The Ancients - The Bronze Age Collapse

Episode Date: January 13, 2024

The Bronze Age Collapse was one of the most cataclysmic events in human history. Over just a few decades, civilisations across the Mediterranean from Greece and Egypt to Mesopotamia and Babylon abruptly deteriorated, bringing an end to one epoch and birthing another. But what exactly happened? And what caused these powerful and interconnected civilisations to come crashing down simultaneously? In today’s episode of the Ancients, Tristan Hughes speaks to Eric Cline to explore the origins of the crisis which birthed the Iron Age and examine the role played by invasions, drought and famine in causing it.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial 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 Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, well, we are talking about one of the most destructive, cataclysmic events in human history. We know it today as the Bronze Age Collapse, which occurred at the close of the 2nd millennium BC, when several thriving Bronze Age civilisations across the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East

abruptly collapsed over just a few decades. Hittites, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Trojans, Babylonians, and so on. So what exactly happened? Why did so many of these powerful, interconnected civilizations all come crashing down so quickly and so close to one another? Well, to explain all, today I'm joined by the professor and best-selling author Eric Klein from the George Washington University. Now, Eric believes that there was

a perfect storm of different catastrophes that ultimately led to this Bronze Age collapse, as he eloquently explains in today's episode. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Eric. Eric, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Wonderful to be here. And for a topic like this, oh my days, this is an extraordinary time in ancient history, when these multiple great civilizations, they fall apart roughly at the same time in this great area. Eric, I can't think of anything quite like it in ancient history. No, it's fairly unique. I mean, we talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, we talk

about the collapse of the Maya, and so on. But this is pretty much the only time we can talk about multiple societies all falling or being affected at the same time. So yeah, it's a fascinating time. And multiple societies. And just to set the scene, I mean, geographically, how big an area are we talking about here? So in global terms, it's not huge, but on local terms, it's quite big. It's basically, let's put it in modern terms, it's from, say, Italy on one side to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan on the other, and from Turkey down to Egypt. So in ancient terms, it would be the Western Mediterranean to the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Aegean. So we're talking about Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians.

I think, yes, that's my G8 of the ancient world. G8 of the ancient world right there. And just so we can get a really clear image in our minds, whereabouts are these various different civilizations? I mean, people like the Egyptians we can automatically place in Egypt, but other names, just so we can get a clear idea where. Sure. So yes, the Egyptians are in Egypt. The Canaanites are in the Levant. That would be modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, that region. Assyrians and Babylonians are in Mesopotamia, which would be essentially modern-day Iraq, northern Syria. Hittites are in Anatolia, which is modern-day Turkey. Cypriots are in Cyprus. And Minoans are on the island of Crete, whereas Mycenaeans are on the Greek mainland.

Let's try and piece together what happens when we see many of these societies collapse at this time. What types of evidence do you have available as an archaeologist to try and deduce what happened? We've got quite a few and we're getting more different sources of data. We have the usual, we have ancient inscriptions. For example, the pharaohs Merneptah and Ramses III both left inscriptions about fighting invading groups that we call the Sea Peoples. So we have ancient inscriptions. We also, along those same lines, have clay tablets with letters and records from the site of Ugarit, which is on the north coast of Syria. Then in addition to the writing, we've got actual archaeological remains where sites like Mycenae, Knossos, Ugarit, you name it,

they've all been excavated, and some show evidence of destruction at this time. There's also, along the evidence for destruction, it can be broken down. Some seems to be human, as in invaders. Others seem to be more Mother Nature, that is, earthquakes. We're still looking for evidence of disease. I think that is part of it, but that's hard to come by. But even there, we've got one pharaoh of Egypt who lives a little bit later, about 1140 BC, who has smallpox. You can see it on his mummy. So typical archaeology, I would say, evidence from digging and from inscriptions. But now we also have some hard science data. So we're getting evidence from things like pollen analysis, pollenology, which can tell us the type of

plants that are living at that time and showing that it's a more arid environment. People are now looking in caves at the stalagmites and stalactites and looking at whether the water is stopping at that point. So also looking at lake sediments, things like that. So we're getting a lot of other data that we haven't had in the past, and that is providing answers and, again, much more information. It blows my mind just how rich the archaeological record is for this time in the Late Bronze Age, more than 3,000 years ago. I mean, you mentioned those great centres like Mycenae and Atusha and Ugarit, which we will get to in time, don't worry. But I also love that you've got shipwrecks as well, so you get a sense not just of the collapse, but also what this world looks like just before

this collapse. I mean, Eric, they weren't living in vacuums, were they? They were all very much connected. Absolutely. And that's actually why I was drawn to this period back in my studies. was drawn to this period back in my studies. In my day, back when I was a student, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we were really taught in silos. If you did ancient Greece, you did ancient Greece, and you didn't know much about ancient Egypt or whatever. I always thought that was fairly ridiculous, and that nobody back then lived in a vacuum, just like they don't today. So I was always interested in interconnections, and in fact don't today. So I was always interested in interconnections. And in fact, that's what my dissertation was on, was looking at the imported goods from Egypt and the Near East into Greece at the time of the Late Bronze Age. So when it came

time to write this book, I wanted to kind of make that clear. And so, while the beginning and ending of 1177 BC are concerned with the collapse itself, the middle chapters are concerned with what collapsed. And that was, to me, almost more interesting in a way. And so, I was able, I hope, to bring to the general public information about groups that they might not have heard about before, like the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Canaanites, and such. And yes, they're all interconnected. The shipwrecks show that. And for me, it's one of the more interconnected periods of the ancient world, and thus has parallels to us today, which some people might not expect. If we focus in on these trade routes, these connections, I mean, what sorts of goods or

ideas were being passed between these various different powers at that time? Good question. And yes, the ideas came with the objects. At least I think that. Certainly, the names come at some point. For example, they're trading back and forth raw materials. at some point. For example, they're trading back and forth raw materials. Metal, for example, gold is being traded back and forth, silver, tin, copper, you name it. I mean, this is the Bronze Age. So you need 90% copper and 10% tin to make bronze, and there you have it. But the copper is really only coming from Cyprus. And the tin, mostly it looks like it's coming from Central Asia, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan. Some comes from Southeastern Turkey, and some seems to come from Cornwall, but I don't think not as much. So, raw materials, including vegetables, grains,

things like that. And so, we have, for example, in the linear B tablets of the Mycenaeans, names like Sassama, which is sesame. But Sassama is actually a Near Eastern name for it. So same thing with the words for ivory and even the word for gold that we find in the linear B tablets of the Mycenaeans. They're all Near Eastern names, so they're coming with the objects. But they're also trading back and forth finished goods. My favorite is a little bit earlier than this, but still, the Minoans from Crete are trading with the Babylonians over Mesopotamia, and we have one mention of sandals or leather shoes from Crete that were sent all the way to Mesopotamia and actually wound up in the hands of Hammurabi, like the famous Hammurabi, like the

law code of Hammurabi. And he returned them. He sent them back. Why did he send them back? Are they too small? Are they too last millennium? So again, it's so similar to today that most people don't realize, but they are interconnected through their trade relationships. In fact, none of them are self-sufficient, and that turns out to be a problem because they're all leaning on each other. But they're also practicing diplomacy at the same time. The trade and the diplomacy go hand in hand. So they're also practicing diplomacy at the same time. The trade and the diplomacy go hand in hand. So they're all interconnected. It's a globalized Mediterranean, as Susan Sherratt from

Sheffield has said. You mentioned diplomatic stuff. I remember seeing on one of the walls of the Hypersdale Hall at Karnak, the Egyptian version of the Treaty of Kadesh, and of course, the Hittites and Egyptians. So you see that kind of side of it as well, which is really fascinating. We've kind of set the scene really nicely with this globalized world, as you've just highlighted there. But before we venture towards the chaos, you did mention earlier this settlement of Ugarit. And this seems quite interesting to highlight in a bit more detail. Now, what was Ugarit? Ugarit is an entrepot. It's a port city in what is now the coast of North Syria. It was independent at first, but then it comes under Egyptian influence, and then it's actually

conquered by the Hittites and owes them allegiance. And so, throughout the 14th century BC and then into the 13th century BC, we can see that they're interacting with all the great powers. I mean, they themselves, I wouldn't call them a great power because it's just a city, but they're in contact with everybody. Now, the site has been excavated since like the 1920s or so by the French, and it's still being excavated. And so they have found all kinds of international goods there. Canaanite jars, Mycenaean pottery, an Egyptian sword, Hittite stuff, you name it. But they've also found at least three archives belonging to private merchants. They found them in the house of each one, and also another archive or two in the

royal palace. And so, these have now been deciphered. They are in a variety of languages, including what we now recognize as Ugaritic, which has spawned its own little village workshop of books, because all kinds of things are written in Ugaritic at the site. But among them are letters to and from the governor of Cyprus, the king of the Hittites, the pharaoh of Egypt. And so we can see that even the private merchants are doing double duty. They're working for the palace as well as working for themselves. And so we get an idea of the trade, the volume of trade, and what they're trading. But this is also then where we're able to begin to get a handle on what happens in terms of collapse and the timing and all of that when things suddenly

stop. So we have a pretty good idea of when all this happened within just a couple of years. But I have to tell you, I would not have wanted to live at Ugarit towards the end because they're hit by all sorts of things, including earthquakes and invaders and you name it. It was not a great place to live just at the end, but it's one of these scenarios where everything was fine until it wasn't. And just like that, Just like that. You've teed it up really well there, Eric. So take it away. It's all going well until we reach this time more than 3,000 years ago and then something happens.

Something happens and everything goes south, as they say. What really happens, the way to put it, is that this globalized network that we've just described, that globalized network collapses. That's gone. That's for sure. Each of the people that were in that network, the G8 that we've mentioned, each of them are affected to some extent. Some of them go down completely and basically disappear. The Hittites, for example, this is it. They're gone. There are little bits and pieces left in North Syria of what we later then called Neo-Hittites, but the Hittite empire collapses. Same thing, the Mycenaeans on the Greek mainland, pretty much their society goes all the way down, and they have to start from

scratch again. Others do better, but everyone is affected. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, everybody is affected to some extent. And what's interesting is watching them try to come back up out of it. But for us, what's important, as I said, the globalized network collapses, and that brings the late Bronze Age to a crashing halt. It's gone. The life that they knew it for several centuries is now gone. And of course, the question is, what caused that? That is the big question. And just so we really know the scene, so when roughly are we talking years-wise in regards to when we do see this great collapse of these many different civilizations occurring?

Yes. So therein lies the question. And the title of the book where I was writing this all about was 1177 BC, the year of civilization collapse. But I fought the publisher for the entire time I was writing the book because I said, that's not the year that it collapsed. It's a year during the collapse. In fact, 1177 is the second time that the Sea Peoples invade Egypt and that Ramses III has to defeat them. But overall, what we're looking at is a systems collapse, and that can take up to a century to do. It was Colin Renfrew from Cambridge that first talked about systems collapses and this time period back in the late 70s. What it turns out, like I said, it takes about a century. I would say in round numbers, 1200 to 1100 BC will do you. It might be as early as 1250

and go down to about 1150, but we're splitting hairs here. It's in that time. It's basically the end of the 13th century and into the 12th century BC. So it's 3,200 years ago. And as we approach what caused this chaos, as you were hinting at earlier, I mean, just archaeologically, when talking about this collapse, and you mentioned civilizations like the Hittites disappearing and the Mycenaeans having to kind of build up again, what archaeologically defines this collapse? I mean, with the Mycenaeans, I remember doing a small course in secondary school, and it's all about the burning down of the palaces and stuff like that. Is this what we should be thinking of? Yes, that's pretty much exactly what you should be thinking of. The question is,

what caused it? I mean, we can take a look at destructions, but we don't always know. Say the Mycenaeans, it may be invaders. It could be these so-called sea peoples coming across. But it's also been suggested that it might be internal rebellions. Now, we have evidence for drought. We have evidence for famine. We have evidence for migrations. So it could be that the proverbial 99% are uprising against the 1%. And so it could be internal rebellions here, too. All we know is that we have destructions at various sites.

Some of them are burnt to the ground and destroyed completely. Others are destroyed partially, shall we say. But yes, it's all over the place. So if we keep going with mainland Greece, for example, most of the palaces see at least some sort of destruction. And then if they're reoccupied, it's by squatters living among the ruins. So that's true for Mycenae. That's true for Pylos. The main one that seems to be the exception that proves the rule is Tyrens, which is only about 10 kilometers from Mycenae. And their habitation seems to continue.

They actually rebuild. There's a new lower town there. But even that is gone within the century. And then we really have to, like I said, we have to rebuild. So same thing with Ugarit. Ugarit is so destroyed, there's a meter of destruction that the excavators had to dig through. Hattusas is also burnt, though there, the capital of the Hittites, they seem to have abandoned it before it's burnt. So there's a lot of different things going on.

Right. Well, okay then, let's go on to therefore the mystery around what caused it and the various different possibilities, Eric. And you've mentioned these words that I'm sure people are dying for you to explain who they are, what they are. Eric, the Sea Peoples. So, who were the Sea Peoples? The Sea Peoples. Well, they came after the A Peoples, the B Peoples, and before the D Pe peoples. No, sorry. Couldn't resist, old archaeological joke. The C peoples, they are our name for a group of invaders that came twice. We know that they attacked Egypt in the reign of Merneptah in what we would call about 1207 BC, and then they came again 30 years later in the reign of Ramses III in 1177 BC. Now, the Sea

Peoples are our name for them, but the two pharaohs actually tell us the real names. They say one group is the Peleset, one group are the Shardana or the Shurdin, one group are the Shekelesh, one group are the Weshesh, and so on. And they describe them as northerners coming from all lands. They describe them as the people of the islands coming from their islands. So obviously, unless you're from Nubia and the Sudan or something, you're going to be from the north of Egypt. And with the mention of the islands, people have long thought that they're coming from places like Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, mainland Greece. And indeed, if you play linguistic games, Shardana or Sherdan sounds a lot like Sardinia, right? And Shekelesh is a lot like Sicily, but they might be false friends. I mean, who knows? But the general thinking today is that these groups are coming from the Western Mediterranean, maybe the Aegean, and they're sweeping across towards the east, and they're coming over Anatolia. They're overrunning Cyprus.

They're overrunning the northern Levant, and then kind of washing up on the shores of Egypt where the Egyptians fight them. And indeed, Ramses III says as much. He says, no land could stand before their arms, and then he names the places they've overrun, including the Hittites and northern Syria and Cyprus and so on. The problem is, we still really don't know who these people are. We've never found a site where we could point to it and say that's where they come from. They are still very mysterious. Very mysterious. I love that potential link to Sardinia or the Nuragic culture or something like that. But as you say, still so much mystery about it. I guess I've got to ask, do we know why? Do we have any idea as to

why they venture east in these huge numbers? Yes and no. The Egyptians do not provide any why. They just say they did. But this is where the new scientific data from archaeology is going to come in. Because I mentioned earlier that we've got things like pollen analysis, where we can see that the plants are more arid. There is now evidence for a drought that may have lasted up to 300 years in some places, which stretched from Italy all the way to Iran in modern terms. And some of that evidence is now coming from places like Northern Italy. And it looks like there was a drought there around about 1200 BC, give or take. Christian Christensen has said that perhaps as many as 120,000 people may have migrated as a result of that. And right there,

that's enough to be all of your sea peoples. But the drought also impacted Mycenaean Greece and Turkey and all of that. So if the sea peoples are migrating and moving, I would strongly suspect it was because of this drought and famine in their homelands. The problem is, and of course, they didn't have instant communication. If they're moving from the western to the eastern Mediterranean because of a drought, they're literally moving from the frying pan into the fire because the drought is in the eastern Mediterranean too, but they would not necessarily have known that. So I think that's the why. I think the why is the drought and the ensuing famine, but there's also evidence for earthquakes

at this time. There's about a 50-year period of earthquakes that take place. It's kind of a storm, and so I think that will impact as well. So one of the things that I did in the book, again, back when I was a student, I was simply told that the Sea Peoples caused the destruction. That was it. They were the bogeyman. And then as I went and kept studying and looked at the Near East, as well as the Aegean, I realized there were alternative suggestions. And what I've ended up, you know, spoiler alert, I've lumped them all together because any one of these will hurt a society, right? An earthquake will kill a lot of people, but it won't end a society. Famine and drought will hurt a society, but it usually doesn't wipe out an entire civilization. But what if you have one or more

at the same time, right? What if you have an earthquake and a drought and a famine and disease, and then you've got invaders? Well, I think you're going to get both a domino effect and a multiplier effect. So everything's going to be exacerbated. And so to anticipate your next question, what I decided is that it's probably a perfect storm and that I'm not going to pick one of these. I'm going to pick them all. I think they all happened. Fantastic, because we're going to go through all of those one by one and kind of look at the evidence that we've got for them. I mean, one more quick thing about the sea people is because it is really interesting. In my mind,

when you mention numbers like more than potentially 100,000, my mind instantly goes to in the Iron Age, you get of celtic migrations down towards greece and turkey and the kimberley and then the much later the germanic peoples to remember that it's not just warriors going east these are entire families yeah so i'm guessing we shouldn't imagine this idea of them just going and raiding and then going back home they're arriving they're making a statement with the warriors but they've got their families and they're going to stay there long-term too. Yes, they're not necessarily invading per se with all the accoutrements of men with swords. No, they are migrating. They are bringing their families. And indeed,

Ramses III shows us this along with his inscription on the wall of his temple at Medin and Habu, not only do we have the text, but we've got pictures. And he shows the naval battle, but he also shows carts with women and children and all of their, you know, Samsonite luggage in there as well. So yeah, these are mass migrations. I think the equivalent would be the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930s, where everybody moved from Oklahoma to California. But more recently, the people fleeing from Syria and the Civil War, and also all the people coming up from Africa and getting into Europe. I mean, we've got lots of migrants, lots of refugees today. And so I and others have suggested that the Sea Peoples, rather than being these invading boogeymen, are refugees that are as much the victims as what went on as they are the oppressors. It makes you wonder and think if many Sea People groups actually went west rather than east and maybe to places like Spain. But hey, they may well have. But yeah, that's another episode. But yeah, they may well have gone west, east, north, south. I mean, it just so happens that we have these inscriptions

by the Egyptians. If we did not have the inscriptions by Merneptah and Ramses III, we would have no clue as to who had done any of this. That's quite mind-blowing in itself there, the survival of particular pieces of evidence, which helps us know what we do today. Well, as I said, let's go through these different elements that make, as you've described, this perfect storm. This is very exciting. All right, let's start with drought. So this is a big factor. What is this evidence that we now have that there was this massive drought at that time? So the idea of a drought is not new, actually. Rhys Carpenter, who was a professor at Bryn Mawr, published a book back in, I think it was 1966,

in which he suggested that the Mycenaean civilization went down because of drought. that the Mycenaean civilization went down because of drought. He didn't have much hard evidence. He based it on data from surveys and such showing that there were migrations, new settlement patterns in the Iron Age. We now know that he was quite correct, and in fact that the population of Greece probably declined by somewhere between 40 and 60 percent between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, from the 13th to the 11th centuries. The hard figures are it went from like 600,000 people in Greece down to about 330,000. Yeah. It used to be thought that as much as 90% died, but now we've ratcheted back to between 40 and 60. So anyway, so Rhys Carpenter had this idea back in the 60s, and it was picked up and dropped a couple of different times by other scholars in the 80s

and all of that. But it was really only in 2010, 2011 that the publication started, in particular by David Kanievsky, a scholar in France, and his team. And they went to a number of different sites and took coring samples, long tubes of dirt from dried up lagoons and riverbeds and such. And that was where they did this palynology, looking at the pollen and figuring out that there was, as they called it, a 300-year dry event. So, a drought. And that's the new data that we've got. They did this at a site just to the south of Ugarit called Teltwaini, ancient Gibala. Then they went over to Cyprus, and they did it at the site of Halasultan Tekki, which

was another one of these major port cities, like Ugarit, but it was in Cyprus. And it has a lagoon right there where you actually get hundreds of flamingos every year, even still today. But they did coring there, found out there was a drought in Cyprus. Then another team, Daphne Langut and Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Litt did coring from the Dead Sea and Lake Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee, also found evidence. Other teams went to Egypt and found that there was a drought there as well. And all of these publications are 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014. They started coming fast and furiously, and then they kept coming, which is why I actually had to update my book. I mean, it came out in 2014, and I had to put out a new edition by 2021, just seven years later, because of all the new data.

So we now have the data that Reese Carpenter would have killed for, right? He was right. It's now proven. We've got the hard scientific data. And it's not just from the coring. This is where the stalagmites in the caves come in as well. And the lake sediments from lakes stretching from Turkey to Iran and so on. So we've got a lot of data. There's definitely

a drought that lasted probably up to 300 years. Ups and downs, we're now getting much more nuanced. So for instance, it looks like there's a 50-year period where things got a little better for a while, but then they got worse. And to jump ahead to the next book that I've been working on, there's even a period where things let up a bit, for example, in the Levant by 1150, 1000, somewhere in there, which may have allowed the new Iron Age kingdoms to start up after everything collapsed. This is when we get Israel, Judah, Ammon, Moab, Edom. It may have been in a period where the drought let up for a while. So, yeah, so we've got the hard data now. Definitely drought is in there. Famine is harder to find, but we've got other evidence for that.

Well, keep going then, Eric. If you've got other evidence for famine, that seems like the way we're going to continue from talking about drought. Okay, if I've got you on the edge of your seat here. Yes, famine can be very hard to find in the archaeological record, of course, unless you have inscriptions, and we do. We have texts, we have inscriptions. For example, if we can go back to the site of Ugarit and those archives of the private merchants and the palace, they say specifically, there is famine in our land. Grain is not to be had. If you don't send food soon, we will all be dead. May you know it. May you know it. And they're not the only ones. The Hittites are writing letters. We've got letters from Hittite kings, also a Hittite

queen, saying things like, do you not know that there is a famine in my land? Send food quickly. And there is some archaeological evidence that some people tried to counter the effects of it. For example, there was an article published a couple of years ago showing that the Egyptians at this time are kind of over-planting in the area of Canaan that they controlled, basically modern-day Israel, and that they are planting grain, excessive grain, trying to counter this. But they're also cross-breeding their cattle. They're taking the usual cattle and breeding them with zebu,

or zebu, not quite sure how to pronounce that, but these are the drought-resistant cattle that you find elsewhere. And so they're interbreeding them to come up with cattle that could survive a famine more easily. So that's where we get the evidence for famine is the written records. And there's no reason for them to be exaggerating or lying or whatever. So I think we can pretty much take them at face value. And we can also see, for example, there's one letter. And some of these have just been published. I mean, they were found a while ago, but they were translated from Ugaritic

or Akkadian into French, and now into English also. And we have one letter from the Egyptian pharaoh in which he says to the king of Ugarit, you had written me telling me that you're all starving and that there's a famine in your city. So now I am sending you 7,000 dried fish and a bunch of textiles and some beads. I don't quite know what the textiles or beads would have been used for, you know, in terms of eating, but 7,000 dried fish would certainly have been of use. But he does not mention sending grain on that ship, which is kind of interesting. But textual evidence we've got for famine, which I think would have obviously led straight out of the drought.

Yes, and the more and more importance on these maritime resources, as you highlighted there, which is super interesting. I also love that idea of them creating more famine-resistant cows in Egypt. That sounds super, super super clever but does that also kind of go hand in hand into what we were talking earlier with the destruction of these palaces these centers of administration that you do see at this time you mentioned it could potentially be as a result of an internal uprising could this potentially be a context if these people are talking to those people at the center we need food food or we will die, and those people aren't able to respond? Ultimately, do you get an uprising and a potential reason why you then see that destruction?

Potentially, yes. But this is where it gets difficult to prove one way or the other. Because, for instance, Ugar is destroyed. H Hazor is destroyed. But we don't know who destroyed it. Let me give you details on both of those. Hazor, down in what is now northern Israel, which is mentioned in the Bible, definitely is destroyed. We can see the entire palace is destroyed. The temple is destroyed. We don't know who did it. There are Egyptian statues in the destruction. There are Can are Egyptian statues in the destruction. There are Canaanite statues in the destruction. Both of them kind of disfigured, arms hacked off, faces, noses hacked off of the statues. And one of the two co-directors, Amnon Ben-Tor,

said, well, Canaanites would not have done this, and Egyptians wouldn't have done this, because they wouldn't have disfigured their own statues. He says, I don't think Sea Peoples did it because they're too far inland, which I would disagree with, but never mind. And so for him, the only thing that was left was the Israelites and the biblical tale of Joshua coming and destroying Hazor, which is certainly possible. But his co-director, the late Sharon Zuckerman, said, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The only thing that's destroyed at Hotspur really is the palace and the temple. The houses of the normal people are not destroyed. And she's like, why couldn't that have been an internal rebellion? Because they didn't have enough food or whatever.

rebellion, right? Because they didn't have enough food or whatever. So it is possible. And my point is here is simply if the two co-directors can't decide who destroyed their site, how are the rest of us going to? But so yes, internal rebellion is possible. In the case of Ugarit, however, and this is for me where it gets very interesting. And one of the reasons why I put out the new edition of the book is that when these English translations of the Ugarit letters was published by Yuri Cohen, one of the new letters that came out in French in 2016, came out in English in 2020, says, the enemy has been spotted. They have overrun Ras Ibn Hani, which is one of the port cities for the port city, because Ugarit's actually a bit inland. The enemy has overrun Ras Ibn Hani, and they are now advancing towards Ugarit. And then the city is destroyed with a meter of

destruction. So it's pretty clear that the destruction of Ugarit is not internal, but is an external enemy. However, it simply says in the tablet, it says the enemy. It doesn't tell us who it was. So, it doesn't say the Shardano, the Wesheth, the Peleset, whatever, but we know it's destroyed that way. And in fact, there's another, an older text, more famous because it's been known for longer, also from Ugarit, that says, my father, now the ships of the enemy have come and they are attacking me. My army is gone. My chariots are gone. So again, we know that Ugarit is destroyed by an attacking force. And we presume it's the Sea Peoples, but nobody tells us that.

And indeed, in one of the letters, there's a letter from the governor of Cyprus, which is not that far away from Ugarit, you know, as the crow flies right across the water. And he says, hey, it's your own ships that are attacking you. It's your own people. So, I mean, I'm sure it's not. I'm sure it's an ancient example of gaslighting. Except it's like, no, no, no, no. But yeah, so we definitely have external invaders in, I would say, many of the cases. But we cannot rule out, as I've said, the internal rebellion at Hatsor, at Mycenae, and at other places. There's any number of reasons why these cities have gone up in smoke. I'll tell you what, for you as an archaeologist who focuses on this period,

Eric, having those letters must be incredible. And to know that even more are going to be translated and published in the future, it's such an amazing record for learning more about this, as we mentioned, almost kind of unique catastrophe in ancient history. Yes, absolutely. I always tell my students that the artifacts that we find while digging, plus the texts and inscriptions that we find while digging, plus the texts and inscriptions that we find while digging, you put those two together and bingo, you have ancient history, right? This is where the stuff in the textbooks comes from. But the ancient texts definitely bring it to life.

They can explain what is otherwise mute in the archaeological record, right? We can see the destruction, but we don't know how or why. But then the texts say, oh, yes, there's an enemy that's coming. And in fact, down further south in Syria, at the site of Katna, there was an archive found recently. And one of the letters is written by a Hittite general. And he says, surrender your city or I will destroy it. And the tablet was found burnt and baked in the ruins of the destroyed city. So pretty obvious that the Hittite general attacked the city, right? But if we didn't have that tablet, we wouldn't have any idea who attacked the city. And indeed, we're not 100% sure it's him. It's just, you know, it's the smoking gun, if you will, the smoking tablet,

right? So, having these tablets, having these archives is amazing. And that's really what puts flesh on the bones of the late Bronze Age world is we have these archives in a number of places. We have them at Hattusas, the capital of the Hittites. We have them down in Egypt at Amarna from a little bit earlier, 14th and 13th centuries, which is the correspondence with all the kings, the G8 writing to each other. We have the earlier archives at the site of Mari in Mesopotamia, where Hammurabi returns the shoes. So wherever we have these foreign archives, we get a lot of information. And it further adds more color almost, but more detailed so that you can understand just how significant a collapse this was for

these civilizations. I mean, Eric, you've gone through these different factors for this collapse over, as you said, maybe as much as a century of time. Just to kind of give a conclusion almost of those factors, this is, as you mentioned earlier, it's a perfect storm that there's multiple factors that cause this collapse, you believe? through them, each one on their own would have been devastating, right? But survivable. If you had two, three, even four, either at the same time or in quick succession, you wouldn't have had time to survive from one catastrophe before the next hit. And so I don't know the order that it came in or anything like that, but let's just say that if the drought had hit and you were already suffering for 10 years or more, and then, of course, the famine comes with it, and while you're still trying to deal with that, which is ongoing, an earthquake hits, adding insult to injury or misery upon misery. And then as you're trying to dig out literally from the rubble and the ruins, suddenly enemy ships are sighted and a horde of invaders or

even just migrating families come in and overrun you. At what point do you just give up? It's like sooner rather than later, I think. So for me, what's interesting in having looked at the long stretch of human history, the number of times where we have recovered from near calamities is far greater than the number of times that we have ultimately given in or collapsed. So we're usually pretty resilient. We're usually able to rebound. In this particular case, the globalized network was not able to rebound. It was not able to overcome all of this. And as I said, each of the societies is impacted to a greater extent. We definitely have this late Bronze Age collapse, out of which the phoenix that's going to arise out of the ashes is going to be the Iron Age, which up until now, many people have called the dark ages. But they're not as dark as they used to be. And we're going to get new things like iron being invented and the standardization

of the alphabet. So good stuff is going to come out of it, but it's going to be a rebirth. It's going to be kind of a renaissance. But the collapse itself, the Late Bronze Age collapse, I think the only thing that you can really compare it to is the collapse of the Roman Empire. That happened 1500 years later, right? And then it's been what? About 1500 years now since the Romans collapsed? So, are we due for another one? Hmm. Don't, Eric. Don't tempt fate, okay? Don't want to do that. But you've highlighted something really interesting there to kind of finish on, isn't it? That you mentioned the word rebirth, and so much technology is lost with this great collapse of this globalized world.

But when you study what happens next, it's very interesting to see how these new societies, changing societies, adapt and create these new technologies. As you say, that brings forward this completely new age. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I've been working on as the sequel, you know, what happens after 1177. So, in fact, the title is After 1177. What happens after 1177? So, in fact, the title is After 1177. Yeah, what happens? So, what I'm focusing in on there is exactly what you were just talking about. How resilient are each of these societies? Did they cope, which means they're just living in the moment, trying to deal with it? Did they adapt, which means they're looking a bit to the future, or did they transform, in which case they've got new inventions and all of that. And I think if we break down these eight societies,

they each fall, not neatly, but they each fall into different categories as to who transformed, who adapted, who coped. And we can see who came out better than the others. What I would say, though, it's akin to a foot race. Everybody is starting from the same starting line with the collapse, say at 1200. Everybody is affected by it. You then have to get to the point where you can recreate your globalized network. That doesn't happen for four centuries. It's not until the eighth century that we get a new globalized economy and network in the same region. And the people affected go across the finish line at different times, staggered, and some don't even finish at all, right? There's no Hittites around in the 8th

century. There's no Mycenaeans around. There are Assyrians. They're new, though. They're called the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians and so on. But it is a new world order in the Iron Age, and what we get are these large kingdoms and empires that you had back in the Bronze Age that have just collapsed. They're replaced with numerous smaller city-states and tiny kingdoms, which then grow again on their own. And that's where we get Israel, Judah, Ammon, Moab, the Neo-Hittites. But it's really, first and foremost, it's the Cypriots and the Phoenicians that do the best. They're anti-fragile, as Tlaib has defined. Anti-fragile, they flourish in a time of chaos. The Cypriots, who may be the ones responsible for sending around the technology

of iron, and the Phoenicians who who standardized the alphabet. But the ones that really do the damage are the Neo-Assyrians. When they come back up in the 9th century, they proceed to conquer the entire ancient Near East, including Egypt at one point. And so, they are the ones that really move in the next iteration. So, there will be new life after the Late Bronze Age collapse, but like I say, it takes some of them up to 400 years to recover. So this is also my question is, you know, what happens if we collapse? Are we going to rebound, and how long will it take us? And are there lessons learned from the ancient world? I think there are. Even though all of this took place 3,200 years ago, I think there are definitely lessons for us that we can learn

if we're willing to study what happened back then. I think so. And if that means more attention to the Ancients podcast and more focus on ancient history, then I welcome it. Absolutely. Well, Eric, that focus on what happens next following this collapse, that is a topic for a future episode we will do when your book is nearing release. But you have written one book, and this next book is close to coming out. So what are these two books that focus around this incredible period in ancient history? So titles, the one that's been out is 1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed, and the forthcoming sequel, which should be out in April 2024, is after 1177 BC, the survival of civilizations. But I also have one exciting piece of news. On the very same day that the sequel is coming out, there will also be released a graphic version of the original. has done a marvelous job in translating it from my written text to essentially a comic book, which features two of the kids from that time period, Pel, who was a sea person, and his friend Shisha, a female Egyptian scribe. And they're running around the Mediterranean trying to figure out what happened. And Glynnis and I parachute in from time to time to give the modern take on this.

So I'm very excited about that too. It should appeal to everyone from age 7 to 70. So keep your eyes out for 1177 BC, a graphic history of the year civilization collapsed, also coming in April. You know what? I did not expect that at all, but I'm so glad that you mentioned it, Eric. This has been great. And it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Well, there you go. There was Professor Eric Klein talking all things the

Bronze Age collapse, this catastrophic event in ancient history. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did recording it. Eric is such a fun, engaging speaker, and hopefully we'll have him return to the show in due course to explain what happened next, what happened after the collapse. Last thing from me, wherever you're listening to the Ancients podcast, whether it's on Apple, on Spotify or elsewhere, please make sure that you are following the podcast so that you are notified when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.