A History Teacher Reacts | "The Bronze Age Collapse (Parts 1-2)" by Extra History

hey YouTube and welcome back to another history teacher reacts video with mr. Teri's I continued my search for historical knowledge here on the Internet alright um we're turning to extra history one of my favorite channels history channels here on YouTube and a topic I've been kind of interested just recently just kind of my own my own accord is the Bronze Age collapse as it's called a lot of it because it's it's still quite mysterious and with just this idea that you have these seemingly thriving civilizations and then within a generation or so they're gone and a lot of the mystery is around exactly who is responsible for this because there's evidence of this these war this warfare invasion and historians as far as I know don't really have a consensus on who possibly this group was and then what arises from it though from the Bronze Age ashes here is of course the Iron Age and a bunch of other new civilizations and I know it's just something I've been kind of interested in lately and just kinda have just um a leisurely time look trying to look more into and and and see you know what pieces are there to put together so when I saw the extra-extra history did a mini-series on it I was excited and wanted to just jump right into it so this is a multi-part series and we're gonna be checking out episode 1 today so I'm hoping to learn a lot if I can add something great I'll try but let's go ahead and try to learn together over here alright if you like the original video please please support them down below they are supportive of me coming and commenting on their videos very strongly and I really appreciate that from the folks over there that make such great videos so please if you have not sub 2 extra history please do that and if you only for some reason to have one sub to spare between 7 to me subbing to them go over there okay alright but nevertheless let's go ahead and get started I'm excited to learn and see what what more I can learn about the Bronze Age collapse giant cities thriving civilizations literacy art trade wonders temples and palaces then nothing but cinder and - crazy he's gone like 50 years the Bronze Age collapse is one of history's greatest mysteries all along the Crescent from modern-day Egypt to Greece there once existed spectacular ancient civilizations civilizations that had lasted thousands of years that built wonders like the great pyramids and the palace complex at gnosis I love the Minoan civilization there at gnosis which is modern-day Crete so yeah you have like Egypt you have Crete and then the other groups in and then the the Mesopotamian societies there who are thriving and doing these amazing things it's it's so neat and then just gone but love gnosis check out if you don't know about the Minoan society it may be one of the most interesting and and kind of more advanced of these very ancient societies that you may not know a lot about check them out they were very very advanced the contemporaries with the ancient Egyptians that interacted with each other a lot but they're really cool to learn about definitely do it then after just a few decades all of it was reduced to rubble between the years of 1200 and 1150 BCE archaeologists found city after city burned leveled to the ground that I mean 50 years is such a short period of time especially in the ancient world short period of time where something like this could happen on the scale that I'm they're gonna talk about here that just that if that's 50 years that's a generation you could be alive before this collapse and by the time you're old and dying it's like a completely different world right that's just it's so amazing that the time which is so short here seee archaeologists found city after city burned leveled to the ground after thousands of years of thriving growth and prosperity almost every major Bronze Age civilization collapsed in less than the span of a single human lifetime and what followed was perhaps the darkest age in history international trade disappears pottery becomes primitive a throwback to an earlier age construction of great monuments and temples ceases entirely centralized government vanishes certain skills and trades simply ceased to be practiced and perhaps most painful of all for us as students of history the written word becomes almost extinct that's why when I was hoping they'd definitely do is writing and writing systems like died with it which is it's crazy it's a kind of like start over again luckily we we still had a lot to go off of but think of how much was destroyed in that we would probably know a lot about more of a lot more about what happened these people had a lot of this the knowledge of some of these writing systems had not gone away and probably been destroyed with the warfare with these these records probably you know being destroyed as well in some areas the ability to read and write appears to die out completely in others a few people desperately clung to the ancient art I think that's what makes this period of history because of the shrinking societies the abandonment of cities and towns the lack of royal decrees or record-keeping and the decline in buildings constructed out of permanent material like stone no one really actually knows why Bronze Age civilization collapsed so this series will be an overview of this mystery a discussion of everything that we do know and also some conjecture let's start by setting the scene and prompt you must first know the players it's roughly 1200 BCE a number of kingdoms city-states and proto empires have sprung up in eastern North Africa the Middle East Anatolia Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea starting from the south and working our way north we first have a genetic Egypt nuking buried power of the late bronze age world with wealth and sophistication surpassing anything that the other empires could achieve Egypt is already ancient he's 12-under BC they've been around for over 2,000 years right they're already ancient and this time he got the new Kingdom which expanded further than any Kingdom any of the previous because he got the the old middle and new kingdoms as they're called and the New Kingdom expanded as far as anybody did they got all the way up to basically the headwaters of Mesopotamia up into modern-day Syria under Ramses so they were you know thriving in a lot of ways so it's not like like you sometimes you see with the fall of civilizations they often coincide with a time in that civilizations history where they're already in a big decline and just really not what they used to be but that's not necessarily the case for these groups which again makes it more interesting they're not just you know pushing over you know a civilization that was already crumbling right there in something that some of these cases thriving this is not to say that the other empires were poor there's quite a lot of evidence that at least materially people in this age were better off basically than every other era until the Classical period but Egypt was out there on top let's talk about their advantages first off the Nile we may think of Egypt as a desert region today but for most of ancient history it was one of the most fertile places in the world now know Egypt the Egyptian kind of Empire Kingdom also did not go too far east or west from the Nile but it was useful I mean the Nile is especially in ancient where a part of ever that is it's flooding is very predictable and a lot more gentle than say like the Tigris and phrase which allowed Egypt to advance you know early on so quick and the natural protection that has always helped with with Egypt with the Mediterranean the north the Red Sea in the east and you got deserts on both sides has always been such a great place and been difficult for people to take over you know it's going to be you know they're gonna have their their run-ins with invaders but Nile is the amazing ancient river especially why because the Nile is an incredibly predictable River it floods r2c in a way that a society living off of irrigation can take enormous advantage of and the flooding of the Nile didn't merely help irrigate the crops it kept the soil rich and fertile bringing in minerals and nutrients really sustained agriculture would usually deplete in any other environment so Egypt had an abundance of food in a time when most of humanity spent the majority of its days simply trying to produce enough food to survive this allowed eaters to engage in long-distance commerce create a strong military with a hereditary caste of warriors and develop complex social and political mechanisms like a strong centralized bureaucracy and a highly developed religion yet people often don't understand how important agriculture is to the development of every other part of society if you have super productive agriculture that then means you can afford I guess to have part of your society specialized in other things where if you are civilization where Agriculture's extremely intensive and basically cludes everybody all the time you'll never have the time right or the people to go and develop other things like writing systems or how to become scribes or I specialize in architecture or anything like that so agriculture is directly tied to intellectual developments not to mention build things like giant pyramids and sphinxes and sprawling temples Egypt also benefited from the Nile as a highway while the Nile cataracts forced merchants and travelers to switch boats or drag crafts over land for a ways the fact that almost all the most original civilization existed along this river was a massive boon for communication internal trade even the movement of troops oh and Egypt had one other thing gold in the South conquered Nubian kingdom of Kush was an unimaginable source of gold no other Bronze Age Kingdom had access to this quantity of gold wealth golden artifacts from Egypt were just around the ancient well off with this wealth the Egyptians had expanded well past its modern-day borders Egypt controlled either directly or indirectly much of the territory along the Mediterranean coast from Sinai to Anatolia which of course put them into conflict with the Hittites by the time of our story the hitmen were most anxious they were a powerful militaristic society whose Empire was built on the back of to economic advantages tin and copper the elements of bronze copper they had in abundance from mines on the island of Cyprus the only truly major source of copper throughout the Near East it became a staple of Hittite trade and then there's 1010 is actually shockingly rare here on earth it's not like iron or even copper it's a lot closer to uranium and scarcity moreover it's not evenly distributed so oddly enough there was almost no tend to be found where Bronze Age civilizations cropped up they it was kind of a mystery of where the Hittites got their tin they try to keep it under wraps because they don't want obviously a whole bunch of people to know where they get it from so keep it kind of secret right and then you can be in charge of such an important technology like bronze working right so exclusivity economic exclusivity is something very important you know maybe you maybe you could like it into Chinese silk and how protected they were of the secrets of how silk was actually made you can kind of almost have a monopoly on it recent archaeological evidence shows that the Hittites had some production facilities for ten at Castille and the Taurus Mountains which if true may well have been the only ten production in the entire region but this source coupled with the Hittite ability to import both from the east through the Assyrians and from the West via trade routes coming through Europe meant that they could help sustain hunger for tin throughout the Bronze Age world this also put them in the crosshairs of basically everybody and they had to fight continuously to keep their trade routes open they were one of the few powers that could go toe-to-toe with the Egyptians and in fact the oldest written peace treaty we have is from shortly before the collapse in which these two superpowers agreed to stop trying to tear each other apart why the ceasefire though well perhaps because they were both feeling pressure from another Empire enemy Assyrians maybe because they were located other east Syrians are a brutal incredibly warlike culture look into a more it's not the point of this this video but the Assyrian Empire were the most militaristic empires of the ancient world I mean their whole society was basically built on the idea that they have to constantly basically be conquering at all times away from the coast or perhaps due to some other combination of military prowess political cohesion and luck the Assyrians were outlast these other empires for a hundred years before their own decline meaning that they won't play to director in our story if anything they serve as a foil a counterbalance an antagonizing force that will keep the pressure on some of these other empires at a time where they can stand at the least what the Assyrian Empire lacked was open trade ports on the Mediterranean coast so they would be drawn to push westward into the Hittite Empire and the Egyptian tributary states of the Levant whenever they think these empires are too weak to resist them which leaves us with just one other people the Mycenaeans these were the proto Greeks they ruled from most of southern Greece to the island of Crete there's instrumental in the vast trading network that extended throughout the Bronze Age world they were also the industrial center for much of the ancient world importing raw goods and then exporting finished product built through a complex top-down system of Industry they were renowned for their cyclopean fortifications and palaces which served as manufacturing centers political machines readouts they were masters of complex engineering that built zoom they're good things so cool you look inside it's got a dome inside of it so Mycenaean culture is very cool kind of the pre Greeks as you would kind of call them they're who come in and Minoan civilization they overlap Mycenaeans basically are going to overtake them eventually I'm a known when them no and society collapses but yeah actually interesting about Mycenaean culture a lot of the Greek mythology that's famous the the religion and stories from the Iliad and Odyssey are Mycenaean and then we're passed down which is probably passed down through the centuries which is probably why all the Greek city-states shared so many religious ideas from their gods and also same heroic stories comes from a similar source that predates them builders of great roads they were also spectacular artists even the Egyptian oh no it's one of the coolest builders of great roads they were also spectacular it's got like the mask of Agamemnon the famous Mycenaean King from digit stories with Achilles Ryu's the king of kind of uniter the Greece the Greeks as they are supposed to have destroyed Troy so that's one of the coolest are facts out there this funeral kind of mask right exactly what they call to something mask of Agamemnon very cool oh no I rewind did it let's find where we were sorry talk talk amongst yourselves as I get that as I get it back 10 Hittites I think we're actually almost done we'll go back right here so her doubts they were masters of complex engineering and builders of great roads they were also spectacular artists even the Egyptians would sometimes hire or emulate them but they like all the rest would fall join us next time as we discuss the technology social structure and politics that make these societies possible but might also set them up for collapse [Music] well cool setting up the players here and yeah all these civilizations are gonna fall within about a 50 year time span although said the Syrians lasted another hundred years after that but yeah the the point you know big point was that these civilizations were doing quite well right like I bet like I said a couple times now they weren't just like already ready to be pushed over it already leaning you know so that makes it even more mysterious that this could happen so quickly all right well let's go ahead and we're gonna go ahead and watch number two try the new Nashville hot risky and firehouse setups on a brisket sandwich alright alright we're gonna go and watch episode two so this one's called the wheel and the rod so let's check this one out turns ages pass society becomes more advanced advancement leads to stability to connection to peace but what happens when that's not true got an exception to history we think of the ancient times before the Greeks and the Romans we think of a barbaric or a primitive age but that age of barbarism we think of actually followed The Late Bronze Age collapse before they collapsed there were societies that wouldn't be rivaled again for half a millennium so today let's look at the technology social policies and political structures that made these kingdoms so impressive so advanced and that may in the end have led to their downfall first we have to talk about bronze itself as we touched on last time bronze is an alloy of tin and copper and most of the Bronze Age world was missing at least one of those components this meant that Bronze Age civilizations had to trade and I'm not just talking about small time exchanging of shinies we're talking a full-on modern day our society requires trade to function type of trade everything pharming to war depended on Braun's much in the same way it depends on petroleum today so a globalized into a localized system of trade sprung up around bronze and with it came trade and almost every other good this was a positive thing it allowed a material standard of wealth especially for the nobility that was unrivaled anywhere in the world except maybe for China yeah the each of these civilizations has something to offer like you saw with with Egypt they have a big abundance of food agriculture pretty most productive agricultural society in this whole region of the world so they can you don't easily trade with places that maybe don't have great agriculture like in Mycenae and modern era and in Greece there they don't have the agricultural productivity like Egypt does but they have like you know mining materials and stuff like that that they can trade so they all depended on each other right was so important again you got stuff I got stuff let's trade and hopefully not fight as much but of course they all fought each other all the time this level of wealth wouldn't be seen again until the Classical Age but it also meant that the kingdoms of the period were sort of like a Jenga tower they stood tall but if too many pieces got pulled out that whole thing would come crashing down so this interconnected system of trade while enormous ly beneficial may perhaps have also been one of the factors leading to the Bronze Age collapse next let's talk war because in this period the chariot was king almost all the major powers of the time built their armies around a chariot core of one type or another and here's the thing about chariots they're really expensive and they're difficult to use you can sort of think of them like medieval knights it takes a lifetime of training to use these weapons and maintaining them cost a small fortune this meant that like medieval knights many kingdoms had a hereditary warrior class that was dedicated to doing just this and remember you can only have a full-time military like this if you have a productive agricultural society if you don't have that then you can't spare people to be able to do that so usually these these warriors full-time warriors come from a noble class and owners right that then use peasants whatever just regular workers and they take care of the fields they take care of the day-to-day operations thus allowing a usually noble class to devote themselves to full-time military warfare so again it's it's becoming more interesting that in these productive societies that have these large standing armies armies they're still going to fall at roughly the same time that's amazing but what happens if you lose a ton of those guys at once you can't just replace them it takes years to train a guy up to the point where he can be proficient with a chariot and what happens if your economy collapses you no longer have the spare resources to maintain a caste whose singular role is to train to use so it's complex weapon much less to pay artists for build that weapon and technicians to maintain it and so while this particular engine of war was highly effective in a time when we hadn't really bred horses big enough to carry a man in full armor it was also a liability if things went really wrong you could no longer maintain this highly sophisticated military gonna bring down the economy and what happens if you need to defend yourself what happens if you face some outside threat what happens if you have to fight but your whole conception of what an army is is no longer viable and so again this very weapon that made many of these states so dominant is perhaps one of the dominoes that sets us up for the Bronze Age collapse and since we're talking about armies let's talk about the governments they fought for because these were incredibly organized incredibly centralized governments the level of central control in the late bronze age states is almost mind-boggling far far beyond the monarchies of the Middle Ages perhaps even more than many modern states which is important because due to this centralized control many of the late bronze age kingdoms were structured as command economies every piece of grain every gram of olive oil every bar of bronze was tallied by the central government farmers were told what to plant where to plant and when mines were state run operations and clearly this varies a bit from nation to nation but from Egypt to my Sania you had top-down economies yeah the the command economies we see all through history but it takes a very specific type of society to even be able to have this you have to have this much wealth and production with that sort of thing they keep comparing it to the Middle Ages where you did not have central authorities after Rome fell like in Europe for example there was no central authorities which developed feudalism which is far more localized right localized Nobles that can that can do that not a central far-reaching government here there you again you have to be productive you can't you have to be an incredibly productive society to be able to have a command a command economy organized by the central authority but what happens to a top-down economy when the top goes missing if you're a labourer and every year and oppression comes and gives you the seeds you're supposed to plant and tells you when and where to plant them what happens if that official just stops showing up localizes issue is compounded by two other pieces of technology the first is irrigation Bronze Age societies had very sophisticated irrigation systems these were massive public works projects that took effort to maintain an element of centralized planning to build them efficiently to maximize crop yield after all having every farmer dig their own irrigation is gonna get way Messier than simply laying out a thousand plots at once standardized was great as it meant high crop yields which in turn meant that you could support big cities filled with artisans priests warrior nobles and bureaucrats and being able to support so many specialized positions in turn means more material wealth a stronger government and more opportunity for innovation but what happens when that irrigation system gets destroyed or simply stops functioning as efficiently well then you've got a whole mess of people in your society who don't make food and even ignoring the potential problems that are subsided and some of these people are very well armed what happens when you can't support the non food producers but they're the planners who make this system run the problem just compounds until you have a runaway collapse and that's not the only problem caused by using advanced irrigation to support an ever-growing population first there's the obvious issue of over even if your food supply can support a large number of people can the rest of your infrastructure there are health and sewage concerns there's a question as to whether your economy can really employ all of these people and of course there's the question of whether you can keep these people from revolting but there's also a less obvious problem with this type of intense agriculture and that is soil degradation whenever you heavily farm an area you leech out minerals you create erosion to disturb the soil biology today we do a great deal with modern farming techniques to avoid this but the Late Bronze Age was perhaps the first time that humans had farmed on this scale and as we mentioned last time while the Nile did bring with it rich silt that helps to restore the soil whenever it flooded this just wasn't true of many of the other kingdoms they yeah these misunderstanding of depletion of nutrients in soil the ancient world wasn't necessarily aware of but the thing is - about the the depletion of these soil nutrients also takes a long time it takes multics many generations for that to happen almost imperceptibly happens right like the Roman Empire had the same issue they had incredible agricultural production but we're over cultivating and it's in the Middle Ages afterwards they figure out the importance of like crop rotation right that you don't farm all of your lands and you rotate plots of land and you rotate the types of crops that are on each types of land because that ends up preserving more of the nutrients what's going to happen there but again that that soil dead rogue degradation is a very slow process and so silently year after year perhaps too slowly for anyone to really notice crop yields decreased and with them the ability to support the ever-growing population of the late bronze age states and lastly we have to talk about writing because the Bronze Age world had come to rely on writing for everything from highly advanced record-keeping to international diplomacy you can't have a large centralized government without a writing system because especially if you're actually doing a command economy where the government is making so many decisions and Cree's about economic production you have to have a writing system so I could totally see that if it how a writing system could get forgotten or lost because it's based on necessity if your writing isn't necessary in certain scenarios if you don't have a centralized government or not doing as much of long-distance trade and that sort of thing you don't actually have that much of a need for the record-keeping so those are directly tied to each other amazing how everything is tied to agriculture isn't it right writing and social structures and militaries it's all tied to that but a scribe is sort of like a knight of letters they're amazingly powerful but they're also expensive and they require training from a young age and though history shows that having the written word propels civilizations forward and that every small increase in literacy ends up rippling out into large increases in the well-being of a society over time even this idea that we usually think of as a purely positive beneficial technology creates a potential liability after all if society depends on written records and on record-keeping what do you do when there's no one left to write the records and so piece by piece the very complexity the very advanced administered Late Bronze Age societies so impressive so much better to live in than anything that followed for hundreds of years also made them more fragile as societies became complex interweaving chains of trade agriculture education and bureaucracy the potential damage that could be caused by removing any link from those chains grew and grew so join us next time as we look at what might have caused those chains to snap okay so they've set up yes so they're still not to the causes of the Bronze Age collapse but what they've definitely set up here now is I guess how fragile this could be okay that there are so many interconnected parts to these to these civilizations that if you move link in the chain right then it ruins the whole thing so we definitely concede you know if one of these things falls in within that society and the way they're structured and how they operate it could yeah definitely bring the whole thing down or at least completely reorganize it which is which is definitely what happens but I'm gonna definitely looking forward to seeing more of potential theories about what had happened right so they're not saying these things are why it collapsed they're just saying that they are smaller again smaller pieces pieces to a larger puzzle and you will not have a complete puzzle and your whole yeah structure can collapse with one Jenga pulling out of the the Jenga blocks oh I like that analogy there okay well cool and we've definitely set the stage now I think we learned a lot of really good background history as to why these civilizations were successful what made them successful I thought they did a great job of that I mean they yeah before before you know I was a comic commenting on stuff that they eventually commented on to so I'm glad were definitely on the same page with a lot of those things that they were imported they got to most of the things I was thinking of for for why they would be important so awesome awesome start so far I'm really really enjoying this so yeah well I'm get into part three with the next video so we just watched the first two parts hopefully enjoyed it and hopefully you keep an eye out for the rest of the series and I'll get to those as soon as I can because I definitely want to learn more about this so alright before we head out though make sure you head over to or head them down to the description where you see a link to their their channel the extra Street people do a great job so be sure to go there like and subscribe to videos looks like they got a patreon account to to support them that'd be fantastic if you'd like to join patreon for my channel that'd be awesome too one of the perks that you get for joining patreon is to vote on videos that I check out so that's a way you can interact and have a little more influence on what's to get what gets on this channel if you would like to do that that's awesome too if you'd like to be part of our community as well there was a link down below to our discord server which has a whole bunch of history minded people that are up for a conversation basically with any historical topic so it's a great place to spend some time alright with that hope to see you soon and we'll go in caught here and we'll see you next time bye

Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 74,102

Keywords: react, history, bronze age

Id: ffzmDrxvw0g

Length: 32min 20sec (1940 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 20 2019