The Bronze Age Collapse (approximately 1200 B.C.E.)

0:03 Some time around the year 1200 B.C.E., human civilization did an oopsie.

0:09 Within the short span one generation,

0:12 the majority of Earth's most technologically

0:15 advanced civilizations faced an existential crisis.

0:19 Nearly all of them failed the test.

0:21 The resulting collapse was a turning point in human history,

0:25 similar in scope to the collapse of the Roman Empire.

0:29 The old world died, and the Bronze Age died with it.

0:41 The odd thing is that we barely understand why this happened.

0:45 There are a bunch of theories, but nothing definitive.

0:48 We'll get into that in a moment, but first, an introduction.

0:54 When the Bronze Age began in Western Asia,

0:56 it brought to an end an old world of tiny

0:59 city-states ruled by an oppressive class of totalitarian priests.

1:04 The new world that came after was one full of possibilities.

1:09 Vast, sweeping empires grew up seemingly out of nowhere.

1:14 New religions, new systems of government, new cultures,

1:17 new technology, all at once, all at a breakneck pace.

1:21 Revolutions in farming lead to massive food

1:24 surpluses which in turn allowed for these huge, bustling, multicultural cities.

1:30 These new cities participated in dynamic system of international trade,

1:35 totally unlike the cloistered city-states that preceded them.

1:43 By the Late Bronze Age, the big players were Egypt,

1:47 Cyprus, the Mycenaeans, the Hittite Empire, Assyria, and Babylonia.

1:52 Each of these states, without exception,

1:55 faced an existential crisis around the year 1200 B.C.E.

2:00 Within a generation, most of them were gone.

2:04 Here's what we know.

2:05 Some time around the beginning of the 12th century, the King of Ugarit,

2:09 a city in the Hittite Empire, wrote a letter to the King of Cyprus.

2:14 "My father, now the ships of the enemy have come.

2:19 They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land.

2:24 Doesn't my father know that all

2:26 of my infantry and chariots are stationed in Khatte,

2:29 and that all of my ships are stationed in the land

2:32 of Lukka?" Khatte was another name for the Hittite capital,

2:35 several hundred kilometers inland.

2:37 Lukka was several hundred kilometers to the west, on the Aegean coast.

2:41 "They have not arrived back yet, so the land is thus prostrate." Defenseless.

2:48 "May my father be aware of this matter.

2:51 Now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us.

2:56 Now if other ships of the enemy turn up, send me a report somehow,

3:01 so that I will know." The Hittites

3:03 promised to send King of Ugarit reinforcements, but it was too late.

3:08 The last known letter to leave Ugarit reads, "when your messenger arrived,

3:13 the army was humiliated and the city was sacked.

3:16 Our food in the threshing floors was burnt,

3:19 and the vineyards were also destroyed.

3:21 Our city is sacked.

3:23 May you know it!

3:24 May you know it!" The King of Cyprus was

3:32 well aware of what was happening on the mainland.

3:34 But he had problems of his own.

3:37 Cyprus was under attack at around the same time.

3:40 Several larger cities, especially on the western coast, were burned,

3:43 and many of the smaller cities further inland were simply abandoned.

3:48 Wealthy residents buried their valuables,

3:50 with plans to return once the crisis had blown over.

3:54 They never returned.

4:00 Things were different in Greece.

4:02 For the last hundred years,

4:04 the Mycenaeans had been plagued by internal instability.

4:07 There are signs of destruction everywhere.

4:10 The ruins of these cities leave evidence

4:13 of massive fires intermixed with arrowheads and weapons,

4:16 which paints a pretty clear picture of a series

4:19 of battles in which the defenders were ultimately defeated.

4:23 Other cities leave evidence of smaller fires confined solely

4:27 to the palace structures in the center of the cities.

4:30 This indicates some kind of popular

4:32 uprising in which local kings were overthrown,

4:35 not just in one city by in many cities.

4:38 Still, other cities show signs of being abandoned,

4:41 either because of famine or natural disaster or both.

4:44 On the whole, the picture is fuzzy,

4:48 but it's fair to say that there was chaos in Greece.

4:55 It was even worse in Anatolia, the homeland of the Hittites.

5:00 Archeological evidence suggests that every major city in Anatolia

5:03 may have been at least partially destroyed during this period.

5:08 This was especially true up and down the coast.

5:10 In fact, we now know that the city of Troy was destroyed at this time.

5:15 Recent archeological digs there have found arrowheads still

5:18 lodged in the ruined walls of the city, and evidence of a fire.

5:24 Further inland, things get a little more mysterious.

5:27 The Hittite capital, which only a few years earlier was being

5:30 protected by the the King of Ugarit's army, was largely abandoned.

5:34 It would later be stormed and burned just like all the others.

5:43 For a long time this abrupt region-wide collapse was inexplicable.

5:48 Historians knew that it happened,

5:50 but they couldn't tell you how or why it happened.

5:53 But in the second half of the 19th century,

5:57 Egyptian archeological discoveries provided a hair-raising

6:00 and revolutionary explanation for this mysterious collapse.

6:06 This inscription was discovered in an Egyptian temple in Medinet Habu.

6:11 It changed our understanding of the Late Bronze Age forever.

6:16 Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses III describes several waves of foreign invaders arriving

6:21 on the shores of Egypt over the course of 30 years.

6:26 The inscription at Medinet Habu reads:

6:29 "the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands.

6:33 All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray.

6:38 No land could stand before their arms."[...]

6:41 "They were coming forward toward Egypt,

6:44 while the flame was prepared before them."[...] "They laid their hands

6:48 on the land as far as the circuit of the earth,

6:51 their hearts confident and trusting:

6:54 'Our plans will succeed!'" The Egyptians had

6:58 some guesses as to who these invaders were, but they couldn't be certain.

7:02 Historians have simply taken to calling them the Sea Peoples.

7:07 We now think that the Sea Peoples were

7:09 loose coalition of groups from all across the Mediterranean.

7:13 We can't be 100% sure of this, but we can

7:15 say with some confidence that most of them were from Sicily,

7:19 Sardinia, Crete, and the Aegean coast.

7:21 Maybe some other places too.

7:23 Some wore feathered headdresses,

7:26 while others wore horned helmets or simple leather caps.

7:31 Some wore kilts, while others wore tunics.

7:34 Some went into battle wearing full body-armour, while others fought shirtless.

7:40 What united these groups was their reason for coming.

7:44 This was a migration.

7:46 We know that they came on boats and on wagons

7:49 with their families and all of their worldly possessions.

7:53 What brought them here is another question that we'll get into later.

7:58 By the time the Sea Peoples finally arrived down in Egypt,

8:02 virtually every other Bronze Age civilization had been overrun.

8:06 The Mycenaeans in Greece, the Hittites in Anatolia,

8:09 Canaan in the Levant, Cyprus in Cyprus, all gone.

8:14 Some states further inland were less affected by the invasions,

8:17 but they were so weakened by the collapse

8:20 of their neighbours that their days were numbered as well.

8:23 When the Sea Peoples began their migration,

8:25 they couldn't have imagined that it would have been this successful.

8:29 All the way up until Egypt, every attempt to resist them failed.

8:34 Why?

8:35 In order to understand this, we need to talk about Bronze Age warfare.

8:42 Chariots.

8:45 Chariots chariots chariots.

8:47 Bronze Age warfare in Western Asia was all about chariots.

8:52 In the Early Bronze Age they were primarily used for transportation,

8:55 but by the Intermediate Bronze Age the militaries of every major state

9:00 in the region were completely designed around the use of the chariot.

9:04 A chariot in this period usually consisted of a team

9:07 of two horses pulling a team of two humans, one driver and one archer.

9:13 The humans, I mean.

9:15 The horses and the driver were trained for speed and maneuverability,

9:18 and at full speed could move roughly twice as fast as a human could run.

9:23 The archer wielded a composite bow.

9:26 Not as clumsy or random as a regular bow,

9:29 it was smaller and lighter with better accuracy, range, and firepower.

9:34 It was a state-of-the-art piece of technology.

9:37 In this period it could punch through 3 inches (7.62 cm) of metal.

9:41 So a full chariot team had everyone else beat when it came to speed,

9:47 range, and firepower.

9:49 This is a bit of a tangent but it's said

9:52 that the moment the HMS Dreadnought touched water in the year 1906,

9:56 every other ship in the ocean became obsolete.

9:59 The HMS Dreadnought was the best in the world when it came to speed,

10:04 range, and firepower,

10:05 which meant that it could just sit back and pick off enemy ships at a distance,

10:09 and then outrun anybody who came too close.

10:13 Like the Dreadnought, Bronze Age chariots had speed, range, and firepower.

10:18 Like the Dreadnought,

10:19 they could just sit back and pick off enemies at a distance.

10:22 Like the Dreadnought, they could outrun anybody who came too close.

10:26 An experienced group of chariots were capable

10:29 of defeating an army 10 times its size.

10:33 This revolutionized Bronze Age warfare.

10:36 But they were expensive as hell.

10:39 Horses had to be specifically bred and trained, which cost a small fortune.

10:43 The equipment was all hand-crafted by artisans,

10:46 and cost at least twice as much as the horses did.

10:50 The loss of a single chariot was catastrophic,

10:54 and so chariots went into battle with thousands

10:57 of inexpensive spearmen and archers deployed in a defensive line.

11:01 The infantry could protect friendly chariots that needed to repair or regroup,

11:07 or they could rush forward and destroy enemy chariots

11:10 that were damaged or caught in a bad position.

11:15 As we get into the Late Bronze Age,

11:17 the region was in the midst of a chariot arms race.

11:21 And then the Sea Peoples came.

11:29 Unlike the Bronze Age civilizations of Western Asia,

11:32 the Sea Peoples fought on foot.

11:35 Instead of using spearmen and archers

11:37 to form a defensive shield for their chariots,

11:39 the Sea Peoples wielded longswords and javelins,

11:43 and they fought with an unmatched aggression.

11:46 I've seen the Sea Peoples described as skirmishers,

11:49 but I don't think that quite covers it.

11:51 A much better word that I've seen

11:53 used is "runners." The Sea Peoples were runners.

11:56 They were highly mobile,

11:58 and weren't locked down into tight little groups like the spearmen were.

12:03 Instead, their way of fighting was to explode outwards in unexpected bursts.

12:08 This fact made the Sea Peoples chariot-killers.

12:13 The whole reasons chariots were effective was

12:15 that they could outrun a person on foot.

12:17 But was the same true of 10 people?

12:20 100 people?

12:21 What if they were coming at them from different directions?

12:24 What if they got cut off from the main group?

12:27 Chariots couldn't exactly turn on a dime,

12:29 so it only took 1 wrong move for the Sea

12:32 Peoples runners to overwhelm and destroy a chariot.

12:35 And like I said, the loss of a single chariot was catastrophic.

12:40 The defensive line of spearmen and archers

12:42 were supposed to protect against something like

12:45 this, but in practice the highly mobile Sea Peoples

12:48 were able to get behind their lines quite easily.

12:51 As a response to these new tactics, defensive lines grew and grew and grew.

12:57 It appears that by the end of this period,

13:00 the armies facing off against the Sea Peoples were

13:03 ten times larger than they were at the beginning.

13:10 As I said before, towards the end of this period

13:13 Egypt was pretty much the last state standing.

13:16 Virtually all of its neighbours had fallen to the Sea Peoples.

13:20 The inscription at Medinet Habu depicts

13:22 the final battle against the Sea Peoples, at the mouth of the Nile.

13:27 Look at how the inscription emphasizes how large the Egyptian army had become.

13:32 Here's a row of spearmen, and then a row of archers,

13:36 and here's the Pharaoh Ramses III personally leading the battle,

13:39 standing on the bodies of his enemies.

13:41 And then of course here's the mighty chariot, prominently displayed,

13:45 but not playing a decisive role in the battle.

13:49 Clearly the bulk of the fighting was among the spearmen and archers.

13:55 In writing we are told that the Egyptians protected the mouth

13:58 of the Nile by making a wall out of ships, each loaded with archers.

14:03 We're also told that every spearman in Egypt was in position

14:07 and waiting for the Sea Peoples to landed on shore.

14:12 The inscription at Medinet Habu tells us the result of the battle.

14:17 Here are some Sea Peoples taken captive and being lead away.

14:21 Here is some unspeakable carnage.

14:25 Of course this is a piece of Egyptian propaganda,

14:27 but we have no reason to doubt that this was the result.

14:32 After so many incredible successes,

14:35 the Sea Peoples were finally defeated in Egypt.

14:39 But even in victory, Egypt suffered.

14:42 From this moment forward Egypt was a second-rate power,

14:46 and even after a thousand years it had not yet fully recovered.

14:52 The fact that Egypt was so badly damaged

14:55 by the collapse of international trade is a clue.

14:59 There has to be more to the story than the Sea Peoples.

15:07 Scholars have been pulling at this thread for the last few decades,

15:10 and the evidence is convincing.

15:12 Bronze Age civilizations needed bronze.

15:16 Obviously.

15:17 Without a constant supply,

15:19 many of their cutting-edge technologies began to deteriorate.

15:22 Bronze is made by combining 9 parts copper with 1 part tin.

15:27 Copper is a relatively common metal, but it's difficult to mine.

15:31 Most of these Bronze Age civilizations ran their own small mining operations,

15:34 but the real action was in Cyprus.

15:37 Cyprus was absolutely swimming in copper, and mining it was dead easy.

15:44 This transformed the island into a fabulously

15:48 wealthy hub of international trade.

15:51 That brings us to tin.

15:53 Tin is funny, because it's actually extremely rare,

15:56 and it's not evenly distributed across the Earth.

16:00 There was a tiny tin mine in Anatolia, controlled by the Hittites,

16:03 but it didn't produce nearly enough to supply the entire region.

16:08 After that, there weren't that many options.

16:09 The next closest major source was all the way over in modern Afghanistan,

16:14 more than 3,000 kilometers away.

16:16 You can just imagine how expensive and dangerous it was

16:20 to haul tin all the way from Afghanistan to Cyprus.

16:24 There were alternative sources, but it was tough.

16:28 There was a smaller mine in Italy,

16:30 and another small mine in Spain, but these alone couldn't meet demand.

16:34 There wasn't another deposit on the scale of the Afghanistan mine until

16:38 you get all the way to Cornwall on the Island of Britain.

16:42 It might shock you to learn that people actually made this trip.

16:46 It was a risky voyage, but if you made it back it was worth it.

16:50 So as you can see, any disruption in this supply chain meant

16:54 that it was no longer possible for Bronze Age civilizations to produce bronze.

17:00 Which by very definition was a problem.

17:03 So the argument goes that the Sea Peoples attacks disrupted international trade,

17:08 slowed down the production of bronze, and weakened every state in the region.

17:13 It was a vicious cycle.

17:15 More attacks meant less trade.

17:17 Less trade made everybody even more vulnerable to additional attacks.

17:22 As the Bronze Age states collapsed, the situation grew more and more dire.

17:28 But there might have been more to this story.

17:31 Even if you put the whole international trade angle to the side,

17:35 this entire region may have been much weaker than it seemed.

17:39 According to experts, the migration of the Sea Peoples coincided with a 50-year

17:44 period where Western Asia was riddled with massive earthquakes.

17:48 I'm no scientist, but that seems bad.

17:52 It's possible that these earthquakes were

17:55 absolutely wrecking the economy in the region.

17:59 Some of the cities that were abandoned for mysterious reasons

18:02 may have in fact been abandoned after a seismic event.

18:06 There's at least some evidence of earthquakes destroying cities in Greece,

18:10 Anatolia, the Levant, and Cyprus.

18:13 Greece seems to have got the worst of it.

18:15 Egypt got off easy, which is an interesting fact

18:18 considering that they were the only major state left standing.

18:22 Maybe the earthquakes played a role.

18:29 So what brought the Sea Peoples here?

18:32 For a long time, scholars guessed that some kind of famine

18:37 in northern Europe caused a domino effect of southward migrations,

18:41 culminating with the Sea Peoples packing

18:44 up and fleeing across the Mediterranean Sea.

18:47 This always made sense on paper,

18:50 but there was very little evidence to support this theory.

18:53 Until now.

18:55 We now know that around this time

18:57 there was some kind of environmental emergency.

19:00 It turns out that, as predicted,

19:02 northern Europe was badly affected by this, which

19:05 would have caused that domino effect.

19:09 But the surprising thing is that the effects

19:12 were even more severe in the eastern Mediterranean.

19:15 We now have ancient pollen samples from northern Syria,

19:19 which seem to point towards a "dry event" lasting for 300 years,

19:24 beginning just before the Bronze Age Collapse.

19:27 Pollen samples have also been taken from Cyprus, where things were even worse.

19:33 These samples indicate that environmental changes were so severe in Cyprus

19:37 that there was no longer enough

19:40 rainfall to sustain even basic agricultural activity.

19:44 This would have been catastrophic.

19:45 It may explain why some of the cities

19:48 were abandoned before the Sea Peoples came.

19:51 Similar things have been found in the Levant, Anatolia, and Greece.

19:55 In fact, in Greece there's evidence that over hundreds of years,

19:58 plants that were evolving to survive a desert-like environment.

20:05 Some of the letters we find in the city of Ugarit support this finding.

20:09 Apparently during one of the invasions there

20:12 were crop failures across the entire Hittite Empire.

20:15 One letter to from the Hittite King to the King

20:18 of Ugarit makes an urgent request for grain,

20:20 ending with "it is a matter of life and death!"

20:25 There's another letter from the nearby city of Emar,

20:27 written during one of the later invasions.

20:30 It reads, "there is famine in [our] house; we will all die of hunger.

20:36 If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger.

20:41 You will not see a living soul from your land."

20:48 If these reports of an environmental emergency are true, and we think they are,

20:53 the Bronze Age civilizations may have been in a state

20:58 of crisis before the Sea Peoples even arrived.

21:03 The best current analysis of the Bronze Age Collapse

21:06 has landed on something called the Systems Collapse Theory.

21:10 According to the Systems Collapse Theory,

21:12 the arrival of the Sea Peoples was actually a medium level threat.

21:17 Under normal circumstances,

21:18 the Bronze Age civilizations should have been able to fight them off.

21:23 But they weren't living under normal circumstances.

21:26 Changes to the climate had resulted in widespread famine across the region.

21:31 This resulted in the depopulation of key cities.

21:34 The famine and the depopulation then lead to internal instability,

21:38 where some local populations rose up and overthrew their ruling classes.

21:44 We have evidence that this happened with some frequency over this period,

21:48 especially in Greece.

21:49 These factors and the Sea Peoples invasions

21:52 caused a collapse in the international trade system,

21:56 which just made everything all the worse.

21:58 Oh yeah, and the region was absolutely riddled with earthquakes.

22:04 The Bronze Age civilizations in Western Asia were dealing with 5 crises at once,

22:09 with each crisis creating a multiplier effect for all the other ones.

22:14 And then the Sea Peoples came.

22:19 We still don't fully understand how or why the Bronze Age abruptly ended,

22:24 and perhaps we never will, but the Systems Collapse Theory is pretty good.

22:29 One thing that I will point out though is that for all

22:32 over its clever work collecting pollen samples and studying ancient seismology,

22:36 the Systems Collapse Theory does slightly de-emphasize

22:39 the destruction wrought upon the Bronze Age civilizations.

22:44 The fact that countless cities were destroyed is undeniable.

22:49 We have the physical evidence.

22:51 The Systems Collapse Theory argues that less of these were

22:55 destroyed by the Sea Peoples than originally thought.

22:58 And this might be right!

22:59 We have all that evidence of environmental changes and earthquakes.

23:03 But we don't know for sure.

23:05 Scholarship in this area is ongoing.

23:08 There have been significant breakthroughs just within the last 10 years.

23:13 We may see some definitive answers in our lifetimes.

23:17 But for now, we don't know.

23:18 We see the aftermath of the Bronze Age collapse,

23:21 but when it comes to the root cause, all we have are theories.

23:35 Upon closer examination, I think these guys are still alive,

23:43 and I think they're licking somebody's foot.

23:49 Nasty!