The Ancients - Birth of the Iron Age

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

It’s the end of the 12th century BC, and a once remarkable Near eastern world lay in ruin. Drought, warfare, famine, earthquakes, plague - all had combined to brutally devastate ancient civilisations stretching from Mesopotamia to Egypt to mainland Greece. It was a catastrophe unlike anything else - a Bronze Age collapse. But that’s only half the story. What happened next? Would these people adapt to this new age of chaos?Dr Eric Cline joins Tristan Hughes to discuss the dawn of the Iron Age. They’re talking Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenaeans, Cypriots, Phoenicians and many more.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Joseph Knight. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘ANCIENTS’. https://historyhit.com/subscriptionVote for The Ancients in the Listeners Choice category of British Podcast Awards here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the end of the 12th century BC, and a once remarkable Near Eastern world lay in ruin. Drought, warfare, famine, earthquakes, plague, all had combined to brutally devastate ancient civilisations stretching from Mesopotamia to Egypt to mainland Greece. It was a catastrophe unlike anything else, a Bronze Age collapse. But that's only half the story. The comeback is greater than the setback, after all, that is the famous saying.

So it begs the question, what happened next for these people? Would they adapt to this new age of chaos, or fall by the wayside? It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today, well, you might remember a few months back, we released an episode all about the massive catastrophe that was the Bronze Age collapse. When the great interconnected world that was the late Bronze Age came crashing down in the 12th century BC through this perfect storm of different disasters. Now that episode with Dr Eric Klein, well it proved incredibly popular, one of our most popular episodes ever. So I'm delighted to say that Eric is back on the podcast today to continue the story. We've covered the collapse itself, now we're talking in detail

about how the various peoples of this ancient Near Eastern world fared in the aftermath as we reached the dawn of the Iron Age. We're talking Egyptians, we're talking Hittites, Mycenaeans, Cypriots, Phoenicians and many more. Now it's fair to say some civilizations fared better than others and Eric is here to explain all, promoting his recent masterpiece, his recent book on the subject. to explain all, promoting his recent masterpiece, his recent book on the subject. Eric, it is fantastic to have you back on the podcast. Thank you. It is wonderful to be back. And we had to have you back after the success of our episode on the Bronze Age collapse. And of course, you have written the sequel to that.

Now, I feel we need to kick this off, Eric, with the biggest question of them all. That period after the collapse, should we call it a dark age? No, I don't think we should call it a dark age anymore. Let's just call it the Iron Age, which is what it was. Well, fair enough. That's good to get that question first of all. It's a really interesting time, isn't it, Eric? Because post-collapse, I see words that you've mentioned like resilience and transformation. This is a time where different peoples, they have to deal with this crisis and some fare better than others across the

Eastern Mediterranean world. Yeah, we essentially have eight case studies about what to do and what not to do if your society collapses. So some of them do fare better than others, and others don't do well at all. And those we, A, should not emulate, and B, should look at to see what they did wrong so that we don't follow in their stead. So that is interesting. So straight away, this is something I was going to ask at the end, but I think it's to go full circle. Nice to also talk about it at the beginning.

Do you think there will be lessons that we could potentially learn from how these various different people's different cultures reacted and tried to deal with this great collapse yes i do think so i also think though the emphasis is on the word potentially because it's up to us. Most of the lessons that I drew out of this, that I put in a table towards the end of the sequel, are common sense, that you don't necessarily even need to know the details about the Late Bronze Age Collapse to come up with probably half of the lessons that I learned from this. But others are kind of specific to it. So there are going to be things like we need to look forward to, like water. Watch for your water resources. If you're on a big natural river like the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, you're probably going to be better off than if

you're in an area without a large natural river. But again, that's kind of common sense, right? I mean, absolutely. And we're going to explore into detail of all of this. You mentioned those eight case studies. We're going to try and get through as many as we can in the time that we have. And that number eight is quite interesting because I remember in our last chat, when we were describing that late Bronze Age world, you described the G8 almost of the time. So set the scene for us, Eric. Let's say it's around 1150 BC. What does the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near Eastern world, what does it look like at that time? Okay. So if we put it at about 1150, we're in the midst of the, in the throes of the collapse,

as it were, right? Because remember the collapse doesn't happen overnight. It takes about a century because this is a systems collapse where everything is going down. And the globalized Mediterranean network as they knew it, that's what's collapsing, right? This intricate link between the G8, the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, the Minoans on Crete, the Syrians and Babylonians in Mesopotamia, what is today modern-day Iraq, Hittites up in Anatolia, modern Turkey, Cypriots, Canaanites up and down the coast of Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Egyptians, those are the eight. And they all go through this collapse and are, as we mentioned, each affected to some degree or another. So by 1150, we've had the invasions of the Sea Peoples twice already. These groups that the Egyptians tell us invaded Egypt. They came in 1207 and 1177, wreaking havoc across the eastern

Mediterranean and the Aegean. And yes, that's where the title of the original book comes from. And the Egyptians managed to beat them both times, and they never come back again. And these are groups that the Egyptians actually give us the names, the Denyan, the Weshesh, the Peleset, the Shardana, the Shekelesh. And we think they come from the Western Mediterranean and come across ending up in Egypt, but we don't know for sure. And the only group that we can really identify are the Peleset, who are most likely the Philistines of the Bible. So you've got those two attacks that have come and gone. But you also now have other things too. You've had earthquakes that have been taking place over about a 50-year period. It's what we know as an earthquake storm.

We've also got, let's see, what don't we have? Let's put it that way. We've got drought. We have a drought that's going to last between 150 and 300 years from, say, about 1200 to 900 BC. With the drought, we've got famine. With the drought and famine, we've got these migrations, invaders, if you want to call them. And what else? Oh, yeah, disease. We can't forget

disease. Having just gone through a pandemic ourselves, right, so there is disease back then. Don't know how much it forms part of the actual collapse, but in the years afterwards, say if we were to go down to about 1140, you know, another 10 years from our starting point in today's discussion, we would find that one of the Egyptian pharaohs had smallpox, and he and his family seemed to have died from it. And they dug new tombs for them in the Valley of the Kings and gave the workers a paid month off and closed the valley is probably the first time that they're trying to isolate a disease like that. So we've got to add disease into the mix as well. So everybody is affected to some degree or another. Some are just going to do smooth sailing, as we're going to get

into, and others already are starting to feel the pinch of these hard times. I remember you also using the expression, it's a perfect storm of catastrophes, isn't it, that combines to result in this interconnected world. We also must remember all these great powers coming crashing down. Also, one last thing to explore there, Eric, should we also be imagining it's around this time that those great Bronze Age centers, whether it's Troy or Hattusha or Ugarit or even Mycenae, is that when these cities almost fade back into obscurity as well? Yes, that's exactly right. If the Trojan War took place, which I personally think it did, I think something did happen. And my question is not,

was there a Trojan War, but which of the Trojan Wars that we know took place was Homer talking about? Because the Hittites in their records mentioned four wars or big battles at Troy. So yes, the Trojan War, I think, is most likely to have taken place as part and parcel of this collapse of the chaotic times. And after Troy 6 and Troy 7, which are the Troy settlements of this period, Troy does kind of fade back, as you said, into obscurity. It will bounce back later in the Greco-Roman times, almost as a tourist trap. I mean, Alexander the Great comes there, Julius Caesar comes there, and so on. But it's not Troy like it used to be. Same thing with Hattusa, the capital city of the Hittites, up on the central Anatolian plateau. It is at least partially destroyed at

this time, at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but the ruling family had already abandoned it, and it looks like the destruction might have been caused by kind of their age-old enemies, the Kashka, who lived up to the northeast. But yeah, not only is Hattusas never the same again, but the Hittites aren't either. The Hittites go away. Their society, their economy, this, that, and the other, you know, the peasants, they keep going, no problem. But the overall, the king, the family, all of that in the main part of Anatolia, it just ends. It keeps going, as we'll see in North Syria, where we get the Neo-Hittites, the New Hittites, which had just been kind of a rump state, as they call them, of the original Hittite empire. And those guys, they continue on,

and they keep Hittite religion going, and Luwian, the writing system, and all that. But the Hittites proper, they're gone. So they're one of the people that, don't be a Hittite. We don't want to emulate the Hittites. Yes, the interesting goddess of kebab, isn't it? And the Hittites, yeah. R.I.P. the Hittites. Now, before I let you loose on all eight of these different peoples, Eric, and explaining what we think about them, source material. Always got to talk about source material. We're approaching this early Iron Age, post-Bronze Age collapse period, and these various different cultures have a huge geographic area. What types of source material do you have to learn about this period?

Great question. And we have all types, but it differs on where you're looking. So for instance, if we are looking at the Assyrians and the Babylonians, we have tons of source material because they leave us a lot of inscriptions. The problem is, can we believe them at face value? The Assyrians who become now the Neo-Assyrians have a tendency towards hyperbole, shall we say, and we can't always know if we can take them at face value. The Egyptians do the same. So anyway, we have a lot of written inscriptions for Assyrians and Babylonians, and we actually have a very detailed year-by-year account of exactly what happened. The problem is

that that's only at the top 1%. That's the king, the administration, the royal family. It doesn't usually tell us what the average person on the street is feeling or doing or having happened to them. So definitely bifurcation of the information. But we also there and elsewhere have, of course, archaeology, where we've actually excavated and we've got the cities and the settlements and all of that. And in some cases there, if we're digging in the right area, we can get information about the regular people. So that's Mesopotamia. If we moved over, say, to Cyprus, we don't have any inscriptions at all, you know, on one hand, in part because Sifra Minoan has not been deciphered. That's a bit of a problem. But we've also there got the archaeology. We've got

changes in burial customs, changes in the pottery, changes in international connections, and all of that. Same thing holds for Greece, where they no longer are going to be, and also to warn the reader that we're going to have differential amounts of reading available, such that in some cases, we will be way too far down in the weeds for the comfort of most readers, and in other places will be so superficial that it will also be uncomfortable. So, you know, and I just say, hey, not my fault. I'm at the mercy of the evidence, as are you. But I want to tell you not just what we know, but how we know it.

I thought I owed it to the reader to let them know where the information comes from. Well, all I can say is that we can certainly dig deep into the nerdy detail here. You are among friends. So let's start with one of the big dogs, I feel, of Bronze Age civilizations, which is, of course, Bronze Age Egypt and the Egyptians. Now, Eric, number one, I mean, when I think of the late second millennium BC Egypt, I think of New Kingdom Egypt. I think of the Zenith. I think of the Valley of the Kings, the Ramesses, you got Tutankhamun earlier as well. So it begs the question, how do the Egyptians, how do they fare in those first couple of centuries following this collapse? The short answer is they did better than some and not as well as others. They are

right in the middle. One thing that I did, and I'm going to be looking forward to discussions with colleagues in the future, shall we say, is I ranked each of the G8. I gave them a numerical score in terms of how resilient they were, whether they transformed, whether they just adapted, or whether they were, wow, just living for the moment and coping. And the Egyptians, on a scale of one to five, I gave the Egyptians a three. So they're right in the middle. They're not as good as the Cypriots, the Phoenicians, or the Assyrians, or the Babylonians, but they are better than the Mycenaeans, Minoans, and the Hittites. So they are adapting, I would say, kind of coping middle of the road.

They still have their kings and the whole government administration system. But now, I mean, we're in what's called the third intermediate period in Egypt during these centuries, which is a known period of chaos and anarchy. It's not the first one. We've got actually three intermediate periods, the first which came after the Old Kingdom, the second which came out of the Middle Kingdom, and now we've got the third intermediate period after the New Kingdom. And just to give you one example, at one point during the centuries, we have no fewer than three, or maybe it's even four people, all claiming that they are the pharaoh of Egypt and ruling in a different geographical portion of Egypt. So to be fair, they may well have been all simultaneously kings. So this is a known period of anarchy and chaos. But like I say,

they do maintain the trappings of society and high-flying society, king and administration, religion, writing, all of that, social classes, they keep going. And in fact, some of the pharaohs do very well. There's one guy named the Silver Pharaoh, nicknamed because of what's in his tomb, would be as famous or more famous as King Tut, except his tomb was found just before World War II, and so nobody paid attention to it. So I rank them right in the middle. But I was just giving a lecture up in New York, and one of the other people there suggested that maybe we're looking at Egypt in the middle. But I was just giving a lecture up in New York, and one of the other people there suggested that maybe we're looking at Egypt in the wrong way, and maybe kind of it's our fault.

She's like, you're ranking them, you know, in the third category in the terms of looking at Egypt as a monolithic unity, which is, you know, what it was back in the New Kingdom. She said, what if it's a kind of a new world order at this point, and we should be looking at Egypt as a series of little smaller city-states within the country, in which case it's not anarchy and chaos if you have four kings in four parts of the country. It's more like Greece, where you have Athens and Megara and Corinth and Sparta. So she's like, maybe with all the new data, maybe we should change our thinking, in which case maybe Egypt, and this was what she was getting at, maybe Egypt should be up in category one as one of the best to adapt, and that they are transforming by changing

their society, which was an interesting idea that I hadn't thought about, but I will now consider. So I had said in the book that I hoped my discussions would begin the dialogue rather than ending it. And I think that's already one example where we might have some new thoughts going forward. I think that's a really interesting take, isn't it? Because you mentioned the Silver Pharaohs there, so Susanese and Shoshenk and Laika, Tanis, and that is their new royal capital and that's near the Nile Delta or in the Nile Delta, I believe. And I know that there is one theory saying that they can no longer go to the Valley of the Kings. They can no longer go to Thebes because that was controlled by another entity. I might be butchering that entirely. But as you say, rather than hinting at potential

decline, the amount of wealth that those pharaohs had still shows that they were very prosperous, still a very wealthy place, but they had just divided into smaller kingdoms as such. And as you say, it is interesting how that list, it's not set in stone. There is room for debate and long may that continue. Yeah. And I'm at great pains when I introduce that in the last chapter. The first five chapters of the book are basically a history book with archaeology and the analyses I leave for the last chapter. And yes, I say, look, this is just my thinking.

It's kind of gut feelings, though I have put numbers to it. I have backed it up in my lectures now, but there's just new ways of looking at it. And I say, I think I might have buried it in a footnote, but there's just new ways of looking at it. And I say, I think I might have buried it in a footnote, but I say, I'm perfectly content to change my mind if somebody can persuade me of it. And I think this is one of the instances where I might do that. The one thing though, that is true is Egypt does lose its place on the international stage. They are not one of the G8 at this time. They basically retreat within their borders. And indeed, it's only a little bit later that we see them starting to reach out to the region of what we would today call Sinai and Jordan to get copper from the

mines there. But even that is a little bit later. And to have somebody like Sheshonk, who may be Shishak of the Bible, who goes up in campaigns in Canaan, that's unusual in this time period. So, you know, even if we do look at Egypt in a slightly different light, I don't think I'm going to be persuaded to put them up in category one, maybe up to two. But, also say, all of this may be anachronistic, that I'm putting back on the past stuff that's for us in the present, and then I'm using it to look towards the future. And one may think that that is something one could do, or one might say, no, no, no, the past is the past, present is present, future is future. But I think they're all linked. And I think that, as you had asked earlier,

I think there are lessons to be learned from the past that can help us now in the present and going forward in the future. So I think this is all worthwhile, let's put it that way. And I look forward to the ongoing debates and discussions. And as I said, I tell people is all worthwhile, let's put it that way. And I look forward to the ongoing debates and discussions. And as I said, I tell people that old saying, I don't have a dog in the fight. So if you can persuade me, I'm happy to be persuaded. Definitely worthwhile. And not least because it's such an interesting discussion to explore these different cultures and how they cope or how they transform and adapt in cases following this massive collapse.

Well, let's keep going on, Eric. We talked about Egypt and I was thinking about going next to Phoenicians, one of those at the top. As you can tell, we're not going from top to bottom or bottom to top. But you did mention there actually who the Egyptians are trading with, those people to the north and east, the Canaanites. I feel like we should go to the Canaanites next then. So Eric, talk us through the story of the Canaanites. It's a mur North Syria, central Canaanites in what is today basically Lebanon and northern Israel, and then we've got the southern Canaanites who are down in the southern Levant, namely Israel, Gaza, Sinai. So, let's just look at the central Canaanites for now, because they, in the region of essentially Lebanon, they survived the collapse. It looks like almost untouched, but we may be a bit biased because there hasn't been as much excavation in that area as there has been elsewhere, because

the major cities are right on top of the ancient ruins, right? You know, Beirut, for example. So we're working with a limited amount of data, but it does look like the central Canaanites managed to survive the collapse. And indeed, they do more than survive. They are, to borrow a term from Nassim Nicholas Tlaib, they are anti-fragile. They flourish in an age of chaos. They take advantage of the conditions and take over. In particular, the central Canaanites, whom we now call the Phoenicians during the Iron Age, they take advantage of the fact that the northern port city of Ugarit had been

overrun. And we know this. I talked about it at the end of the 1177 book. We know that there was an enemy advancing on Ugarit. We know from archaeology that Ugarit was destroyed. There are arrowheads in the walls, a meter of destruction, and the city is not reoccupied for something like four or six hundred years. So that leaves a big power vacuum, and the Phoenicians move into it such that, one of my colleagues said, the Mediterranean became a Phoenician lake. The Phoenicians just sail everywhere. Now, a couple of things, and why they get into my top ranking. They, as I say, they are anti-fragile. They transform and take over the Mediterranean. They're sailing everywhere, and they are bringing two things to everyone.

One, they're bringing the alphabet, which they have not invented it, but they have standardized it. So they bring the standardized alphabet over to Greece, where it becomes the Greek alphabet, and also over to Italy, where it becomes the Latin alphabet. And of course, we're still using the Latin alphabet today to write English and French and German and Italian and Spanish and all of that. So they bring the standardized alphabet to everybody. And they also standardized the production of purple dye, which is what they become famous for, right? The royal purple that

kings wear and all that. And they're kind of part and parcel also with the Cypriots. They're lockstep. The Cypriots have also done very, very well. One thing to keep in mind, they did not call themselves Phoenicians. That's our name for them, and that's courtesy of the Greeks, like Herodotus, who talks about the Phoenicians. They themselves would have referred to them as inhabitants of the individual city-states. They would have said, I'm from Sidon, I'm from Byblos, I'm from Tyreates. They would have said, I'm from Sidon, I'm from Byblos, I'm from Tyre. They would not have said, I'm from Phoenicia, right? That's later people saying that. But they do, among the best, they and the Cypriots do the best of our G8.

And yes, I remember doing a podcast recently on the founding of Carthage, and that's just one great example. But you could also look at Tartessos in southern Spain. You can look at Sardinia and Corsica too. And yeah, it's extraordinary that reach of the Phoenicians. And you just say, yes, they are one of the great emergers from that post-Bronze Age world, aren't they? But one place that they do go, as we keep moving on, I wish I could talk in more detail about them. No, actually, Eric, I'm staying in that area of the world. I was going to go to the

Mycenaeans, but then I thought, oh, hang on, we haven't talked a bit more about the Southern Canaanites, because I feel we probably should talk about the Southern Canaanites, shouldn't we? Yeah, because the Southern Canaanites are problematic insofar as they could be in my lowest level, five, which is where I ended up, or they could be up in category two and have done second only to the Phoenicians and Canaanites. It depends on how you interpret things. All right, here's the basic problem. In the Late Bronze Age, in the Southern Levant, which would be most of Israel and Gaza and Sinai. In the Late Bronze Age, you have Canaanite city-states. You've got Megiddo, Hazor, Jerusalem, Lachish, Ashkelon, all of those. And they're doing quite well. We know all about them from the Amarna

letters in Egypt and so on. They each have their own little ruler and governor and this and that. Okay, Late Bronze Age collapse hits. They're basically all gone. We don't hear any more about any of these sites, except they do exist. I mean, Megiddo keeps going right through the end of the Persian period and so on, but they're not like they had been in the late Bronze Age. So there is a transformation. And part of what happens is that we get new small kingdoms rising up in this area. Now, the Egyptians had been in control. The Canaanites had been vassal rulers to the Egyptians. It looks like the Egyptians withdraw from the region by about 1140, just about the time that the Pharaoh was suffering from smallpox and everything like that. Right. So there is a power vacuum. And into this area, we get new kingdoms like Kingdom of Israel,

Kingdom of Judah, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites. I mean, we've got these small Iron Age kingdoms, bigger than city-states, smaller than empires. So, where'd they come from? That's the problem. Let's take the Edomites, for example. There are now suggestions being made by scholars that they had already been there, but that they were nomadic or semi-nomadic, and that when the Egyptians withdraw, they settle down and take over the copper mines, which is a possibility. So they become sedentary. Same thing's been suggested for the Moabites and the Ammonites, but for all of them, there are also suggestions that no, they weren't in the area before then, and they migrate into the region. So for instance, it's either the Moabites or the Ammonites who have been suggested

maybe came down from Anatolia, possible. So are they newcomers to the region or not? And of course, with the Israelites, we've got the whole idea of the Exodus, right? The famous Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Did it even happen? And if so, is this the time period? And this is what scholars have been arguing about for a very long time. But let's just say for argument's sake that the Exodus does take place, and it takes place in about 1250 BC, something like that, take place, and it takes place in about 1250 BC, something like that, which is what the archaeologists say is the time period most likely if it happened. But in that case, they're migrating in. And if they're migrating in, what happens then to the southern Canaanites who had already been there? Well, the Bible gives us two options, right? You've got book of Judges and book of Joshua. One says there was a

genocide and the Israelites killed all the Canaanites. The other says, no, no, no, they settled down, assimilated, and lived happily together. So, you know, which is it? But you've also got other questions. For example, some people saying, yeah, the Exodus says the Bible tells us never actually happened. The Israelites came in dribs and drabs over the centuries, and they were living up in the highlands in Canaan. And when the Egyptians withdrew and the city-states got torched, that they came down from the highlands and took over.

In which case, those Israelites and maybe the Moabites and the Edomites and the Ammonites, they may have been the southern Canaanites, as we want to call them. And in that case, they have transformed and they have become the Israelites and the Ammonites and the Edomites, right? So, my question, which I ask in the book, is which is it? Have they migrated in all these groups and they're newcomers, in which case I don't even rank them because they're new, or are they the Southern Canaanites who have completely transformed and should either be up in category one or category two, you know, talk about anti-fragile, right? Or are they somewhere in between? And what I decided after much hemming and hawing was, I think the Southern

Canaanites are either assimilated or are simply killed off, because we don't talk about Canaanite society anymore. Now we talk about Edomite and Israelite and all of that. So I decided to put them in my bottom category, but I'm already partway there to saying they did better and they should be up in the top. So this is definitely going to be a place where we have future conversations. What happened to the Southern Canaanites? Do they just change their names and now they're actually Edomites and Moabites, but it's the same people? Or are they a substrata of the population? Or what's going on? I would say that is the most complicated area in terms of putting a label on it. And maybe that's the problem. Maybe we shouldn't try to put a label on it. We'll now move quite a bit to the west, about a thousand miles or so,

and we'll go to mainland Greece. So we're hopping over to another of the G8 now, and that was that extraordinary mainland Greek superpower that was the Mycenaeans, the center of Mycenae, other places like Pylos or Komonos and so on. Now, they don't fare particularly well following the collapse, do they? No, they do not, much to the chagrin

of many of my colleagues who, you know, we're Mycenaeans, go Mycenaeans. Yeah, they don't do particularly well. And in fact, even giving themselves the benefit of the doubt, by about 1050 BC, nobody's calling themselves a Mycenaean anymore. Mycenaean society by that point had fallen. The king is gone, the economy's gone, all of that. So it does take more than a century. I'll grant them that. And they're not completely gone. I've got them in the fourth of my five categories. And what I would say, the way I describe it, it's kind of like a permeable membrane between the Bronze Age Mycenaeans and the survivors on the Greek mainland. Some of the

stuff gets through. So, for instance, religion. We know from the linear B tablets of the Mycenaeans that they had the gods and the goddesses of Greece, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon. You know, they're all already there in the Late Bronze Age. They're still there in the Iron Age, obviously, and they keep going into Archaic and Classical Greece, right? Artemis, Athena, all of that. Other things, though, either get lost completely, like Linear B goes away. There are no more scribes because you don't need them, all right? No more scribes doing Linear B because Linear B was the accounting system for the Mycenaean palaces all right? No more scribes doing linear B, because linear B was the accounting system for the Mycenaean palaces, right? This many chariot wheels coming in, this much bronze and

perfume going out. Well, if you don't have your palace anymore, you don't have your administration, you don't have your king, you don't need a scribe keeping account of what's not happening, right? They're all sitting around twiddling their thumbs going, I don't know, time for tea? Who knows? So, Linear B does not make it through, but it's going to be replaced by the Phoenician alphabet, right? Bingo, there we go. The Phoenicians come in and say, hey, we have a new writing system, and lo and behold, there we go. And so, by the 8th century, if not earlier, the Greeks are writing again, but now using the new Greek alphabet, which they've adopted from the Phoenicians. But the other thing, I'll give you just one more example. Back in the Bronze Age, the king

was the wanox, and each of the major places, Mycenae, Pylos, they had their own Wanox. And a lower level administration official was the Basileus. All right, that's back in the Bronze Age. Fast forward over the collapse through the permeable membrane, and the title of Wanox has been lost. They don't have it anymore. Basileus is now the king, and so he's been given a promotion, as it were. So there is some continuity and others not. But basically, the Mycenaeans did almost as badly as the Hittites. They basically have to start from

scratch. They have to build from the ground up. And so there's been a lot of work done, especially in the last couple of decades, on Iron Age Greece, 11th century, 10th century, 9th century. And they will eventually bounce back, but they have gone down to a much lower level of socio-political economic. So they really have to rebuild, but they're not all dead. And in fact, we've changed our estimations. At one point, way back a couple of decades ago, people had thought that upwards of 90% of the people in Greece had died or migrated during the course of the collapse. Now it's been ratcheted back, and only between 40% and 60% died or migrated. Yes, I know, it's still a big number. And in fact, to give you numbers,

the last ones I saw, they said, for instance, there might have been about 600,000 people in the Aegean in the 13th century. By the 11th century, there's 300,000, give or take. So that's the 50% drop over a period of 100 or 200 years. Anyway, so the Mycenaeans, they could have done better, but they didn't. And that's where, and I don't know if I'm going to anticipate any questions, but that's where the question of vulnerability and fragility come in. Are some of the societies, were they more vulnerable, were they more fragile than they appeared to the outside world? And in the case of the Mycenaeans and the Hittites, I argue that yes, they were more vulnerable than they appeared.

And I think that's one of the things that has warnings for us today. Well, we're going to get through the civilizations that we still got to cover, but shall we start with the Minoans, given that they're quite close to the Mycenaeans? From the outside, some people will not like me saying this, but they sometimes seem quite similar to the Mycenaeans in sharing certain parts of their culture. Do we see a similar fate for the Minoans to what happens to the Mycenaeans? So we do see a similar fate for the Minoans as we do for the Mycenaeans, in part, and this has to be stressed, in part because by the time of the collapse,

it appears that the Mycenaeans had actually taken over the island of Crete. And so the Minoans have become Mycenaeanized. And in fact, one scholar has talked about the Mycenaeans at this point. So, you know, and that is in part where, you know, Linear A, which was the Minoan writing system, and Linear B may have, you know, overlapped to a certain extent. So when we get to the collapse, yes, what happens to the Minoans, what happens to the Mycenaeans is similar. However, in Crete, which of course is a much smaller geographical area than all of mainland Greece, there has now been intensifying amounts of work in terms of survey and excavating and all of that. And we're finding new things, such as Iron Age Knossos seems to have been larger than we had thought it was, right? So one scholar, Sarah

Wallace, has actually said the Minoans had a successful collapse. I don't quite know how a collapse is successful, but maybe it's like the transformation, the resilience, and all of that. However, I would put a caveat there. Yes, the Minoans carry on, but not as the Minoans. Just like the Mycenaeans, after 1050, nobody called themselves a Mycenaean anymore, so too after the collapse, nobody in Crete, certainly say by the 8th century, nobody would have called themselves a Minoan anymore. Minoan society is gone. The king, the religion, the administrative apparatus, all that, for all intents and purposes. However, there is here also a permeable membrane, because you can see in Archaic Crete and later Crete, remnants left

from the late Bronze Age. So it's not gone 100%. But we do get completely new city-states in Crete, for example, in Archaic Crete. We get movements of population. We get lots of decline and all of that. We get lots of decline and all of that. So I have, in fact, put the Minoans and the Mycenaeans in the same category, number four rather than the very lowest. But they're basically just kind of coping. They're trying to make it to tomorrow. And especially we see on Crete during the collapse, we see people running for the mountains. on Crete during the collapse, we see people running for the mountains. We've got all of these new settlements high up in the mountains where they could watch the Mediterranean. If the sea

peoples are coming towards them, they would know it well before they arrived. So after the collapse, they move back down from those mountains and they essentially resettle the island. So I would put them in lockstep, basically. And again, in part because the Mycenaeans seem to have taken over the island before the collapse. I'm not surprised what happens is similar in both mainland Greece and on the island of Crete. So we've done quite a range so far. We've covered

Egypt right in the middle, as you say, the Canaanites, you've got the Phoenicians right at the top. Of course, Martin Anzim and Owens are number four. I'd like to talk about one more near the top and then one more near the bottom. And if we get time, we'd also talk about the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But let's start with the Cypriots, because Eric, I find this perhaps the most fascinating part. Why, of all places, is it this island in the eastern Mediterranean that also seems to do incredibly well following the collapse? This is an extraordinary story, I feel. Yeah, great question. And I can answer it in two words, copper and iron. That's really what it looks like is driving it.

Yes, they are as anti-fragile as the Phoenicians. They are up in my category number one. And it looks like it's because they are the leaders in the switch from bronze to iron, from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Now, you will see a lot of misinformation out on the internet, and in part it's because of what we used to think, which has now been changed, and in part it's just because, you know,

there's a lot of bad information out on the internet. So you will see various people saying, oh, the Sea Peoples, they had weapons of iron. That's why they were able to overrun and win. No, Sea Peoples do not have weapons of iron. That's why they were able to overrun and win. No, Sea Peoples do not have weapons of iron. You also see it for the Dorians. No, Dorians don't have weapons of iron. In fact, as I say at the beginning of the book, the Dorian invasion probably never even happened, and I discuss all that. But again, that's mainland Greece. You will also see that the Hittites invented iron. Now, that is something that we used to think they did, but that was a mistranslation of a text.

And the last thing before I get back to the Cypriots, just because you are in the Bronze Age doesn't mean they aren't already using iron. And just because you switch to the Iron Age doesn't mean they don't still keep using bronze to a certain extent, because they do. Bronze Age means the majority of the weapons and tools are in bronze. Iron Age means the majority are in iron. So one quick example. In the tomb at King Tut, did you know that there was a dagger with a blade of iron? But it's made of meteorite. It's not worked iron. It's not smelt. It's, you know, chopped out of a meteorite. And it is probably actually a gift from a Mitannian king to Amenhotep III back in the Bronze Age, which Tut inherited. So that's one example. But down in the Iron Age,

what it looks like happened is that the Cypriots, who had been the major source of copper and therefore were at the forefront of making bronze, during that process, they accidentally would have made iron from time to time, investigated it, managed to figure out how to do it, because it's a very different process to make bronze versus iron. But some of the leading archaeometallurgists, and yes, there are those people who study ancient metallurgy, they have said that the Cypriots are at the forefront of this switch. And that it's not at all surprising that somebody who is skilled at making bronze could also then become skilled at making iron. So just one example, some of the earliest items we have are bimetallic knives or daggers, where the blade is of worked iron, not a meteorite,

but actually worked iron. And the handle, the hilt, has bronze rivets. And we find these bimetallic with both bronze and iron. We find them on the Greek mainland, for example, at the site of Parati. We also find them in the southern Levant. And it looks like the Cypriots are exporting the technology, the know-how, along with the actual objects. Because once you know how to do it, every country has iron ore. If every country has iron ore, then everyone can do it. And we can see one by one by one, the other countries making their own iron stuff. But it's because of our friends, the Cypriots, that this happens. So I put them up at the top. And just as the Phoenicians managed to transform and be resilient with the alphabet and purple dye, so the Cypriots do it for iron. And that is in part, and maybe we'll come back to this, why this is not

a dark age. When you've got inventions like that, that's not a dark age. Well, the island of Cyprus is very much entwined with the story of the birth of the Iron Age right there, Eric. I wouldn't have thought it until doing the research for this podcast episode. Come on then, let's briefly talk about the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Because of course, those are names we think of from the first millennium BC, Nebuchadnezzar, Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal, and so on. So it feels like, oh, they're fine because they come back and they're as strong, they become a superpower. But is it a bit more, well, less straightforward than that? It is and it isn't. Yes, the Assyrians and the Babylonians are in my second category. They are not anti-fragile, but they are resilient. They transform to a certain extent. But basically,

Assyrians and Babylonians continue on as if nothing had happened, right? They've still got the king. They've still got the administration, the religion, the writing, the monumental buildings, they just keep going. And in fact, it's actually kind of strange. We have tons of inscriptions, but from the 75 years immediately after the collapse, let's say 1200 down to 1125, give or take, we don't have any inscriptions at all from the Neo-Assyrians. We don't know why. They just aren't writing. But then by 1100, we start getting the royal inscriptions again, and we've got three or four different sorts, different types of inscriptions. So we know what happens year by year by year. We know it in excruciating detail, if you will. But again, we're not always sure we can believe what

they say, because some of the Neo-Assyrian kings describe in very graphic detail what happens when they capture a city, how many thousands of people they behead, and what they do with the severed heads, and stuff you don't really want to know about, right? And flaying the king alive, etc., etc. But they too are hit with drought and famine and everything, but almost 100 years later than everybody else. And I really wonder if being on the Tigris and the Euphrates had pushed it off, or it has been suggested by some people that they had the right leaders in place at the right time, and they managed to stave off the catastrophe for a while. But even the Assyrians, we know, were eventually hit by drought and famine such that they record in some of their inscriptions, they had to resort to

cannibalism at one point, right? The people ate each other, it says. But they snap out of it, and one of the things that I do is kind of map what happens by the century. So they're doing okay in the 12th century, yeah, not so well in the 11th, and then the 10th century, you did not want to be a Neo-Assyrian in the 10th century, trust me. Right. But by the 9th century, by the 9th century, they're up and running again and create the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which is the largest empire since the collapse. And they are now, since a lot of their former trading partners are changed, gone down, whatever, they are now taking by force what they used to get commercially.

So, yes, they're up in number two, but it changes by the century as to what happens. And eventually, the Near Assyrians fall to the Neo-Babylonians, who then become the next empire, and so on. We've covered seven out of the eight, I believe, but I think we've been saving the best till last. Now, the Hittites, these are the people that you absolutely, you didn't want to be at this time, it feels. Yeah, pretty much so. You did not want to be a Hittite.

They're at the bottom of my list because they had, well, let's be honest, they had internal problems by that point. And they do fall into the category that I discuss in the sequel that they were probably more fragile and more vulnerable than they appeared. Outwardly, they are huge, big, magnificent. I mean, these are the people you don't want to meet in a dark alleyway, and you certainly don't want to fight with them. But by this time, by the 12th century, there are internal divisions within the royal family such that there are big schisms and divisions. You've got some of the last kings, Tudelius IV and Shupiluliuma II, with problems.

You've got them abandoning the capital city of Hattusa and living down south in Tarhuntasa. And don't forget also that we had a major plague in the middle of the 14th century that wiped out the original Shupi-Ludium of the first Anis family, brought back by prisoners of war from Egypt, where they had been fighting each other in North Syria. So, the Hittites, in addition to everything else, are suffering from, you know, political schisms, disease, drought, and famine. We actually do have letters from some of the Hittite kings and queens to the Egyptian pharaoh. Don't you know there's famine in my land? It's a matter of life and death. I mean, they have a problem, and they don't seem to have a backup plan. You need redundancy. If your plan A fails, you need a plan B, a plan C, and a plan D.

This is part of the lessons that I say one can learn from antiquity. Have redundancy in place, and the Hittites did not. Now, again, just because the big dogs went down doesn't mean everyone died. There are lots of new data coming out showing that the people in the hinterlands are still fine. You know, they're still plowing. They're looking over their shoulders and going, oh, yeah, the big guy just, yeah, he's gone. I wonder who I'll pay taxes to tomorrow. You know, that kind of thing. But we've got the Fridians that move in towards the west.

We've got the Eurasians that move in towards the west, we've got the Eurasians that move in towards the east, and the Hittite empire, as they had known it in central Anatolia, is gone. What we do have surviving, though, and it's important to make this distinction, are the Neo-Hittites in these rump states in what is basically North Syria today. Right where Turkey meets Syria, the modern-day border, you've got Carchemish, you've got Tel Tayanat, Achana, other sites like that. They continue, they flourish, and they keep doing what Hittites do, even though they're now the new Hittites. So, the writing system, as I mentioned earlier, Luwian keeps going, religion, king, all that. Their problem is that

they keep being attacked by the Neo-Assyrians, who seem to like them as a punching bag. But we have lots of inscriptions from that time period and lots of interaction, both the Assyrians mentioning the Neohittites and some of the Neohittite inscriptions mentioning the Assyrians. So, and by the way, these Neohittites, those are the ones that the Bible knows. When the Bible mentions the Hittites, they're talking about these people, because the ones up in Anatolia were gone by that point. So we got them here. And the analogy that I use, and your listeners may appreciate this, British Empire is long gone, is it not?

Right? And yet, there are parts of the world where we still have people drinking afternoon tea, playing cricket, and all of that, as if they're still part of the British Empire, which they're not. Same thing here. The Neo-Hittites continue the trappings of the Hittites, even though they're gone, but they manage to continue. And so that's why I've actually separated them. And the Hittites are down in my category five, don't be a Hittite. But the Neo-Hittites are up in category two, along with

the Assyrians and Babylonians. They actually successfully made it across the divide. There you go, don't be a Hittite. But at the same time, I mean, Eric, it's still very interesting. I think we've been looking at the Neo-Hittites and so on and so forth. It's the fact that with all these cultures of the Late Bronze Age who very much are affected by this collapse, there's no extinction almost of peoples, as you say. It's not complete eradication. It is, they endure, but in different forms, depending on where they were in that formerly very interconnected G8 world. Yes, exactly. And in fact, at the beginning of the book,

I explained to the readers that I have modified my stance a bit, I would say, from at the beginning of the book, I explained to the readers that I have modified my stance a bit, I would say, from at the end of 1177, you know, I'm like, it's total collapse. It's, you know, Armageddon, everything's gone. At the beginning of this book, I said, you know, it's actually a little more nuanced than that. And it depends where you look. So some of my colleagues in reacting to 1177 has said, it's not a collapse, it's just a transformation. And I'm like, no, that whitewashes the human suffering. And so at the beginning of the sequel, I say it's both a collapse and a transformation. It depends where you look. And I say what collapsed, as I mentioned at the beginning of our time, what collapsed is the network that connected them all. That for sure collapsed. But each of the eight societies

is affected in a different way and responds in a different way. And so that's where it gets a bit more nuanced. So like you just said, in Anatolia with the Hittites, yes, the people keep going, but the structure that had been Hittite society, in that case, that's gone, and it gets replaced. And in some places, like I said, it gets replaced by new cultures, new people, if you will, the Eurussians, the Phrygians, and so on. But in other places, they just keep going. And this is where what we need is almost more data. We need to know what happened to the average person, what happened to the 99%. Because knowing only what happened in the capital cities skews our understanding to a certain extent. What we

need to know is, yes, what happened in the capital cities and out in the countryside. You know, if something should happen to us today, which I'm convinced it will, you want to know what happened both in London and out in the countryside. You want to know what happened both in Washington, D.C. and in Iowa, you know, in order to get a picture of what happened, right? And so, in our cases, frequently, we only know what happened at Hatshepsut. We only know what happened at Mycenae. And now, the archaeology is looking at what happened in the countryside. So we need the full picture, and we don't have it, which is why we're getting a look at the jigsaw puzzle with more than half of the pieces missing, if you will. And we're trying to reconstruct it without having the

benefit of the picture on the box to know what it was supposed to look like. One of the great frustrations of archaeology, especially when exploring prehistory like your period, Eric, and it also all combined leads to one of those questions, isn't it? If something similar happened in societies today, in the global interconnected world that we live in today, how would certain societies react? Would they be fragile or would they be resilient? Would they survive and thrive or barely cope? It's fascinating to think, isn't it? Yes. And I think that's where we've got lessons from back then that could apply to us if we're

willing to listen and learn because they were globalized to an extent, you know, globalized Mediterranean, we're globalized today. We have a lot of the same problems around today that they had back then. They collapsed, not everybody made it through. And so what happens to us? I mean, so a spoiler alert, I end this book by asking, are we, if we go through our own collapse, which again, I think we will, almost every society, every society has collapsed or had to transform in the history of humankind. When we go through our own collapse, are we going to be Phoenicians or are we going to be Mycenaeans? And I say, we're going to have to leave it to future historians and archaeologists to tell us how we

did and whether we were resilient or not. Eric, this has been absolutely brilliant. Another message, don't settle for being an Egyptian. Definitely don't be a Hittite. You need to be like a Cypriot. There's nothing bad about that at all. Be a Cypriot. Eric, last but certainly not least, I don't think we can talk about your graphic novel this time, unless you've got a graphic novel version of it too. Talk to us about the sequel, about this book that you're releasing. So we have, first and foremost, we have the graphic version of the original of 1177 by Glynis Fox, which is absolutely wonderful. If you don't like actually reading books,

but you like comic books, you can now read about 1177 in the graphic version. Right, so now we've got the sequel after 1177, and I've just begun work on the third book in the unintended trilogy. Yes, I'm going to keep going because we haven't even touched on some major things. We're barely at the beginning of the 8th century. We haven't even talked about Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, democracy, Persian wars, you name it. So there will be a third book, and the tentative title is 776 BC, The Clashing of Civilizations. And it will go down through the death of Alexander the Great, but you're going to have to give me five or six years to write it. So let's make a date for, what is this now, 2024? So let's say by 2030, I'll come back for another appearance. So long as our civilizations haven't collapsed by that point,

we can't use computers anymore. But let's be hopeful, Eric, absolutely. So we should be all right. And I'll be happy to talk about successes any day of the week in Alexander. So 776, interesting starting point, very much successes any day of the week in Alexander. So 7.76, interesting starting point, very much aligned with one of the biggest sporting events that is actually also happening this year. Eric, it just goes for me to say thank you so much

for taking the time to come on the podcast. Well, to come back on the podcast. It is a pleasure as always. Thank you for having me back. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Eric Klein talking you through the birth of the Iron Age. What happened next to these various civilizations, these peoples across the Eastern Mediterranean, the Near Eastern world? What happened to them? How they fared? How resilient they were in the centuries following

this massive Bronze Age collapse. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. This was so much fun to record. Eric is a fantastic guest and I've got a feeling that this episode will prove just as popular as this previous one all about the Bronze Age collapse. If you haven't listened to that one yet, well, what are you doing? Make sure you go and listen to it because it was absolutely fantastic. Go listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Last thing from me, wherever you are listening to The Ancients, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following The Ancients so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.