More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the megadrought at the end of the Late Bronze Age began approximately 3,200 years ago, it is now commonly referred to in scientific literature as the “3.2 ka BP event,” in which “ka” stands for “kilo-annum” (as in “thousand years”) and “BP” stands for “Before Present.” It is also sometimes more simply called the “3.2ka event” or, more elaborately, the “3.2 cal ka BP event” (where “cal” stands for “calibrated years,” referring to radiocarbon dating).
In 2010, an international team of scholars led by David Kaniewski and Elise Van Campo of the Université de Toulouse in France suggested that they had scientific evidence, from palynology (pollen studies), for climate change and drought in the Mediterranean region at the end of the thirteenth and into the beginning of the twelfth century BC.
They reached that conclusion based on their studies of pollen that they had retrieved by taking core samples from alluvial deposits (silt, sand, clay, and gravel left by a river or streams in antiquity) located near the site. These pollen samples suggested that there had been a change in vegetation, and that “drier climatic conditions occurred in the Mediterranean belt of Syria from the late 13th/early 12th centuries BC to the 9th century BC.”78
additional lines of evidence that support the view that the Early Iron Age was more arid than the preceding Bronze Age. Among these, he noted that Israeli scholars had published oxygen-isotope data from mineral deposits (speleothems) within Soreq Cave in northern Israel which indicated that there was a low annual precipitation during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.
what may have caused the megadrought to begin in the Mediterranean area 3,200 years ago, this remains a matter of discussion. A variety of suggestions have been tentatively proposed by scientists, but the issue is by no means resolved.
there are Rapid Climate Changes (RCCs), which are marked by “cold spells”—that is, a sea surface temperature (SST) drop of 2–3°C in the southeastern Aegean region. These are caused by frigid polar air coming down into the region, creating arid conditions in the Aegean, as Drake discussed in his 2012 article. Such RCCs are well dated and have occurred some six times during the Holocene (the period from approximately 12,000 years ago to the present), once every 1,450 years or so (i.e., at about the same intervals as the Bond events).101 They have been linked to major changes that can be seen in
...more
needed to acknowledge that droughts have been frequent in this region throughout history, and that they have not always caused civilizations to collapse.
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.
What seems most likely to me, therefore, is that the combination of all these individual factors created a perfect storm of calamities, with both multiplier and domino effects. This is what would have led to the rapid disintegration of one society after another, in part because of the fragmentation of the global economy and the breakdown of the interconnections upon which each civilization was dependent. In short, the flourishing cultures and peoples of the Bronze Age—from the Mycenaeans and Minoans to the Hittites, Assyrians, Kassites/Babylonians, Cypriots, Mitannians, Canaanites, and even
...more
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
not every scholar agrees with the idea of a systems collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
soon after 1200 BC, the Bronze Age civilizations did collapse in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, and Near East, and they exhibit all of the classic features outlined by Renfrew, from disappearance of the traditional elite class and a collapse of central administrations and centralized economies to settlement shifts, population decline, and a transition to a lower level of sociopolitical integration,
More than simply the coming of the Sea Peoples in 1207 and 1177 BC, more than the series of earthquakes that rocked Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean during a fifty-year span from 1225 to 1175 BC, more than the drought and climate change that may have been ravaging these areas during this period, what we see are the results of a systems collapse that brought down the flourishing cultures and peoples of the Bronze Age.6
the second invasion by the Sea Peoples, ending in their cataclysmic fight against the Egyptians under Ramses III during the eighth year of his reign, in 1177 BC, is a reasonable benchmark that can be taken as representative of the entire Collapse and allows us to put a finite date on a rather elusive pivotal moment and the end of an age. It was a year when great land and sea battles were fought in the Nile delta; a year when Egypt struggled for its very survival; a year by which time some of the rich and powerful civilizations of the Bronze Age had already come to a crashing halt.
Christopher Monroe cited Liverani’s work and suggested that the economy of the Late Bronze Age became unstable because of its increasing dependency on bronze and other prestige goods. Specifically, he saw “capitalist enterprise”—in which he included long-distance trade, and which dominated the palatial system present in the Late Bronze Age—as having transformed traditional Bronze Age modes of exchange, production, and consumption to such an extent that when external invasions and natural catastrophes combined in a multiplier effect, the system was unable to survive.10
Major Observations We have a number of separate civilizations that were flourishing during the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries BC in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, from the Mycenaeans and the Minoans to the Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites, and Cypriots. These were independent but consistently interacted with each other, especially through international trade routes. It is clear that many cities were destroyed and that the Late Bronze Age civilizations and life as the inhabitants knew it in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and the Near East came to an
...more
number of possible causes that may have led, or contributed, to the Collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but none seems capable of having caused the calamity on its own. There is archaeological evidence for invaders, or at least newcomers probably from the Aegean region, western Anatolia, Cyprus, or all of the above, found in the Levant from Ugarit in the north to Lachish in the south. Some of the cities were destroyed and then abandoned; others were reoccupied; and still others were unaffected. There were earthquakes during this period, but usually societies can recover from these.
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Perhaps the inhabitants could have survived one disaster, such as an earthquake or a drought, but they could not survive the combined effects of drought, famine, invaders, and earthquakes all occurring in rapid succession.
systems collapse might also be just too simplistic an explanation to accept as the entire reason for the ending of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, and Near East. It is possible that we need to turn to what is called complexity science, or, perhaps more accurately, complexity theory,
Complexity science or theory is the study of a complex system or systems, with the goal of explaining “the phenomena which emerge from a collection of interacting objects.” It has been used in attempts to explain, and sometimes solve, problems as diverse as traffic jams, stock market crashes, illnesses such as cancer, environmental change, and even wars,
Known as “hyper-coherence,” this occurs, as Dark says, “when each part of the system becomes so dependent upon each other that change in any part produces instability in the system as a whole.”24 Thus, if the Late Bronze Age civilizations were truly globalized and dependent upon each other for goods and services, even just to a certain extent, then change to any one of the relevant kingdoms, such as the Mycenaeans or the Hittites, would potentially affect and destabilize them all.
Similarly, and more recently, the COVID-19 novel coronavirus has acted as a worldwide disruptive agent. When the first factories in China shut down because workers were staying home, components for items like iPhones and even Ford and Kia automobiles became harder to find. Financial stocks also fluctuated sharply, as the virus began to spread around the world and fears mounted of a coming pandemic. As nation after nation issued “stay at home” orders, businesses closed and job losses skyrocketed, with more than thirty million people filing for unemployment benefits in the United States alone
...more
about 1500 BC until the collapse of multiple civilizations after 1200 BC—the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mitannians, Canaanites, Cypriots, and Egyptians all interacted, creating a cosmopolitan and globalized system of a type only rarely seen before the current day. This very internationalism may have contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that ended the Bronze Age.
The cultures of the Near East, Egypt, and Greece seem to have been so intertwined and interdependent by 1177 BC that the fall of one ultimately brought down the others, as, one after another, the flourishing civilizations were destroyed by acts of man or nature, or a lethal combination of both.
we must acknowledge our inability to determine with certainty the precise cause (or causes) for the collapse of civilizations and the transition from the end of the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.
Adam Izdebski, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and his colleagues have summed up this type of situation well: “During the last four decades, humanities scholars with an interest in the past have become increasingly aware that the goal of their work is to offer possible narratives (“stories”) about the human past rather than arriving at any final truths. While these narratives are limited by the rules that govern their construction, they remain powerful tools that can be used to visualise the past and make it relevant to the society of the present. It is through
...more
Especially important, particularly in terms of explicit relationships between specific individuals named in the letters, is the archive at Amarna in Egypt, from the time of the pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten in the mid-fourteenth century BC, as well as the archives at Ugarit in north Syria during the late thirteenth and early twelfth centuries and those at Hattusa in Anatolia during the fourteenth–twelfth centuries.
numerous types of networks were in simultaneous existence in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean region during the Late Bronze Age, including diplomatic networks, commercial networks, transportation networks, and communication networks, all of which were needed to keep the globalized economy of that time functioning and flowing smoothly. The interruption, or even partial dismantling, of those related networks would have had a disastrous effect back then, just as it would on our world today.
the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean regions, an area that extended from Italy and Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, was a fluid event that took place over the course of several decades and perhaps even up to a century.
Even if not all of the places collapsed at exactly the same time, by the mid-twelfth century BC they had lost their interconnectedness and the globalization that had previously existed, especially during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. As Marc Van De Mieroop of Columbia University has said, the elites lost the international framework and the diplomatic contacts that had supported them, at the same time as foreign goods and ideas stopped arriving.6
Out of the ashes of the old world came the alphabet and other inventions, not to mention a dramatic increase in the use of iron, which gave its name to the new era—the Iron Age.
The period of the Late Bronze Age has rightfully been hailed as one of the golden ages in the history of the world, and as a period during which an early global economy successfully flourished.
there is at least one major difference between then and now—concurrent knowledge of events unfolding. The ancient Hittites probably had no idea what was happening to them. They didn’t know how to stop a drought. Maybe they prayed to the gods; perhaps they made some sacrifices. But in the end, they were essentially powerless to do anything about it. In contrast, we are now much more technologically advanced. We also have the advantage of hindsight.
