The world we live in was born of a 3,000-year old catastrophe | Eric Cline

0:00 I'm Eric Cline.

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

0:04 I'm also the author of 1177 BC,

0:07 and it's sequel After 1177 BC.

0:10 The period that we're discussing today is incredibly

0:14 important in the history of humankind.

0:14 It's the late Bronze Age, in particular,

0:14 which goes from about 1700 to 1200 BCE, or BC, if you prefer.

0:14 This was a time where people were

0:14 basically globalized around the Mediterranean in a

0:14 way that is not frequently seen.

0:14 And so what happened to them back then may have implications for us today.

0:14 So it turns out to be a much more

0:14 important period to study than one might expect,

0:14 even though it's more than 3,000 years ago.

0:14 The rise of a new world order.

0:19 One of the questions that I think is extremely

0:22 relevant today comes in the sequel that I wrote,

0:26 the after 1177 BC, which simply asks the question,

0:30 what do you do if your society collapses?

0:33 If the globalized network that you're a part of collapses, what do you do?

0:39 How resilient are you?

0:40 Now, resilience is a word that's bandied about today by lots of people.

0:45 And that's part of the

0:47 problem.

0:47 It has different meanings for different people and in different situations.

0:52 For me, resilience is how well you do in the face of adversity.

0:57 How do you bounce back when

1:00 something has gone wrong, sometimes very wrong?

1:04 And I think there are basically three ways you

1:08 can deal with it.

1:10 And I get these from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

1:17 They won the Nobel Prize back in 2007.

1:20 They are the ones that put out reports on climate change

1:24 every year, every couple of years.

1:26 And they put out something back in 2012 that was dealing with

1:30 resilience and mitigation, what do you do after disasters?

1:36 They're more looking at things like

1:39 New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, that kind of thing.

1:44 But in that publication,

1:46 they had some definitions that I thought fit very well with the late Bronze Age

1:52 collapse and its aftermath.

1:54 And what they say is that when you have such an event,

1:59 there are basically three things you can do.

2:03 You can either just try to survive until tomorrow,

2:06 which basically means that you're coping.

2:08 You're trying to make it until the sun comes up again.

2:12 But you could also do a little bit more.

2:15 You could adapt.

2:16 You could be looking to next week or next

2:20 month and just saying a little bit longer term survival.

2:24 So coping is just tomorrow.

2:26 Adapting is a little bit further out.

2:29 But they also said there's a third thing.

2:32 If you were to say,

2:34 this can never happen again.

2:36 We can't let New Orleans be flooded by the next hurricane.

2:42 We have to transform.

2:43 We have to do something about it.

2:46 They said that's the top of the heap,

2:49 basically.

2:49 Yeah, you can cope.

2:51 Yeah, you can adapt.

2:53 If you transform, that's now where we're

2:56 talking.

2:56 And so I think that we can take a look

3:00 at the G8 that was affected by the collapse and

3:03 ask how well did each of them do?

3:07 Did they simply cope?

3:08 Did they adapt?

3:10 Or did they go the extra

3:12 mile and transform?

3:14 Or did they do none of the above and they disappeared?

3:19 So I think we can

3:21 actually rank them and then try to ask,

3:24 although this gets very difficult, try to ask what made

3:28 each of them resilient or not?

3:31 What made them be able to transform, cope, adapt or not?

3:35 That's where it gets down into the nitty gritty

3:38 and the weeds and it's kind of a,

3:41 yeah, we might say that,

3:42 but it's going to be hypothetical.

3:45 But I think it's worth exploring because again, I think

3:48 that's where we have lessons that might still be viable for us today.

3:53 One of the things that we see

3:55 in the aftermath of the collapse is basically a new world order.

4:00 As each of the societies

4:02 does or does not deal well in the aftermath,

4:06 we can see new political systems popping up,

4:10 for example.

4:11 We can see new economic systems as they try and either grow back up from the

4:18 ground like the Mycenaeans had to do and again,

4:22 we don't have Mycenaean society after about 1050

4:25 BC.

4:26 We now have the Greeks going back to ground

4:29 zero and trying to build everything back up.

4:33 In other places,

4:34 the huge empires that had been around the Hittites, the Egyptians, Assyrians,

4:40 Babylonians, some of them go away and are replaced by kind of a new world order.

4:47 The Hittites, for example, up in Anatolia,

4:51 they're replaced by smaller city-states and kingdoms.

4:54 We've got some survivors whom we call the Neo-Hittites,

4:58 the new Hittites in North Syria, but we've also got new

5:03 groups, the Eartians,

5:04 over in the eastern half of Turkey and the Frigens over in the western

5:10 half of Turkey.

5:12 They come on in and establish new, albeit smaller, kingdoms in the Iron Age.

5:19 I think we see this especially though,

5:22 down in the southern Levant, the area that today would

5:26 be Israel, Palestinian territories, Jordan, part of Lebanon,

5:32 because where we had the Canaanites

5:36 in the Bronze Age and the Egyptian overlords,

5:40 if you will, because the Egyptians basically ruled

5:44 that area as part of their kingdom or empire,

5:47 that all goes away at the end of the Late Bronze Age

5:51 and it's replaced with much smaller city-states and kingdoms,

5:57 which will sound familiar because

6:00 we know them from the Hebrew Bible.

6:03 We now have, after the collapse in the Iron Age,

6:07 we now have the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah.

6:12 We've got the kingdom

6:14 of Edom, the kingdom of Moab, the kingdom of Ammon.

6:18 All of these areas that we know from the

6:21 biblical stories,

6:22 they come into existence during these 400 years after the collapse,

6:29 they are a reaction to what had just happened.

6:34 And in fact, some scholars have suggested that maybe

6:39 that's more than natural order of things,

6:42 to have smaller city-states and smaller kingdoms, and that

6:46 the empires of the Late Bronze Age were,

6:49 as one person has put it, a failed experiment, that they

6:54 tried and it didn't work all that well.

6:57 I think I would disagree with that.

6:59 I mean, that system

7:01 survived for 500 years.

7:03 I think that was pretty good, but it has no place now in the aftermath

7:10 and we get all of these smaller city-states that are now flourishing.

7:15 On the other hand, again,

7:18 it's not all that cut and dried because

7:21 what about the Assyrians and the Babylonians over

7:24 in Mesopotamia?

7:25 They're still there.

7:27 They're now called the Neo-Assurians and the Neo-Babylonians,

7:32 the new ones, but they have survived the collapse.

7:37 Pretty much intact.

7:39 They didn't do as well as the

7:42 Phoenicians and the Cypriots, who I would give a gold star rating to,

7:47 number one in my book,

7:49 but I would give the Assyrians and Babylonians number two.

7:53 They adapted.

7:54 They almost kind of sort

7:56 of transformed, but at least adapted.

7:58 They've still got their government.

8:00 They've still got writing.

8:02 They're still writing.

8:03 They've still got their religion.

8:05 They've still got the king

8:07 and all the government and all that.

8:09 Still got the economy.

8:11 It's just things have changed slightly.

8:13 And in fact, one of the things I think changed and I

8:17 explore this in the sequel after 1177 basically,

8:20 is that they've lost their trading partners

8:24 because that globalized network has broken down

8:28 and some of the people with whom they

8:30 had been interacting are now basically gone.

8:33 Like they can't interact with the Hittites anymore because they're not there.

8:38 There's no big Hittite king.

8:40 Instead,

8:40 what the Neo-Assurians do after it took them a little while to come back also,

8:46 they do have drought there for a while,

8:49 but when they bounce back by the 10th and certainly by the

8:53 9th century BC, like halfway through the Iron Age,

8:57 the Neo-Assurians take over pretty much the entire

9:00 ancient Near East.

9:01 Basically all the areas they had been trading with and had commercial

9:07 and diplomatic and marital ties back in the late Bronze Age,

9:12 they've now just conquered.

9:14 It's now part of the Neo-Assurian Empire that stretches all

9:18 the way to the Mediterranean Sea and down to Egypt

9:21 in fact at one point.

9:23 So we see things change and we do now see empires growing again, but for a

9:31 different reason.

9:32 The Neo-Assurians are now taking what they need rather than trading for it.

9:38 This is when we also begin to see the rise and fall of civilizations.

9:44 I mean in Hamilton it talks about

9:47 oceans, rise, empires, fall.

9:49 That's basically what we've got here because yes, the Neo-Assurians rise

9:54 up and they're dominant for a while,

9:57 but then they go down and collapse and the Neo-Babylonians take

10:02 over for a while and then they collapse in

10:05 turn and we're often running with the Persians and

10:08 then the Greeks and then the Romans and follow us up until today.

10:13 But that's in part why I would

10:16 again argue that the collapse of the late Bronze

10:20 Age is so important and what happened after the

10:24 collapse of the Bronze Age is perhaps even more

10:27 important because it shows what happens if you are

10:31 or not resilient,

10:33 but it also set us on the path for what we've got today in the Western world.

10:41 That is where everything comes from that we've got.

10:44 I mean, yes, you can look back to Mesopotamia

10:48 and Egypt and all that for some of the things that we've still got today,

10:52 but out of the collapse

10:54 of the late Bronze Age is going to come Greece,

10:57 archaic and classical Greece with the invention of

11:00 democracy and so on.

11:02 So we're going to be on a, I wouldn't call it a straight path, but we can trace

11:07 ourselves back to what happened 3,000 years ago to what we've got today.

11:14 If we're ranking these

11:16 societies as to how well they did in the aftermath of the collapse,

11:20 I would put the Cypriots and the

11:22 Phoenicians in the top category.

11:24 They not only transform, but they're actually anti-fragile.

11:29 Now, this is a phrase that Nicholas Nussim Taeleb has used.

11:32 In fact, it's the title of one of his

11:35 books.

11:35 And what he says is that anti-fragile is

11:39 something that actually flourishes in an age of

11:42 chaos.

11:43 It takes advantage of the chaos.

11:45 So one might actually say, you know, collapse is not

11:50 always terrible for everyone.

11:52 For some people, it's an opportunity.

11:55 And in this particular case,

11:57 for example, we see the Phoenicians from Central Canaan.

12:01 They spread out across the Mediterranean.

12:04 One of my colleagues has called it a Phoenician Lake.

12:07 They take advantage of the fact that Ugarit

12:10 has been destroyed and that the navies of some of the others,

12:14 like the Hittites and the Egyptians,

12:17 have either been destroyed or are not what they once were.

12:20 So I would say both the Cypriots and

12:23 the Phoenicians are actually anti-fragile.

12:25 They are flourishing in this age of chaos.

12:29 They do better than anybody else.

12:31 So I put them up in my top category.

12:34 The Assyrians and the Babylonians,

12:36 they adapt,

12:37 but they don't really transform that much because they don't need to.

12:41 They simply carry on as they were, but they are better than the Egyptians.

12:47 For example, I would put the Egyptians

12:50 in my category three.

12:52 They are adapting a little bit, but more they're just kind of coping,

12:58 if you will.

12:59 They don't go down.

13:00 They don't disappear.

13:01 And in fact, that was one thing that I

13:05 kind of changed from book one to book two and the end of book one.

13:09 I was like, "Ooh,

13:10 Egypt is the only one that really survived." And then book two,

13:13 I'm a bit more nuanced.

13:15 And like, no, actually there are others that survived better than Egypt.

13:19 And I would put Egypt in the middle

13:22 category three.

13:23 They didn't do wonderfully, but they didn't do terribly.

13:27 They're still there, but they have now withdrawn a bit from

13:31 the international world because they are having

13:34 problems back home, if I can put it that way.

13:38 So this is into the third intermediate period,

13:42 as Egyptologists call it.

13:44 And at one point, we've got not just one, not just two, but three,

13:50 and sometimes even four,

13:52 people all saying that they are the pharaoh of Egypt at the same time,

13:59 but in different areas of Egypt.

14:02 Now, to my mind, that's not a good system.

14:05 Egypt is supposed to

14:07 be one king, one ruler, one country.

14:10 And we look back to the new kingdom period, right?

14:13 King Tut, Akhenaten, Amunhotep III.

14:15 And so in comparison to the way it had been in what I would say is

14:22 the glory days of the 14th and 13th centuries,

14:26 Egypt in the 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th centuries is

14:30 not even really comparable.

14:32 But it's not terrible.

14:34 And we do have some highlights.

14:36 So for example, there's one guy Pusenes, who is known as the Silver Pharaoh.

14:43 His tomb was found in 1939,

14:46 right before World War II.

14:47 If it had been found at any other time, it would have made worldwide

14:51 headlines because it's, I believe,

14:54 the second wealthiest tomb in Egypt just behind King Tut's.

15:00 But most of the stuff in the tomb is silver rather than gold.

15:04 So that's kind of a high point.

15:06 We also have one of the pharaohs,

15:09 a guy named Sheshank, Shishak of the Bible, probably.

15:13 He's Libyan.

15:14 He's the founder of the 22nd dynasty.

15:16 And he actually tries to recreate the good old days,

15:20 leaves us an inscription where he went up

15:24 to Israel and Judah and campaigned up there.

15:28 And may have even conquered, for example, Maggito,

15:31 where we find an inscription with his cartouche up

15:34 there.

15:35 So it's not terrible in Egypt, but it's not like it used to be.

15:40 One Egyptologist said to me,

15:42 actually, when I gave a lecture there,

15:44 that that's not a fair comparison, that it's like apples and

15:47 oranges.

15:47 And you can't compare third intermediate period to the new kingdom period.

15:52 And I'm like, well, maybe not,

15:54 but I'm comparing the iron aids to the Bronze Age in all the other societies.

16:00 So I do think it's a fair comparison.

16:03 But so it turned out what I said to them is,

16:08 these categories I'm putting the societies in, ranking them one, two, three.

16:13 I said, it's just my gut feeling based on everything that I've studied.

16:18 But I'm not the be-all and end-all here,

16:22 you want to present data that would persuade me to move them up or down.

16:27 I'm quite happy to do

16:28 that.

16:28 So I will say now that you could put Egypt

16:32 up in category two with the Syria and Babylon,

16:35 and I'd still be able to sleep at night.

16:38 But I'd also be quite happy to put them down into category

16:41 four where they were like with the Mycenaeans and Minoans.

16:45 So it's all fluid.

16:46 And that's kind of

16:48 the beauty of archaeology in ancient history is we put out a hypothesis,

16:52 and then we try and test it,

16:54 and then we go and excavate and find something

16:57 completely new next week that makes us rearrange

17:00 it.

17:00 And that's all good.

17:02 It's called science.

17:03 That's how we advance.

17:04 That's how we progress.

17:06 But for now, I'm going to keep Egypt in category three.

17:09 Category four, as I've just mentioned,

17:11 is Minoans and Mycenaeans, they are just barely coping.

17:16 They're not adapting.

17:17 They're just coping.

17:19 We see all the big palaces in mainland Greece.

17:23 And even on Crete, for that matter, Mycenaeans,

17:27 Pylos, or Comenos, Knoosos,

17:31 they either are burned, invaded, internal rebellion, earthquake,

17:39 you name it, they're all basically abandoned.

17:42 And with them goes the writing system.

17:45 Linear B, which we now know, is an early form of Greek.

17:50 That ceases to be used by about 1050 BC,

17:54 because it was only being used by the

17:57 scribes in the palaces to create inventories.

18:00 What came into the palace, what went out of the palace?

18:04 Though surprisingly, they never mentioned overseas.

18:07 The linear B never mentions contacts with Egypt or the Hidsites, whatever.

18:11 It's a big problem,

18:13 because I know from the archaeology that they are in contact.

18:17 At any rate, what we would have called

18:19 the Mycenaeans and Minoans, it comes crashing down.

18:23 And as I've mentioned, they had to rebuild

18:26 from the ground up.

18:28 They do it successfully, but it takes quite a while.

18:31 And that's why I end after

18:33 1177 BC with 776 BC, which is the first Olympics.

18:39 And by that point, everything in Greece is back up

18:44 and running,

18:45 and we're very quickly going to get them using the new Greek alphabet.

18:50 We're going to get Homer, we're going to get Hesiod,

18:53 we'll get Sappho, we'll get the Archaic poets and Greece is

18:57 off to the races.

18:59 But it has taken 400 years.

19:01 So I put them in my category four, because they did

19:06 just about as badly as you could possibly do, and still survive.

19:11 And then the last category,

19:13 that's the Hittites.

19:14 Don't be a Hittite.

19:15 The Hittites do not do well at all.

19:17 In part, because they've already got internal problems.

19:21 We know that there was a schism in the royal family, and

19:25 that one part moved.

19:27 We also know that the Hittite capital city, Hatusas, was actually already

19:32 abandoned before the end came,

19:35 and that it was only partially destroyed afterward, and probably

19:40 from people that otherwise had nothing to do with anything,

19:43 the Kashka from the Northwest that had

19:46 already destroyed Hatusas a couple hundred years earlier, they came back.

19:50 So I think the Hittites

19:53 probably did it to themselves anyway,

19:55 though it certainly didn't hurt that the Sea Peoples were

19:59 on the shores of Anatolia,

20:01 and they would have been a primary example of the domino effect,

20:07 and remember that the Hittites and Ugarit going down

20:10 at the same time may have been what caused

20:14 the collapse of absolutely everything.

20:15 So I put the Hittites down there.

20:18 I also put the Canaanites

20:20 in southern Canaan into that lowest category,

20:23 because we really don't see them again after the

20:27 collapse of the Late Bronze Age.

20:29 We do not refer to the Canaanites in the Iron Age by that name.

20:35 We now call them by other names,

20:38 the Judahites, the Israelites, the Ammonites, the Moabites,

20:41 the Edomites.

20:42 And so I'm of two minds.

20:46 Either they were wiped out, or they assimilated.

20:50 One of the two, and we've got both stories in the Hebrew Bible.

20:54 Look at the book of Judges versus the book

20:56 of Joshua, is it a genocide or is it a simulation?

21:00 Either way, I don't think the Canaanites in

21:03 southern Levant coped or adapted or transformed or anything like that.

21:08 And so I put them down

21:10 in my bottom category.

21:12 On the other hand, if you were to argue, as some of my colleagues have done,

21:17 that the Edomites, the Israelites,

21:19 the Ammonites and all those guys are actually Canaanites who

21:24 have transformed, then I would say, "Okay, in that case,

21:27 this should be up in category two." Again,

21:30 it's all flexible.

21:31 I only put this out as a suggestion for what we might think about doing.

21:36 And I fully expect that my suggestions hopefully

21:40 will start the discussions rather than end it.

21:44 I think that the new discoveries that we're making every day,

21:48 every week, every month,

21:49 every year, especially in biblical archaeology,

21:52 are going to get us to alter things just like

21:56 we've altered.

21:57 Now what we think caused the late Bronze

22:00 Age collapse will be able to fine-tune how

22:04 everybody did in the aftermath.

22:06 But I wanted to start the discussions.

22:09 And I think they're pretty

22:12 interesting discussions, which again,

22:14 have some bearing on us today when we are grappling with

22:20 some of the same things that brought down the

22:23 late Bronze Age network and that the survivors

22:27 had to deal with in the aftermath.

22:29 When you look around today, we've got the same things here.

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