Fall of Civilizations Podcast - 2. The Bronze Age Collapse - Mediterranean Apocalypse

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

Around the year 1100 BC, a wave of destruction washed over the Eastern Mediterranean. It wiped whole civilizations off the map, and left only ash and ruin in its wake. This catastrophe, known as “the Late Bronze Age Collapse”, has become one of the enduring puzzles of history. I want to explore how so many societies could collapse all at once, and seemingly without warning, as well as examine the lessons it might teach us in our increasingly globalised and interconnected world.Credits:Sound engineering by Thomas NtinasVoice Actors:Shem JacobsJacob RollinsonJake Barrett-MillsBryan TshiobiHelena BaconMusic by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-fre…isrc=USUAN1100209Artist: incompetech.com/Additional music (The Hurrian Hymn) by Michael Levy

The ruins of the great city of Hattusha are an awe-inspiring sight. They sit right in the center of modern Turkey on a rocky outcrop overlooking a bend in the Kisalimak River. Hattusha's crumbling walls of gray limestone stand out against the tawny yellow grassland of the hills, lying where they fell over 3,000 years ago. One look will tell you that Hattusha was once a mighty fortress. Its double wall was defended by over a hundred towers, its thick gateways decorated with carved sculptures of lions. For centuries, this was the capital of the mighty Hittite Empire, which ruled a large portion of Turkey during the Bronze Age. Houtusha's people cultivated wheat, barley and lentils, and wore clothes spun from the wool of sheep they kept in the surrounding hills.

But if you dig down into the ruins of Hurtusha, what you find is to find. is a thin black layer right above the city's ancient floors. This layer is made up of ash, charred wood and rubble scorched in a fierce fire. It dates back to the end of the 13th century BC, around the year 1,200 before the start of the Christian calendar, and when you step back and take in all the details, it's a little breathtaking. Walls and roofs collapsed, bricks shattered and melted, and it's clear that whatever happened to Hattusha, the destruction was savage, unrelenting, and total. After that, the archaeological record here ends.

Except for the signs of a few scattered scavengers eking out an existence among the rubble, the ruins of Hattusha remained empty for centuries. A haunted place where most feared to go. Twenty kilometers to the north, the ancient city of Alasahoyuk, where the Hittites buried their kings in opulent tombs, shows the same. thing. It is completely covered by ash and rubble at the same level. And 100 kilometers to the east of that, at another fortified Hittite town known as Keraloglan, you can find arrowheads littering the earth like fallen leaves, and the bones of men, women, and children left lying in the streets,

right where they fell. In fact, if you zoom out, right across the eastern Mediterranean, anywhere you go in the entire region, across an area spanning over 1,000 kilometers, you will find, this layer of destruction. Archaeological evidence is quite clear. At some point between the year 1200 and 1100 BC, right at the end of the period we call the Bronze Age, a wave of destruction washed across the entire region. It wiped whole civilizations off the map and left nothing in its wake. One by one, vast and ancient empires like the Hittites, Ugarit, the Munoans and the Mycenaean Greeks, collapsed altogether. and they collapsed so completely that they disappeared from the historical record.

It took some of these areas nearly a thousand years to recover after the violent end of the Bronze Age, and exactly what happened is still one of humanity's most fiercely debated mysteries. My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilization's podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory, and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time, witnessing the end of their world? In this episode, I want to look not at the collapse of one civilization, but at the collapse of many. This catastrophe, which historians have called the late Bronze Age collapse, has become one of the enduring puzzles of archaeology. I want to explore how so many societies could collapse all at once, and seemingly without warning. I want to look at the conditions that led up to this collapse, and examine the lessons it might teach us

in our increasingly globalised and interconnected world. Historian Robert Drews puts it bluntly, Within a period of 40 to 50 years, almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again. For a long time after the year at 1200, it is safe to say that there were no cities in the Eastern Mediterranean area. One of the ways in which the memory of the late Bronze Age collapse may have survived into the modern day

is through the epic poetry that was written about this time. You may have heard of some of it. It relates to the destruction of a great walled city in the Eastern Mediterranean called Troy. The epic poems known as Iliad and Odyssey are ancient pieces of oral poetry, attributed to a man named Homer, who may or may not have existed. These poems were passed down for centuries through the period that followed the Bronze Age collapse, which we call the Greek Dark Ages. They survived by word of mouth, with each poet singer

using astonishing skills of memory to memorize and pass them on, lengthening and embellishing them along the way until they were finally written down in the 8th century BC. The poetry of the Iliad especially relates the story of a great 10-year war that took place in the eastern Mediterranean and took up most of the manpower of Greece. This war was led by a man named Agamemnon, a king of Meissen. In the second millennium BC, the city-state of Meissena was one of the major centers of Greek civilization, a mighty city to rival the Hittite capital of Hottusha. About 90 kilometres southwest of Athens, Mycenae was a military stronghold, which dominated much of southern Greece and had a population of over 30,000 at its height.

Like Hattusha, it decorated the gates of its mighty citadel with carved stone lions. Over a millennium later in the second century AD, the Greek travel writer Pausanius wrote breathlessly about his visit to the ruins. The wall, which is the only part of the ruins still remaining, is a work of the cyclopes made of unwrought stones, each stone being so big that a pair of mules could not move the smallest from its place to the slightest degree. Classical Greeks believed that only the mythical one-eyed giants, the cyclopes, would have had the strength to move the enormous boulders that made up the walls of Mycenae. It's a second-century version of the History Channel's ancient aliens conspiracy theories today.

Even then, people found it hard to believe that people so distant to them could have possessed such ingenuity and skill and then disappeared forever. But Mycenae's leading role in the Trojan War is what cemented its place in the Greek imagination. Exactly how much of the actual historical event of the Battle of Troy has survived in Homer's epic is still subject to bitter historical debate. For the longest time, it was assumed that the Trojan's time. war was an invention of the imagination, and that the city of Troy was a myth, but that all changed with the discovery of the ruins of Troy in modern Turkey at the end of the 19th century.

Now, many historians agree that Troy may have been a coastal outpost of the Hittite Empire, and we now know that it was a grand city much as Homer describes, with an impressively fortified citadel. According to legend, the walls of Troy were built by the gods Poseidon and Apollo, and at the time the Iliad may have taken place, they were certainly impressive, nine meters high, with towers soaring up to 18 meters. Outside of this, a ranging curtain wall enclosed a larger area of the city. But the ruins of Troy are strangely silent, that is, there has been almost no writing uncovered in any excavations of the city.

Many scholars now agree that the Trojan War related by Homer may have been in a real event, or at least a composite of events, filtered through the lens of mythology and refracted by the Chinese whispers effect of all transmission. Archaeology shows that Troy was attacked repeatedly and had to defend itself again and again, which is indicated by repairs undertaken to the citadel's fortifications. We can see traces of fire on its stones while human remains were found in houses and in the streets. Bronze arrowheads have also been found littering the ground. in Troy's fort and Citadel, and in fact it seems Troy was burnt twice towards the end of

the 13th century, right around the time that destruction was beginning to rain down on the whole region. Today, most scholars date the events of the Trojan War to just the period we have been discussing, the end of the 12th century BC, and the late Bronze Age collapse. As a novelist and a student of literature, I tend to have a bias towards giving literary sources more weight than a formal historian might. But for my part, I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that these poems may have incubated, at least in a hazy form, an authentic memory of those days,

the feeling of apocalypse that must have washed over the region, and a war that seemed to dwarf all others since. The Greek poet Quintus Smyrnaeus, in his poem The Fall of Troy, gives us just a glimpse of the violence of that time. Blood ran in torrents, drenched was all the earth, earth, as Trojans and their alien helpers died. Here were men lying quelled by bitter death, all up and down the city in their blood. Others on them were falling, gasping forth their life's strength, others clutching in their hands, their bowels that looked through hideous gashes forth,

wandered in wretched plight around their homes. Before we go into just what happened at the end of the Bronze Age, I think it's worth pausing and painting a picture of what it was that collapsed, this vibrant and varied region that had survived for so many centuries and fell so suddenly. We often make the mistake of thinking of the ancient world as a series of insular and isolated states. Something about the monumental remains of their societies makes us think of them in this way. And it's true that their worlds were smaller than ours today.

The known world for someone living in the Eastern Mediterranean around the year 12th, 1,200 BC, would have extended from Greece to perhaps the far east of what today we would call Iran. It was populated by the Mycenaean people of Greece in the west and the new kingdom of Egypt in the south, just emerging from a period of civil war. Their world took in the islands of Cyprus and Crete, as well as coastal city states like Ugarit. And another big player in this region was Babylon, a city in the verdant marshes of southern Iraq, which was ruled by a dynasty known as the Cassites. To the north of them was the great warlike empire of Assyria,

which governed the plains of northern Iraq and Syria, and to the north of them, the Hittites. I'll post a map up on Twitter and Patreon, if you're having trouble visualizing this. These small city states were suspicious of each other, and they often fought wars. But this isn't the whole story. The societies of the Bronze Age were as entangled and

interdependent as the nation-states of today, and perhaps in some ways they were more so. Firstly, trade was the lifeblood of this region. The Mediterranean Sea is essentially a vast inland lake, relatively free of waves and storms when compared to the open Atlantic. Across this relatively placid water, trade boomed. One shipwreck found off the coast of Uluburun in southwestern Turkey gives us just a glimpse into the rich exchange of materials that occurred during this time. The ship is built of Lebanese cedar wood and dated to about the year 1300 BC. And just listen to this list of what archaeologists found in its cargo.

Ten tons of copper ingots and one ton of tin, logs of ebony, elephant and hippotusks along with more than a dozen hippopotamus teeth, a jar filled with glass beads, more with olives and terribinth resin, almonds, pistachios, figs, grapes and coriander, whole pomegranates and a golden scarab beetle inscribed with a name of nefertiti, arrowheads, daggers, turtle shells and ostrich eggs, quartz crystals and gold, pottery and oil lamps from Cyprus, along with blocks of raw coloured glass in cobalt blue and lavender. The Ulubur and Shipwreck contained goods from at least seven different lands, So it's easy to see how this rich trade would have drawn all these disparate nations together.

And people passed between these states too. For instance, we know that Minoan artists from Crete came to decorate the walls of Egyptian palaces in the city of Perunepha. Kings frequently requested the services of physicians, artisans, weavers, musicians and singers from other kingdoms. And intermarriage was also common. To give just one example, we know that Amurapi, the last king of the coastal nation of Ugarit, had married and subsequently divorced the Hittite woman, with their divorce proceedings dragging through the court system for years. And while much of this exchange was in luxury goods and services, other resources that flowed

down these trade routes were utterly essential to the survival of these large and complex nations. And of all these resources, the most critical in the Bronze Age was of course the one that gives the era its name. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin on a roughly 10 to 1 ratio. The amount of copper and bronze found on the Uluburan wreck, 10 tons of bronze and one ton of tin, was exactly the amount needed to smelt 11 tons of bronze. Since its discovery sometime in the 4th millennium BC, this reddish-gold wonder metal had become critical to the manufacture of just about every weapon, tool and household object.

And just like aluminium or steel today, bronze had become completely indispensable to the societies it supported. Without a steady supply of this metal, armies would have no weapons. Chariots would be unable to shod their wheels, and craftsmen would have no tools. The British historian Carol Bell has drawn a striking parallel to the reality of our modern world. The strategic importance of tin in the late Bronze Age was probably not far different from that of crude oil today. The availability of enough tin to produce weapons-grade bronze must have exercised the mines of the Great King in Hattusha and the Pharaoh in Thebes in the same way that supplying gasoline to the American SUV driver preoccupies an American president today. Of the components of bronze, copper was relatively easy to find.

but tin was a rare metal. At the time, the only source readily available was from mines in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan. From there, it had to be brought overland on caravans of donkeys, following the ancient route known as the Silk Road. It was a long and perilous journey that crossed mountains and rivers until it reached the great cities of Mesopotamia. From there, the cargo of tin spread out across the region and over the sea to Greece. the entire military might of the region's superpowers, of Egypt, Assyria, the Hittites, Ugarit, Babylon, and the Mycenaean Empire in Greece, all of them depended on this precarious supply, which at the time must have felt as fragile as a cobweb. So as I relate the events of the next century or so,

I want you to keep this idea in mind, that these nations were not entirely distinct and separate entities, so much as a complex and entangled web of societies, each is dependent on the other as the next. And while peace largely held in the region and trade could continue, they achieved a kind of stability. But for a number of reasons, peace wasn't to last. One thing I want to make absolutely clear at this stage is that our knowledge of this period is very limited. There's so much guesswork involved around the dates and the events of some of what I'm about to describe that it would be very easy to get lost in a cloud of maybes. History is not a science, although it involves sciences. History is a fluctuating series of interpretations, hypotheses and narratives that are borne out in

lively debates on just about every detail of past events. But I think it's worth noting that when talking about this period, there are essentially two sources we use, and each has their problems. The first is the archaeological record. We can learn a lot from digging down into ancient sites and seeing what we find. But a set of ruins doesn't mean anything on its own. It needs an archaeologist to interpret and hypothesize and argue about what they mean. The other source is the written texts of the time, but those can be just as unreliable as the ruins, and they're too often frustratingly vague on the things we really care about. These texts are usually commissioned by kings and rulers as well, and if you can't see the problem with that, imagine trying to piece together

this week's news by only looking at the American president's Twitter feed. I don't want to get lost in endless discussions about the reliability of sources or the debate that rages around every detail of an archaeological site. I want to tell as clear a story as possible that's consistent with available evidence. But if we're really going to delve into what might have happened to collapse so many societies all at once, in a time so distant from our own, we will have to enter the fray of historical debate. When Casting around for causes of the late Bronze Age collapse, historians have long relied on one particular set of culprits. These they refer to by the mysterious name, the Sea Peoples.

Even the name Sea Peoples seems to evoke something terrifying and foreign, something not of this world. They sound like monsters rising up from the deep to wreak devastation on the land, and if the sources of the time are anything to go by, they certainly did wreak destruction. who the sea peoples were, where they came from, or what language they spoke, is a mystery. Many historians have offered their guesses, which range from Sardinia and Sicily to Libya and closer by in the eastern Mediterranean. But wherever they originated, one thing is for sure. Around the time of the great collapse, a vast horde of these invaders began landing on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean in huge numbers and with fearsome force.

The Egyptian pharaoh Ramsey's III wrote about this invading armada on the walls of his temple in Medina Thabu, near the valley of the kings. No land can stand before their arms. From Cata, Quad, Comesh, Arasa and Alicia On all were cut off. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. In some of these ancient sources, the sea peoples begin to sound like something from a Hollywood movie, like Independence Day or War of the Worlds. An invasion force of insurmountable power, landing all at once and completely by surprise, sweeping away one nation after another.

And at least some of the societies that fell during the late Bronze Age collapse fell because of this single cause. One example of these is the city-state of Ugarit, a booming trade city on the coast of northern Syria. At this point, Ugarit had ruled a coastal kingdom of merchants. and sailors for at least six centuries. It stood at the very end of the Silk Road, where this great trade route from as far as China met the Mediterranean. Think of all those items found nestled in the hold of the Ulliburun shipwreck. At Ugarit, each one of them would have been taxed, and with this wealth its citizens built a resplendent city by the sea.

Like most successful trading towns, Ugarit was multicultural and diverse, using at least least seven languages in its records. It was a city in love with the written word, and it kept expansive libraries in its palaces and temples. It even fostered the first private libraries, one of which we know belonged to a diplomat named Rapanum. To Ugarit, we also owe the oldest surviving written music in the world, a hymn dedicated to the moon goddess Nikal, which can still be played today. Here it is, reconstructed by the professor of ancient music. Richard Dumbrell. You can almost imagine this piece of music playing from the temples of Ugarat, washing over its streets and markets. But this thriving city was soon to come to an end.

In Ugarit, archaeologists have found a clay tablet containing a letter. It's a message from the city's last king, a man called Amarapi, the same one who spent years trying to divorce his Hittite wife. In it, he begs the ruler of nearby Cyprus to come to his aid. My father, now the ships of the enemy have come. They've been setting fire to my cities and have done evil in my land. Doesn't my father know that all of my troops and chariots are stationed in Hattie? And that all of my ships are in the land of Luka. They have not arrived back yet, so the land is abandoned.

No help arrived, because the letter was never sent. It burned along with the rest of the city, its clay baked hard in the ensuing fires. When excavating the ruins of Ugarit, archaeologists have found a layer of destruction that lies two meters thick in places, made of ash and broken brick. The city's roofs are caved in and scorched, and its streets are littered with arrowheads. People buried their valuables in a panic and never returned to dig them up again. It's hard to say how large the force was that attacked them, but another letter found in the city's kilns, asks another king to equip 150 ships to send to their aid, suggesting that it

was an enormous force. This letter too was never sent. The fact that all of Ugarat's troops and ships were stationed elsewhere when they were attacked shows just how much it came as a surprise. And across the region, it seems the sea peoples employed the same tactics. They appeared without warning, wreaked havoc, destroyed cities, and then disappeared over the horizon before anyone knew what had happened. Other cities along the Palestinian coast suffered the same fate. The city of Aleppo in Syria was destroyed around the same time. The city of Amar on the Euphrates River burned too, and a tablet found there describes how hordes of enemies had attacked it. This is an unusual phrase to use, since it seems the citizens didn't know the names of their

attackers, or where they came from. The city of Megado, known in the Bible as Armageddon, held out the longest of any city in the region, but it was finally destroyed so violently that when the Israelites later moved into its ruins, they were unable to clear the debris. They simply filled in the ruined buildings with rubble and built on top of them. In Cyprus, where the king of Ugarit had tried to send his plea for help, similar destruction can also be found. On the In sight of Cochinocremus, archaeologists have found evidence that the whole town was abandoned in a hurry. The bronze smith buried his tools in the courtyard of his workshop, the silver smith hid his silver between two stones of a bench, while the goldsmith hid all of his sheet gold in a pit.

What happened to them all, we may never know, but they never returned to retrieve their precious things. One thing is for certain. wherever the sea peoples went, destruction followed. For a long time, historians were happy to attribute the collapse of so many complex societies all at once, to these antagonists, the sea peoples. They provided a convenient scapegoat. These sea peoples were imagined to be something like the Vikings that ravaged medieval Europe, crossed with Attila's horde of Huns.

In common conceptions, they were a marauding mass, hell-beds, on destruction. And since the sea peoples have played such an important role in how people have traditionally viewed this collapse, I think it's worth spending some time on them. Who were these mysterious conquerors? Some of these questions we can never answer. And in this story, the sea peoples don't get to speak for themselves. They left no written sources, and precious few material traces have ever been found that could trace back to them or give us clues about their origins. But a little unusually for this time, we do have a pretty good idea of what the sea peoples look like. That's because of the vast low-relief carving that the Egyptian pharaoh

Ramsey's III chose to adorn the outer wall of his cavernous temple at Medinette Habu. It shows an image of a number of prisoners taken during Egypt's battle with the sea peoples, and the carvings are very detailed. As usual, I'll put these images up on Twitter and Patreon so you can all see what I'm talking about. And in case you're still wondering, the figures on the carving aren't the inhuman monsters you might have been imagining. They wear kilts and a very distinctive kind of headdress that looks like a sheaf of feathers or perhaps reeds, fixed in place with a strap that goes under their chin. Not all of the sea peoples are the same. Some wear skull caps while others appear to wear

horned helmets. And together with Egyptian sources of the time, this points to them not being one cohesive army, but a loose confederation of different peoples, choosing to sail under the same banner. Some of the names of these different peoples are known to us from Egyptian texts. The Danuna, the Cheker, the Pelaset, the Shardana, and the Weeshesh. Even if the motives and identity of the sea peoples are unknown to us, evidence suggests that at least some of the ethnic groups that made up the sea peoples weren't so unfamiliar to the Egyptians. In fact, it seems sea people of certain groups had sought employment in Egyptian courts and armies in the past, and there's evidence they had diplomatic contact for as long as a few centuries

before the great collapse occurred. One group of sea peoples known as the Shardinah even supplied mercenaries to the Egyptian pharaohs such as Ramsees II, but that's just about as much as we know. At some point, this unknown mass of people arrived in the eastern Mediterranean by sea. No leaders or kings of the sea peoples are ever mentioned. They sacked cities where they could and even made incursions onto the land. And with this mysterious force in mind, it's time to turn to the other really major player in this story. And it's worth noting at this point that the nations of the Eastern Mediterranean basically fall into two categories during this event. First, there are those that collapse under the pressures of the late Bronze Age, and they do.

so utterly and completely. They disappear without a trace and leave only ruins behind. Into that group we can place Misenae, the Hittites, Ugarit and others. But the second category is those that survive, although in a diminished and weakened form. The two great empires that survive this collapse are Egypt and Assyria. And Assyria, which ruled the area of northern Iraq today, does this by essentially cutting its losses. It withdraws from all its less defensible territories and falls back to its imperial heartland, around the great city of Nineveh, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. It recoils like a tortoise in its shell. The example of Egypt is much more interesting. Egypt is also going to fall into that second

category of survivors, and the man who's perhaps the most responsible for that is the pharaoh of the time, a man named Ramsey's the third. Ramsey's was a determined and tenacious ruler. Looking at the perfectly preserved mummy uncovered in Medina Thabu, it's easy to imagine what he looked like during his life. His cheekbones were narrow and high, with a tall, cerebral look to his forehead. Looking at the photos, I kept thinking of Captain Picard from the old Star Trek series, a thinker and a planner. But Ramsey's can't have felt that. secure in his position. He was the son of a usurper, a man named Settnachté, who had seized the throne in a bloody civil war and begun the 20th dynasty of Egypt. After winning the crown in battle,

Settnachté only managed to rule for four years before dying and passing the crown onto his son, Ramsey's. This was when the young emperor was only 31, and it's fair to say that this young pharaoh must have felt a fair amount of pressure to prove himself. this can perhaps be seen in the name he chose to rule under. The last pharaoh to hold the name Ramseys was Ramsey's the Great, the Pharaoh of the Bible, who ruled ancient Egypt for 67 years during the golden age of the new kingdom, almost a century before. And for the most part, Ramsey's seems to have been a relatively good ruler,

although it's worth remembering that we have only his inscriptions to go by. But it's clear Ramsey's at least wanted to be seen as a king who did the best he could for, his people. He mentions planting trees to increase the shade along the harsh desert roads, and protecting the rights of women so they didn't fear walking about the streets. He mentions allowing soldiers to go home to their families during peacetime. Another records show that he donated huge amounts of land and wealth to Egypt's temples and also undertook vast reconstruction projects. He sent expeditions across the Red Sea to Yemen, where he discovered long-lost copper mines that boosted Egypt's wealth, and he brought back rare plants in pots to cultivate in his gardens.

By all of this, it seems in another time he might have been one of Egypt's great rulers. But his destiny was to preside over one of the longest and deepest declines in Egypt's history, the twilight of its empire. This decline, as far as we can tell, wasn't his fault. In fact, his actions would ensure that Egypt's cities didn't follow the fates of those like Mice's Yvesenay and Ugaret, where only ash and desolation remain. When news of the sea people's attacks came to Ramseys, he had been Pharaoh for eight years. Upon hearing of the destruction of other cities of the region, he must have felt a chill run down his spine. Great nations were being wiped off the map, and Ramsey's resolved that Egypt would

not follow the fate of its neighbors. Egypt couldn't react to this threat the way the Assyrians had by retreating and consolidating their defenses. Egypt had a long Mediterranean coast, making it vulnerable to invasion from the sea, and maritime trade was the backbone of its economy. Ramseys knew he had to come up with a plan, but it wasn't going to be easy. The ancient Egyptians had a poor reputation as seagoers. They were essentially a land-going power and usually left the messy business of watery warfare to smaller nations.

The Egyptians were used to dominating ancient battlefields using vast assemblages of archers and swift units of horse-drawn chariots. Their tactics were to advance with a wall of infantry, all the while pelting the enemy with arrows from light chariots, before using charges of heavy chariots to so panic and break the enemy lines. This had allowed them to conquer lands all the way up the Palestinian coast and defeat the Hittites in battle. But these tactics required a large open battle. battlefield. Since members of the Sea People tribes had served in Egyptian armies in the past, perhaps they knew this weakness. The Sea People seemed to have known that the one way to neutralize Egypt's tactics would be an attack on its very lifeblood, the Nile River itself.

All of Egypt's great cities lay on the Nile, and if Egyptian resistance broke on the river, its cities would fall one by one and the riches of their land could be taken. It was a huge gamble, but the sea peoples believed it would pay off. The decisive battle would take place in the Nile Delta. That's the part of the river that splits out into multiple branches before it reaches the Mediterranean Sea. It's a green land in the middle of a rolling desert, banked with fertile silt. Red lotuses bloom here in the autumn, and papyrus sedges grow along the banks.

But this time, Nile crocodiles and hippopotamus still ranged wild in the Delta. And it was in this challenging terrain that Ramsey's knew he had to mount his final stand against the sea peoples. Ramsey's decided to play to what strengths the Egyptian armies still had. He decided to lay an ambush and give the sea peoples a surprise attack of their own. As the enemy's ships amassed in the waters outside the delta, Ramsey's gathers, galley, a vast army of his own. He gathered archers on the banks, supported by spearmen in their thousands, all crouching in the reeds. The tension must have been tremendous, all the soldiers

of the Egyptian army holding their breath and waiting for that first sign of an enemy ship to come in from the sea. Then, at last, a ship came around the bend in the river. After that came another, and another, until the whole sea-born might of the sea-peoples was in sight. The Egyptians must have been able to hear the creek of 10,000 oars, the beating of the drums below the deck, the shouts of the helmsmen and soldiers within. The ships of the sea peoples drew nearer until they were within range, and then Ramsey's unleashed hell. The Medinat Harbu inscription recounts what happened next. Those who reached my frontier, those who came forward together on the sea, the full flame was in front of them at the river mouth, while a stuccade of lances surrounded them on the shore. As the sea people advanced in their full force, Ramsey's archers kept up a continuous volley of arrows into the enemy ships.

Panicked, the sea peoples attempted to land on the banks, but as they did, the Egyptian lancemen advanced out of the reeds and met them. While the enemy was held at bay, trapped and frantic on the river, the small Egyptian navy sailed in and attacked them too. They used grappling hooks to haul in the enemy ships, and the chaos of this battle is encapsulated in a sprawling low-relief carving in Medina Harbu. I'll post this on Twitter and Patreon so you can see for yourselves. But from what we can see, it's clear that this was a frantic struggle of ship-to-ship fighting. men are impaled on spears clambering onto the sides of ships, ducking arrows that whizz overhead.

Boats overturn, spilling men into the river, and bodies float upside down in the frothing water. They were dragged in, enclosed, and prostrated on the beach, killed and made into heaps from tail to head. I have made them turn back from even mention in Egypt, for when they pronounce my name in their land, they are burnt up with fear. In the brutal hand-to-hand struggle which ensued, the sea people were overwhelmed. Ramsey's plan had worked. The Egyptians were the first people to ever turn back these sea-going invaders and stopped their campaign of destruction. The hearts are taken away.

The soul is flown away. The weapons are scattered in the sea. Another key source for these tumultuous events is a document called the Harris Papyrus, found near Ramsey's tune in Medina Tabu. It's the longest known papyrus ever uncovered from Egypt, coming in at 41 metres long. That's longer than the wingspan of a Boeing 737, just for reference. In it, Ramsey's boasts about his triumph over the various groups of the sea peoples.

I owe through those who invaded. I slew the Donar from their islands. The Tajaka and the Palescence were made ashes. the shardana and the reshash of the sea were made as those that exist not. I brought captives to Egypt, numerous as the sand of the shore. The Egyptians were victorious. They had repelled the invasion, but this alone would not save them. To see why, you just have to look at the situation that surrounded it.

Egypt now stood alone in a devastated region, like the hero at the end of a disaster movie. Every land around them had been gutted and reduced to ash, vast and ancient civilizations. The Mycenaeans, the Hittites, Ugarit, the Cassite dynasty of Babylon, all of these venerable societies had collapsed utterly, and civil order had given way to chaos. Those precarious trade routes we talked about at the start of the episode were now broken, and Egypt's economy went into a steep and unstoppable decline. By the end of the late Bronze Age, Egypt was uttered. diminished, a shadow of its former self. As other enemies encroached on its borders,

Egypt was able to fight them off, but its treasury became so depleted that it would never fully recover its imperial power. The first known workers' strike in recorded history happened during the 29th year of Ramsey's Third's reign. It happened when Egypt could no longer provide food rations for its elite, royal tomb builders and artisans in the village of Der El Medina. Ramsey's the 3rd ruled for a total of 31 years, but his death was followed by years of bickering among his heirs. Three of his sons would become king at different times, reigning as Ramsey's the 4th, Ramsey's the 6th, and Ramsey's the 8th. And meanwhile, Egypt was increasingly beset by droughts, lack of seasonal floodwaters, famines, civil unrest and official

corruption. While the power of the pharaoh fell, that of the priests in Thebes grew. The last pharaoh of the dynasty, Ramsey's the 11th, grew so weak that these priests became essentially the true rulers of Egypt. The Egyptian Empire finally fractured. It was lost forever, less than 80 years after Ramsey's the 3rd's reign. Earlier, I used the example of the city-state of Ugarit to show the vast destruction that could be wrought by the sea peoples, and to paint them as a terrifying alien invasion responsible for the Bronze Age collapse. But we shouldn't be so easily seduced by the lure of this easy scapegoat. That's because the fate of other sites is actually a little more uncertain. The great city-state of Mycenae, for instance, the main belligerence in the Trojan War,

was certainly wiped out along with all of its surrounding cities sometime around the 13th century BC. but modern archaeologists believe this was actually not the work of the sea peoples, and today it's thought that the culprits were the Mycenaean's belligerent northern neighbors, the Dorians. We do have evidence of sea people's activity around the Mycenaean coast, but it seems more likely that while weakened and distracted by this outside threat, the Mycenaeans were no longer able to defend their northern border, and the Dorians seized their chance.

The Hittite capital of Hattusha where we opened this story is another example. It lies far inland in the mountains of Turkey, and it wasn't likely to be the sea peoples who sacked it. A more likely explanation is that this was done by their long-term rivals, the Thracians, groups from the Balkans who seem to have migrated south during this time. These invaders must have seen their opportunity the moment raids by the sea people's disrupted Mediterranean trade routes and caused famine in Hittite lands. And perhaps a key part of understanding this is seeing how much states of this era

depended on their allies to help them out when they were threatened. But if a crisis like the attacks of the sea peoples happens across the whole region, suddenly everybody's military forces are tied down. Alliances that had previously kept everyone safe would suddenly become ineffective. No one could come to anybody else's aid. One great example of this happening is in Babylon.

Babylon was a mighty city, one of the most ancient and powerful of the region, mentioned at great length in the Bible and located about 100 kilometers south of modern Baghdad. At the time leading up to the collapse, Babylon was ruled by a dynasty known as the Cassites, who for 500 years had ruled the great ancient city. The Cassites had long depended on their allies in Assyria, and the coastal regions to help defend it. But now those nations were busy defending themselves, and Babylon stood alone. To the north was the land of Elam, a hardy people who lived in the mountains and lowlands of southern Iran.

The Elamite king was a man named Kutur Nakhunte, and he believed that the crown of Babylon belonged to him. He threatened an invasion with fearsome rhetoric. I, who am a king, son of a king, seed of a king, why do I not sit on the throne of the land of Babylon? I will destroy your cities, demolish your fortresses, cut down your orchards. You may flee up to heaven, but I'll pull you back down. You may flee down to hell, but I'll pull you up by your hair. Qutir Nahunte led an invasion into Babylonia in the year 1158 BC. With all its allies tied down, Babylon stood alone, and the Elamite invasion succeeded.

Kutir Nahuonte went on to do most of what he promised, and he laid waste to the land. While Babylon burned, its last Cassite king was led to alarm in chains, along with the statue of the Babylonian god Mauduc. And the theft of this statue seems to have traumatized the Babylonian people more than the loss of their king. Babylon was sacked and left in ruins. One sacred Babylonian text, the Nabor Kuduri Usur, recalls the terrible vengeance of the Elamite king. His crimes were greater and his grievous sins worse than all his fathers had committed.

Like a deluge, he laid low all the peoples of Akkad, and cast in ruins, Babylon, and all the noblest cities. And these examples show that the same. situation in this region isn't quite as simple as that classic alien invasion-style scenario I had you imagine. In Hollywood, the writers always imagine the world coming together to fight the outside threat. It makes a better story that way, and we get to hear some inspiring speeches. But the example of the Bronze Age collapse teaches us that it's just as likely that if aliens ever arrive and begin blowing things up, some might see that as an opportunity. The story of the Bronze Age is of

large, complex states successfully defending themselves against the smaller states at their borders, with less complex societal structures. And part of the collapse that ensued is perhaps also down to the increasing power of these smaller, less complex nations. During the Bronze Age, empires like Egypt, Misena and the Hittites had monopolies over the production of weapons, the importation of horses, and the building of chariots. Smaller, less complex states, simply couldn't compete in those areas. But the power of these smaller states was beginning to grow at this time due to one very important thing, one thing that would bring the Bronze Age to an end forever, and that thing was iron. Iron had been in limited use since as early as 3000 BC, and early people

even worked the iron they found in meteorites that fell to the earth. It was considered a sacred metal, perhaps due to its magnetic qualities. But as an every single, you know, but as an every single, day practical object, iron presents a number of problems. It's much harder to work than the copper and tin that go into bronze. Tin, for instance, has a very low melting point of 232 degrees centigrade. If you wanted, you could melt it on your kitchen stove. But iron requires a huge amount of heat to melt, over 1,500 degrees. This requires advanced furnaces and special technology that took millennia to develop, but at this time was beginning to permeate across the region. But iron on its own isn't that useful. It's brittle and it easily breaks. The knowledge of how to

turn iron into steel, mixing it with the right proportion of carbon, would transform it into a metal just as sharp and hard as bronze, but much cheaper and more readily available. Soon, even tribal societies and tiny kingdoms could afford cutting-edge weaponry. It acted a little like the introduction of cheap assault rifles like the AK-47 in our time, a great leveller that destabilized whole regions. We know that after the Bronze Age collapse, bronze was no longer in use across the region. Steel weapons took its place and the Iron Age began. Armies of chariots, such as Egypt employed, gave way to armies of massed infantry.

And some historians point to this factor alone as the great shift that caused the collapse of so many societies. So this is another theory, that the sea peoples and other tribes on the land, newly armed with iron weaponry, were a significant element in the collapse and certainly sacked some cities themselves. But a large part of the destruction was also due to opportunistic wars and infighting between rival nations, and these combined served to pick apart the complex web of interdependency that had sustained these great empires for so long. But some historians go even further, and their work reconfigures the roles of this story completely. They ask, what if the sea peoples aren't the villains in this story?

What if they weren't the perpetrators in the collapse of civilization, but another set of victims? And this final theory allows us to shift our perspectives completely. One thing we do know for sure about this time is that the climate of the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the 13th century BC, underwent a sudden and rapid change. Lands that had previously boiled over with greenery suddenly became dry and arid. Analysis of ancient pollen in the region shows that plants suited to a more desert landscape

flourished during this time. Analysis of sediment cores and oxygen isotopes in mineral deposits in caves in Israel have all shown that the 13th and 12th centuries BC saw much less rain than the previous era. And this all points to a period of climate change in the region, during which the crops that people knew how to grow must have died in the earth. Alongside this scientific evidence, we can see marks of severe droughts and famines in the region's written records, too.

The Hittites in their dry, stony mountains were hit particularly hard. Letters from Ugarit write about sending large quantities of rain up to the hill roads to feed the mighty cities like Hattusha. and the crisis seems to have lasted a long time. In the mid-13th century, one Hittite queen sent a short but dramatic message to the Egyptian pharaoh. I have no grain in my lands. Another tablet sent from the Hittites is equally telling. Did you not know there was a famine in my lands?

Elsewhere, letters sent from a servant to his master, who was a merchant to Nuggarit, show that there was a famine in the city of Amar in Syria at the time of its destruction. There is a famine in your house. We will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive here, you will not see a living soul from your land. And I want to make it clear that there had been famines and droughts in the region before. It was simply a fact of life for people living in the precarious reality of the Bronze Age. But the climate change that occurred around this time seems to have happened so quickly and been so dramatic

that scientists have been looking far afield for an explanation. And to get to the bottom of why this happened, one answer might lie nearly 4,000 kilometres to the north. Let's zoom out and soar around the globe across Europe and the stormy waters of the North Atlantic until we come to rest on the slopes of the snowy mountains of southern Iceland. This is a harsh landscape, a snowy tundra over which the shadow of an enormous volcano looms. Its name is Hekla, and it's one of the world's most active volcanoes.

In the ancient and medieval imagination, Hecler was thought to be the gate to hell, and the prison where the traitor Judas was tormented. The Cistercian monk, Ebert of Claervot, wrote about it with particular color. Mount Hetner, the renowned fire. fiery cauldron of Sicily, which men call Hell's chimney. That cauldron is affirmed to be like a small furnace compared to this enormous inferno. So can it be a coincidence that the most cataclysmic eruption of Hecler we know about was the one that took place sometime around the year 1,100 BC, right as the Bronze Age collapse reached its height? This eruption is known as

Hecler III. It threw nearly seven and a half cubic kilometers of volcanic rock into the atmosphere and covered the sky in a dark shroud of dust that would have lasted for years after the event. In Ireland, studies done on bog oaks, those are trees half fossilized in marshy waters, have shown that for 18 years after the eruption of Hecler 3, the trees barely grew at all. across the Atlantic in the United States, bristlecone pines, the oldest living trees on earth, still show similar records of this time of darkness and cooling, which seems to have lasted about two decades. And the effect on our region would have been dramatic. Crops would have failed, soils would have blown away, and more than that, the dark cloud that seemed to hang over the sun, would have spoken to people of something dreadful on its way,

a punishment from the gods, and perhaps even the end of the world. As people looked up and saw the sun only a pale white through the haze, they must have asked, what did we do wrong? Why have our gods forsaken us? And why haven't our kings protected us? When we dig into an archaeological site and find traces of destruction, we can never really tell who it was who burned this building, destroyed this wall, or buried the city in rubble.

but some historians now think that some of the destruction of the Bronze Age may have occurred due to uprisings and rebellions within the kingdoms. If the gods were angry at the king, so were the people. The spread of iron weapons would have also empowered these mobs and allowed them to arm themselves with weaponry previously unseen outside of a professional army. And I don't want to do too much speculation, but with famine, drought and disease spreading, I think there's a good chance that the citizens of some of these ancient empires simply rose up and burned their own cities to the ground.

And the thing is, if we buy the theory of the Hecler III eruption, it forces us to re-evaluate our portrait of the sea peoples as a marauding armada of destruction. Were the sea peoples, in fact, refugees? Imagine the situation. You were a citizen of an island in the Mediterranean, say Sardinia or a city. Sicily. And one year the sky turns dim. The sun peaks through the gray haze a pale white. Drought soon follows and the crops no longer grow. Starvation begins to set in on your island. Chaos begins to spread. There are riots for food and everywhere people are saying the gods are

angry that the world is dying. And then the next year at harvest time, the same thing happens. The sun is still weak and the crops still don't grow. And now waves of people begin arriving in your lands. Hungry people from the far north where the sun is even dimmer, where the worst winters in living memory are ravaging the lands when nothing grows. What do you do? Do you stay and hope the sun comes back? Hope the crops grow next year?

Do you hope that your new and hungry neighbors are friendly? Or do you band together? My guess is that you do one of the things you do best, you build ships, and then you set sail for somewhere else, somewhere where the sun might still shine. It's easy to imagine this band of sea-going nomads starting small. They go from place to place, trying to find somewhere the gods haven't abandoned, but it's the same everywhere. Society is disentangling in the wake of famines and droughts that last for years, and wherever

they go, more desperate people join them. They get stronger, and in desperation they resort to theft. They steal from merchant vessels and then small villages. They capture prisoners and gain new recruits. Their strength grows and grows until it becomes truly overwhelming, an army of the sea. It seems no one can stand in their way, a roving band of refugee warriors roaming the oceans in search of somewhere to call home. I find this portrait of the sea peoples the most convincing. I think it makes sense of their mystery, how such a vast force of diverse peoples suddenly looms out of the sea

with seemingly no direction, no leaders, and no command structure. If this portrait of them is true, then the sea peoples must have been an anarchic, probably changing leaders frequently. There would have been opposing goals within the group. Some would have wanted to find land to settle, others just to loot and burn. And when they met their deaths in the shady shallows of the Nile Delta at the hands of Pharaoh Ramses III, they must have felt the utter hopelessness of their situation bear down on them. They were people without a land who had brought so much destruction to the

homes of others, and their final desperate gamble to seize the lands of Egypt had failed. If this sounds like too much of an unhappy ending, then I should at least mention that some of the sea peoples, at least, escaped total destruction in the marshes of the Nile. In fact, one of the groups that made up their wandering army seems to have settled down in the region of what is today Gaza in southern Palestine. There they put down their roots as our people. They were known as the Pelliset, who the Hebrews later called Pellashet, and we today call Philistines.

They would come to be remembered as one of the great rival nations to the kingdom of Israel. And the word Philistine has given us. the modern name of the region, Palestine. So as we weigh up the evidence, a picture begins to emerge of a complex, entangled web of societies so dependent on each other that they could not allow each other to fall. These societies sent food to each other in times of famine. They sent artists and artisans to work on each other's palaces, and merchants took luxury goods between the markets in their great cities. And while this interdependency was a strength, it was a was also their greatest weakness. And with the climate changing and people from other lands fleeing,

perhaps invaders landing on their coasts, this interdependent system began to come apart at the seams. One by one these great civilizations fell, the trade routes that had sustained them fell apart, and the basic necessities that allowed their empires to continue were no longer available. Meanwhile, the spread of iron weapons allowed smaller, less than the spread of iron weapons allowed smaller, complex kingdoms to amass vast hordes of infantry and challenge the typically chariot-based warfare of the previous era. Rebellions seem to have rocked at least some of these nations further weakening them and toppling them over into chaos. The events of the late Bronze Age remind us just how fragile

a thing civilization is. It reminds us that in our world today we are not isolated nations either, that we too live in a complex and interdependent world. That once war and violence are set into action, we can rarely contain its consequences. I want to end the episode by playing again that piece of music found in the charred ruins of the city-state of Ugarit, that haunting refrain that speaks out to us from the ages, and reminds us that all things in the end must pass. As you listen, think about how it must have felt. to be a person alive at this time, to see the collapse of so many great civilizations all at once,

and how it must have felt to pass from a golden age of civilization to one of rubble and ruin. Thank you for listening to The Fall of Civilizations podcast. I've been Paul Cooper. I'd like to thank all my voice actors for this episode, Jake Barrett Mills, Helena Bacon, Jacob Rowlandson, and Shem Jacobs. Special thanks to Brian Chiobe for being my Ramses III on this episode, as well as the musician Michael Levy, for his rendition of The Hury and Him. Do check out his album called An Ancient Liar, which is available on iTunes. And special thanks to Kevin McLeod for all other music played on this episode. Do check out the rest of his work on Incompetec.com. I love to hear your thoughts and responses

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