Villa Council Presents: 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed

good afternoon my name is Jeffrey Speer I'm the senior curator here at the Villa I'd like to welcome you all to the Getty Villa for this year's Villa council presents lecture so this is the ninth annual lecture in a continuing series that brings the most innovative scholars working in the field of archaeology ancient history classical art and the reception of the classical tradition to you are much appreciated public the lecture is funded by the villa council a group of dedicated individuals who believe strongly in the mission of the villa and support a variety of programs here including acquisitions exhibitions conservation education lectures theatre and research many of the members of the villa council they are here today and I'd like to thank them sincerely for their generosity today's lecture addresses one of the greatest in some ways most disturbing historical questions of all why do civilizations fall it's a theme highly relevant to the Getty Villa where we display the art of the great roman empire that stretched from Britain to Mesopotamia and incorporated most of Europe North Africa and the Near East before fragmenting into many regions seething first - migrating Gothic tribes and then to Persian and Arabic Vedas before the advent of the Romans the vast eastern part of this Empire was ruled by the Greeks Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC had wanted from the Persian Empire one of the greatest empires ever seen which reached from Greece to India this Empire - collapsed but this is not a story only of conquest but of interconnections between peoples and states international trade and the movement of people are not new and indeed we're the what made these cultures thrive allowing the teaching of so many important things from techniques of growing crops to shipbuilding to metalwork to learning how to write to spreading religion mythology poetry literature and art these historical events make us think of both the accomplishments and problems of today the great wealth of America and Europe and the challenges in maintaining the cultural and economic standards we enjoy how to cooperate with other cultures and how to deal with conflict how conflicts in one region are spillover and affect neighboring countries we watch with some apprehension the dramatic change is happening in Asia and MIT in the Middle East the migration of people's for both economic reasons and as refugees from wars and we wonder about the effects of climate change and natural disasters how will all these affect our civilization but much of this is strangely familiar to historians of the Late Bronze Age around 1300 BC the various states around the Aegean were well-established wealthy and culturally sophisticated there was a palace culture in Mycenaean Greece in the Hittite Empire and what is now Turkey in Mesopotamia and Syrian of course in Egypt these states had closed diplomatic relations exchanging letters and gifts and trading all manner of goods but by around 1200 BC many states began to fail long-established kingdoms such as the Hittites and the Mycenaeans collapsed palaces were destroyed or in banned 'end in some places a Dark Age descended while in others foreign invaders established new kingdoms how did this happen there's no one better to propose answers to these questions than Eric Cline he's a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University and director of the George Washington University Capitol archaeological Institute I should also mention for the locals he is a proud or we are proud of him being an alumnus of Santa Monica High School of course miss applause trained as an archaeologist in ancient historian his work has concentrated on biblical archaeology military history and international relations between Greece Egypt and the Near East during the Late Bronze Age his considerable experience as a field archaeologist working for more than 30 years in Israel Egypt Jordan Cyprus and Greece notably for many years at Megiddo and now on the archaeological excavations at tel Kabri in Israel where he is co-director in addition he's a very fine writer educator and as you will hear speaker he's a prolific writer with 16 books and countless articles including sailing the wine-dark sea international trade in the Late Bronze Age Aegean 1994 the battles of Armageddon Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley from the Bronze Age to the nuclear age in 2000 biblical archaeology a very short introduction in 2009 very useful books and similarly the Trojan War a very short introduction in 2013 he's also an active editor of academic journals and books as well including the Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean he has been awarded many distinctions including fellowships from National Geographic the Fulbright Foundation the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as many teaching Awards and he has contributed to numerous documentaries and television programs which you've probably seen for the BBC the Discovery Channel The History Channel and others I think his great skill is to bring together the vast amount of archaeological historical epigraphic and literary evidence available and present it in a fascinating informative and indeed authoritative form his latest book 1177 BC the year civilization collapse does exactly this and this is the subject he will present this afternoon please help me welcome Eric Klein thank you very much and you can all hear me all right it's wonderful to be here and in fact it is a lot of fun to be back as Jeffrey mentioned I grew up here I went to Malibu Park junior high back when it was a junior high and then - so Sam oh hi and before I went off to the East Coast for college and sight so it's great to be back I've been coming to the Getty since almost the beginning the mid-70s I think was the first time that I ever came here so it's nice to be able to come back and to present what I do now we are going to talk about the Late Bronze Age today this is one of my favorite periods of history in fact if I could be reincarnated backwards I would love to go back to the Late Bronze Age I doubt I would survive for more than about 24 hours but it was via great 24 hours so we're gonna be focusing on what brought this down the collapse of the Late Bronze Age it's just still one of the great questions that we've got in fact I was asked this question if she said Sarah Morris my professor where are you Sarah right there in the back there she's now at UCLA has been here for a long time but she was my professor at Yale when I was doing my MA and she asked me a question on the final exam in the Bronze Age Aegean class I had from her and it said why did the Bronze Age come to an end so 35 years later I hope you like my answer now I also have to admit that it was not my idea to write this book rob tempio at Princeton University I asked me he said can you write a book on the end of the Late Bronze Age and I said sure there's quite a few people that can do it in fact you guys published a book back in the early 90s by Robert Robert Drew's that does the same thing and he says yeah but things have been updated in the last couple decades right and I said yes they certainly have and he said so will you do it and I said well with one caveat I said the collapse is interesting but what collapsed I think is actually even more interesting the Mycenaeans and the Hittites and the Cypriots so I said if you'll allow me to write about what collapsed that was the whole middle part of the book and then bookend it with the collapse then I'm happy to do it we're gonna talk today about the collapse 1200 BC just after that period you can see all the lines and dots on this map this is not the first time that people have talked about collapse of course there was a guy named Edward Gibbon you may have heard about did a little book on the Roman Empire Joseph Tainter back in 1988 wrote a book on the collapse of complex societies and then some of you I imagine probably most of you have read Jared Diamond's book on collapse right he's just here at UCLA now the difference between what they did and what what I did was that in almost all of these cases they're talking about one group that is collapsing like the Romans or the Maya in fact in Jared Diamond's book he has them split into different chapters in this particular case what we've got is a whole set of interlinked civilizations going down all at the same time and my wife Diane climb put together this network social network analysis diagram showing how everybody is linked by one or two degrees of separation if you know the the game Frant the six degrees of Kevin Bacon with all the movie stars same idea here that if somebody didn't know somebody else directly they were only one or two hops away from them they knew somebody who knew some so that's what we've got here and this is in fact a diagram that depicts what we would call a small world network it is basically globalized I know we don't want to say they're globalized like we're globalized today it was much smaller back then but if you take the region from say Italy on one side to Afghanistan on the other and then Turkey down to Egypt that area which was pretty much the civilized world at that time was our equivalent of globalized back then so I think that when this civilization goes down it's one of the few times in history that we've got almost a domino system where one Falls and then the next and the next and it's also one of the few that we could actually compare to us today where we are so interlinked now this is the Bronze Age in fact it's the Late Bronze Age we're basically in the area from about 1700 to 1200 BC and you see on this map the different colors of the people up here the purple are the Hittites we've got Mitanni over here Assyrians and Babylonians Egyptians coming up here actually call them the g8 of the Late Bronze Age world that's fudging a little bit there's actually nine because in the Aegean we have Minoans and Mycenaeans but then Egyptians and Hittites and Canaanites Cypriots mitanni Assyrians Babylonians basically all my friends they were around and they were flourishing for most of this period now if you think that you don't know anybody from this time period you would be wrong you actually know quite a few people from back then for example hatshepsut right anybody heard of hatshepsut we've got Kara Cooney who wrote a book on her top Moses the third eye man hooked up the third Akhenaten The Heretic Pharaoh anybody at King Tut I presume most of you have heard of right ramses ii and we will focus on ramses the third so all of these people are during this time period and then maybe not the Battle of Kadesh is that familiar to people but I presume a number of you have heard of the Trojan War whether or not it happened we have fights at home about this all the time I insist it happen my wife insists it did not interesting topics at home the exodus if it happened falls into this time period so this is quite an interesting period I think maybe you can see why I am fascinated by it now the Bronze Age the bronze that gives us its name you make it using you probably know already maybe you need mostly copper about 90 percent and then 10 percent 10 you put those together and you've got bronze you don't always have to use 10 you could use arsenic if you wanted I'm not sure I recommend that you won't live long but you could use arsenic if you need to now most of the copper at that time is coming from Cypress which I have circled on this map the tin is more of a problem there may be some from southeastern Turkey it's conceivable they want all the way up to Cornwall and Britain but most of the tin is going to come from off this map in what we would now call Afghanistan in fact the Badakhshan region anybody here have lapis lazuli jewelry ok the lapis comes from the exact same region so lapis and 10 are both from Afghanistan there and so if you're in cigs at for example mainland Greece if your Mycenaean and you're trying to make bronze you need to get copper from Cyprus and tin from probably all the way in Afghanistan so this is a major trade route but we know they are doing it in fact we have a letter found at Mari right here which talks about ten coming to Mari and then to Garrett and then going on to Crete in fact it says what on a third Mena of ten to the cafetorium that's their name for the Minoans a third of a Mena of ten to the interpreter of the chief merchant of the CAF torian's in a garret so we know that somebody is speaking more than one language and we know that the tin is coming all the way that way now what happens if that trade route is cut at any point you're in trouble and in fact I'll come back to that because I think that's important what is gonna contribute to the fall in fact you could if we're doing the analogies with today I would say that tins for them is pretty much the equivalent of oil for us today and in fact my colleague Carol Bell in England has made that analogy and she said that the strategic importance of 10 back in the Late Bronze Age probably not far different from that of crude oil today and probably the Great King up in the hot OSA and Turkey and the Egyptian pharaoh and Thebes were concerned with this the same way that the American president is concerned about getting oil and gasoline today so I think tin was rather important back then but it's not the only thing they're also trading things like finished goods and other raw materials gold silver LED evany and all that my favorite one of my favorites is again in that Mari one of the Mari letters it says a cafetorium weapon so in Minoan weapon from Crete the top and the base are covered with gold and its top is encrusted with lapis lazuli now this is not a picture of that dagger this is actually from the death pizza or but it must have looked something like this and I don't know about you but I want one of these I would happily walk around campus with a concealed permit if I could have one of these but my absolute favorite story again in those letters and we're here at just after 1800 BC it says one pair of leather shoes and the cafetorium style so Minoan shoes which are probably there for sandals or maybe boots have you been to Han yeah which to the Palace of Hammurabi king of Babylon and yes that is the famous Hammurabi the lock code an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth which bhakti limb and official carry but which were returned now I've always wondered why he returned them were they too small were they so last millennium um hadn't he heard of regifter at any rate we know therefore they are trading finished goods as well as raw materials and we have evidence for this also in the inscriptions and the text as well as the archaeological artifacts that are left to us for example hatshepsut from Egypt we know that she sent an embassy down to point she's not the only one that does so but she's got inscriptions on her walls and she even shows us the queen of went a woman named Ettie as she tells us and the goods that they bring back so we know that the round about 1500 BC for example they're sending their ships back and forth the problem is we weren't quite sure where point was there were a number of candidates for it but fairly recently in the British Museum they analyzed one of their baboon mummies and they compared it to DNA to today and figured out that point is in the region of Eritrea or Ethiopia which was one of the leading candidates so now we know where point is we've also got wall paintings in the Egyptian tombs we see her from the tomb of rec Marais people from the Aegean Mycenaeans or Minoans bearing gifts for the Egyptian pharaoh the Pharaoh calls them tribute but they're probably just gifts and we can see in fact even things like bulls heads which the Minoans are known for so there's international trade international contacts going on about what 3,500 years ago and this is why I say that they're globalized because they're all in touch with everybody else my favorite though are the colossi of memnon how many people have been how many people have been to see these are they're about 60 feet tall it's Amenhotep the third they are in front of his mortuary temple you might have a little problem you can't see it it's completely gone it was quarried by later Pharaohs so you just have to trust me that there was a full blown temple behind these in the 1960's and 1970's excavations were done and they found the remnants of statue bases statues would have been about and feet high so a little bit larger than life size and on each of the Statue basis the Egyptians wrote the names of places that were known to them so there are names of cities from up in Turkey Hittite cities the Babylonians the Assyrians but there's one that caught my interest which names places in the Aegean it's known as the Aegean list you see it here as it was intact in about 1973 before it was set on fire and exploded official official reports say that it was a wildfire unofficial reports say a Bedouin tribe tried to break off the front so they could sell it on the antiquities market it's been put back together 800 fragments of it so now if you go there you can see it again but we've got on the front we've got the names for probably nice and in Greece and Crete that is keffe to you which is Crete and Tenaya mainland Greece and then the the names themselves will the places I'm new sauce Festus cadonia my scene I the capital city perhaps be ocean thieves or Cadiz a crow then not the Ankara perhaps Troy though I don't think so it's probably actually a site on Crete canal sauce and amny sauce again so if we go to those sites in the Aegean we actually find objects of Amenhotep the third that he or his people left behind right so this is at Mycenae these are all fragments from finance plaques and well you can read it as easily as I can write net whenever the good god that Matra that's all mine hotel the third these have not been found anywhere outside of Egypt except at nice a night in mainland Greece so something's going on if it's an embassy or trade diplomacy something like that but they obviously went to come also as well you've got a scarab here it's possible it's a souvenir or bric-a-brac brought back by somebody else but the fact that you've got a correlation with many of these sites on this Aegean list and the objects found in the Aegean I think means that there's something going on and in fact if you look at the sites in geographical order you can plot them on a map like I've done here and it looks like it's a journey from Egypt to Crete and then up to mainland Greece then back to Crete again and then back to Egypt and in fact I think that's why how many sauces on here twice it's as if you're taking a trip and you're going say from Egypt to Crete bathroom stop right coffee take a break you visit your old friends the Minoans then you go up to greece and visit this new power that's just coming up the Mycenaeans then you head back home and you stop again at avenue sauce you're like okay you know next exit is 400 miles or 70 miles and so everybody out using the bathroom again I think this is a geographical itinerary now I don't think I'm and hooked up the Pharaoh went on it but I think this is a route that he sent people on so I can't prove it but it's it's possible one of the things that leads me to believe this is possible is the uluburun shipwreck which was found in 1982 excavated up through the mid-1990s it dates back to about 1300 BC found off the coast of Turkey and it's a microcosm for the trade that was going on at that time there are items from seven different civilizations found on board this ship so we know that people are making trips like from Egypt up to Crete and mainland Greece this one seems to have been hugging the coast around the southwestern coast of Turkey when it went down you can see what they are finding there this looks easier than it is the wreck went down in between 140 and 170 feet of water imagine anybody dive here and be certified I imagine that you have had two martinis to drink and then you dive that's what it's like that's what George bass once said George bass and jamol Pollock are the people that dov'è on this wreck and they said that you can only go down for 20 minutes per day and it's as if you had two martinis but most of it is copper ingots about 60 pounds each but down the length of a hole are these huge stones each with a hole in them and but a guess those are those were stone anchors stone anchors so as one got caught they would then put another one up there and if they didn't need it it was used as ballast so we've also got on board lots of other raw materials as well here's a better picture of the copper ingots these are oxide ingots is my friend to call Hirschfeld she's the only one that never wore a jacket down there so you can always tell who she is in the pictures but notice she doesn't have any flippers on either because there you might accidentally excavate if you kick the sand so they went down barefoot all right you've got other raw materials on board up top here tin there is in fact a tongue worth of ten and it goes with the ten tonnes of copper that are on board so this is enough copper intend to outfit an army of about 300 men with everything swords shields Greaves helmets and all of that so when this ship went down somebody lost a fortune and somebody might have lost a war as well they couldn't outfit their men so you've got tin you've got copper you've also got down here terebinth resin which is from the pistachio tree you use it in perfume among other things ivory you might recognize this there's an elephant tusks but these two canine and incisor are actually from hippo hippopotami ivory turns out to be very very prevalent back then and then up top here one of my favorites these are also ingots but this is raw glass you've got it in blue you've got tan brown also pink rose yellow so this is what everyone is using and in fact the chemical analyses that were done by the Corning Museum of Glass showed that these are identical to the glass found in Egypt and the glass found in Mycenaean Greece so everyone is getting their glass from a single source probably somewhere up in say North Syria and then down bottom here some of the finished products these are Canaanite and Cypriot pottery brand-new they are being shipped as gifts or for sale or something like that so you've got a combination of raw materials and finished gifts now who was sending this and why we have absolutely no idea it could be a gift from one King to another it could be a very wealthy private merchant who is selling their stuff it could be a ship coming from the Aegean that's on a shopping list right we need 10 we need bronze we need glass and don't forget the milk while you're out there alright we just don't know who sent this so it is one of the great mysteries we do think that it was going around clockwise counterclockwise but if it's a gift from one King to another which we know they're doing at that time it could have a completely different route so we'll wait and see now we do know that there are other ships going on at this time about 40 years after the ship went down there is a text from the site of who Garrett in northern Syria which is known as the sinner on new texts and it says on it from the present day I'm a star ooh son of Nick meta king of Ooo Garrett exempts sinner on ooh son of a Seguin ooh by the way these are great names are they not I wanted to name my kids these but I don't know why my wife said no so I still think that there would be no other Alice Tom Roo in the kindergarten class right anyway it continues his grain his beer his olive oil to the palace he shall not deliver his ship is exempt when it arrives from Crete so you've got a guy in northern Syria that is sending a ship to Crete and then bringing back importing if you will grain and beer and olive oil and when it gets back he doesn't have to pay taxes so I think this is actually the first corporate tax exemption in history that we've got but it also does show that you've got these ships that are sailing around at this time so this gives you a little bit of an idea this is what's happening in the 15th century the 14th century the 13th century people are trading there's diplomacy going on they're exchanging daughters they're exchanging goods and everybody is happily merrily working along until we drop a little chaos into it and one by one the civilizations wink out the only one that really survives is Egypt and even they are so weakened it's a Pyrrhic victory that Egypt is never the same again so the question is what happened soon after 1200 BC what happened this is the collapse as we call it and usually in archaeology it's with a capital C the collapse this was an event I think that you can only really compare to the fall of the Roman Empire the magnitude was just enormous and the amount that was lost I don't think that we're gonna see that again as I say until 1500 years later when the Roman Empire collapses in turn but it's a great mystery as to what caused it all right so here's my answer to that long ago final exam question it used to be that people said the sea peoples did it and we know about the sea peoples because the Egyptians write about them they say they came twice they came in 12:07 and they came in 11 77 BC but of course the Egyptologists are always changing the chronology so it would be more accurate to actually say the 5th century the fifth year of Merneptah and the eighth year of Ramses the 3rd and but that's not quite a snappy a title right so 1177 now you see where the title of the book comes from but in fact like I said the Egyptologists keep changing the numbers so when the book first came out I got an email from a senior colleague of mine on the east coast who just said congratulations your title should have been 1186 I sent him back a two-word email and no it's not what you're thinking my email to him was simply it was and in fact I can show you the contract for the book which I signed back in like 2007 was for a book called 1186 BC but in the five years that it took me to write the book the Egyptologist changed the chronology again on me so the problem is of course now that somebody wants to change it back so the second revised edition may have another year I don't know but for now it's 1177 right and why did I pick that year well actually as I'm about to show you civilization did not collapse in that year it is a hallmark it's a keystone it's like saying the Roman Empire fell in 476 when we know it didn't it took most of the fifth century AD for the Romans to collapse but still when you say when did Rome fall most people will tell you 476 it's it's academic shorthand and so that's what 1177 is as well basically the world in 1300 is quite different from the world in 1200 and the world in 1100 is even more different than the world in a thousand BC is even more different than that but again that doesn't fit on the cover of a book so 1177 is my attempt to say this is about when things start going south so put fifty years on the other side of it and and we won't be good but that doesn't also answer the question of the sea peoples as I said we know they came twice 12:07 and 1177 gaston Maspero a french egyptologist was probably the first if not the one of the first to say that the sea peoples had caused this collapse and he sent it on the basis of this inscription on a wall at medinet habu which has Ramses the thirds mortuary temple and it shows on their pictures of a naval battle and inscriptions in which he talks about the coming of these sea peoples though he doesn't actually ever call them the sea peoples he names them individually so he had formulated this idea that the sea peoples brought the Bronze Age to an end already by the 1860s 1870s by 1901 it was firmly accepted that they had done that the problem was that nobody had actually excavated any sites that had been stride by them so what happened was anytime he afterwards somebody did excavate a site that was destroyed they said oh it was the sea peoples that did it when in fact they had actually no proof it's creating a theory and then finding the facts to fit it so I think the sea peoples were definitely there you can't explain them away but I'm not so sure that they were the cause they may have been one of the causes because I think we've got a multiple number of causes here but I also think that they are as much the victims as they were the oppressors so let me show you what I'm thinking first of all the inscriptions this is what Ramses tells us in his year aid he says the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands all at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray no land could stand before their arms and then he tells us the countries that they overrun and we know where these are hot eh that's the Hittites that's in Turkey code a that southeastern Turkey Carr kamesh that's where turkey meets Syria art Sawa that's over in the western part of Turkey Elijah that's ancient Cyprus he says that they were there the camp was set up in a more that's northern Syria they desolated its people its land was like that which has never come into being and then he names them their Confederation was the police' the trajector the checklist the denyen and the West lands United and they came forward saying our plans will succeed but the plans did not succeed because ramses beats them and in a subsequent inscription he tells us that he slew the denyen who were in their isles the trajector in the place' were made ashes the shardana and the wishes of the sea they were made as those that exist not so he beat the but as I say it was a Pyrrhic victory now one of the questions we've got is exactly who were these sea peoples and they've we've got pictures of them so we know it they actually look like and in fact if anybody wants to dress up for Halloween as a sea people you can do so you can actually do it much cheaper just cut out a bunch of the letter C and put on all over and your sea people so it works just as well but so we know what they look like but that doesn't actually help us so here are the names of some of them the ones that came in this eighth year shardana checklist ejector denyen wish bless it anybody think of a place in the Mediterranean that sounds like shardana that's got the same consonants Sardinia absolutely so a number of people have suggested that maybe the shardana are from Sardinia what about shekel ash anyplace in Mediterranean that sounds that's got an S the K in an L or an SS C and an L Sicily anybody yeah so that may be a possibility to jackar could be sickles could be in the TRO ad denyen a lot of people want to have these as homers Greeks the denier the West not sure maybe we'll lousã and again these are all guesses the plus it's the only one that we think we really know in fact jean-francois Champollion the guy that deciphered hieroglyphics back in 1823 he had already said that these were probably the Philistines so that may be but in each case two we don't we have more of a problem - I even if these are to be associated is this where they came from or is this where they went to after they were defeated right did they give the name to Sardinia after they went and settled there we just don't know I happen to think they came from the western Mediterranean and then get settled in the eastern but that's just a guess I don't know any more than anybody else does so again we've got some more heads we do have some archaeological artifacts the felicity and artifacts a lot like what I would call degenerate Mycenaean it looks like Mycenaeans from mainland Greece are now over in cypress roads Israel and they're making their pottery but they're using local stuff and it's just not quite as good so I do suspect that the Philistines are related to the Mycenaeans in some way shape or form but again that's just a scholarly hypothesis that a number of people hold the other thing to keep in mind is these are not like Viking raiders this is a movement and in fact at medinet habu Ramses the third shows us here's the actual picture and there's a drawing of it they're actually moving with the entire family we've got the wives we've got the children we've got the oxcart and the belongings so this is rather than Vikings this is like the Dust Bowl in the 1930s with the people moving from Oklahoma to California all right this is a movement so the question is what starts such a movement and so people said oh well there must have been a drought and that led to famine and that led to the movement of the sea peoples and they then they cut the trade routes and that caused the collapse which is nice and simple in fact I think it's probably a little too simple you know nothing ever happens quite that linearly and nothing is easy that easy so I would ask what really happened that maybe part of it but I don't think it's the entire story so if the sea peoples are not the reason then what is well other things that have been suggested include drought and famine and invaders and earthquakes and if you asked me what it was that caused it I would say yes all of the above and I think that's in fact what happened I think that all of these happened and while a civilization can survive one of them people survive droughts all the time and maybe even a second they survive famine okay but what if things are happening one after the other what if they're happening all at the same time what if it's a perfect storm that you can't survive and so I suspect that that is what we might be looking at but let me quickly go through and show you some of the things that we've got so for example drought we know there's drought back then and in fact this wasn't even a new idea Rhys carpenter proposed it when he was at Bryn Mawr and back in the mid 1960s he said that the Mycenaeans had ended a little after 1200 because of drought but he didn't have the actual evidence for it he thought because there were population movements and things like that well we've got the proof that he was looking for now and it's really just in the last five years or so Connie uski is a French scholar he put together a team and they did sampling at a place called Gabala in North Syria and there when they did the sampling they did coring in a dried-up Lagoon and lake and they came up by looking at the pollen they were able to say that the pollen shows evidence of what they called a 300 year dry event in other words a drought right they said that this lasted from the late 13th or early 12th century down to the 9th century the types of plants that are growing our types that only grow or can only survive in one of these dry events they also went over to Cyprus how the Sultan teki and there they found the same thing in the dried-up lagoon that there was a dry period from about 1200 to 850 BC and then other people as well Lee Drake took stuff from the Aegean Greece as well as Israel as well as other areas and put together at least three different lines of evidence including the fact that there was a drop in the temperature of the surface of the sea and that's going to lead to less rain on the mainland of Greece so we're gonna have a drought in Greece as well and then Daphne Longwood and Israel Finkelstein and Thomas litt in 2013 went to Israel they went to the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea and there they found evidence of a drought as well lasting from about 1250 to 1100 so shorter just 150 years but still that's a pretty long time for a drought and of course the newspapers got ahold of this right New York Times pollen study points to drought as copper bronze-age mystery the LA Times climate change may have caused demise of Late Bronze Age civilizations National Geographic got into the into the argument archaeology magazine didn't want to be left out right and even the New York Post and they tossed in globalization just for good measure and then if you I don't know if you remember there was a NASA funded study that came out that said that we were gonna collapse in a couple of decades and then NASA backtracked and said actually we didn't fund that and maybe you won't collapse and so at that point I got involved and I put out a blog on The Huffington Post the collapse of civilizations it's complicated taking a line from Facebook so we definitely have drought that's for sure and when you have droughts you frequently have famine but famine is much more difficult to find in the archaeological record unless you find like mass graves of bodies the one way that you can tell if you have famine is if they write about it so is there evidence in the ancient texts and the answer is yes we have the texts from Garrett in northern Syria that I've already mentioned this is where sinner on who started his ship going we've also got texts from up in Turkey and elsewhere and so for example here's one text from the house of a merchant named or tainu talking about famine in the city of Emaar which is an inland Syria he had such a profitable business that his main house was in who Garret but then they had a subsidiary in Emaar so he was getting reports back and he said 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 so if we're looking for evidence of famine I think we found it all right same thing up in the the king of Boogaard he says here with me plenty has become famines so they're definitely having some trouble even up in Turkey the Hittites as well here's a letter from the hittite king do you not know there's a famine in the midst of my land it's a matter of life and death so we've got family we've got drought do we have invaders people like the Sea Peoples do we have internal rebellion and again the answer is yes and yes in fact vaca do guard again we have a rather well-known letter which was found they said in a kiln being baked before it was going to be sent to Cyprus in which it says my father now the ships of the enemy have come they've been setting fire to my cities have done harm to the land all of my infantry and territory are up in in Turkey and hot eh although my ships are stationed in the land of Lucca if other ships of the enemy turn up send me a report so I will know and I was always taught that this was found in the kiln it was being baked before it was sent but that the city was destroyed by these enemy ships before it can be sent turns out that's too good a story to be true when they went back and re-examined the evidence it's not in a kiln it was actually in a basket along with about 70 other tablets that had fallen from the second floor and landed upside-down so when the basket disintegrated it left kiln shape but they were not actually being baked or anything like that and as a result we don't actually know if this dates to the second invasion in 1177 or if it's from the earlier one I suspect it's the later one but now that's been called into question but we've got other letters as well here's another one from regard when your messenger arrived the army was already humiliated the city was sacked our food and the threshing floors was burnt and the vineyards were also destroyed or your city is sacked may you know it may you know it so they've got some problems here and indeed one can you ski when they went to Gabala and did their Corps and find out that there was a drought up there the archaeologists also they were excavating and they actually found a destruction level you can see it right here and they simply labeled it see people destruction layer the problem is there's there's I mean it may be even sea peoples but there's no actual evidence that it is for sure even if some of the things that are there afterward look sea people ish that doesn't mean that they also destroyed it so while this could be see people's we don't know for sure so I leave it as kind of a maybe maybe question mark and one of the reasons I do so is because of another site hot sort down in what is now modern Israel Canaanite hot sort we know for a fact that this is destroyed at the end of the Late Bronze Age we've got the huge palace there torched the mud bricks or burnt cherry red and brown and black but even the two co directors Amnon ben-tor and sharone sir c'mon couldn't decide who destroyed it I'm non bent or said it was maybe Egyptians maybe Canaanites maybe Israelites maybe Sea Peoples maybe you know something else but he discounted Egyptians and Canaanites because there are statues in the destructions that are defaced and he said Egyptian soldiers would never have to face two Egyptian statues Canaanite soldiers would not have defaced Canaanite statues so it can't be either of those he says it can't be see peoples it's too far inland which I would disagree with we've got sea peoples growing very far inland but never mind and so Ventura that left just Joshua and the Israelites and the Bible does say that they torched hot sword so he concluded it was Israelites but sharone Zukerman who passed away very recently unfortunately she said actually wait a minute if you take a look at the destruction at hots or it's the temples that are destroyed and the palaces that are destroyed but the regular people they're not touched on the shops they're not touched she says this I think is what happens when you have an internal rebellion when the bottom 99 rise up against the top 1% because of a drought or famine or whatever and so she suggested it was internal rebellion so my point here simply is if the two co-directors can't decide who destroyed their site how are we going to so there are a number of these destructions that yes they might be sea peoples but they might be something else and in fact that something else could have not been humans it could have been Mother Nature so we've got earthquakes in this region we know that for a fact this is a map that was made up we all the red x's are the cities that are destroyed in and around the year 1,200 and if you superimpose them on a map where there have been earthquakes just since 1900 to the last century or so you can see that many of them are in earthquake active zones and seismic zones and in fact the whole region has fault lines all over it you've got the North Anatolian fault line here you've got a fault line coming down off the coast of Greece you got the great Dead Sea fault coming up here another one continuing there so this is an earthquake it's a seismically active zone in fact the North Anatolian fault line has been unzipping for the last 60 or 70 years started out in about 1939 and there was remember the huge earthquake in about 1999 this is what we call an earthquake sequence and modern terms if you have an earthquake and it doesn't release all of the tension at once you'll have another earthquake right next to it or nearby on the fault line and if that one doesn't release all the tension you'll have another and then another and it basically unzips the fault line until all the pressure is gone and then it takes about another 400 years to do that again so in modern terms this is what a most nor at Stanford studies this is called an earthquake sequence but he and I have also looked at the ancient earthquakes and we've given it a slightly sexier name these earthquakes storms back to them so the question is was there an earthquake storm back then and I think yes you can make an argument so for example here at my scene I with the famous lion gate and the the big walls right here you see this right here most people don't even take a second look at it sorry you don't all have Indiana Jones was your alarm I'm reaching the end of my time here anyway where was it yes my scene I this the archeo seismologist this they're called a most noir and other people they took one look and they said that is a fault zone that's a slip mark that's one half of a fault line and they kind of started laughing in the archaeologists they looked I said wait a minute who would build a major city on top of an active fault line anybody here from San Francisco alright so I my scene I does suffer from from earthquakes in fact we have here one of the victims that was being excavated in this case by noni Milano's and actually this rock was found in the skull this young lady had sheltered in what was supposed to be the safest place in a doorway doorway collapsed and killed her so not not a real good idea nearby tear ins just about three kilometers away we've got a woman and child buried by a falling wall at Troy we also have walls this is not supposed to be tilted like this I here's my picture when I was there last August that is also what happens within an earthquake same thing at bugera itself that wall is not supposed to look like that so I think we do have earthquakes at this time as well and in terms of cutting of international trade route remember I mentioned at the beginning of the talk here that the 10 is coming all the way from Afghanistan and the copper is coming from Cyprus so if those roots are cut at any point you're in trouble and I think that is in part what happens so if I can sum up I've got three points that I think I can say without anybody disagreeing with me I know that's a big thing to assume but let me try them out on you at first point would you agree with me that we've got a number of separate civilizations that seem to been flourishing from about the 15th to the 13th centuries these would include nice in some Minoans and Hittites and Egyptians and they're all independent but they are interacting with each other especially through the trade routes would you agree with me on that right okay I think that's uncontested all right number two would you agree that a number of the cities are destroyed and that Late Bronze Age as they knew it came to an end shortly after 1200 again would you agree with that yeah all right I think that's incontestable as well and number three would you agree that there is no unequivocal proof that's been offered as to what caused this in other words we still don't really know would you agree so far okay so we've got a problem that we haven't actually solved it so I'm telling you right now don't skip to the end of the book and expect me to have solved it I don't what I would say is that it's still I would agree it is not as simple as people still say it is last November at the annual meetings of a sore a scholar stood up and proposed the old simplistic and I think it doesn't work I think it was much more messy I do think you've got droughts and famines and earthquakes and invaders and rebellions and that all of that led combined to the end I think all of those are stressors and I think that they multiplied the effects of each other so like I said you can survive a drought you can survive a famine you can survive an earthquake but what if you've got them all at the same time right slings and arrows of misfortunes as a famous bard once said I think that's what we've got here and I think we've got a domino effect that when one group went down it's going to affect the others and when the next one went down on the next one on the next one what we're talking about very simply is the system's collapsed the whole system collapsed now the hallmarks of this and Renfrew already said this back in it was like 1977 you've got the central administration collapses we've got the disappearance of the traditional elite got the collapse of the centralized economy there's a population decline their settlement shifts we've got all this and we see this elsewhere as well and other civilizations of other times but I think that that's probably the best way to describe what happens here there's a systems collapse and we know that when you have a systems collapse it can take as much as a century for all of it to take place and that's why I say again that life and 1200 BC was different from life and 1100 and very different from life in a thousand BC but you also get then a Dark Age that follows and after that you get the development of myths of a golden age back then and so think of Homer for example in the stories of the Trojan War that's exactly what we get here so just so you don't go away empty-handed if we have any lessons that we can learn from this what can we take away well I would ask are we facing a similar situation today to what they did back in 11 77 I'm already hearing some yeah some agreement but do we have climate change well we could debate that til the cows come home right but let's say just for the argument yes famines and droughts we got those today earthquakes and the earthquakes anybody rebellions yeah I think actually the only thing we're missing of the Sea Peoples and in fact I'm not so sure we're missing them because you could say that Isis are the sea peoples or you could say that the refugees that have been driven into Europe from Syria or the Sea Peoples you could take either side so I actually think we've got the sea peoples as well but again let's do a comparison and the last couple of years if you rip from the headlines Greece's economy is tanked right we've been saying that for the last couple years internal rebellions in Libya Egypt and Syria Outsiders and foreign warriors I've been Fanning the flames there turkey is afraid it's gonna be involved Israel's afraid right this rings a bell right you've all been reading in the newspapers last couple years Jordan's crowded with refugees Iran still bellicose still threatening Iraq is in turmoil all right what if we compared this to headlines from 1200 BC pretty much the same thing so my job as an archaeologist an ancient historian is to look backwards I can only tell you what has happened it's up to others including some of you in this audience to look forward and tell us what's going to happen in the future and to say that if you know every civilization on the history of this world so far has collapsed I don't think that will be immune it's not a question of you know if but but when and so the one difference that I can see is we're more technologically advanced we can recognize when things are going south very quickly but the question is what are we gonna do about it so I do think that in this particular case studying something that happened 3,200 years ago might actually be more relevant than you might suspect and may have more lessons for us today so I look backwards you guys look forwards thank you but that was so that was excellent we have about 10 minutes and the professor Klein will take some questions we have microphones on either side so if you raise your hand they'll bring them to you to bring could you talk about the role collapse that the ability of the people in charge to those external stressors right okay so the inability of the elite to respond into hiring into something like this yeah an excellent question I would I would suspect first of all and they didn't know what was happening to them I mean the Hittites had no idea what would cause the drought they wouldn't pray to them you know the storm gun or something and even climate change we call it you know that's mother nature the good sites are not driving SUVs around back then but the inability to respond in a timely manner again I come back to them not knowing what was happening and I think by the time they realized it it was probably too late but realize too late in terms of things just like writing probably only in the top one percent who knew how to read and write so if you lose that top level then you're civilization is going to take a giant step backwards witches will receive in most of these cases there have been some people that have suggested that the Late Bronze Age Kings were at fault for not adapting to this and anticipating I would come to their defense and say that by the time they real stay with us probably too late and I think that that's the difference between us and then we're realizing it and it's not yet too late so I don't exactly know what they would have done anyway you know there's not so much you can do when there's a drought 3,200 years ago how do you fix it if there's a draft today we know how to fix it how do you respond to earthquake expect them survivors out that's about it now we know a little bit more so I do I would agree that it was caused in part by an inability to adapt but what more they could have done I don't know it wasn't entirely their fault I would say it was conspired and gets them a wonderful lecture and I'll be buying a book in a couple of minutes but looking at what's right in front of us and would it be a stressor or would you view it as the culmination of these stressors is then you end up having this cataclysmic war between East and West for some you know ambiguous reasons such as a marital spat it seems though all of those stressors then lead up to something that really puts it over yes no I would agree but then the question is in which world would you talk about because is it the sea peoples attack on Egypt or does it something like the Trojan War which takes places about the same time and since I do think it happens there you've got again East versus West so but I think it's really just part and parcel of the whole thing and in part is because when you've got people migrating and move to more favorable lands the people that are already living there are not going to be real happy about that so I think that that's where it's you know you can maybe put them in a linear but you can't say what's more important I would say so yes the sea peoples in a way or the culmination but that's only because they've washed up on shore as it were in Egypt and what if he took ten lost where would the sea peoples have gone from there it's just an interesting what-if question but I do say that that you've got an equal number of stressors here and the East versus West is just wonderful if I did have to rank them I think I probably put climate change number one as the stressor that probably led to more of the others but obviously even climate change doesn't lead to earthquakes and less like your fraction Soviet is still in the process of collapsing it's in the middle of that you talk about family they have not been able to feed themselves for many generations they're having a dramatic drop in population do you see parallels there and we don't know if they're going to succumb to your sea peoples or not and in their death throes they're reaching out they're flailing and killing other peoples I'm now seeing parallels everywhere but I think I've never found a way to after all of this I kind of feel like chicken level it's like yes there and there and there are there right but you russian yes russian you you can make that argument i think an even more powerful argument would be some place like Syria right now and in fact when I was giving this lecture last year in Washington DC somebody who studies modern agro business came up and just that you know the whole war in Syria started because of a drought that was back in two thousand six seven eight something like that all the farmers came in so I think that's actually even a more powerful parallel but yes that works as well yeah basically I see it pretty much everywhere and so I am concerned that we are not taking this seriously because if these kinds gets long we can fall too but I don't want to run around being a dooms Dussehra but for me the fact that these guys went down means that pretty much anybody could as well I do have faith in us I think that we can overcome and unless we all get hit by a series of earthquakes we might be ok but you never know so if it does go down I told you so with the advent of environmental factors earthquakes etc maybe even zero I think that did as you're saying create a domino effect and destroyed the the trade infrastructure that was going on that did that wouldn't that have given a distinct advantage to see people who were still able to maintain their trailers and to to plunder and take from one land and get from the other because and with this trade worth going down bronze must have been depleted significantly which again game you can argue that I would say though that the see people says at least as I see them that they're not sitting around in establishing trade routes they're moving they're they're a migrant population we have they want and settle down then they might have been able to do that but I think in this particular case they're just taking advantage of what's going on so I don't see them taking over that way your point though about copper and tin and bronze going away is it's a huge one though and we do see of course iron taking over and I think that's what's going to happen at this time but be aware of course that iron is already being used back to the Bronze Age and bronze is still used in the Iron Age is just a matter of the proportions here but I think in part that when the copper in the tendon became less accessible then people start turning to iron but that's a whole other topic that we can talk about for another afternoon I'd like to follow up on that because obviously the transition was the event you described correspond to the transition from Bronze Star and as the major cutting influence and whether you could discuss what impact that might have on the bullet economy the tributary systems policies that's right exactly understand your question the effect of changing from going to be more widespread use of iron on the tributary systems well from one thing your Bronze Age elites have completely gone away or the Dark Age at this point when they come back up you've got this different system going on but I'm going to actually jump on the Davos would you like to answer my question we have one of the world's experts sitting in the audience here but so but I think the thing is when the bronze age goes down your whole tribute system changes you don't have what you had had before and it's going to take a while for it to come back up so I don't know always that addresses your question you may have to talk privately later but I think you've got a different system in place after this though there is some recent work that's been done Sarah Murray has been talking about what happens in the transition so I think this is an ongoing discussion that will be looked at by the scholars for the next couple of years microphone is running ding theory that suggests that it takes about 200 or 300 years for corruption to set into a government and basically bringing civilization to a halt do you think that might have been a factor and could it have possibly been avoided or Canidae good question I don't see the only way you could even look at that really I think would be in the texts unless you look at the artifacts and saying that's a gift of that surprise there is your traditional grasp that's going on but now I don't see that to that extent and decide to which even than these 300 years with everybody coming and going I'm not sure that I would see I'm not sure I would go that way the corruption well it may be there I wouldn't have thought I was a factor in bringing it down the one factor that I was looking for that I don't know if any of you noticed they didn't mention this disease yeah right I was looking for evidence of that plague disease this is there is some but it's earlier it's about 150 years earlier where the Hittites get wiped out the royal family is wiped out by plate but at this particular point so far I've got no evidence of plague at around 1177 BC I won't be surprised if we find it but so far disease is not one of the stressors much to my surprise but pretty much got everything else but not disease so in case you were wondering there's that well thank you very much

Channel: Getty Museum

Views: 108,037

Keywords: getty museum, getty, getty villa, archaeologist, archaeology, Eric Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Villa Council, Late Bronze Age

Id: uh_xRTp8D0g

Length: 67min 54sec (4074 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2016