Dan Snow's History Hit - The Bronze Age Collapse

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Around 3,200 years ago, a vast, interconnected civilisation suddenly collapsed. A 'perfect storm' of climate catastrophe, famine, drought and invasion tore apart the eastern Mediterranean, plunging the survivors into decades of turmoil.Eric Cline is the author of '1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed' and its sequel, 'After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations'. He joins us to explain how this interconnected world was toppled, and what came after.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This is a story about a sophisticated, rich, interconnected world and its sudden collapse. Just over 3,000 years ago, the Eastern Mediterranean, which included Northeast Africa and what we now call the Middle East, was a cradle of civilizations. Goods from far-flung corners arrived in ships laden with luxuries for the elite. There was a complex web of diplomatic relations between powers. There were advances in arts and science. There was cultural transmission. It was the late Bronze Age.

This was the time people recognised the 18th dynasty in Egypt, which is the best dynasty in many ways You've got Hatshepsut, you've got Amenhotep III You've got the short-lived King Tut Among other impressive pharaohs But there's also the era of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans in Greece And then, then came rapid collapse A prolonged drought

And I mean, you'll hear, a prolonged drought. Earthquakes, natural disasters, cities emptied. The supply chains that people had come to depend on ground to a halt. And after that came the enemy. They could have been climate migrants, desperate men, women, and children. They could have been opportunists who pounced when the deterrence of their rich neighbouring enemies collapsed. They could have been a bit of both. By the way, they brought the sword and the spear to add to the woes of the people of the eastern Mediterranean. We get the briefest of glimpses of them in the Egyptian sources, sadly the only written sources that survive that we can interpret.

One Egyptian source calls them unruly. No one had ever known how to combat them. They came boldly sailing in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them. A slightly later source said the depredations of this confederacy had been so severe that the region was forsaken as pasturage for cattle. It was left waste from the time of the ancestors. And we can imagine that these seaborne invasions were occurring right across the sophisticated urban world of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean. Cities disappeared off the map.

Tell us all about it. We've got Eric Klein. He's a professor of classical ancient Near Eastern studies and anthropology at George Washington University. Ten years ago, he wrote 1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed. And now, after a decade, the sequel is out. After 1177 BC, the survival of civilizations. It is a fascinating and thought-provoking topic. Enjoy. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Eric, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

So before we talk about this collapse, let's talk about, well, the Golden Age, if that's the right thing to say about a Bronze Age. But let's talk about what the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean and Ancient Near East, what was it like? Were these so-called civilizations that we're familiar with, what was the sort of level of interplay between them, exchange? Just try and paint a picture, if you would, of that region. Sure, absolutely. They were interconnected. That's probably the best way to put it. In fact, Susan Sherrod of the University of Sheffield has called this the globalized Mediterranean during this period. And we're back in the Bronze Age. In fact, we're in the last part of it, the Late Bronze Age, which goes basically from 1700 to 1200 BC,

so 3700 to 3200 years ago. And we've got essentially what I would call the G8 interacting at that time. Everybody from Minoans and Mycenaeans over in Greece to the Assyrians and Babylonians over in Mesopotamia, and including the Hittites and the Egyptians. And everybody's interacting diplomatically, commercially, you name it. It was actually a lot more like today than people might expect. People will have heard of Tutankhamen. He was one of the pharaohs, commercially, you name it. It was actually a lot more like today than people might expect. People will have heard of Tutankhamen. He was one of the pharaohs, briefly, on the throne in this period. But as you say, we've got the Mycenaeans. Is this the period of the extraordinary burials in Mycenae? Yeah. Well, a little bit later, the extraordinary burials are from the Shaft Graves, which are back in about 1600 BC. And now we're down at the other end.

Those graves are probably the first dynasty at Mycenae. Now we're down at the last ones. But it is the period of the Egyptian New Kingdom. So yeah, you've got King Tut, you've got Hatshepsut, you have Ramses II, Ramses III. This is the period where I tell people, you know the personalities involved, you just don't know you know them, or you don't know the context. And also, Eric, I feel that the whole idea of Egyptology has done us a disservice because it felt like a study apart from archaeology and history from when I was growing up. It felt like a sort of strange firewalled area of academic discipline. academic discipline. And actually, the Amarna letters I've been reading recently, these Egyptian pharaohs were in contact with these Anatolians, with these Mycenaeans. They were trading. They were asking each other for money and gold and helped building palaces. As you say, it was a

far more interconnected picture than I grew up thinking. Right. Absolutely. Everything's in context. But yeah, between the archaeology and the ancient texts, like you mentioned, the Amarna letters, which were the royal archive of Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten. Yeah, we have all sorts of things, including two different types of trade, if you will. We've got the commercial trade that the merchants are doing, but we also have gift giving between the kings at the royal level. Trade was beneath the kings. They didn't do that, but they gave gifts, and they were amazing gifts. I mean, one set that we've got covers two or three different tablets of just list after list of what they gave. It can be either dowry for a wedding,

or it can be simply a greeting gift. But, you know, woe betide you if you did not give the equivalent, because they kept track, just like we do today. And let's talk about the extent of this trading network. We Brits are obviously very interested in our island's contribution to the Bronze Age, because we have remarkable deposits of tin, which is, as I understand it, quite unusual. But there's amber coming from Scandinavia. Is there British tin finding its way into this system as well? It may well. There's probably some, I would say, some Cornish tin, right? So from Cornwall. And recent studies have been indicating that maybe there's more of that than we think.

Traditionally, the idea is that the tin at that time, some might be coming from southeastern Turkey, but most of it's coming from what today is Afghanistan, the Badakhshan region, which is the same region where Lafus Lazuli comes from. So I think most of the 10 is coming from Central Asia. But yes, there are indications that somebody is coming up towards England, up towards Cornwall. And so it's really the North Africa and then the western portion of Eurasia, remarkable. Is tin and copper essential for making bronze, this tool for weapons, but also other tools that we might use building, farming, etc.? Exactly, yes. So bronze is the material from about 3000 down to 1000 BC for both weapons and tools, as you've said.

And you need 90% copper and 10% tin. If you don't have tin, by the way, you can use arsenic, but I don't recommend that. You'll be dead very quickly. But copper and tin. The copper is no problem. That's going to come from Cyprus. That's most of the copper at that time from Cyprus. But tin is the problem. And Carol Bell in England has made the analogy that tin for them is like petroleum for years, tin back then is almost like rare earths today, like lithium used in chips, everything from computers to cars. That's how important tin

was back then. So if the trade routes were cut at any point and you couldn't get tin anymore, and therefore you couldn't make bronze, then you're in trouble. That's when you're looking at supply chain breakdowns and even possibly leading to societal collapse. Well, let's come on to that. But briefly, because I adore maritime history, and I know you've done a lot of work on the Uluburun shipwreck. Shipwrecks are a wonderful snapshot of this world, of this trade. Well, indeed, you can imagine today if a giant container ship traveling between Shanghai and San Diego or Shanghai and Hamburg sunk and then was preserved, we would get this astonishing cross-section of the material culture of that exact instant in history. Tell me when that shipwreck dates from.

It's just off the coast of modern Turkey, I think. And when does it date from and what was aboard? Great question. So the Uluberin shipwreck, it did go down off the coast of Turkey, as you say, around about 1300 BC. So 3,300 years ago, 100 years before everything started to collapse. So it's a microcosm of what life was like in the good times, right? Where you've got at least seven different cultures represented on board. In terms of the cargo, you have things from the same groups that we mentioned, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Egyptians, Hittites, and so on.

And the big question is, where is it coming from and where is it going to? And what exactly is it? And we don't have answers to any of those. We think it's coming from the eastern Mediterranean, maybe Canaan, maybe Egypt, maybe Cyprus. And it's probably heading towards the Aegean, towards Greece or Crete. But is it a private merchant? Or is it one of these gifts between kings, which would be literally a king's ransom? When that ship went down, somebody went bankrupt. Absolutely. Somebody's like, where's my ship? And it went down. So it is an absolute microcosm of

what life was like before the bad times began hitting. And there are other ships too. There's another one, a smaller one, Cape Galadonia shipwreck that went down very near the Ula Brun one, again off the coast of Turkey. But then just recently, it's been announced that there's another one that was just found a week or two ago that is a mile down. And they've only pulled up two Canaanite jars from the wreck and probably aren't going to pull up anymore. But it is an indication of just how many shipwrecks are down there if we can find them. And the volume of trade and exchange in this period, are they learning from each other? Are there engineering and scientific and architectural breakthroughs that everyone

is then sort of passing on and stealing or collaborating on? Yes, I think so. As I've put it, the ideas came with the objects. So I'll give you just one example. In the linear B text of the Mycenaeans, which are written in an early form of Greek, in those linear B tablets at Mycenae, at Pylos, at Tyrens, which are basically accounting texts of what's coming in and going out of the palaces. They have the names for some things like sesame, you know, sesame like you put on food. That's sasama. That is a Near Eastern word. And same thing with the word for ivory. Basically, the names are coming with the objects.

And so, we do have things like that, but we've also got influences. The famous Lion Gate at Mycenae may have been made with the help of Hittite craftsmen. So coming from ancient Turkey to ancient Greece, essentially. So yes, there are interconnections. And of course, those continue even after. I'd say probably the most famous one later is the Phoenicians bringing the alphabet to Greece and Italy, but that's after the collapse on the other side. So yes, you've got, I would say, ideas and influences coming with the objects. Okay, well, let's talk about the collapse.

Tell me about the collapse itself. What do we know about it before we maybe think about why it happened? So the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, I'd say, is the most famous collapse in antiquity that nobody's ever heard of. Everybody's heard of the fall of the Roman Empire, but the collapse of the Late Bronze Age is just as impactful, if not more so, in a way. And it's 1,500 years earlier than the fall of the Roman Empire. So basically, everybody that we've talked about, all the interconnected societies, the interconnected civilizations, that network goes down. There are a series of unfortunate events, as one might say, a series of catastrophes that happen. Earthquakes, drought, famine, invasions, disease, all of this happens within a relatively short period of time, just after 1200 BC, and the interconnected network goes down. Everything collapses. Nobody is

communicating with anybody else, at least for a while. And each of the societies is impacted to a certain extent. Some go down and disappear, never to be seen again. Others cope, others adapt, and others transform. And of course, as always in those types of situations, there are some that take advantage and flourish in that chaotic age. So everything that we've seen that was happily flourishing for a good 500 years suddenly comes to a screeching halt within just a couple of decades. And the major cities are depopulated, the number of written sources decreases, does it? I mean, the phrase that is now out of fashion for

the early medieval period, a dark age, is that something that you think is sort of appropriate to use here? That was exactly what it was used. And it used to be called the first dark ages. After the collapse of the Bronze Age, we had the first dark ages. But just like our partners later in history, we are frowning upon using that term as well. And in fact, I've recently made a pitch to join my colleagues and just calling the aftermath the Iron Age, as Hesiod calls it, instead of the Dark Age. And it depends, honestly, where you look and when you're looking at it. If you look at Greece, for example, lots of death, lots of migration, the population probably dropped between 40 and 60 percent. It's been thought over in Mesopotamia

that the population might have dropped as much as 75 percent. I mean, it was huge, but some did manage to survive. The Assyrians and Babylonians, yes, they keep their writing. They keep their government. They keep pretty much everything they had had, and they just kind of adapt. The Mycenaeans, though, linear B, which I mentioned a couple moments ago, goes out of use. Nobody remembers how to do linear B anymore. And we go down to a lower level of social, political, and economic complexity.

Hence the term dark age, which now we're like, it was dark to us, but not necessarily to them. The Greeks themselves never mentioned a dark age. So you mentioned earlier some of the possible causes. I'm thinking with the collapse of Roman and Persian power in the Eastern Mediterranean, the rise of Islam, we think plague, disease is a huge part of it, as well as this new military strength thriving in the desert. On this one, you mentioned these earthquakes. Is it predominantly, do you think, a natural world-triggered crisis, or is there some

invasion from the East, like you get around the 5th century with the arrival of the Huns, for example, in Europe? How should we look at it in terms of the balance? I think we should look at it as a combination. There are invasions, there are migrations. The so-called famous Sea Peoples are at this time. They invade twice, 1207 and 1177 BC. They invade northern Egypt. They're invading pretty much the whole eastern Mediterranean. They wind up in Egypt, where they finally lose. Up until that point, they've been doing very, very well. And the Sea Peoples, we're not quite sure where they come from, but probably western Mediterranean, come across to the Eastern Mediterranean, but they are started probably

because of Mother Nature. Not just earthquakes, which are happening at this time, but also drought. There is a lot of evidence now that there was a drought that hit both the Eastern and the Western Mediterranean, lasting at least 150 years and maybe as much as 300 years. And so, these migrants probably begin their search for life and a better land because they have left their own homelands in Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and they may even be coming down from Europe. There is some indication of that as well. But what we're seeing, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, is the last leg of all of that, when they literally wash up on the shores of Egypt and are then beaten. So we've got a combination of human catastrophe, I would say human-driven, but also Mother Nature,

and the two are intertwined. And what I think really happened is you've got a number of catastrophes. You don't have time to recover from one before the next one hits. And they are self-reinforcing because if the trading network breaks down, bronze tools aren't very durable, are they? They don't last. It's not one of those hand the iron mallet down from father to son. They need repairing and replacing, replenishing. And if that strikes me, that's kind of extended trade network, right? From Afghanistan,

Cornwall down to the Eastern Mediterranean, that's easy to fracture and collapse. Yes. And that used to be one of the major theories as to what was going on and contributing to the late Bronze Age collapse, that the trade routes had been cut, that you had supply chain issues, much like we've just had in the last couple of years. And that, yes, if your tin supply stops, you can't make bronze anymore. And then what do you do? And the answer is then you have to be innovative and inventive, which is exactly what some do at that time. Are you referring to iron there? I am indeed.

Okay. Well, let's come to iron in a second, this new wonder material. But I'm very struck by you mentioning that some of the fertile crescent civilizations survive, and the Egyptians just about survive. Is that because they had big old rivers, which even if the water levels went down, they were still clinging to these arterial rivers in a way that isn't true of parts of Greece. Yes, I think that was exactly it, to a certain extent. Yes, because the Assyrians and the Babylonians in Mesopotamia are on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the Egyptians, as you mentioned, have the Nile. In fact, of the four greatest powers at that time, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Hittites,

only the Hittites are not on a major river source. They've got the Hales River, but it's not as big as the other three. And the Hittites are the only one of those four that go down, never to reappear. So I think, yes, I think the fact that they're on major river systems, it comes into play here, which is why I'm a little worried about us today, because we've got problems with water, water resources, drought, more linked than people think. But being on a major river system is very good, and having water resources that you can count on is imperative. A 300-year drought. I mean, that is something. It just reinforces, like the development of our species in the first place,

we are so dependent on these very small differences in our climate. Yes, absolutely. And the thing is, too, that our archaeology, our science is increasing to the extent that now we're being able to see nuances in that 300 years. We can see, for instance, at one point, there's a 50-year period where things get slightly better, and then they go back down again. But yeah, we talk about a mega drought over here in the US, in California, in the West, and they're like, oh, mega drought, that's been 10, maybe 20 years at the most. Think about a drought that lasts 150 to 300 years. We haven't seen the like here in the modern world,

anything like that. It's a very long time. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the collapse of civilizations. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were

by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's come to Egypt, people you're familiar with. This collapse, is this the end of the new kingdom that we're talking about here? Yeah, for all intents and purposes, yes. We're after the 18th dynasty. We're into the 19th dynasty. And by the time we get into the 20th, 21st, 22nd, we're into a whole new period. We're into the end of the new kingdom and then into what's known as the third intermediate

period, which is a period of anarchy and chaos to a large extent. So yeah, I would say the golden age of Egypt, if you want to put it that way, comes to an end with the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age. And for those who are interested, if the Exodus took place, and archaeologists are having trouble finding any evidence of it, but this would be the perfect time for the Exodus to have taken place. It doesn't queue up with the chronology in the Bible, but it does fit with the archaeology of this period. So, if you want to escape Egypt and make your way to a new land, Collapse of the Late Bronze Age provides you the perfect excuse and the perfect context.

And these sea people, so they're arriving sort of around 1200 BC, so right at the end of Ramesses' reign, for example. Is that about right? Yes. We're Ramses II, Merneptah, Ramses III were in that period. Pharaoh Merneptah in 1207 sees the first invasion of the Sea Peoples. And then Ramses III sees the second invasion of the Sea Peoples in 1177. And we might now call these Sea Peoples climate refugees. We might look at them like we've looked at the changes that take place in Central Asia that send these waves of invaders west. These people are, well, they're both desperate, but also perhaps see an opportunity as the

powerful empires of the East show weakness. So the Sea Peoples used to be basically the sole reason, the culprit that everybody put the blame on for the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. And it's now been seen that it's much more sophisticated than that. The new word is polycrisis, and the Sea Peoples were just one of the many crises that happened. But yeah, it used to be that people, archaeologists especially, would use the Sea Peoples as kind of a bogeyman, right? You know, they would tell our kids, go to bed or the Sea Peoples are going to get you.

But now we're thinking that they have been maybe as much victims as oppressors, that they were maybe just migrants in search of a better land. But the Egyptians pictured them as invaders seeking to take over. And I think the picture is a bit more nuanced than we had thought previously, and that they were, yes, invaders, but they were also migrants. So they are two sides of the same coin, if you will. The big question, again, is where did they come from? Where they went to, that's fine. They lose to the Egyptians, and they get settled down in Egypt and in Canaan. But are they from Italy? Are they from Sicily? Are they from Sardinia? We know their names. Sea peoples is what we call them. The ancient Egyptians actually gave us the names of the nine different groups, including Shekelesh,

Shardana, Ekwesh, Peleset. And Shekelesh might be from Sicily, Shardana might be from Sardinia. They sound similar. The only one we really think we know are the Peleset, who are probably the Philistines of the Bible. Fascinating stuff. How does this Eastern Mediterranean world begin to recover? It depends where you look again. It is fairly nuanced. I say it's like a foot race, where everybody begins at the same starting point, that is, with the collapse just after 1200 BC. And it takes them different lengths of time to get to the finish line, and some never make it at all. So, the Mycenaeans and the Minoans don't really adapt. Their palaces go away. The linear B goes away. They really, as I mentioned earlier, go down to a lower

socio-political economic state of affairs, much less complex, shall we say. The Phoenicians, on the other hand, the Phoenicians are the people in central Canaan, what we would call today Lebanon. And what they do is they transform. They take advantage of the chaos. It's what Nassim Nicholas Taleb has called anti-fragile, where you flourish in an age of chaos. And what they do is take advantage and go out into the Mediterranean and take over the sea routes and bring their alphabet, bring the purple dye, all of that. The Cypriots, on the other hand, they transform from just copper to now introducing iron. They're the ones that are responsible.

And it might make sense that the people that were the forefront of mining copper and making bronze are therefore the people that also turn to this new metal, the iron, which keeps a better edge for both weapons and tools. So the Cypriots and the Phoenicians actually do pretty well. Mycenaeans, not so much. And Hittites, not at all. The Hittite society, the economy, all of that goes down, never to recover. That doesn't mean that everyone dies.

It just means that Hittite society goes away, except for a fairly small area in what we would today call North Syria, where there are survivals, and we get the new Hittites, the neo-Hittites. I would say it's like the British Empire doesn't exist anymore, but there are parts of the world where people still play cricket and drink tea. That's what happens in North Syria, these people that are the new Hittites. So it really depends on where you look. And Egypt, for example, is right in the middle. They don't disappear, but they don't flourish. They kind of retract. And as I mentioned, we're in the middle. They don't disappear, but they don't flourish. They kind of retract. And as I

mentioned, we're in the third intermediate period in Egypt at that time, between 1200 and 800 BC, give or take. And it's a period of anarchy. You've got, at one point, you've got four different people claiming that they are pharaoh of Egypt at the same time in different parts of Egypt. So I would say that's not a really good situation, but you also haven't disappeared. So again, it depends on where you look as to how people responded. And again, I think that in itself holds lessons for us today, because essentially we've got eight case studies from the ancient world of what to do or what not to do if your society, if your globalized network goes down. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Thoughts. Happy thoughts. Just remind us why it was so different. Given that iron is so much more abundant, it's so much of it around, and getting tin and copper and mixing them together to make bronze seems to be quite challenging. Why? It's the smelting temperature, right? You have to heat a fire to five times the temperature that you need to create bronze.

Yes, it's a totally different way of creating it, but different technologies, lots of wood, huge smelting temperatures and all of that. They probably found out how to make it by accident at first while they were creating the bronze. But then once you know how to make it, once you've mastered the technique of iron smelting, anybody could do it. And iron ore is much more prevalent, right? Every country's got it. And so what it looks like is that the Cypriots on the island of Cyprus, the ones that started this, they seem to have been good neighbors. So along with the first objects, which by the way are knives and

daggers, where the blade is ironed, but the hilt, the rivets are still bronze. They're called bimetallic. And they export these both to Greece on the one side and the Levant, ancient Canaan, on the other. And they told everybody how to make it at the same time. They're sending out the technology along with the actual objects. And so we can actually see in the archaeological record as one area after another learns how to do iron smelting. And by the time we're heavily into the Iron Age, everybody can do it. So there's no monopoly anymore like there had been with copper and with tin. So it's actually a much better age for everybody involved, but it took a while. The one thing though to counter, and you'll see this all over the internet, the Sea Peoples whom

we mentioned, they did not have weapons of iron. I see that everywhere. Not true. The Hittites did not invent iron. That was a mistranslation of a text done decades ago. It is, we think now, the Cypriots that are involved, and it doesn't take place until partway through and then almost all the way through the collapse itself. It is a reaction to the problems, right? You have to be inventive when times are not good, and that's what we've got with iron. How is this new world different from that late Bronze Age world? So, in terms of how it's different, the big thing that we can see is that the major kingdoms and empires have gone away, and we go down to smaller city-states and kingdoms. So, for instance,

where we had had the Hittites up in ancient Anatolia, we now get the Urartians on one side and the Phrygians on the other. We get a series of smaller city-states in North Syria, the Neo-Hittites, as I mentioned. And then further south, where the Canaanites had been, we get the Phoenicians in central Canaan, essentially Lebanon. And then further south from that, in the region of southern Canaan, we get suddenly the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah, the kingdom of Edom, Moab, Ammon, we get a series of smaller kingdoms and city-states, and it's going to take a while for them to get back into contact with each other. The one empire that we really have still is the Assyrians, and they become the

Neo-Assyrians, and their neighbors, the Babylonians. They managed to kind of weather the storm a little bit better than others, at least at first, probably because of the Tigris and Euphrates, as you mentioned. But even they get hit with drought and famine, such that one of their texts talks about cannibalism at one point. That's how bad the drought and the famine was. But the Neo-Assyrians bounce back, and what they find is, and we're in about the 9th century here, all the people they had been trading with before to get the raw materials, they're in trouble. And so the Neo-Assyrians simply conquer them and take militarily what they want. And we wind up by the 8th century with a new empire,

the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which basically conquers the entire Near East. So nothing new under the sun after the Late Bronze Age empires go away. Eventually, we're going to get the Iron Age empires. And then one follows after another, Neo-Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, you know, empires rise, empires fall. We're off. We're off to the races at that point, all the empires that people will recognize. And the Neo-Assyrian Empire and its successor, the Persian Empire, which occupies much of the same space, its great generational struggle against the Greeks.

In what way does this collapse and then this birth of the Iron Age shape Greek political geography and give us these city-states that we know and love and the competition between them and then the cultural renaissance and the birth of the Greek world? So, the collapse of the Late Bronze Age enabled everything that you've just mentioned, right? Sometimes it takes a large wildfire to get away the old growth and allow new things to grow. And we've got pretty much exactly that situation in Greece. They basically go back down to ground zero. They have to rebuild all the way up. As I mentioned earlier, somewhere between 40 and 60% of the people in Greece either died or migrated.

There are quite a few survivors, but the Mycenaean economy has gone away, the Mycenaean society has gone away. By about 1050 BC, nobody calls themselves a Mycenaean anymore. And the palaces, the palaces that were at Mycenae, Pylos, Tyrens, even over on Crete at Knossos. Eventually, again, by about 1050, those go away. And they are during the 8th century. It's going to take a while, but in the 8th century, we begin to get what we would call the city-states, the ones that everybody's heard of. Athens, Delphi, Sparta, those come up during the Iron Age. And by the time we get into the archaic and then the classical periods by the eighth and then into the seventh centuries, Greece is back up and running. They are part of the globalized network again. They've

reconstituted everything. And then, as you just mentioned, they're off to the races, because then we get little things like democracy and building the Parthenon and all of that, which will come later, you know, 7th century, 6th century, 5th century. But really, if you want to look at it in a way, you had to do away with what was happening in the late Bronze Age in order to essentially get a fresh start and start over again. And that leads to classical Greece, if you will. Ooh, the little saplings poking up through the toasted forest floor. Eric, there's so many lessons here. I'm now wondering, I've never been a radical before, but you can see why there's an argument about the occasional sweeping away of all that is old in the hope and expectation that what is new might be better. The trouble is,

that is accompanied by unimaginable bloodshed and human mortality, or can be, can be. It can be. It's not something I would recommend, let's put it that way. And it's certainly not anything they planned. I'm not even sure they knew they were in a collapse until they're looking in the rear view mirror and going, oh my God, what just happened to us? So they did not plan on it. And then it's a matter of how do you make the best of a bad situation? And they did. They did make the best of a very bad situation. But again, I don't think back then there was anything they could have done about it, nor again, as I said, had they expected it would happen. Was it all just an oral tradition of decline?

I mean, in the collapse of the Roman Empire or the transition of the Roman Empire in Western Europe in the 5th century, we've got scholars like Gildas here in what is now the UK, writing down things and lamenting past greatness and its destruction. Would there have been that same sense of collapse, of decline, of going backwards, do you think? To a certain extent, yes. Unfortunately, we don't have contemporaneous accounts that are saying, woe is us, we're in the middle of a collapse, anything like that. We do have some letters like from the Hittite king to the Egyptian pharaoh saying, woe is us, we're in the middle of a collapse, anything like that. We do have some letters, like from the Hittite king to the Egyptian pharaoh, saying, there's

famine in my land, please send me food, and they do send grain ships. But what we have are later writers, not that much later, but 8th century in Greece, people, your listeners have heard of Homer, I would imagine, and Hesiod as well. So Homer writes about the Trojan War, which does seem to take place, a good time for it, is during the collapse around about 1250 or 1200 BC. So Homer is looking back at this great war between the Mycenaeans and the Trojans, but also Hesiod, one of the earliest of the Greek poets. Hesiod talks about, and he is the one lamenting, woe is me, I'm in the age of iron at this point. Back then, that was the age of semi-heroes and the golden age and then the

silver age. So we do have some people, yes, looking back and lamenting, but not as many as we would wish and certainly not as many as we need because I, for one, would love to have more contemporaneous accounts. Right now, all we have the Egyptians saying that the Sea Peoples have invaded, but we need more text, more archives, more inscriptions talking about that particular period rather than looking backwards. But would there have been enough monumental architecture around as well for people to see it falling into disrepair and thinking, huh, something's weird. We've gone backwards here. You think it would have felt like a regression to people on the ground if they were

near these great urban centers. Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. Especially if you're in Greece and you can see the ruins of Mycenae and Tyrrhyns and all of that. And indeed, we do have something that archaeologists refer to as hero cults, where it would be something from the Late Bronze Age that they're still seeing in the Iron Age and starting to worship around there, starting to worship the ancient heroes. So the Iron Age, they definitely remembered and looked back to the remnants of the Bronze Age. And frequently, this is where we get teleological explanations where people say, oh, look at

the ruins. Yeah, that was X and this happened to it. And so, they make up stories about that. And some of the Greek myths and legends may have their origins in that. Think, for example, of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, right? The half-man, half-bull that lived underneath Knossos. That may have been a later explanation to talk about the ruins of Knossos, where we know they did strange things like bull leaping back in the late Bronze Age, and then you've got the ruins that look like a labyrinth. And so, it may well have been that Theseus and Laminator is a story made up to explain the ruins of Knossos. Not sure that is what it is, but it's a possibility.

And perhaps then to explain how the Athenians got out from underneath their hegemony as well. Absolutely. And then, you know, the story of the Trojan War and all of that, and even the story, the myth of Atlantis may be a memory of Santorini blowing up earlier, 1600 BC. But I'm one of the people that think that at the basis of or some of the Greek myths and legends, there is a kernel of truth that started everything. So, I like the idea of Theseus and the Minotaur being based and trying to explain the ruins of Knossos. Well, Eric, thank you very much for coming in, covering so much history with us, an absolutely fascinating period of history with lots of important, thought-provoking ideas and themes in for today as well. So thank you very much. If people want to learn more, what can they do? Well, we could go read 1177 BC and the sequel now called After 1177 BC.

and the sequel now called After 1177 BC. And I do hope that people read them. To me, this is one of the most famous and fascinating periods in history, which nobody knows about. Yes, your book, 10 years old now, The Year Civilization Collapsed, but the follow-up, After 1177 BC, The Survival of Civilizations, is out now. So go and get it, everybody. Thank you very much indeed.

My pleasure. Thank you very much indeed. My pleasure. Thank you for having me on. you