The Fire Last Time: The Bronze Age Apocalypse | Hacker News Reader

The Fire Last Time: The Bronze Age Apocalypse

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The most recent edition[1] of the Long Now Monthly Seminar series[2] focuses on this:

  Eric Cline: 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed
  Released: Jan 12, 2016

  Consider this, optimists. All the societies in the world can 
  collapse simultaneously. It has happened before. In the 12th 
  century BCE the great Bronze Age civilizations of the 
  Mediterranean —all of them— suddenly fell apart. Their 
  empires evaporated, their cities emptied out, their 
  technologies disappeared, and famine ruled. Mycenae, Minos, 
  Assyria, Hittites, Canaan, Cyprus — all gone. Even Egypt fell 
  into a steep decline. The Bronze Age was over. The event 
  should live in history as one of the great cautionary tales, 
  but it hasn’t because its causes were considered a mystery. 
  How can we know what to be cautious of? Eric Cline has taken 
  on on the mystery. An archaeologist-historian at George 
  Washington University, he is the author of 1177 B.C.: The 
  Year Civilization Collapsed. The failure, he suggests, was 
  systemic. The highly complex, richly interconnected system of 
  the world tipped all at once into chaos.

[1] https://overcast.fm/+lWf-Pr7g

[2] http://longnow.org/seminars/podcast/

Yes and the book unlike the article clearly states it was not only the Sea Peoples, not at all. Superb interesting book.

Barring apocalyptic natural disaster, the similarities with modern times are seriously overblown. Hordes of Somali pirates are going to topple civilizarion? Really? Even Mexico is a haven of good governance and the rule of law compared to pretty much any nation in the world prior to the industrial revolution. The modern world is fantastically stable compared to any previous era in history. Our modern distributed, globalised just-in-time economy simply wouldn't be possible if it wasn't. Yes the high level of optimisation in the modern economy is a potential source of vulnerability, but I believe we have massive economic and technological resources available to overcome such risks. The waves of migrants from the Middle East and Africa aren't coming to Europe to raze our cities, they're coming looking for jobs.

I think there are some similarities to what happened after the Arab Spring. Elite governments were overthrown, and some cases (Libya, Syria) it ended up in destruction and chaos.

While the modern state is indeed stable, environmental change has an impact even if not through apocalyptic natural disaster.

A long term drought contributed to the civil war in Syria[1]. It may be the first of many around the world.

Both Ebola and Zika are exacerbated by global climate change[2][3].

According to the link, Egypt survived as a state for a century longer before it too fell. That was after transforming from a civil society to martial law. With the threat to pregnancy posed by Zika, I'm reminded of the propaganda in "Children of Men": "The World Has Collapsed: Only Britain Soldiers On"

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-...

2. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2014/09/04/how-climate-change-i...

3. http://www.vox.com/2016/1/20/10795562/zika-virus-cdc-mosquit...

"A long term drought contributed to the civil war in Syria". Maybe. However, two planned competing and mutually exclusive major oil pipelines, both routing through Syria, each sponsored by a different superpower, are likely to have led to the civil war even if the area had been an environmental paradise.

People weren't protesting in the streets against the regime because they were concerned about oil prices. They were upset because they didn't have jobs or couldn't afford food, and the countries around them were having revolutions first.

A severe disaster could cause total collapse of society and lack of food. Think like the aftermath of a full nuclear war between two large super powers, or an electromagnetic storm hitting earth, or a man made virus that wipes out half the population and has the other half hiding indoors scared to go outside - borders closed and massive quarantines.

None of these things is particularly likely to happen IMO. But if they did happen, you suddenly have a large portion of people not being fed. When people aren't being fed, you get uprisings, wars, and desperate people joining the roving bands of marauders that the article talks about.

But man, the Earth currently produces so much food. It's incredible really how much we can do with so few humans, with modern agriculture. Most of it goes to animals, and in a time of need we could slaughter them and eat the corn directly.

It would be really, really hard to seriously damage the food output of Earth - or at least first world countries. And it's only going to increase with technology like genetic engineering, super efficient robot greenhouses, or microorganisms bred to produce things like sugar 20x cheaper than conventional agriculture.

Wikipedia is more balanced and I believe more realistically shows what's really known about the subject, namely, less than what the author assumes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages

Also, we know about "Sea Peoples" really little and only from Egyptian sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples

The "The Bronze Age Apocalypse" seems also a clickbait, as it seems it's only Greek lands that declined at that time.

Not only Greece, but also pretty much all of Levant and Mesopotamia was destroyed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

> pretty much all of Levant and Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia? It doesn't seem right. From your link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

"The Late Bronze Age collapse was a transition in the Aegean Region, Southwestern Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean"

See the map:

https://martinhumanities.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/map01-0...

That is, there was a lot of destruction, but that didn't result in a few centuries of "dark age" like in Greece:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syro-Hittite_states

Only because new groups came to dominance in Anatolia and Mesopotamia.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse is a real thing that affected more than just Greece and the Aegean.

I've seen lots to crazy theories behind the cause if it, but never a denial that it happened. I guess I've seen it all now.

The wide destruction of the cities is indisputable, I just don't have the impression that the comparable long-term effects outside of the area known as the ancient Greece existed. The more centuries of "dark ages" (effective illiteracy) that ensued seem to be characteristic only to that ancient Greece area?

For example, Phoenicia had a high point exactly at the time of Greek "dark ages":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia#High_point:_1200.E2....

Re Mesopotamia there were already the links.

A book about the period, published in 2014: "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" by Eric Cline. As both the book and the OP make clear, the collapse did not take place in the course of a single year, despite the catchy title.

It's a highly recommendable read, IMO. A shame it doesn't go in more depth about the LBA before the collapse.

Very interesting. The Western Anatolia cities suffered turmoil until the arrival of the Roman empire in 2nd century BC (the usual low profile wars, Persian invasion, then Alexander the great...). Additionally there's not a site in this area which wasn't shaken to the ground by one or several earthquakes in the same period.

It's amazing to find surviving structures, and luckily archaeologists are still excavating and re-erecting many amazing sites.

One theory I have read is that advances in producing iron (a new technology at that time) helped shift how wars were fought and the balance of power between older methods of war and newer ones using iron instruments / swords, etc.

I am not sure if this is factually correct but it was an interesting theory to explain such a fundamental shift / breakdown in the status quo.

I have read somewhere about a theory that the invulnerability of Achilles might have been down to iron armour being used against bronze weapons.

The best theory about combat styles I read was about the shift from chariot mounted archers to massed infantry.

Prior to the collapse the regional powers in the Levant measured might by the length of their chariot lines. The speculation was that skirmishers (possibly from the western Mediterranean basin) were employed to clean up after a volley-pass, and that these skirmishers realized that the horses would go down as easily as wild game, took that knowledge back to their homelands and returned en force.

Iron weapons aren't quite as good as bronze (or so I am told), but can be produced more readily and cheaply and thus can equip a larger force.

As I understand it, the transition to the Iron Age was largely a result of a shortage of tin (e.g. coming from Britain for the western part of the Mediterranean region). Iron weapons at the time weren't better, just more available, and no doubt steadily more as this small scale industry developed. But if you could afford it, you had a bronze sword, which is a pattern I noted a very long time ago WRT Roman legions.

Indo-European, African and American civilizations all experienced collapses, sure. But to argue it is inevitable requires explaining the lack of Chinese collapses. They experienced turmoil, being conquered, et cetera but in my limited understanding of their history, there were no outright collapses.

It's interesting to appreciate that the Chinese had their ethical views completely different than the Abrahamic religions at least as early as 2500 years ago (all quotes from Wikipedia):

"Some of the basic Confucian ethical concepts and practices include rén, yì, and lǐ, and zhì. Ren ("humaneness") is the essence of the human being which manifests as compassion, it is the virtue-form of Heaven.[15] Yi is the upholding of righteousness and the moral disposition to do good. Li is a system of ritual norms and propriety that determines how a person should properly act in everyday life according to the law of Heaven. Zhi is the ability to see what is right and fair, or the converse, in the behaviors exhibited by others. Confucianism holds one in contempt, either passively or actively, for failure to uphold the cardinal moral values of ren and yi."

Also, even competing ideologies weren't as primitive:

"Taoism tends to emphasize various themes (...) such as naturalness, spontaneity, simplicity, detachment from desires, and most important of all, wu wei (inaction)"

Also, the obligation of the rulers:

"If the emperor did not behave according to proper ritual, ethics, and morals, he could disrupt the fine balance of these cosmological cycles and cause calamities such as earthquakes, floods, droughts, epidemics, and swarms of locusts"

It's worth noting that the Abrahamic religions have only been in the ascendancy in the Mediterranean and Middle East for approximately 1500 years. Before then, there was considerably more variation.

Likewise, it would be a similar generalization to assume that Chinese thought has always stayed on the rails of Confucianism. There's Mohism, Legalism, Daoism, various schools of Buddhism (some of the pants-on-head-crazy Millenarian variety), clumps of Islam, Christianity (again, sometimes pants-on-head-crazy, see the Taiping...) as well as shamanistic and animalistic traditions retained by various invading foreign dynasties.

> the Abrahamic religions have only been in the ascendancy in the Mediterranean and Middle East for approximately 1500 years

Judaism transitioned to the form familiar to the current one 2500 years before now. Christianity became a state religion more than 1600 years before now, Islam started its conquests some 1300 years before now.

> it would be a similar generalization to assume that Chinese thought has always stayed on the rails of Confucianism

And nobody claimed that. Just that all Chinese schools of thought weren't so primitive as the Abrahamic ones. I quoted Confucianism and Taoism in my post.

That the Abrahamic ideologies managed to poison even Chinese territories isn't anything to brag about, in my humble opinion.

A very interesting historical period and an untapped source of great source material for fiction of all sorts :)

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis

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