The Bronze Age Collapse

the Nile River home to civilization for nearly 7,000 years with its nourishing waters it has remained the lifeline of the Egyptian people since the very birth of Agriculture today it's Delta is still the home of ninety percent of the country's population to rely on its waters for their very survival but over 3,000 years ago this peaceful Delta was the site of an armed conflict nearly unprecedented in scale it pitted the forces of the New Kingdom of Egypt against a foe that had reduced the nations of the eastern Mediterranean to ash behind them lay the ruined capitals of Greece Anatolia Syria and Palestine they left no records of their own and our knowledge of them today is derived entirely from the records of their opponents in surviving inscriptions they are named adversary a blight upon civilization itself from whence they came we do not know for their Kingdom was the sea itself from which they emerged to challenge the might of the Egyptian Empire their attack was doomed to failure but the force of their blow plunged Egypt into disorder and decay soon it would join the other foreign nations of the East as the light of civilization went out for centuries to come you you the story of the Bronze Age collapse and the Sea Peoples on whom it is so commonly blamed his one that has sparked a century of debate amongst archeologists over the course of the last hundred years almost every detail of its events has been disputed at one point or another how did it happen when and most importantly of all who or what was behind it was it the fault of the mysterious Sea Peoples or what other factors behind the demise of the bronze age nations of the eastern Mediterranean most of these questions are still being debated in one fashion or another but the details we already know are beyond tantalizing alongside centuries-old theories of warfare and foreign invasions new theories of famine civil unrest and natural disaster are slowly creeping into the picture the result was a saga both dramatic and mundane and one that holds eerie parallels to our own civilization in the 21st century but before we can begin to understand the reasons behind the collapse we have to familiarize ourselves with what the world of the late bronze age would have looked like already more than a millennium old it was a world of startling complexity covered in feuding nation-states and containing more than one great power to the west sack Greece home to the great power centers of the Mycenaean culture the East held Assyria hegemon the Mesopotamia and hold of the ancient cities of a card Sumer and Babylon and in the middle separated by a patchwork of vassals that stretch through modern Palestine and Syria sat the opposing forces of the hitter Empire and the Egyptian New Kingdom direct conflict between the two had long since passed but still they Jacque it for power over the great trade routes of the East from which flowed the precious tin and copper on which all kingdoms relied for survival at first glance the world of the 13th century BC seems a stable one with its key players firmly entrenched in their respective homelands but within the span of the next century each of these nations would undergo a series of catastrophic setbacks the lucky ones would see themselves reduced to a shadow of their former selves most others would be torn asunder swabby only is MIPS passed down by word of mouth through the dark ages that succeeded them the sources of the cataclysms are complex and at the moment we have only a rough understanding of each of these factors even so what is no gives us a tantalizing glimpse at how even the most powerful of nations can find themselves knocked off course by events beyond their control but let's not get ahead of ourselves if we want to understand exactly how an established order can collapse so quickly we will first have to travel back into the history of each of its Nations and where better to start our journey then with the very first civilization to fall victim to the collapse many of us know at least a little of ancient Greece of its great philosophers and scientists of the rivalry between Sparta and Athens and the gathering power of Macedonia to the north but what we find looking back at the archaic Greek world of 1500 BC is something both familiar and alien to its classical successor for at least since the middle Bronze Age Greece had been a nation of agrarian villages ruled over by a patchwork of palatial centers from the decipherment of their written language know now as linear be we can tell that they did indeed speaker version of Greek and the gods of classical Greece were already being worshipped within their halls these palatial kingdoms were likely modeled on that of the Minoans at Crete themselves one of the dominant merchant powers within the Mediterranean and whose distinctive clothing and textiles have been found as far away as Mesopotamia from each one the local ruler known as the annex of the Basel Laius would have sought to extend his power and to acquire exotic Goods for a complex hierarchy of administration and trade some of these rulers were more powerful than others but the largest by far was my Sanae whose power extended over an area nearly three times that of its nearest rival then around the middle of the 15th century BC disaster struck in Crete debate still rages on its exact nature it may have been an earthquake much like the one that rocked Minoan civilization around 1700 BC a volcanic eruption at fira has also been suggested as the culprit though radiocarbon dating now seems to discredit this theory whatever the source it was enough to leave them in no one palaces in disarray my Sanae was quick to take advantage and soon the great palaces of Knossos faced us and many of us were overrun by mainland Greeks with this the money rolled Minoan civilization came to an end and Mycenaeans quickly took their place as one of the dominant trading nations in the eastern Mediterranean from there they would expand into the Aegean establishing settlements were in the siq ladies and on the western coast of Anatolia but this unchecked growth could only last so long and from the 14th century onwards they seemed to have come into conflict with a number of Western Anatolian cities the name of one in particular is still known today kept alive by a legendary war it's supposedly fought with the Bronze Age Greeks the Hittites may have caught it whoa Lucia whilst their opponents knew it as ilium but a despite of a name that it is most commonly known today Troy alas the story of the Bronze Age collapse is not yet that of the Trojan War instead at this time Western Anatolia was busy rebelling against the region's emerging superpower founded somewhere between the early 17th and 16th century BC the Hittites were not the first people to rule in Anatolia but they were by far the most successful emerging from the city of hattusa under their first known king had to silly the first they expanded across the peninsula often spreading their influence that's the point of a sword in their Wars like we had a simple objective much as modern civilization relies on the two major resources of oil and gas so too did life over free millenia ago rely on two hard-to-find metals their function was simple for together they could be used to crack the bronze on which rulers of the time relied to outfit their armies the first of these copper was one the Hittites either had in abundance or received from the copper mines of their neighbors in Southeast Anatolia the second Tim was harder to come by to sources of it have been suggested in the ancient world from mines far to the east in modern Afghanistan or from others further west in the Balkans of Europe securing access to this precious metal would require Hittite control over the major trade routes of Anatolia and Syria and over the next century they set out to accomplish just that to the south they conquered lands around Silesia gaining the access to the Mediterranean in the east they class drove Aleppo winning a series of victories on the how to sell his grandson Missoula that gained them access to the lucrative trade of the Euphrates to the West things also went in their favor there the Hittites encountered resistance by a group known as the as sour countries centered in western Anatolia they are best remembered today for the likely presence of Volusia or Troy within their ranks though it seems to be more frequently an ally than an enemy of the Hittites either way it makes little difference both will Lucia and Izawa were conquered by the Hittites though they would repel many times in the centuries to come by the late 16th century the Hittites would campaign as far afield as Mesopotamia when was sorely sacked the ancient city of Babylon and carted off images of its chief deities and then within only a short time these conquests came undone Masoli was murdered shortly after returning from babylon dying at the hands of his own brother-in-law over the next century the extent if he type rule would fluctuate a time stretching into Syria and as our before collapsing back into their Hartman's around central Anatolia after the conquest of Aleppo by the Egyptians in the mid 15th century the Hittites saw fit to pay tribute to Pharaoh Thutmose the third soon after their fortunes would revive again under King to Talia's the first which saw them expand into the East defeating aleppo and a new estate Mitanni to the west they advanced again this time defeating a new confederation known as a sewer and for the first time a nation known as a kiawa is recorded as active in western Anatolia where they twice attacked Hittite vassals in ours our the identity of our kiawa remains controversial even today but more recent evidence points the finger across the Aegean to the halls of Mycenae itself but this success was all temporary with two Talia's death his kingdom collapsed with enemies invading it from both the North and the east from the north the people of the Cask Islands invaded the Hittite Hartman's themselves burning KATUSA itself to the ground despite these setbacks the hittite kingdom persisted until the 14th century BC when it began a remarkable recovery and it is to one king in particular that this recovery can be largely attributed his name was sapele Loomis he came to the throne in the early 14th century BC overthrowing his brother in the process and from there on out he set about forging his kingdom into an empire taking advantage of turmoil to the south he conquered a lapper regaining access to vital seagoing trade after that he captured the capital of mitanni and encouraged Egyptian vassals to rebel throughout Syria in the West he had less success but he was still able to stretch his high influence forever into arzawa that any of his immediate predecessors such was the pinnacle of his power that the widow of the Egyptian pharaoh like with Tooting Harmon wrote to him to ask him to send her one of his sons so that he might marry her and rule over Egypt a son was Julie sent but the journey would result in his demise despite this setback by his own death so Pella Loomis had made his kingdom one of the most preeminence within the Mediterranean if only his immediate successors had been so lucky many of them were doomed to spend much of their early reigns stamping out revolts in both the east and the west even with these rebellions quelled the Hittites still found powerful rivals circling their borders to the north they again came into conflict with the Casca peoples who once more sata2 sir still the Hittites injured and their conflict with another nation to the south would cement their Imperial status for a century to come that rival was a powerful one indeed for more than 15 centuries Egypt had been one of the world's pre-eminent powers [Music] by the time of the 15th century BC his new kingdom was flourishing under the leadership of the 18th dynasty its ships plied the Seas of the eastern Mediterranean where it traded with the Minoans for clothing and weapons with the people to Sinai for copper and turquoise and even as far as as our and further south in the Land of Punt after Minoan civilization collapsed Mycenaean trade took their place who the Egyptians referred to as de Nadja throughout the remainder of the century the new kingdom would expand conquering Nubia Canaan and Syria with Pharaoh Thutmose the third crossing the Euphrates to campaign against Mitanni but by the fourteenth century BC its power would be weakened by the ATS in effect when the Pharaoh of the time and men had before sought to change the state religion to 1 the more monotheistic direction renaming himself Akhenaten he introduced a system of worshipped centered around the Sun disk or the Aten this deity was cast as the true ruler of Egypt with the Pharaoh as his temporal equivalent on earth Akhenaten likely made the move to burnish his own power and to weaken that of the priests classes of Egypt the result he achieved was rebellions both in Nubia and Syria the Hittites were all too quick to take advantage upon his death Mattson worship was abandoned by his son and successor to to Carmen along with a new city he built on the east bank of the Nile Tutankhamen did not rain for long with the boy pharaoh's own demise the 18th dynasty slowly came to an end with a series of short-lived successes paving the way for the 19th dynasty under this new leadership the Egyptians would soon revive their status as hegemon of the Mediterranean under SETI the first they took control of Aegis vast mineral wealth including copper and tin in the Sinai and gold in Nubia slowly SETI's forces moved back into Canaan and Syria wrestling the city of Kadesh from the Hittites which he and his son ramses entered in triumph but the occupation didn't last the Hittites regrouped Maysoon took back the city and much of northern Syria from then on an uneasy peace descended the Hittites kept control of the city while SETI returned to Egypt to deal with rebellion in Nubia but the tensions between the two sides couldn't remain bottled up forever in the fourth year of the reign of SETI's successor ramses ii they finally boiled over the result was one of the most well-documented battles of the ancient world the Battle of Kadesh the battle took place outside the gates of the city here Hittites cows supposedly leaked a false position to their opponents blowing them into an ambush our main source for the events of the battle itself come from Egyptian inscriptions which claimed that over fifty thousand men were deployed between the two forces along with over 5,000 chariots the most ever deployed in a single battle its exact outcome was uncertain the Egyptian inscriptions report a victory for their side but their claims were mocked in a letter to Ramses himself by the later hittite king Patterson is deferred ultimately neither side seems to have suffered a clear defeat the Hittites withdrew but the Egyptians failed to take the city the two sides would jostle for advantage for the better part of the next two decades until a succession war amongst the Hittites compelled them to make terms the Solva treaty was finally signed in year 21 of Rameses reign and it may even have been sealed with a form of royal marriage peace with Egypt came at a fortuitous time for the Hittites to the east a new power was rising amongst the ancient cities of Mesopotamia existing perhaps as early as the 25th century BC Assyria had been the seat of its own Empire in the late 3rd millennium BC and for more than a thousand years it had remained a strong regional power all this would change with the emergence of mitanni in the 16th and 15th centuries BC after which Assyrian power began a slow decline in the mid 15th century BC Asser itself was sacked and the nation was reduced to mitaina and Basle this state of affairs remained until the mid 14th century when unrest amongst a pro assyrian faction within the Mitanni royal court allowed King era de edad to throw off their influence once and for all his son Asher who bullet was even able to annex maintained Ian's territory taking advantage of their former overlords weakness after supper the Loomis and the Hittites crushed their power west of the Euphrates around the same time Asher sent a letter to Akhenaten in Egypt announcing himself and his kingdom as the equals of Mitani and marking the beginning of the middle Assyrian Kingdom the ambitions have asure and his successors would lead them to a status far beyond that of Mitani over the next century they slowly expanded their borders both at the expense of Mitanni to the west and babylon to the east by the 14th century BC Ash's son and successor Enlil Murari would name himself as Shiro Rabi or Great King in his letters to the hittite ruler his great grandson shower Mesa the first would go one further defeating a combined force of Hittites Matane ian's and their allies in the middle of the 13th century BC under his predecessors Assyria had already expanded to the edges of the hittite domain but now shallow Mesa took hold of his height ruled territories in the West incorporating what remained of Mitani into his kingdom not finished he dealt his enemies a further blow taking control of the copper mines at his sewer on which the hitit relied so heavily to make their precious bronze heat Ike woes were far from over for the rest of the century Assyria continued to press them expanding their lands westward into Syria the Hittites responded as best they could for menteng a marriage alliance with Amuro in coastal syria with the overall aim of restricting assyrian access to Mediterranean trade under King totally as the fourth they would also invade Cyprus known for its rich copper supplies alas their efforts came to naught in 1237 BC the Assyrians again defeated them at the batter of Neriah further weakening its high influence within the region led now by shallow Mises Sun to courting nareta the Assyrians turned their gaze eastward finally placing their own king on the throne of Babel after this tackle tea would assume the ancient title of the Akkadian Empire naming himself king of both Sumer and Akkad eventually he would go even further assuming a title made famous by the Persian kings of more than half a millennium later King of Kings at last around the end of the 13th century BC we find ourselves on the edge of a precipice in the space of the next half century almost all the powers that we have chronicled here would fall into ruin for much of human history the reasons behind this collapse would remain unclear then around the end of the 19th century a theory was put forward based on a series of reliefs found at the mortuary temple of the 20th dynasty pharaoh ramses the third here intricate scenes outline a battle that took place in the early 12th century BC between the forces of Ramses and a mysterious seafaring Confederation if we are to take the inscriptions at face value the knees sea peoples were responsible for the destruction of Mycenae of Izawa and the Hittite Empire of Cyprus and of city-states stretching throughout Syria and cannon it took them remarkably little time as they appeared on the world scene only two decades prior then in the year 11 77 BC they appeared on the eastern shores of Egypt in the inscriptions at medinet habu they're depicted as a diverse group wearing different forms of dress and speaking many languages from here we also learn their names the cherdon and the shekel Esch the Pella set and the Denon the Tajik oh and the wish it seemed they intended to settle in Egypt for with them they brought their families in ox strong cars they would clash twice with the Egyptians first on land then on the waters of the Nile itself according to the inscriptions their invasion was a failure as Ramses defeated them at the Battle of the Delta thousands of the intruders were killed or captured and Ramses was forced to settle his prisoners in camps along the Nile the see people fret was at last defeated all through the might of the Egyptian pharaoh the few survivors of the Sea Peoples fed eastwards settling down amongst the rubble of Syria and canal becoming the forefathers of the biblical Philistines were these invaders truly responsible for the Bronze Age collapse indeed for much of the 20th century the theory of the Sea Peoples was accepted as the driving force behind much of the devastation seen throughout the eastern Mediterranean at this time but in recent decades scholars have become more skeptical of this theory and indeed it raises many problems when considering the archaeological evidence we now have at our disposal to demonstrate this let's take a look at how the collapse effected each nation in turn we start again with Mycenaean Greece here it is universally accepted that the sights of Mycenae Tyrians midea and Pylos were all violently destroyed somewhere between the late 13th and early 12th century BC other sites such as the Argo lead or at Carinthia seems have been abandoned entirely many of these sites also show signs the mass fortification in the decades prior to their final destruction hinting that perhaps they knew that trouble lay on the horizon the most tantalizing piece of evidence comes from pilots where a linear b tablet indicating in the palaces final years its rulers placed Watchers on the sea shortly after this pylos was burned with the configuration being hot enough to melt both the walls of its powers and the gold of it's fine ornaments on face value these destructions fit well with the sea people's fury but at many sites the source of this violence is now disputed in some cases such as Tyrians the destruction was more likely the fault of an earthquake than that of violent invasion my Sanae shows ample evidence of a cataclysmic fire but there is no evidence of the site being deep populated nor are there any of the tell-tale signs of arrowheads are over weaponry when I expect to see a conquering army leave behind sites like pylos do leave open the possibility of Raiders from the sea but even then there are other culprits to consider the Greeks of the Classical era would place the blame squarely at the feet of another group the Dorian's who supposedly migrated into Greece from lands further to the north the tradition of their migrations was well established in the world of the 5th century BC with individual city-states identifying with either Dorian or Ionian ethnicities but when compared with modern evidence the tale of these migrations rings false new settlements do appear throughout Greece in the centuries after the collapse but there is no sign of mass depopulation or of an influx of new migrants pottery styles though cruder still retain many of the shapes the Mycenaean age and the disappearance of linear b writing can be explained by the destruction of the power centers from which scribes would have operated in fact the great Dorian centers of Sparta and Corinth show no obvious signs of habitation until long after the collapse instead the presence of these new linguistic groups might be better explained by the removal of the existing powers elites which would have allowed regional dialects to come to the fore all this taken together he seems unlikely that the sea peoples were behind the disruptions in Greece so what about the rest let us turn our attention to Anatolia where the Hittites were struggling to retain their empire here we again see many cities destroyed around the beginning of the 12th century BC in western Anatolia there are clear signs of destruction at Troy with a destruction layer mean dateable to around 1180 BC KATUSA itself was burned somewhere around 1200 BC after which time it was abandoned along with many other central Anatolian sites with their destruction the Hit sir empire came to an end never to rise again but were the sea peoples behind their demise if we discount Troy there is no evidence of widespread destruction in Western Anatolia the coast of which the sea peoples may have sailed past on their route to Syria and Egypt here the majority of the cities simply seem to have been abandoned with little to no signs of violence and if we stop to consider the destruction in central Anatolia the picture becomes even less clear firstly if the sea peoples were indeed seafarers by Nature then what were they doing here high in the mountains and valleys of central Anatolia and how then would they have had the siege capabilities to overcome the fortifications of a Tusa for many archaeologists the answer is simple they didn't instead the finger of suspicion points elsewhere to the many enemies that his acts have been slowly collecting over the previous centuries the leading candidates had the Casca peoples who has remember sata2 sir only a hundred years prior but how was it that the Hittites found themselves so vulnerable to collapse the Heartland had been invaded many times in the centuries before yet this time their kingdom seems to have simply collapsed into oblivion to explain this we must again return to the theory of the sea peoples and their activities in the southern reaches of the Empire that's because around 1225 BC a wave of destruction rolled across Hittite territories in Cyprus and Syria Cypriot settlement at sites such as n Co me Keith Yan and cinder were raided and destroyed in quick succession whilst in North Syria we see the destruction of cities such as Kadesh Alaka an ogre it from the ruins of the latter a tablet has been unearthed written just before the city's final destruction it's text is fragmentary but what is legible carries a chilling plea from the ruler of ogre it's calling out to a hit Ike king whose help was never to arrive my father behold the enemy's ships came my cities were burned and they did evil things in my country does not my father know that all my troops and chariots are in the land of hati and all my ships are in our land of Lucca thus the country is abandoned to itself may my father know it the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us shortly thereafter the city was destroyed here then we seemed at last to have some evidence for the sea people's activities but whilst Seabourn Raiders certainly seemed tied to some of the destructions seen in Syria the sea peoples aren't the only candidates in fact the Egret tablet never mentions them by name and the only other mention attributed to them comes from the site of EEMA in inland Syria destroyed around the same time as ruger it tablets found there written in Akkadian refer to various hordes but again do not refer to the sea peoples by name there are also difficulties in squaring the geography and the dates and many of these disruptions with a narrative laid out in the inscriptions at Egypt radiocarbon dating now places the destruction of many of these sites around eleven ninety BC so if the sea peoples were behind the destructions in Syria and why did it take them another decade to reach Egypt the destructions in Cyprus also pose problems for the sea people's fear II hear the destructions were not followed by an imposition of any new culture instead we see the slow emergence of a new synthesis of Cypriot Asian and Levant ein social identities and one that was to prosper in the century ahead whatever the source of these destructions they were catastrophic for the Hittites the loss of Cypress also meant the loss of their precious copper reserves and destructions in Syria and southern Anatolia may have severed their access to the trade of the Mediterranean in the northwest nozawa also falls eerily silent perhaps robbing the Hittites have access to their vital tin roots these developments came at the worst possible time as dis clear from Hittite correspondence that central Anatolia was also undergoing a devastating famine with grain having to be imported from vassals in northern Syria and even as far afield as Egypt with these lifeline severed the Hittites were simply torn apart by a combination of war and hunger so here it seems you might very well have found a kernel of truth behind the idea of the Sea Peoples if we keep our interpretation broad sea peoples are not the activity of Marauders displaced from elsewhere in the Mediterranean could well have cut the vital links that held the hittite empire together one might think that these events would also have been a gift to the Hittites rivals in Egypt and Assyria who would have been free to snap up former Hittite vassals in Anatolia and Syria but at the time both were far too busy with their own set of problems which were substantial enough to deny their advance into the former Hittite world for the foreseeable future to the east Assyria seems to have avoided the brunt of the collapse seen around the Mediterranean and what destruction has been found is unlikely to be connected to the sea peoples instead this violence seems to stem from a Syrian conflicts with this state of alarm in the western reaches of modern Iran along with the activities of a temporally resurgent Babylonia under Nebuchadnezzar the first the Assyrians would eventually take over many of the former hittite lambs in Syria but around the middle of the 11th century BC they also seem to have gone into a decline over the next century much of their empire was slowly lost but Assyria and its core territories remained a powerful player in Mesopotamian politics but by the late 10th century BC its fortunes would turn again and over the next 300 years it expanded until it formed the neo-assyrian empire the largest state the world had yet known so in the long term the bronze age collapse seems to have worked out in the Assyrians favor but what about the Hittites other rivals the Egyptians who around the same time was opposed to facing the sea peoples on the Nile Delta surely victory there would have left them with ample opportunities to push into former hit silent lands indeed if we follow the inscriptions of Ramses the third the period after the Sea Peoples invasion seems to have been one of continuity and stability in Egypt during which expansion could have been a real possibility but we now know that many of the monuments constructed by Ramses the 3rd to mask a larger problems in Egypt it seems that as bigger threat as the sea peoples posed Egypt was also dealing who have another fret as Libyan tribes were mounting frequent raids into the west of the country the economic realities of dealing with these frets along with a famine that seems to have struck Egypt in the later years of his reign raised the price of grain and in the process weakened the centralized nature of the state widespread corruption also forced Ramses into reorganizing Egypt's priesthood and it was during this process that he made a pivotal decision one that in the long term would spell doom for his dynasty over the course of this restructuring he made a series of huge land grants particularly to the high priests of our moon in phoebs soon almost a third of Egypt's arable land was within their grasp and this rival economic center slowly contributed to the collapse of Rameses authority ultimately it would prove his undoing as his waning power led to a conspiracy against him from within his own harem the results of this pot can still be seen on his mummy today were a deep knife wound Mars his froat Ramses the third was the last effective ruler of the 20th dynasty after his death Egypt's Syrian and Palestinian provinces broke up and Egypt itself would retreat ever inwards soon after they lost access to the gold mines of Nubia on which they relied to pay their armies and decorate their tombs slowly the country fragmented descending into the third intermediate period centralized rule would not return for the better part of 400 years with that the events of the late bronze age collapse were over beyond them lay a Dark Age during which mass migration would change the shape of the Mediterranean the Philistines settled down in the Levant where the Phoenicians would also emerge from the 12th century BC onwards in Syria and Anatolia various neo-hittite kingdoms would cling on whilst Lydia slowly expanded to cover most of Asia Minor and of activities in Greece we know comparatively little writing would not reappear there until the eighth century BC and by then the events of the collapse have been heavily edited by generations of oral retellings transforming them into the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey so who really were the sea peoples we've seen plentiful evidence of destruction and raids throughout the eastern Mediterranean but can we say for certain that they were behind them alas we lack the evidence to definitively tie the people's appear in the reliefs at medinet habu to the destructions that lie behind the Bronze Age collapse and thus with much of the rest of Ramsey's the Third's rain there may be good reasons to doubt the veracity of the inscriptions themselves in his statues and monuments Ramsey seems to go out of his way to compare himself to his illustrious predecessors in particular he seeks to ape the golden age of the reigns of both ramses ii and his son Merneptah and may well have embellished his own accomplishments to match the case of the Sea Peoples was a prime candidate for this embellishment for we now know that there was in fact another earlier Sea Peoples invasion which the Egyptians again repulsed at a battle near the Nile Delta this invasion taking place during the reign of Mineta happened around 1207 BC when Ramses himself would have been a boy Inman eptas narrative detailed in the great Canuck inscription his foes are five with the air crash the Luka and the teresh taking their places alongside the cherdon and the shekel ash all of whom fought alongside a large force of Libyan Raiders in comparison Ramsey's account has only the latter two in common with his foes numbering either six or seven Nations as mentioned before one of these the Pella set have since been identified with the biblical Philistines but for the other four identifications are far from certain associations have been claimed between the denyen and the teresh with Homeric Greece and Troy whilst the origins of the others that jacker and the Wes still remain uncertain moreover in minetti's account only the sheer den the shekel ash and the equi are named as Sea Peoples whilst the others are simply northerners coming from all lands Ramsay's account also names the shared n as of the sea but not the shekel Esch with the wish and the teresh taking their place complicating matters the share then seems have been well known before the oversea people's having been named as Seaborn Marauders from as early as the 14th century BC ramses ii even recalls repulsing one of their raids himself on the nile delta in the second year of his reign after which many of their number were incorporated into the Egyptian army there are even credible accounts of the shared n being reported as fighting at the Battle of Kadesh these inconsistencies between the various accounts make it somewhat rash to label the Battle of the Delta an outright fraud however it is plausible the conflict may have been lesser in scale than claimed by Ramses himself particularly as the other problems of his reign would be more than enough to explain Egypt's decline but the problems elsewhere in the Mediterranean have less easily explained we must ask ourselves if the Sea Peoples weren't in the cataclysmic force behind the Bronze Age collapse then what was many theories have come and gone over the decades and recently many archeologists have gravitated towards theories of drought and climate change as mentioned earlier a major drought was certainly raging in Anatolia and the time the Hittites destruction and pollen analysis from Cyprus now seems to indicate that conditions there were much drier than normal around the time of the collapse sediment analysis at sites across the Mediterranean also seemed to confirm the idea of a general drought in the late 13th century BC which in turn could explain the appearance of new groups of raiders and refugees drought might also explain the apparent abandonment of settlements throughout Western Anatolia or the isolated violence at cities to just tell huzzah Atkin an on Meissen a itself in greece here scholars have theorized that the destructions may be the results of peasant rebellions as in both places powers areas associated with grain storage seemed to have taken the brunt of the damage climate change certainly seems a compelling factor but there are sites at which other elements seem to have been at work some display clear signs of generalized destruction whilst others have clear evidence of arrowheads and weaponry within their destruction layers in the case of the former many archaeologists have now proposed that earthquakes were the cause of much of the devastation indeed they're examples of misalign walls and falling masonry to be found all over the Mediterranean with damage being visible at cities such as mice in a tear ins media Pylos Troy a to sir Luger it Megiddo and many others in fact it now seems that the period of the Bronze Age collapse was correlated for an unusually large amount of seismic activity within the Mediterranean with the rate of earthquakes only diminishing further into the 12th century BC these earthquakes would have inflicted severe damage on the cities and palaces of the Bronze Age world but this destruction doesn't seem to stretch quite far enough to explain the collapse itself in most of the cities listed the damage was swiftly patched and only a few such as Terrans in Greece and Tel Hazor in Cannon seem to been abandoned immediately thereafter certainly the damage could have made sites more vulnerable to invasion but in most cases the final destructions happen years or decades later long after the worst of the damage would have been repaired as we conclude our journey through the events of the Late Bronze Age collapse it seems that multiple factors lie behind its events earthquakes invasions climate change and trade route collapse from the evidence available to us it seems that no one of these is solely responsible and that more and more the events of the collapse can only be explained by a combination of them all any guess at an exact timeline remains speculative but it is not unreasonable to state that the true story of the collapse may have looked a little like this late in the 13th century BC an extended wave of drought rolls across the Bronze Age Mediterranean leading to crop failure and starvation which in turns back to local uprisings earthquake damage only hastened this turmoil and this in turn made cities more attractive targets to migrating bands of raiders some of these peoples may well have banded together as did the sea peoples after which they would have journeyed Southwood in search of new lands to settle in the wake of their destruction many sites were abandoned entirely only being repopulated later by peoples carrying new languages and cultures this unrest along with increased piracy throughout the Mediterranean would have collapsed the trade networks on which the kingdoms of the time relied one by one the major powers fell and much of the civilized world vanished into a Dark Age some international trade would have continued but less and less of it came within the control of the former centralized states over the next few centuries literacy also declines and new kingdoms are founded in mythical circumstances throughout Greece and Anatolia eventually a new world would emerge one of the Fenians and Spartans of Assyrians and Babylonians and in the distant future why is the mighty Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great and with them emerges a new metal one that would soon take the place of bronze as the arbiter of empires the Iron Age had begun you you

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Keywords: Greeks, Ancient, Egypt, Hittites, Assyria, Mesopotamia, Bronze Age, Collapse, War, History, Documentary, Pharaoh, Ramses, Bible, Sea People, Babylon, Philistines, Phoenicians, Climate Change, Volcano, Earthquake, History Series, Animation, Syria, Israel, Troy, Trojan War, Mycenae, Pylos, Ancient Greece

Id: q0AIYIjZKWY

Length: 54min 29sec (3269 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2019