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And what if that bleeding is from numerous sources internal and external, from a long succession of rough situations? You might not even die from blood loss, yo

And what if that bleeding is from numerous sources internal and external, from a long succession of rough situations? You might not even die from blood loss, you might just have such anemia that mustering your strength to gather the resources needed to survive becomes harder and harder until you perish from exhaustion and lack of sustenance. I find that often the end of things comes down not just to a single definable cause, but when a few events that might have been weathered successfully in isolation happen in an overlapping manner, and may cause additional problems otherwise.

namaria 3y ago
"The system failed" is not much in the way of explanation. All systems over a huge area failed at the same time. Explaining why and how requires more then "multiple things went wrong". Climate and technological changes seem to be a strong candidate.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  I found Robert Drews' explanation the most coherent, although it hasn't caught on so there must have been some problem with it. His explanation was military-technological: infantry weaponry and tactics advanced to the point that infantry > chariotry. At that point, masses of common people with relatively cheaply made weapons (still bronze at this point) could beat the military of the established civilizations, and all those cities were ripe for the looting. Only Egypt and Assyria were able to adapt their militaries to the new realities and survive. This also explains why, when civilization reestablished itself in the Iron Age, it was in a much different form.
- kbenson 3y ago
  My point is that it may be hard to tease out how much of that is survivorship bias (survivorship of records of failed states, that is). If it often takes multiple things failing at once to actually have the societies fail, then when you look back that's what you'll see, because other societies that fails will exhibit that to a high degree as the times when things don't happen to coincide are cases where the societies were able to pull through.
  - namaria 3y ago
    I don't see how survivorship bias applies to analyzing societal collapse when you don't take into account societies that didn't fail... Non failing societies is precisely what you should leave out in this case
    - kbenson 3y ago
      Any conclusion drawn that excludes a bunch of similar situations because the ultimate outcome ended up being different seems likely to be flawed, IMO. It's easy to point at climate change and say that's a deciding factor, but if there's ten times as many societies that faces similar climate change situations and didn't fail, then it's either not climate change, or it's climate change in combination with some other aspect of their society which made the problem something they couldn't deal with, whether that be cultural, socioeconomic, or another problem that happened at the same time. Back to the original point, I think sometimes "multiple things went wrong" totally can be a reason, and if there's an inability to accept that, I think that itself should be questioned. If a society is attacked, and there's a famine because of climate change, and the king dies from an illness unexpectedly and the succession is messy and there's not strong leadership, perhaps any one of those things is a hurdle that can be overcome, but if they all happen in a short period of time, that's definitely going to be a much larger stressor for a society. That doesn't mean they don't need to be identified, and we should accept "eh, multiple things happened" as the only answer, but any inability to accept the there might have been a confluence of events that combined to cause an outcome would be a failure on the part of historians, IMO.
      - namaria 3y ago
        > Any conclusion drawn that excludes a bunch of similar situations because the ultimate outcome ended up being different seems likely to be flawed, IMO. In principle yes but in this case we're looking at why all civilizations collapsed at the same time. There is no control group. The ones that didn't also went through large scale hardship and change. The point is not collapse vs survival, is why the large scale hardship with multiple concurrent collapses happened. The phenomenon being studied is not 'this civilization collapsed at this time', it's the multiple synchronized collapses and widespread hardship and change. > It's easy to point at climate change and say that's a deciding factor, but if there's ten times as many societies that faces similar climate change situations and didn't fail Climate studies in History show how massive, widespread collapse or large scale change happened in times of marked shifts in world climate, not the other way around > but any inability to accept the there might have been a confluence of events that combined to cause an outcome would be a failure on the part of historians, IMO. I wholly agree, and I never encountered this problem in academic History

namaria 3y ago

"The system failed" is not much in the way of explanation. All systems over a huge area failed at the same time. Explaining why and how requires more then "multiple things went wrong". Climate and technological changes seem to be a strong candidate.

pfdietz 3y ago
I found Robert Drews' explanation the most coherent, although it hasn't caught on so there must have been some problem with it. His explanation was military-technological: infantry weaponry and tactics advanced to the point that infantry > chariotry. At that point, masses of common people with relatively cheaply made weapons (still bronze at this point) could beat the military of the established civilizations, and all those cities were ripe for the looting. Only Egypt and Assyria were able to adapt their militaries to the new realities and survive. This also explains why, when civilization reestablished itself in the Iron Age, it was in a much different form.
kbenson 3y ago
My point is that it may be hard to tease out how much of that is survivorship bias (survivorship of records of failed states, that is). If it often takes multiple things failing at once to actually have the societies fail, then when you look back that's what you'll see, because other societies that fails will exhibit that to a high degree as the times when things don't happen to coincide are cases where the societies were able to pull through.
- namaria 3y ago
  I don't see how survivorship bias applies to analyzing societal collapse when you don't take into account societies that didn't fail... Non failing societies is precisely what you should leave out in this case
  - kbenson 3y ago
    Any conclusion drawn that excludes a bunch of similar situations because the ultimate outcome ended up being different seems likely to be flawed, IMO. It's easy to point at climate change and say that's a deciding factor, but if there's ten times as many societies that faces similar climate change situations and didn't fail, then it's either not climate change, or it's climate change in combination with some other aspect of their society which made the problem something they couldn't deal with, whether that be cultural, socioeconomic, or another problem that happened at the same time. Back to the original point, I think sometimes "multiple things went wrong" totally can be a reason, and if there's an inability to accept that, I think that itself should be questioned. If a society is attacked, and there's a famine because of climate change, and the king dies from an illness unexpectedly and the succession is messy and there's not strong leadership, perhaps any one of those things is a hurdle that can be overcome, but if they all happen in a short period of time, that's definitely going to be a much larger stressor for a society. That doesn't mean they don't need to be identified, and we should accept "eh, multiple things happened" as the only answer, but any inability to accept the there might have been a confluence of events that combined to cause an outcome would be a failure on the part of historians, IMO.
    - namaria 3y ago
      > Any conclusion drawn that excludes a bunch of similar situations because the ultimate outcome ended up being different seems likely to be flawed, IMO. In principle yes but in this case we're looking at why all civilizations collapsed at the same time. There is no control group. The ones that didn't also went through large scale hardship and change. The point is not collapse vs survival, is why the large scale hardship with multiple concurrent collapses happened. The phenomenon being studied is not 'this civilization collapsed at this time', it's the multiple synchronized collapses and widespread hardship and change. > It's easy to point at climate change and say that's a deciding factor, but if there's ten times as many societies that faces similar climate change situations and didn't fail Climate studies in History show how massive, widespread collapse or large scale change happened in times of marked shifts in world climate, not the other way around > but any inability to accept the there might have been a confluence of events that combined to cause an outcome would be a failure on the part of historians, IMO. I wholly agree, and I never encountered this problem in academic History