In Our Time - The Bronze Age Collapse

Episode Date: June 16, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Bronze Age Collapse, the name given by many historians to what appears to have been a sudden, uncontrolled destruction of dominant civilizations around 1200 BC in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia. Among other areas, there were great changes in Minoan Crete, Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Mycenaean Greece and Syria. The reasons for the changes, and the extent of those changes, are open to debate and include droughts, rebellions, the breakdown of trade as copper became less desirable, earthquakes, invasions, volcanoes and the mysterious Sea Peoples. With John Bennet Director of the British School at Athens and Professor of Aegean Archaeology at the University of SheffieldLinda Hulin Fellow of Harris Manchester College and Research Officer at the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of OxfordAndSimon Stoddart Fellow of Magdalene College and Reader in Prehistory at the University of Cambridge Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the 12th century BC, there was a dramatic change in the kingdoms and empires of the Mediterranean, a series of events known as the Bronze Age collapse. Over the course of perhaps 50 years, the great palaces of the Mycenaans became ruins, the Hittite Empire of Anatolia broke into pieces, the mysterious sea peoples attacked Egypt.

Literacy disappeared from Greece, as the Iron Age arrived, a web of trade routes across the region fell apart. Once new rulers emerged, their kingdoms were much smaller. What exactly happened in the 12th century, and perhaps more importantly why that happened, and who won, as well as who lost, is a matter of a debate, informed by the texts that remain and new archaeological discoveries.

With me to discuss the Bronze Age collapse are John Bennett, director of the British School at Athens, and Professor of Eugenic archaeology at the University of Sheffield, Linda Hewlin, research officer at the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and Simon Stoddard, reader in prehistory at the University of Cambridge. John Bennett, what do historians mean by the term the Bronze Age? Well, the Bronze Age, it's important to remember is our term for this period, and it's part of a sequence of Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age,

which was essentially developed in a prehistoric, environment, an environment without text. It was developed at the early part of the 19th century by Christian Tom Sen, who was director of the Danish National Museum, to bring order, chronological order, to the finds from prehistoric Scandinavia. And the sequence implies a development where stone was the prime material, followed by a period in which bronze was a prime material, and iron took over.

And that brought chronology to a period that didn't have historical documents to an area that had historical documents. That was then generalized to many other parts of the world, but one of the consequences of that is that the Bronze Age doesn't happen at the same time in every part of the world. So in the part of the world that we're particularly interested in, the Bronze Age ends around about 1,100,100 BC, but it starts quite a long time before that.

How long? In Greece, we would talk about sometimes just before 3,000 BC, so we have about a 2,000 year. Bronze Age, as it were. But is it different in, say, the Hittite Kingdom? Not in the Hittite Kingdom, and in places like the Hittite Kingdom and Egypt and so on, there is a historical chronology which, if you feel like, sort of supersedes the need for an archaeological material-based chronology. But we're loosely, we're generally going to be talking about the very great East Mediterranean powers, so let's stack it there for this

conversation. When did it get going there? We're really talking about the second millennium and particularly about the period from about 1500 to 1200 when those were the, that was the period of the greatest interaction between those major powers, the Hittites, as you've mentioned in Anatolia, the Egyptians and the southern

Mediterranean, and of course the friction between those two powers in the 14th and 13th centuries which took place along the coast of the Levant, modern day Syria, Lebanon, Israel and so on. You have the Mycenaeans and then on the

the western fringes you have the Mycenaeans in the Aegean world and the Babylon is a bit further east, yeah. Was there anything that we could say characterize these kingdoms? Characterise all of them. We can bring them together. Well, I think you've used the word, kingdoms. They're not democracies, that's for sure.

And in the case of the Hittites, it's a multilingual formation. So it is properly called an empire. It fragmented and and came together a little bit in the second millennium, and of course at the end of the period we're talking about, it fragmented into multiple different forms.

Egypt was more uniform in the sense that it was ethnically and linguistically more uniform, so not formally an empire, but Egypt expanded into the Eastern Mediterranean, and it bring in non-Egyptian speakers and speakers of other languages as well. Did they feel part of a group? Did they interrelate with trade in a way that made them interdependent and aware that each other's safety was important? The textual evidence we have, particularly in the Amarna letters, which belong to the 14th century,

BC, yes, indicate a clear understanding, a language, if you like, of diplomacy, of trade at the highest level. And the shared material culture, which the Miscanians, to some extent, to the West, participated in without being reflected textually in those accounts, shows that they were using the same kinds of values metals like bronze obviously gold but materials like ivory

blue glass and so on are we talking about four or five kingdoms of about the same power they're large kingdoms aren't they give us some idea of the size of these kingdoms I'd need roughly the same except Egypt of course which is massive well it's a long thin tube going south

well down to into Africa the Hittite empire I suppose is certainly one of the largest I mean, it comprises most of modern Turkey and into northern Syria now. The Aegean world is a bit smaller and certainly not unified, at least in my view anyway, multiple kingdoms there.

So we are talking about some variation in size, the Hittites and Egyptians and the Babylonians to the east and the Assyrians coming on a bit later are larger. Simon Sotomayor, what was the status of bronze as a commodity in the 12th century? Well, bronze brought new properties, skills and opportunities, and these interacted to give value to this particular commodity. One very important skill was finding the oars.

Whereas in previous periods, you went to one source. Here you had to bring two sources together and then have the knowledge to transform the copper and the tin by smelting them, working with them. And then a second situation was you had to melt them, together in a very precise alloy and it's this control, almost scientific control without the science that we have today that is an essential element of the value of this commodity. And another very important property was that bronze could be recycled. So there is a balance in terms of this

commodity. On the one hand, it is being used and being placed in the ground, sometimes deliberately to offer opportunities to people to display themselves. On the other hand, you, you, are finding new resources and this sets up the whole situation of trade which will be a major flavour of our later conversation where did the tin and copper come from it depends where you are situated in the eastern Mediterranean loosely in the eastern Mediterranean one key area was cyprus for the copper for Afghanistan I believe for the tin from the east but then we should look at this in a much broader spectrum we should not just look at the what I'm going to describe as a little local difficulty in the eastern Mediterranean, and look at it in the Eurasian perspective,

because further west, the response to the so-called collapse of these kingdoms was not uniformly felt. So we must bring into the equation the trade that goes as far as Cornwall, Sardinia, and also centrally, bringing together these component parts, using newborn skills to put together a new material which has these qualities of display and also, as we will describe later, potential for military prowess as well. Well, we describe them later if we get to them. Let's not anticipate what we might not get to it because we've got our own schedule too. Absolutely. You said it was highly skilled bringing these two copper and tin together to turn into bronze. What level of skill can you tell the listeners was employed?

Well, clearly they didn't have scientific laboratories. Therefore, it had to be done by proxy approaches of colour, smell, even taste. observing the colour of the oars as you found them, and also observing the colour of the smelting operation, so that you knew precisely how much oxygen, how much different ingredients you put together to get the precise outcome, because if you got the inclusion of an ally wrong by a few percent,

it wouldn't have the qualities that you were looking for. In other words, copper was the dominant, 90% plus, whereas tin was in a smaller proportion. So was this trial and error? Were there any manuscripts to anything remaining saying this is how you do it, or was it trial and error on the job? The great problem is that we don't see every evidence of the trial and error. So we see the successes, and therefore it's really the outcome, the final product that we see

when they've actually perfected the system. By the time we are talking about, which is broadly 1,200 BC, this was a very successful operation. What difference did it make to the societies that had bronze? It gave them opportunities for exchange on not absolutely new opportunities. They built out of the Neolithic and the Copper Age that preceded it, but this lifted it to another level and made interaction a very powerful theme within Europe. Linda Hewlin, how intimately was bronze tied up with power?

Oh, very intimately. I mean, if you are a pharaoh or a Hittite king, you have basically two jobs in life. One is to be splendid and to channel wonderful things throughout your emphasis. and buy your allies, and you do that by giving money to temples, endowing temples, have fabulous palaces, having a big countrywide building program and having the ability to build fortifications. And the other is having an army to protect your territories

so that you can get the stuff that you get through trade. And for those, you need bronze. You need bronze for chisels. You need bronze for cutting stone. You need bronze for your weapons. So it fuels building projects, it fuels the arms that enable you to stay a military power. What was bronze supplanting? Well, copper and stone.

And stone is used, stone arrowheads continue for some time. Copper is in general too soft. The Egyptians were at quite a disadvantage when they entered the Levant. They didn't have composite bows. They largely, they didn't have chariots. They imported all this technology. and some of this was to do with the new fighting techniques that required swords as well and different kinds of swords.

But bronze meant that you, on the whole you're saying that if you had bronze you were more powerful. Yeah. And you went for bronze to make yourself more powerful. So the trade increased. Yes. And it enables you to inhabit territories, which means you can control the trade within those territories. How can you give us some idea of the web of trade?

in this part of the Mediterranean, let's say from Cyprus to the eastern, and around there. What's going on, though? Obviously there's got to be copper and tin, but there's oil, I presume. Can you give us some idea of the intensity? Yes, and we have a good idea

from the Imani Letters and other texts, which show what... It has been mentioned twice. Can you say exactly what they were? Okay, the Imani Letters is an archive from the Egyptian capital under Arcanaten and its copies of correspondence, sent to the king by vassals and by the other great powers.

And in that we get... In what century? 14th century, mid-14th century. And they are discussing what they term gift exchange, but it's really exchange. And so there will be requests for gold, which is regarded as like dust in Egypt. And they mention all the good things. So they mention gold, they mention silver, they mention fine vessels, they mention cloth. Many things that we actually don't recover archaeologically.

But archaeologically, we have Mycenaean and Cypriot pottery spread all around the region. We have jars of oil, Canaanite jars moving out from the Levant. And we have shipwrecks, and shipwrecks give us a very precise window. So there is a shipwreck at Ulubourun,

around 1,300, that sank off the coast of southern Turkey. And this was a large ship for the day, about 15 and a half metres. And it carried 10 tonnes of copper, one ton of tin, which is the precise ratio to make bronze. But it also carried terribinth oil, wine, some pottery as well,

lots of gold and silver scrap, hippo ivory, elephant ivory, things that would be sent probably to the Mycenaean world for making into these fine furnitures and impressive things that would be used and spread around again as part of a gift exchange. Was this trade pacifically pursued? I mean, do they raid each other ships? Well, the Amarna letters and other letters do set up a framework of law. So we do get, if the donkey trains carrying tin from Afghanistan through Syria to Agarit, for instance, if they are attacked.

Yes. I don't know why donkey should be a romantic image, but they are. No, my... You know, if they're attacked, who pays? If your ship is attacked by pirates, who pays? If your ship is delayed in port, who pays? So when they're not exchanging gifts and marriage contracts, a lot of the correspondence is to do with who is responsible for any kind of pirate activity or attacks by people on land.

And so the idea is to try and smooth the wheels of trade. Nothing much has changed really in a way. No, it's exactly. It's silly about it. These complications of ownership and how you lay claim to the property you think you have is already an issue. Yes, and the fact that they all write in Acadian, including the Egyptians. The Acadian being the diplomatic language of the time.

It's a diplomatic language of the time. It's a club that they enter. John Bennett, let's talk about this collapse. Let's use the word collapse at the moment. What collapsed in the 12th century? Well, one can describe it in terms of political collapse, which in the sense that the Hittite Empire fragmented. Why? Do we know why?

We don't know why, exactly. Egypt seems to have retrenched and one can correlate that retrenchment with the appearance of the sea peoples in certain Egyptian texts, whether we want to link them directly as a cause, but that seems to be part of that phenomenon. Sea people being, as it were,

wondering marauders almost, are that? As presented in the, I mean, what we're talking about, a text that were inscribed on the temple, a mortary temple, Medinette Habou of Ramsey's III, which describe these events both visually and in text. But they are, I mean, one would have to say this is propaganda. So, I mean, it's not in the interest of the text to make these, to minimize, if you like, the threat of these people and so on. But they were there, there were these people, they were going from place to place. and having in some cases a destructive effect. Yes, and there are other references and other texts from elsewhere to them. So that's one thing. What else?

And then I was going to say that in describing it, one can describe, if you like, what happened on the ground. And in the case of the Mycenaean world, we have a wave of destructions at the Mycenaean palace centres, which centre around about 1,200 BC. Can we date those? We can date those fairly precisely. What sort of destruction were there? We're talking about in the case of 1200 burnt destruction where we preserve them in the case of Pylos for example, the whole palace was burnt quite intensively, the olive oil that was there added to the burning.

And fortunately, in the case of Pylos, this preserved a set of texts, about a thousand texts in the Greek language, but the script called Linear B. It doesn't refer to marauders unfortunately, but those were preserved by those burnt. destructions. Before that there may have been a wave of earthquake destructions around about 1250 BC. They might have been. Well identifying it definitively as an earthquake destruction is quite difficult archaeologically but shifting walls and sometimes we get skeletons preserved suggests that the earlier disruptions in the 13th century about

1250 at Mycenae and Tyrians in particular which are very close together may have been earthquake destruction. So you're talking about and you're several other things. A lot of things coming together but the effect is these great palace kingdoms were under threat being burnt, destroyed, demolished one way and another? Yeah. All of them. As far as we can tell, all of them. Some parts of the Aegean, in the northwest Peloponnese, for example, seemed to, in the period following, seem to have some more, don't seem to have a population decline in the sense that sites continue in relatively large numbers. The region around Pulas, for example, in southwestern Peloponnes, I'm just referring to, seems to be almost deserted for a couple of centuries after this.

So there are differential effects, and some places may have, if you like, not exactly benefited, but not suffered to the same degree. But generally speaking, if you take a step backwards, it's a very broad wave of destruction. Can you develop that time and start that as to what sort of changes are occurring in Europe around this time? Well, I think we look... We're still talking about 12th century BC, although one of your colleagues, It says that everything really pivots on 1177 BC, which is, we might come to that.

I can say that. I think we can say that. Anyway, never mind. Useful, easy to remember. 1177. Now, what else is going on? Well, further west, the pattern is much more varied. And there are certain areas like Sicily,

in particular the site of Thapsos, which comes to an end at a broader at the same time. And there you have a lot of Mycenium pottery coming in, and that comes, relatively speaking, rapidly to a halt. southern Italy, very broadly similar in terms of pattern. Little Malta, it's a bit difficult to date it, but it seems to continue in its small, low-key way. Further north, though, if you go towards central Italy,

this seems to be a moment of growth. And so what you find in the interstices, as I like to call them, in other words, between other big places, opportunities are being taken. So there are points of growth which move onto the later phase after they collapse. And of course, that is what happens in Centuritally. That is where the Etruscans and the Latins rise later. And they rise out of, admittedly several centuries later, but they arise out of these opportunities that have been presented.

Several centuries is quite a stretch. It is a stretch. It is a stretch. It is a stretch. We can't we? Just a second. So, can we, John gave us some of the, what's being called the perfect storm.

Did he miss anything out? What about climate change? change? Well, there is a date 1150 which the department in Belfast particularly emphasises from tree ring data as a particular event. Now it's very difficult to

fix this absolutely because it would have taken, in order for a society to suffer from climate, it shouldn't just be one year. It needs to be a range of years. If you're in a vulnerable place like Malta, even one year may have an effect, but if you're in a more

continental area or somewhere with a number of rival valleys such as Greece, you may be able to simply borrow from your neighbours and deploy the crops in a different way. So the response is very varied according to the geography that we're dealing with, I think it's fair to say, subject to climatic change.

Is there anything that is disrupting the trade? I mean, I'm still having, I suppose I'm looking for it's got a key cause, aren't I? What would you say could be called a couple, two or three of the key causes? Has anything been omitted by John in his summary? Well, I think many of these societies

had very difficult problems in passing on succession. Today we have institutions which are very, very organised and legally framed and succession in all sorts of different ways are very easily understood. But in these societies, particularly in the West where I'm talking about, they're often levelling mechanisms by which, if someone got too powerful,

they had to give a big feast, they had to bury a large amount of, the bronze in either a horde, this is something that very much takes place in northern Europe, or they had to put their materials into a burial. And so a lot of the aggrandizement, a lot of the aggrandizement

was controlled by this process. I don't understand how you engrandize yourself by burying your loot. Well, this is the way by which one controls that aggrandizement. In other words, the burying, you were forced by the understandings of your society that it is not permitted

to become too powerful. This is further west and further inter-temperate Europe. In other words, and there are good ethnographic accounts of this, the potlatch is the one that's always referred to, where you throw a big feast in order to bring you,

you get a lot of prestige in your lifetime and perhaps over a few months, but in terms of passing on that wealth to your successors, that is not allowed. And this leads to an instability in many of these societies,

or it can lead either to an instability or to a society which doesn't grow at the same rate that we see in the Aegean. Linda Heer, and there's still the troubling fact, as I think it is, that a lot of these things happened at around the same time to a lot of these kingdoms. I'm rather taken by the mysterious sea people

who, and partly the day, and they're recorded by the Egyptians, whose task in life was to record everything that happened in the world. And what do you feel? Are they having an effect? Is something underneath going on, like the Goths in Rome? What's going on?

Part of the problem in answering this is archaeological resolution, even with well-dated text, in that there seems to be an instability for about 50 or 60 years or maybe more. So what seems like an event gets magnified across the narrative. So yes, Ramesses is the third, yes, in Medinat Abu. he records a battle in year eight where he says there is an alliance that the peoples of the North

made an alliance against him at Confederacy and that he fought a sea battle he was probably actually within the Nile Delta itself on the Pelusiat branch where he defeated an alliance of different people and he also defeated them on land and the scary thing about the land lot was the change there is that for the first time

we see people that it's not just soldiers but carts with women and children so these are people coming to settle. And so he has this narrative of a big battle, and undoubtedly something like that happened. But if you examine his record, there are parts of it which are actually repeated from a first wave of what you might call Sea Peoples under Merrin Patah.

Where are these Sea Peoples coming from? Sorry, interrupted, please. So he is taking parts of the narrative and adding it. In fact, he only refers to two, the Chequer and the Wehches, as being of the sea. And others are the Sheridan, for instance, whom he mentions. Originally, when these people were identified, scholars made very, very simplistic equations.

So the Sheridan kind of sounds like Sardinia, the Peliset are the Philistines, and they probably are. So there were some very facile equations. But the Sheridan first appear in the mid-14th century as mercenaries in Ugaris. and they kick around in the Egyptian army. They fight on both sides in the Egyptian army. They're settled from Rameses II just before Merneptat.

He settles veterans in a village, and that settlement continues through to Rameses III. He's still taking tax from them. So these people are actually spread across. Some of them are causing trouble, others aren't. But in the battle with Rameses III, you do get some new people like the Pellisett, the Czechos, the Westch, who are never heard of before,

and they make alliances, and they probably are coming in from outside. So they're attacking from outside? Maybe a focus on this, John Bennett, would be to talk just about the Hittites. You have a great kingdom there, great buildings, that disappeared, the Hittite palaces and so on. So do we know specifically, can you tell us specifically what happened to the Hittites? Well, the central place, Hattushash, the capital of the Hittite Empire, was destroyed in this same period. We have actually wonderfully preserved grain stores there, which have been a godsend for archaeobotanists to understand Hittite farming practices, for example.

But the Hittite empire had throughout the, from the 15th century two to the end, as it were, had always been trying to. to bring in bits that we're trying to get away from it, particularly on the West. So there's an event with the Asuwa, there's the possibility that Mila Wanda, which many people have equated with Miletus on the west coast of Turkey, was taken over by Mycena and Greeks, and then recaptured again by the Hittites and so on. So it was a core in central Anatolia of Hittite speakers, and then a series of varyingly tied.

polities that are round about. That, when at the time of the collapse, we only know the name of the last Hittite Empire, Emperor, who was called Shupilu Luma the second. And he disappeared. His dates, he started in 1207, we don't know when he finished.

But have you satisfied yourself that there are reasons which you can tell us all about why in that particular great city, great king, disappeared? I can't, I'm afraid. It's part of the same phenomenon, it seems. We have an archaeological black hole here. We have a textual black hole. We have, what happens is that this fragments into a series of what are called the neo-Hittite kingdoms, which are essentially smaller scale kingdoms using, still using a particular script, hieroglyphic Hittite, which is actually a Lovian language.

that continue later on and so on. Now, Simon Sotter, you can break cover. You admit destruction, significant changes, but your question collapse. I think it very much depends on where you're looking at again in the European sphere. Well, let's stick a bit that we've teased our listeners into. The Eastern Mediterranean, Cyprus,

around Turkey and that lot of Egypt and so on, So we just stick there. It gets to, it's enough. Okay? Well, I think that there could easily be a switch in political organisation, which leads us to think its collapse. And there are technical terms which have been used in archaeology. Hierarchy is very clear to understand with an apex,

whereas heterarchy is a term that is much used in current parlance, which means that you have, within a society, competing groups, almost factions, that are working together. So the archaeological record gives an impression of something radically different. And so it may just be a,

it may be a more pleasant way of living in some respects. And indeed, if I can give you again, threaten you with a picture from the West a little bit, there are these societies which are held more in balance where

hierarchy is not imposed and which continue their village life completely unaffected by this collapse at all. So there are some examples which I should also refer to, such as the Terramara in northern Italy, is a very interesting example

because it lies north of this continued development of the Truria and Latian, from right through the Bronze Age, to Trurian Latian, which is where the Atrastans and Latins start. It continues from the Bronze Age right into the Iron Age, so it has very deep-seated roots. It's not something that starts a few centuries later. But the Terramare beautifully contrasts with that.

There, at an earlier date, and I think this is the important point, a lot, and we can look at Spain as well. A number of these collapses are not in sequence with what is happening in the Eastern Mediterranean. So it's inherent in the communities themselves that they change their way of operating. They move from a more hierarchical way

to a more competitive internal way, if I can put it in those terms. Yeah, we've got that, and that's very well expressed. But we go back to the Hittites, the Macedonians, sorry, the Mycenaans, the Babylonians, and so on that we've been talking about. and the outrage of Egypt, they are being attacked, destroyed,

and collapsing isn't a bad word, and although things pop up again a few centuries later, there's a struggle. So there are exceptions. Of course villages don't get taken up in the mainstream of events. Communications were like that, and of course there are exceptions. There always are, especially in times of poor communication.

But wouldn't you agree, well, I'm from all your notes, that this could be called some kind of end of something or other. Like the late Bronze Age comes to an end. I'm going to continue my slightly Western-orientated polemic and point out that a lot of this evidence is textual. In other words, it is very much in the minds of the people who are on the losing end of the spectrum.

They want to make a fuss because their economic system is falling apart. They're no longer in control. I'm going to go to Linda Hewlin. Yes, I think. Because you pointed to her. I'm just taking direction from you. You've run out of path or you think she's going to back you on. I am going to back you up to a certain extent.

Cyprus is an interesting case in point with this. Cyprus was the main engine of copper in the eastern Mediterranean. And the city of Enkamy, for instance, is more or less opposite Ugarit. And they clearly developed in tandem, swapping tin and copper with one another on the routes east and west. They both suffer from pirates. At one point, the Hittites claim to invade Cyprus, although there's no real archaeological evidence for that. Ugarit is clearly destroyed.

Ungarut is a very important trading port. It's the port, yes, and it's the nexus of the land routes and the sea routes, moving copper and tin and other fine things. Now, the interesting thing about Cyprus is its geography. It has this central Turodas Massif and then squeezed around all of it in the middle are the copper-bearing deposits.

So although we don't know, the ancient term for Alashir could mean the whole kingdom or it could just mean a few towns and we really don't know. It basically means that it was impossible for one city or one entity to control the copper trade because they all had access to it and they were all close to the sea. So at the end of this period, Cyprus reorganises itself. Some of the countryside storage places disappear. But Enkemy, after 1,200, actually has its finest hour. rebuilds itself on a new grid, uses lots of fancy Ashlaar Masonry, invests in temples.

It has some people that's new. John Bennett, are we, is the idea of the Bronze Age collapse and drifting away from us as we do this programme and will be sued under the Trade Descriptions Act? Is that what's happening? No, I think there is a phenomenon that happens in the Eastern Mediterranean, which I think is probably best described as a political collapse. but as Linda says we are victims of the fact that we have textual information for that and we very much

want to read the text very literally so what I think we can say is that the trade evidence both textual and archaeological suggests that these entities, the Mycenaeans on the West and so on, were tightly bound up in a shared enterprise and enterprise where value was very much shared across that And so these commodities moving around were essential. What I think it's beginning to happen as we approach 1,200,

is that the ability of these states to monopolize that trade when it happens, but certainly by 1,200, is breaking down. And so we have people working under the radar, as it were. There's a little bit of evidence of this in shipwrecks, where there's a shipwreck that dates about 1,200, a century after the Uluburund wreck, whose cargo looks rather different from that of the Ulberun wreck. It doesn't look like a state-sponsored high-level cargo.

Now, Simon, the Bronze Age seeds, and of course it wasn't tomorrow morning, to the Iron Age and they overlap, and that has a huge effect. What was it and was it destructive in certain parts of the Mediterranean? Well, the Iron Age brings obviously a new material to bear, but it doesn't happen rapidly. The early iron age involves very little iron. And it's really only at the end of the iron age that you get used efficiently and fully.

So what dates are you talking about? Well, we're talking really effective use of iron isn't until the third, fourth century BC, certainly in most of Europe, potentially a little bit earlier in other areas, perhaps in Greece, a little bit earlier. But so the full iron age is a much later phenomenon. And indeed, it is absolutely true,

that when this transition takes place, you see this very well in this country, there seems to be a drop in circulation of all metals at about 700 BC. So there is a former decline, maybe we could give it a term collapse in terms of trading enterprise at that time before it picks up again as the Iron Age,

as a new commodity, begins to take role, its proper role, and bronze also takes a new role, because bronze doesn't lose its role, it just shifts its position. It seems, Linda Hewlin, is that these great palace kingdoms do disappear. And a few centuries later, they're replaced by much smaller states, and then we have the growth of the great Greek states and so on.

So there's this gap in between on the maps as of the timescales I've got from you three. It's 2,300 at least, maybe more, years. What happens then in that time? In that time, we're sort of not sure. Yes, you can say there is this hinge and the states in the Near East, well, the Eastern Mediterranean that we knew of disappear. Cyprus continues.

And the Greek states have not appeared, yes. And they have not yet appeared. Everything is on a much smaller scale, but trade does continue. John referred to the Point Iriar Shipwreck, which is Cypriot and Cretan commodities sailing towards Greece. So, you know, that kind of

surplus and smaller people who know someone who knows someone who's got a boat and know where they can sell it continues and provides a long-term persistence so that when in the iron age you get the spread of the Phoenicians right across the Mediterranean, when you get the Greeks spreading across the Mediterranean, they're doing it as smaller entities. It's not these enormous states that come together and organise huge donkey trains or huge ships like the Uluburun. So the hinge is is moving towards more merchant-driven trade on a smaller scale. To take that on, John, is this gap, decline, collapse, whatever, is this the trigger for a new form of organisation,

for not so much a resurgence as a new invention of what these states, cities could be? Absolutely. I think what the, one could argue that iron, which of course, unlike copper and tin, is pretty much everywhere, and so is readily accessible. And you don't have to do all the time. So you don't have to build long-distance trade routes to find it and so on. You can take a sort of broad view that that undermines this ability to monopolize long-distance trade, and therefore smaller entities can get involved.

If you take the Aegean as a sort of barometer, Cyprus is very important in the Bronze Age for copper, but in the 12th century, it's the origin of certain types. types of iron objects which come in as prestige objects into the Aegean. And in the opposite direction, you have a pottery coming in from Italy in the Aegean. So if you like, the Aegean is drawing in from both ends because of a shift in the way the trade system is working. You've talked about progression, Simon, and I've teased a bit about it, but is there any sense in which we can see that the Etruscans and the Greeks emerged from the Dmitians and the Hittites and so on?

Or is it, let's start again? I think all opportunities like this create new opportunities. In other words, if there is a collapse, there is a new version. There are people there who see the possible. Yeah, but if it was it new people doing what, what new people and doing what? I think they had new, but they're not necessarily new people in a biological sense, but they were people who knew in their motivation, as indeed Linda has mentioned, people who are organised politically in a different way.

And so you get the emergence of different types of political organizations, the polis in Greece. I mean the small city state, which is mainly based on voting males, but still it has a democratic heart, at least in principle. Except for women and slaves. Exactly, yes, that's right. And then the Etruscans probably are a little bit more like what preceded. They are very rich plutocrats, and they retain a family organization, political organizations. organization within their midst so that they don't have the same corporate unity perhaps that Greece does. And they are generally speaking larger in scale than the average Greek city state too.

So there are various versions of what emerges. There isn't one rule. And the Latin's, of course, the successful people had a different version which incorporated other peoples than the course of time. This is a very lump in question, but we're near the end of the program, Linda. Is there a sense in which there were any way for the Greeks, let's take the Greece and the extra-strict with the Greece, who will look across what they called the Dark Age, and say, well, we're not going to go like that, because look what happened

to them. I don't think there was that much of a cultural memory, but I think seafaring nations have an underlying persistence and knowledge that is independent of states. So I could bring the Finitions in as well. They were famed for their fast

ships. Yes, they suffered destructions at the end of the late Bronze Age, and then they were hemmed in by Assyrian expansion. The only to go was into the Mediterranean. But they were probably drawing upon sailors' knowledge of roots anyway. And of course the Mediterranean, the winds and the currents are still the same. So they're going to broadly take you in the same framework. And all trade was personal. So you traded with people you knew and families you knew and you inherited those personal relationships through, you know,

across the generations. So that probably continued. John. Well, I think there is a sense in which the Greeks of the 8th, 7th century BC were aware of their, as it were, Mycenaean past, as we would call it, they would call it their heroic past. We can see it in the Homeric text, which remembers a time,

which clearly was what we would associate with the Mycenaean period. It was a time in which it was recognised that things were greater than they are now. Yet, ironically, the construction that's placed in the Homeric poems describes a world which looks much less impressive. It looks much more like the eight.

century world. So there is that historical memory, I think. And of course, in the sequence, the other metallic sequence, as it were, in Hesiod, the gold, silver, bronze, iron age of decline that he describes in his poem, he has to insert the age of heroes just following the bronze age before the Iron Age, because he knows historically that that was a period that he has to take account of. And there may have been, I don't know, ruins enough remaining of magnificence remaining that made them think it's time to finish the program by the look of it. Okay. My scene was there in 150 AD.

Okay. Thanks very much. John Bennett, Linda Hewlin and Simon Sallat. Next week we'll be talking about William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I enjoyed that.

You're on now. Hello, out there. Yes, we're going to do the P.S. I apologize for my polemic. I was all right. I enjoyed it. I wanted to get a bit of... You obviously got to get it in, so I had to maneuver it so... I'm sorry, I had maneuvered.

But he didn't bomb the program before it started. We're coming back to something you were saying at the beginning about bronze as a transformational material, as it were. It does seem to have qualitatively changed the way in which people are interacted across the entirety of Europe right into the East and Mediterranean. It's not... It's plentiful enough for, it to be widely available, but it's not, it's, it's rare enough to have to capture those, those roots

and so on. So I think you have a, you have a real change in, as you come into the Bronze Age, with, with things like Amber, for example, moving from the Baltic down, ultimately into the Aegean world and so on. That's, and I think one of the transformations is the way in which the body is presented. This is something my colleague, Mary Louise Sorensen in Cambridge, would really want to emphasise that this gave new opportunities of presenting the body, not just men, but also women. And we always think of this as a very very, very important. And we always think of this as a very martial sort of sword-led experience. Indeed, the saw was a major invention of the Bronze Age.

But we also... Why didn't we say that? Blast. I'm sorry. But... I mentioned sorts. I think he did, yes. The dagger rapier swords. Because we're focusing on the end.

Yes, we're focusing on the end. We didn't look at the full sequence. We'll have the sorts by then. But the presentation of the body, I think that there's a one, if I can be discussed, it's a wonderful article by someone called Paul Traherne, which is absolutely beautiful. It describes the body

beautiful. This is very masculine, in fact, and Mary Louise would want to add the feminine side to it, but that really shows the new potential of this material. It's very sensual. It's almost a gold that is more widely

distributed. In other words, and it's something you've made yourself, so you have power over it in almost a magical, cosmological way. So I think these are elements that perhaps we should add to the equation. But there are also very practical and utilitarian things. There's a site, Marsamatru, on the North African coast of Egypt,

which there was a small island there where Mediterranean sailors would call in. And in exchange for ostrich eggshells, one of the things they did, ostrich eggshells, which were exotic in the rest of the Mediterranean, they would take small crucibles with them and make on the spot fish hooks, arrow, heads, needles, things that the population there and possibly the Egyptian garrison nearby couldn't easily access.

So it was... The use of small crucibles was part of the armoury of traders moving around the Mediterranean on ships, saying, well, we've got this small bit of bronze. What do you want made? We'll make it for you now. Right. So I like the

thing of being family firms, talking about the centuries and over the sea. What is interesting about the fall of Agarit is that if it hadn't fallen, we may still have ended up with the same kind of situation. Because we can see in the texts, for instance, that one trader was exempted from tax on his goods coming back from Crete, which implies that everyone else was taxed, but he wasn't. We have other texts where the way the society was organized was that in return for land, various people had to offer services, often military, but not always.

And this was called the Pilku Service. And towards the end of this period, we start getting sales of land for which the Pilku service is stripped away. This means that eventually you will end up with a class of people who have wealth that is independent of royal patronage, similar to something that happened in Europe, in the Middle Ages, with the rise of the merchants. It got halted by these attacks.

But the end result was the same. that in the Iron Age we have merchant-led trade. One of the things that interested me about the bronze is that in one or two cases, of course, it was flashed very heavily in warfare, but bronze armour wasn't as good as beaten leather. There's a very famous experiment, which used to have a picture in our museum,

where John Coles, who was the Bronze Age specialist, paradoxically held the leather shield against the Paleolithic archaeologist, who was holding the bronze age. and it's quite clear who won in this particular battle. And indeed, a lot... The leather shield. The leather shield won.

And indeed, a lot of this armour is for show and parade. It was not necessarily as effective as made out. It was to engage in psychological and won up a ship. If they polished it enough and stood facing the sun, they could blind the enemy. Yeah, exactly, that sort of effect. I think we're being... seduced by the producer, yeah. I've got to get off a tea or coffee.

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