The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

DeMause’s The History of Childhood describes various implements of corporal punishment, including whips of all kinds, cat-o’-nine-tails, shovels, canes, iron and wooden rods, bundles of sticks, “disciplines” (whips made of small chains), and “flappers” (school instruments with a pear-shaped end and a round hole, used to raise blisters).

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Traditionally, the explanation behind “the fall of the Bronze Age” says that sometime between about 1250 and 1100 BCE, something horrifying happened to the areas in the ancient world that were anywhere close to the Mediterranean Sea. Some sort of phenomenon or event or series of events affected states and peoples from the central Mediterranean all the way east into modern-day Iraq. Hundreds of cities were destroyed or abandoned. Famine, war, disease, political upheaval, volcanoes, earthquakes, piracy, human migration, and climate changes such as drought are mentioned in the sources and found in the data. Somehow and at some point, the complex, interconnected system of trade and communication supporting the very centralized states in this era was disrupted. By about 1100 BCE, many of the formerly centralized societies had reverted (or fragmented into) more localized, smaller political entities, while wealth (such as evidenced by grave goods included in burials) declined in opulence.

It seems like much of the darkness that humankind lived with from time immemorial has been banished from our future. But it’s never wise to bet against any of the Four Horsemen long term. Their historical track record is horrifyingly good.

Assyrian kings provided cuneiform text narration of their atrocities, too. When one reads what they wrote about their feats, one feels as though the Assyrians didn’t have just one bad Hitler-esque ruler, but rather that they were all like that. The artistic “court style” of Assyria’s royal reliefs is genocidal. Take, for example, Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BCE), one of the most brutal of the Assyrian kings. He had this to say about how he handled a rebellion: “I built a pillar over the city gate, and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skin. Some of them I walled up in the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes. Others I bound to stakes around the pillar. And I cut the limbs off the royal officers who had rebelled.” Ashurnasirpal II goes on to describe burning captives with fire; cutting off their noses, ears, and fingers; and putting out their eyes. The tens of thousands of warriors who weren’t burned or walled up or beheaded or mutilated were driven into the scorching desert like cattle and left to die of thirst.

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Lest Ashurnasirpal II be seen as an aberration, hundreds of years later, another Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (r. 669–627 BCE), not content with defeating the Elamites in battle, described what he did to their long-dead ancestors, so that they would have no peace in the afterlife: “The tombs of their earlier and later kings, who did not fear Ashur and Ishtar, my lords, and who had plagued my fathers, I destroyed, I devastated, I exposed to the sun. Their bones, I carried off to Assyria. I laid restlessness upon their shades. I deprived them of food-offerings and of water.”*

Assyria didn’t just defeat you, they defeated your ancestors...

One such scene found in the ruins of an Assyrian palace shows a rebellious governor named Dananu before his horrible torture and execution—as Dananu walks to his own death, the relief shows him pictured with the severed head of one of his coconspirators hanging around his neck as he is being abused, spat on, and beaten by Assyrians passing by.* Simply having a severed human head draped around one’s neck seems macabre enough, but to have known the dead person makes it particularly horrific and psychologically torturous. The ancient era, as the biblical Old Testament attests, excelled at such exquisite bloody symbolism.

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Before the epidemic, members of the clergy had devoted their whole lives to the church. The people who replaced them weren’t necessarily as committed or as educated. Corruption began to creep in, especially as men attained elevated positions in the church due to money changing hands, not thanks to their lifelong commitment or qualifications. Over the course of around two centuries, the clergy’s reputation diminished, tarnished by abuses and excess and a lack of high standards. This dissatisfaction led to the development of the many complaints that the German theologian Martin Luther is said to have nailed to the door of the church at Wittenberg Castle in 1517, marking the onset of Protestantism and a break with the Catholic Church.*

In his book Bombs, Cities, and Civilians, Conrad Crane writes: Thousands suffocated in shelters or parks. Panicked crowds crushed victims who had fallen in the streets as they surged towards waterways to escape the flames. Perhaps the most terrible incident came when one B-29 dropped seven tons of incendiaries on or around the crowded Kokotoi Bridge. Hundreds of people were turned into fiery torches and splashed into the river below in sizzling hisses. One writer described the falling bodies as resembling tent caterpillars that had been burned out of a tree. Tail gunners were sickened by the sight of hundreds of people burning to death in flaming napalm on the surface of the Sumida River. A doctor, who observed the carnage there, later said you couldn’t even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood. B-29 crews fought super-heated updrafts that destroyed at least ten aircraft and wore oxygen masks to avoid vomiting from the stench of burning flesh. These sorts of bombings had been happening all over Japan.

Like Dresden...

In 1914 a US president harshly condemned a tiny bomb or two dropped by a lone prop plane. That’s a mere twenty-six years before the Luftwaffe was bombing London day and night during the Blitz, and three decades or so before German and Japanese cities were being erased. That’s a long moral chasm crossed in a short span of time. Two world wars can do that.