what have you lost? Not much. So I would say one of the big lessons from antiquity is prepare for extreme weather conditions. And along those same lines, I would say one of the other lessons is to really be careful of your water resources. Be very careful of where your water is gonna come from, whether it's from a river or elsewhere, but we saw what happened in the late Bronze Age, and we're seeing what's happening today, where people are already fighting over water resources, and especially rivers. So I would say that that's another takeaway from the late Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath. And then the last thing that I would add, the last common sense thing is keep the working class happy. I mean, any historian from any period of history will tell you that that's essential. Keep the working class happy or there will be consequences to pay. And I think we see this in the late Bronze Age collapse, especially if internal rebellions are a greater factor than we have thought even till today. And even now, I would say we need to look around and ask, are we keeping the working class happy? And if not, what's gonna happen? And if people point to all sorts of things, like the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution and all of that, we've seen what happens if the working class is not happy. So I think that is, again, that would be my last of the common sense takeaways, but surely we can add to it. I mean, I think we could probably easily get up to a top 10, but for right now, I've got a top seven. One of the things we need to be worried about is the tipping point. When are we gonna reach the point of no return for ourselves? Are there warning signs? I do think there were warning signs back in the late Bronze Age. We know that the Egyptians, for example, were trying to cross-breed their cattle. Their normal cattle was Zebu or Zebu cattle who thrive better in arid conditions. Is there anything we can do today if we notice signs warning us that we may be approaching a societal collapse, that there might be a tipping point coming up soon? I think we've already got some of the signs out there. Not everybody believes them, but I do think they are there. I think the extreme climate, the weather conditions, is one of the signs that we're approaching, possibly a tipping point. But we've also got other things that some may or may not remember, back during the pandemic, when we had all sorts of supply chain issues and had trouble getting toilet paper, right? That was a systemic problem, and I think kind of a warning of what might come. The ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal for five or six days, that I think was also a problem. And it really drove home the fact that one ship stuck in one canal can affect people worldwide for a week or more. And imagine if you had that at the same time as some of the other problems. We might have been looking at a

systems collapse very quickly. And in fact, one of the things I am now wondering about, back in 2008, we had the Wall Street financial crisis. What if that crisis had happened 10 years later or a dozen years later? What if we had the Wall Street financial problems at the same time that COVID was hitting or beginning to hit? What if they had both happened in about 2020? I'm not so sure that we would be sitting here today. I think we might be scrambling in the ruins of our globalized network. I think we might have come this close to our tipping point and we're lucky that they were 10 or 12 years apart. So I don't think we're out of the woods yet. And I really do think that when people say to me, oh, we can't collapse. We're too big to fail. And I answer it, no, we're not. That's hubristic. Every society in the history of humankind has either collapsed eventually completely or has transformed so much that they're almost unrecognizable in their new form. And to say that that's not gonna happen to us, I think is just foolish, hubristic for sure. So when people say to me, are we gonna collapse? I look at them and I say, yes, we are gonna collapse. The question is when are we gonna collapse? And for that, I don't have an answer. It could be next week, year, could be 10 years from now, could be 50 years from now. But I am sure that at some point we are gonna collapse or have to transform. I mean, maybe AI is gonna create it and cause it right now, but who knows? My big question to those that are asking me is to ask them back when we collapse, how are we gonna deal with it? Are we gonna be fragile? vulnerable? Are we gonna be anti-fragile? In the aftermath of our society collapse, are we going to be Phoenicians? Or are we gonna be Mycenaeans? And I personally am a bit worried. As an archeologist, I look back. And when I tell my students that they're the next generation and they're gonna be inheriting all of the problems we've created, we know that. I'm not saying anything new, but this is where archeology, I think, can be of use. And especially archeology when it's applied to ancient history. Because if we're willing to listen and to learn from the past, then we can deal with what's happening in the present and that will affect our future. So you need to know the past, to deal with the present and go into the future. Otherwise, we're just doomed to repeat the past again and again. And personally, I think we're smarter than that. But I may be wrong. Let's hope I'm right. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think members community where you get access to videos early, ad-free. [ Silence ]