Collapse of Late Bronze Age Civilizations

Well, welcome. My topic today, I'm going to talk about 1177 BC. So let me take you away from rainy Bethesda and take you back more than 3,000 years in the past. where hopefully it's a little warmer and sunnier. This is the late Bronze Age. This is the period that is, I would say, nearest and dearest to my heart. If I could be reincarnated backwards, I would choose to live back then. I'm sure I would not live more than about 48 hours, but it'd be a good 48 hours. So we're in the period from 1700 to about 1200 BC here, 500 years. And you can see from this map the different colored areas are the different civilizations that were around at that point. Basically, I call them for shorthand the G8 of the ancient world because there's actually nine, but never mind. So it's close. So we've got Minoans and Mycenaeans over in Greece. We've got Hittites up in Turkey. We've got the Egyptians, which are coming up here into Canaan. Mitanni here, Assyrians and Babylonians, Cypriots here, these are the great powers of the late Bronze Age. They're all flourishing 3,500 years ago, give or take. And this is actually a period that you know about. You might not have thought you knew about it, but you do. Because in this time period, we've got Hatshepsut, the world's first female pharaoh. Familiar to anybody? You've all heard of her, right? Thutmose III, her stepson, Amenhotep III. How about Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh? All right, okay, so he's in this period as well. I'm venturing to guess that most of you have heard of King Tut. Would I be correct about that? Yes, okay, so that's this period as well. Ramses II, pharaoh of the Exodus, if it took place, that's another lecture. Ramses III is going to be our boy today. He's going to be the hero of this particular period. This is also the time when we get the Battle of Kadesh between the Egyptians and the Hittites, 1279. Little thing called the Trojan War. Heard of that? That's at this time period. In fact, this is the context for the Trojan War. I do think it happened. Again, that's a topic for another lecture. My wife does not think it happened. We argue about this at home. Others argue over mortgage payments. We argue about the Trojan War. And then again, this is the period of the Exodus, probably about 1250 B.C., if it took place. So you see, you already know this period, even if you thought that you did not. Now, one thing that is special about this period is that it is globalized for its time period. That is, it's not globalized like we are today, but from Italy on the west to Iraq and India on the east, they are all in connection with each other there. They're all in contact from Turkey in the north down to Egypt in the south. We get one of these social network diagrams. That's what my wife does, social network analysis. So this is courtesy of her. You know the, what is it, six degrees of Kevin Bacon with all the movies? Yeah. Same thing here, except that this is what's called a small world, which means there are no more than three leaps between any two pairs or any pair of people. So if the Mycenaeans did not know the Assyrians, they knew the Hittites who knew the Assyrians, and you could get there within one or two leaps. Now, the reason this is important is that there's been very few times in history where we've had such a situation. Us today is one, them back then is another. So this is why I would say that looking at what happened to these guys, even though it was more than 3,200 years ago, is actually relevant to today. because looking at what happened to them might have implications for us today as well. And what happened? Well, they collapsed. Just after 1200 BC, everything that had been going very nicely for several centuries by this point comes to a crashing halt on either side of 1200 BC. Everybody that I just mentioned goes down. We get a dark age that lasts for... between 150 and 300 years, and basically civilization has to reboot in this area. So this was... A huge loss to the world. It is comparable to the collapse of the Roman Empire, which happened 1,500 years later. The main problem is, we're not really sure what caused it. So that's what I want to talk about mostly today, are the possible explanations for what caused that collapse, and then see if maybe we should start going, hmm, yeah. All right, so it used to be... that it was a very simple explanation. When I was in graduate school, when I was an undergraduate, and for decades before me, the simple solution was that the Sea Peoples had done it. When in doubt, the Sea Peoples. So who are the Sea Peoples? Well, this is the Egyptian name for them. The Egyptians, actually, it's our name for them. We call them the Sea Peoples. The Egyptians talk about a number of different groups coming through the eastern Mediterranean and winding up. in Egypt on the shores attacking them, not once but twice over a 30-year period. They come in 1207 and they come in 1177. And yes, 1177 is where I get the title of the book. It is the second time that Egypt is invaded by these people. Now the problem is, in fact, that the dates change. The Egyptologists keep changing. the chronology. So a better way to put it is the fifth year of Merneptah and the eighth year of Ramses III, and that way you don't have to worry about it, right? On their inscriptions, they say, in my fifth year, this happened, and in the eighth year, this happened. That is why the, well, when the book came out two years ago, I got a nice note from a senior colleague in New York City, and he sent me an email. And all he said is, congrats on the book. The title should have been 1186 BC. I wrote him back a two-word email. No, it's not what you're thinking. I wrote back and said, it was. And in fact, the original contract, which I had signed with Princeton back in 2007, the title was 1186 BC. But in the interim, while I was working on it, the Egyptologists changed the chronology again. So it became 1177. Ironically, since it's come out, they've changed the chronology back. So the next edition is probably going to be called 1186, question mark, something like that. Anyway, all right, so what we get, the Egyptians tell us in both reigns. Manepta and Ramses III. But let me focus on Ramses III here because it's more literally picturesque. He leaves on the wall of his mortuary temple in Egypt, a place called Medinet Habu, which is near the Valley of the Kings. In fact, I presume some of you have been there. Anybody been to Medinet Habu? No? Well, I think we need a field trip for sure. Definitely. All right. Well, it's over by King Tut's tomb, the Valley of the Kings. On a wall of his temple, which is what you're looking at here on the left-hand side, and you see the drawing on the right-hand side, he gives us a picture of the invasion and an inscription of what went on. So he tells us the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in their fray. No land could stand before their arms. And then he tells us what happens, who they overran. From Hatay, Kode, Karkamesh, Artswa, and Alashia on. Now we know where these places are. Hatay is Turkey, it's the Hittites. Kode is where Turkey meets Syria. Karkamesh, northern Syria. Artswa is actually western Turkey on the coast there. Alashia is the ancient name for Cyprus. So these people are sweeping across from west to east, across Turkey, down the Levant, across Cyprus. They set up a camp in Amur, that's northern Syria, desolated its people, its land was like that which has never come to being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, flame was prepared before them, and then he actually tells us the name of the peoples. He says their confederation was the Peleset, the Tejeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyan, and the Weshesh. So he gives us, how many is that, one, two, three, four, five right there. There's another. Six that are mentioned the first time back in 1207. Two of them overlap. So there's a total of nine separate groups that come twice in those 30 years. So where are they from? What are they doing? What happens to them? Well, we're told part of that. Ramses, in another inscription from a couple years later, he says, I overthrew those who invaded from their lands. I slew the Denyan who were in their isles. The Tejekar and the Peleset were made ashes. The Shardana and the Weshos of the sea, they were made as those that exist not. So he beats them. And in fact, Merneptah had beaten them. back in 1207 as well. So they come twice, they lose twice, they do not come a third time. That's it, all right? Now, the question is, where do they come from? And what do they look like? Well, what do they look like is easy because Ramsey shows us the pictures. This is a picture of the Sea Peoples. In fact, if anybody's gonna dress up for Halloween, there you go. Right, though, it's actually, I've got a cheaper way to do it. When I was in grad school, the two people the year behind me, they came to our Halloween party with about 100 papier-mâché Cs stapled to their clothes. We said, what are you? They said, well, we're C peoples. So they won first place. So true story. All right, so that's what they look like. The problem is, though, where do they come from? So, for instance, one of the groups is Shardana. The other is Shekelesh, Tjeke, or Denyan, the names I just read to you. Can you think of any place in the Mediterranean, either eastern or western, that looks like Shardana? Sardinia, absolutely. So people think that maybe they're from Sardinia. Or maybe they went there afterward, one way or the other. How about Shekelesh? Any place in the Mediterranean got the same consonants? Forget about the vowels, but the same consonants? Uh, no, not Ashkelon, though that is an interesting idea, but no. Somewhere near Sardinia? Sicily. Absolutely, right. So, Sicily. To Jack, it was a little bit harder. We're thinking maybe the Troad or Sickels, so either Italy or Troy. Dania, and many people have suggested these are Homer's Donatans, so the Mycenaeans from Greece. The Weshash, not sure. Ancient name for Troy is Willousa, so maybe that's where they're from. the only one that we're pretty sure we know, and it was actually identified already by Champollion, the guy that deciphered hieroglyphics, is the Plesset. Anybody care to take a guess who the Plesset might be? Philistines. The Philistines. And in fact, the Bible says the Philistines came from Crete, so that would actually fit. So we may be able to identify where these people come from, but it's not for sure by a long shot. And in fact, the original people talking about this weren't sure if they, as I said, came from there or if they went there. And that has not been decided either. What has been decided is that they said the Sea Peoples were responsible for the collapse. 1207, 1177, that was the answer. Gaston Mossborough, a French Egyptologist, had already put this theory, it was a theory, actually it was a hypothesis, in about a... 1850. By 1901, it was solidified. And so every time an archaeologist excavated a site that was destroyed, they said, see, it's the Sea Peoples. The problem is, of course, that's backwards. That's not what you do. So I actually think that this is not the right answer, even though there are some interesting parts to it. So for instance, here's your Sea Peoples again, the Philistines, and we do have Philistine remains. in the region that is now Israel, also Lebanon, also Syria. This is degenerate Mycenaean pottery. It looks like somebody from Greece came over, made it, but the clay that they're using is from Cyprus or Rhodes or the Levant. So it really does look like you've got Mycenaeans that join in and come on over. So there is something to the suggestion that the Sea Peoples were real. The Egyptians are not just making them up. But if we take a look at the inscription that he actually leaves us. What Ramsey shows us, and it's kind of hard to see, but on the left you've got the actual drawing. On the top right is an artist's rendition of it. And then down bottom, a modern-day parallel. What Ramsey shows us is that these people that are coming, they're not like Vikings. They're not just raiding. They're bringing their families. You've got the wife. You've got the kids. You've got the belongings. You've got the ox cart. These are people moving. They're migrating. So instead of Vikings, think of the Dust Bowl from the 1930s here in America. Everybody moving from Oklahoma to California. It's that kind of thing. So the question then becomes, what could have started such a migration? Now. I also think that it's a little too simplistic to give the explanation that I was taught in graduate school. They said, oh, there was a drought, and that led to famine, and that led to the movement of the Sea Peoples. That led to cutting of the trade routes, and that then led to collapse because they were not self-sufficient enough. Now, on the one hand, that's a nice explanation. On the other hand, you will notice it's quite linear. You will also probably realize... It's never that nice, right? It's a lot more messy. And so I think that this is not the right answer. I think it's too simple. The Sea Peoples are part of it, yes, but they're not the sole reason. And in fact, I think they might have been as much the victims as they were the oppressors. That is, they are one of the symptoms of this, but I don't think they're the cause. I think they are a bogeyman that's been used to scare little kids for the last couple of generations, or at least. If your parents are archaeologists, it was. So I was skeptical, shall we say, and I wanted to look around for what really happened. So what I want to present to you today is my alternate hypothesis for what caused the collapse and then see what you think of it. Now, I remind you that we've got a globalized society for that time, for that period, with everybody in contact with everybody else. and I give you one... major example, I said that this is the late Bronze Age, and actually the Bronze Age goes from 3,000 to 1,000 BC, give or take, and we're in that last part of it. You've got the early, middle, and late. The way you make bronze, as I put up here, is tin and copper, right? 90% copper, 10% tin. Some of you may know that if you don't have tin, you can actually use something else. Anybody know what that is? You can actually use arsenic. I don't recommend it. You won't live long, but you can make arsenical bronze. But here, most of the copper is used to make bronze at that time. The copper is not a problem. It's coming from Cyprus. In fact, that's where the word comes from, Kypros. Cyprus means copper. The tin is a little bit more problematic. Possible some came from Cornwall, though I rather doubt they got up there more than once on a blue moon. There are some tin mines in southern Turkey, but not enough. The vast majority came from Afghanistan, specifically the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan. Now, anybody here have lapis lazuli jewelry? Anything like that? Okay, that's the same area, right? Lapis and tin come from the same area of Afghanistan. So we have to get it all the way from Afghanistan. over to this area. And we do know that they are doing this because we have a text from the site of Mari, which is on the Euphrates River. I'm actually not sure that Mari exists anymore because ISIS took it over and were busy looting it. So it may be gone by now. But the Mari letters, which were found by the French in the 1920s, one of them says that 10 is coming there and being sent on to Ugarit on the northern coast of Syria. And from there is being sent on to Crete. So you can see that you've got a trade route of hundreds, if not thousands of miles. If you cut it at any point, you are indeed in trouble. And in fact, a colleague of mine in England has said that for them, tin was like oil is for us. And that keeping the steady flow of tin is the same problem that we've got for oil. And I think that's a pretty good analogy. But bear in mind that they're also importing finished goods as well. We've got them swapping raw materials, not just tin and copper, but also gold and silver and other things. But along with the raw materials are coming the finished goods. They've got a regular trade circuit going here. So this is one of my favorite. It's another one of these Mari letters. Actually dates from just after 1800 BC. One Caftorian weapon. Now they're... The Kaftor is their name for Crete and the Minoans. So this is a weapon from Crete. The top and the base are covered with gold. Its top is encrusted with lapis lazuli. Now, this is not the dagger. This is from the death pits of war. But still, I thought it illustrated it nicely, a gold dagger with lapis lazuli. And I don't know about you. I want one of these. I'd happily carry it open, whatever. But I think my absolute favorite. is another letter that says, One pair of leather shoes in the Caftorian style, so Minoan shoes, and if you've been to Crete, you know those are probably sandals, though they could be boots, which to the palace of Hammurabi, king of Babylon, and yes, that is the Hammurabi, right, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a bhakti limb carried, but which were returned. So these sandals come all the way from Crete to Babylon. They're given to Hammurabi. He doesn't like them, and he returns them. Why? I don't know. Too small? Too last millennium? At any rate, so for fun, at GW, I once had my students look at Hammurabi's law code, all 272 or 282 laws, and I said, find the penalty for returning shoes. And they came back crestfallen. They said, there is no penalty. I said, exactly. So, you know, nothing changes. That's one of the interesting things about it. So, we've got this globalized society, trade, reciprocity, diplomacy. Everybody's marrying each other's daughters for gold and silver and whatnot. And then into it you drop a little chaos, and suddenly we've got a big, big problem. And one by one, these wink out until you're only left with Egypt. Everybody else goes away. No more Mycenaeans, no more Minoans, no more Hittites, no more Cypriots, at least. temporarily. Only the Egyptians survive because they win, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. They are never as strong again. That was their high point, the New Kingdom period. So when you say the others went away, they completely died out or their civilization became more primitive? They pretty much went away. The one percent is gone, and I'll come back to this, but they lose the art of writing, they lose the art of large buildings, you get a dark age. So, Mycenaean civilization is considered to end just after 1200. Same with Minoans, same with Hittites, same with Assyrians, same with Babylonia. You will get successors, which will get there, with Neo in front of them. The Neo-Hittites, the Neo-Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians. So, it's not the end of the world as we know it, but it's close. So, what I would like to do then is to figure out, if it's not the Sea Peoples, then what else could have... caused this. So could it have been drought, like some have suggested? Could it have been famine? Could it have been invaders? Could it have been earthquakes? And my answer to this is yes. I actually think it's all of them, because you can survive a famine, or at least some people can. You can survive a drought. You can survive invaders. You could survive an earthquake. Yes, lots of people will die, but your civilization does not end. What if you have more than one of them then. if you have a multiplier effect, if you have what I would call a perfect storm. And that's what I think happens. So let me quickly run through the evidence for each of those and then see what you think. So, for instance, drought. Drought's not a new suggestion. Already back in the 1960s, Reese Carpenter, who was a professor at Bryn Mawr, was suggesting that the Mycenaeans came to an end because of drought. But he didn't have hard data. He didn't have... proof for it. It was just a hypothesis. He looked at changes in population. He looked at population movements and various things, and he hypothesized that this is what caused it. But it remained just a hypothesis, and it was never proven, so people kind of forgot about it. However, in the last five years, we now have the data that he was looking for. So we can now bring it back scientifically. There is a guy named Koniuski. He works out of Paris. He's got an international team. And he went to the site of Ghibbala in North Syria back in 20... Actually, he was there in about 2010, published the article in 2011. And what they did was to take samples from dried up lagoons and lakes and look at the pollen that was in there. And what they found was that there is what he called a dry event. a 300-year-long dry event. The pollen showed that there was drier climatic conditions in the Mediterranean from the 12th century until the 9th century. So about 1200 BC to about 900 BC, there is this dry event, what we would call climate change. So this was the first instance. He then went over to Cyprus, did the same thing, published that in 2013. and again took samples from Halosulten Teke which has a dried up lagoon. And here again, major environmental changes took place in the period from 1200 to 850. It turned the area into a drier landscape, and the precipitation and groundwater probably became insufficient to maintain sustainable agriculture. So drought in North Syria, drought in Cyprus. And then Lee Drake came along, published a great article in 2012 in the Journal of Archaeological Science. in which he looked at a number of different studies that other people had done and pulled them all together, including things like there is a drop in the temperature of the surface of the sea in the Aegean, which would lead to less rainfall. And he concluded also that there was a drought that started somewhere after 1250 B.C. And I actually, I like this article so much, I did something I don't usually do. I wanted to send him an email saying that it was a great article. I did a search for him. He was somewhere like at Northern Arizona University, and I typed in Lee Drake into Google, and it said, the very first thing it said is, you are friends on Facebook. Seriously? So I wrote to him. I said, Lee, I guess we're friends on Facebook. Anyway, great article. And he wrote right back to me. He says, good to hear from you. I haven't seen you since Megiddo in 2006. Ah, so we dug together. Be careful who you're writing to. You may actually know them. So what was neat, though, he was in the Philippines searching for downed World War II aircraft with XRF stuff. So pretty neat stuff. Anyway, so he came up with this. And then the other scientific survey that is relevant was done by Daphne Langut. You can see her down here. Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Litt. And they went to the Sea of Galilee. and to the Dead Sea, and they showed that there was a drought there as well, but shorter. This time it was only from about 1250 to 1100. So as a result of this now, we've got drought, North Syria, Cyprus, Israel, and Greece, which means that it's pretty much Mediterranean-wide. So I think now we've got the data that Reese Carpenter wanted. And of course, as each of these studies came out, the world's media grabbed hold of it. So this is New York Times. Pollen study points to drought as culprit in Bronze Age mystery. LA Times. Climate change may have caused demise of late Bronze Age civilizations. National Geographic got into it. Archaeology Magazine came out with something. New York Post, and they threw in globalization for good matter as well. Right, so this made headlines all around the world. So I do think that we've got... evidence for drought. And then you may remember the NASA-funded study that said that we were going to end in a couple of decades, except then it turned out NASA hadn't funded it, but never mind. And so at that point, I decided I wrote an op-ed that came out in the Huffington Post, The Collapse of Civilizations. It's complicated, right? Which it is. So we've got drought, and drought frequently leads to famine. But how do you find archaeological evidence for that? it can be tough unless you find mass graves, something like that, you don't know if you've got a famine, unless you have written textual evidence, which we have. They are writing back then, there's no problem, this is a nice period. And this site of Ugarit, where we already mentioned that the tin was coming at one point, there are entire archives that have been excavated there. You have to be able to read Akkadian or Ugaritic, but I presume most of you can, so that's not a problem. So here we've got one letter from the house of Ortenu. Ortenu is one of the merchants that's both working for himself and on behalf of the government. And he says that there is a famine ravaging the city of Emar. Now that's in inland Syria, but he was such a good businessman that he had a branch in Emar. So he's based in Ugar, but he's over in Emar. And he says in about 1185, there's famine in our house, we'll all die of hunger. If you don't quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul. So famine, drought? Yes, I think so. But just in case, here's a letter from the king of Ugarit to somebody who is not named, but he's probably his peer. Here with me, plenty has become famine. So Ugarit itself also is suffering. Up in Turkey, they are hit as well. Two letters from the Hittite king. One says, do you not know? that there was a famine in the midst of my lands, and the other one says it's a matter of life and death. So I think we're on pretty safe ground to say that there is famine and that people are dying from it. Now, what about invaders or even internal rebellion? I think these both happened as well, but it can be hard to tell them apart. whether you've got people from outside or people from inside. So in terms of outsiders, again, we've got written textual evidence. And this, again, is from the city of Hougard. It's just a wealth of information. In fact, they've just published three more volumes in French that I haven't even seen yet, and I want to see what's in those. But here, this was found quite a while ago, and it reports on ships of the enemy. My father, now the ships of the enemy have come. They've been setting fire to my cities. They've done harm to the land. Doesn't my father know that all of my infantry and chariotry are stationed in Hati? So they're up in Turkey. All of my ships are stationed in the land of Luka, and that's Lisha, which is southwestern Turkey. They have not yet arrived back, so the land is thus prostrate. May my father be aware of this. Now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us. If other ships of the enemy turn up, send me a report. Now, I was taught in graduate school that this was found in a kiln being about to be baked before they sent it, which was fairly typical because then you can't change it, and that the city had been invaded again by other ships and it had been destroyed before this could be sent, which is a nice story, right? Too good to be true. It turns out upon re-examination that this was not found in a kiln. It was actually originally in a basket with about 70 other tablets that were up on the second floor of the palace, and they fell during the destruction, toppled over, and then the basket disintegrated, so you're left with what looks like a kiln, but in fact wasn't anything like it. So if this is not being baked, what's going on? Well, we're not actually sure when this is from. It could be from this 1177. Or it could be from the earlier one 30 years earlier in 1207. We're just not sure. So what had been a great piece of evidence goes away. But still, we can use it for outside invaders, regardless of which invasion it is. And then there's a private letter, one of the last that we know about from Mugarret. When your messenger arrived, the army was already humiliated. The city was sacked. Our food and the threshing floors was burnt. The vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it. may you know it. So somebody did come, and in fact, we know that Ugar is destroyed. The archaeologists found about six feet of destruction level, and bodies in the streets, arrowheads embedded in the walls. It's definitely war. It's not like Mother Nature. Now, Koniuski, in fact, looked at this when he was doing the drought at Ghebala, and he looked at the destructions, and he probably said, ah, sea peoples. And he actually published an article that said the Sea Peoples were there, to which I would respond, look, it's definitely destroyed at that time. Yes, the Sea Peoples are around, but you cannot say it's Sea Peoples. There's no little sign there that says the Sea Peoples did it. So they might have, but they might not have. And one of the reasons that I say this is because of the situation at Hazor, which is in Israel today, but it was Canaanite Hazor back at that time. That city was also destroyed. at about this time, between 1250 and 1200. We know it's destroyed because all the mud bricks in the palace are burnt, cherry red and deep brown and all of that. But it could have been destroyed by any one of about four different groups, Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites, Sea Peoples, or maybe even, a fifth possibility, internal rebellion. Now, one of the co-directors, Amnon Ben-Tor, who's actually going to be coming, to this area and lecturing in November on Hazor, so keep your eye out. I think he'll be at the JCC, might be at Bassanova, if you're familiar with those. He says it's not Egyptians or Canaanites, because in the destruction of Hazor, there are Egyptian statues and Canaanite statues, and both of them are defaced. The arm's hacked off, the nose is mutilated, and he says Egyptians would not do that to Egyptian statues, Canaanites would not do that to Canaanite statues. And then he says it's not the Sea Peoples were too far inland at Hazor, which I would disagree with. Sea Peoples got even further inland, but never mind. So for Bantor, it leaves only Israelites, specifically Joshua. And in the Bible, it says that Joshua burned Hazor to the ground. So for Bantor, this is evidence of the Israelites and the Exodus. But his co-director, Sharon Zuckerman, who recently passed away, unfortunately, she said, no, it's not that at all. Well, it's... internal rebellion. And when Bentor said, what's your proof? She said, look at what's destroyed. The palace is burnt. The temples are burnt. But the places where the regular people are living are not touched. The stores are not touched. She said, this is what happens when the 99% try to overthrow the 1%. That's what you get. So she says it was an internal rebellion. I kind of like that thought process. My point, though, is if the two co-directors can't decide who destroyed their site, how are we supposed to, right? So, yes, it could be outsiders, but it could be internal as well. But it could also be Mother Nature. It could be earthquakes. So, for example, we've got a map of, again, all the sites that are destroyed after 1200, all of our 1177, everything that's in X is destroyed. But if you put on top of it a map of earthquakes that have happened in this region just since 1900, you can actually see that most of the sites that are destroyed are in active seismic zones. And, in fact, there are faults going all over. this region, including the famous one going right up the Rift Valley there with the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee. But you've got, for example, the North Anatolian fault line going right across Turkey. And this has done something interesting in the last 60 or 70 years. There have been earthquakes upon earthquake upon earthquake, following one upon the other. And this is what's known in modern parlance by seismologists as an earthquake sequence. Namely, if you've got an earthquake and it doesn't release all the tension in the fault line, you'll have another earthquake very soon thereafter. It might be days, it might be weeks, it could be months, but you'll have another earthquake. If that doesn't release all the pressure, you'll then have another one and another one and another one until the fault line is basically unzipped and all the pressure is gone. You will then have about 400 years before the pressure builds up enough to start the whole process. going again. So this is a known feature for modern, and some people, the archaeo-seismologists, the ones that study ancient earthquakes, say the same thing happened in antiquity, but there they've got a sexier name for it. They call it an earthquake storm rather than earthquake sequence. And I think we've got one at about this time period, because we can see earthquakes in this region from about 1225 to 1175. There's about a 50-year period of what look like earthquakes. damage. So for example, here's Mycenae, right, capital of the Mycenaeans. In Greece, you've got the famous Lion Gate right here. But look off to the side here. Underneath the big Cyclopean Wall, right here, you've got that kind of a slope there. Anybody recognize what that is? Because the geologists and seismologists looked at it and just started laughing. That's one side of a slip zone. That's part of an active fault. And they said the Mycenaeans built... their capital city, or one of their capital ones, right on top of an active fault line. Who does that? Who builds a major city on top of an active fault? And then Amos North from Stanford said, well, I'm from San Francisco. Yeah, yes. On that image, has that moved? It has moved. There have been numerous earthquakes, and yes, yes, it has. But it's not just at Mycenae, it's elsewhere as well. But when I went looking for evidence, because Amos Noor and I worked together on this, we found evidence of earthquake victims at many sites. So, for instance, this young woman, it's the same skeleton in both pictures. This stone right there was embedded in her skull when she was first excavated. She had actually sheltered in a doorway, which is supposed to be the safest place. In this case, the doorway collapsed and killed her. So that's at Mycenae. Just about 10 kilometers away at Tiryns, there's another set, a woman and a child lying underneath a fallen wall. If you go across to Troy on the northwestern coast of Turkey, trust me, that wall is not supposed to look like that. I was there about a year ago, took the same picture right there. Troy 6 is probably one of the cities of the Trojan War. It fits perfectly. It's 1250 B.C., but it's destroyed. by an earthquake. Same thing back at Ugarit, but this is a little bit earlier. This is a wall from about 1365. Ugarit seems to be hit by a number of earthquakes. But again, trust me, that wall was not supposed to look like that. That's what happens after an earthquake. So I think some of the destructions that have been attributed to the Sea Peoples are actually caused by Mother Nature. All right, so you've got some of that going on. And by the way, too, anticipating any questions you might have the climate change. Yes, it's also Mother Nature. The Hittites are not driving SUVs back then. So we've got Mother Nature doing some stuff back then. As far as cutting the international trade routes, I think this is what happens. I think it is part of the scenario. And we've got evidence for what had gone on before that. So, for instance, Hatshepsut, whom I mentioned, she sends an expedition down to Punt. She puts it on her mortuary temple here. This would be about 1500 B.C., give or take. She's even got pictures of what they saw down there and what they brought back. This is the queen of Punt down there in the bottom. And she even tells us that her name is Eti, E-T-I. So we know that they went down to Punt. The problem is we didn't know where Punt was. It could be Yemen. It could be Ethiopia. It could be any number of places. Turns out it is Ethiopia or Eritrea or Ethiopia because of a baboon mummy in the British Museum, where they've analyzed it and said that that's the nice parallel. So that's kind of neat. They are also in contact in Egypt with Greece at that time. Here's a tomb painting from the tomb of Rechmere. These are Minoans bringing gifts to Egypt. Same thing in another tomb. You've got what looks like a decapitated bull's head. That's a Minoan vessel. So we've got international trade between Crete. and the Egyptians. We've also got trade with the Mycenaeans, right? Recognize these, the Colossi of Memnon. This is Amenhotep III's mortuary temple. A little after 1400 BC, he builds this temple. It's now completely gone because the later pharaohs used it as a quarry to make their own buildings, right? Why go and cut stone when you can just rob a guy who's dead anyway? So the entire mortuary temple is gone, but there are still bits and pieces in here. including, you see the little feet right there, there were a line of about 10 statue bases, which once held statues that were about 10 feet tall. Colossi are 60 feet tall. These guys were smaller, just about 10 feet tall. And one of them has a list of names that's never been seen before in Egypt and never is again, at least most of them. The two names on the right here are like head names, like titles. One says Kaftor and the other says Actually, it says Keftiu, and the other says Tenaya. Remember I said Kaftor is Crete? That was the Mesopotamian, Akkadian name. In Egypt, it's Keftiu. Same thing. Keftiu is Crete. Tenaya is mainland Greece. It's the Mycenaeans. So you've got mainland Greece and Crete on one side, and then 14 other names going around the base, and these are Amnesos, Festos, Mycenae, Knossos. Amnesos actually is on there twice. Kythera is on there. Naphthion is on there. These are names and places in Mycenaean Greece. And like I say, these have never been seen in Egypt before, and they will never be seen again. When they were first identified in about 1965, the British Egyptologist, a guy named Ken Kitchen, he published an article in which he said, I hardly dare suggest, but these names look uncomfortably like Mycenae and Knossos. Well, he was quite right. That's exactly what... they were. So I actually think that when you take a look in Greece at what's been found, you've got Amenhotep III, the guy who made the statue base list, you have his objects at many of the sites that are listed on that statue base. So here are fragments of an Egyptian faience plaque with Amenhotep's name on it, found at Mycenae. In fact, there's about 10 of them found at Mycenae. Nowhere else are these found outside of Egypt except for here. You've also got a scarab with his name on it, found at Knossos, where the Minoans are, on Crete. So I think what we've actually got on the statue base, they're actually in geographical order, if you look at it. It looks like a trip that goes from Egypt to Crete, up to mainland Greece, back to Crete, and then back to Egypt. I actually think that's why Amnesos is on there twice, because it's a round trip. So you're going from Egypt up to Crete, and they're like, okay, everybody out, coffee, bathroom, right? It's like being on the New Jersey Turnpike. Then they go around. So they're visiting the Minoans, who they've known. Now, then they go visit the Mycenaeans, who are new to them. And then they're like, OK. And last stop is, again, amnesia. Everybody out, use the bathroom, get a drink. And then we're heading back to Egypt. All right. So I think that's why. So I can't prove it. But I think that's what's going on. And one of the reasons why I think this is a decent explanation, we have another text from Ugarit. It's called the Sinaranu text. because it's a guy named Senoranu. By the way, I wanted to name my child that. My wife objected for some reason. Thought he'd be unique, right? Senoranu Klein, are you here? But no. From the present day, Amastamru, the son of Nicmepa, that's the king of Ugarit, exempts Sinoranu, son of Seginu. His grain, his beer, his olive oil to the palace he shall not deliver. His ship is exempt when it arrives from Crete. So you've got a merchant named Sinoranu in Ugarit, North Syria, sending a ship to Crete, coming back with olive oil, grain, and beer, and when it comes back, he doesn't have to pay import tax on it. I think this may be the world's first corporate exemption in history, but it does mean that we've got these ships going around. And in fact, we found one off the coast of Turkey. There's a ship that went down in about 1300 BC in a place called Ula Burun. This is National Geographic's reconstruction of it. Cover story, December 1987, if you want to go check it out. This is what it looked like when they were diving down there. You've got almost, well, just about 300 ingots of pure copper from Cyprus, each of them weighing about 60 pounds. And actually, there's so much copper on board, you could have outfitted an army of 300 people with swords and shields and helmets and everything else. They've also got about 14 of these big blocks of stone, each with one hole in them. Anybody identify what those are? Yeah. Very good. Stone anchors. Absolutely. As one gets caught, just cut the rope and bring the other one up. In the meantime, you're using them as ballast and to balance your ship. Right. So there's about 10 tons of copper on board this wreck. Here's my friend Nicole. She never wore a jacket, even though this is 140 feet below the surface. They could only go down twice a day for 20 minutes at a time. and director George Bass. who, it's a great name, isn't it, George Bass, for the father of underwater archaeology? Perfect name. He said this was as if you had had two martinis and then tried to work, but working was, you know, 140 feet down and you could drown. So they never had an accident, not a major accident, in 20,000 dives over 12 years. It's because they had an ex-Navy SEAL in charge. So, right. Anyway, 10 tons of copper. There's also a ton of tin. on board and remember the 90% copper and 10% tin? They could have made a fortune in bronze off of here. Other raw materials up here, this is actually my favorite raw material there, ingots of raw glass. In this case, colored with cobalt so they're blue. But they also had purple and rose and brown. And down here, lower left, terebinth resin from the pistachio tree. You use it in making perfume. You also use it to color wax. Ivory, both elephant and hippopotamus. We had always thought all the ivory in the late bronze was elephant. Once it turned out these were hippo, they went to all the museums and retested. Turns out about 90% of the ivory is from hippo. They're like, that's strange. There aren't any hippos in the region of the Levant anymore. Then somebody went, yeah, I think I know why. Right. And then some brand new Cypriot and Canaanite pottery that would have been delivered somewhere. So this ship is, it's a microcosm of the international trade of the time. There are seven different cultures represented on board in terms of the goods, both finished and raw. So it's probably going round and round, but it could be a gift from one king to another. They could have been on a shopping expedition. I mean, we'll never know. We will never know. But it does show what's going on at that time. And in fact, we've got a letter from that period also. I will bring to you as a present 200 talents of copper. Now what we've got on the ship is 300 talents of copper. So it shows that that's what they're doing back then. So again, globalized economy. And I remind you about the copper and tin in antiquity. So to sum up, let me present three points that I think we can all agree on. So the first, would you agree that we've got a number of separate civilizations that are flourishing back then from the 15th to the 13th. just after the 12th, Mycenaeans and Minoans, Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Cypriots, they're all independent, but they interacted with each other. Have I persuaded you of that so far? We agree with that? No argument? Okay. Point number two, it's clear that many cities were destroyed, which they were, and the late Bronze Age civilizations and life as they knew it came to an end a little after 1177. We agreed on that. Everything's destroyed? All right. Number three, there is no proof as to what caused it. Right? We agree with that as well. So what do we do? Well, people are still... presenting the old simple explanation. In fact, just last November at our annual meetings, a very senior archaeologist got up and presented this. And I stood up and I said, this is too simple. And he says, yeah, you have a better idea? And I said, yeah, actually I do. So what I think we've got here, I think that, again, as I said at the beginning, if you ask me, are there droughts, I would say yes. Are there famines, I would say yes. Earthquakes, yes. Invaders, yes. Rebellions, yes. Each of these is a stressor. Each of them is a driver, and you react to each of them in a different way. But I think there's not one, there's not two. I think there's all of them. I also think you could survive one. You could probably even survive two, maybe even three at the same time if you're pushing it. But four or five, you're like, all right, I give up. I'm dead. So I think what we've got then is a domino situation because they are so interlinked that when one goes down, it influences the other. So especially if the Cypriots went down, that affects the copper supply for everybody. The Hittites go down, the Mycenaeans go down. And then I think we've got this, you know, kind of like a multiplier effect going on here. But I also think that we've got other things going on as well. So, for instance, what we're really talking about here is the systems collapse. Literally, the whole system collapses. Now, this is a known situation. It's happened elsewhere as well. In fact, Colin Renfrew, a very famous British archaeologist back in 1979, defined systems collapse. He says it's when your central administration collapses, it's when your traditional elite disappear, your centralized economy collapses, and you get lots of settlement shifts and population decline. And that's exactly what we see here. So what we've got is a systems collapse. But we've also got then to take into account a systems collapse doesn't just happen. in one year. And that's actually why the title of my book is misleading. And I fought the publisher for the entire time I was writing it, because I said, 1177 is not the year when it collapses. It takes a century. And so he says, well, what would you rather? I said, 1200 is very different from 1100, which is totally different from 1000. And he says, well, that's correct, but that's a terrible title. And it won't fit on the book. And I said, okay. So The way I see it is 1177 is shorthand, just as we say that 476 is when the Roman Empire collapsed, which is, of course, not true, right? It took most of the 5th century AD, and even then, the Eastern Roman Empire keeps going for another thousand years, and still we say Rome collapsed in 476, or at least that's what we tell the kids in 6th grade. 1177, for me, is the same thing. It's a hallmark. It's a bench, right? I know it didn't happen that year. But that's a good way to refer to it. So shorthand, if you will. And the thing is, when you have such a systems collapse, there's usually no obvious, there's no smoking gun. And in fact, on Amazon, that's one of the major complaints from the people that bought the book. They said, he didn't give us the answer. I said, actually, I did. The answer is there's no answer. We're not sure yet. They're like, well, where's the smoking gun? I said, we don't have it yet. So in the paperback version, I've got a new afterword that came out when it came out about a year later, in which I say something like no smoking gun or something like that. But the other thing, though, is that when you have a dark age, which always follows a systems collapse, you will then have romantic stories about the past, right? And so think of Homer and the Trojan War. You've got exactly this. So I think that's what we've got here as well. Now, in terms of... Our takeaway, what lessons can we learn? Is there a lesson for us today? I think the answer is yes. So, for instance, are we facing a situation that is similar today? Is there climate change? Well, we could argue all night about that, right? But let's say for argument, yes, at least some. Are there famines and droughts in the world today? Yes, of course there are. Earthquakes? Yes. Rebellions? Yes. I think the only thing that's missing are Sea Peoples. And in fact, I think we've got them too. Because I think on the one hand, ISIS are the Sea Peoples, busy destroying everything. But on the other hand, the refugees that are fleeing Syria could also be the Sea Peoples. So you've got both sides. So I actually think we've got pretty much the same situation. So in the last couple of years, the headlines coming out of the Mediterranean and the Middle East Greece's economies tanked, right? This should all be familiar since about 2012. Internal rebellions in Libya, Egypt, and Syria with outsiders and foreign warriors, right? The Arab Spring. Turkey fears it's going to become involved. Israel's afraid it will be involved. Jordan's crowded with refugees. Iran is bellicose and threatening, pretty much as usual. Iraq is in turmoil. These are all ripped from the headlines in the last, what, three, four years? Well, what if we looked at news from the Middle East in about 1200 B.C.? Yeah, pretty much the same. So my question now is, does knowing this help? us well from my point of view I look back many of you probably look forward so can we use this knowing what happened to them 3,200 years ago and knowing we may have some of the same symptoms what do we do about it or we just say it's history it never repeats itself I think maybe it does different actors thank you Was there any role for piracy? Because you have a lot of this communication that is seaborne. And so, a great opportunity. We see this now. We can add that to your list. We have piracy now in areas that we didn't have it. Absolutely. So, is there piracy? The answer is yes. And in fact, two friends of mine, they've been writing paper after paper after paper about piracy in the late Bronze Age. We definitely know it's there later. I mean, Julius Caesar actually gets captured by pirates from this region. But yes, so Louise Hitchcock and Aaron Meier have been writing paper after paper, and they have all kinds of wonderful titles. You know, arg, piracy. So yes, I think this is part of it. I would, though, put that in the category of cutting the international trade routes. But yes, I think definitely. Presumably these powers had, you know. their own navies that could provide protection as they collapsed, then their lines of communication became extremely vulnerable. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. So one of the modern problems is that if someone gets attacked, their allies have to help. Was that a problem then, too? They did have mutual defense treaties. Yes, in fact, there is a very famous one called the Shashengmuru Treaty, which dates to about the same time period, where the Hittites are allying. from Turkey are allying with the Assyrians from what is now Iraq, northern Syria, and they say, let no ship of the Akyawa go to him. Akyawa are the Achaeans, the Mycenaeans, and so they've actually set up an embargo, but they also say, if you are attacked, we will come to your defense. If we are attacked, you will come to our defense. And we have other ones too, especially with Willis-Troy, same sort of thing. So yeah, they've got mutual defense pacts. back then. Yeah. Did they use any money coins that they traded them? Any money? Money. Coins and all that? No. We are 700, 600 years too early for that. Coins, the first coins we know about are invented in Lydia in Turkey in about 700 BC. So we're a good 600 or 700 years too early. But that doesn't mean they don't have the equivalent. There has been a suggestion that those oxide ingots the talents that were in the ship, that that was the equivalent of currency, and you could barter with it. So we don't have coins, but we do have other things. With copper and tin so very valuable, what did people have to trade to get it? Okay, so what are you trading in order to get the copper and tin? Well, it depends what society you're in, but for instance, we know the Meissenians are trading olive oil and perfume, which in fact they make from the olive oil. They're also trading the other metals, silver and gold. Egypt's got a monopoly on gold. Silver, the Mycenaeans, there's a huge mine just outside of Athens. So pretty much anything you can think of, they're trading, including wheat and grain and barley and grapes and all those things. The Ula-Burun shipwreck actually had the remnants of raw materials such as fruits, figs, and all that. Yeah, so they're definitely going back and forth. It's a nice little economy that's going. Given that that is one of the basic problems that you see here, it seems odd that these invaders had burned the entire city, including all the food crops. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. It does not make a lot of sense, exactly. So if the invaders are coming in and burning everything in the ground, including the grain, yeah, what's going on? In fact, we have an interesting situation, which is... almost the opposite in a way. At Hazor, when she pointed out that it might be an internal rebellion, the jars were found still full of grain. They're burnt, but they're still full of grain. So exactly that. Whoever did it burnt their own grain, which does seem strange. On the other hand, if you are an invader and you're following a burnt or scorched earth policy, that's exactly what you would do. So it may be that in those cases it is the Sea Peoples. But, yeah. What I find interesting, though, linking Sea Peoples and drought, the original hypothesis was that they started moving from Sicily and Sardinia because of a drought in the western Mediterranean. If so, they were extremely unlucky because by the time they got to the eastern Mediterranean, there's a drought there. So maybe these people just brought the drought with them. I don't know. But, yes, so it's odd. I will give you that. Yes. Someone had said that the Israelites originated in an internal rebellion. Could you, in other words, equate them? Could you comment on that? Okay, so the Israelites. All right, so that's probably. the Finkelstein's suggestion where the Israelites are already in Canaan and they are the same as the Canaanites and all that. That's a whole other lecture on the Exodus and all that. The short answer is, I'm not going to go quite there, but I'll go partway there. Because what I think happens is, you notice everything collapses right about the same time as the Israelites are moving around according to tradition. I think what happens is that the the collapse of the Bronze Age powers creates a power vacuum in this region. We know for sure that the Egyptians withdraw, and they had been in control of that area for a good three centuries. And when they withdraw, and if the Canaanite cities like Hazor go down, when the Israelites come in, I think they took advantage of an empty land, smoking ruins, and that they simply claim credit for themselves. So it's what I would call a... coattail hypothesis, that the Israelites are riding the coattails of the Sea Peoples and the other natural problems here. But it is possible they were already there. And that's, in fact, what Finkelstein is saying, that they're moving from the highlands down to the lowlands. But it's because the Egyptians have moved out and there are now smoking ruins there. So I would actually link the two of them. So in terms of the Exodus, and I do mention this briefly in the book, I simply say that I think If it happened, it happens now, and it's because they take advantage. Otherwise, I don't think there's any way the Israelites would have been able to take on the Canaanites. There's no way. But this then explains for me how it could have happened, if that makes sense. Now, you're not asking one other question. I was waiting for you to ask. There is one stressor or driver that I haven't mentioned. that should go hand in hand with drought and famine and war. Yeah, disease. Where's the disease? Thank you. I haven't mentioned disease at all, right? Why not? There's no evidence for it. We don't have bodies anywhere. None of the texts mention it. So there's nothing. We do know. Now, the text should mention it if it's happening. We know back 1350 B.C., time of Amenhotep III, and my favorite guy, Shupiluliuma. I wanted to name my other kid that. He is a king up in Turkey. He's a king of the Hittites. And they tell us that he went to war with Egypt, and they brought back Egyptian prisoners of war who were suffering from the plague. And the plague then wiped out most of the royal family of the Hittites and a lot of the population. But that happens 150 years earlier. There is also evidence there is a mummy of a later Ramses, Ramses VI. who is about 1140, 1130 BC, he had smallpox. And you can tell that from his mummy, but you can't tell if he died from smallpox. And there's no mention in the Egyptian records of anybody else dying for it. So I'm waiting. I'm sure that it was there. But we don't have any text for it. We don't have any bodies. So for the moment, the one thing I thought would have really ravaged the world did not. There is no evidence for disease. As we say in archaeology, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So I think we will be able to add this, but it's going to be another excavation that will find evidence for this. Just like David Soren found a cemetery outside of Rome with all kinds of malaria victims that he says contributed to the fall of Rome. So it may be that we'll have something like that, but not yet. What was happening in Eastern and Western Europe at the time? Is there any evidence of any contact between, like... The peoples that were running around in France and Spain, places like that, is it too remote? No, no, it's not too remote. Okay, so the evidence up in Europe and what's happening at that. There is some contact. In fact, there was an article maybe a couple months ago. Up in Scandinavia, they showed that there were contacts with Mycenaean Greece, which I'm not surprised at. You're getting amber from the Baltic coming down here. So, yes, they're in contact. I don't think it's huge. I think most of the trading partners are in and around the Mediterranean, but we do have them going up to Europe. And there is evidence for a drought up in Europe a little bit before this. So that was the original hypothesis was that people moving down from Europe moved into Sicily and Sardinia. kicking those people out, who then move it over to Greece, who kicked those people out, and you had a whole domino effect that way. So the events in Europe will affect them to a certain extent, but there isn't this globalized connection like we have with these guys here. I would say the contacts are intrepid explorers or somebody who's dead set on getting amber. So I do think the events up in Europe affect them to a certain extent, but not in a calamitous fashion. How does the explosion of Thera fit into this time frame? How does the explosion of Thera fit into this? It does not. And the reason I say this, you're familiar with Santorini. Thera is about 70 miles north of Crete. It does blow up, for sure. And it used to be thought that it ended the Minoans and all this. The problem is that radiocarbon dating has now pushed the explosion back. It's now dated to 1628 BC. So the 17th century. So it probably did have an impact on the Minoans at that point, but it does not end civilization as we know it because, well, 1628 down to 1177, that's quite a few centuries there. But that is the number two question that I get on Amazon. How come you didn't talk about Santorini? And my answer is, I do talk about it. It's on one page, and I say it's not related. But still, everybody wants it to be related because it's an easy solution, right? Not so easy, but people tend to link it, too, to the Exodus with the parting of the Red Sea and this and that. Again, problems there, too. There's a couple hundred years in between. So you'd have Moses raising his hand for like 200 years, which is a little long. So, right. Anyway, yes. You say writing was lost. So I know that like a lot of languages, we don't even have the translation for them. But were there people then who like... still used it despairingly or was it totally just not there? Right, okay, so let me qualify that. What happens at this point, the elite in Egypt and everywhere else, you only have about 1% that can read or write to begin with, right? So the scribe, even the kings couldn't read or write. So when your scribal class goes away, you forget how to write. Now, it does not take long to pick it right back up, but what gets picked up are different things. So, for instance, into this same power vacuum, you get people moving sometimes right away. So, we haven't even mentioned them, but the Phoenicians move into this power gap at the same time as the Israelites do. Phoenicians are on the coast of what is now Lebanon, Syria. In fact, they're probably the survivors of the Canaanites, because Canaan and Phoenicia, they both mean purple so they're probably the survivors And the Phoenicians have this little thing called the alphabet, right? And now, at Ugarit, they had already been experimenting with the alphabet. When they went down, that went away. But the Phoenicians step in right away, maybe as early as the 11th century. So we've got a gap, I would say, of about 100 years. But after that point, the Phoenicians come in. But still, other places like Greece, dark ages keep going until 900, 800. But by the time we come out of it... The Phoenicians have successfully exported their alphabet not only to Greece, but also to Italy. So we've got the Latin alphabet that we use to write English today, but it's the same sort of thing that we've got for Greek. So there are different periods out of which everybody comes. And in fact, I'm about to agree to write a sequel, which is called Phoenix from Darkness to Democracy. Because out of all this, we eventually get new inventions like iron, democracy, monotheistic religion. So I actually have said in the past, and I would agree with it, and I end the book this way, that sometimes you need a wildfire to burn away the old growth and get things started new. And I think that's what you've got. We would not be here today doing the things that we do if these guys hadn't collapsed. So it's because they collapsed that we are doing what we do today. So I'll stick around and answer more questions. And I think there's some books. So if you want, but thank you very much.

Well, welcome. My topic today, I'm going to talk about 1177 BC. So let me take you away from rainy Bethesda and take you back more than 3,000 years in the past.

where hopefully it's a little warmer and sunnier. This is the late Bronze Age. This is the period that is, I would say, nearest and dearest to my heart.

If I could be reincarnated backwards, I would choose to live back then. I'm sure I would not live more than about 48 hours, but it'd be a good 48 hours. So we're in the period from 1700 to about 1200 BC here, 500 years.

And you can see from this map the different colored areas are the different civilizations that were around at that point. Basically, I call them for shorthand the G8 of the ancient world because there's actually nine, but never mind. So it's close. So we've got Minoans and Mycenaeans over in Greece. We've got Hittites up in Turkey.

We've got the Egyptians, which are coming up here into Canaan. Mitanni here, Assyrians and Babylonians, Cypriots here, these are the great powers of the late Bronze Age. They're all flourishing 3,500 years ago, give or take. And this is actually a period that you know about.

You might not have thought you knew about it, but you do. Because in this time period, we've got Hatshepsut, the world's first female pharaoh. Familiar to anybody? You've all heard of her, right?

Thutmose III, her stepson, Amenhotep III. How about Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh? All right, okay, so he's in this period as well. I'm venturing to guess that most of you have heard of King Tut. Would I be correct about that?

Yes, okay, so that's this period as well. Ramses II, pharaoh of the Exodus, if it took place, that's another lecture. Ramses III is going to be our boy today. He's going to be the hero of this particular period.

This is also the time when we get the Battle of Kadesh between the Egyptians and the Hittites, 1279. Little thing called the Trojan War. Heard of that? That's at this time period. In fact, this is the context for the Trojan War. I do think it happened.

Again, that's a topic for another lecture. My wife does not think it happened. We argue about this at home. Others argue over mortgage payments. We argue about the Trojan War.

And then again, this is the period of the Exodus, probably about 1250 B.C., if it took place. So you see, you already know this period, even if you thought that you did not. Now, one thing that is special about this period is that it is globalized for its time period. That is, it's not globalized like we are today, but from Italy on the west to Iraq and India on the east, they are all in connection with each other there.

They're all in contact from Turkey in the north down to Egypt in the south. We get one of these social network diagrams. That's what my wife does, social network analysis. So this is courtesy of her. You know the, what is it, six degrees of Kevin Bacon with all the movies?

Yeah. Same thing here, except that this is what's called a small world, which means there are no more than three leaps between any two pairs or any pair of people. So if the Mycenaeans did not know the Assyrians, they knew the Hittites who knew the Assyrians, and you could get there within one or two leaps. Now, the reason this is important is that there's been very few times in history where we've had such a situation. Us today is one, them back then is another.

So this is why I would say that looking at what happened to these guys, even though it was more than 3,200 years ago, is actually relevant to today. because looking at what happened to them might have implications for us today as well. And what happened?

Well, they collapsed. Just after 1200 BC, everything that had been going very nicely for several centuries by this point comes to a crashing halt on either side of 1200 BC. Everybody that I just mentioned goes down.

We get a dark age that lasts for... between 150 and 300 years, and basically civilization has to reboot in this area. So this was...

A huge loss to the world. It is comparable to the collapse of the Roman Empire, which happened 1,500 years later. The main problem is, we're not really sure what caused it. So that's what I want to talk about mostly today, are the possible explanations for what caused that collapse, and then see if maybe we should start going, hmm, yeah.

All right, so it used to be... that it was a very simple explanation. When I was in graduate school, when I was an undergraduate, and for decades before me, the simple solution was that the Sea Peoples had done it.

When in doubt, the Sea Peoples. So who are the Sea Peoples? Well, this is the Egyptian name for them.

The Egyptians, actually, it's our name for them. We call them the Sea Peoples. The Egyptians talk about a number of different groups coming through the eastern Mediterranean and winding up.

in Egypt on the shores attacking them, not once but twice over a 30-year period. They come in 1207 and they come in 1177. And yes, 1177 is where I get the title of the book. It is the second time that Egypt is invaded by these people.

Now the problem is, in fact, that the dates change. The Egyptologists keep changing. the chronology. So a better way to put it is the fifth year of Merneptah and the eighth year of Ramses III, and that way you don't have to worry about it, right?

On their inscriptions, they say, in my fifth year, this happened, and in the eighth year, this happened. That is why the, well, when the book came out two years ago, I got a nice note from a senior colleague in New York City, and he sent me an email. And all he said is, congrats on the book. The title should have been 1186 BC. I wrote him back a two-word email.

No, it's not what you're thinking. I wrote back and said, it was. And in fact, the original contract, which I had signed with Princeton back in 2007, the title was 1186 BC.

But in the interim, while I was working on it, the Egyptologists changed the chronology again. So it became 1177. Ironically, since it's come out, they've changed the chronology back. So the next edition is probably going to be called 1186, question mark, something like that. Anyway, all right, so what we get, the Egyptians tell us in both reigns. Manepta and Ramses III.

But let me focus on Ramses III here because it's more literally picturesque. He leaves on the wall of his mortuary temple in Egypt, a place called Medinet Habu, which is near the Valley of the Kings. In fact, I presume some of you have been there.

Anybody been to Medinet Habu? No? Well, I think we need a field trip for sure. Definitely.

All right. Well, it's over by King Tut's tomb, the Valley of the Kings. On a wall of his temple, which is what you're looking at here on the left-hand side, and you see the drawing on the right-hand side, he gives us a picture of the invasion and an inscription of what went on. So he tells us the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in their fray.

No land could stand before their arms. And then he tells us what happens, who they overran. From Hatay, Kode, Karkamesh, Artswa, and Alashia on. Now we know where these places are. Hatay is Turkey, it's the Hittites.

Kode is where Turkey meets Syria. Karkamesh, northern Syria. Artswa is actually western Turkey on the coast there.

Alashia is the ancient name for Cyprus. So these people are sweeping across from west to east, across Turkey, down the Levant, across Cyprus. They set up a camp in Amur, that's northern Syria, desolated its people, its land was like that which has never come to being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, flame was prepared before them, and then he actually tells us the name of the peoples.

He says their confederation was the Peleset, the Tejeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyan, and the Weshesh. So he gives us, how many is that, one, two, three, four, five right there. There's another. Six that are mentioned the first time back in 1207. Two of them overlap.

So there's a total of nine separate groups that come twice in those 30 years. So where are they from? What are they doing?

What happens to them? Well, we're told part of that. Ramses, in another inscription from a couple years later, he says, I overthrew those who invaded from their lands.

I slew the Denyan who were in their isles. The Tejekar and the Peleset were made ashes. The Shardana and the Weshos of the sea, they were made as those that exist not. So he beats them. And in fact, Merneptah had beaten them.

back in 1207 as well. So they come twice, they lose twice, they do not come a third time. That's it, all right? Now, the question is, where do they come from? And what do they look like?

Well, what do they look like is easy because Ramsey shows us the pictures. This is a picture of the Sea Peoples. In fact, if anybody's gonna dress up for Halloween, there you go.

Right, though, it's actually, I've got a cheaper way to do it. When I was in grad school, the two people the year behind me, they came to our Halloween party with about 100 papier-mâché Cs stapled to their clothes. We said, what are you?

They said, well, we're C peoples. So they won first place. So true story. All right, so that's what they look like.

The problem is, though, where do they come from? So, for instance, one of the groups is Shardana. The other is Shekelesh, Tjeke, or Denyan, the names I just read to you. Can you think of any place in the Mediterranean, either eastern or western, that looks like Shardana?

Sardinia, absolutely. So people think that maybe they're from Sardinia. Or maybe they went there afterward, one way or the other.

How about Shekelesh? Any place in the Mediterranean got the same consonants? Forget about the vowels, but the same consonants?

Uh, no, not Ashkelon, though that is an interesting idea, but no. Somewhere near Sardinia? Sicily. Absolutely, right. So, Sicily.

To Jack, it was a little bit harder. We're thinking maybe the Troad or Sickels, so either Italy or Troy. Dania, and many people have suggested these are Homer's Donatans, so the Mycenaeans from Greece.

The Weshash, not sure. Ancient name for Troy is Willousa, so maybe that's where they're from. the only one that we're pretty sure we know, and it was actually identified already by Champollion, the guy that deciphered hieroglyphics, is the Plesset. Anybody care to take a guess who the Plesset might be?

Philistines. The Philistines. And in fact, the Bible says the Philistines came from Crete, so that would actually fit.

So we may be able to identify where these people come from, but it's not for sure by a long shot. And in fact, the original people talking about this weren't sure if they, as I said, came from there or if they went there. And that has not been decided either. What has been decided is that they said the Sea Peoples were responsible for the collapse.

1207, 1177, that was the answer. Gaston Mossborough, a French Egyptologist, had already put this theory, it was a theory, actually it was a hypothesis, in about a... 1850. By 1901, it was solidified. And so every time an archaeologist excavated a site that was destroyed, they said, see, it's the Sea Peoples.

The problem is, of course, that's backwards. That's not what you do. So I actually think that this is not the right answer, even though there are some interesting parts to it.

So for instance, here's your Sea Peoples again, the Philistines, and we do have Philistine remains. in the region that is now Israel, also Lebanon, also Syria. This is degenerate Mycenaean pottery. It looks like somebody from Greece came over, made it, but the clay that they're using is from Cyprus or Rhodes or the Levant.

So it really does look like you've got Mycenaeans that join in and come on over. So there is something to the suggestion that the Sea Peoples were real. The Egyptians are not just making them up. But if we take a look at the inscription that he actually leaves us.

What Ramsey shows us, and it's kind of hard to see, but on the left you've got the actual drawing. On the top right is an artist's rendition of it. And then down bottom, a modern-day parallel. What Ramsey shows us is that these people that are coming, they're not like Vikings. They're not just raiding.

They're bringing their families. You've got the wife. You've got the kids.

You've got the belongings. You've got the ox cart. These are people moving. They're migrating.

So instead of Vikings, think of the Dust Bowl from the 1930s here in America. Everybody moving from Oklahoma to California. It's that kind of thing.

So the question then becomes, what could have started such a migration? Now. I also think that it's a little too simplistic to give the explanation that I was taught in graduate school.

They said, oh, there was a drought, and that led to famine, and that led to the movement of the Sea Peoples. That led to cutting of the trade routes, and that then led to collapse because they were not self-sufficient enough. Now, on the one hand, that's a nice explanation.

On the other hand, you will notice it's quite linear. You will also probably realize... It's never that nice, right? It's a lot more messy. And so I think that this is not the right answer.

I think it's too simple. The Sea Peoples are part of it, yes, but they're not the sole reason. And in fact, I think they might have been as much the victims as they were the oppressors. That is, they are one of the symptoms of this, but I don't think they're the cause.

I think they are a bogeyman that's been used to scare little kids for the last couple of generations, or at least. If your parents are archaeologists, it was. So I was skeptical, shall we say, and I wanted to look around for what really happened.

So what I want to present to you today is my alternate hypothesis for what caused the collapse and then see what you think of it. Now, I remind you that we've got a globalized society for that time, for that period, with everybody in contact with everybody else. and I give you one...

major example, I said that this is the late Bronze Age, and actually the Bronze Age goes from 3,000 to 1,000 BC, give or take, and we're in that last part of it. You've got the early, middle, and late. The way you make bronze, as I put up here, is tin and copper, right?

90% copper, 10% tin. Some of you may know that if you don't have tin, you can actually use something else. Anybody know what that is? You can actually use arsenic. I don't recommend it.

You won't live long, but you can make arsenical bronze. But here, most of the copper is used to make bronze at that time. The copper is not a problem. It's coming from Cyprus. In fact, that's where the word comes from, Kypros.

Cyprus means copper. The tin is a little bit more problematic. Possible some came from Cornwall, though I rather doubt they got up there more than once on a blue moon.

There are some tin mines in southern Turkey, but not enough. The vast majority came from Afghanistan, specifically the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan. Now, anybody here have lapis lazuli jewelry?

Anything like that? Okay, that's the same area, right? Lapis and tin come from the same area of Afghanistan. So we have to get it all the way from Afghanistan. over to this area.

And we do know that they are doing this because we have a text from the site of Mari, which is on the Euphrates River. I'm actually not sure that Mari exists anymore because ISIS took it over and were busy looting it. So it may be gone by now. But the Mari letters, which were found by the French in the 1920s, one of them says that 10 is coming there and being sent on to Ugarit on the northern coast of Syria. And from there is being sent on to Crete.

So you can see that you've got a trade route of hundreds, if not thousands of miles. If you cut it at any point, you are indeed in trouble. And in fact, a colleague of mine in England has said that for them, tin was like oil is for us.

And that keeping the steady flow of tin is the same problem that we've got for oil. And I think that's a pretty good analogy. But bear in mind that they're also importing finished goods as well.

We've got them swapping raw materials, not just tin and copper, but also gold and silver and other things. But along with the raw materials are coming the finished goods. They've got a regular trade circuit going here. So this is one of my favorite. It's another one of these Mari letters.

Actually dates from just after 1800 BC. One Caftorian weapon. Now they're...

The Kaftor is their name for Crete and the Minoans. So this is a weapon from Crete. The top and the base are covered with gold. Its top is encrusted with lapis lazuli. Now, this is not the dagger.

This is from the death pits of war. But still, I thought it illustrated it nicely, a gold dagger with lapis lazuli. And I don't know about you. I want one of these.

I'd happily carry it open, whatever. But I think my absolute favorite. is another letter that says, One pair of leather shoes in the Caftorian style, so Minoan shoes, and if you've been to Crete, you know those are probably sandals, though they could be boots, which to the palace of Hammurabi, king of Babylon, and yes, that is the Hammurabi, right, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a bhakti limb carried, but which were returned. So these sandals come all the way from Crete to Babylon. They're given to Hammurabi.

He doesn't like them, and he returns them. Why? I don't know. Too small?

Too last millennium? At any rate, so for fun, at GW, I once had my students look at Hammurabi's law code, all 272 or 282 laws, and I said, find the penalty for returning shoes. And they came back crestfallen.

They said, there is no penalty. I said, exactly. So, you know, nothing changes. That's one of the interesting things about it.

So, we've got this globalized society, trade, reciprocity, diplomacy. Everybody's marrying each other's daughters for gold and silver and whatnot. And then into it you drop a little chaos, and suddenly we've got a big, big problem.

And one by one, these wink out until you're only left with Egypt. Everybody else goes away. No more Mycenaeans, no more Minoans, no more Hittites, no more Cypriots, at least. temporarily.

Only the Egyptians survive because they win, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. They are never as strong again. That was their high point, the New Kingdom period. So when you say the others went away, they completely died out or their civilization became more primitive? They pretty much went away.

The one percent is gone, and I'll come back to this, but they lose the art of writing, they lose the art of large buildings, you get a dark age. So, Mycenaean civilization is considered to end just after 1200. Same with Minoans, same with Hittites, same with Assyrians, same with Babylonia. You will get successors, which will get there, with Neo in front of them.

The Neo-Hittites, the Neo-Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians. So, it's not the end of the world as we know it, but it's close. So, what I would like to do then is to figure out, if it's not the Sea Peoples, then what else could have...

caused this. So could it have been drought, like some have suggested? Could it have been famine?

Could it have been invaders? Could it have been earthquakes? And my answer to this is yes.

I actually think it's all of them, because you can survive a famine, or at least some people can. You can survive a drought. You can survive invaders.

You could survive an earthquake. Yes, lots of people will die, but your civilization does not end. What if you have more than one of them then. if you have a multiplier effect, if you have what I would call a perfect storm.

And that's what I think happens. So let me quickly run through the evidence for each of those and then see what you think. So, for instance, drought.

Drought's not a new suggestion. Already back in the 1960s, Reese Carpenter, who was a professor at Bryn Mawr, was suggesting that the Mycenaeans came to an end because of drought. But he didn't have hard data. He didn't have... proof for it.

It was just a hypothesis. He looked at changes in population. He looked at population movements and various things, and he hypothesized that this is what caused it. But it remained just a hypothesis, and it was never proven, so people kind of forgot about it. However, in the last five years, we now have the data that he was looking for.

So we can now bring it back scientifically. There is a guy named Koniuski. He works out of Paris.

He's got an international team. And he went to the site of Ghibbala in North Syria back in 20... Actually, he was there in about 2010, published the article in 2011. And what they did was to take samples from dried up lagoons and lakes and look at the pollen that was in there. And what they found was that there is what he called a dry event.

a 300-year-long dry event. The pollen showed that there was drier climatic conditions in the Mediterranean from the 12th century until the 9th century. So about 1200 BC to about 900 BC, there is this dry event, what we would call climate change. So this was the first instance.

He then went over to Cyprus, did the same thing, published that in 2013. and again took samples from Halosulten Teke which has a dried up lagoon. And here again, major environmental changes took place in the period from 1200 to 850. It turned the area into a drier landscape, and the precipitation and groundwater probably became insufficient to maintain sustainable agriculture. So drought in North Syria, drought in Cyprus. And then Lee Drake came along, published a great article in 2012 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

in which he looked at a number of different studies that other people had done and pulled them all together, including things like there is a drop in the temperature of the surface of the sea in the Aegean, which would lead to less rainfall. And he concluded also that there was a drought that started somewhere after 1250 B.C. And I actually, I like this article so much, I did something I don't usually do.

I wanted to send him an email saying that it was a great article. I did a search for him. He was somewhere like at Northern Arizona University, and I typed in Lee Drake into Google, and it said, the very first thing it said is, you are friends on Facebook.

Seriously? So I wrote to him. I said, Lee, I guess we're friends on Facebook.

Anyway, great article. And he wrote right back to me. He says, good to hear from you. I haven't seen you since Megiddo in 2006. Ah, so we dug together. Be careful who you're writing to.

You may actually know them. So what was neat, though, he was in the Philippines searching for downed World War II aircraft with XRF stuff. So pretty neat stuff. Anyway, so he came up with this. And then the other scientific survey that is relevant was done by Daphne Langut.

You can see her down here. Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Litt. And they went to the Sea of Galilee. and to the Dead Sea, and they showed that there was a drought there as well, but shorter.

This time it was only from about 1250 to 1100. So as a result of this now, we've got drought, North Syria, Cyprus, Israel, and Greece, which means that it's pretty much Mediterranean-wide. So I think now we've got the data that Reese Carpenter wanted. And of course, as each of these studies came out, the world's media grabbed hold of it. So this is New York Times. Pollen study points to drought as culprit in Bronze Age mystery.

LA Times. Climate change may have caused demise of late Bronze Age civilizations. National Geographic got into it. Archaeology Magazine came out with something.

New York Post, and they threw in globalization for good matter as well. Right, so this made headlines all around the world. So I do think that we've got...

evidence for drought. And then you may remember the NASA-funded study that said that we were going to end in a couple of decades, except then it turned out NASA hadn't funded it, but never mind. And so at that point, I decided I wrote an op-ed that came out in the Huffington Post, The Collapse of Civilizations. It's complicated, right?

Which it is. So we've got drought, and drought frequently leads to famine. But how do you find archaeological evidence for that? it can be tough unless you find mass graves, something like that, you don't know if you've got a famine, unless you have written textual evidence, which we have. They are writing back then, there's no problem, this is a nice period.

And this site of Ugarit, where we already mentioned that the tin was coming at one point, there are entire archives that have been excavated there. You have to be able to read Akkadian or Ugaritic, but I presume most of you can, so that's not a problem. So here we've got one letter from the house of Ortenu. Ortenu is one of the merchants that's both working for himself and on behalf of the government.

And he says that there is a famine ravaging the city of Emar. Now that's in inland Syria, but he was such a good businessman that he had a branch in Emar. So he's based in Ugar, but he's over in Emar.

And he says in about 1185, there's famine in our house, we'll all die of hunger. If you don't quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul. So famine, drought?

Yes, I think so. But just in case, here's a letter from the king of Ugarit to somebody who is not named, but he's probably his peer. Here with me, plenty has become famine. So Ugarit itself also is suffering.

Up in Turkey, they are hit as well. Two letters from the Hittite king. One says, do you not know? that there was a famine in the midst of my lands, and the other one says it's a matter of life and death. So I think we're on pretty safe ground to say that there is famine and that people are dying from it.

Now, what about invaders or even internal rebellion? I think these both happened as well, but it can be hard to tell them apart. whether you've got people from outside or people from inside.

So in terms of outsiders, again, we've got written textual evidence. And this, again, is from the city of Hougard. It's just a wealth of information.

In fact, they've just published three more volumes in French that I haven't even seen yet, and I want to see what's in those. But here, this was found quite a while ago, and it reports on ships of the enemy. My father, now the ships of the enemy have come. They've been setting fire to my cities. They've done harm to the land.

Doesn't my father know that all of my infantry and chariotry are stationed in Hati? So they're up in Turkey. All of my ships are stationed in the land of Luka, and that's Lisha, which is southwestern Turkey.

They have not yet arrived back, so the land is thus prostrate. May my father be aware of this. Now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us. If other ships of the enemy turn up, send me a report. Now, I was taught in graduate school that this was found in a kiln being about to be baked before they sent it, which was fairly typical because then you can't change it, and that the city had been invaded again by other ships and it had been destroyed before this could be sent, which is a nice story, right?

Too good to be true. It turns out upon re-examination that this was not found in a kiln. It was actually originally in a basket with about 70 other tablets that were up on the second floor of the palace, and they fell during the destruction, toppled over, and then the basket disintegrated, so you're left with what looks like a kiln, but in fact wasn't anything like it.

So if this is not being baked, what's going on? Well, we're not actually sure when this is from. It could be from this 1177. Or it could be from the earlier one 30 years earlier in 1207. We're just not sure.

So what had been a great piece of evidence goes away. But still, we can use it for outside invaders, regardless of which invasion it is. And then there's a private letter, one of the last that we know about from Mugarret.

When your messenger arrived, the army was already humiliated. The city was sacked. Our food and the threshing floors was burnt.

The vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it.

may you know it. So somebody did come, and in fact, we know that Ugar is destroyed. The archaeologists found about six feet of destruction level, and bodies in the streets, arrowheads embedded in the walls.

It's definitely war. It's not like Mother Nature. Now, Koniuski, in fact, looked at this when he was doing the drought at Ghebala, and he looked at the destructions, and he probably said, ah, sea peoples.

And he actually published an article that said the Sea Peoples were there, to which I would respond, look, it's definitely destroyed at that time. Yes, the Sea Peoples are around, but you cannot say it's Sea Peoples. There's no little sign there that says the Sea Peoples did it. So they might have, but they might not have. And one of the reasons that I say this is because of the situation at Hazor, which is in Israel today, but it was Canaanite Hazor back at that time.

That city was also destroyed. at about this time, between 1250 and 1200. We know it's destroyed because all the mud bricks in the palace are burnt, cherry red and deep brown and all of that. But it could have been destroyed by any one of about four different groups, Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites, Sea Peoples, or maybe even, a fifth possibility, internal rebellion.

Now, one of the co-directors, Amnon Ben-Tor, who's actually going to be coming, to this area and lecturing in November on Hazor, so keep your eye out. I think he'll be at the JCC, might be at Bassanova, if you're familiar with those. He says it's not Egyptians or Canaanites, because in the destruction of Hazor, there are Egyptian statues and Canaanite statues, and both of them are defaced. The arm's hacked off, the nose is mutilated, and he says Egyptians would not do that to Egyptian statues, Canaanites would not do that to Canaanite statues.

And then he says it's not the Sea Peoples were too far inland at Hazor, which I would disagree with. Sea Peoples got even further inland, but never mind. So for Bantor, it leaves only Israelites, specifically Joshua.

And in the Bible, it says that Joshua burned Hazor to the ground. So for Bantor, this is evidence of the Israelites and the Exodus. But his co-director, Sharon Zuckerman, who recently passed away, unfortunately, she said, no, it's not that at all. Well, it's... internal rebellion.

And when Bentor said, what's your proof? She said, look at what's destroyed. The palace is burnt. The temples are burnt.

But the places where the regular people are living are not touched. The stores are not touched. She said, this is what happens when the 99% try to overthrow the 1%.

That's what you get. So she says it was an internal rebellion. I kind of like that thought process.

My point, though, is if the two co-directors can't decide who destroyed their site, how are we supposed to, right? So, yes, it could be outsiders, but it could be internal as well. But it could also be Mother Nature.

It could be earthquakes. So, for example, we've got a map of, again, all the sites that are destroyed after 1200, all of our 1177, everything that's in X is destroyed. But if you put on top of it a map of earthquakes that have happened in this region just since 1900, you can actually see that most of the sites that are destroyed are in active seismic zones. And, in fact, there are faults going all over.

this region, including the famous one going right up the Rift Valley there with the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee. But you've got, for example, the North Anatolian fault line going right across Turkey. And this has done something interesting in the last 60 or 70 years.

There have been earthquakes upon earthquake upon earthquake, following one upon the other. And this is what's known in modern parlance by seismologists as an earthquake sequence. Namely, if you've got an earthquake and it doesn't release all the tension in the fault line, you'll have another earthquake very soon thereafter. It might be days, it might be weeks, it could be months, but you'll have another earthquake. If that doesn't release all the pressure, you'll then have another one and another one and another one until the fault line is basically unzipped and all the pressure is gone.

You will then have about 400 years before the pressure builds up enough to start the whole process. going again. So this is a known feature for modern, and some people, the archaeo-seismologists, the ones that study ancient earthquakes, say the same thing happened in antiquity, but there they've got a sexier name for it. They call it an earthquake storm rather than earthquake sequence. And I think we've got one at about this time period, because we can see earthquakes in this region from about 1225 to 1175. There's about a 50-year period of what look like earthquakes.

damage. So for example, here's Mycenae, right, capital of the Mycenaeans. In Greece, you've got the famous Lion Gate right here. But look off to the side here.

Underneath the big Cyclopean Wall, right here, you've got that kind of a slope there. Anybody recognize what that is? Because the geologists and seismologists looked at it and just started laughing. That's one side of a slip zone. That's part of an active fault.

And they said the Mycenaeans built... their capital city, or one of their capital ones, right on top of an active fault line. Who does that? Who builds a major city on top of an active fault?

And then Amos North from Stanford said, well, I'm from San Francisco. Yeah, yes. On that image, has that moved?

It has moved. There have been numerous earthquakes, and yes, yes, it has. But it's not just at Mycenae, it's elsewhere as well. But when I went looking for evidence, because Amos Noor and I worked together on this, we found evidence of earthquake victims at many sites.

So, for instance, this young woman, it's the same skeleton in both pictures. This stone right there was embedded in her skull when she was first excavated. She had actually sheltered in a doorway, which is supposed to be the safest place. In this case, the doorway collapsed and killed her. So that's at Mycenae.

Just about 10 kilometers away at Tiryns, there's another set, a woman and a child lying underneath a fallen wall. If you go across to Troy on the northwestern coast of Turkey, trust me, that wall is not supposed to look like that. I was there about a year ago, took the same picture right there. Troy 6 is probably one of the cities of the Trojan War.

It fits perfectly. It's 1250 B.C., but it's destroyed. by an earthquake. Same thing back at Ugarit, but this is a little bit earlier. This is a wall from about 1365. Ugarit seems to be hit by a number of earthquakes.

But again, trust me, that wall was not supposed to look like that. That's what happens after an earthquake. So I think some of the destructions that have been attributed to the Sea Peoples are actually caused by Mother Nature. All right, so you've got some of that going on.

And by the way, too, anticipating any questions you might have the climate change. Yes, it's also Mother Nature. The Hittites are not driving SUVs back then. So we've got Mother Nature doing some stuff back then.

As far as cutting the international trade routes, I think this is what happens. I think it is part of the scenario. And we've got evidence for what had gone on before that. So, for instance, Hatshepsut, whom I mentioned, she sends an expedition down to Punt. She puts it on her mortuary temple here.

This would be about 1500 B.C., give or take. She's even got pictures of what they saw down there and what they brought back. This is the queen of Punt down there in the bottom. And she even tells us that her name is Eti, E-T-I.

So we know that they went down to Punt. The problem is we didn't know where Punt was. It could be Yemen. It could be Ethiopia. It could be any number of places.

Turns out it is Ethiopia or Eritrea or Ethiopia because of a baboon mummy in the British Museum, where they've analyzed it and said that that's the nice parallel. So that's kind of neat. They are also in contact in Egypt with Greece at that time.

Here's a tomb painting from the tomb of Rechmere. These are Minoans bringing gifts to Egypt. Same thing in another tomb.

You've got what looks like a decapitated bull's head. That's a Minoan vessel. So we've got international trade between Crete.

and the Egyptians. We've also got trade with the Mycenaeans, right? Recognize these, the Colossi of Memnon.

This is Amenhotep III's mortuary temple. A little after 1400 BC, he builds this temple. It's now completely gone because the later pharaohs used it as a quarry to make their own buildings, right?

Why go and cut stone when you can just rob a guy who's dead anyway? So the entire mortuary temple is gone, but there are still bits and pieces in here. including, you see the little feet right there, there were a line of about 10 statue bases, which once held statues that were about 10 feet tall.

Colossi are 60 feet tall. These guys were smaller, just about 10 feet tall. And one of them has a list of names that's never been seen before in Egypt and never is again, at least most of them. The two names on the right here are like head names, like titles.

One says Kaftor and the other says Actually, it says Keftiu, and the other says Tenaya. Remember I said Kaftor is Crete? That was the Mesopotamian, Akkadian name.

In Egypt, it's Keftiu. Same thing. Keftiu is Crete. Tenaya is mainland Greece.

It's the Mycenaeans. So you've got mainland Greece and Crete on one side, and then 14 other names going around the base, and these are Amnesos, Festos, Mycenae, Knossos. Amnesos actually is on there twice. Kythera is on there. Naphthion is on there.

These are names and places in Mycenaean Greece. And like I say, these have never been seen in Egypt before, and they will never be seen again. When they were first identified in about 1965, the British Egyptologist, a guy named Ken Kitchen, he published an article in which he said, I hardly dare suggest, but these names look uncomfortably like Mycenae and Knossos. Well, he was quite right.

That's exactly what... they were. So I actually think that when you take a look in Greece at what's been found, you've got Amenhotep III, the guy who made the statue base list, you have his objects at many of the sites that are listed on that statue base.

So here are fragments of an Egyptian faience plaque with Amenhotep's name on it, found at Mycenae. In fact, there's about 10 of them found at Mycenae. Nowhere else are these found outside of Egypt except for here. You've also got a scarab with his name on it, found at Knossos, where the Minoans are, on Crete.

So I think what we've actually got on the statue base, they're actually in geographical order, if you look at it. It looks like a trip that goes from Egypt to Crete, up to mainland Greece, back to Crete, and then back to Egypt. I actually think that's why Amnesos is on there twice, because it's a round trip. So you're going from Egypt up to Crete, and they're like, okay, everybody out, coffee, bathroom, right? It's like being on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Then they go around. So they're visiting the Minoans, who they've known. Now, then they go visit the Mycenaeans, who are new to them.

And then they're like, OK. And last stop is, again, amnesia. Everybody out, use the bathroom, get a drink. And then we're heading back to Egypt.

All right. So I think that's why. So I can't prove it. But I think that's what's going on. And one of the reasons why I think this is a decent explanation, we have another text from Ugarit.

It's called the Sinaranu text. because it's a guy named Senoranu. By the way, I wanted to name my child that.

My wife objected for some reason. Thought he'd be unique, right? Senoranu Klein, are you here? But no. From the present day, Amastamru, the son of Nicmepa, that's the king of Ugarit, exempts Sinoranu, son of Seginu.

His grain, his beer, his olive oil to the palace he shall not deliver. His ship is exempt when it arrives from Crete. So you've got a merchant named Sinoranu in Ugarit, North Syria, sending a ship to Crete, coming back with olive oil, grain, and beer, and when it comes back, he doesn't have to pay import tax on it. I think this may be the world's first corporate exemption in history, but it does mean that we've got these ships going around. And in fact, we found one off the coast of Turkey.

There's a ship that went down in about 1300 BC in a place called Ula Burun. This is National Geographic's reconstruction of it. Cover story, December 1987, if you want to go check it out.

This is what it looked like when they were diving down there. You've got almost, well, just about 300 ingots of pure copper from Cyprus, each of them weighing about 60 pounds. And actually, there's so much copper on board, you could have outfitted an army of 300 people with swords and shields and helmets and everything else. They've also got about 14 of these big blocks of stone, each with one hole in them.

Anybody identify what those are? Yeah. Very good. Stone anchors.

Absolutely. As one gets caught, just cut the rope and bring the other one up. In the meantime, you're using them as ballast and to balance your ship. Right.

So there's about 10 tons of copper on board this wreck. Here's my friend Nicole. She never wore a jacket, even though this is 140 feet below the surface. They could only go down twice a day for 20 minutes at a time.

and director George Bass. who, it's a great name, isn't it, George Bass, for the father of underwater archaeology? Perfect name.

He said this was as if you had had two martinis and then tried to work, but working was, you know, 140 feet down and you could drown. So they never had an accident, not a major accident, in 20,000 dives over 12 years. It's because they had an ex-Navy SEAL in charge.

So, right. Anyway, 10 tons of copper. There's also a ton of tin. on board and remember the 90% copper and 10% tin? They could have made a fortune in bronze off of here.

Other raw materials up here, this is actually my favorite raw material there, ingots of raw glass. In this case, colored with cobalt so they're blue. But they also had purple and rose and brown. And down here, lower left, terebinth resin from the pistachio tree. You use it in making perfume.

You also use it to color wax. Ivory, both elephant and hippopotamus. We had always thought all the ivory in the late bronze was elephant.

Once it turned out these were hippo, they went to all the museums and retested. Turns out about 90% of the ivory is from hippo. They're like, that's strange.

There aren't any hippos in the region of the Levant anymore. Then somebody went, yeah, I think I know why. Right.

And then some brand new Cypriot and Canaanite pottery that would have been delivered somewhere. So this ship is, it's a microcosm of the international trade of the time. There are seven different cultures represented on board in terms of the goods, both finished and raw.

So it's probably going round and round, but it could be a gift from one king to another. They could have been on a shopping expedition. I mean, we'll never know. We will never know. But it does show what's going on at that time.

And in fact, we've got a letter from that period also. I will bring to you as a present 200 talents of copper. Now what we've got on the ship is 300 talents of copper.

So it shows that that's what they're doing back then. So again, globalized economy. And I remind you about the copper and tin in antiquity. So to sum up, let me present three points that I think we can all agree on.

So the first, would you agree that we've got a number of separate civilizations that are flourishing back then from the 15th to the 13th. just after the 12th, Mycenaeans and Minoans, Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Cypriots, they're all independent, but they interacted with each other. Have I persuaded you of that so far? We agree with that? No argument?

Okay. Point number two, it's clear that many cities were destroyed, which they were, and the late Bronze Age civilizations and life as they knew it came to an end a little after 1177. We agreed on that. Everything's destroyed?

All right. Number three, there is no proof as to what caused it. Right?

We agree with that as well. So what do we do? Well, people are still... presenting the old simple explanation.

In fact, just last November at our annual meetings, a very senior archaeologist got up and presented this. And I stood up and I said, this is too simple. And he says, yeah, you have a better idea?

And I said, yeah, actually I do. So what I think we've got here, I think that, again, as I said at the beginning, if you ask me, are there droughts, I would say yes. Are there famines, I would say yes.

Earthquakes, yes. Invaders, yes. Rebellions, yes.

Each of these is a stressor. Each of them is a driver, and you react to each of them in a different way. But I think there's not one, there's not two. I think there's all of them. I also think you could survive one.

You could probably even survive two, maybe even three at the same time if you're pushing it. But four or five, you're like, all right, I give up. I'm dead. So I think what we've got then is a domino situation because they are so interlinked that when one goes down, it influences the other.

So especially if the Cypriots went down, that affects the copper supply for everybody. The Hittites go down, the Mycenaeans go down. And then I think we've got this, you know, kind of like a multiplier effect going on here.

But I also think that we've got other things going on as well. So, for instance, what we're really talking about here is the systems collapse. Literally, the whole system collapses.

Now, this is a known situation. It's happened elsewhere as well. In fact, Colin Renfrew, a very famous British archaeologist back in 1979, defined systems collapse. He says it's when your central administration collapses, it's when your traditional elite disappear, your centralized economy collapses, and you get lots of settlement shifts and population decline.

And that's exactly what we see here. So what we've got is a systems collapse. But we've also got then to take into account a systems collapse doesn't just happen.

in one year. And that's actually why the title of my book is misleading. And I fought the publisher for the entire time I was writing it, because I said, 1177 is not the year when it collapses.

It takes a century. And so he says, well, what would you rather? I said, 1200 is very different from 1100, which is totally different from 1000. And he says, well, that's correct, but that's a terrible title. And it won't fit on the book. And I said, okay.

So The way I see it is 1177 is shorthand, just as we say that 476 is when the Roman Empire collapsed, which is, of course, not true, right? It took most of the 5th century AD, and even then, the Eastern Roman Empire keeps going for another thousand years, and still we say Rome collapsed in 476, or at least that's what we tell the kids in 6th grade. 1177, for me, is the same thing. It's a hallmark. It's a bench, right?

I know it didn't happen that year. But that's a good way to refer to it. So shorthand, if you will.

And the thing is, when you have such a systems collapse, there's usually no obvious, there's no smoking gun. And in fact, on Amazon, that's one of the major complaints from the people that bought the book. They said, he didn't give us the answer.

I said, actually, I did. The answer is there's no answer. We're not sure yet.

They're like, well, where's the smoking gun? I said, we don't have it yet. So in the paperback version, I've got a new afterword that came out when it came out about a year later, in which I say something like no smoking gun or something like that.

But the other thing, though, is that when you have a dark age, which always follows a systems collapse, you will then have romantic stories about the past, right? And so think of Homer and the Trojan War. You've got exactly this. So I think that's what we've got here as well.

Now, in terms of... Our takeaway, what lessons can we learn? Is there a lesson for us today? I think the answer is yes.

So, for instance, are we facing a situation that is similar today? Is there climate change? Well, we could argue all night about that, right? But let's say for argument, yes, at least some.

Are there famines and droughts in the world today? Yes, of course there are. Earthquakes? Yes.

Rebellions? Yes. I think the only thing that's missing are Sea Peoples. And in fact, I think we've got them too. Because I think on the one hand, ISIS are the Sea Peoples, busy destroying everything.

But on the other hand, the refugees that are fleeing Syria could also be the Sea Peoples. So you've got both sides. So I actually think we've got pretty much the same situation.

So in the last couple of years, the headlines coming out of the Mediterranean and the Middle East Greece's economies tanked, right? This should all be familiar since about 2012. Internal rebellions in Libya, Egypt, and Syria with outsiders and foreign warriors, right? The Arab Spring.

Turkey fears it's going to become involved. Israel's afraid it will be involved. Jordan's crowded with refugees.

Iran is bellicose and threatening, pretty much as usual. Iraq is in turmoil. These are all ripped from the headlines in the last, what, three, four years?

Well, what if we looked at news from the Middle East in about 1200 B.C.? Yeah, pretty much the same. So my question now is, does knowing this help? us well from my point of view I look back many of you probably look forward so can we use this knowing what happened to them 3,200 years ago and knowing we may have some of the same symptoms what do we do about it or we just say it's history it never repeats itself I think maybe it does different actors thank you Was there any role for piracy?

Because you have a lot of this communication that is seaborne. And so, a great opportunity. We see this now. We can add that to your list. We have piracy now in areas that we didn't have it.

Absolutely. So, is there piracy? The answer is yes.

And in fact, two friends of mine, they've been writing paper after paper after paper about piracy in the late Bronze Age. We definitely know it's there later. I mean, Julius Caesar actually gets captured by pirates from this region. But yes, so Louise Hitchcock and Aaron Meier have been writing paper after paper, and they have all kinds of wonderful titles.

You know, arg, piracy. So yes, I think this is part of it. I would, though, put that in the category of cutting the international trade routes.

But yes, I think definitely. Presumably these powers had, you know. their own navies that could provide protection as they collapsed, then their lines of communication became extremely vulnerable.

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. So one of the modern problems is that if someone gets attacked, their allies have to help.

Was that a problem then, too? They did have mutual defense treaties. Yes, in fact, there is a very famous one called the Shashengmuru Treaty, which dates to about the same time period, where the Hittites are allying. from Turkey are allying with the Assyrians from what is now Iraq, northern Syria, and they say, let no ship of the Akyawa go to him. Akyawa are the Achaeans, the Mycenaeans, and so they've actually set up an embargo, but they also say, if you are attacked, we will come to your defense.

If we are attacked, you will come to our defense. And we have other ones too, especially with Willis-Troy, same sort of thing. So yeah, they've got mutual defense pacts. back then.

Yeah. Did they use any money coins that they traded them? Any money? Money.

Coins and all that? No. We are 700, 600 years too early for that.

Coins, the first coins we know about are invented in Lydia in Turkey in about 700 BC. So we're a good 600 or 700 years too early. But that doesn't mean they don't have the equivalent. There has been a suggestion that those oxide ingots the talents that were in the ship, that that was the equivalent of currency, and you could barter with it.

So we don't have coins, but we do have other things. With copper and tin so very valuable, what did people have to trade to get it? Okay, so what are you trading in order to get the copper and tin?

Well, it depends what society you're in, but for instance, we know the Meissenians are trading olive oil and perfume, which in fact they make from the olive oil. They're also trading the other metals, silver and gold. Egypt's got a monopoly on gold. Silver, the Mycenaeans, there's a huge mine just outside of Athens.

So pretty much anything you can think of, they're trading, including wheat and grain and barley and grapes and all those things. The Ula-Burun shipwreck actually had the remnants of raw materials such as fruits, figs, and all that. Yeah, so they're definitely going back and forth. It's a nice little economy that's going.

Given that that is one of the basic problems that you see here, it seems odd that these invaders had burned the entire city, including all the food crops. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. It does not make a lot of sense, exactly. So if the invaders are coming in and burning everything in the ground, including the grain, yeah, what's going on? In fact, we have an interesting situation, which is...

almost the opposite in a way. At Hazor, when she pointed out that it might be an internal rebellion, the jars were found still full of grain. They're burnt, but they're still full of grain.

So exactly that. Whoever did it burnt their own grain, which does seem strange. On the other hand, if you are an invader and you're following a burnt or scorched earth policy, that's exactly what you would do. So it may be that in those cases it is the Sea Peoples. But, yeah.

What I find interesting, though, linking Sea Peoples and drought, the original hypothesis was that they started moving from Sicily and Sardinia because of a drought in the western Mediterranean. If so, they were extremely unlucky because by the time they got to the eastern Mediterranean, there's a drought there. So maybe these people just brought the drought with them. I don't know.

But, yes, so it's odd. I will give you that. Yes. Someone had said that the Israelites originated in an internal rebellion.

Could you, in other words, equate them? Could you comment on that? Okay, so the Israelites.

All right, so that's probably. the Finkelstein's suggestion where the Israelites are already in Canaan and they are the same as the Canaanites and all that. That's a whole other lecture on the Exodus and all that.

The short answer is, I'm not going to go quite there, but I'll go partway there. Because what I think happens is, you notice everything collapses right about the same time as the Israelites are moving around according to tradition. I think what happens is that the the collapse of the Bronze Age powers creates a power vacuum in this region.

We know for sure that the Egyptians withdraw, and they had been in control of that area for a good three centuries. And when they withdraw, and if the Canaanite cities like Hazor go down, when the Israelites come in, I think they took advantage of an empty land, smoking ruins, and that they simply claim credit for themselves. So it's what I would call a... coattail hypothesis, that the Israelites are riding the coattails of the Sea Peoples and the other natural problems here. But it is possible they were already there.

And that's, in fact, what Finkelstein is saying, that they're moving from the highlands down to the lowlands. But it's because the Egyptians have moved out and there are now smoking ruins there. So I would actually link the two of them. So in terms of the Exodus, and I do mention this briefly in the book, I simply say that I think If it happened, it happens now, and it's because they take advantage. Otherwise, I don't think there's any way the Israelites would have been able to take on the Canaanites.

There's no way. But this then explains for me how it could have happened, if that makes sense. Now, you're not asking one other question. I was waiting for you to ask. There is one stressor or driver that I haven't mentioned.

that should go hand in hand with drought and famine and war. Yeah, disease. Where's the disease? Thank you. I haven't mentioned disease at all, right?

Why not? There's no evidence for it. We don't have bodies anywhere.

None of the texts mention it. So there's nothing. We do know. Now, the text should mention it if it's happening. We know back 1350 B.C., time of Amenhotep III, and my favorite guy, Shupiluliuma.

I wanted to name my other kid that. He is a king up in Turkey. He's a king of the Hittites. And they tell us that he went to war with Egypt, and they brought back Egyptian prisoners of war who were suffering from the plague.

And the plague then wiped out most of the royal family of the Hittites and a lot of the population. But that happens 150 years earlier. There is also evidence there is a mummy of a later Ramses, Ramses VI.

who is about 1140, 1130 BC, he had smallpox. And you can tell that from his mummy, but you can't tell if he died from smallpox. And there's no mention in the Egyptian records of anybody else dying for it. So I'm waiting.

I'm sure that it was there. But we don't have any text for it. We don't have any bodies.

So for the moment, the one thing I thought would have really ravaged the world did not. There is no evidence for disease. As we say in archaeology, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So I think we will be able to add this, but it's going to be another excavation that will find evidence for this. Just like David Soren found a cemetery outside of Rome with all kinds of malaria victims that he says contributed to the fall of Rome.

So it may be that we'll have something like that, but not yet. What was happening in Eastern and Western Europe at the time? Is there any evidence of any contact between, like...

The peoples that were running around in France and Spain, places like that, is it too remote? No, no, it's not too remote. Okay, so the evidence up in Europe and what's happening at that.

There is some contact. In fact, there was an article maybe a couple months ago. Up in Scandinavia, they showed that there were contacts with Mycenaean Greece, which I'm not surprised at.

You're getting amber from the Baltic coming down here. So, yes, they're in contact. I don't think it's huge.

I think most of the trading partners are in and around the Mediterranean, but we do have them going up to Europe. And there is evidence for a drought up in Europe a little bit before this. So that was the original hypothesis was that people moving down from Europe moved into Sicily and Sardinia. kicking those people out, who then move it over to Greece, who kicked those people out, and you had a whole domino effect that way.

So the events in Europe will affect them to a certain extent, but there isn't this globalized connection like we have with these guys here. I would say the contacts are intrepid explorers or somebody who's dead set on getting amber. So I do think the events up in Europe affect them to a certain extent, but not in a calamitous fashion.

How does the explosion of Thera fit into this time frame? How does the explosion of Thera fit into this? It does not. And the reason I say this, you're familiar with Santorini.

Thera is about 70 miles north of Crete. It does blow up, for sure. And it used to be thought that it ended the Minoans and all this.

The problem is that radiocarbon dating has now pushed the explosion back. It's now dated to 1628 BC. So the 17th century.

So it probably did have an impact on the Minoans at that point, but it does not end civilization as we know it because, well, 1628 down to 1177, that's quite a few centuries there. But that is the number two question that I get on Amazon. How come you didn't talk about Santorini? And my answer is, I do talk about it.

It's on one page, and I say it's not related. But still, everybody wants it to be related because it's an easy solution, right? Not so easy, but people tend to link it, too, to the Exodus with the parting of the Red Sea and this and that.

Again, problems there, too. There's a couple hundred years in between. So you'd have Moses raising his hand for like 200 years, which is a little long.

So, right. Anyway, yes. You say writing was lost. So I know that like a lot of languages, we don't even have the translation for them.

But were there people then who like... still used it despairingly or was it totally just not there? Right, okay, so let me qualify that. What happens at this point, the elite in Egypt and everywhere else, you only have about 1% that can read or write to begin with, right? So the scribe, even the kings couldn't read or write.

So when your scribal class goes away, you forget how to write. Now, it does not take long to pick it right back up, but what gets picked up are different things. So, for instance, into this same power vacuum, you get people moving sometimes right away.

So, we haven't even mentioned them, but the Phoenicians move into this power gap at the same time as the Israelites do. Phoenicians are on the coast of what is now Lebanon, Syria. In fact, they're probably the survivors of the Canaanites, because Canaan and Phoenicia, they both mean purple so they're probably the survivors And the Phoenicians have this little thing called the alphabet, right?

And now, at Ugarit, they had already been experimenting with the alphabet. When they went down, that went away. But the Phoenicians step in right away, maybe as early as the 11th century.

So we've got a gap, I would say, of about 100 years. But after that point, the Phoenicians come in. But still, other places like Greece, dark ages keep going until 900, 800. But by the time we come out of it... The Phoenicians have successfully exported their alphabet not only to Greece, but also to Italy. So we've got the Latin alphabet that we use to write English today, but it's the same sort of thing that we've got for Greek.

So there are different periods out of which everybody comes. And in fact, I'm about to agree to write a sequel, which is called Phoenix from Darkness to Democracy. Because out of all this, we eventually get new inventions like iron, democracy, monotheistic religion.

So I actually have said in the past, and I would agree with it, and I end the book this way, that sometimes you need a wildfire to burn away the old growth and get things started new. And I think that's what you've got. We would not be here today doing the things that we do if these guys hadn't collapsed.

So it's because they collapsed that we are doing what we do today. So I'll stick around and answer more questions. And I think there's some books. So if you want, but thank you very much.

Transcript for:Collapse of Late Bronze Age Civilizations

Transcript for:
Collapse of Late Bronze Age Civilizations