WTF Happened in the Bronze Age Collapse? (This Video Broke Me) DOCUMENTARY

a sinister quote a sensational graphic a trick question and a 15 minute speedrun of half-truths that's the

documentary

I was preparing to share with all of you and you've probably seen it before so I stopped and had a crisis, let's be honest Here YouTube content is pop history, we predigest academic information and regurgitate it on a fancy platter and honestly the format itself is quite restrictive in terms of scope and depth as a lot of what we do is more art than education, but hopefully it's a mix of the two we have to simplify it a lot and there are often misconceptions that are intentionally not perpetuated in our

video

s.

This is generally fine for most topics and it is the song and dance that we have to accept, the idea is that the audience is there. The academy and then there are us, the YouTubers in the middle, serving as ambassadors to hopefully bring you all to the front lines of academia and

this

was the situation that I found myself in trying to bring you all to the front lines of the

collapse

of the Bronze Age, but what I had a problem with was that the more I dug, the more I investigated things, the thicker the cloud of fog became in terms of trying to determine where even the academic front lines are in the

collapse

of the Bronze Age.

Bronze Age. There are so many questions, there are so many uncertainties and I got it right. a crisis. I was just trying to succinctly answer the question why the Bronze Age collapsed now into the past. Pop history has had a simple answer: it was the people of the southeast now pretty quickly after that, people were like, well, not really, and that's where I was headed in the direction of

this

documentary

uh, the academics will come to you and they will say, well, no, it's not just the CP BS, it was probably a combination of factors, the system failure approach, where it's drought, famine, plague, earthquakes, political unrest, economic decline, military innovation, the list.

And it goes on and on. At first glance, this second option presenting multiple factors instead of one seems much more plausible, so I decided to start producing my documentary with this in mind, but this is where I ran into some problems and they As for the triple, the The first problem was that there were too many proposed solutions, it seemed like a complete gallop. There was a lot of stuff being thrown at me and I couldn't really put it into a coherent narrative and it was very difficult for me to accept that right now. At a singular moment in time about a billion things went wrong all at once, so it seemed like someone was trying to cover their ass in terms of responses to say well, it wasn't the people, but here we go, here's a Lots of answers and that should cover you for the Bronze Age collapse which seemed to me almost as unlikely as a singular event because all the events

happened

at once.

Now my second problem was that when I tried to present these scattered factors we had to go further and I couldn't. I don't really give you an answer about what it means to have a drought, what it means to have an earthquake or political unrest or all these different factors, what they mean, we had to shorten all that until the

video

came out. I felt like I was losing its nuances and needed to get those answers first, which brings me to my third point, which is that when I started pulling on these threads to try to dig into each of these factors, it revealed a world of contradictions and uncertainties. in academia. and this is where I had, you know, my midlife crisis documentary.

I had to abandon our typical YouTube format and really rethink things, so in this video what we're going to do is pull back the curtain on the whole process and continue. On this Discovery journey together, my hope is that this video not only provides you with more education on the topic but also more education on the critical thinking process itself, but all of this would not have been possible without today's sponsor, Total War , now it's a A couple of things are in order here. I really have to thank Creative Assembly, not only for sponsoring educational marketing content extensively, but also specifically for this video, for giving me a lot of freedom in terms of what I wanted to cover and how I wanted to cover it. and in particular when I covered it, I promised this video about a month ago and throughout the whole process they have been very understanding of my midlife crisis as a documentarian here and totally told me to take your time, post it when you're ready and it's It's this kind of approach that I really appreciate from someone who is really interested in you, knows the educational side now more broadly when it comes to introducing you to the Pharaoh of Total War.

I've loved Total War for a long time. Right now, the series has been my entry into the historical genre, and frankly, I've enjoyed it as one of those entries. I know there's a general discussion going on right now about the direction of Total War pricing topics covering etc. aside from all that. I really enjoyed Pharaoh and it continues the tradition of being able to play in story sandbox environments that I'm very interested in, especially here. I was playing a lot of campaigns in the context of the Bronze Age collapse while in the background I had podcasts, documentaries and guest lectures like Dr.

Eric Klein and others that were part of my educational process in making this document, so I'm going to go a little meta here, but that's how much I appreciate Total War Pharaoh, so I can highly recommend it. From that front now more specifically in terms of what the game brings, as I said, it places you in the collapse of the Bronze Age as disaster looms on the horizon At launch, you take command of eight playable factions from across the Egyptian Canaanite and Hittite cultures and while this is a welcome return to the historical setting, it's clear that the team has carried out some of the best ideas from the recent Warhammer series - for example, each faction is packed with unique mechanics to help differentiate them .

Additional mechanics such as legacies give you even more control over how you play the campaign, entire campaigns can also be fully customized each time you start, and the world itself is constantly evolving thanks to new pillars of civilization mechanics that help represent the larger narrative of a world teetering on the brink of collapse. There are also plenty of other features worth noting, such as dynamic weather effects that really impact battles, new unit mechanics such as the combat retreat option, and of course, a welcome return to open-style sieges. You can get all this and more in Total War Pharaoh, so click the link below to get it.

Same game now and enjoy it with all this context in mind. Let us now begin our journey to understand the collapse of the Bronze Age. Here is a highlighted view of the Bronze Age collapse as I have put it together for our trip. We will trace it through different In the chapters that follow the sequence as follows, we will begin with a broad look at the characteristics of the late Bronze Age, we will look at the claims of Destruction, the first postulated claims that Destruction is the people of the sea, so we'll look at them and even more the tendency to think that climate change may be a behind-the-scenes culprit, so we'll discuss what that looks like and then we'll look at the details of the collapse, whether it means what the Hittites meant and the Egyptians. and more and finally we'll put it all together with what seems to tie all this data together into an overall system crash, so for those of you following us, we'll zoom in on these charts. tables, graphs, maps, article excerpts, so there is a visual component to this, so if you have a screen I recommend looking at it, but otherwise I think the narration alone will give you the most of information, so I just wanted to put that up front before we dive in and without further ado, let's do it, let's start with our Bronze Age world.

Now we are talking about the Late Bronze Age, approximately between 1,400 and 1,200 BC, this comes after a very long multimillennial period of The extension of the Bronze Age that can be seen above is characteristic of different regions, but right now we are looking at the lake of the Bronze Age and there will be great powers that will begin to emerge here, there are the palaces of Myan in their area of ​​influence around the aan the Hittites occupied much of Anatolia the Egyptians of the New Kingdom who spread from the borders from Nubia to the Delta and then variously held extensions of power in the lands of Canaan and the Levant and there are plenty of other city-states in this region, um, that might be worth mentioning, but within the scope of this video there will be less focus, so this is roughly the world we are seeing.

One key thing to keep in mind is that they are very powerful. um entities that have been around for several centuries and have formed a vast nexus of connections in terms of trade, etc., you can see that here, as goods move, not only you know, general trade goods that are nice to have, but also important shipments of basic products. of grain to make sure that people don't starve to deal with surpluses, you have exotic goods, all kinds of things moving around, which makes a lot of these systems interconnected, and this may prove to be an armor for this. era, as we will see shortly, but one of the most important things that are traded in this era are, of course, the ingredients that are needed to make

bronze

, so they will be copper, tin and various other metals, so the The most important thing is actually going to be the sources of tin, so these will come in different areas, so we have the tin islands, the so-called cities in the Wild West, so a lot of this trade extends further. beyond the Mediterranean from important sources of production that come from on the way. way west Long exposed trade routes, same goes east, you get a lot of metals coming from Afghanistan, from other places around me, Mesopotamia or the highlands, which have to be trucked overland and then finally , they pass through the hands of a group of people before. eventually they all seep into, you know, the swirling trade routes of these empires in the Near East and that's the world that we emerge into a very connected one and just to show you what this looks like.

We have many lines and claims about marketed products and to give you an idea of ​​this, this is one of the shipwrecks that we found off the coast of Anatolia, I believe, and it carries 20 tons of goods in its cargo hold. you have a ton of 10 10 tons of copper, you have a lot of ingots, a lot of glass and then a lot of, actually, what is called Masti, which is actually used as a preservative, they think for wine, so basically This just goes to show the sophistication and degree of interconnectedness of this world before the collapse, so that is setting the table for our next discussion, which will be the destruction of the system that we just saw, so that those of you who have You've been exposed to this topic before.

You're probably familiar with both this type of map that I'm showing and this type of quote, but this is the first data that I started to extract and it had a lot of flags, so let's take a look, so let's first start with the quote, the quote here will be taken from a fairly early version, I think, of Robert Drews' 9s book and a lot of what it presents is actually repeated in Future Works, so we have to go to sort of the seed of where this started and you'll see shortly why it's important to mention this, for example, in your book here, the end of the Bronze Age, on about page four, it says the following quote within a period 40 to 50 years at the end of In the 13th and early 12th centuries, almost all the major cities of the Eastern Mediterranean world were destroyed, many never to be occupied again and accompanying it with a map, the map below On the right is actually its original, but you can see a derived map. in the center and if you ever look at the Bronze Age collapse, this is often what you're seeing, this view of a bunch of flames or ex or destruction all over the Near East that basically shows that they were all destroyed in the Bronze Age. collapse and are usually set on the same date and as you can see in the passage we quoted above, it essentially says, "Look at all these sites, they were all destroyed in the span of 40 to 50 years, about a generation, this is the first time".

Something where our perception of what

happened

at the end of the Bronze Age really starts to break down and we'll see why and, broadly speaking, as a teaser, the idea is that not all of these sites were destroyed and even if they were, They weren't. destroyed in the time it is claimed, so this is already misleading, so this should be a red flag every time you come across the Bronze Age period and are faced with something sensational like this about the destruction, all in a period of timesingular, be very, very suspicious and We will analyze why this is mainly summarized in a nice recent article by Jesse Malik titled The Fall of the Bronze Age and the Destruction That Was Not and essentially what it does is analyze these early claims from the years 90 and on from several really academic articles that seem to repeat these same types of hype and what Jesse did in his article here and as you look into things you actually start to discover that when you scratch the surface of these claims they really aren't certain and what it exposes is essentially a false destruction that is captured and that is exaggerated and says that this probably comes from a couple of different sources, one is the incorrect dating of the finds, the second is once people investigate the finds What do they do. assumptions of such destruction with limited or even no data in some cases and finally you also find cases of false citations where perhaps the original archaeological records said that maybe something was burned and then someone turns it into destruction and somehow you propagate it and it becomes into somewhat more than it originally was, so from those three main sources of findings, he says that, oh, the data is not really true when it comes to the severity of the destruction, so he tries to put some numbers behind it of this and that is what I have done here highlighting your article and basically, you looked at a sample of archaeological literature and found that 61% of these have been incorrectly assumed based on little evidence or have simply never happened and by that percentage I mean how many sites are said to have been destroyed, so in written literature 61% have false destruction.

Then look at, for example, Drew's map here, which has UH 60 destructions and upon examining them he found that actually 52% of them were fake destructions, so this is starting to be a real red flag when you look at the collapse of the Bronze Age and almost every video I've seen of pop history and what would have presented is a map like this and a date like this, we're already seeing that these claims are probably false or at least not proven to be true. are true, then Jesse goes further and says well, why is this the case? and he says, well, here's the problem, there's mostly no single answer to why this happened, but it seems like the main problem is that we don't have a good idea of ​​what collapses and what destruction means.

You know, in this case the destruction is in the eye of the beholder is very much up to interpretation for the reasons we mentioned above, it is possible to date something incorrectly and have a tendency to want to fix it on a certain date because of some existing narrative or maybe I have data where I think there is There was a case where Ash was located in a sediment and that was something that was noted as destruction even though Ash was next to a furnace and so you know you would wait for Ash in any case, so there are all sorts of little things bubbling up. and we find it difficult to deal with what destruction really means.

Another thing that adds to this kind of misconception and infection of the data set. It says here that there is over-citation of certain books and articles that themselves are more accurate than the original excavation reports, so basically what it is saying is that over time these problems have worsened as researchers have taken the work of their contemporaries or previous people as sources of Truth and tried to build upon them and draw inferences from them assuming they were true versus if you go back to the original source of truth then you would see that there is a huge discrepancy so this is what exploded and this is what started my existential crisis over the collapse of the Bronze Age now I'll end with a pretty salient point that Jesse makes and he says: I quote now, this shouldn't give the impression that there was no destruction at the end of the late Bronze Age because there certainly are some, just go on to say that you know it wasn't like that. as extreme as some authors claim and even if destruction occurred, they are not all to the same extent, some are large, others are small and it is debated how much they affected the cultures and regions around them, and he says This is a discussion for another time, now in our video here we will be able to have some of that time, but that's how I wanted to start by just poking some holes in the overall narrative of large scale destruction, it all happens in a single period of time.

As we have seen here, there are many different time frames and destruction may not even be destruction. This then moves on to the second point that is often cited: well, you have this destruction and it was probably caused by the Sea Peoples, so now let's move on to As for the idea of ​​the Sea Peoples, what I have here in the part Above is a table that essentially summarizes our records, our primary records of the Sea Peoples and the first point to note is that most of these records will come from the Egyptians. access some other people's sources, but most of them will be Egyptian writings about these sea peoples, these occur in you know, temple inscriptions on papyrus in Stelly, all kinds of different written records and accounts and what I've done in In this table I have listed the nine traditional groups that appear in most Egyptian records and I have spaced them out to have columns here that represent different instances of them appearing in the record and then I have tried to organize them based on them. in your dates, so this first one will be the oldest date and then this will be the most recent date here so you can see a distribution between the two things to look at when you look at the data in this Oh, it looks like the arrival of the peoples of the sea is not a singular event.

The most commonly seen event will be this one here in 1177. You've probably heard this quote. Foreign countries made a conspiracy in their lands, blah, blah, blah. It goes on and on, we'll get into that passage shortly, but this is the one you hear a lot and just hearing about this case in the Egyptian record seems like they came out of nowhere, but what you can see from this chart is that they actually we have records of the sea peoples that occurred in other times, so there is a greater temporal extension of the sea peoples and you also see towns, you see sea peoples coming and going, they appear, they disappear, there are waves and different frequencies. of them, so that's the main takeaway here.

One of the interesting things that we also get from the Egyptian discs is some images of what they might have looked like, so they are quite distinctive and it's like a legend that helps us distinguish them. in later Egyptian records, so we get some interesting things from the Egyptians. Now I wanted to get into some details, so I directly quote what the Egyptians say about the sea people because it's important. We could see a lot of them, but I think. the most pertinent is to look at the Habu bed record which tells of this great event, the largest of the sea people invasions that beset Ramse II around 1177 BC.

C. and the reason I chose this one is because it's the one you've probably heard about and it actually has a lot of misconceptions built in from the Egyptians, so let's read this one in its entirety and take peace as we go and point out some things that could be misleading. It begins by saying that foreign countries made a conspiracy on their islands. This first one makes it seem like a couple of things happened first, that all of these people that you're going to mention come from islands and that they all had this as a pre-uh attack planned, which we'll see later with a little more context is that they probably It seems that not all of the people mentioned came from the sea, their origins are somewhat unknown, but even so we do not believe that all of them came from the sea, so that is something that arises from this first sentence literally from the Egyptians and the idea of ​​a conspiracy has good propaganda value, but what we will see later is that it does not seem that the sea people were, as you know, as farsighted as one.

I would imagine making a conspiracy, yes, they certainly plan this invasion, but not in the sense that they did it suddenly. We can even see that attested in the Egyptian records when we see that they know they went in and out of the historical record before and after this time, what we see next is that they say that all the soils were removed and scattered among the fry, this is in part incorrect because the statement of everything at once contradicts the fact that, well, yes, we actually have SE people before. and then, but it's certainly important to note that this is a big wave, so we'll give it a half-truth and move on.

They say that no land could stand before their arms of Kat Cod gamish arzawa AIA having been isolated at the same time, so Basically, what the Egyptians are saying here is that look, there are all these sea peoples and all these other entities were destroyed by them, famous for being the Hittites and these other powers arzawa alashia kimes, these are other places on the periphery or in the south in the Levant or in the western part of Anatolia, so basically the Egyptians say that suddenly this big wave knocks everyone out and this is one of the things that was probably what led some of the early scholars to think, oh look, the Egyptians are saying that this happened all at once, let me put together all these supposed events of destruction on one date and that ends up being a problem because it most likely looks like the Egyptians didn't have a great idea of ​​everything that was going on. and two had this kind of tradition of compressing everything that happened for the purpose of just compressing history into a nice little propaganda package to put on the walls of the Temple, so this claim that basically all of these lands were destroyed It is not true and that is evidenced.

By some of the timelines that we'll see later, moving on, they talk about setting up camp, okay, so they say, okay, they desolated their people, they were advancing towards Egypt while a flame was being prepared before them, their Confederacy was and then they named some different peoples and then they said united lands, so this last sentence is again something a little misleading, Ed, where it seems like the sea peoples were much more united and centralized in their efforts by having these big conspiracies, whereas that's not really so. In case it wasn't these, you know, alien powers that were suddenly released and rampaged everywhere, no, as we can see, they are quite a bit more entangled in the history of Egypt and the Mediterranean in general, so there is many misconceptions full.

Moving on to our main source, there are a couple more things we need to keep in mind when it comes to what the Egyptians tell us. The first is that they are not really telling us that these are people of the sea. In Egyptian sources they say that you already know. They can name a particular tribe and say they are from the sea or they can mention a group and say on their islands on their islands, but this is only used to refer to one person or a couple of people, but it is modern sources that group them together. to all. in the sea peoples and that can be a little misleading because not even the Egyptians say that, so we must understand that not all of these peoples are from the sea, more specifically, that is evidenced by the fact that they came both by land and by sea.

So in this case I have highlighted one of the Egyptian inscriptions from one of the battles with the sea people and here you can see highlighted a chariot with families so that they came not only as warriors but also as refugees and families. somewhat discredited in the popular imagination as well, the last thing we've been talking about is, hey, you know, it says up here United lands, but down here my main point is that no, they were actually pretty loosely united and so much so that he actually fought on both sides, so after one of these early battles with the Sheriden um Rames II he is able to defeat them and then calls them to help him fight the Hittites.

This is actually an inscription leading to the Battle of Cadesh. So you can see some sea people fighting for Egypt, meanwhile on the Hittite side they actually invoke the power of Luca and you can see here that the Luca are among the sea people but both of them when they appear are fighting on both sides. established powers that we would think would never work with them because they will ultimately destroy them according to the traditional pop history narrative, so we are already seeing a lot of holes being poked, the next thing I wanted to point out What we know is that we have been speaking so far of all the records based in Egypt, but we have records from other places that seem to talk about sea peoples, but it is important to note that this does not necessarily mean that they are the same people to explain that more can be seen.

I took out two of these tablets and essentially they're pretty vague, so this one, a Yugur tablet, it talks about the enemy ships that came here, it's seven enemy ships that came here.here. and they inflicted a lot of damage on us, so in this case they don't actually say it's the sea people and in terms of numbers it's only seven ships, so it doesn't really seem like an invasion caused damage, but rather it's more of a incursion. In this case, it might be tempting to say, "Look at these people attacking by sea ships, they're probably one of these tribes." It's not necessarily the case because our main source doesn't actually list the same thing with some of these other sources, but there are cases the other way around where we actually have the same people showing the Sheridan, but in this case it's in a context completely different that changes the way we think about the sea peoples, so in this case it's basically a letter from the king of byblos to the king of egypt essentially saying that, hey, a local group killed a sharan in the middle of it, he took three other men captive and fled to the lands of Egypt and this is the fascinating part that basically says um, a deed has been done to us that has never been done since the time of the Memorial, so send the men back to Beos so the city doesn't commit a rebellion, so this seems to imply that there was a Sheran, just one of these sea people in the middle of Byblos, okay, it's just about them, they're cool, they know about these sea ​​peoples who are among them, but what's even more interesting here is that when this sea person supposedly dies, the town is so angry that they might commit a rebellion at the apparent death or murder. of the sea people and the capture of others, so this kind of reframing of our thinking about the sea peoples means that you know we have these interactions with supposed sea peoples in more beneficial circumstances than just the invasion, so it means that You know that Bronze Age communities were aware of these groups as pirates, raiders, mercenaries or perhaps even their neighbors in some cases and what is particularly interesting is that this tablet is dated to approximately 1340 BC.

C., which if you go back and look at our dating of these events, is much earlier than these dates 1200 1100, so already in 1340 you have people who will later be the C people who appear in the records again simply being a neighbor killed by the one that people are angry, so hopefully that really helps reframe the idea of ​​who these C. people are at least according to our records, but what you've derived from this is that you know they might mention tribal names , but we don't really know who they are, and that will be a problem that historians have tried to deal with. uh so what you might see when it comes to the sea peoples are these maps that say hey, the sea peoples came from this region or that region and they went this way or that way, but in the accounting of the records that we've seen here you don't really have that evidence, so much of what you've seen here is largely a hypothesis, this should definitely be questioned in the same way we questioned the Destruction waves from earlier on this map, so that this is a Definitely an oversimplification and might even be a stretch, but how do people come to this level of assumption if it's not actually in our primary sources?

Well, there are a couple of ways that basically people go around looking for connections, sometimes it goes like that. linguistic similarities between what the Egyptians tell us and different places, for example, Luca could be Lans, the shees could be from Sicily, the Sheridon could be Sardinian, just playing on similarities in names, but that can be a problem because even If the connection is established and it is true, you don't actually know which direction it went, a good example is that Sheran is Sardinian, basically it is the name of Association there because they came from Sardinia or went to Sardinia and that is part of the scam. the confusion here, so that's what this dotted arrow is supposed to show.

Oh, actually, maybe the SE people went there after bouncing off the Egyptians, so a lot of these hypotheses about origins don't really have much merit to them. especially if they are only based on linguistic similarities that can only take you so far, so people often look for other ways to have similarities, like pottery for example, they look in the Levant for places where the sea people were supposedly and find examples. of pottery that seem to have similarities to the Myan area, that's how they make some connections between groups through pottery, but again, you know it can be flimsy at times, so what's happening recently is that people are trying to get more concrete ways to look at this information and one of the things that is emerging is that we can actually probably use DNA and this is a more recent development that is trying to harness DNA to discover the origin of these people of the sea, so here I am getting a recent U.

An article that came out in the last few years called Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of the early Iron Age Philistines and essentially what they do is they go up and they went to Ash Ascalon and they dug up some tombs and they made some You know, the DNA testing on these people now is a very small sample size, but even among them they did some analysis of these populations and what they found is, and I'll quote you here, we found that the early Iron Age population was genetically distinct. . Due to European-related WMD admixture, this genetic signal is no longer detectable in the Iron Age population layer, so essentially what they are saying is that we have a basic understanding of what the genetic makeup of the population is and then we look at these uh. remains and it seems that all of a sudden there is an increase in the mix of ads related to Europe which then disappears, the implication is that these are foreigners, perhaps the seed people we don't know who came to the lands intermarried, you know, and then he got his genes. diluted through generations of assimilation to the local area and one of the interesting things about this is that you know that this is a very small sample size with a variety of possibilities, so for example, this shows types of brands potential genetics and where they might be linked.

So you can look at it in very general terms, it's very vague, so be wary of anyone who tries to tell you that DNA tells us something specific. It's pretty vague, but it can still start to give us some indications of where this scientific paper is headed. The example talks about four babies from the Iron Age and that their genetic mix is ​​more typical of populations from Greece, Spain and Sardinia, so it is interesting, so I hope we get more DNA results. They can be the key to breaking part of the impatience we have. I've been at this for quite a while, but it's still not long enough anyway, so be careful with any of these maps you may see or any claims about the origins of the sea peoples.

With all that said, I wanted to introduce you to Dr. Eric Klein, so he has this great book 1177 BC. C. who has a lot of the latest information that's being reviewed and this is a good starting point for waiting until the collapse of the Bronze Age and he posted one morning on Reddit and it's relevant because he was answering some questions about, ya You know, given all this confusion about C peoples, what is your conclusion, so I just wanted to quote you here to close our discussion on the CES with, you know, an expert on the subject and He expresses his opinion because a lot of times that's what what we have to do with these uncertainties, but anyway it says quote.

I talk about this at length in my book from 1177 BC. C. It seems more plausible to me that they began their migration from the western Mediterranean and then continued. people who migrated to the eastern Mediterranean, i.e. survivors of the collapse of the Minoan Hittites of Myans, etc., so when they ended up attacking Egypt they were really a mix in both 127 and 1177 BC. C., but I also think that they were as much victims as they were oppressors and that they are not responsible for most of the damage at the end of the Late Bronze Age that they are frequently blamed for, so I think that is a good highlight about the C towns, again, we could go deeper. depth, but that gives you a good idea of ​​a lot of the misconceptions about the sea people and maybe reframe what we think about their origins and the level of damage they did to try to mitigate the damage caused by the sea people, We probably want to look for another culprit and that's how I started a lot of this discussion is that people throw kitchen sink answers at you, you know, drought, famine, internal unrest, assaults, blah, blah, blah, all these things, but behind everything are, you know, researchers. they're looking for these as primary drivers, what's something important that may have started this domino effect, uh, and it looks like climate change may increasingly be a response to what precipitated a lot of these other things that eventually led to a collapse of the whole system, so with that being said, let's take a closer look at climate change, so starting from the top, when you look at current climate change, you know there are a lot of uncertainties, but at least we can take action in the present, that is not the case in the past.

We have to look and try to recreate the past climate and that is a practice of paleoclimatology and to do that you can't take direct measurements many times, so you have to look for what are called these surrogate markers of what the climate might have had. . It has been and this is summarized quite succinctly in this article by Brandon Drake called The Influence of Climate Change on the Late Bronze Age and Greek Dark Age Collapse and it summarizes a lot of these climate surrogates that they've been using. then they look at rainfall indicators, by looking at stable records of oxygen P isotopes, then they look at pollen records, which could indicate how many plants are active at that time, then they can look at sea surface temperatures derived from the cores of sediments that they can observe.

Within those sediment cores, what is the balance of warm and cold species to see how you know temperatures might have changed? They can look at the temperature of the Greenland ice cores and they can look at what the Sun is doing in general in this period by looking at buril um in ice cores they can also look at things like tree rings they can look at lakes lagoons cave data flood levels There are a lot of things that are gaining more and more traction right now to try to resolve again the kind of academic impatience to understand What happened?

So these are examples of people drilling cores underwater, getting them out of the ice, and starting to analyze data. This is a map that was in this article from 2012 that talks about the different places where I've been looking so you can see that they are going out to sea near the coast at these different centers of interest and one of the things you could see is, for example, here what happens when you look at the you know, the Greenland Ice Core and also this is a model of the temperature that they can derive from the ice cores and what's really interesting here is that ebaa it's the early Bronze Age MBA it's the Middle Bronze Age and the late Bronze Age and this is really interesting. temperatures here there's a big spike and they drop precipitously around the late Bronze Age and then it tends to recover, so this is our first warning that, oh, it actually looks like something is happening as far as the climate in This collapse period then you can see that they have overlaid the Sun's Radiance to try to see what the Sun's activity was like at that time, so it looks like around the same period there is a small drop in the Sun's radiance.

Sun , but it's within the noise level of previous periods and it's not the same as this drop down here, so they're still trying to piece together what the cause was, but this is a high level macro view of how what. It's the general kind of temperature that's going on and it's hard to go from there to specifics both in terms of the specifics of a date range and the behavior of certain areas, so what I wanted to show you is some of the more specific analysis that the people are doing when it comes to getting closer to particular places to get a better idea of ​​both the date and the type of extent of the weather within a particular region, so this is a really good recent article called Climate and Ends from the Bronze Age. collapse new evidence from the southern Levant uh by other authors listed here and essentially what they did was they went to this area around Israel and they looked at the Sea of ​​Galilee and several other areas that are the intersection of these different biomes and What they found in actually and I'll go down here to the pollen data that they were analyzing is essentially um we'll go here to the graph where they plotted here the pollen levels of the tree pollen, non-tree pollen and essentially how to read this is you can see these green and yellow lines the more to theThe left you are, the drier the climate, the further to the right, the wetter the climate so you can follow how it changes over time and they have summaries like that in these columns on the right and then what's really interesting is just around here just when you'd expect the Bronze Age climate crisis oh a big drop in pollen that's dry, something happened that seems to match the previous temperature, uh, change that we saw at a high level, so it looks like the high level change is being reflected at the local level and what's really interesting also is that it seems like it's not just a singular event from a couple of years, but it's a more drastic event that started to take place, you know, at the end of the Bronze Age, so this is quite interesting and I will read to you some of what they have to say in regards to this pollen data, so quoting this, they say it is the most surprising feature of all the sea.

The Gile pollen record appears in the late Late Bronze Age, between 125 and 1100 BC. C., this time interval is characterized by the lowest percentages of tree vegetation throughout the entire sequence. This event probably lasted just over a century and is therefore a relatively long-term event. the most pronounced dry episode during the Bronze and Iron Ages, then they go on to say: you know well, maybe this was caused because you know that the pollen drop is because humans were having some kind of impact, but they were able to rule it out or at less so much. as they could throw it out to try to conclude that therefore this decline was a result of climate change and not human induced change, so this is quite interesting when they say nothing is really happening and to back up the what did you do.

Did you get any correlated data? So in this case, I'm showing some tables here that show the number of sites that exist or at least were identified at different ages of the Bronze Age, so it's the early Bronze Age or the middle Bronze Age. um, middle Bronze Age, late Bronze Age and then you have the Iron Age, so you can see them in the graph form, but what I did was I converted them on my own into um, yeah, into colors, so this is a little more obvious, so what? You can see that these different regions have different slight behaviors, but I summarize them all so you can see that in the Early Bronze Age around 200 sites have been identified throughout Israel.

Okay, so you have the middle Bronze Age and it sort of falls before it peaks and then at the end of the Bronze Age you see a very substantial drop, so again, correlation doesn't mean causation, but you can see that they are trying to have more coverage in terms of whether this is an anomaly, whether it is a fluke, whether there are multiple threads all the data is pointing in the same direction and it seems that that is the case, so after That, if you think something is happening, the obvious question is why, what is the cause and in this case you look again at the Greek ice sheet project and you look at the temperatures and this is again, you know what We showed earlier, that they are pointing towards this peak and then decreasing temperatures around the late Bronze Age collapse, but this is a very important thing because if I told you this is what happened um, it's very difficult to deduce how this temperature , a peak here, a peak and a fall lead to drought, so if we go straight to the newspaper we can hear it from the horse's mouth.

You know what's going on, so I'll quote this passage back to you when they're describing the possible mechanism by which this caused a crisis, so we'll take it from the top: the late Bronze Age dry event was probably related to the peak of temperatures in Greenland, the highest temperatures there in the last 5 millennia were centered around 1200 BC. This warming possibly led to an increase in glacial melting, which in turn resulted in an influx of cold freshwater that reduced sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean basin. This created a push-pull event in which warming eventually resulted in a drop in CA surface temperatures, decreasing Mediterranean Sea surface temperatures limited the flow of fresh water into the atmosphere and therefore , they reduced precipitation on land, so, to repeat this, what they are saying is that you have this kind of reverse effect at play where temperatures appear to increase, but it causes the ice to melt and then it alters the flow of water , reduces sea surface temperatures, that decrease in temperature makes it more difficult for water to evaporate and then go out into the air and nourish the land with water, so this antiphase event is what they are pointing out or dealing with to point to say hey this is the reason we're probably having this crisis and something you see here with climate change that I think is quite appropriate for our modern day is they say you know people in civilizations can adapt we are resilient we can adapt to slow trends we can adapt and overcome extreme low frequency events you know bad things happen there is the strange drought there is the strange event whatever Humanity for the most part can cope, but where?

Things get really dangerous when slow trends move fast and when these strange events become even more frequent, not only do you have to deal with trends accelerating and happening more frequently, but crazy spikes of length of these Stouts become more common. that can be something that overwhelms the resilience and adaptation of people and civilizations and that is what is proving to be a kind of poison pill that starts to activate dominoes, so that will be it for the climate change that we are going to to pass. specifically how this may have impacted the collapse between the Myans, the Hittites and the Egyptians, but first I wanted to finish one last little comment on the type of natural disasters, so another idea that is brought up is this idea of ​​seismic storms that you are very familiar with . destruction that we see happening around this period um well, maybe it wasn't the sea peoples, but maybe it was a giant series of earthquakes that occurred, you know, at this time and it's not necessarily unreasonable, you know, we saw recent earthquakes that They have, you know, tectonic.

The beaches change and then you have some kind of earthquake storm where there are not only after, you know, after shaking, but then other earthquakes that are triggered by the same kind of general plate movement, so understands that there is a storm of earthquakes. You know there is evidence of earthquakes occurring in this region, but from what I found in this article here, Crisis and Context of the End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean by um uh nap and Manning, they basically address the idea of ​​this seismic storm and To say that yes, in theory it is plausible, but the people who propose this have not shown that it was actually the case, so this idea of ​​​​a seismic storm, although in theory it could be possible, it has not been proven that in reality is what caused the destruction. of the cities that are at least confirmed, so I just wanted to address that before we continue, now that we have this climate change that pushes drought in the regions, this can start to destabilize them and you could say, well, it's going to collapse, is it?

You know? We could stop there, we could say, hey, it's not the sea peoples, it's climate change that causes the Bronze Age collapse, but we have to go further because there are a lot of nuances to how the Hittites and the Egyptians collapsed, each in their own way. You already know what collapse means in your specific context, so with that being said, let's delve more specifically into each of these groups to see how they developed, so we'll start with the Myans and the Myans that you know were centered in Greece. As you understand it, it extends a little bit beyond this image that I've shown here, towards the islands and then a little bit of Western Anatolia, but for the most part we're dealing with this region, there are different palaces.

These different centers of power spread across the land, they are usually at the top of the hill, they have a walled palace and then a larger wall around it that encompasses many facilities and these are the central administrative and economic and military points that control them . the states that are around it, so this will be M and Greece with these centers, these palace centers in the middle, so one of the things about the collapse of this system when you put stressors on it is, well, let's understand what it is even the system in the first place, so we have to look at these palaces from an economic perspective, so there is a great article, um or document, I should say, that I found by Paul Hallad, which is called the average palace economy, taking advantage of the maximum gaps in the evidence and basically it's more of an economic look at things, so some of the terminology is dense and not something we're used to, but I'll try to synthesize and simplify what they say and B, basically, I What they say is that they are trying to show that these palaces were economic centers okay, that makes sense and as evidence of that, they basically look at the records, so you have a lot of these linear B records and they show records of livestock labor assets and there are a couple of things that start to Point out to economically minded people E when they see this.

I'll list a couple of things. The first is that they discover that these items are listed separately without equivalences or currency and that the wealth is centralized in the palace and then redistributed. that whole kind of whole in economic terms forms what is often called a redistributive economy or in this context the palace economy and there are some excerpts here that we will get to, but essentially from this diagram what it means is essentially you have the palace sector, so think of the palace sector basically as the land that will be owned and governed by the king, everything is here, that means not just the workshops and the storage centers, and you know all the specialized areas here, but also like Here they declare all the agricultural properties that are owned by the palace, so that is what they call the palace sector and that exists as its own entity and interacts with two different entities, the first will be the palace no p.

So like the domestic sector, these will be the general peasants and other people in the surrounding regions and then there is foreign trade and basically this economic paper looks at how this system develops and there are a couple of things that are exclusive of the system, so basically what they are saying is that the palace sector basically receives a lot of uh, you can see the arrows coming from the left, agricultural labor, uh, not commodities in the form of taxes, grains, no sp specialists, goods they collect. many things from the peasantry and what they do with that is then use them to create workshops or improve some of these products by bringing in labor and creating more things like wool, wheat, olives, figs, grapes, etc., so that they can write I guess you could say recycle some of the things from the general population and then send them back to the population once they have been upgraded by workshops and specialists, since you know they are more valuable products, artisanal products, so basically you have materials simple ones that are then refined and the value of getting these through the placial sector is that once they return to the general population, these are higher value goods that can then be marketed to reinforce what you already know and help provide relationships public to people you already know.

I support someone for being their ally or whatever. These are goods that are useful and as they say here, there is basically evidence that they are used as tokens of value in the exchange of staples, so basically the palace serves to improve these goods that they can then be. used for various functions in the economy that are useful for doing you know more interesting things than simple bartering. The other thing the article points out is that the palace's existence as a center that collects and then redistributes goods is that it can act as a kind of bank, so for example you have your peasants here who for some reason might have a good year. and when they have that good year they can have surplus crops and goods and let's say great, they can't really do anything with most of it, unless they have a place to trade or store, and that is often the function of the palace. , the palace has these large areas where they have storage, so the peasant may not be able to have additional goods but sending his goods and excess into the Palace and putting them in these large storage jars or converting them into other goods serves as a bank in general for the population and what can happen is at times when you know there is no surplus but there is a deficit, the palace can then open its stores and send them back to the population, so it is a small mechanismnice that it strengthens the economy a little bit, but where things might have started to fall apart is in this system once you start stressing it with climate change and prolonged drought, if there are not more surpluses at this end and this arrow of demand to the public in general grows and grows and grows due to the prolonged drought, then this puts pressure on the palace and suddenly the palace starts to close it down. can't relieve the people, can't do things and in particular the palace, there may be some inequalities between the general population and the palace, which lives in large numbers, so it is speculated that basically the palace economy as established a once it is disturbed enough. where people get angry, it could raise, um, it could incite a revolt among the people to try to overthrow the palace because it's too heavy, you know, Eat the Rich type of situation, so that's one of the theories that arise from this understanding of the placial. uh economics, so what evidence do we have of this happening?

Well, we have the fall of the palaces and this happens in a couple of different key locations. First there is evidence of military buildup, so around the end of the Bronze Age we have evidence that the size of fortifications increased. I mention troop mobilization, although it's quite vague when they just say Watchers of the Sea, so there is evidence that something is happening, some military buildup in this last period, when you know that climate change is having its impact, there is destruction in the palaces. I know we were poop. I screwed up before, but it is definitely the case that in the Myan region we see destruction that is evident by the burned structures.

You have evidence of combat, arrows, swords, etc. and what's really interesting and sometimes attributed to all the strength you know, oh, okay. You might think an invader came in, but sometimes the destruction is relegated to just the palace, fueling the idea that, oh, maybe it was a town revolt and they wanted to eat the rich, burn down the palace, so to speak. , other. What is evident that this system is falling apart is the loss of Linear B, so Linear B is the oldest attested form of Greek writing and will be used predominantly by the people in the palace and it begins to die out and basically disappears. after 1190 BC So that essentially attests to the idea that, hey, the Palaces go crazy and these scribes go out of commission and we have the loss of use of the linear beam, so it's evidence, but there are people who have started to try. quantify this further, so there is another article by Sarah Murray that tries to document what this palace collapse is like, so she has an article here on the demographic and domestic changes in early Greece and again on the climate we can't have . censuses from these periods, so we have to rely on representatives, they look at the settlements and the burial structures and they look at the ceramic evidence.

This is all again subject to interpretation, but we still have to work with something, so from this within the document, essentially, uh, her. summarizes different assumptions or estimates that people have about what the size of the population drop is and this surprises me quite a bit: some high level people think that in the Myan era there was a 90% population drop after this guy of great collapse that It is surprising that Snodgrass has it at 75%. These may be somewhat high, so you see the percentages increase. A little more reasonable, but still, the Murray publication in 2017 not long ago estimates a drop of 40 to 60% and that is quite intense now that there are still people holding the idea that basically it's probably not as high as we're reading.

The evidence for incorrect falls in these indirect data may not be that they do not exist but that burial habits changed. Chang pottery changes settlement construction methods, so some people argue that the percentage is even lower, but here we go for now. to go with Murray's answer that it is on the order of 40 to 60%, which is crazy, in this article he goes further and tries to model well how many people that percentage applies to and in this final analysis he tries to say that there are 600,000 people in the central areas of Greece in the Bronze Age and this number drops to around 330,000 in the early Iron Age, which to me is quite shocking, that means we have 300,000 people missing. where they went shortly, but there is one more point to make when it comes to this disappearance of people is that it is not always uniform and therefore this is a comparison that is also in the document that looks at different regions, so which is mainland Greece, there's cre and then, there's different places within each of them and what you're seeing is that yes, most of them saw a fall from the late Bronze Age into obscurity to the early Bronze Age. of the Iron in light gray, but it is not uniform, some places were definitely hit versus others had minimal changes or apparently no change at all, so it is far from uniform, but nevertheless, regardless of where it happened, we definitely have a species of huge demographic collapse, so the question is where did they go, so there are all kinds of theories about where they went.

Come on, we're not too sure. One idea is that there may have been internal migration, deurbanisation, people forming new settlements etc, the other idea is that there may have been external migration, so they could have formed colonies going to Cyprus. We have media evidence. There is a bit of an old and discredited idea at the moment that there is this Dorian invasion from the north, but this has been debunked by archaeologists for the most part, who think that this Dorian invasion is just an invention of Later, the Greeks who were trying to publish some sort of talk came up with a reasoning as to why the Greeks were the way they were.

Later, some people clung to the fact that, oh, it's a distant memory, a vague memory of something that really happened, but. In this history of the arcane Greek world, Jonathan Hall basically debunks it and says that it probably didn't reflect some vague, hazy memory and he's essentially countering this idea of ​​the Dorian migration, so there may have been some movement, but not really the Dorian that is. have been debunked, which leaves this lingering possibility that okay, maybe maybe they really were part of the sea peoples and that's what's giving some critical credulity to this idea that we were touching on earlier, that they're big arrows coming from the middle region. maybe it doesn't seem so far-fetched when you consider the kind of demographic collapse in this period, so that's basically it when it comes to the palaces m Yen, you can see here that yes, it could be blamed on climate change, but it's much more deep when it comes to the structure of the palace economy, this kind of top heaviness and how it could be susceptible to drought when it comes to, in particular, this non-palatial sector wants to get more out of the palace sector, so there is much good.

The next information is that we can move on to the Hittites so that the Hittites get hit again by climate change and I'll jump into those real quick so you know there's some things here that I've collected. The Hittite waterworks basically say they're no strangers when it comes to drought and famine, they have these extensive, you know, monumental dams and reservoirs and all these things, the capital itself has these pipelines that bring water from the aqueducts and feed the people. or sorry, they nourish the people with water, they feed the crops too. The same thing happens when it comes to cereals.

The capital of Husa has these huge grain silos that proportionally can supposedly hold 6,000 tons, which some people estimate to feed 30,000. people for a year, so that's all great, they seem to have some resilience, but as we've said before, these resiliences can be stretched and in particular we see evidence from letters in which the Hittites in this period are increasingly relying on grain shipments from abroad. from Syria to Egypt to maybe overcome some of the deficits that they're having at home and then to point out that there is something here with climate change, there are people who have been looking at the impacts of, you know, specifically in this region in De la In the same way that we look at pollen in the Levant, in this case we can look at tree rings, so this study essentially looked at tree rings and we can say that you know within a very specific date range from 1198 to 1196 that There's a fairly sustained drought, a drought and it was greater than any of the other years surrounding it and you can see this in the data plotted here, a big drop in the amount of moisture in the area and so you know um. decrease the tree rings, so basically all I want to say is that once again, before we talk about the details of the Myan or apologize for the Hittite collapse, I just wanted to reconfirm that you know the data is there to support this change high-level climate that we talked about. it actually started to impact the Hittites, so with that being said, let's talk about the nuances of the Hittites, so the Hittites are here in the highlights of Anatolia, they have three distinct periods that you know are kind of arbitrary. but they capture some of its essence, so the Old Kingdom period lasts about 150 years and basically it is them in the Highland regions that consolidate power around husa and make some expeditionary forays abroad, expand, but then, in the Middle Kingdom Period, it looks something like this. happened, they stumble, they retract, uh, they're not that powerful, but then in the New Kingdom Period, they expand, this period lasts about 250 years and is what takes you to the expanse of all the green that you can see here and that's the period of the Hittite Empire, uh, in the New Kingdom, and that's essentially the Empire that we're dealing with, which then has to deal with climate change and, um, which may be on the brink of collapse, so which, in terms of collapse, one of the most important things for the Hittites that I think is relevant and that Gary Beckman and others echo is essentially that a Hittite Empire, as was said here, was always a structure fragile and susceptible to people challenging its power; there is a protracted Civil War that may cause problems there.

Are there problems with entities separating? The final conclusion here, just to jump the gun, is the idea that the fall of the Hittites was probably not a cataclysm, you know, a one-generation event, but rather, as they say here, a rupture leading to a progressive decline in wealth and military power available to the capital and its rulers, so that's the general story, you know, presented by Gary Beckman, who is very well known when it comes to Hittite studies, but what does it mean this? More specifically, I think. To prove this point, what I did was I put together, uh, I used the family hierarchy, the genealogy of the rulers of the Hittites at the end of the period of empires and then what I did was I put crowns on the various kings and I tried to link them to those kings as the succession flowed and in the next one I put little icons that represent things that happened that sort of led to a problematic succession, so in this period you start to understand that these daggers mean that. someone was killed, okay that's not good for ra, but what seems to be most shocking is in this period around 1370, when the Hitot Empire is supposed to be at its greatest extent and even perhaps because of this it seems that the traveling armies bring back. with them, the plague, the plague is quite terrible.

I have a quote here from one of his actual original Hittite sources and it says you know Hati has been very oppressed by the plague, people were still dying in my father's time at that time. from my brother and since I became a priest of the gods, they keep dying in my time for 20 years. People have died in hotti, so it's a problematic succession that may not necessarily be driven by climate change. Maybe you could say that you know what the plague is, but in this case we already have a conflictive succession so you already know that the crown is shaken, one of the Kings dies, two of his successors die and the heirs die, the crown passes to this last son. here and in the same period while he gets the crown two of his other brothers, um, are kind of regional governors and the important thing about this is that these dotted lines are supposed to be my intention to show you that, hey, you know that there is an official transfer of power, but then along the way these dotted lines appear.

Power is being transferred unofficially by these regional governors where they will gain local power and over time their followers will gain more and more local power and they will essentially be divided, so these areas are Aleppo and Carames, which are basically the areas around the new acquisitions. around the Levant and it is important to mention them because eventuallyThey will separate when the Hittite kingdom falls and will actually exist and live and have some perpetuity after the supposed collapse of the collapse of the Hittites, there are still some of their separatist elements. that exists, but other things that appear in this type of timeline here is that you can see the crown passing and there is an important moment in time over here where a couple of things seem to happen, one in this transfer of the crown, the capital . it moves from Upland uh Hada to Tar honasa and that will be a place that will probably be around here closer to the coast, we don't know exactly why maybe it coincided with Hittite activities in the Levant, you know we have the Battle of Cadesh in the same period of time, but maybe they wanted to be closer to the coast, closer to where the grain comes and closer to coastal control, which maybe is a result of the famine that we don't know very well, so you have that. transfer but this causes a problematic succession when the capital moves the Hittites' rule in the north apparently begins to be tumultuous the people begin to rise in rebellion the nearby neighbors lick their lips thinking that perhaps they can chew some of the territory with the capital gone and then beyond there is another succession shortly after the capital has moved back to Hotusa, but it seems that the internal disputes have not given up, this breaks out to open a war between the Hittites.

Here I have shown that there is a Civil War, the crown passes from a nephew to an uncle, so it passes to this king and then he passes it on when you get to king tatalia I 4. There is evidence that he is building these large monumental dams, so presumably the drought has been happening recently and it is at this time that the crown passes quite quickly and again you can see an arrow shooting where tarasa basically gets his own delegation of power and again the power is separating from the crown central of the Hittites and eventually you reach the last king and basically he is harassed by several things that happen, there is a naval war with Cyprus, there is pressure perhaps from the people of the sea not completely confirmed, but even more so from the other powers, the Kisa, other people from northern Anatolia coming and taking over Hittite type of weakness and maybe, um, the Hittites are not only destabilizing their power, but they are also starving, potentially in their army and their treasury not they do so well and eventually you have husa being sacked in 1190, but again Agreement according to Gary here um He's saying you know, yes, the capital was sacked, but in the decades prior it was probably abandoned and that brings us to the end of the Hittites, so here you see a story that is not as simple as climate change.

It also has to do with the arrival of the plague, the sharing of power, the delegation of power, so I wanted to tell you that the story is never that simple, but obviously you can see here how the pressures of climate change can have a lot to do with it. It accelerated some of these, um, these events that we're looking at, so now finally this brings us to the Egyptians, so let's take a look at the Egyptians and what their collapse looks like, just like with the Hittites, who are divided into the old medium and the new. the Egyptians do the same thing it's just that the Egyptian time periods are much larger in this time period we are looking at we are looking at the new kingdom of Egypt and this time period is quite large it spans several dynasties but essentially the The area we're looking at here is from the Delta to Upper Nubia, controlling many lands in between and extending their range of control to the Levant and sort of these Canaanite cities where they cross them with the cable. with the Hittites, so that's essentially where we are and in the same way that the Hittites have their own problematic succession, the Egyptians do too, so what I've done here is show you that you can't make a family tree. with the Egyptians there are too many, so we just follow the main rulers and essentially watch how these dynasties change over duration.

A couple of things to take away. Here is that I have noticed that when the sea people start to arrive, they seem to come more or less um, where it seems that the succession is tumultuous. You can see a couple of dynasties, you know, Chang here and then there's a couple of short rainy pharaohs, oh. It seems that the sea peoples come after Ramsay the great, there are some quick successions. Oh, it seems that the sea peoples are taking advantage of that, so it seems that this rapid suction of the pharaohs has led to some externally visible weaknesses on top of that.

What we're seeing is that in this later period, this is where we get to the collapse of the Bronze Age, 1200 to 1150 BC. C., so it is in this period where things are happening in the BR where the sea peoples come, it looks terrible, we have evidence in the records. From natural disasters, civil unrest, military setbacks, all kinds of bad things happening here and there, even to make matters worse, Ramsey III, famous for saving the people and preventing Egypt from the collapse of the Bronze Age by defeating this third and final invasion of the Sea People, he really knows he should be the triumphant king of Egypt, but even he falls prey to Herm's conspiracy as a quick tangent here.

In fact, we have long had records of an attempted coup against Ramsey. We had his mummy, but it wasn't like that. It's not entirely clear if he was killed in the hit, but it just so happens that recently more analysis, some scans have confirmed that yes, it looks like his throat was definitely slit, it looks like there were multiple wounds and it looks like he was actually murdered. So that evidences something quite worrying which is ramsy III, who you know should be a great pharaoh, actually ends up being killed in this conspiracy and then after him you have a bunch of subsequent pharaohs and quick succession dealing with a lots of problems. and especially with the sea peoples, they have drained Egypt's treasure and may have caused a mortal wound to give you some context of what that looked like.

I just have some quick passages about the sea peoples and their involvement with the Egyptians, so it goes into several different waves that are growing, we talked about this before first, it's just the people of Sheridan, um, they attack Rames, a second and essentially it's just a raid, it's a raid with force, but Ramsey can bait them, attack their coast. and he launches a surprise attack and sinks them into CA and then what he does is he takes the sharan and makes them his bodyguards and they fight him in cadash, so that's the first SE people that arrive doesn't seem too significant later on, However, in 128 BC, this is where you actually have the neighboring Libyans invading and seeking help from five different sea peoples and bringing their women and children, so this probably shows that there is more and more internal weakness visible within of Egypt, apparently the The battle itself is against Pharaoh Merta and basically what he does is find a good way to defeat the H, the sea people, and it basically has to do with the archers shooting at these sea people , apparently that lasts about 6 hours. until they are weakened enough and then he sends the chariots to divide the sea peoples and in doing so kills 6,000 and captures 9,000, so this is a slightly larger invasion, but it gets even worse in 1177 BC.

C., this is the largest you've probably seen these murals of the sea peoples invading and these massive battles. In this case it's a huge confederation and it's basically against Ramsey II that he's finally killed, but right now it's his moment of glory and he defeats them both on land and. at sea in these two massive battles and eventually has some follow-up punitive campaigns against the attackers, but still, as we have shown here, it could have been great, but it seems that the effort it took to defeat the people of the sea, uh, it wasn't. There is enough evidence in this period of the first recorded labor strikes, perhaps because the treasury was running out of money and then finally, as we said, Ramsy is murdered and there is a coup attempt, so the sea people seems to have contributed to the decline of Egypt, but it did not actually collapse in this period and may have gone further, so we might ask what actually caused Egypt to collapse and this is where it was an internal threat to the Egyptians and actually It's probably going to be the temples within Egypt and the weakening of the pharaohs that led to the end of the New Kingdom of Egypt, so to give you a little bit of context, remember how we talked about the palaces of Myan being centers where you know a lot of people come in. goods and there is an exchange and there is a specialization and production of key materials.

In a way the same system is happening in Egypt and this is what this diagram is supposed to represent, so there is this difference between the local people, the common people and then the higher up. Basically, generally there is the rule of the Pharaoh and the Royal States and the Nobles, but what happens in the New Kingdom Period is that a new type of organ um of the state emerges, which are the temples that increasingly become more and larger and function as their own group that can then gain power internally so that by the time perhaps there is a collapse or a power vacuum in Egypt, when the power vacuum occurs here, in the average case, it seems that the palace is weakens.

Well, the only other people who will take control will be the non-common people sector, unlike Egypt, if there is actually another internal body that can take the Pharaoh's place, well, they will intervene first. people can, so that's what you see happening in this period and to give a little more substance to this context. I have some figures here that talk about the growth of New Kingdom temples, so it's going to be a big one. In the New Kingdom Period you have the emergence of the god Amun, who is very powerful, he is based in Thieves and the thieves are important because it is one more capital in the south of Egypt, where for the first dynasty of the pharaohs and we can go up .

Here in the 18th Dynasty the capital is in the hands of the thieves, then it approaches the Delta, but at the beginning there is a lot of power concentrated in the thieves. The cult of the moon is becoming more and more powerful and that is why the temple of thieves is becoming larger and larger and even though the capital could move further away, they still maintain their presence as a great center of power and we see that this is really happening. shows here when you look at some of the records that are kept in these various places, so this is a table that shows that thieves basically in some of the collections of goods and materials that you have in the records get 80,000 people 400,000 animals uh almost 600,000 fields uh in terms of acres 65 towns 46 construction sites 83 ships so you can see here over time the temples are getting bigger and one of the reasons why this happens is because the temples have a place to play .

What happens is that as the pharaohs of the New Kingdom become more and more powerful, they want to legitimize themselves, they want to prove that they have the favor of the gods, so they start supporting these temples as ways to prosper, so the way they What works in Egypt is that there is actually a little check on the balance of power. Basically it is the pharaoh's job to do large new construction projects, this is what helps stimulate the economy, so the pharaoh holds the keys when it comes to building the temples, but then the temples themselves in terms of collecting tribute. , collecting goods and managing their estates depends on the temple proper, so there is a duality there, yes the temples are getting bigger and stronger, maybe they know it, they will eventually rebel, but the pharaoh has it in his hands the power and the only benefit of being able to be the one who actually builds new things, so there is a little bit of reciprocity and control. power there, but what happens in the later Egyptian period is you see the grip on power start to erode and there's a great article on the economics of ancient Egypt by Brian Mo, who essentially starts listing this and we'll go through it and basically do it. what are you doing.

He looks at the New Kingdom Period and says you know the records and the table we looked at shows the endowments made by Ramsey II for the EG gods of Egypt and the temples of him and essentially shows a large amount of land. What is given to these temples is what represents the total cultivated area in Egypt, it seems that in this accounting alone, around 13 to 18% is what it says here is being given to these temples, so it is given a lot of power from the land to the uh to the temples and beyond this, there's an even bigger idea that maybe that's just the tip of the iceberg.

You know, to quote this, it says that therefore the total amount of land held by the temples and Ramse Egypt may have been considerably greater than these. figures because again, these figures are only looking at a single snapshot, probably the entirety had more power to promote um, you know, driving this point home that the temples become more and more powerful is this quote that I pulled here about the Expeditions to the temple. and it's kind of a highlight on thisdynamic, which is why he says that in both the Old and Middle Kingdoms, the king frequently ordered royal officials, such as viers and provincial governors, to exploit mines and quarries in the deserts of the New Kingdom, however, the king The rights to exploit desert mines were often assigned to various temples and temples of Mory, especially in the Ramsey period, so these temples not only allow you to see at least 15% of the Arab land, if not more, but which seems like they are letting you know that they have never met before. rights and access to obtain mines and more wealth, so it seems that you know the pharaohs as they become weaker over the course of this New Kingdom Period, the temples become stronger and essentially become liberated and that is what you see happening with the The last pharaoh, at one point, the high priest of the amuna themes essentially becomes the deao ruler of Upper Egypt around 1080 BC.

C., so that's the story of Egypt and as you can see, yes, climate change may have been a stressor in each of these, but they had their own Mechanics for the collapse now we can finally see what this has to see because each of these individual collapses probably had a domino effect on the other. We started by saying that this is the world of the Bronze Age and that they are all interconnected by trade and goods and surpluses and all these kinds of things are happening and you can get a domino effect and, for example, if you were to do a mockup here, let's say you know that climate change starts This could happen and maybe that means there is a grain shortage, what happens here, oh, that could mean the economy goes down, that could mean that the palace system of which We talk leads to a riot, the riot could mean that, oh, people start running. as they run they might start attacking and destroying places, if they start attacking and destroying places that diverts the Hittites and makes them look this way, maybe that opens the door for an assault here, maybe the Hittites while they are doing their campaigns , they are going to go. further abroad and maybe that attracts the plague and while all this is happening, there are more and more domino effects because all these powers are connected.

Egypt can no longer trade with the Aane region, the same with the Hittites, so you have a big question mark about how all this could have spread and this remains one of the big unknowns for this period is what is the chronology of these events, so what I wanted to conclude is that, going back to one of these articles, there was a It's a very nice diagram that I found and the document itself is the one that focused on pollen and the Levant, but in This document presented a kind of flowchart of what could have happened, so what they propose is essentially I'll try it. they both show at the same time what they are postulating is that there is a climate change event that we have seen pretty well attested right now drier and colder climate conditions in the Near East and in the Levant in the Near East. causes crop failures, deterioration of grazing opportunities, many people do not do well in the general population, increase in food prices in Myan culture in Hati, causing famine, famine causes social unrest, groups begin to migrate, mainly havoc and destruction on land and sea.

This may have led to the Sea peoples emerging as run and flee people, this leads to wars which then go to Egypt. Egypt already deals with the drought that comes from above, that is this line and then the wars and the peoples of the Sea that come from these. Other groups, this then leads to Egypt withdrawing from the lands of Canaan and what that does is that Canaan, which is already suffering the same types of drought, now has a power vacuum as Egypt leaves, who will take economic and political control? instability, you have these so-called R groups who, as I understand it, are basically bandits, people who are otherwise gainfully employed who are now turning on each other in their desperation, attacking cities, um, there is destruction, more economic and demographic decay and as this happens, it's kind of bouncing back and forth throughout the entire Bronze Age and increasing in this total collapse of society, so that's where the Academy is headed. here and again, much of this is still up in the air, the level of collapse is not total, there was still continuity in this period, but something definitely happened and we are still figuring out what the chronology is and what the magnitude of this is, but as you can see, as you step away from this whole process, this whole journey, you can see why I had my crisis.

There are so many little details and nuances in this discussion that were key to understanding what happened. That said, thank you very much for entertaining my kind of thinking and my new innovation in terms of how I present information to You. I hope it was helpful in learning about the period and also for Le to learn to question sources and be a good skeptic in general when it comes to historical claims, especially when it comes to people like me. Us YouTubers can often make mistakes and even academics, as we've seen here, have fallen into traps, so yeah, with that being said, I can't thank you enough for sticking with me throughout the video and I'll see you in the next one. one and of course check out Total War Pharaoh, see you