1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed | Eric Cline

[Music] good evening my name is Alexander oz on the director here at long now and as you know at the beginning of most of these talks we do what's called the long short a short film that in some way exemplifies long-term thinking tonight's comes from some some members who are here in the room where are you wave your hands to out there you are in the back of the room thank you and actually it's a it's a good point to remind you all that actually finding these long shorts is quite difficult so if you have good candidates please send them in to us or make some of your own like like these guys did which are which is a really great one and I think tonight's long short is interesting I mean we're definitely going to go vastly further into the past then tonight's long short is but part of civilizations fragility comes both from its interconnectedness and that's also one of the things that really make civilization robust so I think tonight's longshore it shows a little bit of each of that enjoy [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] good evening I'm Stuart brand from the long now foundation as you know the long now we define as the next 10,000 years which we're building a clock for in the last 10,000 years which we're still figuring out what happened part of the idea of all that is to sort of calibrate how we think about time and history in eternity which doesn't actually play into this at all forever is not part of this story but time has size and we're pretty good at the minutes and hours and the kind of stuff we saw in the film here we're still figuring out decades centuries millennia so half the way back 5,000 years ago was the beginning of the Bronze Age we started to get bronze tools and weapons and the kind of society that can use those things and that went on for 2,000 years and then it ended much more suddenly than it began and we have a speaker who knows more about that than anybody Eric Cline thank you so much for inviting me here thank you all for coming I'm presuming you're out there it's hard for me to see but what I would like to do tonight in the next hour or so is to take you back take you back between 4000 and 3000 years ago to the time that is my favorite period in ancient history Late Bronze Age 1700 to 1200 BC if I could be reincarnated backwards that's the period I would like to live in I don't think I'd survive for about more than 48 hours but it would be a marvelous 48 hours now this is the period when we have what I would call the g8 of the ancient world and I'm cheating a little bit because in order to do that I have to combine the Minoans and the Mycenaeans of Greece into one entity but we have them on the edge of the screen there we also have the Hittites in purple up here in Turkey Mitani is in red Assyrians and Babylonians and they're in kind of a mustard yellow and then Egyptians are the orange going up the Nile and into Canaan we also have Cypriots and other people as well now all of these people are interacting in the time period that we're going to talk about and I dare say that you actually know more about that time period already then you might suspect so for example this is the time when hatshepsut lives the famous female pharaoh how many people have heard of her okay top Moses the third one of the greatest military conquerors lives at that time my boy Amenhotep the third he's the guy I most wish I could meet in antiquity Akhenaten the famous Heretic Pharaoh I dare say you've heard of him King Tut that's the man that everybody knows Ramses the second Ramses the third this is the time period that we're talking about and during these centuries everything flourished it was in fact a time that was almost globalized if we can use that word and put it project it back into the past but with that comes other things too not just trade not just diplomacy but things like Wars so for example we've got the Battle of Kadesh between the Hittites and the Egyptians we've got a little thing called the Trojan War right you may have seen a movie that Brad Pitt was in we also have things like the Exodus which if it took place will have taken place at about this time period now what we've got is a globalized society in which everyone is interconnected if you know the six degrees of Kevin Bacon we've kind of got that here as well this is a social network diagram that my wife Diane Kline made and you can see that pretty much everybody is interconnected in some way if the Mycenaeans and the Hittites aren't directly connected they know somebody who can connect them and in fact we've got writing from that time period such as this this is a typical cuneiform tablet looks like a bird a stepped in ink and walked across the page there's an archive that dates to about 1350 BC in which we found about 400 of these tablets and their letters to and fro to and from the kings of that time period the king of the Hittites king of Egyptians king of Babylon king of Assyria and also to the vassal Kings the ones that owed them allegiance and if you map them you can see that we really are talking about a small world effect which is where again if you don't know the person at least you know somebody in between and usually there's no more than about three leaps that separate any particular person so if you map these out as my wife did here you can see with a couple of huge nodes with the king of Egypt and the king of the Hittites and so on that pretty much everybody is in contact with everyone else so I know that saying that that time period is globalized as a loaded term and yet I think we can use it it was globalized for its time period and that is from Italy on the west to Afghanistan on the east everybody is in contact they're trading they are swapping raw materials gold silver copper tin they're also trading finished goods now this is the Bronze Age which starts in about 3000 BC it's all gonna come collapsing down at about 1200 BC so what I actually want to do tonight is to build this up show you what they were doing what was there and then collapse it all down by the time we're done we don't know why they collapsed and that's part of the mystery and that's part of what I will talk about but before I collapse it let me build it up so this is the Bronze Age to make bronze you need ten and you need copper by the way if you don't have ten you can also use arsenic I don't recommend that but you won't live very long but you can make our cynical copper but ten is much better 90% copper 10% tin and you'll get your bronze now the copper is not a problem the copper is gonna come from Cyprus in fact that's where the name comes from keep rose it means copper the tin is a little bit more difficult there's some ten of course up in Cornwall there's some in southeastern Turkey but not enough most of the tin seems to be coming from an area off this map you can see the arrow going off it is in fact an area in what is modern-day Afghanistan the Badakhshan region and in fact not only Tim comes from there anybody here have lapis lazuli jewelry lapis also comes from that region so what we've got is the need to get tin all the way into the region of Mesopotamia Egypt the Aegean and this is going to involve trade routes that can be hundreds or even thousands of miles long and in fact we know that they are doing this there is a letter at Mari which is in Syria on the river they're not sure if Mari actually exists anymore Isis has occupied it and is looting it so we don't know if it's still there but there was a cache of letters found and among them was a an itinerary in which it described ten coming from Afghanistan to Mari in what is now Syria then going on to Garrett on the northern coast of Syria and then going from there over to Crete and in fact it says that at Boogaard which is right up there that there is in fact a man from Crete a Minoan who can speak the local language he is the translator so we know that they are sending tin all over there and in fact a good friend of mine Carol Bell she's a British archeologist she has said that their need for tin is basically the equivalent of our need for oil and that the search for tin would have occupied the king of Egypt and the King up in the hittite region in Turkey just as the search for oil today occupies like a US president so if you can think of that kind of a parallel that's what we've got here but as I say they're not only trading for raw materials they're also trading finished goods and in these Mari letters which actually date a little bit earlier than our period that date to about 1800 BC so just under 4,000 years ago we have one text that describes a a weapon that's being brought from Crete says one calf torreón weapon calf door is their name for Crete and the Minoans the top and the base are covered with gold its top is encrusted with lapis lazuli so it would have looked something like this though this isn't it because this is from the death pits of war dating to about 2500 BC but nevertheless it's quite nice and I wouldn't actually mind having one of these not sure I'd be able to carry it but I wouldn't mind so this is one good example of what they're sending back and forth but my absolute favorite and it shows that nothing has really changed is a text that talks about what must be sandals that says one pair of leather shoes and the calf Dorian style now if anybody has been decreed you know that cafetorium starrer Minoan style are either sandals or boots you can still get a nice pair of boots at Chania I suspect they're sandals but I'm not sure but the text then says which to the palace of Hammurabi the king of Babylon and yes that is the Hammurabi and eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth but the limb carried them but which were returned for the life of me I can't figure out why they were returned were they too small were they to last millennium and in fact I asked my students wants to read through the whole lock code there's about 272 laws and I said find me the law with the penalty for returning shoes they came back and they said there isn't one we can't find it I said exactly he got away with it but I still don't know wouldn't you have kept them in at least re-gifted them so things have not changed all that much so basically my point here is they are trading finished goods and raw materials and they are in fact going back and forth between the different countries we know for example that hatshepsut sends an embassy down to punt we don't quite know where point was or at least we didn't know until recently but on her mortuary temple she has descriptions and pictures of the ships that went she even has pictures of the goods that are brought back and she even tells us in the lowest picture there that the Queen is named Ettie so we know all about this the problem was as I said we didn't quite know where punt was until recently and then someone did an analysis of some baboon mummies in the British Museum and determined that they were most closely related to baboons in Eritrea or Ethiopia and that was one of the possibilities for punt so that's probably where it was now she wasn't the first person to send embassies there and she's not the last but that's what she is known for other embassies though other trade missions may have gone over to the Aegean to Greece here is the tomb of wreck Moray and in here wreck Moray is what the Vizier liked the right-hand man to the Pharaoh we see people from Greece these are Minoans or Mycenaeans and they're bringing typical Aegean Goods to Egypt same thing here in this tomb again we have you can see somebody is carrying a Bulls head that's straight out of Konoe sauce so we know that Egypt and Greece are trading already back at well about 1400 1450 BC would be when this has taken place and it continues this is Amenhotep the thirds mortuary temple i wager that some of you have seen these the colossi of memnon they're about 60 feet tall and in fact there were Greek and Roman tourists that went to see these they scratch their names Kilroy Was here but in Greek what you don't see is the missing mortuary temple that these were at the entrance to because it was stolen by the later Pharaohs why go out and quarry more stone when you can just take this from a dead Pharaoh and make your own temple so most of them are now gone now much more interesting to my mind than the big 60-foot tall ones are the smaller ones that were probably only about ten feet tall you can't see these statues anymore they're gone you just see the feet here but in the 1960s German archeologists were excavating and they found five of the statue base lists they hypothesized there were ten in fact the new excavations that are there now have revealed more than 40 of the statue base lists on each of these bases are the names of foreign powers foreign countries one mentions places that we know belonged to the Hittites another one mentions the Babylonians and the Assyrians but this particular one is the one that caught my interest the Aegean list it has names that had never appeared in Egypt before and would never appear again for the most part because what you see on one side is two names over here which are the head names for the lists kofte you and Tenaya CAFTA you is the egyptian name for crete just like they called a calf door up in Mesopotamia in Egypt they call it kofte you Taniya is probably mainland Greece so we've got crete and mainland greece and then on the other side and going around the edge we've got a series of 14 names that mention again places that had never been written down in egypt before amny sauce Vestas cadonia Nicene i caddos acro not Theon Elios Cano sauce and amny sauce again which is kind of interesting now the very first time it was deciphered when it was translated in english ken kitchen a rather a preeminent british scholar published and he said i'm rather hesitant to suggest this but this looks uncomfortably like my sinaia no sauce well uncomfortable enough it was my scene I and Cano sauce and this list is basically one of a kind but if you go over to Greece and you look at the sights that are mentioned on that statue base you actually find objects with Amenhotep the Third's name on it or his wife Queen T they seem to have married for love but here we've got a faience plaque with egyptian hieroglyphs and we've got on the right side you can see natural nephron imatra the good god and then the name of Amenhotep the third and add a number of the sites that are on the statue base we've got objects with his name on it so for instance at canosa on crete here is a scarab of Amenhotep the third so i think that this is not just boasting or bragging I actually think it might record an itinerary of the way to get from Egypt up to Greece and back again and I would suspect that maybe that's why I'm new sauce is on here twice it's a round trip so you're going from Egypt you get up to Crete and you stop it's the first place get off everybody use the bathroom it's time for a coffee alright and then you go and you've known the Minoans for quite a while the Egyptians have known them already for a couple of hundred years but the Mycenaeans our new upstarts at this time at about 13 50 BC so let's go up to mainland Greece and see what's going on up there then we cut bent down to Crete and here we are at mu sauce again everybody used the bathroom it's going to be a long ride till we get back to Egypt right sound familiar so I think that we might actually have an itinerary here I can't prove it but I think it's a definite possibility one of the reasons why I say this is because we have the remains of actual ships that we're going around and around the Mediterranean at that time this is the rather well known hula beroun shipwreck which went down off the coast of Turkey in about 1300 BC it's been excavated by George bass and Jamal Pollock of Texas A&M Institute of nautical archaeology and they found what you're looking at here you can see the stones going right down through the middle with the holes in them those are anchors there are 14 stone anchors on here but the majority of the cargo 300 copper ingots which you see here and the copper is 99% pure and it comes from Cyprus so this particular ship is carrying actually it's more than 300 ingots you can carry them on your shoulder they each weigh about 60 pounds it's got 10 tonnes of copper it also has a ton of tin on this same boat so if you mix the copper in the tin you're looking at an awful lot of bronze in fact George bass at one point estimated that there is enough raw material on board this one ship that you could have outfitted an army of 300 soldiers with swords shields helmets Greaves everything that you would need to get a modern Bronze Age army back then so when this ship went down somebody lost a fortune and I actually hope they were insured now seriously there was insurance back then we know it from the text so it's not out of the question that this was insured so we've got lots and lots of copper lots and lots of 10 in fact we have other things as well the top left-hand column our picture there you actually have tin you can see the round bun ingot there you've also got in the top right-hand picture also round ingots but this is raw glass colored with cobalt and in fact when the corning museum of glass analyzed these it matched perfectly with glass from Mycenaean Greece and New Kingdom Egypt so they're all getting their glass from the same place we've also got in the lower line there all the way down bottom on the Left terebinth resin which comes from the pistachio tree you use it in making perfume in the middle ivory of course but not just from elephants also from hippopotamus and it actually turns out that about 90 percent of the ivory in the Late Bronze Age is from hippo not from elephants which people found surprising and then new unused pottery from Cyprus and Canaan Israel Lebanon Syria so this is for me a microcosm of the international trade that was going on at the time that this ship sunk in about 1300 BC and in fact if you plot this on a map which National Geographic did by the way if you're interested its December 1987 it's my favourite issue ever they on this map put the objects from the ship on the map as to where they came from they thought the ship was going round and round and round hence the blue arrows I'm actually not so sure that they were doing that I think it might be a gift from one King to another in which case it's going straight across but it's not out of the question it was also on a shopping expedition because everything they needed would have been used by a Mycenaean Palace right so we need raw glass we need more pistachio resin we need some tin we need some copper and you know get some milk while you're out but the ship never came back so for me this is as I say a microcosm but we've also got the writing a text from ooh Garrett on the north coast of Syria dates to about 40 years after this ship went down it's called the sinner a new text because it mentions a merchant a private merchant named sinner on ooo it says from the present day on the stammer oh the son Nicke nepo king of wu Garrett exempts in iran who son of segi knew by the way I wanted to name our kids this my wife refused for some reason at any rate let's see his grain his beer his olive oil to the palace he shall not deliver his ship is exempt when it arrives from Crete so we have a private merchant in about 1260 BC who is importing olive oil beer and grain and he's exempt from taxes I actually think this might be the first corporate tax exemption in history but can't be sure about that so when you combine the physical evidence from the shipwreck and the written evidence from the center under text I think it's pretty clear that we've got international trade going on so basically what we've got we've got a globalized society and I do use that term wearily but interconnection Merilee going along 17th century 16 15 14 13 everybody's having fun being diplomatic and trading and there's reciprocity going on and then into this a little chaos was dropped and one by one each of the civilizations winked out actually they did it pretty fast the only one that was left standing was Egypt and even they were so weakened that they were never the same again the New Kingdom is the high point so just after 1200 BC we get what we called the collapse or the calamity and pretty much everything gets destroyed everything that had been good everything that had been ticking along merrily suddenly goes out as if somebody had just snapped their fingers now the question is what caused it and that's been one of history's great mysteries one thing we can say is that the magnitude of the collapse when it did take place was enormous I don't think anything comes close to it until the Roman Empire collapsed and that was 1,500 years later but as I say the question of what caused it is a bit of a problem and that's where my book comes in Rob tempio of Princeton University Press asked me if I would write a book about the collapse and I said sure but I also want to write about what collapsed so the beginning and the end or about the collapse in the middle is what I've just described to you what collapsed telling the stories about that now I also realize that I'm not the first person that's discussed the collapse of civilizations there was a guy named Edward Gibbon who wrote a little book about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire Joseph Tainter in 1988 put out a book the collapse of societies of complex societies which has been an absolute marvelous book for all of us and then of course I imagine a number of you have read Jared Diamond's book on collapse the difference though is that when the Late Bronze Age collapsed it was a multitude of interconnected and intertwined civilizations that all went down at once these books mostly are talking about the decline of a single civilization at a time Roman Empire Maya Mongols Indus Valley we are rather unique here in the Late Bronze Age in that that is one of the few times when you actually had interconnected civilizations much as we have today so I actually think the parallels between us today and then back then are much stronger than you might suppose even though they were 3,200 years ago so anything that we can learn about their collapse I think is not just idly studying ancient history but may contain some lessons for us today but the big problem is trying to figure out why they collapsed and it used to be the easy solution everybody said oh those the sea peoples why not sure sea peoples well we actually know these from the Egyptians we know that they came through twice 12:07 BC and 1177 BC and you can see right there that's where the title of the book comes from but actually it would be better to say the fifth year of Merneptah or the eighth year of Ramses the third be because the Egyptologists keep changing the chronology all right everything is you know it's on a sliding scale so in fact when the book came out a senior colleague of mine up in New York sent me an email in which he said nice job congratulations title should have been 1186 I sent him back a two-word email and no it's not what you think my email to him simply said it was and in fact in the contract I signed the title was originally 1186 BC but in the years that I was doing the research and the writing the Egyptologist changed the chronology again and so it became 1177 in the interval since the book has come out they've changed the chronology again and so the next editions going to have to be called 1188 anyway so for us let's just say the eighth year of Rameses the third well what happens here he actually tells us in both pictures and texts and he shows us the naval battle and talks about the land battle and he says and I'll quote here the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands all that once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray no land could stand before their arms from hot a code a cart commish arts awha and the last year on now we know where those places are kotti those are the Hittites up in Turkey code a and carcass that swear turkey joins Syria arts awaaz on the western coast of Turkey Elijah that's the ancient name for Cyprus so we can see that these people are basically coming across Greece to Turkey to Cyprus and then into Canaan because he continues a camp was set up in one place in a more omuro is by Ugarit on the north coast of Syria they desolated its people its land was like that which comes never come into being they were coming forward toward Egypt while the flame was prepared before them and then he gives us the names of the peoples because there's not just one Sea Peoples in fact he doesn't call them the sea peoples that's our name for him right he gives us the actual groups the polis at the - jackar the shekel s the denyen and the West and then he says that he defeated them and we know this from his year twelve papyrus Harris says I overthrew those who invaded from their lands I slew the denyen who are in their aisles the two jacker and the policy were made ashes the shardana and the west of the sea they were made as those that exist not so you can see how we've got the name the peoples of the sea but he actually gives us the names in fact when you combine this with the earlier invasion thirty years previously there's nine of these groups that all come in so the big question that we've got is who are these people where did they come from and where did they go to now we know what they look like because Ramsay's shows us them these are pictures of captive sea peoples in fact if you want to dress up at Halloween that's quite easy to do it but trying to find where they came from is more and more difficult so people have been playing for example linguistic games so shardana named me a place in the mediterranean that has similar consonants where they could have come from and give you him look in the western Mediterranean Sardinia people have suggested that's where they came from same thing with shekel Esch nearby Sicily possibly - jackar maybe somewhere in Italy or Turkey the denyen some people have suggested that these are the denounced Homer's Mycenaean Greeks Wesch we're not quite sure about maybe from will OSA it's only the police' that we think we know the Philistines and in fact jean-francois Champollion the guy who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics he had already suggested that the police were the Philistines way back in 1823 or so now one of the problems we've got though is did they come from there or did they go there afterward right are they from Sardinia or is that where they fled after they were defeated and we don't know the answers all I can tell you right now is that no site has been excavated where we can definitively say that's where the sea peoples come from they are a mystery we do know where some of them ended up the Philistines the police' they wind up in what is now Israel Lebanon Syria and in fact you can see from this Philistine stirrup jar it's what we would call degenerate mycenaean it looks like somebody from Greece is still making their pots their stirrup jars but they're now using local clay from roads or Cyprus or even Canaan ancient Israel so it really looks like at least part of the Mycenaeans had joined the Sea Peoples maybe after they lost and in fact I suspect that that's why we've got the disparate groups as these people swept over the lands some of the people they were vanquishing joined in so what we see in Egypt is the end of the process this motley crew but they're not Vikings they're not Raiders we shouldn't be thinking like that because in the pictures that Rameses shows us he shows us and you can see on the left and also the drawing on the right there they're coming with their possessions they're coming with ox carts they're coming with wives and children's this is a migration this is a movement think 1930s Dust Bowl and everybody moving from Oklahoma to California that's what this is it's a migration it's not just Viking raids so then the question is well what caused that and for the longest time there was a very simple logical linear explanation that there was a drought and that drought led to famine and that led to the movement of the sea peoples that led to havoc and the cutting of the trade routes and that led to collapse and it's a nice easily told bedtime story or perhaps not bedtime but the problem is it's too logical it's too messy nothing is that logical I think it's too simple so what really happened well that was what I wanted to investigate if everything was gone what caused it why did everything collapse so suddenly so the sea peoples were usually blamed for it but I actually think they were as much the victims as they were the oppressors I think they've been given a bad name they got bad press yes they were there yes they did some damage but I think they had a little bit of problem themselves so what else could have caused it well drought has been suggested famines been suggested invaders have been suggested earthquakes have been suggested so if we have to pick and choose one of them I respectfully decline I would choose them all I think there's a perfect storm I think they all happened let me present the evidence to you rather quickly and then see what you think drought is not a recent suggestion in fact Reese carpenter who was a professor at Bryn Mawr suggested this in the 1960s he said that the Mycenaeans had declined and gone downhill very quickly because of drought but he didn't have proof for it he didn't have any hard data and so people gradually forgot that he had suggested this but we now have that data we've got it in the last five years Connie uski a French professor has been going with this team to a number of different places and they went here to the north coast of Syria place called Gabala and they took course from dried-up lagoons and lakes and then they looked at the pollen that was in there and they decided they could see that the plants had changed and there was what they call a 300 year dry event in other words a drought and the pollen shows that there were drier climatic changes back then from about the 12th century or the 13th century right right about our time period just after 1200 all the way down to the ninth century so 300 years so north Syria looks like it had a drought they wanted went over to Cyprus did the same thing at hala Sultan teki same thing there is a drought there as well from 1200 to about 850 BC judging from the pollen and then Brandon Drake pulled together a bunch of different data and a study that was published in the journal of archaeological science including things like the / of the sea which dropped and when you do that you get less rain on the in this case the mycenaean or Greek mainland and he said that took place about 1250 down to 11 97 BC now Brandon's article was so good I did something that I rarely do I wanted to contact him and give him my congratulations so superb article so I googled him all I knew was that it was Brandon Drake from University of New Mexico and Google came up on the very first thing it said was you are friends in facebook really so I sent an email to him and he's like hey Eric how's it going I haven't seen you since Megiddo in 2006 alright we dug together so you may know people you don't even know you know the power of the Internet the most recent of these scientific tests has taken place with Daphnia on route who you can see in the picture down there in Israel Finkelstein and Thomas litt - German scientist they also did the coring and the pollen analysis this time from the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea and they showed that in Israel - there was a drought it didn't last quite as long it was from about 1250 down to 1100 BC but so we've now got that missing data that Rhys Carpenter was looking for that there was a dry event a drought that lasted from well at least 13 or 1200 BC down - take your pick 11:50 900 somewhere in there and it's in Israel it's in Syria it's in Cyprus it's in Greece so at least the science is telling us that there is a drought and of course the media went wild over this right New York Times pollen study points to drought as culprit in Bronze Age mystery LA Times got into the act climate change may have caused demise of Late Bronze Age civilizations archaeology magazine and National Geographic didn't want to be left out there's Nat Geo here's archaeology new york post got into it they tossed in globalization for good measure globalization and climate change destroyed ancient civilization and then you may remember that NASA funded study that turned out to be not so funded by NASA that said that we were going to collapse in just a couple of decades and at that point I was a little fed up so I put a an op-ed in The Huffington Post the collapse of civilizations it's complicated which it is now with drought you frequently get famine but famine can be difficult to discern in the archaeological record unless you find bodies and things like that but that's where written texts come in and in fact we've got archives at jugar which tell us that in fact that's what's going on here is a letter from the house of or Taino he's another one of those private merchants like sonora no only a hundred or more years later he has a outlying office in the city of Amar in inland Syria and he gets word back there is famine in our house we will all die of hunger if you do not quickly arrive here we ourselves will die of hunger you will not see a living soul from your land so I think you can agree with me that there's probably famine going on there we've cut the written records and we've even got this from the kingdom of God another letter here with me plenty has become famine I think this is incontrovertible evidence even the hittite king do you not know that there was a famine in the midst of my lands it is a matter of life and death and in fact we know from other records that the Egyptians who until recently had been mortal enemies of the Hittites were sending grain ships up to help a leave the famine in the hittite lands so we've got that going on which we see the same sort of things today now adding insult to injury though do we have invaders well yes we do see peoples remember them the Egyptian records but it can be tough sometimes to figure out who's causing your destruction so it could just as easily be internal rebellion and in fact we've got yet another letter from the in this case being sent to the king of Cyprus and he says my father now the ships of the enemy have come they've been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land doesn't my father know that all of my infantry and Cherrytree are stationed in hoti so they're up in the hittite lands in Turkey and then he says seven ships have been sighted if any more are coming then please let me know now the story that was told for decades was that this text had been found in a kiln at Gujarat it was being baked before it was shipped over to Cyprus so it wouldn't fall apart but that the destroyers had shown back up those ships had come again and that the kiln and the whole city had been destroyed before it could be sent makes a great story again too good to be true reexamination has now shown that it was not in a kiln it was in fact probably in a basket up on the second story which fell and landed upside down and in that basket were this tablet and about 70 others and as the basket disintegrated it left a kiln shaped lump with all these tablets so in fact we now think that it in fact was sent and this could actually be a copy that was left so we don't actually know it if it's from the last sea peoples or the previous one 30 years earlier so it's not as much of a help as we thought and yet it's definitely evidence for invaders we've even got another letter it's a private letter it's one of the last from regard which says when your messenger arrived the army was already humiliated and the city was sacked our food in the threshing floor was burnt and the vineyards were also destroyed our city is sacked may you know it may you know it so somebody is coming in and destroying this area and in fact Connie uski the same guy that took the pollen samples when he was at Gabala and Noor Syria he actually identified a destruction layer as Sea Peoples but this is a bit hasty there's definitely a destruction layer but it's not necessarily by the sea peoples we don't actually know who did it so this is a bit of a problem and in fact I give you one example Canaanite hot sore in the north of Israel definitely destroyed somewhere around 1200 BC we know this because we've got the archaeological evidence of the Late Bronze Age palace that is completely torched the mud bricks or I'm sorry the mud bricks are burnt red and black a fire destroyed this and in fact the excavator is actually two excavators Amnon ben-tor and Sharon Zuckerman who just recently passed away they were directing the site and Amnon ben-tor said you know what it's probably not Egyptians that did this destruction because there are Egyptian statues that are in the destruction level and they're deface they have their arms hacked off inside so no Egyptian would have done that so it can't be Egyptian and same thing with the Canaanites because there's also Canaanite statues and the destruction and they are also defaced so it's not Canaanites that are doing this he says that leaves the Israelites and the sea peoples and this is too far inland for sea peoples and I would actually debate that sea peoples got quite far inland but he didn't want them that left the Israelites Joshua and in fact hot sore is mentioned in the Bible as one of the cities that Josh were burned down well Sharon Zuckerman said wait not quite so fast this has definitely burnt down that's for sure but how do you know who did it he says well what do you mean she says well if you look and see what's destroyed it's the palace and a couple of temples but the actual domestic areas where the people are living and working there untouched they're not burnt they're not destroyed she said to me that's the sign of an internal rebellion of the lower classes rising up against the upper class when they don't have enough food or enough money or whatever so she said it's an internal rebellion and my point here is very simple if the two co-directors can't decide who destroyed their site then how are we ever going to decide all we know is that it is destroyed by somebody or maybe by some thing because we can't rule out earthquakes and in fact if you take a map of the sites that are destroyed in this collapse from about 1225 to 1175 everything you see here with the red X is destroyed and if you overlay it on top of a map of earthquakes that have happened just in the last century or a little bit more it's about 1900 you can see that most of the sites are actually in active seismic zones in fact we've got a number of fault lines you've got the North Anatolian fault line and light blue get another fault line in green you've got an orange one coming up the Great Rift Valley so there are lots of fault lines and lots of earthquakes in this region and in fact we have something that I find absolutely fascinating this is the North Anatolian fault line running across the top of Turkey it has had what is called in modern terms an earthquake sequence over the last 60 or more years in fact specifically about 1939 to 1999 an earthquake sequence is when you have an earthquake and it doesn't release all the pressure there'll be another earthquake right next to it or nearby sometime in the future a week later a year later maybe a decade later if that one doesn't release all the pressure you'll have another one and another one until the fault line unzips this is stuff that a most nor at Stanford studies so earthquake sequences what they call it when it happens in modern times but it happened in antiquity as well and they have a much cooler name for it it's called an earthquake storm when you have this earthquake storm and it unzips over a period of 50 or 60 years it then takes about another 400 years to generate enough steam and start the whole process over again and it looks like if we look at some of the sites that are destroyed that there is a 50 year earthquake storm right around our period so I think that there are earthquakes taking place here so for instance my scene I here on the land gate you can see the cyclopean masonry on the left side and it's built on top of what looks like bedrock there that's actually one side of a fault zone all the geo archaeologists went there and just started laughing they're like wait a minute they built the major city on top of an active fault zone who would do that yeah the people from San Francisco just kind of shook their head and in fact we've got victims that are obviously killed in an earthquake here is one young lady it's actually the same one in both pictures here and you can see the rock that's lying to the side of her head in the was that the right picture for you that rock was actually embedded in her skull she had taken shelter in a doorway which is usually the best place to do it in the basement but the whole thing had collapsed and had killed her so my scene I Terrans just three kilometers away same sort of thing in this case we've got a woman and a child killed by a collapsing building at the same time period if you go over to Troy with the Trojan War and all that Troy 6 you've got a wall that is not supposed to look like that right that one that's leaning trust me it wasn't built like the way originally and even at Garrett this is a slightly earlier one but you see how that wall undulate sits not supposed to do that so there are earthquakes at this time so here my point would be that if you see a site that's destroyed it might not be who it might be what that destroyed it in this particular case but if you do have a few a who then you've got the cutting of these international trade routes and that is going on and I bring us back to one of our original slides here where you've got this long trade route with the bronze and the copper and the tin and if imagine it had been cut at any point along that and you suddenly couldn't get your tin anymore then how are you gonna make your bronze now that's not going to bring your Bronze Age to a complete halt in and of itself but if you add that in to the great mix then I think you can see you've got a problem and in fact they were lucky that they were able to turn to iron to take over and in fact you know in the Bronze Age there are really oh there are already using iron in King Tut's tomb there's an iron dagger it's just that they're using bronze much more and even in the Iron Age that takes they're still using bronze but not as much so in this particular case we see basically an innovation taking over to fill the gap where they don't have bronze anymore and they've got iron so in terms of what happened well it's still a mystery but I think we can sum up if I give you three points that I think you will agree with me and there'll be no arguments we can then proceed from there so first point would you agree that we have a number of separate civilizations that are flourishing between say the 15th and the 13th centuries we've named some of them Mycenaeans Minoans Hittites egyptians canaanites Cypriots they're all independent but they are all interacting with each other especially through trade routes would you agree with me with that point ok so we've got that second point it's pretty clear that many of the cities were destroyed and that the Late Bronze Age pretty much came to an end right around eleven seventy seven or soon thereafter we all agreed with that no argument there everything's destroyed everything goes down but point number three there's no proof as to what or who has actually caused this all we know is that it did collapse so we've got three main points that everybody agrees on and yet it in a way doesn't help us all that much and in fact people are still even today going with that same linear progression they still say I heard it last November drought famine cutting of the trade routes movement all that I still say that is too linear it was much much messier so if you were to say to me well what is it earthquakes famine drought movement of peoples I would say yes to all of the above in fact the only thing that's missing is plague there's no evidence for plague and I actually do find that surprising I think there should be but no evidence for that yet but everything else absolutely we've got the whole so the whole thing the problem is I don't know that we can point to any one single driver or stressor certainly climate change seems big but is that the major stressor or driver that can be argued because some of the others may have caused a problem as well and in fact different parts of this region ranging from remember we're going from Italy and Greece all the way over to Iraq and Iran in Afghanistan different problems may have arisen in different places and they may have reacted differently but the ending is the same they all end they are depending on each other for both raw materials and finished products and therefore when one went down there is a domino effect what happens to the hittites affects the Mycenaeans which affects the Cypriots which affects the Assyrians and so on so anything that gets destabilized in a system like this is ultimately going to affect everything right and in fact what we're looking at is the system's collapse this isn't an explanation for it it's just a name for it when you've got a systems collapse and Colin Renfrew was talking about this already back in about 1979 you have a collapse of the central administration you've got the disappearance of the traditional elite you've got the collapse of the economy if you've got a centralized economy and you have entire population shifts and decline now this doesn't happen overnight systems collapse which we can see in a number of different places takes about a hundred years and in fact I would say that 1177 is the wrong title for my book civilization did not collapse in that year that is just shorthand for the whole collapse just as we say that Rome fell in 476 even though we know it didn't it took most of the fifth century and even then you've still got the eastern Roman Empire continuing on we still say Rome fell in 476 it's shorthand if you will that's what 1177 is it's a shorthand perhaps a better way to say it would be that the world in 1200 was very different from the world in 1100 and completely different in the year 1000 but that doesn't really fit on the book cover so we're looking at something that takes about a century and when everything does fall you get a dark age and in fact we've got that we've got the Greek Dark Ages that go for about 300 years and in the system's collapse you frequently get myths about the Golden Age that came just before so think for example about Homer and a story about the Trojan War that's a perfect example so what I would say that we're looking at is indeed a systems collapse from that time period so what are the takeaways what lessons can we learn from this well one of the questions we can ask is are we facing a similar situation today now that might be I mean its 3,200 years but let me ask you is there climate change today well we could argue about that till the cows come home but I think most people now would say yes famines and droughts somewhere in the world absolutely earthquakes going on yes rebellions sure in fact I think the only thing we're missing are the sea peoples and in fact I'm not so sure we're missing the sea peoples because there could be two different groups that you can interpret as the sea peoples they could either be Isis which is busy destroying everything in the Near East our antiquity is going to be gone if we don't do something about it or they could be the refugees that have fled from Syria and elsewhere that are now in Europe it depends if you see the sea peoples as victims or oppressors or maybe both so I actually think we do have the sea peoples today as well just with a slightly different name and in fact if we take a look at headlines from around the world from say the last two or three years Greece's economy is tanked right that's been in the news internal rebellions have engulfed Libya Egypt and Syria Outsiders some foreign warriors are fanning our flames yes not news it's on TV every night turkeys afraid it's going to be involved as does Israel Jordan is crowd with refugees Iran is bellicose and threatening and Iraq is in turmoil right all of this ripped from the headlines in the last couple of years well what if we had newspapers from 1200 BC what would the headlines have read pretty much the same thing so my question is we are more technologically advanced we are also more aware of our surroundings that is the Hittites did not have SUVs they did not cause climate change but Mother Nature did a pretty good job of it back then I also think the Hittites were not aware of what was happening what was a drought why didn't it rain I mean you pray to the storm guide and it works or it doesn't work we know what is happening we know what's causing it and we might know what to do about it the question is will we do it now I look backwards that's my job as a historian it is the job of others including in this audience to look forward so I would simply say that if a similar globalized Society collapsed 3200 years ago might we not want to study it a little bit to find out what we could learn and maybe stop ourselves from doing the same thing food for thought thank you thank you sir have a seat say more about the Dark Age 300 years of what what was lost I mean you said you wanted to live in the golden Bronze Age there's lots of apparently good things but we're like you know languages lost technologies lost cities emptied what what what is darkness mean in this case darkness means totality I mean you ask what's lost what isn't lost they lose the art of writing the art of writing well if you want to call it the art of read they they forget how to write now remember that only 1% can really write back then so when you top when you take off that traditional elite including the Scrabble class you're left with not many people who know to read and write so linear B goes away which the Mycenaeans are using and so on so they lose writing they lose the monumental architecture they lose much of what we would call the hallmarks of civilization now they're gonna get it back but it's gonna take a while it takes a different period of time depending on where you are so in Greece for example it takes about two to three hundred years to come back but in other places it takes them far less for example remember Egypt doesn't really collapse it's just weakened and Assyria and Babylon they bounced back in a couple of decades and I think the secret there's they're all on major rivers you've got the Nile you've got the Tigris and Euphrates so even if you've got a drought I think they're less affected but even they have dark ages so it's what happens so was there a Renaissance where people sort of rediscovering stuff from before and there was a continuity or was a completely new invention of these things both there's both the Renaissance and new inventions but in fact there is a period of Greek history that we call the Greek Renaissance and this is the period when you have Homer Hesiod and then Sappho in the Greek poets the eighth century is when they're coming back up and rediscovering but in the meantime you've got new things for example the Phoenicians have brought their alphabet and so when they're now writing in the eighth and seventh centuries they're using an alphabet which is completely different from what they had done with linear B which is basically pictograms so there's both the Renaissance and new ideas and one of the things that occurred to me is you know I hate to kind of put it this way but if you have an old-growth forest sometimes a forest fire is good it clears away the underbrush and lets new things grow and that's kind of what happened here because think about a what if what if this hadn't collapsed would you have the Israelites coming in would you have Moses and monotheism would you a couple centuries down the pike have Greece and democracy I mean it's all kind of so because this collapsed we've got our world today so one of these days I want to write something about what if what if it hadn't collapsed what would we be doing smart dinosaurs um question from CRISPR so please illustrate the scale of the cities kingdoms armies and navies the town's well is the population of canosa and so on but how many people are we talking about now it's very tough to estimate population and it depends yes three different people you get three different answers they have a range problem yeah they've got a range and in fact there's a new article out saying can also says three times larger than we ever thought it was at this time pruder actually in the iron you theory or new data a new data that's just coming out yes but the the upshot is in terms of cities I mean we're talking a couple thousand people we're talking armies that are maybe a couple of hundred people they're not huge there is in the Battle of Kadesh any of a couple hundred people hundred people can do pretty devastating attack even at you know yeah yeah there is in the Battle of Megiddo for example there are nine hundred chariots that are captured that's a huge fighting force that's actually is absolute lot of Tanks yeah armored cavalry armored cavalry for that time for it we have another Hittite text that talks about a force in the region of Troy and about 1,500 BC and it says so-and-so landed with a hundred men that was a lot so we're not talking huge amounts we're talking a couple thousand I think if a city is ten or twenty thousand it's it's big huge and what was in these fees that people would want I mean it I can see this or the the not an invasion but Refugee approach but some of these sound like they were you know and we're gonna take down your city and what was there that they would want its this slave gold and what's there well in a lot of these cases what it seems is at the end of the Late Bronze Age they're burning down the cities and then reoccupying them so remember this is a migration they're actually looking for places to settle and in fact some of the archaeological evidence is indicating that the assimilation if you will was much more peaceful the Canaanites and the Philistines for example oesophagus Orlando of Haifa is has got evidence that these are actually maybe much more peaceful settling down hmm so yes there is some warfare yes there is some destruction but they're not you know pillaging and burning and moving on they are even at Gabala where kind of you ski was looking there is a destruction and then there's an immediate reoccupation and in that case there is this Philistine looking pottery which is why he thinks that sea peoples had there been a long peace before all of this breakdown that made these societies more vulnerable in some sense more relaxed about things it's possible that it is quite possible they are definitely this is an era of prosperity I would say from the 14th century ons or a growing prosperity people are growing cross generation generation better and better off exactly and they may have been lulled into a sense of false security I was at a conference a year or two ago on climate change at this time period and one of the people there suggested that there was actually a time in the 14th century of more rain and better times and perhaps they overextended themselves so when the ending came it was all that more droughts stick so yes they may have been I wouldn't say lulled into false security mmm but things were going really well in the 14th and 13th centuries and in fact that's the thing about this collapses everything's going really well until suddenly it's not mm-hmm it's not like things were going badly for a while it's a new guard for example the letters from the merchants and the kings and all that everything is going great until suddenly the city's destroyed so these societies do they have histories to themselves are they telling stories of their own past are they living in a kind of a rolling prison depends on the city regard for example has there's actually a cottage industry of huger riddick studies they've got history they've got King lists they've got Queen list they've got epics they've got so we've got that but from others it's it's new that we don't have anything so it just depends where you are Steve Lavigne Asst can you comment on the languages of the period was there a lingua franca so they're doing all this trade there's numbers and then we have this accounting is there something besides numbers that they all absolutely excellent question and yes the lingua franca of that day is Akkadian which the Amarna letters that I cited at the beginning if you were Hittite and you were and you could read or write you would know Hittite and Akkadian if you were Egyptian you would know Egyptian and Akkadian a even probably the Mycenaeans they would know linear be an Akkadian if you are living in Assyria and Babylon you're home free because you're doing Akkadian anyway right but that is the lingua franca and we do see the diplomatic correspondence being written in it some of the Amarna letters are one of them is written or two of them are written in hittite but that's unusual most of them are Akkadian everybody's got their own language and then there's one diplomatic language so that in a sense was the Bronze Age lingua franca absolutely absolutely well like English some guy writing in the dark I can't read his name Bob Cole pocket might look like when did the iron business start that iron technology you mentioned briefly that it was just getting going in Egypt so the wear and see a little bit about bronze technology versus iron technology okay this is a much debated point but basically iron once you are able to master the smelting and all that of course I aren't going to be much better than copper but copper is in some ways seems to be easier to manipulate now that's not always true but there is a good reason why they are using bronze for almost two thousand years and that iron doesn't take over until it really absolutely has to the actual date for the invention of iron is a bit of a debate and there's kind of an old wives tale that the Hittites invented it and had a monopoly and that's why they were able to to capture most of the Middle East at one point that turns out to have been a mistranslation of one of the texts and so while the Hittites did know iron so did everybody else but it's the type of thing where you're not going to actually do it until you have to and so I would say as I said that this is something where if your supply of tin is cut off and you can't make bronze anymore you will turn to iron which turns out to be better any which turns out to be better anyway exactly yeah what is this sharpness about bronze dagger versus iron really matter how sharp it is if it goes in you it goes in you all that bronze says in the whole thing edge presumably as well bronze does not hold an edge as well I still would not want to get attacked by it fair enough I promise not to manual met manometer I think yes because they have done in 1177 to prevent the collapse good question I've been wondering that myself what could they have done to prevent it who would be the day in this case it would be the day yeah might be in fact I think Egypt did prepare I if lugar it is destroyed between 1190 and 1185 which we think mm-hmm and the Sea Peoples don't wind up in Egypt until 11 77 that gives them a good 7 to 10 to 15 years to figure it out so I think Egypt was plenty prepared in fact there's some new evidence but colleague of mine that thinks the land battle there's a land battle and a naval battle and she thinks the land battle was actually fought earlier up in Syria and that it was kind of an offensive defense that go protect your country it was sort of reach the Egyptians went all the way up and then later they fought the naval battle down below so I do think that they had some time to prepare and I think that's probably why they were successful others you know what can you do if your if your supply of a crucial raw material has come off it can be difficult if you're hit by an earthquake I don't know anything that can prepare you for that so I'm not so sure it was possible to have survived it and this is one thing that I would say if an earthquake hits you can survive it if a famine hits you can survive it I mean people will die but you can survive it a drought yeah invaders yes somebody always survives but what if you have one then two then three and then four what if you have the perfect storm that also gets you a multiplier effect where everything is gonna get worse and worse and worse and I think that's what we've got here so I think if it had been just a famine they could have survived it they've done that before we know they had a famine back in the 14th century they survived it we know there's invaders they've survived it but when you've got them all at once so they're how do you prepare for that and I'm not sure that you can so you've got a sort of cascading effects you've got a chaos leading to chaos you mentioned four things in your slide the sort of loss of administrative centre the loss of kind of an economic apparatus the loss of the elites and I forget what the oh right the population declines on movements hmm so do the cities really empty out in these circumstances or what happens some of them did some of them that they're actually population movements and in fact that's what Reese carpenter was basing himself on he didn't have the data about the pollen and everything but he did notice the population shifts and he said one of the only reasons that could have caused it was drought and then the whole thing collapsed so indeed so we can go away from drought that makes a lot of sense they go away from chaos bit toward white right ironically however one of the major suggestions is that if the sea peoples the shardana and the shekel ash really did come from Sardinia and Sicily which I do adhere to that I don't think they went there afterward I think that came from there the hypothesis is that there was an original drought up in Europe or in western Mediterranean during their moving in which case they have the worst rotten luck because they're moving from one drought into another draught right on the eastern Mediterranean and what do you do if you have a 300 year long drought that's pretty hard to survive famously so Egypt goes into a steep decline that is the way you describe to say a little more about that so even though they were prepared in they're the ones that survived what a survival mean under the circle up evil and turmoil and rebellions in Egypt everything is not hunky-dory they do survive in fact Ramses the 3rd himself the man who saved Egypt from the Sea Peoples it would said how he was seen at the time is the guy who I would upstand you don't actually have anything that says well actually he himself says that I'm sure he said I didn't know he was assassinated in a harem conspiracy it's just kind of a interesting way to end your life in fact and it was we know about it because it was written it's actually a fairly famous papyrus where it says that there was an assassination plot and it names a minor queen who had just the Sun and there were something like 40 accomplices in the harem and they're all put on trial and they're put to death but nobody knew whether it has succeeded the actual report doesn't say but Ramses the thirds mummy was x-rayed in cat scan not so long ago oh and his mummy has kind of a scarf around his neck and when they looked through it they just now saw this is the last couple of years a knife and incision by a knife that went right in and just cut his throat basically he would have died pretty much instantly and so it looks like the assassination did in fact take place now in the same tomb they also found a young man wrapped in a goat skin and not mummified which is what you do when somebody is well you don't want them to survive into the afterlife and that mummy of the young man shows evidence of having been strangled to death so the hypothesis is that that is the young prince who was part of it and that he was then buried with his father after the assassination took place so even though you beat the sea peoples you might have trouble at home yeah yeah the most dangerous thing is Affairs either your family or your harem or both and Michael M asks there are lots of mysteries what one piece of information were you as an archaeologist most like to find that would solve most of the questions you have what would I most like to find that would solve most no would you like somebody else before someone you know lad Lee Reid yes do both actually vote there's digs that you work on and there's things to other people working absolutely so for example at Megiddo where I was for last 20 years we know that the king of Megiddo be readier in 1350 is writing to Amenhotep authority - where Makita is Megiddo sorry is northern Israel Jezreel Valley if at Megiddo is Armageddon har Megiddo in Hebrew is the mound or mountain of Megiddo har Megiddo Armageddon army the original rough breathing or H was lost to us over translation so megiddo is Armageddon and that was kind of fun digging an Armageddon for 20 years in fact our shirts at the back said I survived Armageddon in heaven year well in about 1350 the king of Megiddo is writing to the Egyptian pharaoh and we have six letters from him in that Amarna archive in Egypt what we don't have are the responses they are somewhere at Megiddo and that was actually why I joined the project originally in 1994 I wanted to find that archive in fact I think I know where it is because Chicago who was there 1925 to 1939 they excavated half of the Late Bronze Age Palace and the other half is still there waiting to be excavated and that's probably where the archive is hmm I was so sure we were gonna find it in 94 I brought my Akkadian textbooks I was prepared to translate them on the spot oh boy yeah we never found exactly what again return so I would love to find the archive at Megiddo that I know is there we just haven't found it so but basically writing writing writing hmm my other side of Cobre which is a Canaanite palace way up in the north of Israel think right on the Lebanese border that's where we are we've got a middle Bronze Age Canaanite palace and in 2013 and 2015 we found the oldest and largest wine cellar from the ancient world so we've got about 16,000 liters of wine it's got an earthy taste now but no it's all gone we just have the the jars but organic residue analysis can tell you what was in the jars we don't have a scrap of writing I would love to know if they were writing were they writing too because they've got connections to Greece so so it's the missing tablets that have me in a conundrum that's in my wildest daydreams that's what I would want to find another couple of archives you realize that if civilization collapses about 30 years from now there'll be no writing and all recording what the hell happened it'll all be in the cloud it will be out there you know analyzing corpses trying to find out what they were sick with theirs I'm so and that for me as an archaeologist is a fascinating question as what are people going to find from our civilization if and when we do collapse and if there are any future archaeologists what are they going to think when they excavate say the Smithsonian Museum or the Washington zoo were all the Starbucks that are out there well do a little taxonomy of collapse here so the one clearly that we in the West take most seriously was the the collapse of the Roman Empire compare and contrast what happened then with what happened 1,500 years earlier 1177 well I think the the collapse of the Late Bronze Age was at least as great as the collapse of the Roman Empire in terms of what we lost hmm in terms of I mean the Babylonians and Assyrians are doing complex mathematics and astronomy and medicine we've got the texts from them and from the Egyptians right all sorts of things that were lost all that astronomy is lost all that was gone yeah now it's later reincorporated I mean the we've got the Neo Babylonians and the new Assyrians who rise up in the first millennium and they continue like I said for them they only go down for a couple of decades so they are able to have the Renaissance right away and so we've got a neo Babylonian astronomy for example is quite advanced but in other cases I mean it's so lost we don't even know what they had hmm the Mycenaeans their language was only deciphered in 1952 as an early version of Greek one gets a sort of sense of trauma that happened in the West after Rome went down do you think it was that kind of traumatic in the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age went down yes I think it was absolutely traumatic especially for the survivors that probably didn't know what hit them and what really what to do about it I mean think if you've got a complex society and everything's ticking away merrily and then into it like I said you just drop a little chaos you've got everything it's like a flying racecar where if you throw a rod from your engine suddenly you're driving a piece of junk same thing here I think it had been absolutely marvelous and wonderful and they were going places and suddenly it's a screeching halt and everything stops and then you've got so these were monumental civilizations and so you've got you know the the thing that we saw in a sense after Rome and after the later demise or slowdown of Egypt of people sort of camping out in the ruins of a former yes yes and we do have that we have squatters in most of these places in fact can also us with with them thinking that now in the Iron Age it's three times bigger in the immediate aftermath that probably was squatters in fact my scene I for example Agamemnon's my scene I there are squatters that continue it doesn't just go down it continues on a trickle but squatters show up how in archaeology it's hard to tell sometimes but when they're living and what are obviously ruined buildings and yet they're still living there that's a pretty good indication see a little more about the mention they're talking before you're working on a couple of stories now on being Makita one being archaeology of the future we had long now foundation very interested in the archaeology the future since we're trying to create some with ten thousand year clock what have you got what's what is you bear down on what future archaeologists will find what stands out well it's interesting question actually it comes from the world without us exactly got me thinking about that and they were a couple of specials on TV at the time so now you know when I fly into a major city I try and imagine what I would find as an archaeologist in say 2000 years hmm and of course what would be left or the plastics and the things that are non biodegradable probably but then I do come to the question of how you would in prett it's because in archeology for example we've got a saying of course is tongue-in-cheek but if we don't understand something then it's cultic or religious so our fertility right sorry our fertility or fertility exactly so for example I mean if you were excavating some of the Smithsonian museums that's gonna throw you for a loop like what's the what's the Hope Diamond doing next to an elephant doing next to it but you know nabonidus and the 6th century BC he had a museum that was gonna say there must be historic museums that have like that lets everything cobble together and that through the archaeologists for a loop when they're finding sumerian stuff next to babylonian stuff they're doing what's going on they suddenly realized we're digging in ancient museum so what if you have something like that or what would be left say of the zoo San Francisco Zoo Washington zoo I if the animals got out and you just have empty cages or if the animals don't get out and they're still there what are you gonna do with that and then really what are you gonna do with all the McDonald's and Starbucks that are on every corner are you gonna interpret it religious you've got that green green haired goddess so all I can think of we were talking earlier about motel all the mysteries they which a wonderful book where they misinterpreted Motel and they've got somebody lying in the sacred chamber and they're on the sacred platform and they have the sacred communicator looking at the altar and you realize it's a TV with the remote and he's on the bed right shouting into the toilet everybody makes it this great echoing sound that was obviously a my favorite picture is where she is wearing toothbrushes dangling from her ears and she's got the sanitized for your protection right around her head and was wearing a toilet seat and it's a deliberate recreation of Sophie Schliemann wearing Priam's treasure Troy absolutely marvelous so what's the future of archaeology I mean don't we run out of things to dig up after a while [Laughter] fortunately no there is no there's so much past there's so much stuff in so many places we never run out right we will there's no such thing as peak antique no there will always be something the question though on a serious note is how are we going to do archaeology and that's one of the things I've been wrestling with there have been so many advances for example just in the last couple of decades now we're using satellite imagery right sarah park ack the space archaeologist is finding stuff from space some of you may have seen her on colbert the drones that can go right over their little area it absolutely lidar can see through the jungles so I'm actually getting a bit frustrated to be honest of digging blind as I say we're a trench down and we're not sure if we're gonna hit something so there are ways to look through electromagnetic and resistivity and conductivity and things like that but there's got to be something out there that can actually tell us more what we're looking for and I suspect it's there and then somebody here in Silicon Valley or whatever is already using it and I just have to talk to the right person who says basically oh yeah we got that all right so you know what can what can we find for instance looking into a mound like Megiddo which has 20 cities one on top of another we don't do that anymore we don't stack our cities know we're City more's the pity no the coastal cities may do that is this level rises perhaps but no but they did it they stacked them but I would love to be able to something that would tell me yes 20 feet down there is a plaster floor should be able to be something that would detect the components of plaster I would think you don't just drill in these nothing you don't so I I think with we had a major revolution with these new sensing devices but that was for the most part 30 years ago I think it's time it's ripe for a new revolution the question is what's it going to be now the people that were digging in the 60s could never predict a lidar or satellite images at least not your girl's biome analysis of you know what's in the wine jars exactly the organic residue no absolutely so what's it going to be like 30 years from now well that's one reason that we don't do 100% excavation of a site we leave part of the site knowing that the next generation is going to either be better than us or have better equipment than us now if I admired the long-term thinking involved in that is it actually the case that people do go back and do another trench and so there is a sort of a absolute return the problem is that each time somebody else comes they take away a little bit more so for instance Heinrich Schliemann was at Troy first and he actually dug right through the layer that he was looking for and threw it out on his back pile right right if I had $50,000 I'd go dig through the back pile at Troy because that's where all the good stuff is because Schliemann threw it out so the next person dort felt had to dig around the edges mm-hm and then the next person after him Lagan had to dig around his edges and it was only until Manfred Curfman got there in 1988 with new technology that he was able to figure out that what we know of as Troy is just the Citadel where the king and his retainers were there is a lower city in the plain below that expands the size of the city by 10 or 15 times oh boy yeah so that gets closer to the city we hear about in horror exactly so now now it fits better but in that particular case had Sleeman realized there was a lower City I'm sure there'd be nothing there for anybody else to accident so there's two things being discovered here one is more swell better tools to discover more stuff probably more archaeologists now alive than there have ever been I would think so yes and archaeology is now there's not only more of us it's more scientific than it ever was it's more a theory based as well and it's more both enter and cross-disciplinary theory in terms of theory of archaeology a theory of what's being discovered both okay both I would say we're we're trying to ask bigger questions we're no longer digging just to dig we're not digging just oh it's a city let's see what's there for example at covery our Canaanite palace we are our larger questions we're trying to investigate the rise of rulership hmm we're trying to look at the Canaanite economy and try and compare palatial versus non palatial so we're we've actually got bigger questions that the digging can help us answer this story continues they'll keep finding more stuff and what I love is you keep finding new stories emerging from the stuff thank you for the stories tonight [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 239,513

Rating: 4.7135205 out of 5

Keywords: History, Culture, Environment, Bronze Age, Civilization, Collapse, Networked, Society, Sea Peoples, Ancient Egypt, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Tin, Copper, Bronze, Shipwreck, Clay Tablet, Refugee, Drought, Famine

Id: M4LRHJlijVU

Length: 91min 30sec (5490 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/JoNightshade]

This is fantastic and I watched it straight through. Thank you so much for posting!