Transcript for:
Late Bronze Age Collapse

now I'd like to call on Professor Eric kleene uh who will talk about uh 1176 BC the year civilization collapsed thank you very much you two kinds um but it is absolutely wonderful to be here I'm going to start sharing my screen I presume you can all see this yes you should be looking at the front slide um it is wonderful to be here and thank you for that introduction and um I can tell you that your next speaker Kira Newman is going to be absolutely fabulous so uh come back to hear her next month and if you are not already a member of AIA I would um second the the notion of joining my wife and I are actually the co-presidents of the Washington DC local Society so in about two weeks I'll be on the other side of this microphone introducing our next speaker so it's a wonderful organization and again if you don't already belong you should indeed join we will so um one of the school yeah I'm um I'm very sorry I'm not actually there in person as you might imagine I would much rather be in um the warm climate of your lovely Island than stuck here in snowy Washington DC but I will take you up on that offer in two years and will happily come out but tonight what I want to do is talk to you about 1177 BC and the collapse of the late Bronze Age uh that took place about 3,200 years ago now I had a book that came out about seven years ago that was based on this but um I have the pleasure tonight of giving you the updated and uh revised version the book that you see on the screen in the lower left there just came out on February 2nd so it's brand new and you are only the second audience to hear this updated version of the lecture the first audience being the book launch on the night that it came out so um even if you've heard portions of this before I have inserted some brand new stuff that uh has just come out including new texts that were just published a couple of years ago so without further Ado let me get started and introduce you to what is my absolute favorite time period in history namely the late Bronze Age about 1700 to 1200 BC as I say this is my favorite period my wife who's also an archaeologist and ancient historian does uh ancient Athens of the fifth century BC and so I always joke that I'm about a thousand years early or or older than she is uh and we argue over the dinner table about things like the Trojan War and what actually caused the plague in Athens and the sorts of things that academic couples do so uh this is my period near and dear to my heart and I will defend it including to her as the best period to study in the ancient world so what is it that I love so much about it it is a time period that's very similar to ours today in terms of being a globalized world and I use that with caution not Glo globalized like us today where something happens in Japan one day and it's felt 10 minutes later in New York but that from an area um that in today's world would be from Italy on the west to Iran and Afghan anistan on the East and from what is today turkey in the north down to Egypt uh in the South that whole area during the late Bronze Age was in contact and was interdependent and in fact I'm going to argue that its very interdependency even though it made for a golden age is also what kind of led to its demise because when one of these Societies or civilizations went down the others all went down as well in the domino effect um just within a couple of decades or within one or two generations at most so we've got here color kind of colorcoded on this map U we've got in purple in modern day Turkey ancient Anatolia Ancient Asia Minor that's where the Hittites are we've also got over here in red we've got uh where the matani were you prob never heard of them but they were a major power from the 15th to the 13th centuries over here in kind of the orangey color um that's where our Assyrians and Babylonians were in Mesopotamia Egyptians are obviously down in Egypt Canaanites up along the letine coast basically where Israel Lebanon Syria Jordan is today Cyprus where the cypriots are and then over in Greece Myans and man ens these are basically the G8 of the ancient world as I refer to them though there's actually nine of them if you count monans and Myans as separate people so even if you're not intrinsically familiar with this period you still know a lot of the major players uh even if you didn't know that you know them so I'm going to wager a guess and unfortunately since I'm not there in person I can't see you all nodding but I'm going to assume that a fair number of you have heard of hatut uh one of the first female pharaohs of Egypt you might have heard of her stepson T Moses III possibly heard of my favorite guy Aman hotep III you may well have heard of aanan the heretic Pharaoh might have invented monotheism I don't actually think he did it was a slightly different variant but never mind um but the one guy I'm pretty sure you've all heard of is in the lower left namely King Tut and then we've got Ramsey II and the star of our show tonight ramsy II so all of these are pharaohs of New Kingdom Egypt they are all going to be ruling During the period that we are talking about this is also the period of the Trojan War if it took place uh I imagine many of you are familiar with the Trojan War some of you may have even seen the film Troy starring Brad Pit uh others of you may wish that you hadn't seen the film Troy starring Brad Pit but I leave that up to your discretion uh this would also be the context that is most likely to be the period of The Exodus if we're ever able to find evidence for it so that's the period we're going to be talking about and as I said during these centuries from the 15th or even earlier the 15th century down through the beginning of of the 12th we've got this what I would call a globalized society for its time where you've got all of these people interacting and in fact this is what um my wife refers to as a small world network uh in her work on fifth century Greece she actually jumped down a couple hundred years and she looks at the social network of people like Alexander the Great and Socrates and Pericles and so in doing this which is um a field known as social network analysis they tend to draw lines in between people that are interacting and that's what you see here and um in fact with the red lines going across and moving basically what we're trying to show here is that everyone is in contact with everyone else they might not be directly in contact but they are no more than one or two s from anybody so for example if the Myans are not trading directly with the Assyrians the means are trading say with the Hittites who are trading with the Assyrians so there's no more than one or two hot to get from one place of the network to any other one and in fact if you've got a network like this which has an average of fewer than three then that's called a small world Network so we've actually got that back in the late Bronze Age now I point this out again because back then in the late Bronze Age and us today in our world in 2021 we are two of the only times in history where there was such a globalized world system in place even if it didn't cover the entire globe and so there are more similarities to the late Bronze Age and its collapse and us today than you might expect and we will come back to this at the end of the lecture but in terms of talking about interconnections one of the best ways I can do this is simply talk about bronze because in order to make bronze you need tin and you need copper you need in fact 90% copper and 10% tin to make your bronze now it's not a problem getting your copper that comes from Cyprus heo actually um gave rise to the word copper but the tin is a bit of a problem there is some tin in Southeastern Anatolia there is tin of course up in Cornwall but that's a long way to go but the majority of the tin in the late bronze AG seem to have come actually from off of this map off to the right basically from Afghanistan and specifically from the bakan region in Afghanistan now some of you you may actually have some Lapis lazle Jewelry and again I can't see you but nod your head if you've got some um and lapus lle comes from the exact same area as tin they both come from the bakan region so they are um importing tin from Afghanistan it's going to come to the site of Mari and then go from there to ugarit for example and then go over to Cit now how do we know this because there was a tablet a clay tablet found by the French at the site of Mari uh in what is now Syria in fact Isis occupied it and looted it I'm not sure how much of it is still there but one of the tablets found at Mari mentioned hin being brought from Afghanistan to Mari to ugarit and there it is given to the korian that's their name for for the Minoans they called creit ctor and so the Koran there are in fact translators there at ugarit on what is now the northern coast of Syria and they would have sent the tin on so we will come back to this because you could see that if that trade route was cut at any point and you can't get you tin anymore then you're in trouble if what you're making is bronze and that is I believe one of the things that happens at the end of the Bronze Age so we know there are trading in raw materials pin copper but also silver which is available in Greece for example at the Lavon mines just outside of Athens and gold the Egyptians had control of the gold um and in fact some of the other kings wrote to the Egyptian pharaoh saying gold is like Dust In Your Land of course they've got the gold mostly because they're controlling Nubia and the Sudan and all that but basically if you wanted gold you had to trade with the Egyptians um of them all though tin was the most valuable uh and in fact my colleague Carol Bell a British archaeologist has said that for them tin was the equivalent of oil for us today that's how important it was and at one point she said getting enough tin to produce weapons grade bronze must have exercised the minds of the Great King in husa that would be the Hittites up in what is now turkey and the Egyptian pharaoh in thieves just like getting oil occupies an American president today and I think that's a a pretty good parallel for how important 10 is but they're also trading finished objects as well now let me just show you two examples from these Mari letters which are a little bit uh earlier than the period we're going to talk about but are still in the same uh genre these date back to the 18th century um and one of the texts in Acadian says a korian weapon the top and the base are covered with gold its top is encrusted with lapis lazle so they have imported all the way to Mari all the way to the Euphrates in Syria from creit a golden dagger with a handle inlaid with lapis Lai um and the picture showing you is not that dagger that dagger has disappeared what you're looking actually is a dagger from the death fits of ore which is even earlier um but I don't I I want one of these if anybody's out there I want one of these I've already told my students when I retire that they need to get me a letter opener that's in this shape so um so this is a good example of the finest objects that they are trading but my absolute favorite is the text that talk about one pair of leather shoes in the castorian style so these would be Manan or shoes and if anybody has been to cre recently um you will know that what they sell there are sandals and in some cases like in haa leather boots but these are probably sandals leather shoes in the monan OR korian style which to the Palace of hamurabi King of Babylon and yes that is the hamurabi as in an eye for an eye a tooth for the tooth and the lack coat of hamurabi that guy is getting these shoes and it says Baki Lim an official brought them to him but which were returned and I've always wondered if you're hamurabi why do you return these shoes they come all the way from greet and yet he returns them are they I mean are they too small are they too last millennium and hadn't he heard of regifting right these didn't fit me but they're from Creed so here you go but if you look through the law code of hamurabi all 272 or 282 laws there is no penalty for returning gifts so he got away with it so uh again that's that's my absolute favorite item from back then but showing you other examples and moving down in time if we go down into the 15th century and the time of hatut and her stepson nephew tutmosis iiii in the wall paintings of the Nobles from their reign we see Minoans and Myans on the walls bringing gifts from the aan so tomb of rear here for example and here another tomb and look at the guy on the right there with the Bull's Head that he's carrying that's totally Manan it can't come from anywhere else and actually we know that's where it comes from because in these tombs they frequently have inscriptions and they say things like gift of the prince um from kefu which is their name for cre so Mesopotamians called Tre kaftor Egyptians called it kefu so these are um evidences of trade embassies as far as I can tell um there would have been a special occasion Maybe one of the um festivals for T Moses III uh because we see not just people from the Ean but people from elsewhere uh also in these same tombs and we also know that they are sending ships they are trading um via Maritime voyages I give you just one example here because we're pressed for time if it were up to me i' I'd spend the next five six seven hours talking to you but you probably have other things to do so I'm going to keep e each of these brief so here's one example that we call the senanu text dates to about 1260 BC uh cinan was up in ugarit that same place where we had the korans getting the tin and the tablet that was found in ugarit again by the French it says from the present day aamu son of nicka the king of ugarit exempt Sanu the son of sigin knew his grain his beer his olive oil to the Palace he shall not deliver his ship is exempt when it arrives from CRE so what we've got is this private Merchant tanu who is sending a ship from what is today the coast of North Syria down to C and back again and he is importing from C grain beer and olive oil and what the King has just done is said he doesn't have to pay import tax right so this is maybe one of the earliest examples of of a corporate tax exemption if you want to put it that way but for our purposes it is enough to show that there is trade going back and forth across the aan and Eastern Mediterranean and if that written text isn't enough proof we've actually got a shipwreck from that time period this is the UL Baron ship it went down off the coast of turkey somewhere around 1300 BC George bass and Jamal pulik excavated it in the 80s and early 90s you see here a black and white picture of the um ship on the seabed floor this is about 140 to 170 ft deep so um off the diving charts they were only able to go down for 20 minutes a day two times a day but they managed to excavate the whole ship and you're seeing here Stone anchors r running down the hull and on either side copper ingots pure 99% pure copper ingots which um the metallurgical analysis has shown are coming from Cyprus there are more than 300 ingots on board this one ship um that is 10 tons of copper there's also a ton of tin on board and George bass at one point estimated that that amount of copper and 10 is enough to outfit 300 Soldiers with swords Shields Greaves everything you need so for me this one ship that went down at about 1300 BC is a microcosm of the globalized world at that time because on board that ship there are items from at least seven different cultures so we've got hittite stuff on there we've got Egyptian Canaanite cypriate Assyrian mean minoan Italian and even a couple items from uh or at least one item from up in the Balkans so here you can see top left some of the tin objects bottom left here tabin resin from pistachio trees used in perfume uh elephant and hippo Ivory brand new pottery from creat uh sorry from Cypress and Canan and among my favorite objects up here top right r glass ingots these colored with Cobalt so they're blue but there are others that are a rosé color others that are yellow others that are brown and so when the ship went down somebody lost the fortune I really hope that they were insured so this is what National Geographic published and again to me it really um epitomizes the international nature of this particular period the ship itself went down here at Kos ulon but it was probably going around and around the Mediterranean at that time so we actually have another text found in Egypt in the Amara archive uh time of am hotep thei and aatan about 1350 BC giv take and it's a letter from the king of Cyprus that says that he is sending him 200 talant of copper now each of those ingots on the UL Bron shipwreck we think might have represented an ancient Talent weighs about 60 lbs so the UL Bru ship is not this ship because we've got 300 on the UL Brun and here he's sending 200 but it's enough to show that they are sending raw medals around uh at that time so raw metal finished goods everybody's happy um trade is flourishing life is flourishing uh 1500 1400 1300 and then boom right after 1,200 BC everything comes to a shrieking halt um round about 1290 1280 sorry 1190 1180 and down to 1177 uh everything falls apart just one civilization after another and so that's what I was studying is what happened why did this take place now in examining the collapse of um a society or civil a of course I'm not the first one to do it um Edward given probably gets that uh some of you may have read his little paperback the decline and fall of the Roman Empire Light reading on an evening if you want um but others may have read Jared Diamond's book collapse much more recently uh and then Joseph tainter in the middle the collapse of complex societies the difference between what they did and what I was trying to do in my book is they were examining single civilizations even Jared diamond and collapse takes a different civilization in each chapter in my book I'm examining the collapse of all eight or nine Societies or civilizations at the same time which is pretty much unique in the history of our world the magnitude was catastrophic as my kids would say it was ginormous U and really we're not going to see such a catastro ropy again until the fall of the Roman Empire and that took place 1500 years later um I will not of course point out the obvious fact that we are at about 1500 years on from the collapse of the Roman Empire and I would never Dain to say that maybe this happens every 1500 years and perhaps we should be worried but of course I wouldn't think of ever saying that instead what I want to do is take a look at see what caused the collapse because this has been debated for decades now uh if not longer the original hypothesis was that the end of the late Bronze Age was brought about because of a number of groups that we collectively called the sea peoples um and we in this case being some early French egyptologist now we know from the Egyptian records that's where we get all of this from the texts of the fifth year of manpa and the eighth year of ramsy III that these groups these sea peoples came twice so the fifth year of Mana is about 1207 BC and the eighth year of Ramsey the third is but to all accounts 1177 and that's where I got the title of my book be aware of course that Egyptian chronology depending on who you're talking to can vary um so the original title from my book was 1186 and then by the time I was done writing it I decided I like Ken kitchen's chronology so I changed it to 1177 actually a better title for the book would have been the eth year of ramsy III then there wouldn't have been any problem but um that didn't fit on the cover of the book so at any rate this is what we've got in 1177 U Ramsey III on the wall of his Mortuary Temple at Med at Habu rather blurry here and I apologize for that but he shows us this second invasion of the sea peoples and when Gaston moso one of these early French egyptologists that I referred to he took a look at this and he said ah sea peoples they invade it's the end of the Bronze Age they're probably the ones that caused all the devastation and he suggested that just as a hypothesis in about 1860 but by 1901 it was solid and everybody accepted it so they said every time any archaeologists found um a site that had been destroyed they said oh the sea peoples did it but of course this is not the way you're supposed to do archaeology uh and in fact um I'm not sure that they were the single culprits let's say and I'll come back to this in just a minute but to show you what Ramsay the thir tells we've got a lot of information says the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their Islands although once the lands were removed and Scattered in The Fray no land could stand before their arms and then he tells us the um he tells us the countries and the areas that they overran so he says from Cod Kish Arta and elasia on well we know where these are ha those are the Hittites up in Anatolia kod that's basically where today um kod and Kesh are both where turkey meets Syria today um artas over on the western coast of Anatolia Alasia that's Cyprus so they're kind of sweeping across what we would see today as turkey and Cyprus and then he says a camp was set up in one place in Amur well that's amuru that's Northern Syria so we know where they're coming and then he tells us who they are remember the name sea people was simply made up by moso in French they didn't call them that back um in the Egyptian period they actually give us the names of the individual groups so they say they were the peset the tajer the shes the denan and the Wes and they all came United but the Egyptians were able to beat them they defeated them and ran a couple years later in year 12 says I overthrew those who invaded from their lands I slew the denan the tajer and the peset were made ashes and so on so manpa had already beat the first wave back in 127 Ramsay's now beats the second wave there will not be a third wave that's it see people's never come back but it was a pic Victory because even though Egypt won they were really never the same again the rest of the 19th Dynasty 20th Dynasty into the 21st and 22nd is a very much weakened Egypt so um 18th 19th dynasties at least to my mind was their high point so Egyptians do win but it was at a cost but they show us what the sea peoples look like on that Mortuary Temple uh and they also talk as I say about who they actually were and we archaeologists ancient historians have been playing a guessing game for decades now trying to link them so for instance um many people suggest that the shardana may have come from Sardinia and they look at the names and say it looks a little familiar same thing with the shees it looks a little bit like Sicily now this may be accurate it may not be um the tajer though if we're going to continue that's harder could be the sickles could be from around Troy tro many people think the denan might be Homer danaans the the other name for the means right Agamemnon and all those guys Wes could be similar to the hitte name for Troy which is wiusa which actually is very similar to the Greek ilio because ilos originally would have been willos and the dama drops out so the actual name for Troy in both hittite and um early Greek was probably about the same so maybe the westest are from there but really the only one that we know and that we're confident about are the peset and these are the Philistines and already um choon the guy who deciphered hieroglyphics he had already suggested that maybe the PESA were the Philistines and indeed very recently um and by recently I mean July 2019 there was DNA analysis published from four infants found at the site of ashalon in modern day Israel and in those four infants who are buried underneath the floors of some houses they are of mixed parentage they have local Canaanite DNA and they have foreign DNA up to 68% and the computer models suggest that the foreign DNA most closely match Prat and Sardinia so they may not be Philistines though that's what the pottery suggests but they may certainly be that in which case who knows but we've definitely got somebody intermarrying the local Canaanites from probably cre or Sardinia and those are reasion where we've got um the sea peoples coming from and indeed if you know your uh Old Testament of the Bible the Hebrew Bible uh it says that the Philistines come from creit and so who knows maybe we've actually got confirmation of that from DNA so regardless um the pottery the Philistine Pottery like you see here on the right it looks like Myan Pottery it's what I would call degenerate Myan because it looks like the pottery from Mainland Greece but now it's now it's made with local clay it's made with clay from the Levant or Cyprus so it really does look like the Philistines came from the aan and then settled down in this region but I hasten to say that this is not a raid it's not testosterone Laden men on a raid um like the Vikings sometimes did but a movement of people and I know that vings frequently came with all of their families um so if that's the case then this is similar you can see on the left here part of the picture at mednet Habu from Ramsey III upper right is an artist rendition and then lower right is um akin to an ethnographic parallel from today but basically what we're looking at is people moving with all of their families um husband wife kids luggage on the carts this is a movement it's not an invasion and I would say if we're looking for modern parallels it's probably something like the Dust Bowl in the 1930s where everybody is moving from say Oklahoma to California and in terms of our world today another parallel might be the refugees that have been fleeing from the civil war in Syria so movements of entire people not necessarily aggressive but being pushed out of one place for whatever reason War drought famine and making their way towards a better life in some other area so it was frequently said before that maybe they were being pushed out of Sicily Sardinia Northern Italy because of a drought which caused famine that caused the sea peoples to move they cut the trade routes and that's what led to collapse and indeed I think that this is part of what happened but since I think the sea peoples are as much victims as they were oppressors I think that this is far too simple this may well have happened but it's just part of what went on so that's what I was trying to figure out is what really happened so to remind you we had this nice globalized Society everybody's trading everybody's doing diplomacy uh reciprocity and now you've got some chaos dropped in just after 12200 BC and very quickly and one after the other everybody goes away basically except for Egypt and Assyria to a certain extent but really Egypt is the Survivor so they're all gone within just a couple of decades after 1200 and then the question as I've said is what caused it so it used to be the sea people's got blamed but there were other suggestions drought some said some said Invaders earthquakes and so if you ask me which of these was the cause I would say yes yes they all were I think it's a perfect storm because and I think you'll probably agree with me that if a massive earthquake hits lots of people are going to die but it normally doesn't end a society or a civilization same thing with Invaders same same with famine same with drought these are all terrible things when they happen but it doesn't usually bring a society to an end there's usually survivors but what happens if you have more than one happening at the same time or one after the other what if you have a drought and famine and Invaders and earthquakes at some point you're going to throw up your hands and just go diu no enough I give up and I think that's what happened I think we've got a ser Series of Unfortunate Events here and it was a perfect storm and that's what brought them down because I don't think they had time to recover from one catastrophe before the next one hit so let me just give you very briefly some examples I want to run through to show you the evidence that we've got so for instance drought that's been suggested for a very long time re Carpenter suggested it back in 1966 that that's what ended the MMS on Mainland Greece but he didn't have the data it was just a hypothesis well now we have the data we have what ree Carpenter was looking for Kan yusi he's a a French scholar um went with his team to gibala in North Syria just south of ugarit they did cing in the lagoon there and retrieve the pollen and it turned out that the pollen from a time period of just after 1200 BC uh the end of the 13th beginning of the 12th century down to the 9th century 300 years the pollen is from plants that survive in Aid conditions and so he hypothesized in a paper published in 2011 that there was a 300-year dry event now that's gargon for a drought and 300-year drought that actually is what we call a mega drought so he found it in North Syria he then jumped over to Cyprus did the same thing at Hala saltan te found the same thing another 300 or so year Mega drought and Lee Drake um pulled together a bunch of different studies and said well it's actually not just Syria and Cyprus there's also evidence in Greece and in fact over in Italy it was aan and Mediterranean wide uh and then D Longo you see her here on the lower right and Israel finklestein plus Tomas lit they did the same thing they went coring at the Bottom of the Sea of Galilee and the western shore of the Dead Sea Bingo drought there also but it wasn't as long it was only about 150 years so a mini Mega drought I suppose you could call it uh and now most recently uh Christian Christensen has published evidence for a drought in Northern Italy at about 1200 BC with a massive migration of up to 120,000 people that left and it may be that we're looking here at the beginnings of the sea peoples though to be fair there's never been a site that's been identified as the origins of the sea peoples If I Had a Million Dollars and an unlimited permit I would totally go over to Sicily Sardinia Northern Italy looking for the sea peoples but more evidence now has come out from Greece in a cave um that's down by pyos Martin F and his colleagues um hold on this is going away there we go Martin F and his colleagues looked at a stall Mite and that shows evident for a drought uh if you look at the lower right hand chart down here in the purple and the green you're looking at major drought in Greece so there's lots and lots of evidence now all that has come out since about 2011 uh and indeed much of it's come out since 2014 which is why I had to rewrite the book because I had to put all this data in so we now have everything you've got with a red dot here that is evidence for the drought uh and you can see this map um goes from Northern Italy all the way over um into Iran uh and we've got evidence from all kinds of places from the bottom of lakes and lagoons to caves to even the Nile is affected as well so um it's I'd say beyond the doubt now that you've got a drought and in fact when these studies were reported the major media um published studies or or stories on all of them New York Times LA Times National Geographic our very own arch ology Magazine from AIA um my absolute favorite though is the New York Post that not only put in um the drought as climate change but toss in globalization for a good measure as having ended the late Bronze Age so we definitely have d uh have drought no problem there famine is a little harder to find you need to find like dead bodies in a pit usually um but you can find them in written texts and that's what we've got so let me take you back briefly to ugarit again in Northern Syria French have been Excavating there um and have found lots and lots of tablets including this particular one which was talking about a famine in the city of imar which is Inland um this guy ortu you can see his name here he's another Merchant like senanu um and he was doing so well that he had a branch office in Emar this is a letter from one of his employees saying we've got a famine in Emar there's a famine in our house we will all die of hunger if you don't arrive here um we're going to die of hunger you won't see anybody so there's definitely famine in Emar there is also famine in ugarit itself this is one of the brand new tablets that was just published um in French in 2016 and my friend Yori Cohen has an English translation that's coming out that he gave me permission to quote and to show you and it is a letter here from pharoh CI II up to the king of ugarit quoting a letter back to him you had written to me in the land of ugarit there is severe hunger may my Lord save the land of ugarit May the King give grain to save my life and to save the citizens of the land of ugar this is the first evidence we have for famine in ugar itself and Saidi did send a rescue mission he sent a ship which had 7,000 dried fish on it um the guy had actually asked for grain he didn't ask for dried fish but I guess you send what you can um we've also got others here this is another new one from uh a citizen of the city to the king of ugar um grain Staples from you are not to be had the people of the household of your servant will die of hunger give grain Staples to your servants so we've got more and more evidence for famine in ugarit we've also got evidence for it elsewhere these are various letters from the hittite King up in Anatolia do you not know there was a famine in the midst of my land here with me plenty has become famine it's a matter of life and death and indeed the Egyptians who had been the enemies of the Hittites not so long AG go Battle of cadesh 1279 they were like mortal enemies and yet the Egyptians come to the aid of the Hittites in this time of need and indeed it looks like the Egyptians may have anticipated this situation to a certain extent Israel finlin and others have now shown that Egypt in its lands in Canaan was planting uh drought resistant crops and that they had interbred cattle uh that would be more hearty so it does like they looks like the Egyptians knew what was coming and tried to Stave it off but too little too late but we've definitely therefore got drought we've definitely got famine we've also got Invaders that's for sure we have a very famous tablet from ugarit talking about ships of the enemy that have been seen um seven ships in particular but we've also now got another another one of these brand new tablets which tells us even more I wrote to you once twice Thrice news regarding the enemy may my Lord know now that the enemy forces are stationed in um rashu which is modern rasib andan that's ugarit port and their avantgard forces were sent to ugarit May my Lord send me forces and chariots and save me so this brand new tablet is showing that an unnamed enemy presumably one of the sea people's groups overran the port of ugarit and was now on its way the Avant guard forces were on their way to ugarit we know ugarit was destroyed by humans there are arrowheads in the walls there are bodies there's um a meter 3 feet deep of Ash so it may be that this tablet uh is showing what's about to happen so we definitely have Invaders and other letters also talk about the enemy um coming in humiliating the Army sacking the city and so on and indeed KUSI at tell um gibala he thought he actually have evidence of the sea peoples but there's no sign there and we don't know for sure so this may be wishful thinking in his publication to say see people's lay but then again it might be on the other hand I give you very briefly the example of hatur in Canaan Northern Israel today because that city was definitely destroyed the palace is burnt to a crisp and it happens um somewhere between about 12:30 and 1180 but the Destroyers did not leave a calling card so there are two co-directors there Oman bentor says that they were not Egyptians or um Canaanites that destroyed it because in the destruction there are defaced statues both Egyptian and Canaanite and he says Egyptians wouldn't have defaced their own statues Canaanites wouldn't have um defac them so for him it's either Israelites or sea peoples and he said hot swur is too far away from the from the sea probably not sea people he said I might disagree but never mind so for Ben or he said it's the Israelites specifically uh under Joshua like the Hebrew Bible says but his co-director Chiron zukerman who unfortunately passed away uh a couple of years ago she's like wait hold on Aman wait not so fast what is actually destroyed at hotor um and he says well the palace is destroyed she's like yeah what else he says the temples are destroyed she's like yeah what else and he says well that's that's about it and she says the private housing weren't destroyed the lower City's not destroyed he says no she says you don't have Invaders you have an internal Rebellion you've got the lower class rising up maybe because there's drought maybe because of famine she's like that's why the palace and the temple is destroyed but not the private houses you've got an internal rebellion and we may have something similar at myi also so I also give you this then to say that even though a city is destroyed we don't necessarily know who did it and if the two co-directors of Hort can't decide who destroyed their City I don't know how we're going to so Invaders maybe internal Rebellion maybe but it could also be and not necessarily at hotor but elsewhere could also be mother nature because it's very hard to tell an earthquake from Human destruction in many cases so here's a map for example of all of the or most of the Cities destroyed at the end of the late Bronze Age and if you overlay this on a map that shows earthquakes that have happened in the same region in just the last century you can see that we're talking it's an active seismic Zone all over this region and indeed if you look at the fault lines you've got the north Anatolian fault line in light blue it's got another fault in green coming down the the side of Greece you've got the great fault coming up the rift valley um through modern day Israel which forms um you know Lake Tiberius and the Dead Sea so this is an active fault Zone everywhere including Anatolia and elsewhere and I show you right here the city of myi with the famous lion gate but these over here what looks like Bedrock on the left underneath the wall that's actually one half of an earthquake fault Zone that's what it looks like and when the Archos seismologists came here they started laughing they're like who builds their city right on top of a major fault line and then one of the seismologists said well actually I teach at Stanford I live in San Francisco and uh I think we kind of did the same thing so um not unusual but at myi therefore we've got here this skeleton it's the same skeleton in both pictures but you see the archaeologist digging it up here and over here I wanted to show you the rock here that rock caused this young lady's death she was standing in the doorway and the whole house collapsed in the earthquake that rock shatter her go so that is an earthquake victim at myi same thing at tyan we've got kind of hard to tell here but the skeleton of a woman and her child underneath a fallen wall at PN and then if we jump across to Troy here is one of the walls from Troy 6 and trust me that wall is not supposed to look like that that's what happens when you have an earthquake and it's now tilting over and we know that Troy 6 is destroyed by an earthquake even at ugara that's what happens when you've got an earthquake where it goes all a skew so it may be that some of the destructions are caused by an earthquake rather than by human beings but of course then we come back to what I referred to at the beginning what if some or all of these end up cutting the trade roots and if you can't get your tin anymore you can't make your bronze now iron does not begin until the end of the late Bronze Age see people do not have iron that's a myth you'll see on the internet sometimes uh the Hittites don't have it that's another myth really they don't start inventing Ing and using iron until they had to until the tin was gone so the end of the Bronze Age then I think is pretty much all of these factors combined so uh since we're basically almost out of time here let me wrap up by just making a couple final statements that I think you'll agree with and then we'll see where that leaves us so my first statement would be um that we've obviously got a number of separate civiliz ations at this time right Hittites Egyptians Babylonians they're all independent but they are interacting with each other especially trading right International Trade secondly it's very clear that many of these cities were destroyed and that pretty much life as they knew it came to an end round about 1177 but it's also clear that we don't know what caused it is it humans is it mother nature is it all of the so we're stuck here with what I would call one of History's Mysteries and that's why I would say that for those people that are still doing this linear equation that that is no it was much much mess here I think you've got all of this stuff drought famine earthquakes Invaders rebellions each of these stressors Force the different societies to react in different ways but the ultimate reaction was either you survived and transformed or you didn't and you disappeared most of them did not and they disappeared some were able to transform but it took a couple of hundred years Egyptians for example Neo Assyrians Neo Hittites but the big eight or nine they go away and life as they knew it ended and I say it's because of them being globalized that they were perhaps too dependent had they been more self-sufficient they might have survived but they weren't so when one went down the others followed soon afterward so we have a name for this this is a systems collap um Colin renre coined the term back in 1979 and he said it's when you see the collapse of your central Administration it's when your traditional Elite think the one % they disappear your centralized economy collapses and you get lots of population decline like up to 75% of the people dying and the rest moving migrating shifting and the thing about a systems collapse is it actually doesn't happen in one year it can take up to a century and that's why 1177 for me is just shorthand for this whole couple of decades or even up to a century and what uh Renfrew said is in the aftermath you get a transition to a lower level of sociopolitical um uh cities and such and you get Dark Age myths think Homer think ilad and odyssey where they talk about the golden aides that had just disappeared and so I think this is a perfect system collapse that we are seeing at the end of the late Bronze Age so since I'm a historian and archaeologists that think we can learn from the past if we're uh L willing to listen to it let me ask you do you think we are today facing a similar situation that they did back in 1177 do we have climate change yeah are there famines and droughts in the world yeah earthquakes for sure rebellions yes the only thing missing maybe other sea peoples and even them we might have them also so what I would say is um if we looked at newspapers from our present day say from 2008 until the present day some of the headlines that we've had are Greece's economy tank as of 2008 you've had the Arab Spring which engulfed Egypt and Libya and elsewhere Syria has had its Civil War turkey has become involved Jordan's got refugees this is all the news from our last say 15 years if they had had newspapers back just after 1200 BC I think the headlines would have been pretty much identical so I do think that we are in a situation today very similar to what they had back then um they collapsed so what are we you know going to do about it so I had an interview um with Adam Frank of NPR when the book first came out in 2014 and I kind of blly said to him well it's not going to happen to us today because unlike the Hittites we're now Advanced enough to understand what's happening you know the Hittites they didn't know how to stop the drought maybe they prayed to the storm God maybe they didn't so I said we're much more advanced and we can take steps to fix things and he just devastated me with his ant with his response he said yeah okay fine but are we Advanced enough to do anything with our understanding and I would remind you that not only does it remain to be seen whether we are Advanced enough to do anything with our understanding but that Mark Twain reportedly said history might not repeat itself but it sure does Rhyme so I'm a little concerned about what's going on today and on that pessimist note I will end and I thank you for your attention