PSW 2351 Sailing the Wine Dark Seas | Eric Cline

is my pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker Eric Klein Eric is Professor of Classics and anthropology and director of the Capitol archaeological Institute in the department of classical and Ne Eastern languages and civilizations at the George Washington University he is an active field archaeologist and currently serves as co-director of excavations at tell cabri in Israel previously he served as chair of class classical and near Eastern languages and civilizations at George Washington University and is co-director of excavations at Mago in Israel also known as biblical Armageddon Eric has more than 30 s seasons of excavation and Survey experience at archaeological sites in Israel Egypt Jordan Cyprus Greece cre and the United States he's an author on nearly 100 academic articles and 16 scholarly and popular books he speaks widely and has given more than 300 scholarly and public lectures and presentations and he has appeared in more than 20 television programs and documentaries among many honors Eric has been awarded the biblical Arch archaeology society's best popular book on archaeology award not once not twice but three times and the American schools of Oriental research's best popular book book award as well he is also the first gwu faculty member to have won both the tractenberg prize for teaching excellence and the tractenberg prize for faculty scholarship he earned an AB In classical archaeology in anthropology at Dartmouth an MA at Yale in near Eastern languages and literature and a PhD in ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania his talk tonight is entitled selling the dark Seas international trade and the collapse of the late Bronze Age AGM please hold questions to the end and join me in welcoming Eric to the [Applause] podium thank you it's all yours thank you very much you can all hear me wonderful okay it's a think honor and a pleasure to be here uh and a bit daunting to be honest with so many notables in the audience I hope that what I have to say this evening will be of some small interest to you so let me without further Ado take you back to a time more than 3,000 years ago and to the Mediterranean both aan and Eastern Mediterranean a time between 1700 and 1200 BC when we we had the G8 of the late Bronze Age now I'm fudging a little bit there because to get eight rather than nine I have to have the means and the manans of Greece as one entity the aan but then we have Egypt we have the Hittites up in Turkey we have matani we have Assyria and Babylon we have the Canaanites and the cypriotes and I think that's eight right there now this is is without a doubt my absolute favorite period in ancient history if I could be reincarnated backwards it would be to this period I don't think I would survive more than about 24 to 48 hours but it would be a wonderful 24 to 48 hours and what I want to present to you tonight is what is so special about that period and then I'm going to completely collapse it and bring it to an end all of this comes to an end we don't know why this is still a mystery one of the great mysteries of history now this particular period though is actually uh probably better known to you than you had suspected so for instance this is the time of hot chepet the famous female pharaoh which I presume a number of you have heard of so also the time of tutmosis iiii one of the great conquerors uh from ancient Egypt Aman hotep III my favorite guy if I could meet anybody in Antiquity it would be this this man his son aanan the heretic Pharaoh is probably known to many of you I dare say a few of you have heard of King Tut all right this is all that time period and then Ramsey II and in fact the star of our show ramsy III this is all the New Kingdom Period of Egypt we're in the 18th Dynasty the 19th Dynasty it is the high point of the Bronze Age in case none of these names were familiar to you uh you may have heard of for example perhaps the Battle of cadesh but I'm betting the Trojan War maybe from how many you heard of the Trojan War yes okay in fact there will be something on PBS on Tuesday night on the Trojan Horse which I will be in uh along with other people so if you've got nothing else to do Tuesday night tune in to PBS Trojan War and the Exodus if it took place it will have taken place at about this time so 1250 BC for both of those so that's the time period that I'm asking you to come back and join me in tonight uh this is a time of dare I say globalization it is globalized for that period it's not globalized of course on the scale that we know it today but from Italy in the west to Iraq in the East everybody is in connection this is a um small world a social network analysis diagram that my wife Diane Harris Klein sitting in the front row here has created she is a specialist in social network analysis and put this together for me what it shows very simply is that if you were an Egyptian you may have had Direct contact with another group of people if you did not have direct contact you at least knew someone who knew them if you know for example the movie game with um what's his name Kevin Bacon the de same thing here and you're going to make a couple of hops but everybody either knows everybody or it knows someone who knows someone so it is interconnected it is globalized for their time period And I would argue that that period and our period are two of the only times in history where we have this interconnection so studying that particular period is not just an exercise in ancient history what happened to them may be of interest to us today but I will get to that so in this period which is the Bronze Age Bronze Age starts at about 3,000 BC lasts till just after 12200 BC uh you make bronze using tin and copper I dare say a number of you know the in fact the percentages and how many know how much copper does it take in here what percentage it would be anybody about 90% is what you want leaving 10% tin if you don't have tin you can use arsenic I don't recommend that but you can make AR cical bronze if you wish now copper is not a problem copper is from Cyprus at that time in fact the name kpros means copper but tin is the problem tin is coming from off of this map in fact it's coming from the region of Afghanistan now some of you I presume have lapis la jewelry would that be correct comes from the same region it's the badakhshan region of Afghanistan tin and lapus come both from there now in order to make the bronze then the 10 has to come all the way across and we in fact know that they're doing this I know this is way too small uh to read it uh from your seats so I'll I'll read it out loud and I'll take the liberty of translating the Acadian because I know it's too far for you to see it uh but this is a letter that is found at Mari up here on the Euphrates and in an archive that dates to just under 1800 BC round about the time of hamurabi the great in fact there is a tablet which says oneir of a Mina of 10 to the Koran and ctor is what they called creit so it's a third of a Mina one and a third Mina to the korian another third to The Interpreter so we have somebody news bilingual at least of the chief Merchant of the korans in ugarit so ugarit is on the coast here so what we have in this one tablet is telling us the tin came from Afghanistan went to Mari goes from there to ugarit and from there over to C and then to Mainland Greece so this is a trade route of hundreds if not thousands of miles so this is the interconnection that we see now it's not just for tin uh they're also trading for gold and other precious materials but they're also trading for finished goods as well and in fact um the raw goods and the finished goods together are extremely important so much so that my colleague Carol Bell you see her here she's a British archaeologist she compared tin in the Bronze Age to oil today and at one point she said the Strategic importance of tin in the late Bronze Age was probably not far different from that of crude oil today the availability of enough tin to produce weapons grade bronze must have exercised the minds of the great king in hausas that's up in turkey and the Pharaoh in thieves down here in the same way that supplying gasoline to the American SUV driver at reasonable cost preoccupies an American president today and I completely agree with her I think it's actually a very good parallel because if this root is cut at any point and they can't get their tin they can't make their bronze just like if our oil supply lines are cut I don't know if any of you well you probably do I remember the 1970s gas lines right same sort of idea now we actually have in those Mari archives which are one of my favorite sets of uh ancient letters to read we have evidence of other things that are traded besides the raw material so for example here it says one Koran weapon so a minoan or cre weapon the top and the base are covered with gold its top is incrusted with lapis lazle so it would have looked something like this a solid gold dagger with a Lapis handle I don't know about you but I want one of these I'd walk around I'd have a concealed weapon permit no problem and i' just walk around and this is wow anyway but they're also trading and this is actually my my favorite text of all from antiquity it says one pair of leather shoes in the korian style so I presume some of you have been to Creed so it's probably sandals or it could be boots like from Hanya but I think it's sandals which to the Palace of hamurabi King of Babylon and yes that is the hamurabi right eye for an eye tooth for a tooth a great lock code um Bak Lim an official carried these leather shoes but which were returned now I've always wondered why did Hama robbery return them I mean talk about a mystery for the Ages were they too small were they so last Millennium and since they're from C they've got like distance value why didn't he at least keep them and regift them that's so one day I actually I told my students at GW I said can please go through the lock hod of hamurabi all 272 or 282 two laws and find for me the penalty for returning things they went through the whole thing and they came up kind of sheetless and said um Dr cin there's no penalty for returning anything I said exactly he got away with it so I think for me this is evidence that things haven't changed that much right what was of interest and of not non-interest to them back then are still of interest to us today now some of the other evidence that we've got for what I would call Long trade the sailing the wi dark Seas part of this talk come to us from a variety of of data we have written records some of which I just quoted to you we have uh pictorial records like we have here for hot shepsut and then we actually have the uh artifactual evidence that we've come up with in excavations so when we're looking at things like hot Shepu uh in this case she is sending an embassy down to point and on her Mortuary Temple she shows us the fleet going and in fact she shows us the objects and the people and the animals that they are bringing back from point she even shows us the queen and tells us that her name is etti so we know the name of the queen of pun from hat sheep's time which is about 1500 BC so 3,500 years ago the problem is we've never quite known where point is some people have suggested Yemen or Arabia but recently as of 2010 they did some analyses of baboon monkeys in the British Museum and based on those and a comparison to Modern baboons they have determined that P is probably Ethiopia or retria and that was always the most probable anyway but now it's nice but at at the hands of baboons we find out where point is so that's quite a ways away um she's not the first to send an expedition down there nor will she be the last but she and her stepson right to mosis III is both her stepson and her nephew they are probably better known for the contacts with Greece so here we have in the Tomb of Reay who is the Vier or like the number two person in the Kingdom we have a wall painting from his tomb showing us people coming from the aan now it's hard to tell if they're Manan or Myan they are a Gian style but what they are dressed as and the gifts they are bringing there is no question about it uh and in case you are questioning anyway the inscription next to it says these are men of kefu which is the Egyptian name for cre Mesopotamia cre is kaftor Egypt it's kefu so we frequently see in In Articles people talk about kaftor slfu meaning cre so in another tomb for example we see the same sorts of uh men we don't know if they're uh ambassadors or what they're doing but when they're bringing things like this a Bull's Head you know they're coming from creit and again the inscription says it's kefu the interesting thing is that the inscription also says that this is Inu which we spell i n w and that's usually interpreted as tribute so thought people thinking oh Egypt's in charge but Inu has a secondary meaning of Simply a gift and more than likely these are gifts being brought by an embassy the question though is what is going on at this time period and indeed in these tombs it's not just the aan people pictured but in the different registers there are people from different parts of the known world at that time so I suspect it's something like a jubilee Festival of top Moses III celebrated after 30 years of rule and you've got people being sent by other kings in other words it's like you know when one of the British royalty get married or a coronation or something like that so I think we're looking at an event on that scale but we also have other uh voyages I believe these are the colossi of mnon which are probably familiar to many of you they're about 60 feet tall they're sitting at the entrance to Aman hotep III's Mortuary Temple now he is ruling in Egypt about a 100 years later or so he's actually 1390 to 1350 so so uh close to a century later back here where it's missing was his original Mortuary Temple which is now gone it was quarried away quite literally by the later pharaohs who said why should we go to the Quarry and get cut stone over there when we can just dismantle this uh this Temple and build our own so most of the blocks from his Temple are found in later Pharaoh's temples and Mortuary remains um one of these was famous in Antiquity for the cries of the God every morning it turned out it was simply the stone expanding and Contracting with the desert heat uh there was an earthquake during the Roman period they came in and repaired it and lo and behold the god stopped speaking so how it goes now these are are uh interesting in and of themselves and in fact there is graffiti from tourist carved in there but they are Greek and Roman tourists so 2,000 years ago they're already carving Kilroy was here and so on so but what interests me is not these front though I love them dearly but inside the temple there are the remains of now at least 40 statue bases they're not nearly as big as the colossi but each of them you can see right here would have been over life siiz maybe a 10t tall uh statue of Aman hotep III and on each of the bases is carved names of places that were known to the Egyptians so one base contains um place names from Anatolia the Hittites ancient turkey another one has names from Assyria and Babylonia another one has Nubia and so on this particular one has names that have never been seen before in Egypt and will never be seen again except for the two head names at the top of the list these two guys who are shown as bound prisoners which by the way does not mean that Egypt can control the aan this is the Egyptian standard iconography for depicting a foreign place and in particular you can kind of see the oval there has crenellations around it that means it's a fortified City these two over here one is kefu which is cre the other is Tanaya which is mainland Greece and then around on this side we have 14 names now kefu and Tanaya have been seen before but these 14 names have not been so there's kefu and there's tanayah and then going around the base we have names such as amnos festos kidonia my dict methana napon KRA perhaps Troy though I doubt it it's probably more Elia canosos amnos again now when this was found it was found in the 1960s and published promptly was uh uh rather famous British egyptologist who said in reading this and then he published it in a journal called orientalia 1965 and he said I hardly dare suggest this but this looks uncomfortably like omnis and canosos and that might be my seni well he was of course completely right all right but he was very hesitant because nothing like this had been found before so the question is what are we looking at what is this list and in particular why does amnis sauce appear twice well in fact if you plot these on a map and then you compare it to spots in the aan where objects with Aman hotep III's name have been found you find there's a correlation in fact these are fragments of fance it's a material halfway between uh glass and pottery they have Egyptian hieroglyphics on here right here and as you can tell I mean you can see it says netra nephra neat ra right right yeah the good god nebat Ra which is Al H up the third's throne name and it then continues these are pieces from the bottom they're inscribed on both sides if these have been found in Egypt they would be called Foundation deposit plaques and you put them underneath the temple or a building or a statue when you've dedicated it think um Time Capsule like for us today so in Egypt these would be underneath probably a Temple or a room in Greece these are at myi they were found not together but scattered but almost all of them are in ritual contexts so the means in Greece knew that these were religious of some sort but used them wherever they wanted to now these plaques have not been found anywhere outside of Egypt except my seni it's the only place so something unusual is going on here and then we've got uh his Scarab at canosos we've also got objects with his wife Queen T and we have this correlation so it looks like the uh sites on the aan list and the sites where we have his objects we've got a correlation and in fact if we map it uh it really looks like the beginning sites go from Egypt to creit across cre from uh one side to the other then up to and then Greece via KRA then back down to Creet and then to Egypt in fact I think that's why omnis sauce appears twice as if you're on a car trip today you get in and within the first 10 or 15 minutes one of your kids says I've got to go to the bathroom all right so same thing here you get to to cre from Egypt and you're like all right everybody out use the bathroom get some food get some water then you go and visit your longtime friends the monans with whom youve been trading already for more than a century but then you go up to Mainland Greece to see these upstart means who have really just appeared on the scene so you go up to here figure out what's going on you come back and then you stop at Amon sauce again and you say Okay 23 miles until the next rest stop everybody out use the bathroom and you go back to Egypt again so I actually think this is a geographic itinerary now that does not mean that uh Aman hot the third himself went in fact I rather doubt he did but it does mean that he sent emissaries and so I think those fance plaques for instance are rather special I also think they were're only seeing the tip of the iceberg here these things would have accompanied an entire cargo of gift Goods perishable gold textiles spices perfume and so on and they would have brought them back today so I think what we're seeing is kind of the Bricker back that's left over right you go on a tour you go on a Smithsonian Cruise you empty out your pockets when you get home and you've got you know bus tickets and this and that the little and you put them maybe in a little album to remember your trip same sort of thing here I think what we're looking at is the Bricker Brack of the trade we have to realize as archaeologists that we've probably got less than 10% left to us of what was once there the rest is all gone either it's like textiles that have perished or it's raw materials like gold or silver or copper or tin that have been made into finished objects and now when you look like an Ayan sword you can't tell where the copper and Tin came from unless you do something like lead isotope analysis and then you in fact can tell so the hard Sciences are becoming and have been for a while more and more important in archaeology now we also upon occasion get lucky and in this particular instance with the ulon shipwreck in 1300 BC we are very lucky because they were not the ship went down at about 1300 BC this is a National Geographic picture where you have one of those Egyptian paintings from a tomb and then the Reconstruction of the ship underneath the ship went down off the coast of turkey one dark and stormy night actually don't know if it was either dark or stormy but I do know the ship went down it hit a wall spun around and went straight down 100 140 ft deep it's down there between 140 and 170 ft it's off the diving charts was found by a young boy uh actually a Turkish sponge diver on his first season of diving and he came back up and he told the ship's Captain I saw a metal biscuit with ears one of these guys that's an oxide Ingot that's raw copper weighs about 60 lbs and it really looks as if you slaughtered a cow or Bull and took off the head as if it's got the four legs there this seems to be the best way to carry them we see them in the Egyptian wall paintings it also may be at 60 lbs a talent it may be an ancient Talent from that time period so the the young 17-year-old came up said I saw a metal bistic with ears the captain said oh that's what those crazy American archaeologists are looking for and he reported it and in 1984 George Bass from Texas A&M Institute of NAU clar geology started diving on the wreck and with uh his student now his colleague Jamal pulock they Dove on the wreck until 1996 almost every year something like 20,000 Dives with no major catastrophes mostly because they had an ex Navy Seal in charge of procedure and what they came up with was an entire ship filled with goods from 1300 BC it is a microcosm of the trade from back then seven different civilizations have uh artifacts on board now you can actually see these with the holes of them anybody care to Hazard to guess what we're looking at there it's the first time they've been found in C2 these are Stone anchors absolutely going right down the middle of the Hole uh because as one would get caught you just chop it off and put down another and in the meantime they're ballast and these have been found on Cypress and archaological sites but never in a shipwreck before but it was the copper that really made the news more than 300 of these ingots right you can see walking you see they take their flippers off so that they don't disturb them it's my friend Nicole herfeld carrying a Canaanite jar there these uh let's see there was so much bronze it's 10 tons of bronze and then there's also tin on board the equivalent of one ton of tin which is of course enough to make the bronze you need it was um at one point estimated this is enough raw material copper and Tin that if you made it into bronze it would outfit an army of 300 soldiers complete with swords Shields Greaves helmets you you name it when this ship went down somebody lost a fortune and in fact a kingdom may have gone down at that time I hope they had insurance and actually I just but they did have insurance back then we know from some of the text toar that they were already insuring shipping not much has changed now of the raw materials and other Goods that were found on board the ship some of them um just wow it was there are a lot of Firsts on here so for instance up here I just actually mentioned what this is what material is this that's 10 you've got some finished objects in it right here but there is a bun in it and that guy up there that is one quar of what would have been an oxide ingot in tin but it was worth so much they've chopped it into quarters this is the first time that tin had ever been found from the ancient world from this time period in fact ironically George bass had found some um a good 20 years earlier on another wreck and nobody believed him because it came up looking like toothpaste now this time he found this and he just said told you so so we have tin here these are are my favorite they are also bun ingots they're also raw material but what material are we looking at there anybody hasard to guess this is ancient glass ancient glass and in fact um when the scientist at the Corning Museum analyzed it and analyzed also Egyptian glass and Myan glass chemically it's all the same they're all getting their glass from the same Source there are blue ones uh pink ones brown ones uh yellow ones they've got all kinds of colors there so this was the first time that raw glass had been found we had anticipated it but had never found it here something you probably won't guess this is uh from the pistachio tree it's terab benth resin and you use it in particular to make perfume which pyos on the mainland of Greece was known for but it's also a way to color wax so it's not just white you get a kind of a yellowish tint uh Ivory that one I'm sure you had no problem with but to their surprise although you've got elephant here these two the canine and the inzer were hippo they hadn't even thought about that yet they went back and retested all the Bronze Age ivory from the British Museum and the Lou 90% is hippo not elephant now you don't have hippos in that region like of Israel anymore because they hunted them to Extinction so that was a surprise too and then here unfinished well unused brand new pottery from Cyprus and seral Palestine Israel Lebanon Syria Jordan absolutely unused found in what turned out to be like a China Barrel that's being sent so the the big question is you know what do we have here they originally hypothesized that it was a ship going round and round and round which it may well be picking up some stuff taking dropping off others um I actually think it might be a gift from one king to another much as the gift giving that we know is going on the other possibility is that it was on a shopping trip because most of the raw Goods that are needed are things that would have been needed back in Greece so and there were at least two Myans on the board on board the ship we can tell from their goods so I'm actually wondering if this was sent out so you know you've got your shopping list I need 10 uh I need bronze uh I need some glass um I should get some milk while I'm out as well we're probably add of cat food so but when this ship went down it never got back so again in looking for a kingdom that may have had trouble I actually probably want to look somewhere on the mainland of Greece now we have written evidence about such voyages as well uh the senanu text dates to about 40 years after UL Bruin ship went down this is from ugarit on the coast of of um northern Syria from the present day Amash TAMU the son of Nick mea uh by the way those are very good names if you're um looking to name a cat or a dog or a hamster uh I don't know any with the name of amast Samu son of nicka King of aart exempts senanu the son of sigu his grain his beer his olive oil to the Palace he shall not deliver his ship is exempt when it arrives from Creed so here we've got written evidence from 1260 BC of a merchant in in ugara in Northern Syria sending a ship to cre and importing back grain beer and olive oil and look what we've got he is exempt from taxes when he gets back I think this is evidence actually of the first corporate tax break in history well all of that was merily ticking along for a good 300 or more years with everybody happily doing trade and reciprocity and diplomacy and marrying everybody and signing treaties and everybody's in touch and then into this mix comes a little chaos and with the chaos then comes a collapse and one by one each of the civilizations that I've just mentioned goes out until we're only left with Egypt and even Egypt is so weakened that it's never the same again so the question then when we talk about the collapse which is just after 1200 BC is what caused this why did these kingdoms that were stable independent and yet dependent on each other and happily surviving for hundreds of years suddenly went down one after the other within a couple of decades so the situation say in 1200 BC was different from that in 1100 BC and was completely different in 1,000 BC the world as they knew it collapsed it was never the same again so the question that we've got which has never been solved is what caused this collapse so this was as I said a huge loss to the world in fact I would compare it to the Roman Empire that's going to fall 1500 years later we don't have anything in between of that magnitude so what caused it we still don't know that's what I wrote this book about I will give you a spoiler alert I don't solve it either I have suggestions and I will show you some tonight but there is no answer out there right now the original hypothesis was that it was the sea peoples that did it they come we know twice they come in 127 BC and they come in 1177 BC uh we know because the Egyptians tell us this in records but in fact 1207 and 1177 those are our numbers it's probably more accurate to say the fifth year of manpa and the eighth year of Ramsey III because the egyptologist keep changing the numbers in fact when my book came out with the title 1177 BC I got an email from a senior colleague in New York who s which said simply congratulations the title should have been 1186 I sent him back a two-word email and no it's not what you're thinking my email said it was and it was the contract for the book said 1186 BC the year civilization collapsed but in the eight years that it took me to research and write it the egyptologist changed the chronology so I changed the title of the book all right now what we are told for um 1187 1177 the eth year of Ramsay on the wall at Med at Habu he shows us these sea peoples now um Gaston masbro a French egyptologist had already looked at these and created this hypothesis that the sea peoples had ended the Bronze Age and he came up with it in the 1860s by 1901 it was solidified but they hadn't yet found any sites that had actually been destroyed so it was a theory with no facts however as the archaeologist excavated the sites and they turned out to be destroyed they attributed each one to the sea peoples I actually therefore think that we've given the sea peoples too much credit I don't think they did everything but we're told by the Egyptians exactly what happened I won't read you the whole thing but Ramsay says on that wall the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands all at once the lands were removed and Scattered in the fry no land could stand before their arms from hat we know where that is that's the Hittites up in turkey kod that's also in Turkey kimesh North Syria artswa on the western coast of turkey alashia that's Cyprus all them on being cut off at one time a camp was set up in one place in Amore that's amuru it's Northern Syria so we know they're coming across basically from you know Greece to Turkey to Cyprus and then down the lant until they get to Egypt and he actually tells us their name he says they are the peset the tajer the shees the denan and the Wes so he doesn't call the sea peoples that's our name for them he actually gives us their individual names and he says he defeated them but there again he gives us the names the denan who are in their aisles the tajer and the peset were made ashes the shardana and the Wes of the sea they were made as those that exist not so he won but as I say it was a pic Victory Egypt was never the same again and in fact we know what they look like because he tells us this in fact if you want to go to a costume at some point dress up like a sea person you'll be the only one there uh if you have trouble finding this costume you can do what two friends of mine in graduate school did they simply cut out several hundred letter C out of cardboard pinned it to themselves and when we said to them what are you they said we're sea peoples they won first place at that costume party so you could do that but our problem is that we've never actually found any place that belongs to them we don't know where they came from and we don't know where they went to not really so people have played linguistic games with them so for instance where in the Mediterranean is a place that sounds like shardana that has the same consonants what would you guess Sardinia Sardinia shardana people are thinking that maybe they're coming from there what about shees is there a place near Sardinia that has those same kind of consonants Sicily absolutely so people are thinking maybe Sicily TOA we're not so sure about maybe the troad like around Troy the denans people have long thought that these are Homer Dan which is possible Wes we're not sure maybe wio which is another name for Troy it's only the last one the peset that we think we know and in fact cholon Jean Fran champoo who translated Egyptian hieroglyphics he already said that long ago that these are probably the Philistines right in fact if if you read your Bible it's inferred that the Philistines come from creit so that would actually work fairly well and we've got Philistine remains it actually looks like mean pottery from Mainland Greece but it is made using local clay in Cypress and Roads and Israel Lebanon Syria today so it's what we call degenerate mean and it really looks as if the Philistines are maybe people from mland Greece that came over so I'm one of the school that thinks that they're moving from the Western Mediterranean to the Eastern Mediterranean for whatever reason then they lose and Ramsey III settles them in there he says he settles them in Egypt now they are coming not as Vikings or anything like that but as a migration these are also pictures from that same wall at mednet Habu they are coming with their entire families including the kids and all the luggage and everything else this is a migration think of it in terms of like um the Dust Bowl in the 19 1930s with people moving from Oklahoma so there was for a long time and in fact still is uh in some quarters a very nice logical linear explanation that there was a drought somewhere over in Europe or Western Mediterranean that started a famine that started the movement of sea peoples that led to havoc and cutting of trade routs and that led to the collapse right nice and simple great explanation too good too good I don't think it's that simple that's too simple I think it was a lot Messier and so what I wanted to look at is what really happened so I'll spend the rest of this lecture then going through a couple of the hypotheses so SE peoples as I said were originally blamed I think they are as much victims as oppressors they did exist but I think they are in trouble and are moving along anyway so the other things that have been suggested drought famine Invaders earthquakes these these are all possibilities and so I wanted to investigate which ones of these worked so for example drought this was suggested already back in the 1960s reys Carpenter a professor at brenmar suggested that the Myans on Main the Greece came to an end because of a drought but he had no hard proof he couldn't prove it it was just a theory and because of that it eventually went away people forgot it basically but in the last four or five years we have the proof that he was searching for we have the hard data now KUSI a French scholar and his team went to gibala in North Syria and they took their Colin uh pollen cores from a dried up lagoon and in that section they were able to look at the pollen and realize that there was what they call a 300-year dry event drier climatic conditions occurred in the Mediterranean belt of Syria from the late 13th early 12th centuries to the 9th century in other words their pollen shows that there was a drought in the near East for about 300 years this is what Carpenter have been looking for but couldn't find so county yusi found it in North Syria he and his team then went to Cyprus and found the same thing Hollow salt and techie they took a core they looked at the pollen and here they found there was a drought from 1,200 to 850 so so far we've got Syria Cyprus then a separate investigator Brandon Drake took a look at three or four different lines in this case three are the ones that I liked and each one of them implied a drought this time in Greece and in particular there was a drop in the temperature of the surface of the sea which means you'll get less rain over the land which means it's aot he said there he wasn't quite sure how long it lasted but it certainly started somewhere between 1250 and about 1197 so Syria Cyprus Greece and then Israel uh dhne Lut who you see here and Israel finlin who I worked with at megiddo and Thomas lit from Germany took uh coring samples from the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee and they found evidence of severe drought beginning 1250 BC but only lasting for 150 years so it's over by about 1,00 so Syria cyp Greece and now Israel I think we've got a drought going on here now of course when they announced it as each team announced that the world's media seized on this because we're kind of fascinated with climate change and drought so here's the New York Times talking about drought being a culprit in the Bronze Age uh the LA Times seized upon it as well uh National Geographic of course didn't want to be left out so drought led to collapse of civilizations uh archaeology magazine drought might have doomed bronze AG civilizations uh New York Post got into the ACT but they added in globalization for good measure and then of course we had the infamous NASA funded study which said that we were going to end in a couple of decades uh and then NASA backed off and said actually wait we didn't fund that and that's not exactly how it goes at that point I was fed up and I published an oped in The Huffington Post and I just said the collapse of civilizations complicated and went from there so this is what we're dealing with I think we've got drought now that's you know scientifically proven what about famine that is much harder to find in the archaeological record unless you find you know Mass Graves with people looking emaciated but it's very hard to find that however if we have written texts that's better and we do from ugara which we've met already it's up here rash ugarit there are several archives belonging to Merchants that were connected with the Royal house here is the house of ortu for example and he gets a letter from a merchant at a satellite campus basically of his uh Merchant Enterprise from imar in Inland Syria 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 evidence of famine I think so just in case here's a letter from the king of ugar to another probably another king here with me plenty has become famine so imar in Inland Syria ugarit on the coast they've both got famine even up in Turkey the hittite king says do you not know there was a famine in the midst of my lands it's a matter of life and death so everybody is suffering here in fact the Egyptians end up sending grain to the Hittites even though they had been their enemies not much earlier clear now with this part and parcel you're going to get probably Invaders but it's hard to tell at an archaeological site who actually destroyed your site sorry it's actually my alarm I know I'm running out of time here where was I oh yeah destroying sites when you are digging a destruction at a sight you know it's destroyed but you don't always know who did it uh and even then it can be a matter of debate so here again writing comes in here's for mugar it's one of the last texts that we've got my father now the ships of the enemy have come they've been setting fire to my cities have done harm to the land doesn't my father know that all of my infantry and chariotry are stationed in hati all of my ships are in the land of Luca they haven't come back please tell me if you see more ships all right so this I think is evidence of Invaders right you'll agree with me there um others too here when your messenger arrived the Army was already humiliated and the city was sacked again Invaders coming in here uh and in fact at that city of gabala where KUSI found his first evidence of drought there are destruction layers and they've actually gone ahead and label them sea peoples I think that's a little get putting the cart in front of the horse I will agree that it is destroy and it's at about the right time but there's nothing that actually says it sea people so I'm not sure I'll take that final step with them and in fact I would use Canaanite hator as an example here at the site we know it's destroyed at about this time 13th century BC the palace is so completely destroyed that the mud bricks are um burnt red or black um but even the two co-directors can't agree on who destroyed it I'm non bentor ruled out Egyptians CU there are Egyptian statues that are defaced there and he said no egyptian Army would have defaced Egyptian statues which he's quite right he rules out Canaanites because there are also Canaanite statues there that are defaced and he says they wouldn't have defaced it so he's right leaving with Israelite sea peoples um he rules out sea peoples he says hot Sor is too far inland which I would actually disagree with leaving for him Israelites right he wants Joshua and all those guys to destroy but but his co-director Chiron zurman says actually you know what at hotor not everything's destroyed it's the Palaces and the temples and that's it and she says that for me is an indication that the lower classes rose up and I think we have an internal Rebellion when they got cut off from their supplies and they had trouble they torched the elite so she says maybe the 1% went away but not everybody else so my point here is that if it at hotor the two directors can't decide who destroyed their site it's kind of hard for the rest of us as well might have been sea people might have been somebody else earthquakes I won't spend too long on this just to tell you that there are earthquakes at this time there's in fact a 50-year period of them uh modern seismologists talk about an earthquake sequence if an earthquake say in turkey and you see here these are all the earthquakes since 1900 if you've got on the North Anatolian fault line an earthquake that doesn't release all the pressure at once you will get another earthquake somewhere nearby whether it's a couple days later a couple weeks later something like that and it usually is over a 50-year period where this fault line unzips This is a map of the earthquakes from 1939 to 1999 a 60-year period we have the same thing in Antiquity from about 1225 to 1175 so I think we've got earthquakes at that time and indeed many of the sites that are destroyed are on active fault lines this at M for example that's a scarp that's one/ half of the fault line oh my reaction here is the means built their Capital City on top of a Act of fault who would do that then I thought wait a minute San Francisco yeah okay so same thing here and if you look at the bodies we actually have earthquake victims at myi and at tyan a woman in a child there uh even at Troy that's not supposed to be tilting that way in fact here's a better picture I took when I was there last August that is earthquake destruction and even at ugara itself that wall is not supposed to look like that so we've got earthquakes as well and then people have suggested cutting of the international trade routes now we've already spent more than half of the lecture on the trade routs so you know that we've got this for example tin coming and all I would say here again is what happens if this is cut at any part of the root and suddenly you can't get your tin anymore you can't make your bronze now I think if we sum up I will pres I will ask you there are three things that I think I can say that we will all agree with right number one would you agree that we have a number of separate civilizations that are flourishing and they're interacting and then all of a sudden they are consistently Interac acting but they're gone would you agree with that in fact here it's clear that many of them are destroyed even if we don't know who does it and in fact there is no unequivocal proof as to what caused it so there were flourishing civilizations they went away we don't know what happened would we all agree with all three of those right so if we're trying to figure out if this is too simple I would argue again it's too simple and yet people are still saying this today I heard it at our meetings just last November right I'm like no it wasn't that linear it was much much Messier so if you were to say to me in the social hour afterwards so what was it really was it droughts was it famine was it earthquakes was it Invaders rebellions you can tell me and I'll say yes it was all of the above the question is which is the primary stressor which is the primary driver I'm not sure we can tell that what we can tell is that you get a domino effect and when you have one and then two and then three you also get a multiplier effect so what I would say is you know we have earthquakes and people do survive them we have famines and droughts and people do survive them we have Invaders what if you have one followed by another followed by another what if you're still reeling from an earthquake and then it turns out you've got a drought and famine and then an Invader comes in I think you could survive one you might survive two you're probably not going to to survive all three I think that's what happens here we wind up with what I would call A Perfect Storm where everything is happening this was probably not the time to be alive is in the years right after 1177 but what we've got this is what we call the systems collapse Colin Renfrew talked about this already back in 1979 your central Administration collapses your traditional Elite the 1% disappears centralized economy collapses and there are huge population declines and entire shifts of population now A System's collapse doesn't happen overnight in fact 1177 is simply shorthand for the whole fall that took as much as a century just like today we say 476 is the fall of the Roman Empire and actually it took most of the fifth century same thing here 1177 is Shand for a collapse that probably took a century the thing about A System's collapse is it is followed almost always with the Dark Age and with the development of romantic myths like think of Homer and the Trojan War this actually fits perfectly into a system's collapse so what lessons can we take away what can you all go home and discuss well are we currently facing a situation such as they faced in 1177 and let me ask you do you think we have climate change today well we can spend the rest of the evening discussing that right okay but at least some would say yes we have climate change what about famines and droughts are there any in the world today all right how about earthquakes any earthquakes going on recently yeah a couple here and there rebellions yeah we got rebellions I think the only thing missing is the sea peoples and even there I'm wondering if Isis or dases might not be our equivalent of the sea peoples or if all the refugees pouring into Europe now are the equivalent of those sea peoples migrating and in fact if we took a look at the headlines that were ripped from just the last 2 or 3 years in the Mediterranean in the Middle East Greece's economy is tanked internal rebellions in Libya Egypt and Syria with Outsiders and foreign Warriors right sound familiar ripped from the headlines recently turkey fears it's going to be involved Israel thinks it might get involved is worried about it Jordan's crowded in fact overcrowded with refugees Iran's Bellic and threatening Iraq is in turmoil that is Us in the last what 2 3 years if we looked at headlines from the Mediterranean of the Middle East from 1200 BC that is 3,200 years ago would they be well they'd be identical so I think we've got perhaps something we might want to take a look at what happened 3200 years ago and see if we might not have the same sort of thing the difference is of course we're technologically advanced enough that we recognize these things and we know for example droughts and climates and climate change and earthquakes we might be able to do something about it the Hittites I don't think they knew what happened I don't think they knew what hit them but we I think are Advanced enough that we can take steps to change things if we want to history can teach us if we want to listen thank you [Applause] thank you Eric we have time for questions there are three microphones with Runners so if you will hold your hand up and wait till the microphone comes to you and then when it's your turn stand up tell us your name whether you're a member or you're not a member no penalty for not being a member and then ask a question Carl member wasn't this also the period when the island of sanini exploded um right in the beginning of this the question is is this the period when the island of santarini exploded it is but it exploded much earlier the eruption of Santorini has now been redated by Carbon 14 dating to 1628 BC so it is during our well the end of the middle bronze beginning of the late bronze but it will have happened 400 years before any of this so it does not impact it so I'm going to say yes it's there but a little too early unless you want you know 400 years later so um it's so tempting to link it but I think they're separated by 400 years um my name is Jer Olson non-member um I was wondering what the population density was like back then like what were the numbers in these regions that you're disc question about the population density back then it's extremely hard to estimate right and you'll hear all kinds of facts and figures here I would say on um just as kind of a rule of thumb your basic major cities like Troy and myo and all that couple of thousand people maybe 10,000 at the most um a a huge Army might have had you know a couple of hundred people of elite uh we hear about Chariot armies with 200 250 chariots in there so certainly not on the scale that we've got today but denser than they had been at any time really up until then this was the flourishing period uh Terry Leighton I'm a member why going back to your introduction why is akatan the person you would most want to meet say this again why is aatan the person you would most want to be you said he's the person you would most want to meet no i' I want to meet his father his father I think aanan is kind of cool but Aman hotep III he is the ultimate Diplomat I think he is the one that gets Egypt to its period of uh of height and Glory but not through War he does it through trade and diplomacy and we've got uh for example the Amar archive I I read to you from the Mari archive which is 1800 BC we have another archive from am hakan's time period about 13 1850 BC and they are writing to all the other kings in fact had I more time I would read out to you some of those CU they're absolutely amazing and they're not so different from us today so for example the kings are writing to Aman hotep saying send me gold gold is like Dust In Your Land just give me some you won't even notice and in one the the guy I think it's the king of Babylon or matani writes to Aman hotep and says if you send me gold right now as much as you can I'll give you my daughter to his credit Alan hup writes back to him and says what kind of a man are you that would swap your daughter for a nugget of gold and then he sends his daughter anyway so this I think is an absolute for somebody that's interested like I am in international relations and trade 3500 years ago that was the period and then of course the added bonus is if you meet am and hotep the thir you're probably going to meet a young aanan before he's done his whole monotheistic uh heretic rebellion and I'd love to know what made him take as a youngster that got him to change things when he was older so I think that would be for me the period one of the people you scien you D David hi I'm David Rosen I'm a lifetime member of the uh the the one of the theories was one of the people were the Israelites are the isra are any Israelite as as a group even recognizable in the archaeological record or anything anything vaguely like Exodus or anything good question so can do we have any evidence of The Exodus or the Israelites at this time period uh the short answer is um no but also kind of yes um we do have evidence but when you've got the collapse and then when they come up out of the collapse the Israelites are there now I supect that what has happened I mean finlin Israel finlin says they're already there they've always been there and they've just taken over what I suspect whether or not the Exodus as we know it from the Bible took place I published a couple articles where I actually think the Israelites came in on the coattails of the sea peoples because I don't see any way that the Israelites would have been able to take on these Majestic Canaanite cities with their huge armies there's no way they could have done it whether or not you know the almighty was helping them what I think happened though is the sea peoples and everything else came in you have this collapse the Egyptians Retreat they've been in control this area for 300 years they withdraw you are left with a power vacuum in this region and I think the Israelites moved in not just them but the Philistines and the Phoenicians so I actually think the isra Israelites are kind of on the coattails of the sea peoples well yes they definitely exist I mean whether or not the Exodus took place the Israelites exist because immediately thereafter we have Israelite four roomed houses and collar room jars by say 1100 BC they're definitely there so they have to have gotten there somehow and I think it's during this period of collapse and that's actually why towards the end of the book I say you know most clouds as the saying goes have a silver lining everything here collaps the late Bronze Age goes away but out of the ashes come us today you've got the Israelites coming in with monotheism uh in Greece eventually you know you're going to get the rise of democracy centuries later but out of this is going to come us so one of the questions I was asked at one point I haven't done it yet somebody said would you write a what if what if the collapse hadn't happened what would our world be like and that is something that is an interesting question you know would we be here uh would be I I have no idea I haven't even thought about how to write that yet but um the the upshot is that if the collapse had not happened there's a lot we probably wouldn't be doing today that we do today today so yes the Israelites get there how and when and why is a whole another question Kim uh Timothy Thomas I am a member of the society I uh as I believe you said Ramsey III defeated the uh sea people or what he thought of as um and yet his civilization survived all the other countries collapsed and he attributed his success and he was on site to Victory Battlefield right so why are you making up other explanations when the people at the time said defeat the SE people your civilization lives good point all right so Ramsey is claiming he beat the sea pills and as a result he survived the problem is it wasn't as perfect as he made it out to be in fact he himself gets assassinated in a heram conspiracy uh not long thereafter we found his mummy and there was a slash in his throat and he actually got a knife to the throat uh and Egypt uh has turmoil and internal Rebellion soon thereafter sorry what is a Haram conspiracy oh good question well the Pharaoh has a Haram with all kinds of foreign princesses and all that one of his lesser Wives has a kid she wants him to become uh pharaoh and they hatch an assassination plot we know about this because there is a very long pap irus that tells us of this Haram conspiracy and says that everybody was caught and put to death 50 people including the Lesser princess and her son but we never knew if it had been successful then they did a CAT scan of his mummy he's got a scarf around his neck when they undid the scarf there is the slash right through and it went right in he probably died instantly and in fact in his tomb there is a young man who is buried in a goat skin which is not what you do in Egypt that's what you do when you don't want the person to make it to the afterlife and forensic analysis have shown that that young man has died by strangulation it's probably the Young Prince so they found so it's not quite as wonderful as he makes it out but you do bring up an interesting point because not only does Egypt survive to a certain extent but Assyria and Babylonia actually bounce back within about 50 years and I think think that the common threat is that they are all on major river systems Tigers Euphrates and Nile so even if you have a drought and a famine somewhere they're not as affected so I think they're able to come back quickly but um like I said I don't think defeating the sea peoples is enough uh I think there's other things you have to overcome as well but if you want just the sea peoples I'm good with that too but I'd rather put in a couple of other things to make sure we're going to collapse I don't think the sea peoples are enough it's a fairly long book you have to write it is a fairly long book I have to write yes indeed hi my name my name my name is al er Al Al Al there's one in the back first my name is Dan Eldridge I'm not a member my kids are 22 and 25 they were in high school about 10 years ago plus or minus in their textbooks they always they had this threel abbreviation BCE ah yeah that was news to me but how come you have BC and not BCE uh it depends BC and BCE are alternate designations um BC a of course is the more usual in archaeology we tend to use BCE and CE right before the Common Era and the Common Era you're trying to get away from religion because BC and AD is of course centered around Jesus the problem is BCE and CE is still centered around Jesus the year zero is the same right so it really it depends on for whom I am writing right in my scientific articles and journal field archaeology and all that we use BCE in this particular case I asked Princeton which published it if I could put BCE and they said you know the vast majority of people will either not know what you're talking about or will be offended by that if you don't mind we'd rather go with our inhouse style which is BC and I said you know it really doesn't matter to me one way or the other I still think they're religious based so that's why we went BC the textbook your children were using is trying to be a little more evenhanded shall we say but it really depends and for instance Hershel Shanks who publishes biblical archaeology review he has at the front of every issue uh the whole explanation BCE versus BC and he says it's up to our individual authors which one we use so it just depends on which one I'm where I'm publishing as to which one I use nothing more Sinister than that my name is Al Erick and I am a member uh did I miss it I I didn't quite get the definition of the sea peoples did they come from uniquely the islands or are they just Marin Mariners and uh how do you define that also were the boats made of reads were they re boats or okay so questions about right so a better definition of the sea peoples and their boats first of all the boats no they're not reboats they are wooden boats they in fact they're very well done that medet hoba relief they are so deep that people have published entire books analyzing the boats but they're wooden boats in fact the Egyptians have in their records something a reference to kefu boats we don't know if they're boats from creit or boats that could go to creit um in terms of the sea peoples yes I'm deliberately vague because we don't know in fact the earliest egyptologists like Gaston mpo actually thought that after they were defeated they went to Sicily and Sardinia and gave their names to that area now more archaeologists actually think it makes much more sense especially since Ramsay said he settled them in Egypt for them to come from the West to the east but to be perfectly Fair there like I I did say there's been no site that's ever been identified as a site from which they came so I was interviewed a little while ago I think it just went up on the Internet two or three days ago and the the interviewer said if a billionaire were to give you a million dollars what would you do with it and I said I would go and try and find the origins of the sea peoples they the because in ramsy why are they called sea peoples in ramsy he says they come from the sea they come from the Isles but that is the name that Gaston mpero gave to them in France she said it's so it's our name for them according to ramsy they are people of the aisle people of the sea and people from the north but if you have Invaders coming down to Egypt they're all from the sea the North and the right so that doesn't help right so at the moment right we can't solve it hi I'm Andy I'm a honored guest I guess uh so what in the next you know five to 10 years should we be looking at in terms of new areas of research new technologies that sort of thing that might sort of drive you towards one particular uh causation for this so what do we need to do in the next 5 10 years to actually further this along excellent question uh for one thing I think we need more of these coring and the pollen analysis to make sure what's going on here uh secondly well in a nutshell we need more hard hard science right there is if we start finding some Graves I would want to do DNA analysis if we could find any match then we're starting to find maybe where these people came from or went to right um radiocarbon dating all that sort of thing so I would say keep doing what we're doing Maybe do a few more surveys to go see if there's other sites that we've missed but we the Archaeology is up to Snuff it's putting in the hard data and finding the money to do it all right and this is something for instance Israel Franklin has been doing you got a huge Grant from the EU uh about six or seven years ago and he called it the exact life sciences and archaeology and this is exactly what he's doing but he's doing even things like analyzing what you find on the floor to see how long it before it was you know abandoned after it was destroyed so we I'm hoping we do 50 years I'm hoping it's shorter than that I'd like to know the answer before I die but I do think it'll be solved I do I think and all you know all it's going to take is one site one site where we can say this is where somebody comes from the only problem is I'll be very very worried about like planting stuff or forgeries because usually in archaeology if it's too good to be true it's too good to be true right so I want something that is found accidentally that almost circumstantially uh says this inference that this is probably the peset something like that we know where they ended up I want to know where they started from it'll be a site in turkey or in Greece or Sicily Sardinia it'll be out there and I do think somebody will find [Applause] it my name is j two more questions my name is Jim Griffin and I'm a member a couple of questions is there any estimate we only get one choose your question wisely okay uh is there any estimate of the population of this small Global uh this globalization group that we're talking about total population the total population that's the question I think we've already asked and answered we're not sure of the whole thing but uh but it's couple of thousand 10,000 at the big cities and then scattered in in the uh in the countryside so not huge but certainly denser from before that period last question Rob Klein I'm a member could you elaborate on this idea of a 300-year drought it seems to me a 300-year drought is an ecological shift and since we all eat that that would be a primary cause for a collapse I I would agree if it is indeed 300 years I I think um for most of them and this is why finlin was very pleased with his Dead Sea one um most of them are very large you're only sampling in 50 or 75 year chunks they uh D langu and Franklin and Thomas lit did it in 20year chunks and they said look we've got 150 years which is half of the others uh I still think that if you do have something that long even if it's on again off again that it probably would be the primary driver I think if I had to rank them which I didn't do in the book but somebody did ask me later if you had to rank them I and actually I take it back in the newest paperback that just came out I was able to add in a three-page afterward and I did say of all of these I think climate change is the primary driver because that leads to everything else the one thing that we don't find which is not in the book and every and everybody says to me what there's no evidence for disease I would have thought we'd have epidemics and plagues and this and that no evidence whatsoever the mass Graves and not in the writing there is no epidemic at this time which I find very strange and again that may be out there to be found so we've got everything except for disease well thank you very much [Applause] ER and before you go let me present you with this plaque uh it's a copy of the announcement of your lecture signed by the members of the general committee on behalf of the membership thank you so much you again pleasure and appreciate it and thank you all thank you all after

Channel: PSW Science

Views: 47,072

Keywords: PSW, PSW Science, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, Canaanites, Bronze Age, Eric Cline, Sea Peoples, Hittites, Collapse of the Bronze Age, Ancient Trade

Id: 5LvgiaOuNM4

Length: 76min 38sec (4598 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2015