School of War - Ep 258: Eric Cline on the Collapse of Civilizations

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Eric Cline, professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and of Anthropology at The George Washington University and author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, joins the show to break down the collapse of the Bronze Age civilization and why it matters today. ▪️ Times 02:57 Writing History for All 04:51 The Three Age System 10:32 Tin: The Oil of the Ancient World 11:37 Archeology in the Future 13:22 Bronze Age Society 21:02 The Beginning and End of History 26:07 The Sea Peoples 32:36 The Collapse  35:00 The Mystery of the Exodus 40:53 Resilience and Regeneration Post-Collapse Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Hebrew Bible, and other classic texts composed in the Iron Age, that is, the first millennium BC, depict a lost world, ancient even to them, of palaces and kings, migrations and wars, and ultimately catastrophe and collapse. This world was that of the late Bronze Age, that is to say, the second millennium BC. And our guest today, Eric Klein, is going to help us understand how its civilization fell apart. Let's get into it. It is the script for war this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in him.

A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain situation in grand. You're just right on the beach. We shall sight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today.

Eric Klein, he is professor of classics and ancient near-eastern studies at George Washington University. He's the author of several well-known books that I have been eager to talk about now for years. And so Eric gets in the like to have you on the show. You've written 1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed. a little bit more recently than that. You wrote after 1177 BC, the survival of civilizations. There's also a graphic novel,

I believe based on the first one that's just out now. You'll tell us the name of that. And I'm just looking forward to talking about all this with you. Thanks for joining the show. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me on, and I'm looking forward to talking about all of this as well. Also, as a point of praise,

and just for listeners to know, I really like your books. And one of the reasons why I like them is, you know, for a more general audience, but in the title, you know, after 1177 with, I guess is this, who is this on the, is this Turner you have on the cover? Yeah, I think so. You know, the, you know, the dramatic, you know, depiction of civilizational collapse.

It's very popular in its presentation. And then you open it and it's actually, it's actually for the general intelligent reader. It's a very serious sort of scholarly work of synthesis where you really are quite in the weeds in learning details while at the same time it's put together. in a way that, you know, someone like me, for example, I have no training or background in archaeology or sort of pre-classical, as it were, near Eastern history, I can actually follow the argument.

And I'm just, I just want to praise you for that. It's a real accomplishment. Well, thank you. That means a lot, especially coming from you. And that's exactly what I was hoping to do. So I had wanted to write these books for a very long time. But I wanted it. It was treading a fine line.

I wanted it so my wife's grandmother. who is a very intelligent layperson that she could read it and understand it, but I wanted it so that also my colleagues wouldn't come down too hard on me, and then it would be useful for students, both undergraduate and graduate students. So I was trying to please several different audiences, and some think I pleased one and not the other. Others think I didn't please either, though. I was hoping I pleased both. So anyway, yeah, it is a surprise to some people when they open up the book.

book and they're expecting, I don't know, a much more easy way in, and then they're hit with footnotes and, you know, and names they've never heard of before. But I wanted to introduce readers to the late Bronze Age, which is my favorite period of the ancient world. I mean, it's, you know, 3,500 years ago, and yet, you know, this is something I think they should know about. Anyway, I'm glad to hear you say that because it means that what I was trying to do worked, at least for you. Well, let me start with a really big picture question. We use these terms Bronze Age, Iron Age. They've been in circulation since well before you and I were around, Eric.

And I want to ask you how they came into usage, how useful they actually are, how real they are as periodizations. I mean, Stone Age, I guess, is sort of self-explanatory. But talk us through how they're. this came to be this breakdown of ancient history. Well, okay. So you're getting into my intro at archaeology class, which I'm just finishing up for the semester. Very good.

So, yeah. So it goes back to a guy named Thompson, who was a museum curator in, I think it was Denmark, back. I mean, we're talking, you know, 1800s. And he decided to classify the stuff that was in his museum. And he broke it into what we now called the three-eighths. system, Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. And so it goes all the way back to him. And it really

is exactly what it sounds like. Everything made out of stone went into one area. Everything made out of bronze and another, everything into iron in another. But it actually works chronologically as well. We have now broken it down even further. So instead of just Stone Age, we've got Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic. So old stone age, middle stone age, new stone age. And then within that, like Neolithic, we've got before pottery, after pottery was invented, so we have pre-pottery, we have pottery, we have, you know, pottery. But then we, I mean, we love to break things down.

We are archaeologists are either splitters or lumpers. And in this case, trying to get at the chronology, we're splitters. So we've got pre-prodery Neolithic A and B. and then we've got pottery Neolithic A and B. And we're talking 9,000 BC to 8,000, 7,000, to 6,000, and so on. All right, by the time we get to the Bronze Age, we are at 3,000 BC. We're 5,000 years ago. And the Bronze Age, and we're talking here about the Mediterranean area and the ancient Near East.

We're not talking China, Japan, Australia, America, anything like that. because each area has its own chronology. In our case, the Bronze Age in, let's say, from, in modern terms, from Italy on one side to Iran, Afghanistan, on the other, and from Turkey down to Egypt. So, Aegean, Mediterranean, Middle East. Bronze Age is from 3,000 down to 1,000 BC, to put it in big numbers. And then the Iron Age begins, and it lasts, well, for quite a while more, but at least, another 400 years and we break that into early Iron Age, middle, late, and all of that. What it is marking is the majority of the metals.

So in the Bronze Age, which is tin plus copper, I don't know if you've made bronze recently, you know, in your backyard. No, I haven't managed to you. Okay. Well, in case you feel the urge to do so, you need 90% copper and 10% tin, and that'll get you bronze. If you don't have tin, which can be hard to come by, you can use arsenic, which I don't recommend it. You'll be, you know, dead in a couple of days, but that's what you need. So the copper is no problem. Copper comes from Cyprus, the vast majority. The tin, though, yeah, you can get some

up in Cornwall. You can get some in southeastern Turkey. But the vast majority from 3,000 to 1,000 BC came from Afghanistan and the other stands, right? So you're going off into Central Asia. And we know it's coming from there because we have ancient texts written on clay tablets that talk about tin coming via a certain trade route and making it all the way over to Crete in the Aegean, you know, where the Mnolans are.

So that continues, like I say, for about 2,000 years. There then is a problem, which we will talk about at the end of the late Bronze Age. So right around 1,200 BC, and they make the switch to iron. And the big question is why? You know, we thought maybe the trade routes were cut. You couldn't get tin, whatever. Maybe copper was hard to come by.

Anyway, they make the switch to iron, and boom, we're off into the Iron Age, and, you know, that's why we have this split. But figuring out why they did it is one of history's mysteries and all of that. So, I mean, to answer your question then, it goes back to this guy Thompson a couple hundred years ago trying to organize his museum, but we still use it today. And to be clear, Eric, when you say a lot of the tin came from Afghanistan, unless I'm mistaken, it's not just Afghanistan, which sounds sort of remote and mysterious enough, but is it Badakshan, which is, you know, the sort of roof of the world corner of Afghanistan next to what is now China. I mean, that is really the back of beyond to include in 2025. Yes, yes, and yes, you're correct. Yes, it's the production region, which is where lapis lazuli comes from as well.

So anybody out there wearing lapis lazuli jewelry that came with the tin. So there may have been other areas up in that general region that it comes from. Yeah, and one of my enduring questions is who is mining it there? You know, who's at that end of the production? And did they profit? I mean, this is like, this should be the Persian Gulf of, you know, this is the oil of the Bronze Age, but one wonders if they were successful in monetizing their end of the chain. Yeah, exactly. And then that's a perfect parallel because this was the oil of the ancient world. I mean, tin was that precious. So, but I'm not sure. I think the local tribesmen that were mining it, I don't think they monetized it as well as they could. Because just like anything that, you know, including what we've got today, As you move it down the line, each of the middlemen increases the price they're asking for it. So by the time you get over to Ugarit on the coast of North Syria, the price is probably, you know, 10 times what it was back in Afghanistan, you know, for the 10.

But anyway, a good question. We've got a lot of things that we still have to answer. You know, we can see that the 10 is moving. But exactly who's involved is still kind of an open question. You have to pity future archaeologists in the sense that, you know, if anything ever happens to the historical record, all of our physical stuff that we rely on, the oil example is, you know, is consumable. The digital age is, well, it's in the cloud. Who knows what the longevity of, maybe it's here forever, maybe it's not. That can be as much physical stuff to work with.

I completely agree. And I tell this to my students in my archaeology class. We actually had a session the very last day of class. I said, what are future archaeologists going to think of us? and are they going to misinterpret us? I mean, what are they going to think of the Smithsonian Museum when they excavate it? What are they going to think of the National Zoo in 2000 years? You know, are they going to interpret it?

And my absolute favorite, when they excavate a Starbucks and a McDonald's, are they going to interpret it correctly? I think they're going to interpret them as houses of worship. And, you know, for all I know, Starbucks may actually be a house of worship for some. But I do think, yeah, if something goes drastically wrong when, you know, all the digital stuff is erased, they may well think that we were pretty much illiterate because there's not that much, you know, paper. And we don't inscribe that many things on our buildings anymore. So, yeah, future archaeologists may have a tough time figuring out how much we knew and how much we didn't know and all of that. Well, as we contemplate our own civilizations collapse, that's a good segue to your first, well, your first.

book in this series, 1177, what was the late Bronze Age like? What would it have been like to be a, I was about to say citizen, but that's the wrong word, to be a person living in Egypt or the Near East or in what are the palace societies in Greece? You know, what is this world? Describe it to us. Yeah, well, as you might imagine, in some ways it's kind of like today, you know, there's a segmented society and trying to describe what it was like. It, it depends on where you look. It depends on when you look. It depends on who you're looking at. Because, and again, like today, if you're looking at the top 1%, you're looking at the elite, looking at the kings and the queens and the palaces, that's a very different look from looking at the

bottom 99% or the bottom 10%. And as you might imagine, we have much more material from the upper classes. I mean, it's kind of like what we were just talking about. What happens, you know, if we go away, what are they going to find from us? Same thing. It's much easier to find stuff from a palace that's burned down or been destroyed by an earthquake to excavate it and find out stuff, especially if there's tablets in there with writing. If you're out excavating a rural settlement in the back of beyond, which, you know, is built with perishable goods and there's no writing, you know, it's much harder to find out about them. So in my books, 1177 BC and then the sequel after 1170s, I say right up front, look, this is going to be a bit biased.

I'm going to focus in on the information we have, which is mostly from the elite. So if you're interested on how the average person lived, this is not going to be the book for you. But if you want to find out about what I call the ancient G8, the great patterns. if you will, the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Egyptians. I can tell you how the upper class lived, you know, the haves, how they did versus the have-nots, because they left the inscriptions, they left the records. So I warn the readers at the beginning, you know, this is going to be kind of a top-down approach. But that's the way it is necessarily for what I was doing.

So the end result is it's probably kind of as you might imagine. The kings and the queens, the palace, there's government in there, there's legal system, there's writing, there's trade. And that's actually what fascinates me about, in particular, the late Bronze Age. So I said earlier the Bronze Age as a whole is from about 3,000 to 1,000 BC. The late Bronze Age is from 1700 BC or BC, if you preferferfer. it's that last 500 to 700 years. And that's when the Mycenaeans are flourishing on the Greek mainland. I mean, think Agamemnon, think the Trojan War, right? That's the period we're talking about.

The Minoans are flourishing on creed. Think King Minos, if you know your Greek mythology. The New Kingdom period in Egypt, that's what we're talking about here. King Tut, I presume some people have heard of him. All right? So we're in that particular period. And it was an unusual period in that they are interacting with each other commercially, diplomatically. I guess economically falls into commercially. But it's a small world network. That's the best way to put it, which means that everyone is either in direct contact with everybody else or they're indirect, but no more than three jumps away. So let's say, we are Misenans and we're trying to get in touch with the Assyrians over.

in Mesopotamia, we're not in direct contact, but we are in contact with the Hittites who are in Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, and the Hittites are in contact with the Assyrians, so we can get to the Assyrians via the Hittites. That's two jumps. Everybody in the network at the time we're talking about is connected like that. There are no more than three hops from anybody else. And that is, according to social network analysis, that's the definition of a small world network. So why does that matter? Because that actually hasn't happened that often in human history. Us today, obviously, of course, yes, we're a small world network all over the world. Them back then, they were also a small world network in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern area. As a result,

what I said in the books is that what happened to them may actually be more relevant to us today than you might think, even though it was, you know, 3,200 years ago, still they had the same problems, the same, you know, highs and lows that we have, and they collapsed. And if you were to say, yeah, we're too big to fail now, I would say absolutely not. Every society, every civilization in human history has collapsed, or at least transform so much that you can't recognize it in its new iteration. And they all collapsed. We've got a, a lot of the same problems and crises today that they had back then. And their, what I would call a perfect storm, their perfect storm of crises resulted in

everything collapsing. That small world network collapse took 400 years to come back. We've got the same things today. And I didn't mean to start out saying this in the book. But by the time I got to the end of the book, I had terrified myself. I was worried. I'm like, I didn't even realize this until I finished writing it, but we have the same

things around. Is it going to happen to us? And then I said, yeah, yeah, it's definitely possible. So what can we do about it? So the book I was writing about my favorite period in history more than 3,000 years ago ended up being much more relevant to today than I thought it would be. when I began the project. And that's then where the sequel came is,

what do you do after your collapse? How do you come back? Well, some of the romance of the subject, I mean, in addition to the drama, is this fact that, you know, I certainly grew up. I suppose this is something we inherit from the Greeks, this notion of what comes before classical Greece or comes before the classical world is all pretty barbaric.

And, you know, my only real, I have no archaeological training, but I guess I've spent some time reading Thucydides, at the beginning of Thucydides book, I don't know if that's where we get the word or people just call it the archaeology, but his depiction of sort of Greece's rise from darkness, which is very much how he depicts it, in which, you know, the Mnowans come up as sort of pirates

who figure out how to be the, to monopolize piracy, and so you get, you know, you get a state. So it's all sort of being built up into something that culminates in classical Greece. Whereas what you're describing and what the record seems to show, is that prior to a kind of age of, you know, I know you'll object and others object to this, but prior to a kind of dark age at the start of the first millennium BC.

Actually, the second millennium BC is this thriving kind of world that they did not see themselves as the beginning of anything. If anything, presumably, is it all, fell apart. They realized they were the end of something. Right. Exactly. Yeah, Thucydides and Herodotus and all that begin their histories back in the Bronze Age. I mean, they start with the Trojan War in some cases.

So, yeah, and this is in part what fascinates me is that before the glory that was Greece and all that, you had the beauty of the Bronze Age. Ooh, that's actually a pretty good book title. Right. Anyway, you have this incredible society that then collapses. And you're right. You go into what we used to, and most people still do, called the world's first dark age. right and yes i'm going to object to that because that's the iron age but essentially everything that i

talk about in the first book and that we'll talk about here collapses and goes away in many cases especially in greece they have to start from ground zero again they have to build right back up so everything they had was lost including the art of writing right they were using linear b in Greece, which is a very early form of Greek, was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventress. When the collapse came after 1,200, they stopped using linear B because it was a language that was only used, or a writing system was only used in the palaces for economic reasons. You know, this many chariot wheels being brought in for repair, this much copper arriving, this many textiles being sent out.

when the palaces collapsed, you don't need that accounting system. You don't need the writing system anymore. So it goes away. They only had like 1% of the people could write anyway. So you have to reinvent writing during this dark age. Well, fortunately, the Phoenicians bring over the alphabet and Greece adopts it. So there is this entire period before archaic and classical Greece that most people don't know about except through the mythology. the tales of the Trojan War, the tales of Hercules and his labors, you know, Jason and the golden fleece.

You know, these are stories that we still tell our kids today, but they are memories of this Bronze Age that disappeared. So when I teach my Greek history class, which, again, I just did this past semester, many historians, when they are teaching history of ancient Greece, will start with the first Olympics. 776 BC, which is when they're coming out of the dark age, I tell my students, no, you can't understand what comes later unless you start back in the Bronze Age or even back in the Neolithic. So we start back in the Stone Age and spend the first three, four weeks getting down to the Bronze Age, and only after the first midterm do I say, okay, now we're getting into the part of Greece that you may have heard of. So, yeah, and that's why I wanted to write the books, was to bring this world that most people have never heard of to their attention. I think it's absolutely

an amazing period and I just, I wanted everybody to know about it. So things fall apart in the 12th century BC for a very long time, and you don't fully reject this, you've added a fair amount of complication to it, but for a very long time this fall was associated with the marauding aggression of a group or series of groups, groups of people. called the Sea Peoples. Who were the Sea Peoples, Eric? So the Sea Peoples are one of history's great mysteries. The short answer is, I have no idea. We don't know. Having said that, there's a lot that we do know. So we get, our information comes from the Egyptians. And the Egyptians say that these groups, and they actually name the individual

groups. There are nine of them all told. We, lump them. We group them and we call them the sea people, which is a term that a French Egyptologists invented back in the 1800s. So the Egyptians say in two waves, 30 years apart, during the reign of Pharaoh Mernepta and the reign of Pharaoh Ramses III. These are maybe Pharaohs, and you know, you've never heard of, but they are in the, well, the last decade, of the 13th century BC and the first two decades of the 12th century. So in what I would say is the year 1207 BC, see people show up the first time. Then they show up the second time 30 years later in 1177 BC, hence the title of the book. That's where that comes from. Now, the nine different groups,

I won't bother you with most of the names, but one group is the Shardana, and we're trying to figure out where they came from and where they went to, and Sardinia is the closest we can get. It's a, you know, a word game. We might be right. We might be wrong, but we're thinking maybe the Shardana come from Sardinia. Another group, the Shekyllesh, might come from Sicily. So basically, they're probably coming from the Western Mediterranean. The first Egyptologist actually thought they went there after losing to the Egyptians,

but now we're thinking they actually are coming from there. So there are other names like the Equish, who could be Homer's Achaeans, and the Dhanans or the Dhanian, they could be Homer's Misenans also. He's got two names for them. The only group out of the nine that we're sure we know is a group called the Palescet. Now the Pelleset are the Philistines who are mentioned in the Bible, and in fact, the Bible says they came from Crete. So that's, you know, neither here nor there. You can use it if you want or not. But the Pellicet are the one group that we had already identified archaeologically. We know their pottery. We know all of that. We had found them at various sites in what was ancient Canaan, now modern day Israel. And so we know pretty much where they're coming from because they look like they're Mycenaeans that have

fled Greece and are now over in the eastern Mediterranean. At any rate, the two pharaohs say that these groups attacked Egypt, and that the Egyptians beat them both times. And in fact, Ramsey's the Third says that there are two battles, one by land and one by sea. Sounds kind of like Paul Revere and his midnight ride, you know. The Egyptians beat them both. They beat them in the land battle and the naval battle. And on one wall of Ramsey's the Third's mortuary temple, Medinat Habu, it's over by King Tut's tomb near the valley. of the kings in Egypt. He actually gives us a picture of the naval battle. You can see the ships. It's very detailed, so much so that people have written entire books on the ships that you can see in this

picture. And there are different groups depicted in the picture. And he says he beat them, and then he settled them in strongholds bound in my name. Those were his words, which means that he settled them in Egypt and Canaan, which Egypt controlled at the time. So we have two invasions. We have the Egyptians beating them both times, and that's it. They never come back. There's no third wave. And that's it.

That's really all we know about. There are bits and pieces elsewhere. There's a new text that was just published. Well, it's an old text, but it was found a couple of decades ago and just published from Ugarit on the north coast of Syria. And it says that enemy ships have come. again and that they have overrun the port city and they're on their way to regard it. But it only mentions the enemy.

It doesn't even say Shardana or Shackalash or Palesa or whatever. So we know that these sea peoples are running around causing havoc, but we don't know that much more about them. I once said, oh, six or seven years ago, there's that kid's meme, right, six, seven years ago, I once said if somebody gave me a million dollars that I would go over probably to the Western Mediterranean and try to find the origins of the Sea peoples because we've never found a city that we can say is where they came from. Yeah, which is kind of interesting. Wouldn't the issue be though, you're going to tell me why this is wrong, but I think

that'll be interesting. You know, they remind, and this is a comparison you've drawn, but, you know, they sort of sound like the Normans a bit, you know, the early, and the problem with tracking the archaeological origins of something like that is in its early days it is you know there's not going to be they are there are you know Viking like marauding military organizations right out for plunder and ultimately power and so the the record the physical record is going to get more it's going to get richer the better they do yeah the earlier story there's just not going to there's not going to be you know there's going to be campfires and you know things like that right right trying to find the origins can be difficult

And actually, that's a very good analogy, and one that I've used in previous lectures, and gotten pushback from listeners. Because way back when, what I was saying in my early lectures is these sea peoples, I said, it's a migration. You can see, actually, in Ramsey's the Third's picture that there are women and children with them. There are ox carts full of luggage. I mean, they are migrating. And I said kind of lightly, it's not like they're Vikings, you know, test. stressorone fueled and coming in and pillaging and then leaving again. And all the comments were like, that's not actually really how the Vikings did it. There were women and children with them. And

I'm like, okay, so it's actually an even better analogy. So yeah, but trying to find origins, it can be difficult with the Normans and such. So the Seat peoples remain one of history's great mysteries. But where this all comes in is the original explanations that we had for the collapse at the end of the late Bronze Age was plain and simple that the Sea peoples did it, that we pointed to them and said, that's them, their invasion, not only when they attacked Egypt, they also attacked everybody else, and the whole late Bronze Age system collapsed because of these invaders. All right, that's what I was taught as an undergraduate and even a bit into graduate school. But I also, as we went along,

the professors said, you know, there are alternate theories, alternate hypotheses, people have been put out, or pitting out. It may be that there was a drought, some said. Maybe there was a famine. Maybe there were earthquakes. I mean, there are all these other possibilities. And my professors in the classes I was taking kept asking one big question on the final exam, which was either what caused the entire end of the late bronzes?

or splitting it up, what caused the end of the meno-mycinance, what caused the end of the Hittites, what caused, and so at one point I had all this memorized with which scholar said what in which year. You know, so, oh, Yakoviti said earthquakes in 1977, and Milona said this in whatever. I had it all because whenever I walked into the final exam and I saw that question, I'm like, oh, I know this. Boom. Out came all my regurgitated information. Right. So when Rob Tempeo at Princeton University Press said to me, can you write a book about the late Bronze Age collapse? I said, yeah, sure, because I had all this memorized. I said, but I don't want to write it. And he's like, why not? I said, well, because it's already been done for one thing. Robert Drews wrote a book on the end of the late Bronze Age back in 1992. And I looked at Rob, I said, and you guys published it. You know, it's Princeton. And he's like, you.

Yeah, but having things changed since then? It's been like 25 years. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, okay, so can you basically, you know, update it? And I said, well, yeah, but I don't want to. And he's like, well, what do you want to do? I said, I want to write about what collapsed, right? I want to write about the Misenians, the Benoans, the Hittites, the Egyptians, and all of that.

And he said basically, okay, you know, begin and end the book with the discussion of the collapse. and in the middle, you can do whatever you want. And I said, okay, we have a deal. And he's like, okay, what do you want to call it? And I said, I want to call it Hamarabi shoes because there's a great text about Minoan sandals being sent from Crete all the way to Hamurabi, like the famous Hamurabi, right,

a lock code, a knife for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, from 1800 BC, right, way before the Bible's got it. And the text says, Hamerabi received these shoes, and he returned them. Why did he return them? They're long distance. They've got to be high value. Were they too small?

Were they too last millennium? I mean, what's going on? And so I said, I think the title of the book should be Homorabi Shoes because that kind of encapsulates the late Bronze Age. And Rob said, yeah, no, it's going to be 1177 BC. And I'm like, why? He's like, because that says much more about what the book is about. And numbers sell.

I'm like, okay, fine. So I trusted well on that. He was right. Yeah, you've got a good editor. Exactly. He's got a good eye for, is this the Barry Weiss of the bronze of ancient historical publications? Exactly, exactly. So that was, so that's how 1177 BC came to be.

And so, you know, I begin with the C peoples, with this mystery, who are they, what they do. And then I say, look, in order to understand what happens in. 1200, we've got to go back three or four hundred years, just like if you want to understand us today, you actually have to go back to the revolution, you know, and the Civil War and understand the buildup to us today. Same thing. So the intervening chapters are all about, like I said, Mycenae, Minotans, and Sittites. And I walked the reader through the centuries, 15th century, 14th, 13th, telling them what I think is absolutely fabulous. So I've got stories in each of the chapters.

And actually, my students say, we can hear you talking to us because the stories are right for my classes. You know, I teach history of ancient Egypt in the Near East, and some of my classroom stories went into the book. I teach history of ancient Greece. Some of those stories went in.

Towards the end of the book, then I take up this question of what actually caused the collapse. And I walked the reader through the pros and cons of each of the hypotheses. Could it have been an earthquake storm, which some, including myself, have suggested? Could it have been drought?

Could it have been famine? In other words, was there climate change back then? Is that possible? Could it have been disease? Now walk through all of these possibilities with the pros and the cons. And in the end, I mean, spoiler alert, in the end, I decide yes. Yes. it's all of them it's all of them it's a perfect storm in the time we have we don't have a ton of time

and i want to make sure we get to the second book and to to resilience and regeneration so this this perfect storm likely of different factors occurs different bronze age everyone everyone has massive trouble yes some civilizations more or less survive others survive like egypt it survives but forever weakened. I mean, never quite what it was. And then you have some that are just wiped out. You know, we've been talking about all these ancient literary texts that depict the period. We haven't talked about the Bible yet because, you know, the Canaanites, as you depict, do not fare well here.

And I guess is Bronze Age, is it's embarrassing? I don't even know this, but is Exodus a Bronze Age story or an Iron Age story? Yes. Offered questions. Yeah. Yeah, so it's probably Bronze Age, but it may be a memory from the Iron Age. I mean, the whole, you know, it's disputed when the Bible, as we know it, is written down. You know, it's supposed to be written by Moses back in 1,200, but it's actually more likely written down 7th century, 6th century, BC.

And some have even said later than that. So it's been suggested that, you know, the Exodus story, as we know it, is there's a problem with it, because we can't find it archaeologically, which we're, we should be able to, but we can't find it. So what's going on? You know, was it a real event? Was it not? Is it a memory of what we call the expulsion of the Hixos from Egypt, which happened earlier? Or is it made up by later Israelites? I mean, there's a whole problem there. But the way I see it, it's kind of like Homer remembering the Trojan War from when he lives in the Iron Age. It's actually a pretty good parallel. I think the story of the Exodus has come down to us is a memory written down in the Iron Age of what might have happened back in the

Bronze Age. But it is relevant. I argue in the books that if the Exodus took place and the Trojan War, for that matter, that the context of the collapse of the late Bronze Age is the perfect context for it. Yeah. Well, just to pick, I mean, there's so many things we could zoom in on, but maybe let's just zoom in on the Canaanites for a minute. Why didn't, why, why didn't they make it. Why want me? Oh, man. If I knew that, I'd be rich and famous and I could retire. So, but this is, this is the big question. Okay. So to go back a step, when everything collapses and that small world network breaks apart, as you've just mentioned, the various societies, the G8, they each are affected differently. They're each affected to a different extent. And they each

deal with it in their own way, some better, some worse. Basically, what we would call today resilience. And so that's what I took up in the sequel, which again, Rob asked me if I would write it. And again, I said, sure, and I've got the perfect title. It's going to be called Phoenix from darkness to democracy. And he said, great title. No, it's going to be called after 1177 BC. I'm like, okay, fine, right? So the question is, right after the collapse, what happens in the next 400 years, the period that we used to call, and most still do, the world's first dark ages? What happened to them? How did they deal with it? And again, are there any lessons that we can learn from that today? So what I did was I broke them down. I actually ranked them. I had the

temerity to rank them. And as to how well they did, how resilient were they? So without going into too much, detail. The people that do the best are the Phoenicians and the Cypriots. The Phoenicians come from, today we would say Lebanon. That's where they come. They're actually the Canaanites from that region that survived the best. We know the Phoenicians is the people that spread the alphabet. They standardize it and then spread it. And that's where we get the Greek alphabet and the Latin alphabet today, which we're still using. We use the Latin alphabet to write English and French and German and all of that, but they also spread purple dye. So they did the best. The Cypriots, we already talked about the switch from bronze to iron. The Cypriots were in the lead for that. They seem to be the people

that go, hey, we're not going to do bronze as much anymore, but there's this thing called iron. We'll tell you how to work it. So they're at the top of my list. They are so resilient. They are anti-fragile, which is what Nicholas and Nassim, takes. He actually has a book called that. Basically, if you flourish in the age of chaos, you are anti-fragile. That is as resilient as you can be. So they were taking advantage. So they're at the top.

Then, like you said, the Egyptians, ah, they're kind of right in the middle. They don't disappear, but they don't do that well either. You know, you've got at one point three or four guys all at the same time, each saying they're Pharaoh of Egypt. That's not a good situation. but way down bottom, number five out of five, you couldn't do any worse, are the Hittites up in Anatolia, modern day Turkey. They basically disappear leaving only little fringes, the Neo-Hittites down in Syria, but the main Hittites, they're gone, and the Canaanites down in Southern

Levant. We don't really have Canaanites anymore in the Dark Ages, in the Iron Age. What we have are new little kingdoms. We've got. the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah, Amon, Moab, Edom, we have all these little Iron Age kingdoms that spring up. Now, the Canaanites either are wiped out by them, or they assimilate. And this is something that we can't quite figure out what's going on. There's lots of disagreement. This is how we make our careers today. And I put the Southern Canaanites into my bottom as the least resilient that they didn't do well. I mean, again, look at the Hebrew Bible, the book of Joshua and the book of judges.

One says the Israelites, when they come on in, wipe out the Canaanites, that it's a genocide. And the other book says, no, no, no, it was more peaceful. They assimilated and they settled down. So which is it? I mean, these are two books in the Hebrew Bible that are contradicting each other. Which one was it? From my perspective, whether they're wiped out and are killed or are assimilated, either way, Canaanite society, as we knew it back in the Bronze Age, disappears and is taken

over by these new Iron Age cultures. Now, that doesn't mean that the people all died, you know, necessarily, unless they were wiped out, and it doesn't mean that the cities that they had were all wiped out, even though many of them are destroyed, but the names continue. So you would recognize them, right? The Canaanite cities, oh, there's one called Jerusalem, for example. There's another one called Biblos, Beirut, Tyre, McGito, right? These names live on. They're even still there today. We've got Gaza in the news today. It was around back in the Bronze Age. So there is continuity, but there is also a lot of change. So this what I was looking at in the second book is what caused the change we had talked about in the

first book, but then how well did they deal with it or not would deal with it is in the second book. So I made up a table at the end what to do and what not to do. If your society is in the process of collapsing, how can you be resilient? What's the best way to be prepared? Then I called it common sense lessons from the collapse of the late Bronze Age, which may be relevant again to us today. Well, for crying out loud, Eric, give us a quick overview, would you? So listeners can get ready. Yeah, I don't want to just leave you hanging there. Right. Well, as I say, they're common sense. And I actually had the temerity to say in the book, you don't actually have to have read this far in the book to figure these out because they're that common sense. I mean, number one was have, have

redundancy in place, not only have a plan A, if such and such happens, but have a plan B, and a plan C, D, E, F, and G, right? You've got to have all these. It's like having a generator in case your electricity comes out. But, you know, but what happens if your electricity goes out and your generator fails or you run out of gasoline for it? What, you know, what's your plan B, what's your plan C? So that was, number one, have lots of redundancy in place. other one was be as self-sufficient as you can, but don't be isolationist. I mean, use your neighbors. They've got stuff you don't have. You don't have copper, but the Cypriots do. You don't have tin, but these people do. So, you know, work with your neighbors, but be prepared to be self-sufficient if you have to. One of the main things was that if all this happens, you need to be innovative and you need to be inventive. You need to be able to spin on a dime. in case something bad happens. And in fact, that's what during this dark age, iron age, is what they do.

They are inventive, right? You've got the alphabet. You've got iron. You know, this is in part why scholars, myself included, are now arguing that it's not a dark age. Anytime you've got the invention of the alphabet and the invention of iron, that's not a dark age. It's a period where, yeah, things have gone back to lower socioeconomic political, but they're building back up. So let's see, there was also watch out for your water, your water resources, which is incredibly important. We know the Assyrians and the Babylonians and the Egyptians did survive

the collapse, although they regressed a bit. But Osirians and Babylonians in Mesopotamia, they're on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. And the Egyptians are in Egypt with the Nile of the big four, which are those three plus the Hittites, in Anatolia. only the Hittites collapsed completely, they're the only one of the forests that are not on a major river system. So I think water is incredibly important. And indeed, I've been told by those

who are in positions to know that the wars for us, the wars for the next century, are probably mostly going to be fought over water resources, right? We can already see things like that over in California, Mexico, and such. Water's a problem.

So there's that too. And then I ended with the the age-old one that all historians, I would say, keep your working class happy, or there's going to be a problem, right? We see again and again throughout history, when the working class is not happy, bad things happen to the upper class, right? So same thing here with the late Bronze Age,

the peasants, if you will, the lowest of the low, farming out in the hinterlands in Greece or in Anatolia, they might not have minded the collapse of the palatial economy because they had probably been being abused by it. So they're like, you know, farming their field and somebody says, oh, the palace at Mycenae has fallen. And they're like, oh, okay, I wonder who I'm going to pay taxes to tomorrow. You know, so not everybody was unhappy, I would say, at the collapse. And that's where archaeology is getting more interesting as well. We are excavating those sites that I mentioned at the beginning that are harder to find,

you know, the non-polatial ones, and then trying to figure out what did the average person do in the collapse. So anyway, the table that I made up of, I think it was seven things, you know, to do or not to do. We're all common sense. And I come back to the same thing that I concluded with in the first book that I see around us, the same problems that they had in 1177, right? Today, we've got drought in a world, you know, around the world, we have problems like drought, we've got famine, we've got disease, there are earthquakes, there are migrations,

there are refugees. We've basically got absolutely everything that they had 3,200 years ago, and they collapsed. So if we don't plan for it, we're going to be in trouble as well as what I say. And I conclude, and again, spoiler alert, I conclude the sequel by saying it's not, the question is not, are we going to collapse? For me, the question is, when are we going to collapse? Because it's going to happen.

I just don't know if it'll be a next week, next year, 10 years from now, 50 years from now. But the world, as we know, is going to collapse the network that connects the U.S. to Europe to, you know, Southeast Asia, to whatever. it's going to collapse. It's time will come. And then the question is, what do you do afterward? And so I end by citing John Wooden, who was the coach of the UCLA Bruins basketball team. I got to watch him coach his last two games. I was about 10 years old.

And he said, he used to tell his teams that by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Now, I've been told somebody named Ben Franklin might have. said it as well. But I never met Ben Franklin, but John Wooden, I knew. So I would say that's the situation that I would say, I mean, I'm an ancientist story and I look backwards. I don't look forward. But I do say that history, there's things to be learned from it if you're willing to listen. And in this particular case, we've got all the symptoms they had back then. It was a perfect storm of all those things that created the collapse. And I see everything around for the makings of a perfect storm today. And if we deny it's happening, we may well go down sooner rather than later.

And, you know, what's the harm in preparing? If you prepare and things don't happen, fine. But if you don't prepare and things happen, then you're pretty much screwed. So this is where I'm like, look, history is telling us these things, and I know it doesn't repeat. I mean, Mark Dwayne said that, but he also said history does rhyme. And I do think we're in the middle of a rhyming couplet. So I'm a little worried based on what has happened in previous time periods. Well, a happy Thursday to you, Eric. We'll have to leave it there. I know you're working on a lot more stuff. Maybe you'll come back and talk to us about it as it comes to fruition. There's a third volume to this account of the ancient world. You're doing a deep,

dive on the Amarna letters on this literary evidence from the period. All, I would love to have you back on the show to discuss. Eric Klein, author of After 1177 BC, The Survival of Civilizations, and of course, its prequel, 1177 BC. Really, really interesting. Thank you so much for coming on the show. My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Aaron.