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Late Bronze Age Collapse
- worldthruword 3mo ago[dead]
- evanjrowley 3mo agoSeems to be a popular topic. Historian Eric H. Cline has multiple books citing this time period, specifically 1117 BCE as the inflection point for the bronze age "collapse", defined by a deterioration of international shipping routes that weakened the nation-states of the era. I've learned about it recently because YouTube began recommending videos about it. For example: https://youtu.be/choxcHXhZhE?is=t5lDwQQpqPsE2k5M https://youtu.be/choxcHXhZhE?is=t5lDwQQpqPsE2k5M One historical event that Cline focuses on is a severe centuries-long drought. It's something the ACOUP article seems to omit. Cline does not focus as much on destruction of bronze-age sites although there is one port city in particular which is linked to the international trade of the time. Exactly who destroyed it appears to be a mystery but it could be linked to the migration theory that ACOUP dismisses. The migration may have actually come as a result of the previously mentioned drought.
- darkfloo 3mo agoShameless plug for my favourite YouTuber of all time https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=GviYcvEtOAJ1mln7 https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=GviYcvEtOAJ1mln7
- CountHackulus 3mo agoHistoria Civilis somehow distills subjects down to squares in a great way. Entertaining and informative. Fantastic channel.
- moffkalast 3mo agoThe man who singlehandedly got me to think about Rome on a weekly basis.
- DicIfTEx 3mo agoThe fantastic Fall of Civilizations podcast also had an episode about it: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/01/21/episode-2-is-now-live/ https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/01/21/episode-2-...
- pfdietz 3mo agoThe drought explanation seems particularly plausible for the Hittites, IMO. They had grain storage, but ~3 years of drought would exhaust that. So if the climate becomes just a bit drier the chance of such a three year run increases enough to likely crash their society. Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.
- idiotsecant 3mo agoIt's unlikely that rich countries would experience famine as severely as poor ones and consequently they would probably still demand meat. Grain that could feed people would still feed livestock.
- bryanlarsen 3mo agoA draw down of animal stocks increases meat supply in the short term. As grain gets more expensive, farmers sell animals for meat rather than keeping them to reproduce.
- stymaar 3mo agoBut “As grain gets more expensive” middle eastern countries (that rely almost entirely on import for their grain source) would start facing grain shortage (due to balance of payment issues) or at least severe deprivation of the poorer part of their population. The Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan revolutions didn't occur at the same moment out of coincidence…
- stymaar 3mo ago> Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. This, plus the gigantic amount of agricultural land being used for biofuel production (almost as much as cattle food).
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- icegreentea2 3mo agoI don't think Bret (the author of ACOUP) omits drought - he leads his section on plausible theories with "period of drying and consistent crop failures". While Bret dismisses the out to in migration/invasion theory, he does support the idea of intra-region migration/warfare (perhaps induced by drought/crop failures).
- the-smug-one 3mo agoEric Cline has an interview on "Tides of History" podcast.
- flir 3mo agoI'm really annoyed that Patrick gave up on that. I mean, I know he's been doing it a decade, and I can't chain him to a desk, and I'm being entitled, but...
- the-smug-one 3mo agoIt was cancelled by Amazon when they purchased Wondery, IIUC. He's got "Past Lives" podcast now!
- flir 3mo agoWell that sucks. Thanks for the update. I listened to a couple. The first (current?) run on Past Lives was about slavery, and was a bit too "misery porn" for me. The historical fiction component of the show was always my least favourite bit.
- ape4 3mo agoI think it's a popular topic because so many people are wondering when our civilization will fall.
- forlorn_mammoth 3mo ago> deterioration of international shipping routes like a closing of a certain straight that was essential for a large percentage of a necessary resource?
- RetroTechie 3mo agoProbably more in general, as in: fighting between states disrupts trade between them. Enough of that & hardly any inter-state trading is left.
- Brendinooo 3mo agoIt injects some really interesting color into the Tanakh/Old Testament - I'm not sure anyone has definitively lined up the Bronze Age Collapse with Biblical events, but it sure seems to have happened somewhere between the Exodus and King David. One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.
- simiones 3mo agoThe Exodus is an entirely fictional account though, it's not based on any real historical events. Even King David seems to be mostly mythical, though there is some vague evidence of a "House of David" being something some real kings claimed descent from. Edit: I should say "almost entirely fictional". The main scholarly agreement is that it may record some stories of some small numbers (hundreds, at most some thousands - nowhere near the 600k in the Bible) real semitic slaves' escape from Egypt and migration to the area of Canaan, mixing with the local Canaanite population that were the precursors of the Jewish populations of later Israel and Judah.
- bazoom42 3mo agoWe dont know that.
- cogman10 3mo agoWe actually do. There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories. For example, the death of a large amount of the population along with the pharaohs son. The destruction of pharaoh's army. Records of ancient hebrew slaves. Ancient Egyptians left behind a pretty large amount of history and documentation. They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation.
- cs702 3mo agoThe OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting: > there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.
- pfdietz 3mo agoOne possibility I've wondered about is the emergence of a new crop pathogen. This might be addressed by looking at DNA of modern crop pathogens, and possibly looking if there was a change in the crops being grown before/after the LBAC.
- The_Blade 3mo agoEric Cline is great - when i had a tooth removed in a somewhat nasty procedure i spent a Caturday hepped up on goofballs watching his videos on LBA while playing Hatshepsut on Diety in Civ VII 1.4 (i got to play test 1.3.2 via Firaxis via discord, ooh la la i call a car hole a garage) in my personal "immersive learning" period starting 2021, i discovered acoup.blog when Old World came out and extended into reading while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action EDIT: in the blind i'm guessing the port city of which you speak is Ugarit, which i had never heard of. IIRC everything was weakened by drought and famine, and Ugarit's armies were pulled over to the Hittites who abandoned Ugarit to The Sea Peoples. and the Sea Peoples always came off like a "cosmological constant" fudge factor where constant advances in shipwreck archaeology should provide more clarity in its merry time history is dope. it never repeats itself but it always rhymes :)
- nchmy 3mo agoits been a while since ive read a comment somewhere that I am so completely bewildered by. I understand about half the words, and none of the references, that you wrote. Hope your teeth are doing better now!
- The_Blade 3mo agomy mother is a fish
- simtel20 3mo agoDo you find yourself more lost in the history parts or the gaming parts?
- The_Blade 3mo agothe point is sort of both (i've been nerdy and signalling enough in these general and personal trying times, so why stop there) - Chris Crawford created Balance of Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)) and had some writings saying games are more important to / have a greater capacity to aid learning than the modern education system at large, citing the little games mother cats play with kittens to teach them how to survive (or something to that effect). that stuck with me but either way, without BoP and WarGames you don't have, say, Twilight Struggle - Another thing later on that stuck with me are media theorist Marshall McLuhan's concept of hot versus cool media (perhaps more famous for the medium is the message / massage). I am not going to consult AI for this, but I contextualized it as how much work the "recipient" has to do. I.e. baseball or War of the Worlds on the radio is "cooler" than red-hot NFL football or Independence Day on the screen So then Contagion is hot media, passages from David Quammen's Spillover are cool(er) media, and Plague Inc.'s porridge is just right. or play Augustus while I, Claudius is one while getting ripshit on Ovid and wine if i had more time i would make it shorter
- bloak 3mo agoI'm being pedantic here, of course, but "nation-states" is perhaps not the right expression to use for that era. Nation states are primarily a thing of the nineteenth century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state). The article seems to talk about "imperial states" and "palace states", and I'm not sure I've ever seen the expression "palace state" before.
- beloch 3mo agoOne of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. It was a systems collapse. The societies of the time were likely resilient enough to deal with "just a drought", "just a war", "just a big earthquake", or just some "international trade hiccups". What happened during the collapse was all of these things at once. It was the combination that proved so difficult to handle. To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline. Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.
- pfdietz 3mo ago> One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. I don't think he establishes that. It could be one root cause, and complexity in how things then fell apart.
- atombender 3mo agoHe's also recently been on Empire [1], the Goalhanger podcast — and sister show to the great The Rest is History (which I hope will cover this period someday, though they tend not to go back that far in time) — in a series of episodes on the late Bronze Age collapse, which had Stephen Fry as a guest as well. Cline does cover the evidence of destruction, which is also talked about in the other episodes. But the thing about drought is that we have written communications between different rules documenting that they were struggling with food supply. An aside: For some reason I find Cline super annoying to listen to — his voice, drawl, and odd cadence triggers something visceral in me. But I admit he knows his stuff. [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire-world-history/id1639561921 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire-world-history/i...
- lordleft 3mo agoBeware the Sea Peoples
- evanjrowley 3mo agoIn an alternate timeline, The Sea Peoples are Romans sailing to England, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans. Things became fuzzy when the English themselves became other civilization's Sea Peoples.
- appreciatorBus 3mo agoI would wager that almost every civilization has been some other civilization’s sea people at some point in it’s history.
- mannykannot 3mo agoAnd don't forget the Vikings, who may provide the best analogy to the Sea Peoples.
- forinti 3mo agoThere's a Portuguese saying "há mouro na costa" which is literally "there are moor at the coast" and means that there is something fishy going on.
- hackyhacky 3mo agoThe Moors existed about 1900 years after the Sea People of the Bronze Age.
- onion2k 3mo agoThe Bronze Age was the third best age.
- dn3500 3mo agoAfter the one where humans first harnessed water power, the Dam Age, and when we started wearing clothes, the Garb Age.
- D-Coder 3mo agoAnd carrying stuff, the Lug Age.
- marking-time 3mo agoAs well as dating in the Old Age.
- inigyou 3mo agoThe Iron Age can be researched at your Town Center, but the Post-Iron Age isn't a real age, it's just an extra setting on the map settings menu that starts you in the Iron Age with everything already researched.
- onion2k 3mo agoIt was a Gold, Silver, Bronze joke. :(
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- marking-time 3mo agoI got it. It is a good one :)
- projektfu 3mo agoAt least it medaled. The same can't be said for the information age.
- timbits98 3mo agoGiven the era, it seems likely that the collapse was the work of multiple angry gods. The author doesn't cover this possibility.
- mr_toad 3mo agoThe people of that era would have thought so. The Iliad and the Odyssey (if they have any basis in reality) might be examples of that period seen through a lens of mythology.
- bazoom42 3mo agoHow so? Are the Greek the sea people then?
- mr_toad 3mo agoMyths don’t have natural or human causes. Instead you have wars caused by divine rivalry (e.g. the Judgement of Paris). Maybe Troy was actually destroyed by the Sea Peoples, but that probably wouldn’t make as much at the box office.
- tetromino_ 3mo ago> Are the Greek the sea people then? Very possibly a subset of the Sea Peoples were Greek. Egyptians reported the "Ekwesh" (which might be the Egyptian word for Achaeans) and the "Denyen" (which might be the Egyptian word for Danaans) among the Sea Peoples.
- fuzzfactor 3mo agoPeople have always downplayed the number of things their gods can get angry about, while it often escalates beyond sustainability. >Late Bronze Age Collapse It was a little late but it had to happen sooner or later. For those in power there may not be many other opportunities to set the standard for archaic leadership, so better get it while they can. As we have seen :\
- lokar 3mo ago
- Amorymeltzer 3mo agoPatrick Wyman—of the Tides of History podcast—just put out a new book, Lost Worlds, which is worth a read if this is your bag. The basic premise is that the way ancient history is typically taught, "that we moved linearly from foraging to farming, and then from country farmers to city-dwelling, tax-paying subjects of kings and emperors," is essentially wrong. He goes on: >All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt.... >That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more. It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
- The_Blade 3mo ago> "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it." pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :) i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky. i'll see myself out
- timacles 3mo agoI think the same, we are headed for the tech version of the Dark Ages, all with feudalism. The corporations will be the feudal lords, because they have more capital than most of the countries in the world. I'm just wondering how will conflict and fighting for resources play out during this time. Will the corporations simply hire military groups with their infinite money?
- usumgallu 3mo agoI am mobile and not at my main system with my HN login, so I made this temp, but I think I cracked the primary cause and have been slowly working on a paper to submit to the journals... I was doing geological research trying to show how crustal displacement theory is incorrect, and stumbled upon a paper that elucidated the insight: There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field in the Levant and in the Med (3 actual areas) starting at roughly 1200 and ongoing until about 600! Im pretty sure Im the first person to posit this theory, but the more I steelman against it the more I think I'm onto something, and the implications are huge... because it has more to do with other subjects such as the evolution of religion in the region too. My theories on that are harder to prove but will be the follow up paper, at first Im just trying to focus on the geological proof. Essentially a localized reduction in geomagnetic shielding allowing increased cosmic ray flux and solar radiation caused destruction, migration, religious interpretations of what was being seen in the sky, and all the war and tumolt that would come along with those...
- esikich 3mo agoMhmm. Take your meds.
- usumgallu 3mo ago[dead]
- marking-time 3mo ago>There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field > geological proof This is an interesting theory. My question is: What methods are you using to test the change in magnetic fields? Put another way, what is your middle range theory from an archaeological perspective? How are you dating your samples? etc.
- usumgallu 3mo ago[dead]
- ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
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- bee_rider 3mo agoOur favorite pedant should have a new post up today, I think he posts in the afternoon though. At least, checking in the morning and saying “ah, dang, the acoup post hasn’t come out yet, maybe I’ll reread an old one…” is a Friday morning ritual for me.
- cineticdaffodil 3mo agoMy pet hypothesis is : That trade networks, in times of collapse- become sort of superspreader networks of downfall. Think about that city state who runs out of food by the sea! It still has all the trading vessels- whats more logic then to go - and take over somebody elses city and ships! Piracy of the damned! Stealing the food from the starving, just to give there families one more day! Following the coast- until you run out of city- and the civilization is gone!It should also not affect the country interior cities - who then would murder the upstart pirates who took over the old capital near the sea..
- vitally3643 3mo agoThat's just the Sea Peoples hypothesis
- cineticdaffodil 3mo agoWe should sea other people?
- mohamedkoubaa 3mo agoThe Ottoman embargo of Western Europe leading to the collapse of the Aztecs supports your hypothesis. The other sea people.
- forgotmypw17 3mo agoHave to mention this talk by Jonathan Blow, which maps the LBAC onto software development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
- wangii 3mo agoyep, that's my first thought came to my mind as well. it's a great talk fueled with the passion of engineer, especially relevant in the era of LLM.
- marking-time 3mo agoThe study of the LBAC is compelling these days because of the similarities to our present day situation. Other commenters have noted the the possibility of AI driven collapse, but another possibility is our dependence on oil. Bronze is the combination copper+tin. Copper is common in earths composition, but tin is much more scarce. The scarcity of tin necessitated the expansive trade networks to acquire the resource. To my way of thinking this correlates to our dependency on oil which while not exactly scarce, is not evenly distributed across the world. Our global supply chain for oil is fragile in the same way that the supply chain for tin was to the bronze age empires. As for the article: I found the authors use of dating systems inconsistent and confusing. Some references are listed with the BC/AD nomenclature while others omit it entirely leaving the reader confused as which era he is referring to. Also, the use of the BC/AD has been supplanted by the use of the BCE/CE nomenclature in scientific references for 20+ years. This could simply be due to the fact that the author is a historian, but one would think a PhD would know better. All of this made me wonder if perhaps the author relies too heavily on AI.
- upfrog 3mo agoThe author has been an established blogger since well before the modern AI boom. It is of course not impossible that their writing technique has changed, and they now use AI heavily, but preferring BC/AD over the alternative/not always clarifying which strikes me as incredibly weak evidence.
- 131012 3mo agoTypos are frequent (including in this blog post), and have been for a while. Bret is not an AI bot.
- marking-time 3mo agoA PhD that did not use a spell checker? How would you describe that?
- 0xffff2 3mo ago
- brainlessdev 3mo agoAlthough it's not its main topic, I enjoyed Ian Morris' Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, which goes over this in a way that really fascinated me. The book's ideas seem contested but as a layman it was a great tour of many years of humanity.
- worldthruword 3mo agoFinancial Imperialism is the reason why US is rich in terms of resources and because of material richness, lot of raw brainpower is attacted to America. Read the book "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire" by Michael Hudson.
- dllu 3mo ago> in Spanish, there wasn’t an English version, but it will do I've just uploaded an English translation to: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moyen_Orient_13e_si%C3%A8cle.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moyen_Orient_13e_si%... If someone can proofread my translations that would be great.
- frm88 3mo agoThank you. On an unrelated note: I found this map where you can view the changes in political geography over time via scroll at the bottom. It's my goto with historical posts. https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/regions#position=5/49.79/8.47&year=1140 https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/regions#position=5/...
- pu_pe 3mo agoA very pleasant and informative read. The hypothesis that climate change was the primary cause of what came after seems plausible.
- tsoukase 3mo agoAs a Greek I feel proud that we passed through all history tides during our high times: multiple cycles of thriving and decline, the last one being the Classical century of 5th BC, then the Hellenistic period of Alexander until we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans. This lasted for a full thousand years until a little before Jesus birth and it continued in Europe and the rest of the world in the same way for two more until today. It seems the reasons of decline were most often the boring ones: variable scale fightings and climate change. Any resemblance to modern times is not coincidental.
- bamboozled 3mo agoIt's why I love visiting Greece so much, you can feel the history slapping you in the face and it's an awesome feeling. It's a wonderful place.
- userulluipeste 3mo ago"we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans" As a tongue-in-the-cheek retort, if the Greeks were really doing that (i.e. only playing ball in the grand building up of civilization), then the Roman Empire wouldn't ended up speaking Greek and looking so different in the period in which it is nowadays being called "Byzantine". Romans revered various Greek aspects, and somehow that privileged status that (everything) Greek enjoyed inside the empire played a role into the movement of the empire's capital to the Greek city of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople). It surely feels more like taking (the reigns, and not doing much afterwards, other than holding out for as long as possible).
- DeluluDon 3mo agoITT: Gen Z argues with Millennials about the Bible.
- singularity2001 3mo agoAs the author mentions the Trojan War in the Illias could be reflections of this event
- wisty 3mo agoI saw a slghtly odd youtube video by a small creator who thinks it was at least partly because the gods stopped talking to people. No, hear me out. Obviously they weren't real, but the Youtuber said (based on sources) people used to talk to the gods, like you might talk to a cat. And the gods spoke back (and we all know cat owners who insist the cat is replying). As societies became more sophisticated, this stopped. Around the time of the collapse, rulers complained that the gods were silent. The usual interpretation is that the gods did not help, but what if they literally stopped "hearing" the god's replies? You couldn't have a conversation with Zeus in the town square anymore without people saying you were nuts, unless you were a ruler. But the sophisticated, skeptical societies also became fractured and disloyal (especially when only their rulers were arguing with Zeus over why the peasants weren't taking them seriously), and social institutions (which were stuck in the past) couldn't keep up.
- lou1306 3mo agoIs this the old "breakdown of the bicameral mind" theory? I don't know. I think that tin trade routes breaking down + rise of iron-wielding civilisations are more plausible.
- mannykannot 3mo agoIt looks very much like it: Julian James, 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' (see [1]), which influenced Neal Stephenson's writing of Snow Crash. Scott Alexander wrote a critique of it beginning "Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact..." [2]. A response (which I have not yet read) can be found here [3]. [1] https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overview/ https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overv... [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-... [3] https://www.julianjaynes.org/2023/09/04/fact-checking-scott-alexander-part1/ https://www.julianjaynes.org/2023/09/04/fact-checking-scott-...
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- krzyk 3mo agoA very interesting read. I'm a bit puzzled by one thing. Author writes that the Greek alphabet is based on Linear B script, and also that it is based on Phoenician alphabet. So was it a mix of both?
- nand4011 3mo agoThe Greeks lost writing as a technology during the collapse, so the two alphabets aren't related. They just represent the same language.
- jccooper 3mo ago> The Mycenaean palaces had developed a syllabic script, which we call Linear B, to represent their spoken Greek. This form of writing is entirely lost. In the 8th century, the Greeks will adopt an entirely new script – borrowing the one the Phoenicians are using – to represent their language You've misread something. Linear B encoded Greek, but is not related to the Phoenician-based script.
- shevy-java 3mo agoI think "Collapse" is a strange word because we talk here about several hundred, if not thousand of years. A good example is the old roman empire - it expanded, it grew - until it no longer did and then it whittled away or lost out to e. g. northern tribes. Collapse as a word is just weird here really. Even the old roman empire did not "collapse" per se, if we ignore big single final battles such as 1453: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople
- Andrew_nenakhov 3mo agoThe real reason for dark ages was not the fall of the western roman empire, but the arabian conquests, which turned the international trade highway (the Mediterranean sea) into a highway by which pirates and slave traders had easy access to their prey.
- jschveibinz 3mo ago[dead]
- abetusk 3mo agoPopulation estimates for that era (2,000 BC to 1,000 BC) are anywhere from about 25M to 150M [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population#Historical_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...