Piracy and the Bronze Age Collapse | Dr. Louise Hitchcock | Dr. Aren Maeir

so today we have a very fun episode planned out for you and that is a subject that many of you are going to love if you love the late bronze age the collapse and piracy the title of this episode being piracy in the bronze age collapse we are joined by two very special guests and that is none other than dr aaron mayer and dr louise hitchcock and so i'd like to begin by talking about primary sources but before we jump into that based on your experience dr mayor and your imagination and based on the years of research you've given studies or subjects like this when you hear the term piracy in the late bronze age what do you imagine well i think um in in just about any uh historical period that we have um relatively good documentation and even to a certain extent in when we go back into the bronze age um there seems to be evidence of uh groups who were you know pirates raiders who who applied the seas you know in various ways whether um you know from from a ship base or from a from you know from a coast that was hard to access um and they um plundered uh shipping and other uh things in it and them and when you have uh rich shipping on the one hand uh that's something that attracts piracy and of course in periods in which the uh the central powers are less powerful and they don't have the ability to stop piracy so piracy also flourishes so um the late bronze age is a good example of a period when there's a lot of international shipping in the eastern mediterranean and we know this from many sources and at the same time at the end of the late bronze age in the beginning of the early iron age there's a period when there's a process of collapse and change and transformation um many of the the so-called superpowers of that period go through um either collapse or uh substantial changes and that opens up the possibility of piracy now um you know you don't have to expect that everybody was with a wooden leg and a um in an eye patch and said ah and like that but uh people uh people throughout history in many many areas throughout the world and then we're talking in times when there's excellent documentation piracy was a common thing so there's no reason to expect that it didn't exist um in antiquity as well well that's a good question because that's what got me interested in researching that topic because i would often read articles about the see people or chat book chapters or accounts or something and it would say they were pirates or they committed acts of piracy and it was never explained what that meant so to me it was a meaningless term and that's what inspired me actually to start researching the topic because it made me wonder what did it mean to be a pirate in the 12th century bce and what i tried to do was to look at what was common to pirates across time zones and time periods one thing i learned is that pirates typically do not write their own history somebody else does so the histories tend to be very unflattering in this way it's kind of like the philistines and that the historical accounts of the philistines come from the old testament and so they're not about giving a factual account they are usually negative portrayals and so writing reading these histories and these accounts though gave me some indication what was common to pirates in the greek period the roman period north atlantic period and then i also looked at seafaring and the bronze age because of course the ship technology was different the weaponry was different and when it comes to the subject of piracy in the late bronze age and in the collapse do we have any primary sources on this particular subject and if so who were they and what can they tell us well there's not a lot of sources but there's some hittite sources which mention mention it um there's for example some of the depictions of the the so-called sea peoples for example from ugarit um seem to hint to sort of like a a raiding type of uh image now whether it is this is a this is like a regular military raid or it's a a piracy like raid uh it's perhaps hard to tell um and then there's a couple of sites which have been suggested to be related to piracy um for example um on cyprus there's a couple of uh sites were pro you know where promenatories were overlooking uh shipping lanes uh which have been suggested as uh perhaps um somewhere where pirates uh were located there's a site in uh on the northern coast of egypt marsa martreux which uh bates island which was suggested is perhaps related to piracy um and uh for example if you go on forward towards the roman period there were whole sections of the of the coast of modern-day turkey which were known to be um pirate areas uh and the romans fought these people so there's no there's no reason uh to assume that this was not the case back in those times as well and again if ships laden with goods and riches are are coming by and and very often antiquity ships um were sailed quite close to the uh to the coast i mean not not in danger of being pushed in but nevertheless keeping the coast you know uh the highest mountains on the coast as close as possible to to make navigation simpler so it's no big deal to uh to push off a uh a boat from the coast and attack them um you know just like you know the the somali pirates of today you know they're utilizing um you know the simplest um you know ships you know nowadays they got more sophisticated but in the beginning all you need is a shipping boat and a kalashnikov and you could take over a a you know a super tanker and um and particularly in times when there's um economic troubles and political issues so i think this only exacerbated um and i think the again it's we don't have a lot of sources on it but the sea peoples what we call the sea peoples among them the philistines i wouldn't say that all of them are pirates but due to the fact that um the sea peoples and the philistines are appearing during a time of collapse and extended time collapse louise and i have argued again and again and again that we have to take into account that at least some of these peoples and groups had piracy um in them you know whether some of them were pirates or that was part of their their of their activities etc but that's something to take into account when understanding um this period and the and this phenomenon gosh it's really fragmentary we have the um like the egyptian sources that talk about um the people the sea people they call them the people of the sea or the people the great green or the people from the islands uh the term sea people is actually a modern term used collectively to refer to these like seven or so different tribes of um see people like the chardonnay the pelosette or philistines the lucca or the litians and the egyptian sources talk about how they were engaged and uh one of my favorite quotes is and i'm not remembering it precisely here because i'm do it for memory but it was like confident in their hearts they felt we shall not fail and then it talks about how they were it was completely destroyed and what we learned from this egyptian source the egyptian sources is that the sea peoples if engaged in direct combat they could be easily defeated and that their success lay in sort of hit and run commando tactics and for crete the people move from the coastline a lot of them moved to the mountains to more easily defendable sites and what i kind of learned about this but also from reading about the barbary pirates is that the barbary pirates desolated the coastlines of north africa and pirates overall tend to use these hit-and-run tactics uh first of all because it means you could have a small crew but pirate ships often had larger crews but you could have a small crew you didn't have to worry so much about casualties and even in the 18th century medicine wasn't great um so you'd have less problem with casualties and you could like easily overtake a village by surprise and burn it and carry off what you needed and also take slaves it's a seems to be a pattern in historical piracy that whenever you have piracy you also have slavery or slave trade because that just becomes one more commodity the pirates can use and and sometimes instead of becoming slaves these people become they join the pirate culture and usually you do that through what we would call in anthropology rights of initiation so you become a pirate by engaging showing your loyalty by engaging in acts of piracy we have 14th century mentions of the luca and the ahiawa by the hittites and that they were sort of plundering and also we have the famous letters that are mentioned in in search of the trojan war the famous hit type letters that talk about uh pia maraduce and uh always uh sort of attacking the hit type world and pia marriages wasn't so much a pirate but a mercenary and this gets into an idea of what uh i read this article by a man uh scholar thomas gallant who works on modern greek history and by modern i mean within the last several hundred years and that um he refers to what he calls military entrepreneurship and this means there's like a continuum if you make your money as a fighter or an independent mercenary you might be a mercenary you might be a robber you might be a pirate but you would be able to sort of act along this uh continuum and then um other sources we have that are more like you have to try to read into them you have um what seems to indicate a shortage of metals at pylos in the mycenaean kingdom in that there's a tablet saying that there was no allocation for the metalsmiths which indicates that um that trade was being disrupted maybe and then you also have references to um watchers guarding the coast which means they were on the lookout for anyone that could cause trouble and you have references to master 600 rowers and so they might be engaged not just um using these rowers for maritime trade but also to keep and maintain a presence to keep the sea lanes clear and then there's like a very cryptic letter from the king of ugarit to the king of cyprus where he says that they are at my shore they are doing great damage um and so that would be a source and we can also think in terms of archaeological sources in the sense that you have all these destructions around the mediterranean one subscriber had asked if the iliad is essentially just about the great golden age of piracy he goes on to say that in the story he says achilles boasts 12 cities of men have i laid waste with my ships and even by land i avow throughout the fertile land of troy from out all of these i took much spoil and goodly and all would i have ever bring to agamemnon he wants to know is the iliad really just showing us an example of piracy in the late bronze age and i'd also like to bring up the odyssey as well and ask if that could also tell us anything about piracy in the late bronze age well um first of all um as i assume you probably have talked about this in the past the the homeric texts are a very complex multi-layered um phenomenon uh and there are apparent memories of uh of the gene bronze age in it um and you know there's various discussions how can we define what is a memory from the late bronze age in the homeric text um and and although most scholars would say nowadays that the uh the most significant part of the homeric text actually reflects uh much later iron age um you know eighth century sixth century you know um later on way past the the the bronze age um aegean uh nevertheless um it does seem to reflect also aspects relating to the uh the collapse of the uh aegean bronze age and the collapse of the palace um societies that existed in greece at that time and both during the collapse and probably beforehand as well and afterwards as well there were phenomena of uh related to piracy so that might be reflected in these various uh things here but again you have to take into account that the the homeric text cannot be read as a blow-by-blow depiction of a specific historical event but more of you know it gives you the the flavor of the times and and and gives us all kinds of different flavors of the time and for example a depiction of of piracy might reflect um both later iron age materials and the the the transitional period and even beforehand all enmeshed together well that's a good and a difficult question because we know that homer um worked in the 8th century bce not in the 12th um what he might be relying on is historical memory tales that we get from the hittite kingdom um it's interesting i i don't remember if aaron mentioned this but the old testament term for the philistine kings is sarin and out of that you get the greek word tyrannos and this is not a linear b word it's i mean it we don't see this in linear b um but we there is a luvian word um called tarwanis and it could be that the word for a pirate captain it means warlord the word for a pirate captain could be anatolian um and what homer might be talking about are sort of handed down i'm i'm always troubled by the iliad uh as as a source that's taken historically because it always seems that the people get in there and they mix things up and just when things get interesting the gods step in and uh sort of solve it all so i i wouldn't be surprised that there was historical memory and certainly there was would have been plundering going on probably even in homer's time so that's how i tend to see things like that um i know the odyssey is seen as a lot closer to being uh an account of um pirate activity but certainly we might think of the of the myceneans as going out and plundering but you don't want to plunder everything it's kind of like um with uh too much automation i henry ford made the comment you know if everything is automated who's gonna buy the cars i'd like to start by asking has archaeology told us anything about piracy in the late bronze age well there's nothing i would say um it's very very explicit about it there's as i said before there's hints to a couple from a couple of texts um and there's a couple of sites that have been suggested to be connected to piracy um but there's nothing you know it's not as if you know they found a pirate you know uh settlement like they have in the um in the caribbean or something like that you know it's not as is definitive of that i think it's more uh what what um the various people who are talking about piracy in these periods are more i would say more saying is that based on the uh the fact that in periods when we do have extensive historical uh documentation about piracy it's very logical to reflect it back to these periods as well and so that's that's i think the main thing unfortunately uh we don't have uh the grave of someone with a wooden leg or an eyelash or something of the sort that would be amazing yeah yeah uh when i sent these questions to dr hitchcock she said she's like i love these this is gonna be a long episode i like it she said a lot of these questions are gonna be answered with we don't know i was like i'm fine with that i was like well listen i think i think there is an issue here of um it's you know you can't prove it but again very often we have to use analogies from different cultures and periods to try to understand um you know the picture the periods in which things are a little less uh clear you know the the dark ages let's call them uh and um you know often you do something that sounds logical but you can't go very much farther than that based on the current uh fines and and uh and um you know inscriptional material and so now we're going to talk a particular favorite subject and that is art in your opinion does art tell us anything about piracy in the late bronze age oh gosh it tells us so much just in that um we don't have any accounts of the sea people's tribes by them and we what we and also with seafaring um we only have several shipwrecks none of them necessarily pirate wrecks and so most of what we know about ships comes from iconography and how it's either similar or changes and what the medianet haboo reliefs show as well as um these sort of really badly painted mycenaean 3c pots is that the preferred ship seems to be the mycenaean galley which is of course based on earlier minoan ships and it's sort of a long boat with a bird head device and you see similar devices also on sardinian bronze ship models and then there's a stirrup jar from the um cyclotic island of keras that shows what i always thought was a mycenean ship but more recently it's been identified as a sardinian ship and then some of these um pottery shards actually show um they just they're fragmentary they're not complete but they show fragments of people fighting on a ship and so it indicates there's some kind of fighting platform um on these galleys and you see uh sort of spiky-headed people which indicates the spiky-headed helmets or the feathered helmets you see in the meeting at habu reliefs you tend to see two kind of helmets the horn helmet uh like you see behind me on my um little uh and you see well i actually the the the horned helmet is on my left and the um feathered helmet is on my right and these are two main kinds of helmets you see and we don't really know for sure what they are made of but you see similar horned helmets on the sardinian warriors except with the sardinian warriors they're coming out of the front instead of out of the side and then with the feathered helmet they've actually found at the site of portez in arcadia in greek and greece rather one of these metal bands that would fit around the head and it had remains of canvas in the middle for like sticking feathers or quills or whatever they used to make these helmets from and that's the first time they've actually found what is regarded as a sea people's helmet so that's a rather um important find what's interesting is that what you'd never see with depictions of the sea people you never see the boar's tusk helmets associated with heroic myceneans which is also mentioned in the iliad and why does the iliad know that it's because it's a bronze age um it's because it's a bronze age text or is it because they robbed tombs and they found actual boar's tusk helmets there's also i mean this i'm kind of digressing a little bit here but there's also like hit tight turns of phrase and iliad there have been comparisons made to various mesopotamian myths so it's it's something that's kind of stitched together it's not it's not really a uniform sort of story but getting back to the art we have the meeting that have we released we have these pottery representations we have this helmet there's a couple pc period burials by 3c period i mean the period during the collapse we don't have a lot of burials from this era of what might be considered pirates but there's one um there's one in the uh from i believe it's from rhodes and um it shows uh or it is of a man who's buried with uh a now two sword the famous now two sword we talked about in earlier uh in an earlier pod and also um a spear an italian style spearhead an italian style razor and amber jewelry and lots and lots of other accoutrement with them but we don't find much in the way of rich warrior barrels from this period so it's really uh kind of an important find and then of course we have the weapons i'm not sure you know if you consider the weapons to be art or material culture but it's still a piece of evidence we don't have a lot of them i think there are 17 now two swords found all together in greece and i mean the thing is though you wouldn't expect to have a lot because bronze often tends to be recycled and put to some other use so 17 could be considered quite a lot and then there's a one of these hilltop defensible sites in crete they've actually found both a now two sword and an italian razor in a house which is an interesting context because it might indicate a house for one of these mercenaries or pirates was in fact living so based on other periods in history such as for example we know that when it was not farming season certain groups in medieval europe such as the north men would actually go viking basically you know their version of piracy based on the history of piracy would you say that in the bronze age it would have been seasonal uh it might have been uh particularly you know um you know people along the coast um because the you know in traditional agriculture in the mediterranean um you don't have what to do in your field you know 12 months a year uh and there are there are dead periods uh or less active periods so if you're um if you're uh uh living along the coast or not far from it it might be very logical uh to go out and do it um you know just like just like um you know some of the empires utilize farmers in the off seasons to go on military campaigns um that's one possibility or um for example you know farmers you know would uh would bring home the the olive crop during one season and make olive oil and then in the offseason uh they would weave um so you know some people we even some people and make carpets and some people go out and and rob ships so it's uh you gotta keep you gotta keep your food on the table now another thing is and i would assume this would be particular so in times of uh of collapse and uh droughts and things like that uh when there isn't enough food from agriculture people uh have to look for um alternative uh income um this is by the way what's happening what's happened and it's still happening to return in somalia uh people who are living in a failed state um have to feed their families i'm not saying it justifies them going out and being pirates but that's the that's the incentive that's the reason why they're going out because you look out at sea and a couple of kilometers off the coast there's ships carrying all the riches in the world um you know sailing by so you know you can take out your ship and steal it and then you can put food on your table um so i think that probably is again something that we had in many many periods throughout history even those when we don't have direct and clear-cut documentation of it yes absolutely because in the bronze age the technology oh there's one other thing i want to mention about the ships what you see on the meeting at habu reliefs and a scholar named jeffrey emanuel has written a lot about this is that you have a brailled sail which you don't see on earlier mycenaean galleys and it's thought that this innovation was added from canaanites and it kind of points to sort of entangled culture that you would get amongst the sea people especially with the different tribal names and although we can't locate all of them we certainly know the luca were from militia the ahiawan were probably greek and possibly also greeks living in the anatolian coastline and the pelosette who we associate with the philistines and then there are others that are a bit more pro and we know that um we know that the shekalesh who are often associated with sicily occupied tel dor because of the tail of when a moon so you have sort of changes in the ship iconography give us changes in the technology um these ships were not capable of sailing all year round in rough seas and you had what was known as a sailing season which went from april to october with both april and october being the sort of iffy months where things could get rough and you could get stranded someplace and in fact bernard knapp who's written on the amarna texts and talks a bit about seafaring also has written about how you have uh actual temporal distance but you also have cultural distance and he mentions how um a seafarer who got stranded in egypt ended up staying there for six years and so even though the distances could be short people might spend more or less amounts of time in certain places but it was april to october and again this tells us where not all historical references are accurate for example we know the solution pirates sailed all year round because they're referred to as having lived on their ships um it seems that the vikings though adhered to a sailing season um i'm not a huge expert on the vikings it's something i've just read a little bit about an area i need to do a lot more reading on where there's a lot of information is chinese piracy but the vikings also tended to be have the um the sort of sewing season and the sailing season so they would actually farm part of the year and go raiding the other part of the year um so there definitely was and you know we have to sort of make some assumptions or try to figure out you know well when the pirates were taking off part of the year where were they hanging out and it's been suggested by christophe nowitzki that there's a fortified site in the gorge of the dead in eastern crete near the palace of catastro where you might have had a pirate enclave because it would made a suitable place for hiding out also aaron and i have suggested that ma paleocastro which is a promontory on cyprus would have been a good place to um hide out also possibly uh pila coconut cremos on cypress so they would have probably spent part of their year um maybe just reverting to a farmer type lifestyle and another part of their year rating although it seems like piracy at the end of the bronze age whereas it was sort of a ongoing but sporadic activity earlier on at the end of the bronze age where it becomes intense that you would have had probably just a couple generations of pirate activity and then they seem to once the hittites lose their grip on coastal anatolia and the egyptians lose their grip on kanan and some of the centers in cyprus are disrupted you seem to have where they resettle quite quickly and so i would assume realistically we probably don't but i could be wrong and that is do we know anything about the sizes of different pirate groups what can we expect to be average or abnormally well i would assume that if you had small piracy you know like uh you know people living on a coast and going out on a small boat or ship then you're talking about a small group of five 10 15 20 people know more than that um though if you understand some of the see people phenomena as related to piracy so perhaps there you had larger groups working maybe you know with several ships simultaneously um you know to to to do what they're doing now again this is very well paralleled with many many historical examples of piracy of just you know a bunch of uh farmers in a boat with uh with some weapons uh down to you know pirate fleets um you know in this for example depictions of the roman navy fighting you know large fleets of pirates you know that uh which were a major problem that they had to deal with in you know in in major naval combat okay um i actually talk about this or we actually talk about it in our world archaeology article and what we relied on for demographics was partly assafjas orlando's book where he argues that the philistines were mycenaean colonists but he does some anthropological and demographic studies and suggests that the numbers were not all that huge around three to four thousand i think and um we also know that in the 18th century the numbers were not so great about uh 3 500 but they don't start out that big um and this is a good thing that uh marcus redeker talks about the north atlantic piracy you have just two original ships and which were crewed by i don't know how many people but from these two original ships you end up expanding to 3 500 or so pirates and what happens is that as they capture prizes and um attain followers um they the followers have to go into another ship because you can only carry so many people and then as um i kind of liken it to hunter-gatherer tribes because hunter i'm not saying that pirates are hunter-gatherers but what happens is with hunter-gatherer tribes is that they tend to have a catch uh um a catchment zone that they forage in and when the group gets too big or if there's uh fighting and disagreement they fission off and the group goes to occupy another area and i think we can look at the pirates like in this way in this regard in that when um warm warships get captured and you have uh it gets too crowded within a certain geographic area they split off and um let's say exploit another niche except for them exploiting a niche isn't uh growing and hunting food or producing anything it's uh it's plundering um and that's kind of interesting again the solution pirates seem to be more of anomaly it's suggested or it's recorded that there were up to 10 000 of them and in fact it's been argued that there were two there were so many solution pirates they couldn't have all come from cilicia so they had to have also acquired quite a number of followers um but they seemed to be the sort of the the exception to the rule and that they sh they sailed all year round and their numbers were so great it was more attractive piracy was more attractive to members of the british royal navy in the north atlantic era because the way the british navy would sort of hit out their ships would be to have the minimum number of people um on the ship to make the ship run smoothly and then accounting for death and accident things like that um and the differences with the pirates is that they um would have the maximum number on the ship that they could have because their economy was to sort of share everything um to share it equally it was very much an egalitarian society in that regard and um maybe the person who got a little bit more on a pirate ship and then this is in historical times would be the doctor or the the captain who could um attain leadership through skill and prowess but again they did not really portray themselves as having so much more uh than anyone else on the ship and they could also have as much grog as they wanted instead of uh grog being rationed out again as in the british royal navy so even though you might have a short life as a pirate um i mean usually if you made it to 30 you were an elderly pirate and on these ships and again this is very well portrayed in mastering commander where you have the young boy who's on the ship people would be pressed into the british royal navy in childhood and there's no reason not to think that this also happened in um the time of the sea peoples and there is no um indication of hierarchy from what we know in the iconography of sea people ships where they're shown as prisoners on the egyptian relief there's nothing that really picks out one of the particular sea people as special or different except one that is um has i think they have their hands manacled behind their back and that might be the only difference and that might indicate the captain but there's nothing to indicate any sort of hierarchical structure and from everything we know of historical piracy it seems to be an egalitarian structure where everything is shared and this is interesting in terms of what we know about feasting feasting in the 13th century world of the mycenaeans was something provisioned by the palaces and you would have what they call a diacritical feast and what that means is space is segmented whereby you have the sort of people the farmers and so forth outside the palace and you had the more elite people in um in the more inner areas and the more inside you were the more elite you were it's kind of like today when you go to a rock concert are you standing in the crowd or do you have the backstage pass and that sort of connotes your difference within the hierarchy now when we get to homer um the homeric term for feasting is deus and deus means to share so it means that things were shared as opposed to having this hierarchy of feasting and the two main activities that do take place in homer are feasting and fighting and this would also seem to sort of go along with the idea of piracy and so it would like you might have a ship that's overcrowded at the same time if they wanted to take a city um the ships would could actually beach with a minimal crew so they could carry off more stuff and apparently the mycenean galley was a ship that was fairly easy to operate so you could have a minimal crew and maybe have your other crew waiting elsewhere or maybe just operate with a minimal crew and while the mycenaean galley would be the ship of preference again what we know from historical piracy is that um pirates would um it would be like a crime of opportunity if you took a ship and it wasn't quite perfect you'd use it anyway and we do know that um in ancient times before like you had the isthmus or you had at the isthmus of corinth before the canal was cut through um you'd with smaller ships you could actually drag them over land or put them in a cart and move them that way so you might have a variety of ships but again there were always preferred types of ships so when it comes to weapons and armor and the late bronze age and then the subject of piracy most of us who have studied the sea peoples are familiar with the reliefs that show them fighting the egyptians and in some cases we know they've got horned helmets so on and so forth when it comes to typical piracy and ruling out possible large naval battles that may not have been related to piracy such as these battles of the nile and stuff like that would we have been expecting realistically more farm tools to be used in these acts rather than actual military weapons who knows i mean listen the um in the end of the day ancient military naval warfare is basically um the same as uh land warfare except you're doing it on a platform at sea because you didn't have long-range weaponry as they had you know um you know cannons etc so almost all um naval warfare is basically bringing your ships together and then either from very close range shooting arrows one another or uh boarding and that was the major component in ancient naval warfare is to is to maneuver your vessel so you can ram the other and then board um so um you can use a sword but you know if you don't have a sword and you have a uh you know an agricultural implement that you can hit someone on the head that might work always as well but i would assume that the pirates if they were more organized and they you know they had they had weapons of different types and again it could very well be and this is something that louise and i have uh have suggested that the pirate groups were multi-ethnic multicultural uh groups of various origins and then and again the reason why was one of the reasons why we say this is because again when you look at pirate groups in better documented periods they're very often comprised of a very mixed uh bag of people of different origins and it could very well be that each one brings the sword or the dagger or the or the uh of the bow and arrow typical of his culture and then they uh they fight in this you know this mixed bag of equipment well i don't know what you would call military grade in the bronze age but what we tend to see in depictions of the sea people and it's very similar again to what you see in these sardinian bronze figurines and you also see it in the ingot got it incomey which is kitted out like a sardinian warrior except for his ingot that he stands on although recent studies have shown that uh the ingot and the beard on the ingot god were later editions um and their kit they tend to be kitted out with a spear and shield and a helmet and then um it seems like they wear a corsalet and the corslip was probably made of leather it could even and we know from both from um aegean art as well as from homer we have these um descriptions of oxide shields and that's where you actually make the shield out of animal hide on a wooden core and um i was in a maritime museum in sydney a few years ago where i saw some aboriginal armor and the armor was actually it wasn't armor but it was like a body shield you wore and it was horse hide and instead of just one layer of horsehide there were multiple layers of it to create a cushion to protect one i would think something like metal armor would be very rare the only we only have two kinds of evidence as far as i know for metal armor and that would be you find these sort of um plates for making plate armor small plates like about that big and that would be stitched to something we never find huge numbers of them we find isolated uh pieces and they're often in a ritual context and so if people collected them and made a few sewed them to something and just had a few or had a lot i don't know and then we have the famous dendra armor from the mycenaean world which is quite a bit earlier i think it dates to like the 15th or 16th century but the armor is made out of concentric rings of bronze and each ring is tied to the previous ring with horsehide and it weighs about 30 kilos and all the weight hangs from your shoulders and it's very painful to wear you would have to be wearing some kind of leather padding underneath and then if you fall down you're literally like a turtle on its back you cannot get up and because it's kind of a one-off a lot of people believe it was probably more like ceremonial armor that the king would um wear like going in a chariot procession do like the queen wave as he's a uh going along but it it wouldn't it or you know it makes you think also something like jousting where you're just in a stationary thing and you're trying to knock somebody else out of their chariot but um it it it doesn't seem to me to be a much practical value what it seems to see you know if you had metal maybe a breast plate but it seems like mainly you have or um are uh sort of leather um leather cut leather uh armor and uh maybe hide armor and wood and then um the shields you get depicted in earlier aegean art these big figure of h shields and what you tend to see more is like a hoplite style armor almost with the sea people with a smaller round shield and then the spear and the um and the sword and you also see this depicted on the famous uh warrior vase from mycenae which also dates from the era of the sea people and usually you only see the side because it's better preserved where they're wearing the horned helmets on the other side of the warrior vase there are actually uh people wearing these sort of feathered or porcupine style helmets so it really is kind of a vase depicting greeks as as a see people's types so we know that piracy in the late bronze age could probably be very sporadic and so i want to talk about control over the shipping lanes when it comes to the late bronze age which governments or national entities can we expect to be patrolling with their navies basically well you would have you have the egyptians and the hittites um probably also some of the aegean polities had uh and navies um and i would assume that in times when these um kingdoms empires were strong and they projected their power then uh they would be more effective in um in stopping piracy whether actually physically being there and stopping them or knowing that oh i don't want to mess with these people so i'm not gonna i'm not gonna steal from the ships that are connected to them um but i would assume that even in times of uh you know when the egyptian empire was strong there still were people out there who were trying to rob the roads and rob the rob the seaways and now do we know anything about pirate bases and possible locations for hideouts forts and ports probably river valleys strategic areas um like promontories areas near choke points a choke point would be an area where the geography would force a group of ships to uh sort of spread out for example troy being on the straights of the dardanelles is a perfect example of a choke point and it's probably why troy was a wealthy city why it was a wealthy city because it would have controlled transportation from the mediterranean to the black sea and it could be why it was a does let's say a desirable target for uh aegean and other warriors to try to capture um so places like that any place that occupied a strategic area and it's interesting i we did a paper a few years ago where um i started looking at crete just in terms of its uh of strategic placement and in the earlier era of the minoans it's known as a period of peace and that there was a minoan thalistocracy although the minoan thalisocracy is something mentioned in the fifth century by thucydides and some historians have argued that um and i know one of your listeners is going to get very upset with this but that thucydides uh developed this idea of a minoan thalisocracy to legitimize the idea of an athenian thalisocracy now this is not my idea this is an idea that has been floated by a number of historians and when i was working on my phd on the minoan palaces i'd always go to sites very blinkered just focused on the architecture and the building and not really paying much attention to the landscape and the last couple of trips i made to crete i went around thinking more about where these sites were situated and a lot of them are either situated near the coast or on the coast or a little ways back from the coast or even overlooking the coast but also strategically placed near a river valley for example there's a very important palatial villa in southern crete called mirtas pyrgos and it's on a hill it overlooks the libyan sea but also overlooks a river valley and river valleys um from what we know about later studies of pirate geography river valleys were favorite hideouts for pirates because they could hide there but they could also uh they could also undertake ambushes from there just as they could from promontories and it seems like what also sort of uh helped contribute to what we call the paxmenoica or minoan peace most of their sites were not fortified was the fact that they located their power centers in strategically placed areas and that alone could have helped contribute to their um to their security now we see this also with the mycenaean palaces on the mainland they're located again on near the coastline in bays harbors um maybe a little ways back for example mycenae was not so visible in uh the argolid however terence was in my city and times the sea came right up practically right up to terence and this has been determined by core samples of the soil and so they would have like had a presence advertising themselves advertising their presence and that presence would it would be like a deterrence and just like today we have deterrences in the era of the barbary pirates as a deterrence you'd have these fortified cities and they'd have captured pirates that were dead in a gibbet hanging over the walls as sort of a means of deterrence but getting back to the mycenaeans for a moment a lot of the sites that were areas that were occupied under the myceneans later became occupied by the venetians so that indicates also their attractiveness as sort of trading centers but also trading centers would also um help to uh help to sort of create sort of sense of presence one subscriber had asked when it comes to piracy were there certain trade war routes that we can think were the most affected when it comes to piracy and if so did pirates and their presence influence the development or expansion of navies from national entities well for the early periods that's really hard to say i mean um you know what do we know about it we know very so little about it i mean we do know though in later periods that the romans and then later on and you know the the western navies were very you know there were periods when they were very very occupied with fighting piracy um and at the same time sometimes utilize pirates or what they call privateers for their uses and listen till today it took quite a few years for western modern navies to get a hold on the somali pirates you know they were running circles around uh the you know but the western countries quite a while um and uh so i'm sure it these were issues that were problems for many navies and many kingdoms and many polities over over the centuries i'm actually glad you brought up basically a lot of entities throughout history using pirates as almost a contracting group to mess with people right based on that realistically do you think that let's say ancient egypt or the hittites in anatolia may have also had similar relations with pirate groups as well paying them to basically attack uh let's say rival trade centers um it could very well be and and we know that the very you know the both the hittites and the egyptians used um soldiers of various origins um whether they were people who were captured and then enlisted into the army or they were mercenaries who came from afar and and for example the chardonnay apparently served as mercenaries uh in various armies at the time and we know that for example in later times in the iron age there were greek mercenaries who hired themselves out to all kinds of kings and uh and uh political entities in the eastern mediterranean uh so i assume that existed in earlier times as well and um you know one of the ways to win a war is to be tricky and if you can um use your um against your enemies all kinds of different groups that exist out there so you're doing your job well um you know because because in warfare you know until the geneva convention it didn't matter how you did it as long as the end you came home when you were victorious so you could be very very sneaky and underhand uh listen until today you know that you know you know they say that the second oldest profession in the world um is is is a spying so that's also part of it we now come to a question i think you're going to enjoy and that is the question of disease and piracy in the late bronze age and my question is do we have any records at all or any evidence that suggests possibly pirates having any issues with disease that would have been around during the late bronze age we don't have any records of pirates and their diseases because we don't have any records of pirates written by pirates almost ever and i'll come back to the disease in a moment but i want to mention um the language of the barbary pirates i heard the term lingua franca correct we usually think of lingua franca as a language used that that different cultures use to communicate internationally because um it becomes like an international language however the original use of the term lingua franca was the name of the barbary pirates language which was an amalgamation of like arabic turkish greek italian and several other languages and we have very few examples of it and it's kind of a modern only partially deciphered language so we don't even have their histories written by them anyway so we don't have any records specifically of uh of pirates and their diseases what we do have we have plagued deities that were as i talked about in the other pod worshipped i mean worship throughout the bronze age and into the iron age indicating plague was around we have historical evidence that the hip tight king and his son died of plague which could have weakened uh created enough weakness in their kingdom to make it easier to overthrow them we have a mouse from the ula baroon which could have been a plague carrier disease ships without a doubt carry diseases and we don't know what kind of any would have been carried then but it's quite possible that certain ships of pirates had disease but we really don't know what role it precisely uh would have played i mean we also know as i mentioned before we know that in the amarna letters that there was a shipment of copper getting that was late getting from cyprus to egypt because they were gripped by the hand of nergal which means they had a plague so there were probably plagues and illnesses going on which probably created moments of weakness might have been seen as a disease brought by different groups of people who traveled by ship pirates might have had it but we don't have any really um any hard evidence and so when it comes to the late bronze age and not just in the collapse but periods leading throughout the bronze age we've come a long way in scholarship and archaeology and understanding trade and trade routes in the bronze age and though we have a lot more to learn i was hoping that you could tell us when it comes to trade routes throughout the mediterranean during the late bronze age how affected do you think these trade routes were back in the 1980s when i was a student i told my history professor that i wanted to do a paper on economy in the classical period and he said there was no economy because there was no word for it it was just oikos which meant the household and then you had um this historian moses finley who sort of started he sort of brought structuralism into uh classical history arguing that you had um you had structures even if you didn't have texts talking about them and so you would have to have economy and it's only then that you started to have economy talked about really broadly and then you start to have roman historians coin hordes and their significance and it's really only in the 90s and later that you start to have talk about pre-monetary economy which is the economy of the bronze age trade and so forth and so it's been a really the last 30 years have been really exciting for trying to understand even bronze age economy because it's become an area that's more legitimate to work in an area that more people are interested in and so it's it's really kind of a new way of looking at things instead of looking at big buildings and big men i think the coast of crete was suspect susceptible because it seems to become somewhat desolated you still have a few big centers that persist into the iron age and it's probably because they're so big that they weren't attacked sites like hanya in the northwest and canasos in the north central area but then you have all this other movement to mountaintops and of course the mycenaean sites were susceptible because they were destroyed and you have a kind of a depopulation in in the mainland that we talked about in connection with pandemic any coastal areas they're going to be great for having trade but they're also going to be susceptible to piracy especially with these attacks by night um and um you asked me earlier about garden tools being used as weapons i'm sure they were you have this uh one part on the maiden at habu reliefs that show what looks like a garden hoe on a rope being used to pull down uh the mast on the um on the mycenaean ship so was it a grappling hook or was it a garden hoe i i really don't know but there's no reason you wouldn't but something that you do see as a great change is um in we get into the era where the so-called sea people settle and you have all these new sites or newly inhabited sites or newly amalgamated sites it's like when people migrate they don't migrate to places where they're strangers they usually migrate to some place with a prior connection and so instead of destroying like a lot of these canaanite sites it seems like the sea people settled among them and uh sort of formed what we would call what aaron and i call an entangled culture but you don't see weapons we don't have heart we have hardly any philistine weapons what we do have are tools um so there's a more there's a shift in terms of how metal is being used but back to trade routes the trade routes we would know from sort of the movement of imports for example crete had very few raw materials what they were able to export was their in the earlier era the palaces was textiles and uh probably wood and um we know that myceneans had a perfumed oil industry at pylos from the linear b texts and we know that pot we know how pottery moved around from seeing mycenaean pottery in the levant or in egypt we know that gold had to be coming from egypt ivory had to be coming from egypt or syria but probably mostly from egypt so it's sort of the the sort of movement of these items that partly helps us understand trade routes you also get earlier in the mycenaean period you have baltic amber in the mycenaean shaft graves this doesn't necessarily mean that myceneans were traveling all the way to the baltic region but you would have what we call down the lip line trade where things move from one place to another to another uh just like the caravanserai routes so you probably had direct trade you probably had indirect trade and especially tin and copper i mean these had to come from certain specific areas and so we can use this sort of distribution of fines to help reconstruct trade routes now having said that there are a couple of really interesting things um sardinia and sicily which are very close together and the western med is a place i've just started uh looking at and i have a sardinian phd student coming to work with me next year and you should actually do something with her because she's really she knows sardinian archaeology really well and she's going to be one of the few people that can really translate it to the anglophone world anyway you have a very different material culture on sicily and sardinia despite the fact they're extremely close together and it seems like trade routes that were going from cyprus to sardinia bypassed sicily and went mainly straight to sardinia although you do have some aegean objects in the region of syracuse in sicily but sicily otherwise seem to be a very um very isolated many ways uh although you do have a mycenaean style building from the 12th century that we're about to submit an article on right now but still not much context the context seems to be more between sardinia and cyprus and it seems kind of weird in some ways because what were the cypriots getting because cyprus had copper and sardinia had copper i'm thinking maybe they were getting cornwall tin from the sardinians or exchanging technologies but sardinia also has a very unique material culture based on these round fortresses called naraji but i'm kind of digressing a bit but what i'm trying to say is that the trade routes are not always as direct as we'd like to think because you might have certain areas being bypassed for we don't know why and you would also have currents that would make a difference i at the last creton historical studies conference five years ago i went to a talk on the movements of one of the um of the disciples of christ and how he moved around and how he got from ashkelon to corinth and he had to take a very specific route that had him traveling along the northern coast of crete and then up towards corinth rather than along the southern coast or other areas and this has to do with currents and also maybe where there were safe harbors but um there are subtle things that uh we don't entirely know um there was this idea back in the time of uh shortly after the discovery of the oola baroon that the ula baroon followed this continuous circular route around the mediterranean going from place to place to place and just continuously offloading and uploading uh goods and that was kind of the trade route that most people embraced for a long time and then this other scholar carol bell who looked at trade between cyprus and the levant she wrote an interesting paper called wheels within wheels and what she meant by that is like you might have this big circular trade route but you might also have smaller trade routes like going from enchamida biblos and back and forth so you could have you you would have a whole wide variety of different trade routes is what i'm saying and it's hard to always like single them out discreetly but we did try we did try in our papers that are our published papers aaron and i to sort of um show some of the possible different trade routes that people were using or that pirates were using and so now i want to talk climate and nature many of my subscribers had asked if climate change could have had any effects on piracy during the late bronze age and especially in encouraging it i'm sure um the uh if we see piracy as one of the one of the factors behind it is is societal collapse and a lack of resources and lack of governmental control so um we know for example that towards the late of the end of the late bronze age there was a period of drought and that may have been one of the major engines between behind the the late bronze you know iron age transformation and and and collapse so i would assume this is this is so also for uh things like piracy you know when you don't have enough food when there's not enough control and all this can be related to issues of climate then you know you're out there realistically when we look at the history of piracy and especially as we approach the late middle ages and the early modern period especially in the 18th century you start to see government-sponsored piracy privateers who work for the government you know usually to troll the enemy so on and so forth do you think realistically state sponsored piracy would have existed in the bronze age i have a hard time accepting that because they could just deal with ad hoc piracy like if they needed slaves or something and i think to encourage too much piracy would hurt production and would hurt trade although there's an interesting book that's written about later piracy on pirate economics and the author argues even though he's a free market economist he argues that piracy actually helped distribute capital more widely disperse capital by moving it to places where it might not have ordinarily been through taking from rich places and distributing it to other places and this is also brings in another important aspect of pirate economics we we often think of uh piracy like uh especially with the again the johnny depp movies or the um movies from the errol flynn movies about pirates always being after this chest full of treasure what pirates really wanted was food and grog and if they did plunder um objects it was more for the purpose of exchanging it but the the main things they were after like food grog and slaves things they could really make a lot of use of but i i just have a hard time seeing a lot of evidence for state-sponsored piracy unless again you think of things like the um stories of pia maraduce um from um ancient miletus or milawanda who is striking out at the hittites and causing them lots and lots of trouble so you might have had a limited amount of it it's just it's hard to identify and it's like you know the one thing we like about the pirate model is it accounts not just for the fact that you have mycenaean style pottery being produced all over the mediterranean at the end of the bronze age but it also accounts for other anomalies things like cypriot types of ritual activity from notched cattle scapulae which are used for fortune telling which you find not just in cyprus by then but also in the philistine world at telusafi and you find it as far away as sicily or things like the name tarwanis which is luvian or um the uh so-called um well lattes inscription from telusafe which is a lydian name and uh the brailled sale which comes from the canaanite culture and all these things point to pirates being a more multicultural uh sort of culture that sort of melded aboard ship into something independent from its origins i don't want to push the model any farther than i can go based on uh sort of sound arguments that are based on evidence and based on historical texts you know we might come up with something better in the future but uh yes it's or somebody else might come up with something but i i just don't see it right now so now as we come to the end of this i want to bring up the sea peoples and ask how they fit into piracy in the late bronze age and collapse and the reason why i specify that is i don't necessarily consider all the sea peoples to be pirates right i feel like there's a lot more to that especially when you have large groups of them supposedly moving by land and fighting alongside people moving by sea and so there's definitely more of a strategic military element there and i don't want to confuse migrations and military style invasions with piracy and so my question is would you consider it accurate to consider certain elements to be pirates but not all of them oh well um my view on this philistines for example is that it's a group that cons that's consistent of many peoples of various origin backgrounds um so for example um i don't i don't think that the philistines you know came in a in a uniform organized migration neither by sea or by land but rather they were comprised of various peoples some of which came by land some of which came by sea from outside the lebanon but also those within the live on now among the people coming from outside of the levant i think it's very logical to assume that some of them came from pirate-like backgrounds when you see the evidence that we do have from the philistines during the iron age we don't have evidence of extensive piracy in iron age felicia um but that doesn't mean that some of the groups that the philistines were eventually comprised of were not of of uh of pirate-like backgrounds and private activities and again because all of this is occurring during the late bronze age iron age transition and all the collapse that's going on there for more than a century i think it's very logical to assume that there are also hierarchical elements out there and they or at least some of them eventually become part of the philistines yeah i think that makes sense i was curious to know if it would have been uh i've i know i've seen it online several people will say and i had even wondered at first that basically all the sea peoples were pirates and a part of me had kind of felt i just don't necessarily feel that that's completely accurate i think i think it's making things too simplistic you know they're um they're the the sea people's phenomenon and the and the the lebron's iron age transition phenomena are complex multifaceted uh processes which are going on for 100 150 even 200 years with all kinds of vectors from all kinds of directions some of them may be related to piracy but to say that they're all pirates is you're going back to square one for a simplistic uh explanation i don't think i think we know enough nowadays to say that um things are not you know it's not a simple black and white explanation but rather a complex multi-colored um you know mishmash no i completely agree i completely agree when it comes to the sea peoples the late bronze age the collapse and piracy i've heard a lot of people automatically associate the sea peoples in general with piracy do you believe that it could be somewhat inaccurate to do so as in obviously there are some pirate elements to the sea peoples but that it could be a oversimplification to just call them all pirates um i think it was an oversimplification before aaron and i drew out the model to kind of explain how piracy as an activity uh could have worked i mean obviously these pirates were trying to eke out a living for themselves but i think i think piracy does pretty well describe the sea peoples um and there weren't as i said there weren't huge hordes and numbers of them there were some numbers of them and i think piracy and let's say robbery um best explains the evidence for their movements their settling their uh sort of entangled nature of their material culture um i'm not wedded to this theory even though i have four articles you know if it pushes somebody to write a better explanation um i'm all for that but uh i i think it's a much better explanation than mycenaean colonization um and a much more accurate uh means it's like why would mycenaeans want to go colonize anywhere um so no i think i think it's right now the best theory but again somebody comes up with a better one you know go for it i'm happy for them to put their theory out there and let it stand or fall um i do kind of have one other thing i'd like to mention yeah go for it um you didn't mention gender and um there's not a huge amount of evidence for gender we have pictures of the sea people traveling over land and carts where you see women and children but we do have evidence in other eras that women were pirates um i don't know the details on this because i haven't looked at the chinese evidence yet but there was a very prominent female chinese pirate um we do know of two female pirate captains from north atlantic piracy in the 18th century one was named uh mary bonnie i don't remember the name of the other one offhand but these are mentioned in marcus rediker's book but we do know that there were female pirate captains and if they aren't depicted in depictions of the sea people it might have to do with the fact that in later eras female pirates dressed like men when they were engaging in piratical activities they could have also been left at settlements but um it's very possible that women did engage in piratical activities we also have royal navy burials um from an island off the coast of egypt from again the era of uh royal navy activities and one was a woman who was buried like a man uh with weapons and she also had a little sort of a ball from one of these guns or muskets or whatever rolled into the curl of her hair which was very much a way that male uh maritime pirates and warriors it was a way they buried themselves so this is a burial from a later period there's also a viking burial of a female viking warrior and not the word warrior burial is very problematic because you get it um a lot of times it's assumed when there are weapons it's a man or that when they're buried with weapons it's a warrior and now that we're starting to get more skeletal studies they're realizing first of all that occasionally you do have female warriors buried with weapons and also occasionally you have warrior burials where they weren't warriors and being buried with a weapon doesn't necessarily determine that you're a warrior what determines it is that um usually there's a certain amount of muscle memory involved in being a warrior or a swords person and um it would be it's usually something that started military training starts when you're a teenager and so not everybody even who participated and see people's activity was probably a warrior some of them were probably just rowers um or very clumsy fighters but usually if you're skilled as a swords person or as a fighter you have a place in the shoulder where the connecting tissue is connected and it's usually thickened on warriors and so if you don't have that thickening and muscle tissue if you have the burial then you it would sort of indicate that person might have been buried like a warrior but was maybe not a warrior maybe a you know a wannabe warrior so that is something also very interesting um the problem with the sea people is we don't have a lot in the way of sea people burials uh so we can't tell that but i just wanted and we can't prove that there were female pirates among the sea people i just kind of wanted to sort of put it in as a possibility to indicate that it's something we see in other eras and other cultures and it could have been a possibility now that's a really good point i mean it's uh especially when you look at the sea peoples and other pirate groups you have a very multicultural oftentimes even multi-racial groups and so it wouldn't surprise me if obviously there would have been women fighting as a pirate in the bronze age i mean we know for example among barbarian tribes in europe to where in the roman and greek world women participating in military combat was kind of a frowned upon thing but in barbarian territory it was normal you know a woman for example could lead armies in celtic europe you know and stuff like that and so it'd be it'd be interesting um i will ask this you know if your life is on the line you're not gonna stay at home leaving you're just gonna go out there and you know try to save yourself as well do you think that the for example the depiction of the sea peoples by the egyptians do you think that even let's say there were women who were pirates who were visible do you think the egyptians would have left them out on purpose due to their view on egyptian society um not really because you had egyptian kings that were women and um although they were portrayed as men but i just think they would have been um what you see with the sea peoples other than the wagon scenes where you do have women portrayed with the with the um warriors they're all in warrior garb and so they might have just chose to stereotypically portray them as warriors and again if you look at the portrayals of the north atlantic female pirates they're dressed like men there is one thing one other thing i want to mention and again this will make some of your viewers heads explode it's on the idea of ethnicity and ethnic identity um pirates would have been an entangled culture then they were entangled later and by that i mean you have different cultural groups intermingling um i like to use barbarossa as the perfect example he was born on roads his mother was greek christian his father was albanian muslim he wore turkish garb including a turban but had like a little cross in his turban and many of the barbary pirate captains were actually british they continued to practice christianity but they adopted muslim names and muslim garb and so what constitutes identity is very much what we would say is entangled in these areas and not because not just because we're trying to be politically correct or social justice warrior but because when you have um maritime trade and islands and coastal um emporia and people moving around there is a lot of opportunity for cultural mixing to take place and it just was kind of a fact of life i'm going to often try to take our modern categories and impose them on the past where they're not really necessarily operative the categories are more let's say fluid ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for joining us today at the study of antiquity in the middle ages i hope you enjoyed this episode i had a blast doing it i really love these subjects and i'm so grateful for these awesome two professionals and scholars for coming on the show to better educate me and you on the subjects that we love dr aaron mayer thank you so much for coming on the show today my pleasure always great being here dr louise hitchcock thank you so much for coming on the show today pleasure as always so so [Music] you

Channel: Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Views: 30,313

Keywords: Sea Peoples, Bronze Age Collapse, Ancient Canaan, Ancient Egypt, Hittites, Ancient Anatolia, Ancient Greece, Homer, Ancient Mesopotamia, Ugarit, Ancient Africa, Ancient Mediterranean, Ancient Near East, pirate history, ancient pirates, Ancient history, mycenaean, Canaanite, Sea Peoples Documentary, Ancient Levant, Sumerian, Trojan War, 1177BC, Semitic, Indo European, assyrian empire, Ancient Israel, Ancient Warfare, Troy, Philistine, Hebrew History, ANCIENT SEA PEOPLES, eric cline

Id: EJ4AagRoIM4

Length: 87min 10sec (5230 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021