Empire: World History - 332. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Before The Collapse (Ep 1)

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

This is the beginning of the most dramatic imperial collapses in history. Why were Ancient civilisations so interconnected 3000 years ago? How did this interconnectedness lead to their downfall? Did people at the time know that disaster was on the horizon? In Episode 1 of a brand new series, Anita and William are joined by Josephine Quinn, author of How The World Made The West, and Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University, to discuss the interconnected Ancient Mediterranean city states on the brink of the Bronze Age Collapse of 1147 BCE. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editor: James Clayden Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. We've seen many empires rise and fall, but in the next six episodes, we're going to look at the most dramatic imperial collapse in history. empire after empire disappearing in a wave of violence, droughts and catastrophes. This is the Bronze Age collapse 2000 BC. Hello and welcome to Empire. I'm William Duremberg. And I'm Anita Arnan. Now, William and I, since we began this podcast, we've been looking at the rise and fall of empires, why it happens, when it

happens, who was involved? But over the next series, what we're going to be doing is we're going to be exploring, which something that really has to be one of the most dramatic imperial collapses of all time in human history. And it's a period that is much earlier than, you know, the things that we normally look at here. We are leaving the world of the East India Company. We are leaving the Mughals. We're leaving the mutiny far, far behind us. And instead, we are heading 3,000 years into the past to a world which in many ways actually looks surprisingly like the one we're in today? I hope it's not too similar because this is a period when empires collapse in a range of

connected crises. There are raiders, brigands, droughts, a whole variety of different crises that bring down first Mycini, then Troy, then a whole range of city-states on the Mediterranean. This is the Bronze Age collapse, 2000 BC. And to help us understand this extraordinary period of time and a period of time that I'm sure you don't know much about. We've got such stellar guests lined up and we're starting actually on a high. We've got Professor Josephine Quinn, who you've heard on this podcast before, Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University. And her work on ancient Mediterranean cultures has completely transformed the academic field. So it makes us think, Joe, again, about sort of

global connectivity. We think of that far behind. And I suppose normally we'd think about little enclave, of humanity, but it was much more sinuous and connected than you might imagine. Exactly, yeah. Thanks for having me back. And to talk about one of my favorite subjects, this incredibly interconnected world of the ancient Mediterranean, even as far back as the Bronze Age. We're absolutely not looking at pockets of civilization or isolated economies here. We're looking at this huge network of states and societies and communities. And at the heart of it, you've got this group of big empires, Egypt, the Hittites in Anatolia, the Babylonians, and so on. And that's a completely interconnected world of trade, trade agreements, royal marriages,

diplomatic correspondence. I mean, that's a world where people are in contact all the time where kings are in contact all the time. And at the same time, they're also in contact. And at the same time, They're also in contact. They're also kind of dealing with this much kind of vast number of other communities, other states and so on. Some of them subordinate to them. Others of them just foreign. And this is a world that reaches from Afghanistan,

across to Morocco, Scandinavia, Eurasian steppe down to Sudan, basically, possibly even further into the Indian Ocean at this point. this completely enmeshed world in a way that I think it's really hard to imagine now. Joe, what surprised me about reading about this era is the incredibly detailed sources. I always imagine that when you get to the 18th to 19th century, you've got diplomatic letters and, you know, register of merchants and all the stuff that they're selling and so on. And I imagine that at this sort of period in 2000 BC

that we're dealing only with sort of dusty bits of pots dug up, by archaeologists, but it's actually got really rich sources. There's incredible archives at Hattusha in Hittite Anatolia. She's near modern Ankara? Near modern Ankara, exactly, in central Anatolia. You've got Ugrat on the coast of Syria. Incredible archives. Well, I spent a night in a sleeping bag once upon a time,

and my 20th birthday, my first night in Syria was spent because I couldn't afford a hotel. I bedded down in a trench in the dig. I am super jealous. Have you ever been to Armana in Egypt? I haven't actually, no. Because that's where the biggest archive of all is, that's the most important one. That's the one where you get all the correspondence to the Pharaoh, to Akanaten,

it's Tutankhamun's dad. And in the 14th century... Sometimes said to be the first monotheist. Debatable, yeah. Got out of fashion that one. It's in the Philip Glass Opera. Yeah, yeah, no, no, I... Which is brilliant.

But, no, it would be a totally reasonable thing to say about him. He was also a great correspondence. And this is the kind of the thing that's being really useful. for historians is you have these letters not only from all the other great kings, the kind of emperors of the era, but also from their subjects. And the great kings call each other brothers.

Well, you know, sibling squabble. And you've got squabbily messages going between some of these rulers. Oh, I mean, some of them are incredibly miffed with each other. The Egyptian pharaoh, he controls the gold. The gold is in Egypt and everyone else wants gold. So you get these letters that say things like, you haven't sent me enough gold, but it grows like dust in your country. Why haven't you sent me enough?

The king of Cyprus writes to Pharaoh's mum to say, your son sent me these statues, but they weren't gold. They were gold plates. How very dare you? How very dare you? And just give us a sense of scale. You know, you say these places are interconnected. How much of the planet did they cover? I mean, how many people did they go? Just give us the scale. Well, I mean, one way to get at that is a shipwreck off the coast of the Cape of Ulburen in Turkey, around 1,300 BCE. This ship, it's got 10 tonnes of copper on it. It's got a ton of tins. This is the perfect ratio for making bronze. But it's also got amber from the Baltic.

It's got ebony from Africa. It's got enormous jars of resin from the Levantz. It's got ivory. It's got... It sounds like a sort of bronze. age Harrods or something. Yeah, exactly. But the other thing, it's got a little figurine of a levantine god, some leventine weights and measures on it. So you can tell where the crew are from, but they're bringing things from all over the world and carrying them around. So when you say

they, I mean, who are the they that are moving all this great stuff around? Well, yeah. This are your friends. Yeah, these are the people. Your first book, the Phoenicians. Absolutely. They've been called Canaanites. They've been called Phoenicians. What they were people from the city states of the Levant, so Tyre, Saiden, Biblos, modern Beirut is one of these city states that still survives. And these are the people who are actually moving the stuff. Much smaller states, kind of running under the radar of the Great Kings a little bit, behaving well, making the trade work. They're really the glue in this kind of huge imperial system, these kind of maritime geniuses. So you've got all of this economic activity,

wherever you have economic activity, you have turmoil, you have dispute, you have people wanting to get the upper hand. Is that happening at the same time? Oh, all the time. These kingdoms fall out all the time. In particular, Egypt and Hittite Anatolia, those are the two great enemies. They're particularly fighting over the Levant. There's a huge battle, 1274. Are they equal?

Because, you know, we go to Egypt and we see all that stuff in Egypt. There's a lot of stuff in Egypt. less so in Anatolia. I mean, even when you see Hittites in picture books, it's always those two lions, quite sort of crutty-looking lions at the entrance to Hattusha. Were the Hittites really a big deal? Yes, they really were in this period. I mean, these were pretty much balanced powers. And the remains aren't as impressive. The archives are extraordinary. And actually, if you can get to them, some of these Hittite cities are amazing. So, I mean, okay, they are considerable. But the way I think about it, the world today is that you have superpowers and then you have medium powers and then you have

those who are often crushed under those powers. Can you categorise that way? You can bring out a sort of three, that sort of three level. You can have the powers at the top, Egypt, Hittites, the Babylon, the Cassites in Babylonia, the rising Assyrians, those are the guys right at the top. Think of this sort of medium layer. Cyprus controls a lot of copper. They're pretty big in the system. Mycini in Greece. These places a bit to the West that are sort of the rising powers. Your wonderful book, which we have to actually mention yet, how the world made the West, which was my holiday reading this summer.

I sat very happily deep in that book. I highly recommend to anyone that listens to this. But in that you have a picture where quite a lot of the ideas, perhaps counterintuitively for anyone that's been brought up on a sort of Western Civilization course or something, that they're given all those American universities. A lot of the ideas that we perhaps associate with Western civilizations, with a capital W and a capital C, actually coming from the eastern side of the Mediterranean

and travelling westwards to the less civilised Western Europe. One of the kind of problems with this is this whole idea of civilization. It's sort of invented at the same time as the idea of the West. It's my wonderful friend, George Osharach Sarkas's new book, The West, History of an Idea. He traces it to the same period, kind of early to mid, kind of 19th century, and the idea of civilization is taking off as well. So I think those two ideas, civilization in the West, have become incredibly bound up with each other.

But actually, one of the things that's glorious about the Bronze Age is that you see how many things come from elsewhere. So different kinds of metal technology from Anatolia, but also early ideas of peace treaties, of legal codes come from Anatolia. Greeks themselves talk about how much philosophy and history come from Egypt and so on. Herodot is very keen on that idea. But things are coming from the west and the north at the same time.

So, amber is coming down from the Baltic. Tin is coming from Cornwall. And lapis from as far away as Badakshan in Afghanistan. Absolutely. And I was just before I came here, I was in Mumbai for a few days. and I saw this wonderful new hall in the big museum in Mumbai. Partly based on the Golden Road, I'm very happy to say. It's brilliant.

It's just opened last month, I think. And it has a Harappan city, an Indus Valley, an ancient Indian city. Grid plans, private toilets in the houses, absolutely extraordinary. Things that people have been saying for a couple of hundred years. Oh, the Greeks invented this or even the Minoans invented this. Actually, there isn't a thousand years. It's modern Pakistan. Exactly. Exactly. It's absolutely incredible.

As friends of ours would say, on goodness gracious me, Indian. But can I just go back to this superpower idea? Because, you know, not that I'm saying it's happening right now, but superpowers tend to try and destroy the world. And if the two sort of superpowers that we're talking about at this time of the Hittites and the Egyptians, they do clash as superpowers tend to. But it doesn't end in cataclysm, interestingly enough.

No, I mean, it's a huge battle, a Battle of Kadesh, 1274 or so. What it actually ends in is a peace treaty. It's a sort of a stalemate, 15 years they wrangle over it. Then there's a treaty in about 1259. And we know they had a treaty because the treaty survives. I mean, things that you just think it would be impossible that they would last for thousands of years. People have found them.

They've touched them. They've read them. They've deciphered them. No, it's extraordinary. And one of the things that it shows is this, idea of the balance of powers. So what they do is they split the Levant between them. And it pretty much sticks after that. I'm fighting over it. Spheres of influence, dare I say? Spheres of influence. Yeah. And it stays for about 100 years maybe. And another very familiar thing you seem to be

having at this time, which perhaps would surprise people, is you have what looks like a kind of civil service. You have a professional teams of scribes. The reason we know all this, we've been talking about these documents, is that they're on clay, which when a thing gets burnt down actually solidifies Well, it hardens. Yeah, it does the opposite of what you burn a library. You know, it just goes up to smoke. But with clay, it's there forever if you burn it. And this seems to be a key to this period.

These are little palace-based economies, these city-states, with little teams of scribes all communicating to each other in Acadian, is it? Is that the diplomatic language? It depends where you are. So the diplomatic language that these great kings write to each other in is Acadian. That's the same. Acadian is Sargon of Akkad. Exactly.

Exactly. This is Babylonian. So quick, boring. thing that I always bring up any time anyone says Akad is Hehruana, which is his daughter, apparently the first named author in human history. Don't make that face, Joe. I'm going to play poker with you, Joe. Joe has got such a poker face. I just know. So you're going to tell me, no. Well, the thing is, we don't know. And Hadoana existed. Yeah. She was a priestess. The idea that she was a great author, the work that's attributed to her is much rate her. Are you suggesting

that Elita is exaggerating? The role of a woman. kick-ass women. She would never do that. She would never be the only one. And I hate it. I'm such a boring academic. I'm so skeptical. I would say,

we can't prove it. It's not, I'd love it to be true. No, to be like that, Joe, that's fine. But we can't prove it. Yeah, I'll tell you what, but we are playing poker because your face

is a giveaway. Okay, so moving along. I'm a terrible poker player. Talk a little bit more about these palace economies, because I want to know how centralised the control is. So, I mean, it's a really good question because I think until maybe a generation ago, would have said these are completely palace-based. You know, 100%, these are centralised,

directed economies. And what's really been coming out of the more recent readings of the tablets, and of course there aren't that many people who can read these thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. There's new things coming out all the time. And I would say right now what it looks like is that there's a lot of palatio-centric, can we call it? Most people in these big empires owe time, labor to the palace, which means that the palace therefore controls quite a lot of agriculture, crafts, production, that kind of thing. But we also can see evidence of independent landowners, including kind of religious organizations. We also can see the first references to the demos, the people, the word that becomes demos, that gives us democracy.

see these groups called the Damos can be independent landowners. So if you're a peasant with your olive trees 20 miles out of Miscini, let's say, are you selling only to Miscini? And is it the palace which is getting all the goodies? You may well be. It's not certain that you would be. You may well have to send a certain amount to the palace. If you're a craftsperson, the palace may give you some things they've had in to kind of use.

But not all of it probably. We're talking today from Jaipur at the Jaipur Literature Festival. And in the 18th century, this was very much what was going on in places like Jaipur and the Red Fort in Delhi, that you didn't, the artisans producing all those beautiful things that you see in exhibitions of the Rajputs or the great moguls. Our palace-based artisans, the manuscripts are in one room next door, all the guys doing the stuff in copper or excavating rock crystal or whatever it is. There's a huge amount of that. But there's other stuff going on as well. It's just beginning to appear.

Right, so with the other stuff, are there smaller states that are given the oxygen to exist? And I mean, how important are they? And what are they doing? We don't know that much about them. We know they exist. We also know, by the way, that traders are independent or can be independent. Again, there's a lot of palace-based trade, palace-directed trade. It's also a lot of independent trade. So there's a kind of symbiosis going on between these great kings and these traders and farmers. and so on who are working partly with them and some of them, maybe a lot of them, working partly independently as well. But then there are a lot of people

who don't get any choice in the system, who are just indentured, who are enslaved and so on. And there's going to be quite a lot of friction in a society like this. Welcome back. Joe, so we talked before about all these different palaces sitting around different ports in the Mediterranean, all sort of sending boats to each other

and these floating department stores full of amber and lapis going from east to west and west to east and all that. Tell us about the cultural world. Are they intermarrying? Are they all got the same gods? How are they interating? I mean, Marini is a long way from Egypt, for example.

Right. So there's different kinds of integration, not even interactions, integrate. So you have royal marriages. You know, you have Hittite princesses, marrying the pharaoh. You've got Cypriot kings. kind of arranging marriage, all that kind of thing.

But you've also got kings asking for specialists from each other and in kind of local knowledges. You get a letter at Amarna asking for a specialist in the interpretation of the omens given by vultures. People are interested in the knowledges and the kind of cultural practices of other people. You also get, one of the things I love is that the original Greek word for wine, It's actually Wainu. From Winoe, which is a Semitic word.

So you can begin to see the vocabulary that's reflecting the kinds. So when we call someone a Wino today, we're speaking West Semitic, are we? But will he mention gods? And, you know, how do the gods cross borders? And do they transform once they've crossed a border? Yeah, so this is really fun. So you get it in two ways. You get the ways people relate to the gods.

So this is in ancient Greece, for instance. This is the period, late Bronze Age, when people start burning sacrifices, so smoke can waft up to the gods or pouring libations on the grounds, we can go down to the gods of the underworld. Totally leavened-fying. Is that the idea of libation? It's going down to the gods. I always see them. I'm thinking wasting all this good wine. My Scottish self is outraged at the thought of it.

I think they keep back quite a bit for themselves as well. They certainly keep all the meat from the smoke sacrifices. But then you get the gods as well. And what happens is sometimes you get wholesale adoptions of gods. I mean, ISIS, Egyptian ISIS, very popular in the Levant and so on. Sometimes I'm a different name. I remember sending you a picture a couple of months ago. I went to the Egyptian Museum in Turin.

And there was something which was extraordinary, which really took me back because it was an Egyptian picture of a Canaanite goddess. And she was this naked woman standing on a lion, which again is what we were. associated here in India with Durga and there's a whole world of goddesses on lions that moves from here eastwards into India. But what I was intrigued by is that this world of Canaanite gods, I hadn't taken in that there was this whole world, which is obviously impacting on how early Israelite ideas of God, ideas of Yahweh. And I spent the Christmas actually reading these books about early Canaanite religion, having asked you for reading this. And this idea is, some scholars think that Yahweh had a goddess attached to him, that the god that we call God and

Christianity. What, you're saying there's a Mrs. Yawai? This is controversial stuff, but it's, some scholars do think this, don't they? There's definite indications of that in, in the inscriptions, very early inscriptions where I think this happens in a lot of religions that, that, that sort of become monotheistic. You actually realize that in the early stages, this happens in Persian religion, two, that you actually have a whole set of gods

and one of them becomes kind of our god and that becomes the important one. And true also of the way that the Canaanite gods who end up being regarded as the sort of enemy gods by the Israelites become our devils. So Lucifer starts off as an astral deity and Bialzibab, who's another figure in the Old Testament that reappears in the New Testament, the Lord of the Flies, is a version of Baal, a localized version of Baal, who is the main Canaanite storm god?

Is that right? Yes, exactly, yeah. And they are literally demonized. They're turned into demons from gods. Exactly, exactly. And these kind of movements happen all the time. So there's a wonderful text by a guy called Philo of Biblos. He's writing in the Roman period.

But he says, he's talking about ancient Phoenician. That's a lot of overlap with Ugaritic things, which really are Bronze Age. So it looks pretty good. And he says, first of all, he says, oh, well, of course, this Levantime religion, this Phoenician religion, as he calls it. It's got a lot of connections with Egypt, comes from Egypt. But then he tells these stories about how the god El, the king of the Canaanite, Phoenician, king of the gods, gives cities in the Levant. He gives one to Baltis, his a Levantine goddess. He gives another one to Poseidon, who's a Greek god.

Then he gives Athens to Athena. And it's like, hang on. How are you at? And he is very much around El, because in two ways. A, he becomes synonymous with Yahweh in some of the early texts. And you find the Psalms and some of the early bits of the Bible using the word L as the form of God. And it lives on, in no less in names we have today, like my son's name, Samuel. Oh.

That's El. Gosh, I never thought of that. It's extraordinary. The king of the gods, the gods, the gods. So is it all oral tradition? Or is there, I mean, how much literacy is there? Do people write stuff down and do people read the stuff that they write down? See, this is one of the really interesting things.

If you look at the really big empire, it's the top layer, Egypt, Hittites and so on, a lot of the literacy is kept in the palaces. It's professional scribes, it's used for administration and so on. The smaller societies you come down to, the less control you've got, the less conservative they are. So Ugarit, for instance, we have all the palace-based stuff. We also have priests archives.

We also have Traders' Archives, as you said. I should put in here that Joe Quinn, our wonderful guest today, is one of the few people in the world that reads Ugaritic. I think it's a very splendid thing to be able to do. It's not a hugely useful life skill these days. But you can read.

Does anyone else in Europe read Ugaritic? I mean, is there a whole world of Ugaritic scholars? Do you all go on holiday together and have conferences? You know, we could have a WhatsApp group. Yes, the conferences are so small they take place in the elevator. But with Uguerite, though, I mean, does it look very different? Does it sound very different? Does it, you know, is it just completely impossible for people to understand?

Or is it like, you know, Hindi and Urdu, for example, that there's, you know, a great deal of crossover. So what's brilliant is there's a huge amount of crossover. So Ugaritic is very closely. related to Phoenician dialects, very closely related to Hebrew. Old Hebrew, yeah. These are all closely related. It's not too far from Acadian, not mutually comprehensible, but, you know, it doesn't they long to learn if you know one of them.

But what they write it down in, actually, it's very unusual to write down your local language in a city in a swat. You write down Acadian, you speak the local language. But what they do is they do start writing it down, and they write it down in an alphabet, which is a very leaven time thing. thing that goes from east to west. And Ugrat is an important part of that story, isn't it? Well, except.

It's a bit of a strange dead end. Because what the people of Ugarit do is they write their alphabet, not in the scripts that the Phoenicians use, that then becomes Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, that kind of thing. They write it in Cuneiform. They write it in the Acadian script, not the Acadian Lounge, but it create Cadian script. So this is very grand kind of international rights. system and they use it to write the alphabet. And this is, I mean, it's extraordinary.

They take a technology from one place to do so from a very global international technology to do this completely local thing, this phenomenon of localization, where alongside this globalisation, always kind of shared international tastes and so on, you get alongside it, but kind of in reaction to it as well, this new focus on the local and the sort of pride in local. identity and local achievements and so on. That's what's going on with the Eucharitic alphabet. When I grew up, I had a very clear idea in my head that sort of, you know, there were the Phoenicians who are roughly where Lebanon is and that they're different from the Canaanites who are roughly

where Israel, Palestine is and that these are different things. But these worlds, you think are actually, I mean, particularly the East Levantine coast is, despite being different city-states, is one cultural unity? I wouldn't say a unity. I'd say more of a spectrum. A spectrum. Very good. But each city state. Like Renaissance Italy?

Yeah, much more like that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then the thing about Canaanites and Phoenicians is that these are external labels. We use pretty vaguely. Sometimes Canaanite means something like brigand. Other times it's a geographical label for the southern Levant. Other times it's used for.

the land that Egypt controls, and similarly for Phoenicians. Sometimes it just seems to mean sailors. Sailors speak a different language. Other times it's used of places that we wouldn't consider part of, people speaking Aramaic and so on. Other times it's used of these city states, again. And then there's become this scholarly convention where the Canaanites come first and then you get the Phoenicians.

And there's no reason to think that's an ancient idea at all. So, and I think in all this kind of labour, You sort of lose those city states at the heart of it. But what you seem to be talking about, and now I'm worried we're doing the wrong thing, because you're talking about something that's so like lace. It's all sort of interconnected. And there are branches that overlap and they weave into each other. I mean, it sounds like it's a pretty good deal.

I mean, was it stable? Because we are talking about a collapse after all. I mean, it all sounds lovely. One of the problems is the interconnection itself. that it's all very well to have lots of connections and draw on lots of other people and resources and so on. When you start depending on them, when you stop being self-sufficient, that becomes a problem. It's fine as long as everything stays the same. But if you get disruption, that's an issue.

Surely, let's just say you're sitting in my seat and you've got the locals producing all your grain and your grapes and your olives. It doesn't terribly matter if you don't get last. Lappis coming in from Badakshan or if the amber for the Baltic doesn't turn up. That's not going to be the end of the world. But it does. If you pay for your grain with lapis, you know, or if you need bronze, you need that copper from Cyprus. You need the Tim from Afghanistan or Cornwall.

That literally where the only two places to come from? They're the only two substantial sources. So where were the big disruptions? I know you said they were warning signs. So they're different kinds of things. So you can have climate disruption. there seem to be periods of drought that's tricky for the system

you can have wars sometimes wars so far away that we don't even hear about them but the tin gets cut off from one direction or another there are very mysterious wars in continental Europe in this period there seems to be a lot of disruption

kind of Iran, Central Asia we don't know the details but you can see people looking for new places to get their metals from that's the kind of thing that doesn't work in a super interconnected system because this is what Eric Klein has written about so wonderfully in his book 1177. Which, again, was part of my Christmas reading.

I again, strongly recommend it. We're having Eric Klein for some episodes in this series to come. And he will be telling us about the actual claps. But before the claps, just to set this scene of this world which is about to fall, this very modern sounding world where you've got ships going back because of forwards, bringing goodies from abroad and everyone's happy. One question I want to ask is, if you're a peasant in this world, if you are that man with the olive tree outside Mycini or it's equivalent in Ugarit or in Canaan.

Are you happy with all these fancy palaces taking all your stuff? I love that question. Are they happy? Are they happy? I don't think they're happy at all because they owe not just their farming labour, but in a lot of cases they're going to have to give labour to build these palaces. The Cyclopean walls of Myzini. Someone has to move those walls.

They didn't need to be that big. But it looks great, but somebody had to move those stones. So I think this is the other problem. It's not just the interconnectedness of the kind of global system we've been talking about. It's also in a way the over interconnectedness of the local system, that over-hierarchized system. So one of those warning signs is you get these destructions by fire. You don't really know what's going on. They're not mentioned in the tablets and so on.

Now, is this, you know, pirates, is it brigands? Is it awesome? Awesome. Exactly. Yeah, it's local. If you're somebody who's been lugging great chunks of rock and suddenly there's scarcity and you're the first one not to have dinner, of course, you know, of course you might torch the bloody thing. Right. And some of these destruction layers do not have bronze arrows heads connected with them.

I mean, some like Ugarit clearly do have attacks and we know that, you know, someone has come from a boat. We even have messages. People say, please help. Exactly. All this will be coming in Eric Klein's episodes in this series in two or three episodes. but there are thick destruction layers in many cities. There's also, I think I'm right in saying, that there is signs of people rebuilding fortifications just before this collapse,

that there's a sign that people are anxious. Yeah, there's rebuilding of fortifications. There are also places where a lot of the damage is focused on the palace, the kind of upper town, not the lower town and so on. So this is really, if people talk about the collapse of civilization, they don't mean everybody's civilization. In fact, they mean what looks like civilization to us, right? The palaces, writing, that kind of thing.

Eric Klein will tell you all about this. There's a lot of destruction, goes on, a lot of depopulation. But as with kind of the black death in the medieval period, there's an argument to be made that for the people who are left at the end of it, life is actually better without those kings. I just wanted to remind me, this is the age of Troy, isn't it? How sophisticated was warfare? Do we know?

I mean, super sophisticated. So this is the height of bronze warfare in the Bronze Age. You've got siege warfare. You've got these amazing fortifications there against. You've got bronze weapons. You know, this is the height. It's also the last great moment of bronze. This is another thing that goes.

Iron takes over after this. In a terrible way, I want to say it's going to be beautiful warfare. This is the flashing swords and so on, the chariots, all that kind of stuff. this is its greatest moment when it's actually on the brink of oblivion. Is the, I always, as a child was very interested, I was very keen sort of nerdy young archaeologist going around the hill forts in Scotland where I grew up. And I always had this idea that if you had a bronze sword and someone came along with iron,

that your sword would just shatter in front of the paper scissors. Exactly that. Exactly that. Is that the sort of thing that's going on? Are we thinking of new people's turning up with iron and threatening these people? that have only got bronze? Or is that not? It's more that iron is much easier to make. So it's that bronze, it's great, but you need that tin from very far away. You need a good, very reliable source of copper. You need people who know how to make it. Iron is hard too, but it's a kind of one-off

trick. So iron is a super, super luxury metal in the Bronze Age. Only the Hittites know how to make it. Yeah, the Hittites are the first guys to get held of this. So no wonder that they're really sort of giving a run to the Egyptians. so far we've been quite land lobby about this, right? Okay, so there are fortifications going up. There are people throwing things at fortifications. But there is also a danger in the water, isn't there? I mean, the seas are not safe at this time. Can we just spend a, I mean, there'd be pirates? I mean, what are we talking about here? Well, who are the sea peoples? There certainly are pirates. We know that. We got into all this when you last came on,

where we were doing Philistines in Gaza, yeah. Even aside from that, we know they're a pirate. So these letters that are being exchanged, particularly at Ugarit, they're talking about these dangers from the sea. But even in Pilos, there's a thing saying there's watches of the sea. Do you have to say where Pilos is in the modern. Pilos is very nice place for a holiday. We had a family holiday in Pilos, which is in the Peloponnese. Can I just say that helps no one but the Dauro Imples?

That's a considerable constituency. Bay of Mavrino. It's a very nice beach area in the Peloponnese, southern Greece. And there's a very nice palace there associated in legend with King Nestle. And there's a reference here, which is so, it isn't it the name of a Genesis song too, Watchers of the Sea? I remember early on, yeah, all this stuff. But this is a clue as to just how much trade is going on. I mean, trade attracts pirates.

If you don't have a big international, interconnected world, there's no point in being a pirate. It's not a lucrative occupation. Too much time on your hands. Yeah, I know. It's a bit boring. Bobbing about. I mean, what you're really talking about? I mean, it seems to me a really kind of sophisticated world of wealth that is ultimately, like, more fragile

than anyone at the time could have known. But we look back and go, my goodness, you know, like, house of cards, kind of stuff. It's two things. It's the interconnection. It's also the problem of empires. Big states, they are conservative. They are inherently conservative. They need to keep doing what works.

They're too big to, like a juggernaut going forward, too big to change. And so they can't react quickly when things go wrong. If they're also interdependent on each other, it's a total disaster. The House of Cards is absolutely collapsed everywhere. The thing is, you say they couldn't have known, and that's probably true. We can know this now. Right. It would be amazing if any politician had ever really looked at history and said,

oh, maybe there's a lesson there. It doesn't happen as much as you don't. like really, I think, in all periods of history. So if you're a trader, our chap, we have one name, don't we have one wonderful merchant? Altanoo. If you're Altenu and you're sitting in Ugarit, you've got your fleets and you're doing all this doing and throwing, do you have any, does he have premonitions that the whole thing's about to give way and disappear off the face of the earth? Not as much as we do now, I think. But he, no, he would have seen, he would have had a very successful career, very successful operation. He might have seen some smoke on the horizon,

a burning village. He might have a messenger coming to say, oh, we've lost one of your ships the pirates, but it would have looked like these are just little bits and pieces we can cope. He wouldn't, I think, have seen how interconnected the problems were. He would have had no idea that it was all about to end. Yeah, it's the lack of having, you know, the vista of a big picture. Listen, it's so interesting. You've set us up so beautifully for this series. And Joey, it's always such a fabulous pleasure to have you on. Next time we got a bit of a treat. We have. We got that Stephen Frye on. And he's going to be talking to us about Troy and Mycini. So, I mean, do say with the series. Which is part of this story. It is very much part of this story. So if you don't want to wait and you want a bit of fry right now, you don't have to wait. All you need to do is go to EmpirePodUK.com. That's EmpirePodUK.com. Becomeiccom. Become a member of our club because it means you get everything all in one go in these mini-series.

So that's what you need to do for less than a price of coffee. Until the next time we meet then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnhann. And goodbye from me, William Durunpool.