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Pendlebury even published a monograph on the topic, entitled Aegyptiaca, in which he collected and cataloged all of the Egyptian imports found at Knossos and elsewhere on the island, before being shot to death by German paratroopers when they invaded Crete in 1941.18
Some thirty-four hundred years later, General Edmund Allenby used the same tactics as Thutmose III, in September 1918 during World War I, with the same successful results. He won the battle at Megiddo and took prisoner hundreds of German and Turkish soldiers, without any loss of life except for a few of his horses. He later said that he had read James Breasted’s English translation of Thutmose III’s account, leading Allenby to decide to replicate history. George Santayana once reportedly stated that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, but Allenby proved that the opposite
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Written in Akkadian—the diplomatic language of the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East—using cuneiform (wedge-shaped) signs, the inscription reads as follows: i-nu-ma mDu-ut-ha-li-ya LUGAL.GAL KUR URUA-as-su-wa u-hal-liq GIRHI.A an-nu-tim a-na DIskur be-li-su u-se-li. For those few readers not conversant with Akkadian, the English translation is “As Duthaliya the Great King shattered the Assuwa country, he dedicated these swords to the storm-god, his lord.”
Ahh. Professor humor.
I herewith send you 1 chariot, 2 horses, 1 male attendant, 1 female attendant, from the booty from the land of Hatti. As the greeting-gift of my brother, I send you 5 chariots, 5 teams of horses. And as the greeting-gift of Kelu-Hepa, my sister, I send her 1 set of gold toggle-pins, 1 set of gold earrings, 1 gold mašu-ring, and a scent container that is full of “sweet oil.”
Anthropologists have noted that such efforts to create imaginary family relationships happen most frequently in preindustrial societies, specifically to solve the problem of trading when there are no kinship ties or state-supervised markets.15 Thus, a king of Amurru wrote to the neighboring king of Ugarit (both areas were located in coastal northern Syria): “My brother, look: I and you, we are brothers. Sons of a single man, we are brothers. Why should we not be on good terms with each other? Whatever desire you will write to me, I will satisfy it; and you will satisfy my desires. We form a
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“sesame” in Linear B is sa-sa-ma, coming from the Ugaritic word ššmn, the Akkadian word šammaššammu, and the Hurrian word sumisumi. On these tablets are also terms like ku-pi-ri-jo, which has been interpreted as meaning “Cypriot.”
One such house is known as the “House of Yabninu,” located near the southern part of the royal palace. The house itself has still not been completely excavated, but is already known to have covered at least one thousand square meters, so Yabninu must have been a reasonably successful merchant.
The site of Emar in inland Syria, with which Ugarit was in contact, was also destroyed at approximately the same time, in 1185 BC, as we know from the date given on a legal document found there.
In summary, as with Hazor and Megiddo, it is unclear who destroyed Lachish VI or the earlier city of Lachish VII. Both, or neither, could have been devastated by the Sea Peoples, or by someone—or something—else entirely.
“You may climb up to heaven, [but I’ll pull you down] by your hem, you may go down to hell, [but I’ll pull you up] by your hair!”65
Iakovidis further remarked that “the archaeological context … offers no evidence for migrations or invasions on any scale or for local disturbances during the 12th and the 11th century B.C. Mycenae did not meet with a violent end. The area was never … deserted but by then, due to external and faraway causes, the citadel had lost its political and economic significance. The complex centralized system which it housed and represented had broken down, the authority which had created it could maintain no longer and a general decline set in, during which the site fell slowly and gradually into
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Recent discoveries at Ashkelon show that the migrants [actually] settled on a deserted site, on top of the unfinished remains of an Egyptian garrison.… There are no clear signs for any violent destruction at Ashdod … the signs of destruction described by the excavators [there] may be no more than evidence for cooking.… At Ekron, the small Canaanite village … was indeed destroyed by fire, but … [was] replaced by another Canaanite village … before the arrival of the migrants.”46
given the additional data that have appeared in the years since 2014, while I would still posit multifactor causation, I am inclined to think that this megadrought is likely to have been the principal driving force behind many of the problems that Late Bronze Age societies faced. For example, the texts from sites like Ugarit in Syria confirm that with the drought came famine, with people starving. And with famine came upheaval, including armed attacks and internal rebellions,
Renfrew framed his definition in terms of catastrophe theory, wherein “the failure of a minor element started a chain reaction that reverberated on a greater and greater scale, until finally the whole structure was brought to collapse.”2 A potentially useful metaphor that comes to mind is the so-called butterfly effect, whereby the initial flapping of a butterfly’s wings may eventually result in a tornado or hurricane some weeks later on the other side of the world.
there has never been a civilization in the history of the world that hasn’t collapsed eventually, and since the reasons are frequently the same,
This is either tautological or false. The only way civilization can end is collapse then obviously all non-extensive civilizations have collapsed.
But I don’t think that is the right definition I would not say that the Inca or Aztecs collapsed. I would say they were conquered.
