Eric Cline - The Collapse of Cities and Civilizations at the End of the Late Bronze Age

it's my distinguished pleasure to introduce yet another incredible speaker our next speaker is Professor Gary Klein the gentleman on my right or your left a couple of things like to say to introduce him that I wish I could say more but human seed is PhD or his master's from Yale PhD from University of Pennsylvania he is currently professor of classics in anthropology at the University on University in Washington DC he has managed to achieve three incredible distinctions the first is he had managed to conduct 30 consecutive years of field work as with the seasoned archaeologists excavated in Megiddo which is people Armageddon is also cover II he did somehow while excavating for 30 years is some time to write 16 books and 100 turtle articles he had also found time to become a very good teacher and being a teacher ticlaw work as well in terms of preparation he has one eye fountain but I was browsing through the archaeological Institute of America it's teaching Awards annual award given and his name came up about all I must be good teachers perfect everything else our cooking and cooking cooking but he also won the Trachtenberg prize for Teaching Excellence as well as the Trachtenberg prize for faculty scholarship so research and teaching the only faculty member at GW to go he is also recently produced of course the Teaching Company which you can check out if you're interested and he's a book that came up recently on the topic of today which is all a Bronze Age box full of evolution 77 BC which we'll be talking about today and you have a forthcoming book which is a delightful or I hope I haven't read it but I assume it will be based upon my conversations with them a delightful sort of summary of the field of archaeology in terms of historical development and major findings which is worth a tended to be a sequel to a previous classic and if you so please join me in welcoming pleasure bye thank you sir thank you very much it's wonderful to be here you all having a good time so far previous speakers have been great so I have a lot to lift to live up to yeah well dr. hall is absolutely amazing so I'm in trepidation following in his footsteps but we'll see how I do anyway it's wonderful to be here it's nice to be back at Yale I did I got my masters here in 1984 and near as I could figure I haven't been back since I was wandering around last night going wow this has changed really James but the halle Graduate Studies is still there so I felt I felt good anyway we're going to talk here about the Late Bronze Age and the collapse of the cities I'll introduce them to begin with and then destroy them but I presume this is familiar to many of you how many of you teach some aspect of this in your classes right okay so my scene I can also us all that stuff right good so we've got a knowledgeable audience here so you also won't mind if I go for three or four hours so fine all right just stopping when you've had enough all right so we're going to be concentrating here on the Late Bronze Age from about 1700 until 1200 BC this is my absolute favorite period of ancient history if I could be reincarnated backwards I would want to be in this particular period I'm sure I would not survive for about 24 to 48 hours but it would be a lot of fun while I was there now you see some of the great powers at the time on this map I say that they are the g-eight of the Late Bronze Age there's actually nine there but who's counting so we've got over here in Greece we've got the Minoans in the Mycenaeans we've got the Hittites up here in Turkey we've got Mitanni in red we've got Assyria and Babylonia over here Cypriots are on Cyprus and then in orange there we've got the Egyptians coming up the Nile Valley and into what was then Canaan so this is what we're going to be focusing in on and in particular we'll zoom and on 1,200 BC and what happened just after that now those of you that are not familiar with this period you actually know more about it than you think already right Hatshepsut how many have heard of her the famous female pharaoh okay Tut Moses the third one of the best conquerors Egypt ever had my favorite guy Amenhotep the third I wrote my master's thesis on him his son Akhenaten the famous Heretic Pharaoh King Tut I presume most everybody here you don't know him you'll be living in the closet somewhere alright Ramses the second perhaps the Pharaoh of the Exodus and then the guy that we're going to concentrate on Ramses the third who fights the Sea Peoples this is also the time period though of the Battle of Kadesh in about 1279 Trojan War if it took place is going to be at this time period somewhere between 1250 and 1175 and also the Exodus if it took place is going to be at about this time as well probably about 1250 BC so lots going on in the Late Bronze Age in fact it is a I hesitate to call this but I will a globalized world system it's not globalized like we know today but for that particular period it is globalized if you talk about something from Italy on one side to Afghanistan on the other Turkey down to Egypt that in that area is a globalized world system such as you see here this is a social network diagram that my wife made she does social network analysis if you're familiar with the the cocktail party game the six degrees of Kevin Bacon right with who is in what movie you can do the same thing here and that is if the Egyptians didn't know the Hittites they knew somebody who knew them so nobody is more than two or three steps away from anybody else so it is very much a small world and that's what you need to be a globalized world system back then so for instance we've got in Greece we've got my Cena in the Mycenaeans Agamemnon here's the capital city the type site after which the Mycenaeans are are named with the fortification wall going around we've got map right there there's my scene I there in connection to Athens just to place you there it is on a nice little mountaintop not the highest mountaintop in the area but enough that you can see for about 10 kilometers in all directions you come in here through the entrance gate there's the famous shaft grave circle let's I'll show you in a minute and you make your way up to the palace so they're around from about 1700 to 1200 BC it was the famous lion gate one of the oldest freestanding sculptures in Europe now it's been reconstructed like this you know the heads are not there so archaeologists have fun playing with putting different heads on them from time to time including aliens most recently but never mind this is a very typical site you walk up then you've got the big second pan masonry on your left you've got a tower on your right and dr. hall was talking about how the hoplites are outfitted same sort of thing back here in the Late Bronze Age you're going to have your your shield on your left hand and then your sword in your right hand doesn't how many people are left-handed here yeah sorry back then you're right-handed no choice right so you've got shield on your left spear sword and your right as you're coming up towards the lion gate here you are going to be protected on your left side because of your shield but as you get right up to the entrance that tower you see it ruined there you're going to be attacked from your right you're going to be dead before you ever get through the gate very standard for Mycenaean palaces they all have this system and keep your eye on this right there it is a slip zone this is actually is active seismic area so that is actually one half of an earthquake fault zone and the archaeologists never knew that when the seismologist showed up they started laughing and they're like what are you laughing at this is a very serious city they're like they built it right on top of an earthquake fault zone and then they went why would anybody do that and then somebody said I'm from San Francisco I think we did that too so so we'll come back to that keep your eye on that all right okay so we have the shaft graves inside which would have looked like this this is from the earliest period of the city back in about 1600 BC where we've got the famous gold masks if anybody is in the area of Washington DC go to National Geographic they've got the Greeks exhibit up right now it's absolutely amazing 500 objects some of which have never left Greece before they've got this one but it's a facsimile they have one of the other ones which was real but absolutely amazing and there was just a three week series on PBS if you saw it the Greeks the last one was just now on Tuesday so absolutely amazing exhibit in Washington DC my favorite piece inlay dagger the lion hunt but again this is from the earliest period of Mycenae if we march up to the top we get up to the palace which is going to be there right up through and functioning until 1200 BC outer porch inter waiting room and then the backroom with the King back there hard to tell what it would have looked like from the foundations here but if I tell you that it was completely painted would that help at all try reimagining what it might have looked like you're going to have the walls going up there plastered and then paint it okay but I guarantee them no matter what you've imagined it's nowhere close to reality that's reality and also I think qualifies as garish is the word that comes to mind that's what it would have looked like all the pieces none of them were in place they were all found broken up and lying in the ground but this is pretty much what it would have looked like as you walk in there you're there's a hearth in between you and the king's palace so think kind of a Wizard of Oz effect so you can hear this voice from the back but you can't really see the King probably be lit up and it'd still be dark you'd be smoky there's no windows the only way anything can get out is through your your light well up top so we'd be very dark and smoky and dank in there I think in comparison the Minoans on Crete are very different and we've got the capital city or that one of the capital let's just call it a capital of Cano sauce there there's about seven different palaces on Crete at this time all owned by the Minoans none of them with walls around them which has always caused a problem why wouldn't you have walls around it so the thinking now is that maybe the head honcho - if you will is that canal sauce and other members of the family are at the other palaces and that's why they're not protected because they're not going to attack each other but this is the opposite of a Mycenaean Palace this is open it's light its Airy lots of light it is integrated into the landscape these people are at one with the countryside and they have a love of plants and animals also so I usually teach about a real dichotomy between the Mycenaeans and the Minoans with the Mycenaeans being very warlike and the Minoans being a lot more peaceful but that may be us putting it back on them they're also into strange things with bowls right the Minoan bull leapers this is an actual very small wall painting showing them doing something with bulls the women are always white or yellow the men are always red or browns we've got two women and one man and either they are all flipping and you see this in sequence with her just having landed him flipping and her out to jump over or they're more like like the role of rodeo clowns and they're distracting the bull while he leaps over it can't really tell but this whole idea of leaping over a bull it imagine like you're in the Olympics and you're doing the pommel horse except the pommel horse has horns and it's trying to kill you all right that's kind of what's going on right now and in fact if you type in bull leaping into the Internet look at YouTube there are people in Spain that are doing this today as part of entertainment so they're quite good they flip in midair so we've got the Minoans we've got the Mycenaeans we also have the Trojans in the Trojan horse this is not the original this is the facsimile that was made and put up at Troy courtesy of Homer of course we know of the of Troy in the Trojan War with The Iliad and the Odyssey you're all familiar with the tale so I won't go into it but just be aware that the ancient Greeks didn't know when this had happened they have 13 different dates they had suggested finally they settled on 1184 BC which i think is actually pretty close it's probably somewhere between I said earlier 1250 1175 I probably narrow it down to 1202 1175 somewhere in there Heinrich Schliemann found Troy that's actually how I got interested in archaeology and ancient history to begin with my mother gave me a book when I was 7 years old called the walls of Windy Troy it's a biography by Marjorie Bremer and then when I graduated from college with a degree in archaeology and my mother gave me the same book again so yeah very sweet and in fact I still have it it's in my office so and now I teach the seminar to freshmen on Troy and the Trojan War so it comes full circle right so anyway here's Troy 6 which is probably the Troy of the Trojan War it could be Troy 7 but you see the massive walls right here I should mention though that of course not everybody thinks that the Trojan War happened my wife in fact does not think it happens we have arguments at home over this this is what happens when two archaeologists marry each other you argue about the Trojan War at the same time right so here's Troy over here on the northwestern coast we've also got over here blasts coy or hot to sauce the capital city of the Hittites they're interacting with everybody as well you can see here the mountain pass that's the only way to get in too hot to sauce we're about an hour and a half drive east of Ankara at this point so it's the central Anatolian plateau that's the only way in they are also around from about 1700 to 1200 BC same as the Minoans Mycenaeans their city's only captured twice in their entire history because it was so well protected all right so here it is there's the plan on a photograph and you can see even if you make it in then you've got to go up against their fortifications and it gets awfully cold and snowy in the winter there and they don't have things like olives so they have to trade for olive oil they have their own Lion Gate which looks a little different from the Mycenaean one these look more like seals to me than lions right but the famous seal gate doesn't quite work we don't know which way the influences go the Hittites and the Mycenaeans are definitely influencing each other but we don't know which way the influences are going and then we've got us the site of Gaara on the north coast of Syria I'm not actually sure if it exists anymore since it's in the middle of a Syrian Syrian civil war and other things but well the French excavated it from about the 1920s on now you can see the town right here it turns out to be a very important international trading center during the Late Bronze Age and it's particularly important for us because there have been a number of archives found so we've actually got the written texts and there is now a whole cottage industry of ogre it extend ease tablets they've got historical records they've got letters between Kings letters from vassals they've also got myths epics love poems you name it they've got everything written the only thing is you have to be able to read Booga Riddick which I can't but others can so so this gives us an insight because in among these texts they talk about things going along merrily right up until the end when that just collapses so everything's to me seems to be okay it's not a gradual decline it's very very very sudden so what we've got the hallmark of this whole period we're in the Bronze Age in fact the Bronze Age as a whole goes from 3000 BC to 1000 BC we're in the Late Bronze Age which as I said is 1700 to 1200 BC the way you make bronze as I've got up here on the slide is 10 plus copper 90% copper 10% tin you do those you've got yourself bronze if you don't have 10 you can use arsenic I don't recommend it you're not going to live very long but you could use arsenic if you need to now the copper is not a problem copper is coming from Cyprus in fact that's where the name comes from Chios means copper the tin is another bit of a problem though there's a little bit of tin down here in Turkey there's also 10 in Cornwall and they may have been going from time to time to get it there but the vast majority of the tin in the ancient world at that time is coming from off the map here in Afghanistan specifically the Badakhshan region in fact it's not just tin that comes from there anybody here have any lapis lazuli jewelry okay lapis also comes from that area and they are trading for it so this is some of the raw materials and the ten is going to come all the way across from Afghanistan to the Aegean and perhaps beyond so in fact we have a letter from the site of Mari which is right there on the Euphrates River and what is Syria today it's a letter that dates to a little after 1800 BC so almost just before the start of our period and in this text which I know is too small you can't read it so I'll read it to you it says one on a third Mina of 10 to the cafetorium now calf tour is their name for Crete so one and a third Mina of ten to the Minoan from Crete a third of a Mena of ten to the interpreter of the chief merchant of the CAF torian's in ugarit so this is a letter at Mari it's talking about ogre it and it's talking about ten coming from Afghanistan and there is a guy apparently who's an interpreter who is able to speak both Minoan and Akkadian and is translating for them so we know that the ten is coming to Mari then to agar it and then over to Crete and onwards so this is long-distance trade imagine if it's cut at any point you're going to be in trouble for your ten and if you're in trouble for your ten you're in trouble for your bronze and that seems to be part of what happens round about 1200 BC is that these trade routes are probably cut now in terms of how important tin was at the time the best analogy I can make is what my friend Carol Bell did she's a academic over in Britain and she said tend to them was like oil to us today and that getting tin concerned the Egyptian pharaoh and the hittite king just as much as getting oil concerns the u.s. president today and i think that's probably the best analogy so they are trading 2010 they are trading lapis lazuli they are also trading finished goods and in these mari letters which again date to about 1800 bc one letter for example says a cafetorium weapon so that's a Minoan weapon coming from Crete the top on the base are covered with gold its top is encrusted with lapis lazuli so it would have looked something like this this isn't actually it this is from the death pits of or dating to about 2500 BC but it must have looked similar with the gold and the lapis lastly I don't know about you but I want one of these I just I just want one of these but we've also got a text that talks about probably my my favorite incident in ancient history it says one pair of leather shoes and the cafetorium style so Minoan shoes and if you've been to how many people have been to Crete we'll create you Manoa its sandals basically there's an yah makes boots but most everybody else makes leather sandals so parallel the shoes in the cafetorium style which to the palace of Hammurabi king of Babylon and yes that is the Hammurabi and eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth black tea lemon official carried but which were returned so somebody is sending Minoan sandals all the way to Babylon and giving them to Hammurabi and he says thanks but no thanks and returns them I've never understood that so were they to last millennium were they too small now you know the law Code of Hammurabi has got 272 laws in it and I frequently teach my students at least the first couple of them in my intro class but then one day for fun I just said here's an English translation go through and tell me the penalty for returning shoes or sandals and they came back kind of crestfallen they said there's no penalty there's no law I said exactly he got away with it but still I don't know you got something coming all the way from Crete wouldn't you have said here these don't fit me but they'll fit you I mean rege if thing doesn't work anyway so the point is that they're sending around finished objects along with the raw materials and I would argue along with both of those sets of goods also the ideas are coming so they're coming along so for instance epic of gilgamesh The Iliad The Odyssey they're all portions that are vaguely similar everybody goes down to the underworld this that and the other I think those stories are coming with the trade goods and here the importance are the people that are Manning the boats right dr. Hall just talked about how many people were in a trireme and all that well you don't quite have that many on a Late Bronze Age boat but you still do have an entire crew and when the officials are up at the palace doing the diplomatic negotiations and whatever they're doing the crewmen are getting drunk in the bars and the ends waiting to go back home and they're like hey I got a story for you and I think they're swapping tails and they're swapping ideas and so I think that's in part something that we've overlooked the transmission of ideas at the lower levels of society just the ordinary people who are there you know for some other reason are then swapping these stories I think that's how we get things like the myth of Kumar be from the hittites looking a lot like he see it's works I think that's how it's getting there so I wouldn't discount the ordinary people and we do know that there are such trade embassies and other things diplomatic here's hot Shep suit for example at her mortuary temple we know that she sends an embassy to point she's not the first to do so from Egypt and she will not be the last but she gives us the best representation of what is being brought back from point she even tells us the queen of punts her name is Ettie so we know that they've got people going back and forth our manger our major problem was we didn't know where point was until recently just a couple of years ago in the British Museum they analyze some baboon mummies and found out that they most closely resemble in the DNA on other things to ethiopia and eritrea which actually was one of the suggestions it was a retro Ethiopia and Yemen were the main candidates for point so now we can say pretty much for sure Ethiopia Eritrea that is where point is so imagine the Egyptians sending trade down there but they're also trading with people from the Aegean this is the tomb of Rick Marais well vizier to top moses the third and hatshepsut and on the walls of his tomb he's got Minoans painted bringing gifts actually one of them is repainted and they're thinking maybe this is when Mycenaeans take over from Minoans but who knows Aegean people let's just put it that way they're trading with the Aegean here's another one that guy carrying a Bulls head is definitely a Minoan no no two ways about it so we've got the Egyptians sending out diplomatic embassies and trade missions all over the place at this time another one to the Aegean my favorite there's colossi of memnon the mortuary temple of Amenhotep the third this is dating to a bell you know 13 60 BC the mortuary temple is completely gone it was stolen by the other pharaohs and to build their temples right ready-made blocks but if you go back there and into the weeds they found at one point they had found five statue bases and it's now up to about 40 because of the renewed excavations there each of these statue bases which is about 10 feet tall would have been the statue so slightly over life-size they have a list of names on the base that represent the world is known to the Egyptians in the Late Bronze Age this particular one lists names from Greece it's never been seen before it will never be seen again these two over here are Tenaya and KEF to you which are the egyptian names for mainland Greece that's Tenaya and KEF to you it's like cuffed or that's Crete so you've got mainland Greece and Crete here and then over on this side and around you've got 14 other names and these are names like I said that have never been seen before amny sauce Festus cadonia Mycenae dick take arrows a Croma thana Napoli ankara illios Cano sauce and then amny sauce again this looks to me like a geographical itinerary and in fact if you go to Greece at most of the sites that are listed on that statue base you actually have objects of Amenhotep the third or his wife Queen T at those of gian sites so here is a finance plaque there's about 11 of them at Mycenae with Amenhotep netra nephron imatra that's Amenhotep the third these type of Egyptian plaques are not found anywhere else in the world outside of Egypt except Mycenae there's something special that went on there so I actually think that we've got as I said a geographical itinerary where they're going up to Crete and visiting the Minoans who they've known for quite a while then they continue on to the Mycenaean so at this point are kind of up starts in the 14th century then they come back down to Crete and then back to Egypt and I think that's why I'm new sauce is on there twice so the first place you get to when you're coming up from Crete you're like oh thank God everybody out use the bathroom I'm going to get a coffee rest stop right then you go around the Aegean and then you come back and you're like okay we're back at m2 sauce last stop everybody empty your bladder get your coffee now we're headed for Egypt right so it's a round trip this is what I think now I don't think I'm in hotel the third himself went I think this is some sort of diplomatic or trade embassy that is going there and in fact we have very good evidence that such things we're going on this is the gulab Arun ship that sank off the coast of Turkey in about 1300 BC so a little after the time of Amenhotep the third this is from National Geographic and what you see up top is an Egyptian tomb painting much like we had it recommends tomb and then the bottom is the reconstruction of what the ship would have looked like right so it goes down at about 1300 BC was found in 1982 they did something like 20,000 dives in a dozen years there and took pictures of everything most of the cargo is copper ingots like raw copper from Cyprus each of the weighing about 60 pounds there are more than 300 ingots on this shipwreck then there's also these blocks of stone with a hole in each one and we know what those are they're running the length of the keel so they're being used as ballast for most of the time but then who actually stone anchors yeah so as your anchor gets stuck you're like and you cut the rope and then you pull up another one in the meantime they're being used as ballast we have these types of stone anchors at sites in Cyprus for example but we've never actually found them before in situ in an ancient ship so as I said there's more than 300 of these oxide ingots as we call them they look like if you slaughtered an ox and chopped off the head and then you just had the legs it's in four and you can actually carry these quite easily those 300 is make about ten tonnes of copper there's also a ton of tin on the wreck so if you put those together you've got yourselves 11 tonnes of bronze so when this ship went down somebody lost a fortune and actually suspect that somebody must have lost a kingdom or a war also because this amount of copper and tin as George bass the guy that was excavating this once said you could outfit an army of 300 people with swords shields helmets even Greaves the whole shebang so this is enough to outfit 300 men so there's part of the tin there's a tin ingot right there another so there's a ton also got terebinth resin on board which is from the pistachio tree you use this in making perfume there's a ton of that on board ivory the Tusk is from an elephant the other two the incisor and canine are from hippo and this actually made everybody go back to the museum's because we had just thought all the ivory was from elephant turns out about 90% in the bronze ages from hippo and they're like but there aren't any hippos in Israel Lebanon Syria now they're like yep now you know why exactly right so lots of raw ivory they're some of my favorites up here also ingots of raw material anyway hazard a guess what material we're looking at there it's not lapis but it's a replacement for it it's glass it's raw glass in this case they're colored with cobalt so they're blue but yeah exactly and that's why glass is invented in part to replace expensive stone like lapis lazuli but in addition to the blue we've also got pink ones yellow ones brown ones we've got all kinds they've got about 150 of these I think maybe a little bit less on board and then down here finished cargo this is actually from Cyprus and Cyril Palestine and they were found in a huge jar which originally they thought would have held fresh water and been up on the deck turns out it was a China barrel when they tipped it over trying to pick it up all this spilled out so you've got raw materials and finished goods and it looks like this ship is heading towards Greece because the one thing you don't have in any of this are brand new stuff from the Minoans or Mycenaeans you do have some used pottery which looks like it belongs to the crew but you don't have finished goods so it looks like this is all stuff from the Near East being sent to Greece on the return home or just the return trip you would have probably packed full Minoan and Mycenaean stuff taking it to Egypt in the Near East but this is going to Greece at this point so this is the route they thought it went round and round and round and round I'm not so sure about that I actually think this might be a ship sent for from one King to another as a royal gift because there's a couple of objects on there that are only used by Kings these drinking vessels called B brew so I'm not sure I agree with George bass and I might suggest an alternative that it's straight one way or the other but we also suggested my co-director Acharya and I we published an article in about 2007 suggesting that the other Brewin ship was actually on a shopping trip and it was from Greece to the Near East because all the materials match things that have workshops at places like Pylos and my CNI so somebody could say look we're pretty much out of tin we're out of copper we're out of glass we need some of that turbans resin stuff so can somebody go to the Near East and get it and while you're out get some milk and sugar too right but on the way back it's sank so and it's definitely possible because we've got sets of weights from both sides so I put that out there as a possibility and we've also got textual evidence from just a little bit later this is from lugar one of the merchants in North Syria guy named Sonora know and it says in the text from the present day I'm a stammers son of Nik Mehta king of Wu Garrett exempts in Iran Oh son of Seguin ooh I really wanted to name my son this but my wife objected I don't know why I'm like he'll be the only sinner on who in the classroom Hey no so this guy sinner Ando is the merchant his grain his beer has olive oil to the palace he shall not deliver his ship is exempt when it arrives from Crete so you've got a guy in North Syria sending a private merchant sending a ship to Crete bringing back grain olive oil and beer and when he gets back he doesn't have to pay taxes on it so I think this is actually the first corporate tax exemption in history that we've got right so it shows how interconnected that everybody is at this time okay so everybody is merrily going along like this from it's it takes a little while to get started but by say 1500 this is going on so 1,500 1,400 1,300 diplomacy reciprocity trade everybody is happily interacting with absolutely everybody else round about 1200 BC there's a little chaos interjected here and one by one each of the civilization winks out until you're left just with Egypt it's the only one really left standing and even they are so weakened that this is a Pyrrhic victory right they'll never be as great as they were back in the New Kingdom period of time at King Tut and all that yes exactly right so Egypt always is under somebody else's thumb so this is what's happened there is a collapse round about 1200 BC I actually think it takes place a little bit later it's actually a continuous it's like a systems collapse which we will get to but basically everybody and everything we just talked about goes away that's it so it is a huge collapse it is ginormous as my kids would say I would say that the world doesn't see such an enormous collapse again until the Romans fall right and that's going to be 1,500 years later so the big question is what caused this what could bring everything to a screeching halt all at the same time what could cause these cities like my scene I can also as hot Rosasco guard to all simply end and if they ended that suddenly could have happened to us and that's why I think that studying this particular period which is you know 3,200 years ago is not as irrelevant as some people might think I think it does hold some lessons perhaps for us without pushing it a little bit too much if we can see what led to their collapse and then see if we've got anything around today we might go huh maybe we should try avoiding that kind of stuff so the problem is we don't actually know what happens it always used to be blamed on the sea peoples and they come through according the Egyptians they come through twice they come through and 1207 and they come through in eleven seventy seven right that's where the title of my book comes from is eleven seventy seven for the second wave now even that is not quite accurate because you know the Egyptologists keep changing the chronology so it's actually more accurate to say they come through in the fifth year Merneptah and the eighth year of Ramses the third so we know about them from the wall relief that rams is the third leaves us at medinet habu this was found a very long time ago so Gaston Maspero a french egyptologist already by the 1860s had said ìlook the sea peoples must be responsible for the collapse and by about 1901 that was the theory so whenever anybody went and excavated a site that was destroyed at about this time they said oh it must be the sea peoples but that's kind of working backwards that's finding a theory and then fitting your facts to it and so the sea peoples now in kind of revisionist history are no longer at least according to me responsible for as much destruction as we thought I do think that they're there but I think in some cases they're as much victims as they were oppressors and I'll show you that in just a moment but first as a sample Ramses the third in urate tells us 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 from Koch a code a car commercial art sua and Alaska on now we know where those are right hot eh those are the Hittites up in Turkey Cote is where turkey meets Syria kharkom ash is in the same area arts with o is back on the western coast of Turkey over by Troy Elijah is the ancient name for Cyprus but basically we can see that they're sweeping from west to east they're coming across Greece and Turkey and Cyprus and then a camp was set up in one place in a more that's by who Garrett and North Syria and then they come down to Egypt they were coming forward all the flame was prepared before them and then he tells us who they are he doesn't actually call them the sea peoples that's our name for them he actually tells us the individual groups Paulette to jackar shekel s denyen and Wes lands United so he actually names them and in fact Merneptah 30 years earlier had named a slightly different group so all told there's about nine groups that come on in but Ramses tells us that he defeated they see people's lose both times I overthrew those who invaded from their lands I slew the denyen who are in their Isles the two Jecker and the Poulet were made ashes shardana and the Wes of the sea they were made as those that exist not and so on so in the end like I say Egypt won but it was a Pyrrhic victory on the way everybody else lost so one of our big questions is who exactly are these people well Ramses shows us them these are pictures of the sea peoples and so for instance if you want to go dressed up as a sea person for Halloween you can do so because you know what they look like it's actually easier though just cut out like the letter C 50 times and put it on you right and that way when somebody says what are you can say I'm a sea person right graduate school it worked they won yeah yeah bad joke I know but so here they are sardonic checklist ejector Dania and Wes pull si people have been playing linguistic games with these guys for a very very long time so in trying to figure out where they come from anybody think of anything in the Mediterranean that has consonants like s Rd and Sardinia absolutely people have suggested they come from Sardinia what about shekel s anything with an S and a K and an L or maybe a C and an L Sicily right people have suggested Sicily - jackar might be somewhere around Troy denyen people want these to be the de Naughton of Homer I can memnon on those guys Wes they're not so sure about polis at though even jean-francois Champollion the guy who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics he had already said the pleasant were listings and in fact the Bible says the Philistines come from Crete so maybe that works maybe it doesn't so out of all of these we're not really sure about any except the pole essa and in and indeed some people have said rather than coming from these areas they might have gone there after they were defeated so maybe they gave their name to Sardinia afterward I happen to think they came from the west and went east because Ramsey says he settled them in his strongholds in Egypt and up into Israel where Tel d'Or is called a sickle town which is one of these guys so I think that they may well have come from here and then settled over in the East and one of the reasons I say that is because we know the Philistines from areas of Israel and Lebanon and their pottery looks like Mycenaean pottery but made with local clay that's what we call degenerate Mycenaean it looks like Mycenaeans from Greece picked up move over to the Near East keep making their pottery but now they're making with local clay that's not as good so I think that the Philistines are my snails but who have moved to the Near East and that would fit as part of this yeah now notice though as part of the inscriptions Ramsey shows us this picture here's a drawing of it here these are not Viking raiders these are not macho men just out to kill and plunder these are people moving with their entire families you see the wives and the kids and the entire household goods on a cart pulled by oxen this is a mass migration they are moving because they have to so I would say this is like the Dust Bowl in the 1930s people moving from Oklahoma to Texas in California that's what we're looking at here so what causes such a migration you don't move unless you have to so something is causing it they have to move so if it's not the Sea Peoples and I think that's too simple then what is it but people used to say oh there was a drought then there was famine then the sea peoples moved and then they cut the trade routes and then there was collapse but you know I think things are usually much more complicated that may have been part of it but that wasn't the whole thing so what really happened that's what we want to spend the rest of the time on let's see we're at yeah we've got time so if the sea peoples are not the boogeyman they used to be then what might have happened people have suggested droughts they've suggested famine they suggested invaders they've suggested earthquakes which of these do I like I like them all I think everything happened I think this was not a good time to be alive I think this was a perfect storm of the absolute worst catastrophes all coming at the same time because you can survive a drought at least some people can you can survive a famine some people will invaders some people survive earthquakes some will survive what if they come one after the other after the other one on top of another you get a multiplier effect and after like the third one you're like alright I give up we're dead right so I think what we've got is a perfect storm here let me show you what I mean drought this is actually not a new suggestion Reese carpenter from Bryn Mawr suggested it in the 1960s he said the Mycenaeans ended because of drought but he didn't have proof for it it was just a hypothesis now we've got the proof in the last five years the proof has come up there is a site near Garrett called Gabala and county uski a french scholar led a team there that looked at cores from dried-up lakes and in the cores they looked at the pollen and the pollen is showing that there was what he calls a dry event in other words a drought it lasted for about 300 years from the late 13th early 12th centuries right down to the 9th century in other words the Dark Ages in Greece this is that period so he has evidence that the pollens suggest drier climatic changes and conditions went over to Cyprus did the same thing 2013 at Hollis Alton techy from the dried-up lagoon there same thing major environmental changes from 1,200 to 850 BC everything became dryer so drought climate change if you will caused by mother nature they're not driving SUVs back then right but Mother Nature can do it just as well and then Lee Drake 2012 looked at stuff from Israel to Turkey to Greece to Italy came up with at least three different other things that all suggest a drier climate including a drop in the temperature of the surface of the sea if that happens you're going to get less rain on the mainland so maybe we do have a drought after all hey says this starts between 1250 and 1197 BC right in this particular case just a word of warning to any of you active on Facebook and of your students active on Facebook right I liked leaves articles so much that I wanted to send them a little note saying I don't usually do that but I'm like this was a great article in the journal of archaeological science so I googled Brandon Lee Drake and it came up it says you are friends on Facebook like really so I sent them an email and I'm like I don't actually remember knowing you but I really liked your article hero packages at Eric we dug at Megiddo in 2006 like no that was a guy named Ali Drake he says yeah that's me I published with Brandon my middle names Lee I go by Lee I'm like so a word of warning you may know people that you don't even think you know right and then in Israel Finkelstein definite long route and Thomas lit from Germany they did the same thing in the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea they took coring samples and the pollen there also indicates a severe drought from 1250 to 1100 BC so that's a little bit of a shorter period it's only 150 years but so now we've got scientific evidence for drought in North Syria Israel Cyprus Greece I say that's pretty much the Mediterranean right so I think we can say that there's drought of course each time one of these publications came out the media got ahold of it New York Times LA Times National Geographic archeology New York Post got into it of course they added in globalization for good matter to alright so everybody got all excited about Late Bronze Age and drought and all that finally great way you've been finally and then finally yes nicely course that's that's my alarm don't you all have any other Jones's your alarm so I know I've got about ten minutes left so right remember the NASA funded study that came out a couple years ago that said we were going to decline in a couple of decades then it turned out it wasn't NASA funded and all that right at that point I wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post going collapse of civilizations it's complicated because it is indeed complicated so drought equals famine often sure do we have any evidence for that well that's where a guard comes in and those archives I mentioned because even if there's famine we don't have like mass graves at this time but what we do have is textual evidence here is one text from the house of a merchant called or tainu which is from about eleven eighty five BC and he says there's famine in our house we'll all die of hunger if you don't quickly arrive here we ourselves will die of hunger you will not see a living soul from your land so famine I think so but others here's a letter from the king of Ooo guard to somebody else here with me plenty has become famine so I don't think the texts lie here these guys are suffering even up from the Hittites in Turkey there's from the king do you not know there was a famine in the midst of my land it's a matter of life and death alright so they've got droughts and they've got famine not too surprising the two usually go hand-in-hand what about invaders and what about internal rebellion can be very difficult to tell these apart because you end up with simply a destruction level you don't often know who did it so in one case we know that the king of Ooo Gaara is right into the king of Cyprus and you say my father now the ships of the enemy have come they've been setting fire to my cities and have darn harm to my land now if any other ships come please let me know so in this case we know that this is foreign invaders and in fact this text I was always taught when I was in college in grad school that this was in a kiln in the palace at jugar it being baked before it was sent to Cyprus but that the invaders had come and set fire to the city before it could be sent a very dramatic tale too good to be true turns out upon reanalysis that this was not in a kiln it was in a basket that had fallen from the second floor and turned upside down leaving a kiln shape when the basket disintegrated and it's in there with about seventy other tablets so we still do know that there are invaders but we don't know if it's from the last days or maybe from that first wave back in 1207 but still here we know we've got invaders and another one from lugar this one we know is from the last days when your messenger arrived the army was already humiliated the city was sacked our food and the threshing floors was burnt the vineyards were also destroyed our city of sacked may you know it may you know it so again definite invaders here same thing with Connie uski when he was at Gabala they actually had a destruction layer which he promptly said is the Sea Peoples and the rest of us promptly said maybe not it's a destruction but what says sea people she's like well that's when they were here like yeah but that doesn't mean this is them so yes no I give you hot sore as probably the best example Canaanite hot sore in modern Israel we know it's destroyed in about 1200 BC because we've got the burnt mud bricks they're fired red and black in a final destruction the two co-directors are split though as to who did it one Amnon ben-tor says it wasn't Egyptians because they're Egyptian statues that are mutilated in the destruction and Egyptians would never have mutilated such statues it's not Canaanites because same thing there are Canaanite mutilated statues they wouldn't have done it so maybe Israelites maybe Sea Peoples he says this is too far inland see people's which I disagree with so for him that leaves Israelites which means you get to do the Bible because hot sore is mentioned as destroyed in the Bible so he wants it to be Israelites but his co-director Sharon Zuckerman who just passed away about a year ago she said I'm not wait a minute what is burnt at our site and he says palaces temples and she's like yeah what else and he says no that's it palaces and temples and she's like well if you have an internal rebellion if you're 99% rise up against the 1% they're going to burn the temples and the palaces but not their own houses not their own workshops and he's like what are you saying it's just that I think it's an internal rebellion I think when they have a famine and a drought they rise up you can't tell so if the two co directors of the site can't decide who destroyed their site I don't know how we're going to decide so maybe invaders maybe internal rebellion but maybe earthquakes I'm going to go through this quickly but let me just say that it's very tough to tell the destruction caused by an earthquake from a destruction caused by humans the one major difference is you won't have weapons if it's an earthquake right so for example this all the earthquakes that have happened in turkey in the last 100 years and if you put them on top of the cities that are destroyed at 1200 you notice most of the cities are in an active seismic fault zone so in fact there's all the fault lines and they're running across our entire area so I think some of the destructions are caused by earthquakes rather than by humans so remember that slip zone I showed you at my scene I my scene is destroyed by an earthquake right at about this time period at nearby Teheran so actually this is still my scene I this young let me see that rock there that was in her head she had sheltered in place she had sheltered in a doorway which was usually the safest place in the earthquake in this case the doorway came down slammed in her head killed her instantly so that is in my scene I victim at nearby tear ins which is just about 10 kilometers away we've got the bones woman and child that were killed by a collapsing wall Troy that's not supposed to look like that that's what happens when you have an earthquake here's my picture from last August right that is what happens when an earthquake tilts and indeed Troy 6 looks like it's destroyed by an earthquake and then back into gar with all of our tablets that wall is not supposed to look like that that's what happens when you have an earthquake so there are a series of earthquakes that happen between about 1225 and 1175 and then cutting of the trade routes we've already talked about if you're 10 and you're copper if that's cut off at any point you're in real trouble and in fact that may have been why they went to it's probably why they went to iron afterward if you can't get the tin you can't make bronze you're going to go to iron and it turns out that iron is actually better anyway but be aware they've already been using iron in the Bronze Age and they still use bronze in the Iron Age in fact King Tut's one of those daggers you read about that a couple weeks ago it said King Tut has an alien dagger yeah the irons from a meteor but still so they did know iron back then so I think we've got cutting of the trade routes back then also so if I can sum up then let me give you three points that I think you will all agree with there'll be no argument would you agree that there are a number of separate civilizations at this time nice and man's Assyrians Babylonians Hittites all that right they are independent but they're interacting right pretty obvious everybody agrees all right it's also clear that many of the cities the ones we've talked about and others were destroyed at this time they come to an end around about eleven seventy seven again no disagreement right everything goes kaput right but we have no proof as to what caused this we still don't know the answer right everybody agrees with that so what have we gonna do here I've been talking for an hour or so and I don't have a promised answer which everybody reads my book they get pissed off about that too I'm like I don't have an answer because there isn't an answer because it's still a question that we're investigating so all of these I think are a possibility however people still use this simplistic drought to famine to move in to see people's - cutting a trade route to collapse I heard that at our academic conference last November I'm like no it's not that serious that that simple it's much much messier so what I think we've got droughts famine earthquakes invaders rebellions yes all of them it is all together as I said and we are so interlinked back then they are so interdependent they are not self-sufficient that when one went down they all went down just like dominoes so when the Mycenaeans go down it affects the Hittites which affects the Cypriots which affects the Egyptians so this is part of the problem with being so intertwined back then but it's also what we call a systems collapse literally the entire system collapsed it's not the only place it's not the only time this happens elsewhere and elsewhen but the hallmarks central administration collapses traditional elite go away centralized economy collapses and you have population shifts and population decline and again we see this in other places and in other time periods it also takes up to a century for this to all happen so while I used 1177 as kind of the linchpin or the hallmark I'm fully aware that it didn't all happen that year it takes like I said up to a century so at one part in the book I said something like life in 1200 was different from life in 1100 and very different from life in 1000 BC and that was when my publisher said that's too long a title it won't fit on the cover seriously what I would say is 1177 is to the fall of the Bronze Age s 476 is to the fall of the Roman Empire we all know the Roman Empire did not fall in 476 but that's the date that you drum into the students if you remember any date remember 476 same thing here I want to make 1177 the date that people remember for the end of the Late Bronze Age but the other takeaway is what can we learn from this and I already kind of hinted at this are we currently facing a similar situation do we have climate change well most would argue yes we could argue about that for the rest of the afternoon but most would say yes famines and droughts various parts of the world yes earthquakes rebellions I think the only thing we're missing with the Sea Peoples and in fact I would now argue that Isis are the sea peoples because they are busy destroying all the ancient antiquities and all that on the other hand you could say that the refugees in Europe are the sea peoples yeah so it could it depends are they the victims or the oppressors Central American refugees coming over whether is the absolutely right so I actually think we've got all the same things and in fact recent news ripped from the headlines in the last like two three years from the Middle East in the Mediterranean Greece's economy is tanked there's internal rebellions in Libya Egypt and Syria Outsiders and foreign warriors Turkey is afraid it's going to become involved Israel's afraid of that Jordan's graduate with refugees today Iran bellicose and threatening Iraq is in turmoil if we had headlines from the Middle East from 1200 BC pretty much the same thing so the question is what are we going to do about it I mostly look at ancient history I don't look ahead so I leave it to other people to figure it out but what I would say is one of the main differences is that we've got obviously better technology now but we're also aware of what's happening so when the Hittites had a drought they probably didn't even realize if we're quite a while and then they couldn't figure out what to do about it you know pray to the storm god or something now we can figure out what to do about it the thing is we have to actually first admit that we've got a problem and it's kind of the thing where I think if you think you've got a problem and you go to solve it and it turns out you didn't have a problem what have you lost but if you did have a problem then you've gone some way to fixing it so part of me thinks that we've got some of the same problems that they had back in 1200 I'm optimistic until they realize that every civilization up until now has fallen and there's no reason why we would be left out of that so it may be a matter of when rather than if but I don't think we're quite there yet at the same time looking at what happened to 1200 BC does give me pause and with that I thank you

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 280,084

Rating: 4.6333332 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, Ancient, PIER, Cities, City, Eric Cline, Teaching, Teachers, Bronze Age, Collapse, Sea Peoples, Institute, History, ancient cities

Id: ppzMdQqm_6M

Length: 61min 35sec (3695 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2016

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For more than three hundred years during the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 BC until just after 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, Trojans, and Canaanites all interacted. They created a cosmopolitan world-system, with flourishing cities such as Mycenae, Hazor, Troy, Ugarit, Hattusa, Babylon, and Thebes, such as has only rarely been seen before the current day. It may have been this very internationalism that contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that ended the Bronze Age. When the end came just after 1200 BC, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from Greece and Italy in the west to Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia in the east. Cities and towns, large empires and small kingdoms, that had taken centuries to evolve, all collapsed rapidly. With their end came the world’s first recorded Dark Ages. It was not until centuries later that a new cultural renaissance emerged in Greece and the other affected areas, setting the stage for the evolution of Western society as we know it today. Dr. Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology, former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at The George Washington University, in Washington DC. A Fulbright scholar, National Geographic Explorer, and NEH Public Scholar, Dr. Cline holds degrees in Classical Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology, and Ancient History, from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania. An active field archaeologist who is the former co-director at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) and the current co-director at Tel Kabri, he has more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey experience in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States. Dr. Cline has written (authored, co-authored, or edited) a total of sixteen books, which have been published by prestigious presses including Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Michigan, and National Geographic. He is a three-time winner of the Biblical Archaeology Society's "Best Popular Book on Archaeology" award (2001, 2009, and 2011). He also received the 2014 "Best Popular Book" award from the American Schools of Oriental Research for his book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which is an international best-seller and was also considered for a 2015 Pulitzer Prize. In addition, he has also authored or co-authored nearly 100 academic articles, which have been published in peer-reviewed journals, festschriften, and conference volumes. At GW, Dr. Cline has won both the Trachtenberg Prize for Teaching Excellence and the Trachtenberg Prize for Faculty Scholarship, the two highest honors at the University; he is the first faculty member to have won both awards. He has also won the Archaeological Institute of America’s “Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching” Award and been nominated three times for the CASE US Professor of the Year. He has also appeared in more than twenty television programs and documentaries, ranging from ABC (including Nightline and Good Morning America) to the BBC and the National Geographic, History, and Discovery Channels.