American Reacts to The Bronze Age Collapse | Historia Civilis

yeah i'll react to that sure okay morning video first video of the day i've been getting pretty good though i i feel less tired every day trying to wake up earlier successfully i'd say but yeah first video if you're new my name's connor hello just all of the buttons just all the things original link to the video top of the description if you're not ready to learn just just get out let's go i got my coffee bronze age collapse let's do it oh what video historia the moderators over on discord said i hadn't seen this channel yet i don't think but it seems sort of familiar and i think his voice year 1200 all right sorry let's go sometime around the year 1200 bce human civilization did an oopsie within the short span of one generation the majority of earth's most technologically advanced civilizations faced an existential crisis nearly all of them failed the test the resulting collapse was a turning point in human history similar in scope to the collapse of the roman empire the old world died and the bronze age died with it [Music] aliens [Applause] the odd thing is that we barely understand why this happened there are a bunch of theories but nothing definitive we'll get into that in a moment but first an introduction when the bronze age began in western asia it brought to an end an old world of tiny city-states ruled by an oppressive class of totalitarian priests the new world they came after was one full of possibilities vast sweeping empires grew up seemingly out of nowhere new religions new systems of government new cultures new technology all at once all at a breakneck pace revolutions in farming led to massive food surpluses which in turn allowed for these huge bustling multicultural cities these new cities participated in a dynamic system of so they just found a new rock right i mean no joke jokes aside like they they found a new rock so it really went from the stone age to like the cooler stone age the cooler stone right because bronze is is bronze an alloy of uh tin and copper right is it bronze is an alloy copper and tin i was right okay so basically they just found a new metal that was a new rock right a metal is basically a rock a nice rock and they they combined two previously known metals into one metal that is really good for weapons and farm work and stuff like that is i know it's more complicated than that and and the success of the bronze age after the stone age had more to do likely than simply finding bronze but of international trade totally unlikely let me know if i'm wrong participated in a dynamic system of international trade totally unlike the cloistered city-states that preceded them [Music] by the late bronze age the big players were egypt cyprus the mycenaeans the hittite empire assyria and babylonia each of these states without exception faced an existential crisis around the year 1200 bce i have in a generation most of them were gone here's what we know sometime around the beginning of the 12th century the king of ugarit a city in the hittite empire wrote a letter to the king of cyprus my father now the ships of the enemy have come they have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land doesn't my father know that all of my infantry and chariots are stationed in cat and that all of my ships are stationed in the land of lucca cat was another name for the hittite capital several hundred kilometers inland luca was several hundred kilometers to the west on the aegean coast they have not arrived back yet and so the land is thus prostrate defenseless may my father be aware of this matter now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us now if other ships of the enemy turn up send me a report somehow so that i i i have a theory about something i just i i can't wait the hittites promised me a report somehow so that i will know the hittites promised to send the king of ugari to reinforcements but it was too late the last known letter to leave ugreet reads when your messenger arrived the army was humiliated and the city was sacked our food in the threshing floors was burnt and the vineyards were also destroyed our city is sacked may you know it may you know it let me just say what's on my mind my theory i guess about my so i can easily be changed i'm guessing that the bronze age brought this is like my pre-learning hypothesis i'm guessing that the bronze age brought weapons and technology that made whoever harnessed it so much better than others around it and so was able to conquer them and with a larger population under one ruler maybe it um uh just allowed for more again all right i could it just allowed for more improvement when there was one ruler does that make sense there maybe it's a flawed hypothesis oh the king of science i just thought that bringing around those weapons made a certain power conquer a large area and then in that subdued population grew a more productive civilization i guess that would be bruce was well aware of what was happening on the mainland but he had problems of his own cyprus was under attack at the same time several larger cities especially on the western coast were burned and many of the smaller cities further inland were simply abandoned wealthy residents buried their valuables with plans to return once the crisis had blown over they never returned things were different in greece for the last hundred years the mycenaeans had been plagued by internal instability there are signs of destruction everywhere the ruins of these cities leave evidence of massive fires intermixed with arrowheads and weapons which paints a pretty clear picture of a series of battles in which the defenders were ultimately defeated other cities leave evidence of smaller fires confined solely to the palace structures in the center of the cities this indicates some kind of popular uprising in which local kings were overthrown not just in one city but in many cities still other cities show signs of being abandoned either because of famine or natural disaster or both on the whole the picture is fuzzy but it's fair to say that there was chaos in greece [Music] it was even worse in anatolia the homeland of the hittites archaeological evidence suggests that every major city in anatolia may have been at least partially destroyed during this period this was especially true up and down the coast in fact we now know that the city of troy was destroyed at this time recent archaeological digs there have found arrowheads still lodged in the ruined walls of a city and evidence of a fire further inland things get a little more mysterious the hittite capital which only a few years earlier was being protected by the king of ugarit's army was largely abandoned it would later be stormed and burned just like all the others for a long time this abrupt region-wide collapse was inexplicable historians knew that it happened but they couldn't tell you how or why but in the second half of the 19th century egyptian archaeological discoveries provided a hair-raising and revolutionary explanation for this mysterious collapse this inscription was discovered in an egyptian temple in medinet habu it changed our understanding of the late bronze age forever egyptian pharaoh ramses iii describes several waves of foreign invaders arriving on the shores of egypt over the course of 30 years the inscription at mendinet habu reads the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands all at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray no land could stand before their arms they were coming forward toward egypt while the flame was prepared before them they laid their hands on the land as far as the circuit of the earth their hearts confident and trusting our plans will succeed the egyptians had some guesses as to who these invaders were but they couldn't be certain historians have simply taken to calling them the sea peoples we now think that the sea peoples were a loose coalition of groups mermaid okay no i would okay sorry from all across the mediterranean we can't be 100 sure of this but we can say with some confidence that most of them were from sicily sardinia crete and the aegean coast maybe some other places too some wore feathered head dresses while others wore horned helmets or simple leather caps some wore kilts while others wore tunics some went into battle wearing full body armor while others fought shirtless what united these groups was their reason for coming this was a migration barbaric they know that they came on boats and on wagons with their families and all of their worldly possessions what brought them here is another question that we'll get into later by the time the sea peoples finally arrived in egypt virtually every other bronze age civilization had been overrun the myceneans in greece the hittites in anatolia canaan in the lebant cyprus in cyprus all gone some states further inland were less affected by the invasions but they were so weakened by the collapse of their neighbors that their days were numbered as well when the sea peoples began their migration they couldn't have imagined that it would have been this successful what was the sea peoples what did the sea people what did they look like were they european looking were they northern african looking were they middle eastern looking were they the asian step looking that this would help a lot to see people did i miss something or no i get that's that's the name okay all the way up until egypt every attempt to resist them failed why in order to understand this we need to talk about bronze age warfare chariots chariots chariots chariots bronze age warfare in western asia was all about chariots in the early bronze age they were primarily used for transportation but by the intermediate bronze age the militaries of every major state in the region were completely designed around the use of the chariot a chariot of this period usually consisted of a team of two horses pulling a team of two humans one driver and one archer the humans i mean the horses and the driver were trained for speed and maneuverability and at full speed could move roughly twice as fast as a human could run the archer let me just be fair here that's not that's impressive um that's that can't be easy to do just think about all the things that can go wrong like from the the stirrup the i'm not great with this horse and horse riding lingo but just you know getting the wheels perfect so i'm not sure if they use some sort of natural oil to to lubricate the the axle or whatnot and just have it design the chariot and all the the you know failure that had to go into making it uh more efficient just that's some that's nothing to kind of skulk at i just make up that word it's early speed could move roughly twice as fast as a human could run the archer wielded a composite bow not as clumsy or random as a regular bow it was smaller and lighter with better accuracy range and firepower it was a state-of-the-art piece of technology in this period it could punch through roughly three inches of metal so a full chariot team had everyone else beat when it came to speed range and firepower this is a bit of a tangent but it's said that the moment the hms dreadnought touched water in the year 1906 every other ship in the ocean became obsolete the hms dreadnought was the best in the world when it came to speed range and firepower which meant that it could just sit back and pick off enemy ships at a distance and then outrun anybody who came too close like the dreadnought bronze age chariots had speed range and firepower like the dreadnought they could just sit back and pick off enemies at a distance like the dragon hey first time i've ever seen a chariot cavalry symbol just the cavalry symbol the black dot and then the chariot wheel right not they could outrun anybody who came too close an experienced group of chariots were capable of defeating an army 10 times its size this revolutionized bronze age warfare but they were expensive as hell horses had to be specifically bred and trained which cost a small fortune the equipment was all hand crafted by artisans and cost at least twice as much as the horses did the loss of a single chariot was catastrophic and so chariots went into battle with thousands of inexpensive spearmen and archers deployed in a defensive line the infantry could protect friendly chariots that needed to repair or regroup or they could rush forward and destroy enemy chariots that were damaged or caught in a bad position hey you know take those chariots and repurpose as we get into the late bronze age the region was in the midst of a chariot arms race and then the sea peoples came to see people right unlike the name is so frustrating it's just like it's can you be more vague age civilizations of western asia they see unlike the bronze age civilizations of western asia the sea peoples fought on foot instead of using spearmen and archers to form a defensive shield for their chariots the sea peoples wielded long swords and javelins and they fought with an unmatched aggression i've seen the sea peoples described as skirmishers but i don't think that quite covers it a much better word i've seen used is runners the sea peoples or runners they were highly mobile and weren't locked down into tight little groups like the spearmen were instead their way of fighting was to explode outwards in unexpected bursts this fact made the sea peoples chariot killers the whole reason a chariot was effective was that they could outrun a person on foot but was the same true of 10 people a hundred people what if they were coming at them from different directions what if they got cut off from the main group chariots couldn't exactly turn on a dime so it only took one wrong move for the sea people's runners to overwhelm and destroy a chariot and like i said the loss of a single chariot was catastrophic the defensive line just like anyone knows like you know in a bike if there's i'm i'm wondering if they had any just it didn't even have to be a pointed object and it'd be nice if it could be used as both a spear and a chariot wrecker but just throw it into this the spokes of the um chariot tire and just jam it into the ground and cause it to break or injure the horse maybe of spearmen and archers were supposed to protect against something like this but in practice the highly mobile sea peoples were able to get behind their lines quite easily as a response to these new tactics defensive lines grew and grew and grew it appears that by the end of this period the armies facing off against the sea peoples were 10 times larger than they were at the beginning why can't you just call them barbarians just the sea people is just like it sounds like a mythological it's like the sea people it as i said before towards the end of this period egypt was pretty much the last state standing virtually all of its neighbors had fallen to the sea peoples the inscription at mednet habu depicts the final battle against the sea peoples at the mouth of the nile look at how the inscription emphasizes how large the egyptian army had become here's a row of spearmen and then a row of archers and here's the pharaoh ramses iii personally leading the battle standing on the bodies of his enemies and then of course here's the mighty chariot prominently displayed but not playing a decisive role in the battle clearly the bulk of the fighting was among the spearmen and the archers in writing we are told that the egyptians protected the mouth of the nile by making a wall out of ships each loaded with archers we're also told that every spearman in egypt was in position and waiting for the sea peoples to land on shore the inscription at mednet habu tells us the final result of the battle here are some sea peoples taken captive and being led away here is some unspeakable carnage of course this is a piece of egyptian propaganda but we have no reason to doubt that this was the result after so many incredible successes the sea peoples were finally defeated in egypt but even in victory egypt suffered from this moment forward egypt was a second-rate power and even after a thousand years it had not yet fully recovered the fact that egypt was so badly damaged by the collapse of international trade is a clue there has to be more to the story than the sea peoples [Music] scholars have been pulling at this thread for the last couple of decades and the evidence is convincing bronze age civilizations needed bronze obviously without a constant supply many of their cutting cutting-edge technologies began to deteriorate bronze is made by combining nine parts copper with one part tin copper is a relatively common metal but it's difficult to mine most of these bronze age civilizations had their own small mining operations i remember from the uh bill wurtz uh the you know history of the entire world i guess is that not they didn't really know where they got ten fronts but the real rate was in cyprus cyprus was absolutely swimming in copper and mining it was dead easy this transformed the island into a fabulously wealthy hub of international trade firewall that brings us to tin tin is funny because it's actually extremely rare and it's not evenly distributed across the earth there was a tiny tin mine in anatolia controlled by the hittites but it didn't produce nearly enough to supply the entire region after that there weren't many options the next closest major source was all the way over in modern afghanistan more than 3 000 kilometers away you can just imagine how expensive and dangerous it was to haul tin all the way from afghanistan to cyprus there were alternative sources but it was tough there was a smaller mine in italy and another small mine in spain but these alone couldn't meet demand there wasn't another deposit on the scale of the afghanistan mine until you get all the way up to cornwall on the island of britain it might shock you to learn that people actually made this trip it was a risky voyage but if you made it back it was worth it so as you can see any disruption to this supply chain meant that it was no longer possible for bronze age civilizations to produce bronze which by very definition was a problem so the argument goes that the sea people's attacks disrupted international trade slowed down the production of bronze and weakened every state in the region it was a vicious cycle more attacks meant less trade less trade made everybody even more vulnerable to additional attacks as the bronze age states collapsed the situation grew even more dire so is this like a don't put all your eggs in one basket kind of teaching moment in history where since brawn is so important that means 10 is so important and 10's hard to find and so if you run out of 10 you run out of the ability to make an alloy with copper and make bronze and then everything that built your civilization is numbered but there might have been more to this story even if you put the whole international trade angle to the side this entire region may have been much weaker than it seemed according to experts the migration of the sea peoples coincided with a 50-year period where western asia was riddled with massive earthquakes i'm no scientist but that seems bad it's possible that these earthquakes were absolutely wrecking the economy in the region some of the cities that were abandoned for mysterious reasons may have in fact been abandoned after a seismic event there's at least some evidence of earthquakes destroying cities in greece anatolia the levant and cyprus greece seems to have got the worst of it egypt got off easy which is an interesting fact considering that they were the only major state left standing maybe the earthquakes played a role [Music] so what brought the sea peoples here for a long time scholars guessed that some kind of famine in northern europe see people just makes it seem too mythological i'm just thinking barbarian caused a domino effect of southward migrations culminating with the sea peoples packing up and fleeing across the mediterranean sea it seems like these sea people were just a group or just i'm sure just like rome was i'm sure the uh bronze age civilizations were under constant attack from tribes and barbarians on their outer borders and eventually a a situation arose whether it be from a bunch of earthquakes and not a huge supply of tin and maybe political instability or whatnot they finally were conquered and so i just think the sea people although it might be might be correct and that's what they actually called them it just makes you it makes the brain go to a more like insane sort of place than if it was just yeah barbarians i could be wrong this always made sense on paper but there was very little evidence to support this theory until now we now know that around this time there was some kind of environmental emergency it turns out that as expected northern europe was badly affected by this which would have caused that domino effect but the surprising thing is that the effects were even more severe in the eastern mediterranean we now have ancient pollen samples from northern syria which seemed to point toward a dry event lasting for 300 years beginning just before the bronze age collapse pollen samples have also been taken from cyprus where things are even worse these samples indicate that environmental changes were so severe in cyprus that there was no longer enough rainfall to sustain even basic agricultural activity this would have been catastrophic it may explain why some of the cities were abandoned before the sea peoples even came similar things have been found in the levant anatolia and greece in fact in greece there's evidence that over hundreds of years plants were evolving to survive a desert-like environment some of the left letters we find in the city of greet support this finding apparently during one of the invasions there were crop failures across the entire hittite empire one letter from the hittite king to the king of ugarit makes an urgent request for grain ending with it is a matter of life and death there is another letter from the nearby city of imar written during one of the later invasions it reads 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 [Music] if these reports of environmental emergency are true and we think they are the bronze age civilizations may have been in a state of crisis before the sea peoples even arrived [Music] the last current analysis of the bronze age collapse has landed on something called the systems collapse theory according to the system's collapse theory the arrival of the sea peoples was actually a medium level threat under normal circumstances they must have been attacking all along and then it was weak enough where the attacks worked bronze age civilizations should have been able to fight them off but they weren't living under normal circumstances changes to the climate had resulted in widespread famine across the region this resulted in the depopulation of key cities earthquake the famine and the depopulation then led to internal instability where some instability populations rose up and over through you know what i mean like does anyone understand what i mean by like the the mythological like it's so it's so far in the past and i don't like to see people although it might be correct and that's what they called them but it just makes you think like ooh atlantis or aliens or i just think that we're so prone to thinking of this this crazy insane unbelievable answer to something that was very likely similar to what happened to rome and and what hap like to a bunch of places and i hate to suck all the fun out of the room but it just this this doesn't seem that crazy to me you know it in classes we have evidence that this happened with some frequencies especially in greece these factors and the invasion of the sea peoples caused a collapse in the international trade system which just made everything even worse still early and i'm tired the region was absolutely riddled with earthquakes the bronze age civilizations in western asia were dealing with five crises at once with each crisis creating a multiplier effect on all the other ones and then the sea peoples came [Music] we still don't fully understand how or why the bronze age abruptly collapsed and perhaps we never will but the system's collapse theory is pretty good yeah one thing that i will point out is that for all of its clever work collecting pollen samples and studying ancient seismology the system's collapse theory does slightly de-emphasize the destruction wrought upon bronze age civilizations the fact that countless cities were destroyed is undeniable we have the physical evidence the system's collapse theory argues that less of these were destroyed by the sea peoples than originally thought so did the bronze age immediately after uh end with the the iron age is after so end date 300 bc so what when did the iron age started 1200 bc so it they overlapped uh the bronze age uh final epoch of three age division of the prehistory and proto history of humanity preceded by bronze and stone age concept has mostly been applied to europe and ancient near east uh partially old world um bronzies collapsed 12th century bc the music technology okay so they didn't so started 1200 so that they didn't overlap so the bronze age collapse so it seems like all of that stuff can be true and then there was a new metal iron which was superior to bronze and so it transitioned i might be right we have all that evidence of environmental changes and earthquakes but we don't know for sure scholarship in this area is still ongoing there have been significant breakthroughs just within the last 10 years we may see some definitive answers in our lifetimes but for now we don't know we see the aftermath of the bronze age collapse but when it comes to the root cause all we have are theories [Music] that's a cool video it really was um i'm more awake now than i was at the beginning so that's good another video coming right after this see you guys next time

Channel: McJibbin

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Keywords: #History, #Reaction, #worldhistory, #American, #McJibbin, New England, Rhode Island

Id: jmeES3MfaKM

Length: 32min 44sec (1964 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021