8 ms·
Seems 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 a
by evanjrowley 3mo ago
Seems 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).
- 3mo ago
- 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...