1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed | Eric Cline

Good evening, my name is Alexander Oz. The director has been here for a long time, and as you know, at the beginning of most of these talks we do what's called the long short film, a short film that somehow exemplifies long-term thinking. Tonight's comes from some. Members who are here in the room, where do you wave your hands to get out? They're at the back of the room, thank you, and it's actually a good point to remind everyone that finding these long shorts is pretty difficult, so if you have any good candidates, send them to us or create some of your own like these guys did, which are really great and I think tonight's long short film is interesting.

I mean, we're definitely going to go much further in the past. So tonight's long short is nothing more than part of the fragility of

civilization

s, it comes from their interconnectedness and that is also one of the things that really makes

civilization

robust, so I think tonight's longshoreman shows a little of each of those enjoyments. Good evening, this is Stuart Brand from the base of the long now, as you know, the long now that we define as the next 10,000 years for which we are building a clock in the last 10,000 years and we are still figuring out what happened, part of the idea All of that is kind of calibrating how we think about time and history in eternity, which really has nothing to do with this forever, it's not part of this history, but time has size and we're pretty good. with the minutes and the hours and the kinds of things that we saw in In the movie here we're still figuring out decades, centuries, millennia, so half a century ago, 5,000 years ago, was the beginning of the Bronze Age, we started to have tools and bronze weapons and the kind of society that can use those things and that went on for 2000 years and then it ended much more suddenly than it began and we have a speaker who knows more about it than anyone Eric Cline thank you very much for having me here thanks to all to come I guess they're out there, it's hard for me to see, but what I'd like to do tonight in the next hour is take them back to 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, to the time that is my favorite period in ancient history, Late Bronze Age, 1700 to 1200 BC If I could be reincarnated in reverse, that is the period I would like to live in.

I don't think I would survive more than 48 hours, but it would be a wonderful 48 hours. Now this is the period where we have what I would call the g8 of the ancient world and I'm cheating a little bit because to do that I have to combine the Minoans and the Mycenaeans of Greece into one entity but we have them on the edge On the screen there we also have the Hittites. in purple here in Turkey, Mitanni is in red, the Assyrians and Babylonians and they are in a kind of mustard yellow and then the Egyptians are the orange that goes up the Nile and reaches Canaan, we also have Cypriots and other people, now all these people.

They are interacting in the time period that we are going to talk about and I dare say that you actually already know more about that time period than you might suspect, so, for example, this is the time that Hatshepsut lives, the famous pharaoh, how many people do they have? heard of her, okay, up Moses, the third, one of the greatest military conquerors, living at that time, my son, Amenhotep, the third, is the guy I most wish I could meet in ancient times, Akhenaten, the famous heretic pharaoh. I dare say you've heard of him, King Tut. that is the man that everyone knows Ramses the second Ramses the third this is the period we are talking about and during these centuries everything flourished, in fact it was a time that was almost globalized if we can use that word and project it We go back to the past, but with that come other things, not just trade, not just diplomacy, but things like wars.

For example, we have the battle of Kadesh between the Hittites and the Egyptians. We have a little thing called the Trojan War. You may have seen a movie that Brad Pitt was in. We also have things like the Exodus, which if it took place, would have taken place around this period. Now what we have is a globalized society in which everyone is interconnected. We have the six degrees of Kevin Bacon here too. This is a social network diagram my wife Diane Kline made and you can see that almost everyone is interconnected in some way, except the Mycenaeans and the Hittites. connected directly, they know someone who can connect them and in fact we have writings from that time period like this.

This is a typical cuneiform tablet that looks like a bird, stepped on ink and crossed the page. There is an archive dating back to about 1350 BC in which we find about 400 of these tablets and their letters to and from the kings of that time period king of the Hittites king of the Egyptians king of Babylon king of Assyria and also the vassal kings who owed their allegiance and if you map them you can see that we are really talking about a small world effect which is where, again, if you don't know the person at least you know someone in the middle and generally There are no more than three jumps that separate them. any particular person, so if you plot them like my wife did here, you can see a couple of huge nodes with the king of Egypt and the king of the Hittites, etc., which are almost all in contact with everyone else, so i know.

That saying that that time period is globalized as a loaded term and yet, I think we can use it, it was globalized for its time period and that's from Italy in the west to Afghanistan in the east, they're all in touch, They are trading, they are exchanging raw materials gold silver copper tin they are also exchanging finished products now this is the Bronze Age which starts around 3000 BC. everything will collapse around 1200 BC. so what I really want to do tonight is build this show you know what they were doing what was there and then collapse everything

when

we're done we don't know why they

collapsed

and that's part of the mystery and that's part of what I'll talk about, but before you collapse, let me build it, so this is the Bronze Age.

To make bronze you need ten and, by the way, you need copper. If you don't have ten, you can also use arsenic. I don't recommend it, but you won't live long. you can make our cynical copper but ten is much better 90% copper 10% tin and you will get your bronze now copper is not a problem copper will come from Cyprus in fact that's where the name comes from keep pink means copper, tin is a little more difficult, there are about ten, of course, in Cornwall, there is some in the south east of Turkey, but not enough, most of the tin seems to come from an area outside this map, you can see the arrow sticking out, in fact it is. an area in what is now Afghanistan, the Badakhshan region, and in fact, not only does Tim come from there, someone here has lapis lazuli jewelry, lapis lazuli also comes from that region, so what we have is the need to carry tin to the end.

Mesopotamian region, Egypt, the Aegean and this will involve trade routes that may be hundreds or even thousands of kilometers long and in fact we know that they are doing this. There is a letter in Mari, which is in Syria, on the river they are. I'm not sure if Mari already exists. Isis has occupied it and is looting it, so we don't know if she is still there, but a cache of letters was found and among them was an itinerary describing ten people coming from Afghanistan to Mari. in what is now Syria, then he goes to Garrett on the northern coast of Syria and then he goes from there to Crete and in fact he says that in Boogaard, which is right there, there is in fact a man from Crete, a Minoan who can speak the local language, he is the translator, so we know that they are sending tin everywhere and in fact a good friend of mine, Carol Bell, she is a British archaeologist, has said that their need for tin is basically the equivalent of our need for oil. and that the search for tin would have occupied the king of Egypt and the king of the Hittite region of Turkey, just as the search for oil today occupies a president of the United States, so if you can think of that kind of parallel, that It's what I've gotten this far, but as I say, they don't just exchange raw materials, they also exchange finished products and in these letters from Mari, which actually date from a little bit before our period, they date from about 1800 BC.

C., that is, a little less than 4,000 years ago. We have a text that describes a weapon that is being brought from Crete, it says a calf turret weapon. The calf gate is the name of Crete and the Minoans, the top and base are covered with gold, its top is inlaid with lapis lazuli, so it would have looked like something. Thus, although this is not the case because it comes from the death pits of war and dates from approximately 2500 BC. C., but it's still pretty nice and I wouldn't mind having one of these, I'm not sure I could carry it, but I wouldn't mind, so this is a good example of what they are shipping back and forth, but my absolute favorite and shows that nothing has really changed is a text that talks about what sandals should be that says a pair of leather shoes and the Dorian style calf now, if anyone has been decreed, you know that the Cafetorium Starrer Minoan style are sandals or boots, you can still get a good pair of boots in Chania.

I suspect they are sandals, but I'm not sure, but the text says which one. to the palace of Hammurabi the king of Babylon and yes, that is Hammurabi and an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but the limb took them but they were returned for my life. I can't understand why they were returned. they were too small to last a millennium and in fact I asked my students who wanted to read the entire lock code, there are about 272 laws and I told them to find the law with the penalty for returning shoes, they came back and said no . one we can't find.

I said exactly that he got away with it, but I still don't know. Wouldn't you have at least saved them and re-gifted them so things wouldn't have changed so much? Basically, my point here is they exchange finished products and raw materials and, in fact, they go back and forth between different countries. We know, for example, that Hatshepsut sends an embassy to clear it, we don't really know where the point was or at least we didn't know. until recently, but in her mortuary temple she has descriptions and photographs of the ships that left, she even has photographs of the goods being brought back and she even tells us in the lowest image that the Queen's name is Ettie, so we know everything about this.

The problem was, as I said, we didn't know where batea was until recently and then someone did an analysis of some baboon mummies in the British Museum and determined that they were more closely related to the baboons of Eritrea or Ethiopia and that was one of the chances of punting, so that's probably where it was now. He was not the first person to send embassies there nor the last, but that is why he is known to other embassies, although other trade missions may have gone to the Aegean to Greece here. It is the tomb of the Moray shipwreck and here the Moray shipwreck is what the Vizier, the right hand of the pharaoh, liked, we see people from Greece, these are Minoans or Mycenaeans and they are bringing typical Aegean products to Egypt, the same here in this grave Once again, we can see that someone is carrying a bull's head that comes straight out of Konoe sauce, so we know that Egypt and Greece are already trading around the year 1400. 1450 BC. would be

when

this occurred and continues.

This is Amenhotep, the third. mortuary temple I bet some of you have seen these colossi of memnon, they are about 60 feet tall and there were actually Greek and Roman tourists who went to see them, crossed out their names Kilroy I was here, but in Greek, what not? I don't see the mortuary temple missing from the one at the entrance because it was stolen by later pharaohs. Why go out and quarry more stone when you can take this from a dead pharaoh and make your own temple? So most of them now are. In my opinion they are now much more interesting than the big 60 foot tall ones, the smaller ones which were probably only about ten feet tall, you can't see these statues anymore, they're gone, only the feet are visible here, but in the 1960s.

German archaeologists were excavating and found five of the statue base lists; They supposed there were ten; in fact, new excavations now underway have revealed that more than 40 of the lists of statue bases in each of these bases are the names of foreign powers, foreign countries. one mentions places that we know belonged to the Hittites another mentions the Babylonians and Assyrians but this one in particular is the one that caught my attention the Aegean list has names that have never appeared before in Egypt and would never appear again in most the cases. partly because what you see on one side are two names here, which are the main names of the lists kofte you and Tenaya CAFTA you is the Egyptian name for Crete, just like they called a calf gate in Mesopotamia in Egypt, they call it kofte you.

Taniya is probably mainland Greece, so we have Crete and mainland Greece and then, on the other side and going around the edge, we have a series of 14names that again mention places that had never been written about in Egypt before Amny Vestas sauce. cadonia Nicene i caddos acro no salsa Theon Elios Cano and salsa amny again, which is kind of interesting now, the first time it was deciphered when it was translated into English. Ken Kitchen, a fairly prominent British scholar, posted and said I'm pretty undecided. suggest this, but it looks uncomfortably like my sinaia without salsa, well, quite uncomfortable, it was my scene I and salsa Cano and this list is basically unique, but if you go to Greece and look at the places that are mentioned in that base of the statue you actually find objects with the name of Amenhotep the Third or his wife, Queen T, they seem to have married for love, but here we have a faience plate with Egyptian hieroglyphs and on the right side you can see the natural nephron imatra, the good god and then the name of Amenhotep the Third and add several of the sites that are at the base of the statue, we have objects with his name, so for example, in Canosa in Crete, here is a scarab of Amenhotep the Third, so I think that this is Not just bragging or bragging, I actually think I could record an itinerary of the way to get from Egypt to Greece and back, and I suspect maybe that's why I'm new.

The sauce appears here twice, it's a round trip, so "you go from Egypt, you get to Crete and you stop, it's the first place. Get off, everyone use the bathroom, it's time for coffee, okay, and then you go and you've known the Minoans for quite some time, the Egyptians have known them for a long time now, but the Mycenaeans were our new upstarts at this time, about 13-50. BC, so let's go to mainland Greece and see what's going on there, then we lean towards Crete and here we are in the mu sauce again it's going to be a long trip until we get back to Egypt, sounds familiar, so I think we might actually have an itinerary here.

I can't prove it, but I think it's a definite possibility, one of the reasons I say this is because we have the remains of actual ships that we were going around and around. Mediterranean at the time. This is the fairly well-known hula beroun shipwreck that sank off the coast of Turkey around 1300 BC. C. It has been excavated by George Bass and Jamal Pollock of the Texas A&M Nautical Archeology Institute and they found what you are seeing here. You can see the stones going through the middle with the holes. Those are anchors. There are 14 stone anchors here, but most.

It carries 300 copper ingots that you see here and the copper is 99% pure and comes from Cyprus, so this particular ship is actually carrying over 300 ingots, you can carry them on your shoulder, each one weighs about 60 pounds, it has 10 tons of copper, he also has a ton of tin on this same ship, so if you mix the copper with the tin, you're looking at a lot of bronze. In fact, George Bass estimated at one time that there is enough raw material aboard this ship. that an army of 300 soldiers could have been equipped with swords, shields, helmets, greaves, everything you would need to have a modern Bronze Age army back then, so when this ship sank, someone lost a fortune and in fact I hope they were insured now, seriously, there was insurance back then we know from the text, so it is not ruled out that this was insured, which is why we have many lots of copper and lots of 10, in fact, we also have other things in the top left column, our In the picture there, you actually have tin, you can see the round bun ingot that you also have in the top right picture, also round ingots, but this one is glass in cobalt-colored rough, and in fact, when the Corning Museum of Glass analyzed them, they matched. perfectly with glass from Mycenaean Greece and the New Kingdom of Egypt, so everyone gets their glass from the same place.

We also have on the bottom line, all the way to the bottom left, terebinth resin that comes from the pistachio tree that you use. It is used in perfume making in medium ivory, of course, but not only from elephants, but also from hippos, and in fact, it turns out that about 90 percent of Late Bronze Age ivory comes from hippos, not elephants. , which people found surprising, and then new, unused pottery. from Cyprus and Canaan Israel Lebanon Syria so to me this is a microcosm of the international trade that was happening at the time this ship sank around 1300 BC.

C. and in fact, if you plot it on a map that National Geographic made by the way If you're interested, it's December 1987, it's my favorite number. On this map they put the objects from the ship on the map as to where they came from. They thought the ship was going around and around and around, hence the blue arrows. actually I'm not so sure they were doing that, I think it could be a gift from one king to another, in which case it will go directly, but it's not out of the question, it was also on a shopping expedition because everything they needed would have been used . for a Mycenaean palace, so we need raw glass, we need more pistachio resin, we need some tin, we need some copper and you know, get some milk while you're away, but the ship never came back, so for To me this is, as I say, a microcosm. but we also have the writing of a text by ooh Garrett on the northern coast of Syria dating from about 40 years after this ship sank.

He is called the sinner. A new text because it mentions a merchant, a private merchant called a sinner, in ooo, it says. from today on the stutter oh the son Nicke nepo king of wu Garrett exempts in Iran who son of segi knew by the way he wanted to name our children this my wife refused for some reason in any case let's see his grain his beer his oil of olive to the palace, he will not deliver his ship is exempt when he arrives from Crete, so we have a private merchant around 1260 BC. C. which imports olive oil, beer and cereals and is exempt from taxes.

In fact, I think this might be the first corporate venture. tax exemption in history, but I can't be sure of that, so when you combine the physical evidence from the shipwreck and the written evidence from the center below the text, I think it's pretty clear that we have international trade, so basically what we have , we have a globalized society and I use that term wearily, but the interconnection Merilee goes in the 17th century 16 15 14 13 everyone has fun being diplomats and trading and there is reciprocity and then in this a little bit of chaos ensued and one by one, Each of the civilizations disappeared, in fact they did so quite quickly, the only one left standing was Egypt and they were even so weakened that they were never the same again.

The New Kingdom is the climax, so just after 1200 BC. C. we come to what we call the collapse or calamity and almost everything is destroyed everything that had been good everything that had been moving along merrily suddenly shuts down as if someone had just snapped their fingers now the question is what caused it and that has been one of the questions of history. great mysteries one thing we can say is that the magnitude of the collapse when it took place was enormous. I don't think anything came close to it until the Roman Empire

collapsed

and that was 1,500 years later, but as I say, the question of what caused it is a bit of a problem and that's where my book comes into play.

Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press asked me if I would write a book about the collapse and I said yes, but I also want to write about what collapsed, so the beginning and the end. end or about the collapse in the middle is what I just described to you, what collapsed telling the stories about it now I also realize that I am not the first person who has talked about the collapse of civilizations, there was a guy called Edward Gibbon who wrote a small book about the de

cline

and fall of the Roman Empire. Joseph Tainter in 1988 published a book on the collapse of societies of complex societies which has been an absolutely wonderful book for all of us and then of course I imagine a number of you have done it.

Read Jared Diamond's book about the collapse, but the difference is that when the Late Bronze Age collapsed there were a multitude of interconnected and intertwined civilizations that fell at once. These books mostly talk about the de

cline

of a single civilization at one point in the Mayan Roman Empire. We Mongols in the Indus Valley are quite unique here in the Late Bronze Age in that it is one of the few times where there were actually interconnected civilizations like we have today, so I think the parallels between us today and So they are much stronger than You might assume that even though they were 3,200 years ago, I think that whatever we can learn about their collapse is not simply idly studying ancient history, but may contain some lessons for us today, but the big problem is trying to figure out why they collapsed and it used to be the easy solution, everyone said: oh those, the sea people, why am I not sure?

Well, actually we know them from the Egyptians, we know they came twice in 12:07 BC. C. and

1177

BC. C. and you can see right there, that's where the title is. from the book it comes from, but actually it would be better to say the fifth year of Merneptah or the eighth year of Ramses, the third because Egyptologists keep changing the chronology, it's all good, you know, it's on a sliding scale, so in fact when the the book came out, a colleague of mine in New York sent me an email saying good job, congratulations, the title should have been 1186.

I sent him a two-word email and no, it's not what you think. My email to him simply said. was and in fact in the contract I signed the title was originally 1186 BC. C., but in the years that I was researching and writing, the Egyptologist changed the chronology again and it became

1177

in the interval since the book came out. I've changed the chronology again and therefore the next editions will have to be called 1188 anyway, so for us let's just say the eighth year of Ramses, the third, well what happens here, it actually tells us both in images as well as in texts and he shows us the naval battle and talks about the land battle and he says and I will quote here that the foreign countries conspired on their islands so that once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray no land could resist before their weapons from a hot code cart commish arts awha and last year now we know where those kotti places are those are the Hittites in Turkey code a and corpse who swears that Turkey joins Syria arts awaaz on the western coast of Turkey Elijah, that's the ancient name of Cyprus, so we I can see that these people are basically crossing Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and then to Canaan because it continues, they set up camp in a place in a more omuro place, near Ugarit, on the northern coast of Syria, they desolated their people, their land was like what is to come, it never came to be, they were advancing towards Egypt while the flame was preparing before them and then it gives us the names of the towns because there is not a single Town of the Sea, of In fact, he does not call them the peoples of the sea who are ours. name for him, correct, he gives us the royal groups, the polis in the - jackar, the shekel, the denyen and the West and then he says that he defeated them and we know this from his papyrus of the year twelve.

Harris says I overthrew those who invaded from their lands I killed the denyen who are in their halls the two jackers and politics turned to ashes the shardana and the west of the sea became like those that do not exist so you can see how we got the name of the sea peoples, but it actually gives us the names, in fact, when you combine this with the previous invasion thirty years earlier, there are nine of these groups coming, so the big question we have is who are these people? , where do they come from and where did they go?

Now we know what they look like because Ramsay shows them to us. These are photographs of captive sea people. In fact, if you want to dress up for Halloween, it's pretty easy to do, but trying to find where they came from is trickier. and it's harder, so people have been playing, for example, linguistic games, so shardana named me a place in the Mediterranean that has similar consonants where they might have come from and take a look at it in the Western Mediterranean. The people of Sardinia have suggested that that is where they came from. thing with shekel Esch near Sicily possibly - jackar perhaps somewhere in Italy or Turkey deny it some people have suggested that these are the Mycenaean Greeks Homer denounced Wesch of which we are not quite sure maybe Will OSA is just the I know the Philistines and, in fact, Jean-Francois Champollion, the guy who deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, had already suggested that the police were the Philistines back in 1823, but now one of the problems we have is whether they came from there or not.

They go there later, are they from Sardinia or is that where they fled after being defeated and we don't know the answers? All I can tell you now is that no site has been excavated where we can definitively say that is where the sea is. The towns ofwhere they come from is a mystery, we know where some of them ended up, the Philistines, the police, they end up in what is now Israel, Lebanon, Syria and in fact you can see in this Philistine stirrup jar which is what we would call degenerate mycenaean. It seems like someone from Greece is still making their vessels, their stirrup jars, but now they're using local clay from the roads or from Cyprus or even ancient Israel from Canaan, so it really looks like at least some of the Mycenaeans had joined the Sea Peoples, perhaps after they lost. and in fact I suspect that's why we have disparate groups as these people rampaged through the lands, some of the people who were conquering joined together, so what we see in Egypt is the end of the process, this motley group, but they're not Vikings.

They are not assailants we should not be thinking like that because in the photos that Ramses shows us and you can see on the left and also the drawing on the right there they come with their possessions they' They come with ox carts They come with wives and children This It's a migration This is a movement Think about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and everyone moves from Oklahoma to California That's what it is This is a migration It's not just Viking raids So the question is well what caused that and for a long time time there was a very simple logical linear explanation that there was a drought and that the drought led to famine and that led to the movement of the sea peoples which caused havoc and the cutting of trade routes and which led to collapse and it's a nice easy story to tell before bed or maybe not before bed, but the problem is that it is too logical, it is too complicated, nothing is so logical, I think it is too simple, so what really happened well, that was what that I wanted to investigate if everything had disappeared, what caused it, why everything collapsed so suddenly, so the sea people were usually blamed for it, but actually I think they were both the victims and the oppressors, I think they have been given a bad name, they got bad press, yes they were there, yes they caused some damage, but I think they had a bit of a problem themselves, so what else could have caused it?

Well, drought has been suggested, famine has been suggested. Invaders have been suggested, earthquakes have been suggested, so if we have to choose one of them, I respectfully decline. I would choose them all. I think there is a perfect storm. I think they all happened. Let me present the evidence to you pretty quickly and then we'll see. What you think of as drought is not a recent suggestion, in fact, Reese Carpenter, who was a professor at Bryn Mawr, suggested this in the 1960s. He said that the Mycenaeans had declined and gone downhill very quickly due to the drought, but he had no evidence of it.

He didn't have hard data, so people gradually forgot that he had suggested this, but now we have the data that we have for the last five years. Connie uski, a French teacher, has been going with this team to several different places. and they went here to the northern coast of Syria, to a place called Gabala and they headed from lagoons and dry lakes and then they looked at the pollen that was there and they decided that they could see that the plants had changed and there was what they call an event dry 300 years, in other words, drought, and the pollen shows that there were drier climate changes back then from about the 12th century or the 13th century, right around our time period, just after 1200 to the 9th century.

So, 300 years ago, northern Syria seems to have had a drought that they wanted. They went to Cyprus, they did the same thing in Hala Sultan Teki. Same thing, there's also a drought there from 1200 to about 850 BC. C. judging by the pollen and then Brandon Drake pulled out. put together a bunch of different data and a study that was published in the journal of archaeological science that includes things like the / of the sea that fell and when you do it it rains less on, in this case, the Mycenaean or Greek continent and said that it took place around 1250 to 11 97 BC.

C. Now Brandon's article was so good that I did something I rarely do. I wanted to contact him and congratulate him. Such a great article, so I googled it. All I knew was that it was Brandon Drake from The University of New Mexico and Google the first thing they said was that you guys are actually friends on Facebook, so I emailed him and he said, Hey Eric, how are you doing? I haven't seen you since Megiddo in 2006, okay, we'll investigate. together so you can meet people you don't even know, you know the power of the Internet.

The most recent of these scientific tests was carried out with Daphnia en route, who you can see in the photo down in Israel. Finkelstein and Thomas litt - German. The scientists also sampled and analyzed pollen, this time from the Sea of ​​Galilee and the Dead Sea, and showed that in Israel there was a drought that didn't last as long as between 1250 and 1100 BC, but so now we have the missing data that Rhys Carpenter was looking for that there was a dry event, a drought that lasted at least from 13 or 1200 BC. C. downwards; pick 11:50 900 somewhere there and it's in Israel, it's in Syria it's in Cyprus, it's in Greece, so at least science tells us there is a drought and of course the media went crazy with this.

The New York Times pollen study points to drought as the culprit in the Bronze Age mystery. Climate change may have caused the demise of Late Bronze Age civilizations. The archeology magazine and National Geographic did not want to be left out. There's Nat Geo. And then you might remember that NASA-funded study that turned out to be not-so-NASA-funded that said we were going to collapse in just a couple of decades and at that point I was a little fed up, so I put in an option. ed in The Huffington Post the collapse of civilizations is complicated and now with drought there is frequently famine but famine can be difficult to discern in the archaeological record unless you find bodies and things like that, but that is where written texts come in and in fact we have files in play that tell us that in fact that is what is happening here is a letter from the house of Taino is another of those private merchants as not only a hundred or more years later does it have a peripheral office in the city of Love in the interior of Syria and they tell you that there is famine in our house, we will all die of hunger if you do not quickly get here, we ourselves will die of hunger, you will not see a single living soul in your land, so I believe.

You can agree with me that there is probably famine there. We have cut off the written records and we even have this thing about the kingdom of God. Another letter here with me. Much has turned into famine. I think this is incontrovertible evidence, even the Hittite king. Don't you know that there was famine in the middle of my lands? It's a matter of life and death and in fact we know from other records that the Egyptians who until recently had been mortal enemies of the Hittites were sending grain ships to help out of the famine in the Hittite lands, so we have that going on.

We see the same kind of things today, adding insult to injury, although we have invaders, yes we see peoples who remember them in Egyptian records, but it can sometimes be difficult to discover who is causing their destruction, so It could easily be an internal rebellion and, in fact, we have yet another letter from, in this case, sent to the king of Cyprus and it says that my father now the ships of The enemy has come, has been burning my cities and has done harm to the land, doesn't my father know that all my infantry and Cherrytree are stationed in Hoti, so they are in the Hittite lands of Turkey and then?

He says seven ships have been sighted, if more come let me know now. The story that was told for decades was that this text had been found in a kiln in Gujarat and was being fired before being sent to Cyprus, so it would not fall apart, but that the destroyers had returned, those ships had returned, and that the oven and the entire city had been destroyed before it could be sent, makes a great story again too good to be true. A new examination has now shown that it was not in an oven, in fact it was probably in a basket on the second floor that fell and landed upside down and in that basket was this tablet and about 70 others and when the basket disintegrated it left a oven-shaped lump with all these tablets.

So in fact, we now think that it was actually sent and that it might actually be a copy that was left behind, so we don't actually know if it's from the last sea people or the previous one, 30 years earlier, so we don't know. It's so much. a help as we thought and yet it is definitely evidence for the invaders we even have another letter it is a private letter it is one of the last from the point of view that says that when their messenger arrived the army was already humiliated and the city was looted our food In the threshing floor was burned and the vineyards were also destroyed.

Our city was sacked. Maybe you know. So someone is coming in and destroying this area. In fact, Connie Uski, the same guy who took the pollen samples when I was in Gabala, Noor Syria actually identified a layer of destruction as Sea Peoples, but this is a bit hasty, there is definitely a layer of destruction, but no it is necessarily on the part of the Sea Peoples, we don't know who did it, so this is a problem and, in fact, I give you an example of a Canaanite plague in northern Israel definitely destroyed around 1200 BC. C. We know this because we have the archaeological evidence of the Late Bronze Age palace that is completely burned, the mud bricks or sorry, the mud.

The bricks burn red and black. A fire destroyed this and in fact the excavator is actually two excavators. Amnon Ben-tor and Sharon Zuckerman, who recently died, were running the site and Amnon Ben-tor said they are probably not Egyptian. I did this destruction because there are Egyptian statues that are at the level of destruction and they are disfigured, their arms were cut off inside so no Egyptian would have done that so he can't be Egyptian and the same with the Canaanites because there are also Canaanites . statues and destruction and they are also defaced, so it is not the Canaanites that are doing this, he says, that leaves the Israelites and the sea people and this is too inland for the sea people and, in fact, He would debate that the sea people came quite far inland, but he did not want Joshua to leave the Israelites and, in fact, the burning sore is mentioned in the Bible as one of the cities in which Josh was burned.

Well, Sharon Zuckerman said don't wait so fast, this thing has definitely burned, that's for sure, but how do I do it? you know who did it he says well what do you mean? She says well, if you look and see what is destroyed, it is the palace and a couple of temples, but the domestic areas where people live and work there intact, they are not burned. You're not destroyed, she told me that's the sign of an internal rebellion of the lower classes that rise up against the upper class when they don't have enough food or enough money or whatever, so she said it's an internal rebellion and my point here is very simple if the two co-directors can't decide who destroyed their site then how are we going to decide?

All we know is that it was destroyed by someone or maybe something because we can't rule out earthquakes and in fact if you take a map of the sites that were destroyed in this collapse from about 1225 to 1175, everything you see here with the red is destroyed and if you overlay it on a map of earthquakes that occurred just in the last century or a little bit more, it's around 1900, you can see that most of the sites are actually in active seismic zones, in fact, we have several fault lines, you have the North Anatolian fault line and in light blue, get another fault line in green. you have an orange one going up the Great Rift Valley, so there are a lot of faults and a lot of earthquakes in this region and, in fact, we have something that I find absolutely fascinating: the North Anatolian Fault that runs through the top of Turkey has had what in modern terms is called a sequence of earthquakes in the last 60 years or more; in fact, specifically between 1939 and 1999, an earthquake sequence is when there is one earthquake and it doesn't release all the pressure, there will be another one. earthquake right next door or nearby at some point in the future a week later, a year later, maybe a decade later, if that one doesn't release all the pressure you will have another one and another until the fault line opens up, this is something that a most nor in the Stanford studies, so the sequences of earthquakes, as they call it, when they happen in modern times, but it also happened in ancient times and they have a much cooler name for it, it is called seismic storm when you have this seismic storm and it opens up over a period of 50 or 60 years, then it takes another 400 years to generate enough steam to start the whole process again and it seems that, if we look at some of the sites that are destroyed, there is a 50 year seismic storm right around our period, so I think there are earthquakes here, for example in my scene, here at the earth gate,you can see the cyclopean masonry on the left side and it is built on what looks like bedrock which is actually a side of a fault. area all the geoarchaeologists went there and started laughing, they said wait a minute, they built the main city on top of an active fault zone, who would do that?

Yes, the people of San Francisco just shook their heads and, in fact, I have victims who obviously died in an earthquake. Here is a young woman. She's actually the same in both pictures here and you can see the rock that's on the side of her head. That's the right image for you. That rock. It was actually embedded in her skull. She had taken shelter in a door, which is usually the best place to do it in the basement, but the whole thing had collapsed and killed her, so my scene with the Terrans just two miles away is the same kind of thing in this one. .

In the event that we have a woman and child killed by a building that collapsed in the same time period, if you go to Troy with the Trojan War and all that Troy 6, you have a wall that is not supposed to be seen like that, right? That one that's tilted, believe me, it wasn't built like originally and even in Garrett, this one is a little bit earlier, but you see how that wavy wall isn't supposed to do that, which is why there are earthquakes right now, so here's my point. I would be. be that if you see a site that is destroyed, it may not be who it might be that destroyed it in this particular case, but if you have some who, then you have the cutting of these international trade routes and that goes I'll continue and take us back to one of our original slides here where you have this long trade route with bronze, copper and tin and if you imagine that it would have been cut off at any point along that and suddenly you couldn't get to it You don't have tin anymore, so what?

How are you going to make your bronze? Now that's not going to completely stop the Bronze Age itself, but if you add that to the big mix, then I think you can see that you have a problem and, in fact, they were lucky to be able to turn iron into taking the control and in fact you know that in the Bronze Age there really is oh, they are already using iron in King Tut's tomb there is an iron dagger, it's just that they are using a lot more bronze and even in the Iron Age that is still needed they are using bronze, but not as much, in this particular case we see basically an innovation taking over to fill the gap where they no longer have bronze and they have iron, so in terms of what happened, it's still a mystery, but I think we can Summarize if I give you three points on which I think you will agree with me and there will be no arguments.

Then we can proceed from there. First of all, would you agree that we have several separate civilizations that are flourishing between, say? In the 15th and 13th centuries we have named some of them Mycenaeans Minoans Hittites Egyptians Canaanites Cypriots they are all independent but they all interact with each other especially through trade routes, would you agree with me on that point? Okay, so we have On that second point, it's pretty clear that many of the cities were destroyed and that the Late Bronze Age pretty much came to an end around eleven seventy-seven or shortly after, we all agreed that there is no discussion, everything is destroyed, everything is collapsing, but point number three.

There is no proof of what or who actually caused this, all we know is that it collapsed, so we have three main points that everyone agrees on and yet somehow it doesn't help us all much and in fact , people still today follow the same linear progression. They still say I heard it last November. Drought. Famine. Cutting of trade routes. They are earthquakes famine drought movement of people I would say yes to all of the above in fact the only thing missing is the plague there is no evidence of the plague and in fact it seems surprising to me I think there should be but there is no evidence of that yet but everything The rest of us absolutely have it all so the whole problem is that I don't know if we can point to a single factor or stressor.

Certainly climate change seems big, but is that the main stressor or stressor that you can argue because some of the others may have also caused a problem and in fact, different parts of this region range from, remember, we go from Italy and Greece to Iraq and Iran in Afghanistan. Different problems may have arisen in different places and they may have reacted differently, but the end is the same. They all end up depending on each other for both raw materials and finished products and therefore when one falls, there is a domino effect. What happens to the Hittites affects the Mycenaeans, which affects the Cypriots. it affects the Assyrians, etc., so anything that is destabilized in a system like this will ultimately affect everything correctly and in fact what we are seeing is the collapse of the system.

This is not an explanation, it is just a name. when there is a collapse of the systems and Colin Renfrew was talking about this already around 1979, there is a collapse of the central administration, there is the disappearance of the traditional elite, there is the collapse of the economy, yes We have a centralized economy and there are changes and complete population declines. Now this doesn't happen overnight. The collapse of systems, which we can see in several different places, takes about a hundred years and in fact, I would say that 1177 is the wrong title for my book, civilization did not collapse in that year, that is just a shorthand for everything the collapse, just as we say Rome fell in 476, although we know it didn't, took most of the 5th century and even then you still have the Eastern Roman Empire continuing we still say Rome fell in 476 is an abbreviation if you want that. is what it is 1177 is an abbreviation maybe a better way to say it would be that the world in 1200 was very different from the world in 1100 and completely different in the year 1000, but that doesn't really fit the cover of the book, so we're seeing something that takes about a century and when everything falls, you reach a dark age and, in fact, we have the Greek era.

Dark Ages that last about 300 years and in the collapse of the system myths often arise about the Golden Age that came just before, so think, for example, of Homer and a story about the Trojan War which is a perfect example, so So what I would say is that in fact what we are seeing is a collapse of the systems of that time period, so what are the conclusions? What lessons can we learn from this? Well, one of the questions we can ask is whether we face a similar situation today. I could say it's 3,200 years, but let me ask you: is there climate change today?

Well, we could argue about that until the cows come home, but I think most people now would say yes, famines and droughts somewhere in the world, absolutely earthquakes, yes, rebellions, sure, in fact, I think its the only thing. what we are missing are the sea people and in fact I am not so sure that we are missing the sea people because there could be two different groups that can be interpreted as the sea people: they could be Isis who is busy destroying everything in In the Near East our antiquity will disappear if we don't do something about it or it could be the refugees who have fled from Syria and other places that are now in Europe, it depends if you see the sea peoples as victims or oppressors or maybe both things, so I think today we also have the sea people, just with a slightly different name and, in fact, if we look at the headlines around the world from, say, the last two or three years , Greece's economy has collapsed, that's right.

In the news, internal rebellions have engulfed Libya, Egypt and Syria. Outsiders, some foreign warriors are fanning our flames. Yes, no, news. It's on TV every night. The turkeys fear they will be involved, as does Israel. Jordan is full of refugees. Iran is bellicose and threatening, and Iraq is. Amid the confusion, all of this was ripped from the headlines in recent years. Well, what if we had newspapers from 1200 BC. C.? What would the headlines have read more or less the same? So my question is: we are more technologically advanced and we are also more aware. from our environment, i.e. the Hittites didn't have SUVs, they didn't cause climate change, but mother nature did a good job back then.

I also think the Hittites were not aware of what was happening, what a drought was, why not? rain, I mean, you pray to the storm guide and it works or it doesn't work, we know what's happening, we know what's causing it and we might know what to do about it. The question is: will we do it now? I look back, that's my As a historian, it's the job of others, including those in this audience, to look forward, so I would simply say that if a similar globalized society collapsed 3,200 years ago, maybe we wouldn't want to study it a bit to find out what could we learn and maybe stop doing the same thing to reflect thank you, thank you sir, take a seat, say more about the Dark Ages, 300 years of what was lost.

I mean, you said you wanted to live in the Golden Bronze Age, there are a lot of seemingly good things. things but we are like you know languages ​​lost technologies lost cities emptied what what does darkness mean in this case darkness means totality I mean questions what was lost what is not lost they lose the art of writing the art of writing well if you want to call it the art of reading, Now they forget how to write, remember only 1% could really write back then, so when you get past that traditional elite, including the Scrabble class, you're not left with many people who know. reading and writing so that the linear B that the Mycenaeans are using and so on disappears, so that they lose writing, they lose monumental architecture, they lose much of what we would call the distinctive characteristics of civilization, now they will recover it, but it will take a while, it takes a different period of time depending on where you are, so in Greece, for example, it takes between two and three hundred years to return, but in other places it takes much less, for example, remember that Egypt does not really collapse , it's just weakened and Assyria and Babylon recovered in a couple of decades and I think the secret is that they are all on major rivers, you have the Nile, you have the Tigris and the Euphrates, so even if you have a drought, I think they are less affected, but even they have dark ages, so that's what happens.

Was there a Renaissance where people rediscovered things from before and was there a continuity or was there a completely new invention of these things? There is both the Renaissance and the new. inventions, but in fact there is a period of Greek history that we call the Greek Renaissance and this is the period in which we have Homer Hesiod and then Sappho in the Greek poets. The 8th century is when they go back and rediscover, but in the meantime, you have new things, for example, the Phoenicians brought their alphabet and, therefore, when they write in the 8th and 7th centuries, they use an alphabet that is completely different from what that they had done with the linear B, which is basically pictograms, so there's both the Renaissance and new ideas and one of the things that occurred to me is you know I hate to say it this way, but if you have an ancient forest, sometimes A forest fire is good, as it eliminates the undergrowth. and let new things grow and that's what happened here because think about what would happen if this hadn't collapsed.

Would you have the Israelites come in? Would you have Moses and monotheism? A couple of centuries further down you would have Greece and democracy? I mean, it's all like this because this thing collapsed, we have our world today, so one of these days I want to write something about what would happen if it hadn't collapsed, what we would be doing with intelligent dinosaurs. A CRISPR question, so please. illustrates the scale of cities, kingdoms, armies and navies, the well of the city is the population of hoary, etc., but how many people are we talking about now, it is very difficult to estimate the population and it depends on, yes, three different people, you get three different answers. a range problem, yes they have a range and in fact there is a new paper that says it can also say three times bigger than we thought it was at this time, more prudent actually in iron theory or new data, new data that is just arriving.

Yes, but the result is in terms of cities, I mean, we are talking about a couple of thousand people, we are talking about armies that are maybe a couple of hundred people, they are not huge, in the Battle of Kadesh there is a couple hundred people hundreds of people can make a pretty devastating attack even when you know, yeah, yeah, in the Battle of Megiddo, for example, there are nine hundred captured tanks, that's a huge fighting force that's actually a huge number of tanks. , yes, armored cavalry, armored cavalry for At that time we have another Hittite text that speaks of a force in the region of Troy and around the year 1,500 BC.

C. and says that so and so landed with a hundred men, that was a lot, so we are not talking about large numbers. We are talking about a coupleIt's a fascinating question: what will people find in our civilization if and when we collapse? Any future archaeologists, what are they going to think when they dig? Let's say the Smithsonian Museum or the Washington Zoo were all the Starbucks there are. We'll do a little taxonomy of the collapse here, so the one that clearly we in the West took most seriously was the collapse of the Roman Empire compare and contrast what happened then with what happened 1,500 years earlier 1177 well, I think the collapse of the Late Bronze Age was at least as big as the collapse of the Roman Empire in terms of what we lost hmm in In terms of, I mean, the Babylonians and the Assyrians are doing complex mathematics, astronomy and medicine, we have the correct texts of them and the Egyptians, all kinds of things that were lost, all that astronomy was lost, everything that disappeared, yes, now it was reincorporated later.

I mean, we have the Neo-Babylonians and the New Assyrians who rise up in the first millennium and continue, like I told you, they only go down for a couple of decades, so they can have the Renaissance right away and so on. we have Neo-Babylonian astronomy, for example, which is quite advanced, but in other cases I mean it's so lost that we don't even know what, hmm, the Mycenaeans had, their language wasn't deciphered until 1952 as an early version of Greek. Do you think it was that kind of sense of trauma that occurred in the West after the fall of Rome?

Do you think it was that kind of trauma in the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age? Yeah, I think it was absolutely traumatic, especially for the survivors who probably didn't know what to hit them and what to really do about it. I mean, to think that if you have a complex society and everything is going along happily and then, like I said, you just let loose a little bit of chaos, you have it all, it's like a flying race car where if you pull a rod out of your engine, suddenly you're driving a piece of trash, same here.

I think it had been absolutely wonderful and wonderful and they were going places and all of a sudden it screeches to a halt and everything stops and then you have so much. These were monumental civilizations and so you know what we saw in a sense after Rome and after the subsequent disappearance or slowdown of Egypt of people camping in the ruins of an ancient yes, and we have we have squatters in most of these places, in fact, we can also be with them thinking that now in the Iron Age it is three times larger in the period immediately after, what were probably squatters, in fact, my scene, for example, that of Agamemnon, my scene, there are squatters that they continue, they don't just go down, they continue little by little, but the squatters show how In archeology it is sometimes difficult to know, but when they are alive and what are obviously ruined buildings and yet they continue to live there, it is a good indication.

See a little more about the mention they're talking about before we work on a couple of stories about being Makita, one about the archeology of the future, we had a foundation very interested in the archeology of the future for a long time, since we are trying to create some with a ten thousand year clock, what do you have? future archaeologists will find what stands out well, it's an interesting question, it actually comes from the world without us exactly it made me think about that and there were a couple of specials on TV at the time, so now you know, when I fly to a major city, I try. and imagine what I would find as an archaeologist in say 2000 years hmm and of course what would be left or the plastics and things that are probably not biodegradable, but then I come to the question of how would you actually do it, because in archeology for example , we have a saying which of course is ironic, but if we don't understand something, then it is sectarian or religious, then our fertility, sorry, our fertility or fertility exactly, so for example, I mean, if you were digging some from the Smithsonian museums will leave you perplexed, like what the Hope Diamond is doing next to an elephant next to it, but you know, Nabonidus and the 6th century BC.

C. had a museum that was going to say that there must be historical museums that have this way that allows everything to be improvised and that, through the archaeologists in a loop, when they find Sumerian things next to Babylonian things, they are doing what is happening, They suddenly realized that we are digging in an ancient museum, and what if you have something like that? or what would be left of the zoo San Francisco Zoo Washington Zoo. If the animals came out and you only have empty cages or if the animals don't come out and they are still there, what are you going to do with that and then?

Really, what are you going to do with all the McDonald's and Starbucks on every corner? Are you going to interpret it as religious? You have that green-haired goddess, so all I can think is that we were talking earlier about the motel, all the mysteries they have. wonderful book where they misinterpreted Motel and they have someone lying in the sacred chamber and they are on the sacred platform and they have the sacred communicator looking at the altar and you realize it's a TV with the remote control and he's in bed, right ? shouting in the bathroom, everyone makes a big echoing sound which was obviously my favorite photo, where she wears toothbrushes hanging from her ears and she has the disinfectant for protection around her head and she was wearing a toilet seat and it's a motion deliberate.

Sophie Schliemann's recreation using Priam's treasure, Troy, absolutely wonderful, so what is the future of archaeology? I mean, won't we run out of things to dig up after a while? it will never end well we will do it there is no such thing as maximum antiquity there will not always be something the question, although on a serious note is how are we going to do archeology and that is one of the things that I have been struggling with, there have been so many many advances For example, just in the last two decades, we're now using satellite imagery, right?

Sarah Park. The space archaeologist is finding things from space. Some of you may have seen it on Colbert, the drones that can fly over the small area of ​​it. absolutely lidar can see through jungles so to be honest I get a little frustrated digging blindly as I say we're in a trench and we're not sure if we're going to hit anything so there's ways of looking. through electromagnetic, resistivity and conductivity and things like that, but there has to be something out there that can really tell us more about what we're looking for and I suspect that someone here in Silicon Valley or whatever is already using it and I'm just I have to talk to the right person who basically says oh yeah, we got it right, so you know what we can find, for example, looking at a mound like Megiddo that has 20 cities on top of each other, we don't do that.

We no longer stack our cities, we know that we are cities. What's more, it's a shame that the coastal cities can't do it, I mean, this level goes up maybe, but no, but they did, they stacked them, but I would love to be able to do something that would tell me. Yes, 20 feet down there is a plaster floor. There should be something that detects the components of the plaster. I don't think you need to drill these, anything, so I think we had a big revolution with these new ones. detection devices, but that was mostly 30 years ago.

I think it's time for it to be ripe for a new revolution. The question is what will be now, the people who were digging in the 60s could never predict lidar or satellite images, at least not. the analysis of your girl's biome you know what is in the wine jugs exactly the organic residue not at all so what will it be like in 30 years well that is one of the reasons why we do not excavate a site 100%, we leave part of the site knowing that the next generation will be better than us or have better equipment than us now, if I admire the long term thinking involved in that, is it really true that people come back and make another trench, so there is a kind of return Absolutely, the problem is that every time someone else comes, they take a little more, so, for example, Heinrich Schliemann was in Troy first and actually dug through the cloak he was looking for and threw it on his pile of back, sure, if I had $50,000 I'd go dig in the back pile in Troy because that's where all the good stuff is because Schliemann threw it away so the next person who thought he had to dig around the edges mm-hm and then The next person after him, Lagan, had to dig at its limits and it was only until Manfred Curfman arrived there in 1988 with new technology that he was able to discover that what we know as Troy is just the Citadel where the king and his servants were. .

There is a lower city on the plain below that expands the size of the city 10 or 15 times, oh yes, so it is close to the city we heard about with horror exactly, so now it fits better, but in that particular case had Sleeman. I realized that there was a Lower City. I'm sure there would be nothing there that anyone else could get into, so two things are being discovered here: one is better tools to discover more things, probably more archaeologists alive now than there ever have been. I think so, and archeology now is not only more of us, it is more scientific than ever, it is also more theory based and it is more of a comprehensive and interdisciplinary theory in terms of the theory of archaeology, a theory of what is being discovered. okay, both of us, I would say we are trying to ask bigger questions, we are no longer digging just to dig, we are not digging just, oh, it's a city, let's see what's there, for example, in Covery, our Canaanite palace, we are our bigger. questions we're trying to investigate the rise of government hmm we're trying to look at the Canaanite economy and trying to compare palatial versus non-palatial so we actually have bigger questions that research can help us answer this story.

They continue, they will continue to find more things and what I love is that they continue to find new stories that emerge from things, thank you for the stories tonight.