The 300-year drought that ended the ancient world | Eric Cline

0:00 I'm Eric Cline.

0:01 I'm an archaeologist and an ancient historian.

0:03 I'm also the author of 1177 BC and its sequel, After 1177 BC.

0:14 The conditions that led to civilizational collapse.

0:19 When I was first learning about all this, when

0:21 I was in college and then in graduate school,

0:23 I was basically taught that the collapse was caused by the sea peoples,

0:29 this group that the Egyptians had mentioned that came not

0:33 once but twice in the years 1207 and 1177 BC.

0:39 The Egyptians, Merneptah and Ramses III were the two pharaohs 30 years apart.

0:44 They both said that Egypt had been attacked

0:48 by a coalition of invaders and they give us their names.

0:52 It's us that calls them the sea peoples.

0:55 It comes from a French Egyptologist that was studying these originally.

1:00 But the Egyptians actually give us the names and we know that there are

1:05 nine different separate groups that come sweeping

1:08 across the Mediterranean and wind up attacking Egypt.

1:11 So I was always told that these groups which are the Shardana,

1:17 the Shekelesh, the Weshesh, the Eques, the Peleset, you know,

1:21 these names that most people have never heard

1:24 of, that they were the ones that were

1:27 responsible for attacking all the G8 and bringing

1:30 them down one by one, if you will.

1:33 Now out of all those sea peoples,

1:36 there's really only one group that we could identify.

1:39 We've played around with the other ones.

1:42 I mean, Shirdon or Chardana sounds a lot like Sardinia.

1:45 So it may be that that's where they came from.

1:48 The Shekalesh, that sounds a lot like Sicily.

1:51 So maybe they came from there.

1:54 But the earliest Egyptologists actually thought

1:56 that that's where they went after they were

2:00 defeated by the Egyptians and that they then gave their names to those islands.

2:05 So we've flip flopped over the years.

2:08 Personally, I think the sea peoples come from the Western

2:11 Mediterranean and sweep across the Aegean and wind up attacking Egypt.

2:16 But we still have the problem of, you know, who are they?

2:20 Out of all the groups, the only one that we think we've

2:24 really identified is the group called the Peleset.

2:27 And the Peleset are the Philistines.

2:30 Now the Philistines are mentioned in the Bible.

2:33 We already know them archeologically.

2:36 It really looks like they are Mycenaeans from Greece who have fled Greece

2:41 and come over to the Eastern Mediterranean

2:45 because Philistine pottery looks like degenerate Mycenaean.

2:48 Meaning not that it's terrible,

2:50 but it's Mycenaean pottery as if it were made in Greece,

2:55 but it's made with clay that's local to Cyprus, Rhodes, the Levant.

3:00 So it looks like the Mycenaeans come across.

3:03 Now Ramses and Merneptah both say that they defeated the sea peoples.

3:07 And in fact, Ramses III says,

3:10 "I settled them in strongholds bound in my name." Meaning he settled

3:16 the defeated sea peoples in Egypt and in the region of southern Canaan,

3:21 which the Egyptians controlled at that time.

3:24 So I think we know where they went,

3:28 even if we don't quite know where they came from.

3:31 If I had like a million dollars, I would go looking for the origins of the sea

3:36 peoples and try and settle that once and for all.

3:39 But the one thing that we're quite sure, or at least I'm quite sure of now,

3:45 is they were not single-handedly responsible for the collapse.

3:49 In fact, I kind of agree with my colleagues who have

3:53 suggested that they were as much victims as they were oppressors,

3:56 and that they're more like a symptom of what's

4:00 happening than they were the cause of it.

4:03 I think there were a lot of other things involved,

4:06 and I think the picture was a lot more complicated than

4:10 I was first taught when I was an undergraduate in college.

4:15 In some ways, the sea peoples are one of history's great escape goats.

4:19 I mean, I think they're blamed for something they didn't really do.

4:23 And indeed, I used to use the sea peoples to scare

4:26 my kids at night to make them go to bed.

4:28 You know, time for bed, and if you don't go to bed,

4:31 the sea peoples are gonna get you.

4:33 I mean, I think they're kind of the bogeyman

4:36 of antiquity and kind of unfairly blamed.

4:39 I think some of the other explanations that people have now put forward,

4:45 like drought and famine and all that, might have contributed

4:48 to why the sea peoples were migrating in the first place.

4:53 And I actually think a good parallel would be something

4:57 like the dust ball in the 1930s in the United States,

5:01 where the people were leaving Oklahoma and going

5:04 to Texas and California to get a better life.

5:07 Same thing, you could look at some of the migrants and the refugees today,

5:12 the people fleeing from the Syrian civil war,

5:15 for example, the people leaving and trying to get

5:19 up into Europe for a new and better life.

5:21 I mean, we're seeing some of the same things today.

5:25 So I think that's really what the might, but the sea peoples were.

5:29 They were migrants in search of a better life.

5:31 If the sea peoples are not to blame for the collapse, then what is or what was?

5:38 There have been a number of other

5:40 suggestions that scholars have made over the years.

5:43 And in my first book in 1177 BC,

5:45 I went through the various suggestions, looking at the pros and cons for each.

5:51 And in the end, I thought the answer was yes.

5:55 It's all of the above.

5:57 It's a perfect storm.

5:58 It is, you know, all everything,

6:01 you name it, everything everywhere, all at once.

6:04 And it would have been hard to avoid.

6:07 So I looked at what my predecessors had suggested and thought

6:12 that there was merit to almost every one of them, but not on their own.

6:18 You had to bring them all together into this series of unfortunate events,

6:23 as Lemony Snicket once said.

6:25 One of the possibilities is that there was a drought back then.

6:30 This is not a new suggestion.

6:32 It was actually made back in the 1960s by Reese Carpenter,

6:36 who was a professor at Bryn Mawr College.

6:39 He suggested that the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece,

6:41 that their civilization had come to an end because of a drought.

6:46 But he didn't have any hard data to back his suggestion up.

6:51 It remained a hypothesis.

6:53 We now have the data that he didn't have.

6:57 And we have it not just for mainland Greece,

7:00 but we have it for an entire area stretching from Italy over to Iran today.

7:04 So the evidence that we've got for drought, and by the way,

7:09 it's not just a drought, it's a mega drought.

7:12 It's 150 years at the minimum and 300 years at the maximum.

7:17 So say from 1200 BC or 1250 BC down to 900 or 850 BC,

7:23 I mean, it's a long, long, long time.

7:27 Now, we find evidence for it all over the place.

7:32 We find it in caves where the stalagmites

7:36 stopped growing because they ran out of water.

7:40 We find it in dried up lakes, dried up lagoons, dried up riverbeds,

7:46 where when you take samples and you look at the pollen under a microscope,

7:51 you can see that we get more arid plants,

7:55 that it becomes a much harsher environment.

7:58 If you look at the sediments at the bottom of lakes that still exist in Turkey,

8:04 for example, you can see this as well.

8:06 So it's not like we have data from one place and one type of source.

8:11 We have it from a multitude of places.

8:14 If you look at a map where we have scientific evidence

8:18 of this mega drought at the end of the late Bronze Age,

8:21 you've just got, it's peppered with red

8:23 dots where we've got all of this information.

8:26 So I would say it's beyond a doubt now.

8:29 You cannot call it into question.

8:31 There was a drought back then.

8:33 It lasted for at least 150 and maybe 300 years.

8:37 And that would have impacted pretty much anybody back then because,

8:42 well, frankly, society, you can't survive.

8:45 A drought that lasts that long.

8:48 I mean, we have trouble surviving a drought today that lasts 10 years.

8:53 So imagine one that's 10 times that or so.

8:57 Anyway, so I think drought makes sense that that was

9:01 one of the big factors at that time.

9:03 And it may have actually driven some of the other factors as well.

9:08 If you've got drought, you've probably also got famine coming right on its

9:14 heels because if you have a lack of rain, if you have a lack of all your major

9:19 resources and all that, people are gonna start starving.

9:22 And it looks like that's what happened

9:24 during the late Bronze Age collapse as well.

9:27 Now, it can be actually pretty hard to find evidence of famine,

9:31 unless like you find a mass grave, which we haven't found by the way.

9:36 But if they write about it, if they write about it in their text,

9:41 then you can be pretty sure that there was famine.

9:45 And we have that now, especially in recent years.

9:48 There have been some texts that were found at the site of Ugarit,

9:54 which is up on the north coast of what is now Syria.

9:58 And the site of Ugarit were very important,

10:00 Entropo, very important international port at that time.

10:04 And there have been tablets that have been published fairly recently,

10:08 like in 2016 in French.

10:10 And then a couple of years later in English,

10:13 in which they say there is famine in our city, please send us help.

10:18 I mean, they come right out and say it.

10:22 Now, we had others before that as well.

10:25 We know up in Anatolia, for example, where the Hittites were.

10:30 There are also tablets that talk about famine,

10:33 starting as early as about 1250 BC.

10:35 So a little bit earlier than we might have suspected.

10:39 And they are writing and saying things like, famine is here in my lands.

10:44 It's a matter of life and death.

10:46 Please send grain.

10:48 And they're asking people like the Egyptians to send relief.

10:52 And in fact, we know from other texts

10:56 that the Egyptians did send grain and dried fish

11:00 and other things like that to help out

11:03 the people in Ugarit and Anatolia and so on.

11:06 So we definitely know that there is famine at that time.

11:11 And it obviously comes hard on the heels of the drought.

11:15 Now, if we pull the sea peoples back in again,

11:19 I think this then explains why they

11:22 might have started migrating in the first place.

11:25 If they do come from the Western Mediterranean,

11:29 like I think Sicily, Sardinia, Italy,

11:32 there is now evidence that there is a drought in Northern Italy as well,

11:38 where the Terramare culture was.

11:40 And there's evidence for people leaving at that time in mass numbers.

11:46 So it may be that that's where we should be looking for the sea peoples coming

11:51 from and that they started their migrations because they

11:54 were starving and there was a drought in their lands.

11:58 In which case though, I mean,

12:00 as the old saying goes out of the frying pan and into the fire,

12:04 because the Eastern Mediterranean had a drought as well.

12:07 I mean, it stretched all across the Mediterranean,

12:11 but they couldn't have known that, at least not easily at that time.

12:15 So they start migrating and they get to a place where it's just as bad,

12:20 but there are also people already living there.

12:24 So they are attacking at the same time as assimilating,

12:27 they're just trying to get a new life for themselves.

12:31 And I think that's what we see when they attack Egypt.

12:35 But we also know from other tablets that they attack elsewhere.

12:40 So we have to add other things in here as well.

12:44 But for right now, I would say we've got drought equals famine,

12:48 and then maybe that's gonna lead into migration and other things as well.

12:54 Now it used to be that the only evidence we had for migrations or invasions,

13:00 if you will, which is probably a better way to put it,

13:04 is the evidence from the Egyptians, the inscriptions that Merneptah and Ramses,

13:09 the third left us from 1207 and 1177.

13:13 But now we've got other evidence as well,

13:16 the same archives at Ugarit on the north coast

13:20 of Syria that gave us the tablets talking about famine.

13:24 They also mentioned invaders.

13:25 Some of them have been known for quite a while.

13:29 There's a fairly famous tablet that talks

13:32 about enemies and ships having been sighted.

13:35 And are they gonna come here or not?

13:38 And their messages between the king or the governor

13:41 on Cyprus over to the king of Ugarit.

13:45 And you can see Cyprus on a good day from Ugarit, basically.

13:50 So we knew about these enemy ships, but we didn't know who they were.

13:55 Like it doesn't say the sea peoples or anything like that.

13:59 It just says ships of the enemy.

14:01 Well, the new tablets that have just been

14:03 published from Ugarit also mention ships of the enemy,

14:08 but they also mention that they've made landfall.

14:12 And in fact, one particular text, which is written by the king of Ugarit,

14:17 basically asking for reinforcements to be sent.

14:20 He says, "The enemy has landed.

14:23 "They have overrun one of my port cities

14:27 "and they are now advancing on Ugarit itself.

14:31 "Please send help." Well, we know that even if the help was sent,

14:37 it wasn't enough or it was too late because the French archeologist,

14:41 when they excavated Ugarit,

14:43 starting back in the 1920s and even continuing until fairly recently,

14:49 they found that Ugarit at that time period

14:52 had been destroyed and had been destroyed by humans.

14:55 There are bodies in the streets, there are arrowheads embedded in the walls.

14:59 There is a meter of destruction,

15:02 like three feet deep of destruction in that city.

15:05 And it was then abandoned.

15:08 It was abandoned for between 400 and 600 years.

15:12 People buried hordes of precious metals and never came back for them.

15:17 So that enemy, whoever they might have been,

15:20 not only advanced on Ugarit, but destroyed Ugarit.

15:23 The problem, once again, the scribe just says, the enemy,

15:29 it doesn't say the shalim or the Sherden or the palescent or the washes.

15:34 And I, oh, I would love to take that scribe

15:38 and take him out back and say, come on.

15:40 Why didn't you tell us who they were?

15:42 Why did you just say the enemy?

15:44 But that scribe might not have known who they were.

15:48 Give them a break.

15:49 But we can now say that there were invaders.

15:53 There were invaders from outside.

15:55 Whether they were sea peoples or something else,

15:58 we can't know for sure, but we definitely have invaders at that time.

16:03 There are a lot of destructions around the ancient

16:07 Near East and the Aegean at this time of cities, both major and minor.

16:14 There are discussions as to whether there are actually city-wide destructions

16:19 and whether maybe just a cow kicked over a lantern like Mrs.

16:25 O'Leary in Chicago.

16:27 We're still debating exactly how many

16:30 destructions and how destructive they were, if I could use the same word again.

16:36 But the basic feeling is yes, there were invaders, there were destructions,

16:41 but some of the destructions might not have been by outsiders.

16:47 They might have been internal.

16:49 It might have been an internal rebellion by the locals rising up,

16:56 precisely because they're starving, because there's no water,

17:00 there's no food, anything like that.

17:02 And there are a couple of instances where we can see that.

17:06 The site of Mycenae on Mainland Greece where the famous Lion Gate is,

17:11 it has been suggested that its ultimate demise

17:14 at this time was because of internal rebellion.

17:18 We can't be sure of that, but it is a definite hypothesis.

17:23 Another example might be the site of Hazor in ancient Canaan,

17:27 which is today in modern Israel.

17:30 And at Hazor, where we had two co-directors that were excavating

17:34 and couldn't agree on what caused the destruction of the site.

17:40 One said it was Joshua and pointed to the book

17:45 in the Hebrew Bible that talks about Joshua conquering Hazor.

17:50 The other co-director said, now wait a minute, at the site,

17:55 the palaces burnt and the temples were burnt,

17:58 but not the houses of the local people.

18:02 And that looks like an internal rebellion, right?

18:05 Palaces burnt, temples burnt, but not the people's houses.

18:08 You have an invader from outside, they're gonna burn absolutely everything.

18:13 But if you have the people's houses still there,

18:17 doesn't that look like an internal rebellion?

18:20 Well, it might.

18:21 Now again, hard to decide, my point would be if the two co-directors

18:27 can't decide who might have destroyed their site,

18:30 pretty hard for the rest of us to decide that as well.

18:34 But I would put this up as an example of maybe internal rebellion.

18:40 So yes, we have destructions, not everywhere, but a lot of them.

18:45 But we can't be sure if it's external or internal.

18:49 We just know the city is destroyed.

18:52 If we see a destruction at a site though, it might not be by humans.

18:58 It could be by Mother Nature.

19:01 I'm talking about earthquakes.

19:02 Some of the sites that we see destroyed at the end

19:06 of the late Bronze Age really seem to be destroyed by earthquakes.

19:10 Now it can be difficult to determine if

19:14 a destruction's by humans or by Mother Nature.

19:18 Sometimes it's obvious.

19:18 I mean, if you find bodies in the streets with arrowheads sticking out of them,

19:22 it's probably humans and not an earthquake.

19:26 But when you find bodies simply buried like under walls of collapsed houses,

19:31 it could actually be either one.

19:34 But if there are some symptoms, and we can usually tell when the city is hit

19:41 by an earthquake because we'll have walls that are off-kilter,

19:45 that shouldn't be, we'll have keystones slipped in an arch, things like that.

19:51 And in some of the cases, we could say, yeah,

19:54 this is most likely an earthquake rather than by humans.

19:58 And if we take a look at those type of sites at the end of the late Bronze Age,

20:04 it really looks like we have what's known as an earthquake storm.

20:08 Now that's the name for it in antiquity.

20:12 If it happens today, it's known as an earthquake sequence by seismologists.

20:18 And the general idea is frequently that if you have a fault line,

20:23 like the North Anatolian fault line that runs across Turkey,

20:27 that if you have an earthquake and it doesn't release all of the pressure,

20:32 you will have another earthquake sometime later nearby.

20:36 It could be a week later, it could be a month later,

20:41 it could be a year later, that will release more of the pressure.

20:45 And if that still doesn't release all of the built-up pressure,

20:48 you will have another earthquake and another and another.

20:51 Basically, the fault line will unzip until all the pressure is gone.

20:57 That can take up to 60 years, 60, 60 years.

21:02 We see that today.

21:04 It's been happening across Turkey since like the 1930s.

21:08 But it also happened in antiquity.

21:11 And it looks like it took place in the Aegean

21:15 and Eastern Mediterranean from about 1225 to 1175 BC,

21:20 in other words, spanning the late Bronze Age collapse.

21:25 And so we can see bodies in a number of cities.

21:30 There's a young teenage girl at Mycenae, for example,

21:34 who tried to shelter in the doorway of her house.

21:37 Normally, that's one of the safest places to try and shelter from an earthquake.

21:42 But in this case, the whole house collapsed,

21:45 and one of the stones fell and hit her in the head,

21:49 probably killed her instantly.

21:50 She was found with that stone still embedded in her skull.

21:55 At other places, there are other bodies as well.

22:00 And just to give you one more example, at the site of Troy,

22:04 where the Trojan War took place, according to Homer,

22:07 and we have nine cities, one on top of another,

22:11 city number six is destroyed by an earthquake, not by humans.

22:15 There's no bodies there, there's no arrowheads, anything like that.

22:19 But the city is destroyed with giant rocks thrown around,

22:24 and everything fallen with walls undulating.

22:27 Pretty obvious, Troy six was destroyed by an earthquake.

22:31 And so we can put that into the category as well.

22:35 Now, if we're trying to kind of make a logical succession where we have drought,

22:42 famine, migration, that works for all

22:45 those, but we're do earthquakes fit into that.

22:49 Well, you don't really fit earthquakes into that, they just happen,

22:54 but it turns out that this is a very active seismic zone in this entire region.

23:00 There are fault lines off the coast of Greece.

23:04 There's a fault line coming straight up the Rift Valley,

23:08 where you've got the Dead Sea and Lake Tiberias.

23:11 There are fault lines across ancient Anatolia.

23:14 And in fact, if you lay a map that shows all

23:19 the earthquakes that have happened in modern Turkey since say the year 1900,

23:25 and you've got all the earthquakes plotted,

23:28 and you lay that on top of a map showing the cities that were

23:34 either partially or totally destroyed at the end of the late Bronze Age,

23:39 there's almost a one-to-one correlation.

23:41 And so I think we have to add

23:45 in earthquakes as one of the other possible stressors,

23:50 drivers, factors that led to the late Bronze Age collapse.

23:54 The other factor we should bring into the equation is that of disease.

23:59 We haven't mentioned this up until now,

24:01 but in terms of like the four horsemen of the apocalypse,

24:05 where you've got drought and famine and earthquakes and all that, even today,

24:10 you frequently have disease following on the footsteps.

24:12 And I think we might have had that same

24:16 situation back at the end of the late Bronze Age.

24:19 Certainly we know this from some of the stories that have been handed down.

24:23 For example, Homer in "The Iliad" in the first book talks

24:27 about a plague sweeping through the Mycenaean troops that are besieging Troy.

24:33 In the story of the Exodus from the Hebrew Bible, we've got the 10 plagues.

24:39 These might be memories, vague memories of what actually happened back then,

24:43 but we do know, for example,

24:45 that there was a plague that hit the Hittites earlier,

24:49 about 150 years before the collapse,

24:52 back in the time of my favorite Hittite king, Sufi Lulu-Luma I,

24:58 who ruled about 1350 BC,

25:00 and we are told by one of his successors that he and most

25:06 of his immediate family died as the result

25:10 of a plague that was brought to Anatolia,

25:14 courtesy of Egyptian prisoners of war, and it absolutely decimated the Hittites.

25:20 Now, that's a century and a half before the collapse.

25:24 So we really can't say that that's part and parcel of it,

25:27 but there is an Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses V, if I remember correctly,

25:33 who ruled about 1140 BC, and we've got his mummy.

25:37 And if you look at the mummy along the jawline

25:40 and kind of on the cheek, there are pustules.

25:44 He had smallpox and he probably died from it, and we're able to say this because

25:51 we actually have a papyrus, the Turin papyrus.

25:55 It's in a museum in Italy today in Turin,

25:59 and it talks about the fact that Ramses

26:02 and other members of his family died of the plague,

26:06 which we would say is smallpox,

26:09 and that they were buried in the Valley of the Kings, but most unusually,

26:14 it took something like 16 months to bury them,

26:18 they dug brand new tombs for them,

26:21 and after they put the king and his dead relatives

26:26 in, they dismissed the workmen who had dug the tombs,

26:30 they gave him a month off at full pay,

26:34 and then they closed the Valley of the Kings to everyone.

26:39 It was like maybe the world's first quarantine at that time.

26:44 So we do have evidence for plague a little bit after the collapse,

26:50 but the collapse is gonna take most of the 12th century BC to fully form,

26:57 and so somebody that dies of smallpox in 1140

27:00 is in fact part and parcel of the whole collapse.

27:04 So I think we do have to add in disease in addition to everything else,

27:11 earthquakes, migration, famine, drought, you name it.

27:14 I think we've got enough there to justify the fact that we've

27:19 got a poly crisis going on, that if you had one thing,

27:21 you might survive it, two things maybe,

27:22 by three, you're throwing up your hands going,

27:22 enough, we can't take this anymore, and boom, everything collapses.

27:22 One of the things that we've got in looking at all these multiple

27:27 causes that might have led to the collapse is the fact that we've got,

27:32 first of all, a multiplier effect going on, that is each one

27:37 has got a bigger effect than it might have because of the others,

27:42 but we've also got a domino effect going on, that is

27:46 when one of these goes down or is dreadfully impacted,

27:50 it would have affected the others much as today we

27:54 can set up dominoes to all fall in a row.

27:58 If you've got a supply chain shortage to put it in today's terms,

28:02 if the tin is cut off and you can't make copper anymore,

28:06 that's gonna affect pretty much all the civilizations,

28:09 but if you've got something that affects cypress and the Cypriots,

28:14 which is giving everybody the copper,

28:16 then that is gonna have a domino effect on everybody else.

28:21 So even just the news of one of them being affected might

28:26 have had a domino effect on one or more of the others.

28:31 Now, one of the questions that we wanted to ask is

28:36 what would it have taken to have brought down this network?

28:41 And so actually after I published 1177 BC,

28:46 I was approached and got together with colleagues from the US

28:50 Army Corps of Engineers and we ran scenarios through a computer trying

28:56 to figure out which of the G8 or others in which order

29:03 would it have taken for them to fall to collapse the whole network?

29:08 For instance, if the Mycenaeans had gone down,

29:11 would that have collapsed the whole globalized network?

29:14 If the Minoans had gone down, would that have shattered the small world network?

29:19 What did it take?

29:21 And we know by looking back at it that it did collapse,

29:25 it was shattered, but in what order and how important was the collapse itself?

29:32 Can we actually figure out who went down first and who went down last?

29:38 Well, it turns out we can try and approximate that.

29:42 We ran a couple of thousand scenarios through a computer and came

29:47 up with two basic scenarios that would have resulted in the collapse.

29:53 One is if the Hittites and the Egyptians

29:58 both essentially collapsed at the same time,

30:01 that would have brought down the rest of the network or if that city of Ugarit,

30:08 the international port on the coast of North Syria,

30:12 if that had collapsed at the same time as the Hittites,

30:16 that would have been enough to disrupt

30:19 the entire network and bring it down also.

30:22 So those were the only two scenarios

30:25 that actually resulted in what we could see.

30:28 But over the two, one was preferable because

30:32 the scenario with the Egyptians and the Hittites going down,

30:36 we know that's not what happened.

30:39 We know the Egyptians survived.

30:42 The Hittites do not.

30:44 Their society basically ends for all intents and purposes.

30:48 The Egyptians, while they don't do well, they do muddle through,

30:53 they coped and they kind of adapted, but they do survive the collapse.

30:59 So we knew that scenario in which both went down at once didn't work.

31:05 We know historically that's not what happened.

31:07 That has left us with the scenario

31:11 of Ugarit and the Hittites going down virtually simultaneously.

31:15 That would have been enough to bring down the whole thing.

31:19 But interestingly, the rest of them,

31:21 the Assyrians going down, the Babylonians going down,

31:23 whatever, none of that would have been enough to take out the entire network.

31:28 So it does show that it's not easy to collapse

31:33 a network and that I would say you're much more

31:37 likely to be able to be resilient and overcome

31:41 a catastrophe than you are to be taken down by it,

31:46 but it really depends on how effectively you react to it.

31:50 And if you are actually trying to survive the collapse,

31:55 instead of ignoring it and denying it is happening,

32:00 but that brings us to another question of whether they

32:04 even knew they were collapsing while they were collapsing, did they?

32:07 So what we're talking about at the end of this late run

32:11 stage with the collapse is what is known as a systems collapse.

32:15 This was a term that was invented by Colin

32:18 Renfrew at the University of Cambridge in the late 1970s,

32:22 but it basically describes what happens when

32:25 you have one of these complex systems collapse.

32:30 You've got your central economy collapses, your upper elite, the 1% go away.

32:37 You've got the government, the centralized government collapses.

32:41 You have all these hallmarks of what

32:45 had made your society so vibrant and thriving, they now all go away.

32:52 And along with that, you've got a huge decrease in population,

32:57 both death and migration.

32:59 And that's what we see at this end of the late run stage.

33:03 So I think we're looking at a systems collapse.

33:06 Now, it's not unique here.

33:08 There are systems collapses that have happened elsewhere and elsewhere.

33:13 The Maya collapse, follow the Roman Empire,

33:17 the Harappan civilization in India, it happens.

33:21 And in most cases, when you have one of these systems collapse,

33:26 you have then a dark age that happens immediately afterward where

33:31 you revert back to a lower level of socio-political economic functioning.

33:38 You go a whole step backwards into what historians call a dark age.

33:45 And you basically have to start all over again.

33:48 Now, the thing is a systems collapse doesn't happen overnight.

33:52 It can take up to a century to take place.

33:56 So like life was very different in 1200 BC

33:59 from 1100 BC and completely different in 1000 BC.

34:03 So we're looking at a systems collapse

34:06 and then we're looking at a dark age afterward.

34:09 And in the dark age, that's when you try and regroup basically.

34:13 And one thing that Colin Renfrew said is one

34:16 of the hallmarks of a dark age is that they look

34:20 back at the age that has just disappeared and consider

34:23 it a golden age and they frequently tell stories about it.

34:27 And you know, that's exactly what we've got with Homer and the Iliad

34:31 and the Odyssey and the story of the Trojan War and so on.

34:35 So I do think we've got a systems collapse and I do

34:39 think it segues right into what historians have called a dark age

34:43 because some of the same things that we lose because of a systems

34:49 collapse are the very same things that define a dark age.

34:53 They lose, for example, the knowledge of how to put up big buildings.

34:59 They lose writing, linear B in my Sydney and Greece

35:03 is not used again after the collapse of the Mycenaeans.

35:07 So what we've got then is in the years, in the centuries, after the collapse,

35:14 say for 400 years, say from 1200 BC down to about 800 BC, four centuries.

35:22 This is what historians have called the world's first dark

35:27 age and they point to everything that I've just said.

35:32 Now, that's kind of not fair, I would say,

35:35 in a way because each of the different

35:39 societies is affected to a different degree.

35:42 Some actually did okay in the collapse.

35:46 Others, like the Hittites, completely disappeared.

35:49 And it's also an era of invention and innovation,

35:54 in part because they had to, right?

35:58 What's the saying, necessity is the mother of invention?

36:01 If you're having trouble getting tin, for example, and you can't make copper,

36:06 you might turn to another metal that you already knew about,

36:10 but that you hadn't been exploiting yet because it was too difficult,

36:15 too hard, didn't have enough, whatever, iron.

36:18 Iron does not really come into use until during

36:22 and after the collapse and it becomes a replacement for bronze.

36:28 Now, that doesn't mean bronze completely goes away,

36:31 but it does mean that iron takes its place.

36:35 We also get the standardization of the alphabet at this time,

36:40 which the Phoenicians bring across the Mediterranean.

36:43 Now, the Phoenicians who come from central Canaan,

36:47 what we would call today Lebanon, they're actually survivors of the collapse.

36:53 They actually are among the people that do the best

36:56 in the aftermath of the collapse in terms of resilience and transformation.

37:01 And the Phoenicians standardize the alphabet.

37:04 They don't invent it, it's already been around, but they standardize it,

37:08 they bring it over to Greece and they bring it over to Italy,

37:13 and it becomes the Greek alphabet and it becomes the Latin alphabet,

37:17 which we're still using today.

37:19 So the Phoenicians and the Cypriots, alphabet and iron, because the Cypriots,

37:26 who had been the source for all the copper,

37:29 now seem to be the first people to be using iron.

37:33 We get the first bi-metallic weapons and tools where

37:37 we've got like an iron blade and a knife,

37:40 but bronze rivets in the handle and the Cypriots send them

37:44 out to Greece on one hand and the Levant on the other.

37:49 And they seem to have been very nice about it

37:52 because they sent the technology as well, oh, you like this?

37:56 Well, here's how you make it.

37:58 And every country had iron ore, it wasn't like the copper in the tin.

38:03 And we can see the development of iron

38:06 working spread across the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean.

38:10 So I would say Cypriots with their iron Phoenicians

38:13 with the alphabet and don't forget purple dye as well, they're doing the best.

38:19 But that also means that our dark age might not be a dark age.

38:25 And one of my colleagues has said that any age that sees the invention

38:30 of iron and the standardization of the alphabet

38:33 cannot be considered to be a dark age.

38:36 It's an age of invention.

38:38 And so what we archaeologists are trying to argue

38:42 now is stop calling it a dark age,

38:45 just like the medieval people don't want theirs to be a dark age anymore either.

38:50 And now it's like late antique or the early Middle Ages.

38:54 Same thing with us.

38:55 We don't want a dark age now.

38:58 What we wanna do is simply call it what it is.

39:01 It's the iron age.

39:03 It's when they start using iron.

39:04 And that's got no pejorative sense or anything like that.

39:08 It's just a fact.

39:10 You had the Bronze Age, now you have the iron age.

39:14 And so I think that actually is a better way to describe this.

39:19 Now, I will admit that many of the societies do

39:23 go back down to a lower level of socioeconomic political circumstances,

39:28 like the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, on the Minoans on Crete.

39:34 Others disappear entirely like the Hittites.

39:37 But, Cypriots do okay, Phoenicians do okay, Assyrians and Babylonians do okay.

39:43 So we actually, we need to be specific here and differentiate between

39:50 the different societies as to how well they did or didn't do.

39:54 And then see if there are any lessons that we can learn from that.

39:59 One of the other things to keep in mind, and which is at the basis of the debate

40:05 between archaeologists and ancient historians as to whether

40:08 we're looking at a collapse or a transformation

40:11 at the end of the late Bronze Age,

40:14 has to do with the idea of how much survived and how much didn't.

40:18 In terms of the people themselves versus the societies that they make up.

40:26 So, for instance, and this is a part of a problem too.

40:29 All right, you take something like ancient

40:32 Anatolia and we talked about the Hittite Empire.

40:34 Well, there's actually a whole mess of different

40:37 ethnicities that are living in Anatolia at that time.

40:41 The Hittites, per se, might have been the overlords.

40:45 They might have had the Empire,

40:47 but the Luwians that are there would have said, I'm not a Hittite, right?

40:51 The Trojans up in Troy, I'm not a Hittite, right?

40:54 But we talk about this, you know, big entity.

40:58 So when we get to the collapse and then the survival afterward,

41:04 when I talk about a collapse, I don't mean that everybody dies.

41:09 I mean, a lot of people do.

41:11 The estimates in Greece, for example,

41:13 or maybe as much as 40% of the population died or migrated between,

41:19 say, the 13th and the 11th centuries BC.

41:22 So, you know, a lot of people do die.

41:25 It wasn't a wonderful time, but not everybody does.

41:28 Same thing with Anatolia, with the Hittites,

41:31 same thing with Mesopotamia and the Assyrians.

41:34 So what we have to realize is there

41:39 is some level of continuum that life does continue,

41:43 but what changes is the political entities, if you will, the societal entities.

41:50 So we no longer have the Hittites, per se, in Anatolia,

41:55 but we do have some of the survivors,

41:58 and we call them the Neo-Hittites down in North Syria.

42:03 Others, though like the Etruscans,

42:05 you do have new peoples moving into some areas,

42:10 and we know this from the records,

42:13 like the Frigens coming in, we know about their invasion,

42:17 but you've got other people who are still farming

42:21 in Anatolia that are basically looking over their shoulders saying,

42:25 "Okay, who am I paying taxes to tomorrow?" Right, I'm still here.

42:30 My Hittite government isn't here.

42:32 So we do have to keep this in mind.

42:35 Even in Greece, for example,

42:37 nobody called themselves a Mycenaean after about 1050,

42:41 but that doesn't mean that Greece was empty.

42:44 It means that the survivors were just dealing

42:48 with life and figuring out what to do after that.

42:53 So this is where we still have our arguments in academia.

42:57 What is a collapse?

42:59 What is a transformation?

43:01 Right, and where do the two meet?

43:03 Where's the gray area?

43:05 And that's why I kind of took, I wouldn't call it the easy way out,

43:09 but I wanted my cake and to eat it too.

43:13 And so in the sequel, I said,

43:16 what collapsed was the network that connected them all?

43:21 What transformed are the various societies?

43:24 And they didn't always transform, some just coped,

43:28 some adapted, but that's where you get the nuances.

43:32 But you also have to realize too,

43:34 that you're really talking about the whole group.

43:38 And if you get down to the individuals, that's where it's,

43:43 first of all, I'm gonna get very, very interesting.

43:46 I mean, what I wouldn't give to have a time machine and go back and yeah,

43:50 it'd be great to talk to the kings and the pharaohs.

43:52 I'd also like to talk to the farmer in Messenia, living near Pilos and saying,

43:57 so how did your life change after the palace went down?

44:02 And that is nearly impossible to answer,

44:05 unless you get lucky doing some archeology.

44:08 But I do think we have to keep this in mind,

44:12 the ethnicities versus the societies, the people versus the government,

44:18 and just realize that we're frequently talking

44:22 about the forest and not the individual trees.

44:26 Because in part, that's all we can do.

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