Hunger and the Late Bronze Age Collapse (Sea Peoples)

every great civilization that has risen over the course of human history has also fallen like the people living in them the earliest urban societies did not have long life spans kingdoms rose and fell within lifetimes their great cities abandoned or destroyed the cause is very and it's impossible to predict how or when a society will fall but fall they do we're going to try to explore most of the possibilities why but focus most of all on one in particular hunger I'm the anthro chef and it's hard to imagine real hunger though you wouldn't know it by the way my wife and I talk shortly before dinnertime I have never truly been hungry in my entire life but I understand at least on a distant intellectual level that there are a few experiences as agonizing as starvation an empty stomach can make a human being do just about anything it can destroy people families cities and entire civilizations hunger and thirst and the tension over the resources that relieve them have driven so much of human history but things may have actually been easier in very early days over most of the time we've been a species humans were foragers mobile and versatile humans who got too hungry could switch to a different niche or even pack up and move somewhere else entirely did the Gazelle migration fail to arrive for a hunter he can fish more that season did the fishermen's Nets come up empty he can live more off of wild plants until next year but what about early farmers common sense would say that by developing agriculture humans were now in better control of their foods and less vulnerable to hunger and the whims of nature but common sense is actually wrong here the reality is that the first urban humans were creating a new type of environment that was more vulnerable by building in heavily investing in a domestic environment that they became totally dependent on the earliest farmers had locked themselves into a limited system that was extremely susceptible to catastrophic failure and to famine the word is a distant threat today but through most of recorded history it was a great source of terror and anxiety in any season for any reason at all the crops might fail smart farmers could stockpile enough to protect themselves in lean years but this did not erase all vulnerability surpluses and overproduction in good years could only protect so much if a long cycle of bad harvests or shortages struck the causes for famine could be both natural or political natural causes included things like droughts pests or poorly timed flooding political causes might be war or deliberate acts by those in power intended to suppress people other times the breakdowns occurred as a result of incompetence by those responsible for taxing gathering transporting storing and distributing food emergency supplies were sometimes available from neighboring areas or substitute foods could provide some immediate relief the world is full of wild greens for instance or chestnuts or acorns could be used for making bread instead of grain people could and did still forage especially the common poor various wild herbs and even weeds would have saved many farmers who would have otherwise starved even modern agriculture shows us that crops can fail quite often in the Athens region of Greece between 1930 and 1960 the wheat crop failed one year in for the barley crop one year in 20 and legumes three years and four in the Middle East today even with modern techniques it is relatively common for a one or several crops to be lost to insects birds or a disease one experiment was conducted in which a crop of barley was planted without modern herbicides or pesticides half of all the plants were lost 20% due to disease 12% to animals and pests and another 18% just to wheats in the ancient world the threat of starvation was recognized as a disaster of the highest magnitude and taken extremely seriously the good news though is that while short term hunger and smaller local food crises were quite common catastrophic multi-year famines over white areas were not so much nor did people necessarily die during great famines rather they would have dispersed and moved away from the region that was suffering but when catastrophe did strike the effect was momentous huge urban communities would come together only for their people to eventually disperse reverting back into smaller towns and villages again abandoning these cities and all of the systems that came with them this happened over and over as time went on historians have long referred to these great events of urban abandonment as collapses but it turns out that that's not the best word to describe to understand these so-called collapses better let's look at some of the biggest ones believe it or not the first great event of this kind actually happened before there were any cities remember the great towns of old Europe or how about chattel who yuck with its sprawling honeycomb structures of houses or maybe Jericho in the Levant and its massive walls these were all homes to thousands maybe tens of thousands of people during the neolithic and yet anthropologists don't really consider these towns to be true cities yet they had close to the necessary populations but they lacked the hierarchies and the institutions that so characterized the true cities of Samaria that came thousands of years later not only that these not quite cities may have been organized no differently from the bands and villages of egalitarian foragers of the past that could have something to do with why they all fizzled out every single one of these places was abandoned during the mid 5000 specie their people presumably leaving to smaller groups of foragers that only farmed part time many anthropologists call this dispersal the failure of the Neolithic experiment when large-scale settled life collapsed and would not revive again for thousands of years what happened well one possible cause of this collapse is disease before the late Neolithic proto city's human populations were small scattered and spread out thus somewhat protected against disease and its effects but by carving out a settled agricultural life humans unwittingly created a brand-new type of ecosystem where crops people animals and all of their wastes were packed densely together into an unnatural landscape they couldn't have known it at the time but Neolithic people had made the perfect ideal breeding ground for pests viruses and diseases to evolve and flourish not only that but the widespread malnutrition created by a limited grain based diet made people even more susceptible to infection these brand new density dependent diseases such as malaria tuberculosis and many more must have sent mortality rates skyrocketing entire communities may have been wiped out maybe even some of the largest ones and it was not only people who were in danger their crops to face their own set of threats many pathogens and insects of domestic life evolved to take advantage of the feeding ground early farmers were providing by crowding fields of non diverse crops together as these micro predators thrived and spread famine and starvation may have followed in their wake so the concentration of pests and disease made large Neolithic communities susceptible to population collapse one illness one droughts or a single plague could have brought the whole system crashing down agriculture may have been more productive than hunting and foraging but it was also way more vulnerable this explains the collapse itself what it does not explain is why people never tried again for thousands of years some historians believe that it's because the people who built these outsized mega villages still had a prehistoric mindset remember that while it's tempting to call shuttle who yuck Jericho and their contemporary cities they really weren't there were no palaces no massive monuments dedicated to the gods no signs of class distinction every family had one small room home with a hearth and each home was roughly the same size though there was art there was no writing and there was little in the way of specialized labor some individuals may have achieved prestige through deeds or a generosity but overall everyone had an equal say in other words the only thing that made them like urbanites was their population as for how they saw the world these Neolithic people still had in common with foragers and villages that came before this is fine in small communities even ones that farm where you know all your neighbors and only share with those whose lives are tied up with yours but once you get a few hundred people living together maybe even a few thousand it gets a lot harder to maintain an equal social structure people start needing representatives to stand in for them maybe even a writing system to catalog and keep track of all those people and what they own some people stopped producing food and instead focus on specialized tasks in exchange for food maybe even achieving a higher status along the way in other words true urban systems can't seem to develop without social inequality as this may have started to happen in the Neolithic proto cities people probably did not like it one bit they probably still treated differences in status as taboo just like their fathers grandfathers and Beyond had for generations before major conflicts may have broken out about how to handle this tension between the desire for equality and the need for social hierarchies to hold a large society together in the face of big problems like famine and disease we may have collectively chosen to walk away from the Neolithic experiment if this is true it means that agriculture was a technology that arrived before humans were ready for it it gave us the means to grow large but not the means to organize ourselves and hold together as a result our earliest urban experiments collapsed and when times got too hard we dispersed back into the small villages we had known for thousands of years so if not a direct famine or shortage of food it may have been opinions on how to handle those events which caused the Neolithic collapse without written records to explain why there's no writing there isn't a lot of evidence to support this hypothesis but it's an interesting idea especially when considering the fact that when the first cities do emerge millennia later in Sumeria they come with rigid social hierarchies and the specialized systems to organize them the Neolithic dispersal was just the first in a long record of famine and collapse that continues across recorded history true urban civilizations were actually more vulnerable as they took everything that made the Neolithic towns dangerous and magnified it on a greater scale no one came to understand those dangers better than the Sumerians as well as all the other Mesopotamian civilizations that followed them the first societies of the world to build true cities also composed entirely ments about their Falls they knew that about the only thing they could be sure of in their unpredictable tumultuous world was that change would come and destruction come with it Mesopotamian civilization offers particularly clear lessons on the cycles of societies rising and falling how the end could come quickly and dramatically or it could also be slow yet unstoppable changes to traditions the howl of collapse wasn't so important because the outcome was always the same ancient people the Sumerians and Mesopotamians in particular were very much aware that all good things even the greatest of civilizations come to an end back in episode 4 we covered how the Sumerians invented urban civilization but we didn't talk much about what happened afterwards like we did with Egypt and Greece by rectifying that now and taking a crash course in Mesopotamian history we'll be able to set up the next great development for the ancient world the Bronze Age and then we can talk about how that too collapsed but when we last left the Sumerians they were just getting started controlled by powerful mafia esque families and then taken over by the most powerful family of all that of the resident God and the priests who administered his house also known as the temple so the temple wasn't charged at first but over time things began to change and individuals called lugol's literally big men rose to power as temple authority declined today we would refer to these lugol's as kings how did these mortal men wrest power away from the gods to understand that we have to try and figure out how the idea of kingship might have been invented in the first place and how its origin might be tied directly to food specifically to hunger relief back in the early days of Sumer when temple priests still held all the power these so-called big men were just heads of powerful families or maybe great warriors by this time temple bureaucracies had grown increasingly corrupt at the expense of the poor masses over taxing hoarding power and resources and pushing society to the breaking point it's possible though not provable that kingship was invented when one of the big men confiscated agricultural land from the temple by force the theory goes that by taking the food supply from the corrupt priests and giving it to the hungry big men brought relief and saved the social order claiming political authority in the process big men let's just call them Kings now we're no longer just heads of households but patrons of the whole four corners of the civilized world protector is not just from barbarians and corruption but from hunger as well it's a speculative theory but it makes sense given what we know about famine and early civil society this uh sure's in the early dynastic period in ancient Sumer about 5000 years ago or 3,000 BC if our theory about Kings arising out of almost Robin Hood esque figures is true this is when it would have happened the temple still played a huge role in civil society but kings now rival them in power and soon grew into mythical almost divine figures they consumed multiple lavish meals a day just like the gods they were supposedly subservient to Kings got a banquet of dishes all day long endless concoctions of barley and other grains meat at every meal a creative arsenal of desserts and pastries sweetened by dates and other fruit and nuts it was good to be king good but short power and control shifted and changed constantly kingdoms rose to power and fell within lifetimes they never lasted long rare was the dynasty that lasted more than a generation or two after its founder died succession conflict civil strife and natural disasters all made sure of that but this did not deter them from trying for the next seven centuries various kings and the collection of powerful cities they ruled competed in the Sumerian alluvial plain for resources and power their mode for controlling and organizing society would spread to pop up very soon in the Levant Egypt and beyond as urban civilization moved like a virus around the Continent some Kings would concur enough territory and hold enough influence over people to claim that they were kings of Kings claiming rulership of the entire land of Sumer this was probably more boastful than factual even so the cultural idea for a king to rule over all the lands had infected the populace after almost a thousand years of chaotic power struggles between tiny kingdoms the Sumerians were ready for someone who could unite them into the world's first true Empire that happened in the 2300 s BC when a man named Sargon from the Highlands further upriver called Akkad rose to power in the city of Kish conquering his homeland and then going south to conquer aruch and all the other city-states of Sumer so many of the formerly independent city-states of the region were now officially a Commonwealth under Sargon and all were required to pay him regular tribute of food and men for his armies the former Kings were now more like governors Sargon was king of kings no one had ever taken and held such a large Kingdom before the world's first true territorial Empire now the Acadians and not their Sumerian cousins would dominate the region both politically and culturally and Sargon of Akkad was forever after known as Sargon the great regarded as a model by Mesopotamian kings for some 2,000 years after his death later Assyrian and Babylonian rulers saw themselves as the heirs to Sargon's Empire the ruler himself had achieved legendary status practically deified after his death into the many myths and tales about his birth life and rise to power and despite their official vassalage to the king of Kish the reality was that all those conquered city-states kept a lot of local autonomy and control for themselves throughout his long and glorious reign provinces were constantly rebelling against Sargon who was only able to keep his empire together through constantly squelching the revolts by force and through his cult of personality Sargon had a long life and reign but ultimately never did establish full local control and it would cost his successors dearly the Akkadian dynasty collapsed after just two more generations of rulers amid squabbling over royal succession incursions by migrating nomadic peoples and a stream of revolts shaking off the Akkadian yoke of control and most of all don't forget hunger and famine the collapse of Akkadian power can also be related to a great 200 year long drought that started in Northeast Africa geologists refer to this great drought and the famine that followed as the 4.2 killa year event a powerful example of natural climate change the once fertile alluvial wetlands of Sumer dried out significantly and the agricultural system it depended on crashed this famine in drought may also have been the death blow to the old kingdom in Egypt as well as to the Indus River Valley civilization in India who we haven't even mentioned yet on this podcast salt - an ingredient beloved by chefs everywhere was actually causing devastation to the food supply irrigation over the millenia had raised the ground water bringing salt to the surface and poisoning the soil once fertile now overworked soil had become a desert of salt a second great collapse was occurring in slow-motion across the by 1700 BC water had all but disappeared from the now saline lands of southern Mesopotamia and many of the great earliest cities were abandoned their population had shifted further north into Akkad and beyond the once farmers paradise of Sumeria was on its way to desolation and today the affect has only been exacerbated now in 2018 Wolf's scavenge in the wastelands outside of war this was bad news for the urbanites but a great opportunity for others nomadic people in the northern hills and mountains known as the GU Tian's migrated into the weak and divided Mesopotamia conquering and taking political control of what remained for the next 200 years the GU Tian's were not the barbarians that the Mesopotamians portray them to be they tried to adopt sumerian and akkadian language and custom becoming the first but not even close to the last foreign group to dominate intermix and control the region before someone else displaced them though they tried to assimilate the GU Tian's could not shake their reputation as barbarian invaders and the Sumerian city-states were eventually able to unite rise up and drive their leaders out but by then it was too late the GU team people were already mixed in and a true part of Mesopotamian society this brings us into what's called the Neo Sumerian period or the Sumerian Renaissance when the cities of Mesopotamia revived some of their old culture and influence this era is where much of what we know about ancient Sumer comes from as the Neo Sumerian Kings promoted their power through heritage writing down all the old oral traditions of the great heroes myths and kings of the past among them the legendary Gilgamesh who seems to have been modeled at least in part on Sargon the great the most powerful of these revived city-states was or through conquest and economic prosperity were managed to bring much of Sargon's old territory under its control but with Sumerian agricultural soil in really really bad shape at this point it wasn't to be a long reign as food crises continued to devastate lands and people's a large group of cementec nomads migrated into the region and mass once again this time they did not come out of the mountains but rather from the deserts to the south and west a people known as the amorite s' the nila Sumerians tried everything they could to expel and keep the Amorite sout even building an enormous wall down a stretch of the Euphrates but it was too late the amorite soon reached a critical mass and were able to displace sumerian control of the region becoming the next ethnic majority in line to rule mesopotamia but their reign too would also collapse in the middle north of mesopotamia in the growing power center of babylon a man named Hammurabi hey you've heard of him would become king of the city drive out its amirite rulers and conquer a large swath of Mesopotamia Hammurabi is of course famous for his code of laws many of which deal with grain food supply and farming and land rights now begins the period were the people we were calling Sumerians then Acadians then neo Sumerians are now referred to as Babylonians confusing right Hammurabi was able to build the last truly homegrown Empire of the region but as was always the case in these ancient empires in quotation marks Hammurabi's declined almost immediately after his death the very same year that he died outsider is invaded once again this time it was the Elamites from what is today Southwest Iran their conquests officially ended old Sumerian civilization and its chaotic Golden Age for good from now on the once great Sumerian Akkadian or and then Babylonian empires would be reduced to independent city-states fought over by bigger neighbouring powers who we'll get to shortly but that didn't mean that Sumer as' influence on the culture of the region was ended population and power may have shifted far upriver where farming was still viable but the culture of the world's first civilization was still alive and revered in the form of its gods Civic laws and ideas and institutions and of course cuisine and culinary tradition throughout all this dance of rising and collapsing Mesopotamian civilization the culture and food we discussed in Episode four holds true recognized and respected as the world's first even during the day Sumerian cooking tradition from recipes to meal customs would become a part of new traditions all over the Near East though it would never be the heavyweight player it once was on the world stage in the days of Sargon the world recognized the debt that had owed to Mesopotamia it's only recently more powerful neighbors tried and succeeded to dominate the region but they were reluctant to destroy it as they would have other rivals when these mythic cities were sacked it was seen as a grievous act a heinous crime against civilization itself who were all these would-be conquering neighbors the answer is all sorts of people but today we'll just cover the biggest players let's start in mesopotamias fringes northwest of the Tigris and Euphrates all the way up by the Mediterranean coast the Taurus Mountains rise up into the highlands of Anatolia or modern Turkey where the people called the Hittites ruled the largest land Empire of the day lying at the center of all three continents the Hittites served as a conduit between the cultures of Asia Africa and as their empire extended towards the Mediterranean they clashed with Egypt to their south and the Greece based Mycenaeans to the west the city-state of Troy may have been a vassal of the Hittite Empire and the Trojan War it's famous conflict with the Mycenaeans may have been a power struggle between the Greeks and the Hittites with Troy caught in the middle the Hittites were known across the lands for their military prowess and considered equals to Aegean heroes Egyptian pharaohs and Mesopotamian kings they may have been major players of the Bronze Age but the Hittites are actually the first people known in history to forge iron weapons ahead of their time for an age to come next as for Hittite food and ingredients they seem to be generally similar to that of contemporary civilizations especially in regards to grain meat and dairy dishes but of course with their own distinct flavor from the unique vegetation of Anatolia one particular item the apple seems to be indigenous to that region and we know that the Hittites cultivated apple trees from an early date apples were considered a sacred fruit and there were laws and consequences for those who destroyed fruit bearing trees in the same vein we know that the Hittites took kitchen sanitation very seriously one tablet describes how cooks who had large unkempt hair or beards and came into the royal kitchen could receive the death penalty as well as their entire family the same goes for any cook who hadn't bathed now in the restaurant I've dealt with some severe inspectors in my day but that is one zealous Health Department though its culture goes back much further the Hittite Empire flourished between 1500 and about 1200 BC or what's called the late bronze age out of their capital hattusa they managed an empire that stretched from the west coast of Turkey down to the borders of modern Syria and Lebanon today joining the exclusive club of powerful civilizations of the day exclusive but not alone sandwiched between the Hittites and lower Mesopotamia was the hilly and mountainous land of Assyria the Assyrian Empire was initially based from the city of Ashur which at its height was a town of perhaps thirty thousand people Asher was the center of strategic trade routes between Babylon Turkey and Syria it was the envy of invaders to hold the city the Assyrians had to become strong militarily and skilled diplomatically once again for a more detailed picture of Assyrian cuisine see pretty much everything from episode four on Sumer bread beer onions vegetables fish water fowl and meat for the rich soups and stews porridges higher-end dishes that are precursors to modern Iraqi cuisine just with a more limited palette of ingredients the Assyrians emerged about 2000 BC pretty late by Mesopotamian standards for centuries they were dominated by foreign occupiers mainly a powerful Kingdom called Mitani who was buddy-buddy with Egypt to the south but when the Empire of the Nile became occupied by war with the Hittites the Assyrians were able to expel the Mitanni occupiers establishing themselves as a regional power around 1350 BC having a society which revolved around the military would pay off big-time down there when after the Bronze Age collapse Assyria will find itself as one of the only major kingdoms able to recover and using its warrior know-how and might to brutally subdue everyone to its will coming to rule almost the entire Near East for over 500 years even as far as Egypt for a brief spell but that's say it with me a story for another podcast for now at the end of the Bronze Age Assyria is just one more minor contender holding its own against bigger powers of the day so far this episode might seem a little disjointed why are we going from talks of famine and collapse to all these different Mesopotamian cultures what's the point of it all what this round about history lesson is trying to accomplish is setting up one of the world's most fascinating periods of history when the world started by those Sumerian urban experimenters reached a sort of peak in era that while still unmistakably ancient almost resembles our modern era in a lot of ways that period is known as the Bronze Age that term has popped up a couple times today but what exactly was the Bronze Age well specifically it refers to the era of all the earliest urban civilizations when they learned how to make bronze and bronze tools that in turn improved our farming and cooking and led to an overall higher quality of life though poverty and subsistence living was still the norm for most people after episodes on the Nile and the Aegean and now a laughably brief and incomplete summation of Mesopotamian history I now think we have all of the main players of the Bronze Age in place Babylon Assyria the Hittites Egypt and Mycenaean Greece there were other kingdoms of course but those are the biggest ones here in the Late Bronze Age we are considering a globalized civilization of multiple societies interacting and at least partially dependent on each other rulers sent each other letters regularly conducting diplomacy and negotiating for goods from all these places have been found in all of each other's possession having traveled all over the Mediterranean this whole process really accelerated after the Minoans rose to power dominating the Mediterranean Sea and taking the role of middlemen in all this trade the Minoan contribution in goods were the best luxury foods olive oil and wine Anatolia and Hittites had access to the most metals the Levant had cedar wood Mesopotamia had its textiles from all that sheep's wool and also access to the precious gems metals and spices from further to the east in modern Iran Afghanistan and India and Egypt was sought after as a trading partner mainly because of its tremendous access to gold rulers would frequently write to the Egyptian pharaohs requesting or even subtly demanding gifts of gold and complaining when they didn't get them even going so far as to tell one pharaoh gold is like dust in your land merchants and traders acted as emissaries and ambassadors trade between kingdoms disguised as gift exchange was a way for rulers to save face to trade for useful goods without seeming like they needed or depended on other rulers I'm sending you two talents of olive oil as a gift in reality though I'm expecting you to send me something of relatively equal value in return as your own gift this was the way Kings traded with each other rulers referred to each other by familial terms using brother for those considered equals and father to those who were known to be superior the late bronze age had full-blown international norms and raw goods were not all that were exchanged while rulers were exchanging gold gems and luxury foods sailors and traders might have been swapping food and other commoner life staples as well as myths legends and tall tales maybe even recipes such interactions probably contributed to cultural exchange mixing and spreading between Egypt the Aegean and the Near East it could explain the many similarities between the epic of gilgamesh the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as Hittite and Babylonia myths - this may also be where we see the blending of food styles a bit between ingredients that can be found all over the region systems for obtaining storing and preparing food conveyed the culture of their practitioners food was the repository of tradition and identity there's a reason so many cultures today claim to be the ones who invented hummus or baklava or a baba ghanoush or you named the Middle Eastern / Mediterranean dish all the way back into the Bronze Age these cultures were sharing and mixing there's not a lot of evidence to say for sure but this may have been the first instance of a pan Mediterranean cuisine like we see today with influences blending and changing local diets and food customs all of this set the stage for a new complex world where all of these early empires that had previously been in isolation now had access to the best that each of them had to offer that meant that all of them had access to bronze the bronze age is of course named after the medal which defined Ella's technology but what makes bronze so special after eons of stone tools metallurgy had emerged in the very late Neolithic mainly with copper but copper is fragile and brittle by itself by adding tin to the mix and turning it to bronze you make a stronger material that can form tools which can be honed and pushed much further this upgrade from stone to copper to bronze changed everything but it's specifically how that metal affected the food supply and people's standard of living that had the greatest effect Braun's cooking tools opened a new world for chefs having a quality sharp bronze knife would allow someone culinarily minded to explore all sorts of unique cuts and textures beyond the knife bronze vessels improved thermal processing of food roasting frying and boiling all became more efficient and easier to control allowing those techniques to save fuel become more economical and thus more common and widespread second the least interesting but probably the most significant is that bronze tools greatly increase the productivity of farming sure increased human efficiency and optimized labor mostly just helped the rich get richer but even common people saw their basic needs more easily matched and an overall higher standard of living than at any time before societies could now focus on loftier goals developing and sharing more art culture and technological progress finally not directly related to the metal but rather the widespread trade network of the day salt previously known only as a luxury good became increasingly available this resulted in the development of more sophisticated preservation techniques more food could be shipped to more distant foreign customers increased salt consumption therefore helped perpetuate the trade Network which brought it about while also increasing the pallet ability and flavor of food everywhere so much of the prosperity and modernist that characterized the late bronze age was grounded in changes to the food supply the development of food technology laid the groundwork for a prosperous globalized and interconnected system to be constructed it was one of the great golden ages of the ancient world but sadly this episode is titled hunger and collapse I'm mostly telling this Bronze Age story so we can talk about how it ends the Bronze Age in the old Mediterranean world did last for about two thousand years up to just after 1200 BC but then it all disintegrated over just a few decades Babylon Mycenae Hattusa and many more cities were all destroyed some were rebuilt many just abandoned ash rubble weapons and bodies in the streets have all been excavated from these sites in the early eleven hundreds BC something or someone was rapidly destroying Late Bronze Age cities as well as kingdoms and entire empires the effect on the international community was catastrophic the whole system came crashing down this event called the Bronze Age collapse is somewhat mysterious in its range and its totality and also in what exactly caused it evidence shows that prosperity international trade and contact were all going strong until the very last moment when the end came suddenly and without much warning when it was all over Mycenaean and Minoan civilization were gone Hittite civilization was gone Mesopotamian civilization was remade anew in tumult once again Egypt survived but in a weakened state it would never recover from the international community came to an end and a new transitional era began that would prevail for centuries after with civilization withered and shrunk society reverted back into more localized and isolated types of units this was not exactly a Dark Age as it has been called for years but it was certainly a much different way of life than had flourished during the Bronze Age most puzzling to anthropologists it's not entirely clear who or what was responsible for all these massive destructions for the longest time the collapse was blamed on a huge group of roving Marauders known collectively as the sea people either invaders or refugees to the region depending on who you ask really though it should be Sea Peoples it's not entirely clear who they were or where they came from it could be as far as Europe maybe Italy Sicily or Sardinia or it could be from closer lands in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean the Egyptians the only Kingdom to survive the invasion of the sea peoples are our sole source of their possible origins they record them as many different groups working together so they may have come from all those above listed places diverse groups from different geographies and cultures migrating and mass into the region for reasons unknown they may have not even been working together each group was on the move but may have been motivated by different reasons some may have been plunderer is looking for spoils sure but others may have been refugees fleeing calamities like war famine or earthquakes collapses in their own homelands this is all very dramatic talk of invasion and battles but maybe not quite accurate until recently the influence on the collapse of international civilization may have been blamed too much on these poor sea peoples it's highly probable that they were as much the victims of collapse as they were aggressors forced from their homes into weak kingdoms that were already in decline for other reasons their settlement may have been even more peaceful than the Egyptian sources make it sound many scholars argue that while there would have been some violent incursions most of these so-called invaders were farmers rather than warriors trying to peacefully move and settle on sites that were already destroyed or abandoned for other reasons just about the only thing that is clear about the sea people is that we can't blame them solely for the Bronze Age collapse so what else can we blame scholars don't agree on this either and there is legitimate evidence to for all kinds of theories one possibility is that all the theories are true as Eric Klein puts in his book 1177 the year civilization collapsed where much of the information for this episode was taken a perfect storm of calamities may have hit the bronze-age world all at one time overwhelming the powers of the day before they could recover in other words your kingdom can survive losing a war or it can survive a terrible earthquake or a massive volcanic eruption it can survive internal rebellion or a few years of famine especially if you have international contacts you can lean on for support but what if all those disasters strike at the same time what if that international support network is going down just as hard as you are let's start with earthquakes for a long time this was the second biggest thing historians blamed for the Bronze Age collapse and similarly to the sea peoples their influence may be overstated even so it's clear that the entire region particularly Greece was struck by what's called an earthquake storm around 1225 BC that's a pretty metal name for when a seismic fault continuously unzips over years and years until all of its pressure is released this particularly earth-shaking period may have rocked the Mediterranean for over 50 years right on time for the end of the Bronze Age it must have seemed apocalyptic to the people living through it however even though these quakes must have caused severe damage many of the sites were rebuilt and occupied afterwards and earthquakes had been a fact of life in the region for many thousands of years prior it's unlikely that by themselves they would have been enough to cause the complete collapse of society but again there was plenty of other stuff going on widespread internal revolt in kingdoms across the land may have worsened instability but this is a chicken-and-egg type situation did revolts caused the collapse or were people revolting because of the conditions the collapse was already causing another catalyst maybe the disruption of trade networks the aforementioned earthquakes rebellions and foreign invasions may have cut off key trade routes restricting the flow of goods which had so prosperously held up the system before and forget the wealthy just having to live without their imported luxury foods when a bronze society has its supply of tin suddenly cut off well things can get ugly if trade was disrupted all these now interdependent kingdoms would have withered quickly if the loss of trade networks didn't cause the collapse on their own they may explain why none of these societies were able to recover afterwards if a kingdom whose lifeblood is international trade gets destroyed and their trade network is destroyed with it why would anyone bother to build that up again or maybe I'm getting too dramatic again the whole trade system was slowly changing anyway perhaps the seemingly sudden collapse was just a symptom of inevitably changing times some theories suggest that the supposed collapse was just the slow triumph of the ancient entrepreneur you see at the height of the Late Bronze Age all that international trade was controlled by rulers and their palace economies but it may be that the rise of private merchants and traders which so dominated the Iron Age that followed may have weakened and crippled the traditional palace system creating the conditions for a dramatic but slow change are you getting the sense that this is all a little murky and confusing how two types of events seem to be causing each other if that can even make sense was there war and destruction because of natural calamities and trade disruption or is it vice versa what came first and what caused what we've gone over numerous possibilities and seem any closer to understanding what actually ended the Bronze Age this may be because of that perfect storm effect a barrage of poorly timed events which caused a domino effect and then assistance collapse urban civilization had been growing and learning for thousands of years at that point and had insurance against many of the described calamities above but being unable to foresee or stop the effects of all of them arriving together was simply too much for the system to bear it created a multiplier effect where the repercussions of each factor was magnified and the world changed but isn't this all a little too purely historical for a history of food well it might seem that way so far but looking at it from the perspective of a chef I do see one common thread our old friend hunger remember I am NOT a real historian but from my point of view hunger and famine magnified by all the other events described above may have been what triggered the whole collapse if as we've seen the world was already just slowly changing on its own hunger turned that change into an event there are several examples of textual evidence attesting to famines across the land during this time with rulers writing to each other requesting food aid and coordinating emergency shipments of grain drought may have pushed the initial group of sea peoples creating a chain reaction of displaced people moving east into the destabilized Mediterranean for a more recent historical example of this kind look no further than the 1930s Dust Bowl when farmers moved and mass from the dried-out Great Plains to the lush Qwest coasts of the United States again all these empires and kingdoms had survived famines and hard times before but it's possible that earthquakes wore internal revolt and then trade disruption made things far worse a particularly harrowing letter was discovered in the city of Wu Gerrit in the north of modern Syria a citizen begging for help 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 what caused this most severe famine archeologists have shown a drop in temperature on the Mediterranean Sea between 1250 and 1197 and that the iron age that followed was much drier than the Bronze Age Greece and the Mediterranean belts had drops an annual rainfall and thus in human population hunger and famine followed which I would argue caused or at least preceded other socio-economic crises like war rebellion trade disruption and waves of human migrants it's not a linear progression from drought to famine to systems collapse but I would still guess that hunger probably played the greatest role in the violent end of the Bronze Age as well as many of the other collapses before it and yet to come but remember it's important to keep in mind that this seemingly apocalyptic event was far from the actual end of the world evidence suggests that many of these affected cultures actually recovered rather quickly just into new very different forms they made smart adaptions into more local and isolated systems that were sustainable for the new age of the day and this is always the reality when we talk about the so-called collapse of historical civilizations they may just be slow in perceivable changes to traditions and ways of life something that seems like a collapse to historians but is actually just another change in the human story but will that always be the case if you're thinking ahead you may have already noticed several comparisons between the world of the Late Bronze Age and our current international system today in 2018 we - just a few years ago we're living in a fully globalized society that only seemed to be trading and cooperating evermore growing closer and more interdependent but over just a few short years things seem to have changed rebellion and authoritarianism have engulfed many countries that were just stable democracies only recently nativist and nationalist movements have sprung up in countries all over the world and seemed to signify a trend towards localism and isolation droughts war economic hardship all are driving mass migrations of refugees from their homes into new lands clashing with societies that are already frayed it all seems a little too familiar to the end of the Late Bronze Age doesn't it are we living through another slow change in the history of civilization rising and collapsing and then rising again or now with the modern ability to destroy ourselves have the negative consequences of the Neolithic and urban revolution reached their logical final conclusion part of me worries that were headed for that great final collapse but then I remember everyone living through the previous collapses probably thought the same thing all of this has happened before many times and will probably happen again it may be that urban civilization just isn't possible without these cycles of collapse back into less complex localism despite my concerns I think it's likely that we are simply living through another cycle one more ongoing part of human history that concludes our long and winding tour of Mesopotamia the Bronze Age and the collapse of civilizations come back next time when we backtrack a bit through time and head far to the east to the Yellow River Valley that's right break out the rice and the soy sauce it's time to study the history of food in ancient China [Music]

Channel: The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Views: 140,775

Rating: 4.7035961 out of 5

Keywords: Sea Peoples, Sea Peoples Documentary, Late Bronze Age Collapse, Sea People, Late Bronze Age, Bronze Age Collapse, Bronze Age, Ancient History, Ancient Near East, Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Levant, Hittites, Hittite Empire, Ancient Egypt, Sumer, sumerian empire, sumerian, ancient food, Akkadian Empire, Mycenaean greece, Mycenaean Civilization, Trojan War, Eric Cline, 1177 BC, Ancient Assyria, Babylonian Empire, Ancient Canaan, Semitic, Mesopotamia, Kings List, Ramesses II

Id: _AeRe3wpft0

Length: 57min 53sec (3473 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

there wasn't room to put this in the title but this vid is by someone called anthrochef and has a theme of the history of food in the middle east. It's quite light hearted and very interesting! I hope you enjoy it. He has also done another vid about ancient china,