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Bronze Age Collapse is some fascinating shit, kinda scary too
- Thread starter Sander VF
- Start date
i think china is more closer to how we treated iran in history than rome , where whoever rules over the land is called china regardless if they considered themselves china or not
OP
OP
Had an option like that too.
Yes, I considered two of the most likely options on the polls and left them out in favor of unfunny jokes.
1/3 of my YouTube time is spent watching lectures on this time period. I see Eric Cline has been posted already lol he seems to lean into his public role as "Bronze Age Collapse Guy". Probably my favourite age.
This is also the period where (1/2 of the reason 1/3 of my YouTube time is focused on Bronze Age) the Israelites consolidated as a unique group, as a chunk of the Old Testament takes place in the Early Iron Age. Actually, due to the collapse, the Old Testament is some of the only written record we have of the Early Iron Age. Although it's not literally historically accurate, there is a lot of history for that period between its lines.
On that note, there is more evidence for the Sea Peoples than we let on but it's largely boring shit like pottery. A lot of folks in here are posting some theories of the exact timeline that I haven't seen corroborated as fact by archeologists. We know climate change, drought, etc. influenced much of this; we do know that the invasions started in Mycenea and slowly moved Southeast, likely picking up steam and refugees/fighters as it went; we have letters from across the world at the time acknowledging the encroaching doom and begging for help that no longer existed; we know Egypt battled a group of these peoples (we even know Egypt knew a few of them previously), defeated them, re-settled a few, added others to their army, etc. We know through Egyptian records that these were whole communities and not just armies.
How does that tie into the Israelites? Well, we now know that the Phillistines were one of the Sea Peoples. The archeological record shows a number of their artifacts (yes especially pottery) being either Mycenean, Minoan, or of Crete, idr which, a number of their cities destroyed in line with the broad Biblical account, and over the span of about a century slow assimilation into the surrounding Canaanite culture (particularly seen through the use/slow disuse of pork and, yes, pottery).
IIRC Egypt had glass by this point as well. All that shit disappeared for centuries.
This is also the period where (1/2 of the reason 1/3 of my YouTube time is focused on Bronze Age) the Israelites consolidated as a unique group, as a chunk of the Old Testament takes place in the Early Iron Age. Actually, due to the collapse, the Old Testament is some of the only written record we have of the Early Iron Age. Although it's not literally historically accurate, there is a lot of history for that period between its lines.
On that note, there is more evidence for the Sea Peoples than we let on but it's largely boring shit like pottery. A lot of folks in here are posting some theories of the exact timeline that I haven't seen corroborated as fact by archeologists. We know climate change, drought, etc. influenced much of this; we do know that the invasions started in Mycenea and slowly moved Southeast, likely picking up steam and refugees/fighters as it went; we have letters from across the world at the time acknowledging the encroaching doom and begging for help that no longer existed; we know Egypt battled a group of these peoples (we even know Egypt knew a few of them previously), defeated them, re-settled a few, added others to their army, etc. We know through Egyptian records that these were whole communities and not just armies.
How does that tie into the Israelites? Well, we now know that the Phillistines were one of the Sea Peoples. The archeological record shows a number of their artifacts (yes especially pottery) being either Mycenean, Minoan, or of Crete, idr which, a number of their cities destroyed in line with the broad Biblical account, and over the span of about a century slow assimilation into the surrounding Canaanite culture (particularly seen through the use/slow disuse of pork and, yes, pottery).
IIRC Egypt had glass by this point as well. All that shit disappeared for centuries.
It is wild to know that without modern archeology the Hittites would still be seen as some group the Israelites made up for their Bible. Turns out they were one of the superpowers of their time.
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It's a fascinating subject all right.
Also, Extra Credits is incredible. I had no watched their videos on the bornze age collapse, time to fix that.
Also, Extra Credits is incredible. I had no watched their videos on the bornze age collapse, time to fix that.
One of the Fall of Civilizations podcast episodes talked about this. Best theory put forth is climate change in Nordic region forced those people to move and they were the 'sea peoples.' Makes sense.
Also, climate change seems to have affected the fall of a lot of civilizations, but it doesn't seem we've learned that lesson.
Also, climate change seems to have affected the fall of a lot of civilizations, but it doesn't seem we've learned that lesson.
Yeah, I've been pretty convinced "Sea People" was just a catch-all name for pirates, mercenaries, and other stateless actors that ballooned in the power vacuum after various societies started collapsing. That adds up to me.
It's definitely a period that fascinates me, though. We're so used to a world that gets increasingly complex, and interconnected, and advanced, that it's tough to imagine all that just... stopping. And for centuries, you're living in the ruins of a world you couldn't rebuild if you wanted to.
It's definitely a period that fascinates me, though. We're so used to a world that gets increasingly complex, and interconnected, and advanced, that it's tough to imagine all that just... stopping. And for centuries, you're living in the ruins of a world you couldn't rebuild if you wanted to.
Regional climate change likely played a substantial part in the collapse. Once-verdant fields would suffer droughts, leading to massive human displacement. Those displaced would need fresh resources to survive. Some of them likely became "the Sea Peoples." The Sea Peoples, as scholars such as Eric H. Cline have posited, were less "cause" and more "effect."
Of course, this is just one of several key angles. I recently read this book and recommend it:
I disagree with Cline here and there. I think his structure could have been improved with a more cutthroat kind of editor. But overall, it's a terrific read, and it does an excellent job showing us what researchers now believe was the "Perfect Storm" that led to the Bronze Age Collapse.
Of course, this is just one of several key angles. I recently read this book and recommend it:
I disagree with Cline here and there. I think his structure could have been improved with a more cutthroat kind of editor. But overall, it's a terrific read, and it does an excellent job showing us what researchers now believe was the "Perfect Storm" that led to the Bronze Age Collapse.
These are the people responsible for ending their civilization most likely
OP
OP
Between this and the Historia Civilis video... boy that shit was just the fucking Climate Crisis, but thousands of years ago.Regional climate change likely played a substantial part in the collapse. Once-verdant fields would suffer droughts, leading to massive human displacement. Those displaced would need fresh resources to survive. Some of them likely became "the Sea Peoples." The Sea Peoples, as scholars such as Eric H. Cline have posited, were less "cause" and more "effect."
Of course, this is just one of several key angles. I recently read this book and recommend it:
I disagree with Cline here and there. I think his structure could have been improved with a more cutthroat kind of editor. But overall, it's a terrific read, and it does an excellent job showing us what researchers now believe was the "Perfect Storm" that led to the Bronze Age Collapse.
FUCK
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
Can we all just write down "it was the Climate Change, don't repeat our bullshit" for the future civilizations on a stone tablet somewhere, if this goes down again?
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OP
My impression is that they were hit hard by natural disasters and then invaded and/or assimilated by Mycenaeans.
half a page in and we finally get some dates. don't want to sound whiny, op, but simply stating the years this went down in really helps with context.This is a good, pretty quick read on the subject:
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
back on topic: so basically 3200 years ago a bunch of near east civs vanished. will watch the vids later, i like a good history mystery.
Came here to post this book, it is a pretty brief read, but it seemed to cover the range of possibilities of what happened very well, which may not be as exciting as an "unknown peoples came and destroyed all"This is a good, pretty quick read on the subject:
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed - Wikipedia
Really interesting topic.
IT is crazy to think that civilizations collapsed like that. Also I always get these weird feeling thinking about how humans were out and about so long ago doing crazy shit, I wonder what a day in the life was like.
IT is crazy to think that civilizations collapsed like that. Also I always get these weird feeling thinking about how humans were out and about so long ago doing crazy shit, I wonder what a day in the life was like.
Maybe, my take was that the cultures of the age were more or less peaceful and in constant trade with each other. In the Iliad the King of Knossos does send troops to Troy.
It seems like, upon a certain point of development, that civilizations eventually collapse into infighting and corruption. So it's really not that mysterious to me that complex civilizations would regress over the course of a century or so, while also being too weak or apathetic to, outside invasions that were slowly but surely picking off the bones.
The Sea Peoples were viking hipsters.
Anyway, I guess they were various seafaring tribes from various places, and not a single people.
I fucking love this time period, the whole "Sea Peoples" mystery thing has fascinated me ever since I was a kid.
It's absolutely insane that human history experienced another Dark Age before the Dark Ages. How society is able to recover is fascinating as fuck.
It's scary to think, it happened twice already which means it can happen again.
It's absolutely insane that human history experienced another Dark Age before the Dark Ages. How society is able to recover is fascinating as fuck.
It's scary to think, it happened twice already which means it can happen again.
or Egypt. You could call Egypt a 7000 year old nation state and you'd not be strictly wrong, just mostly wrong. Same goes with China/Persia/etc.
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I... didn't know the dates.
Just that it was at the end of Bronze Age.
Went back and put in the centuries timeframe from Ancient History Encyclopedia website.
The Bagaudae in the late Roman period are interesting and might provide a more recent example of nation-state decline from within and without. However, the Sea Peoples appear to have been able to defeat standing armies and siege large settlements with technically advanced weaponry.
LOL this is what happens when I reply to something at 6AM in the morning :D Yes, I totally got my periods confused.
OP
OP
Lol yeah, it's not entirely 1-1, but enough parallels there that it should make people severely uncomfortable. Except with this one we're basically trying to speed-run our doom as we're literally causing it, despite knowing for the last couple generations that what we were doing was destroying our future.
Humans need to stop believing ourselves as above nature. Environmental crises always precipitate mass change in the civilizations feeling them, but there's no reason we have to let it go like all the other times, where that change means total collapse and suffering.
We've already baked in a lot of biblical plague-level shit when it comes to this impending biosphere collapse, but we have the tools and knowledge to avoid a bronze-age collapse of civilization even as the planet's fever gets existentially worse. But as we are now...lmao, enjoy this decade wherever and however you can folks.
It wasnt until relatively recently in historic terms that societies expected to get better over time and grown and become stronger. For much of human history, civilizations would make a lot of progress and then completely fall apart back to stage 1. It's why you would have ancient empires who were powerul in their own right look back and look upon the ruins of an old doomed civilization who had more advanced techniques and technology then they did, and wonder at how powerful they must have been.
I read a book on the subject a few years ago
Sadly I don't recall anything ATM
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) - Kindle edition by Cline, Eric H., Cline, Eric H.. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) - Kindle edition by Cline, Eric H., Cline, Eric H.. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading 1177 B.C.: The...
www.amazon.com
Sadly I don't recall anything ATM
That was interesting. The fucking sea peoples! Makes me think of a horror movie where you've got this thriving civilization and then all of a sudden people start whispering about the "sea peoples" and you don't know what is going on all you hear is omg it's the sea peoples.....the damn sea peoples are here! And you're dead and your cities are gone and no one knows what happened.
I've been looking at maps now lol. There is a large area in Europe that is like proto-celtic or germanic(?) but then I doubt they would come down that far having to go around all the mountains plus be great with ships, seems far fetched. There is also a big area that is in Russia and they have a clear shot through the Black Sea. There is the Italian peninsula which is close. The idea that it was an uprising due to a cascade of problems seems the most logical but then why didn't they rebuild the area?
Did the Thracians have some big empire building up there?
Was it just a whole bunch of different civs attacking at the same time by coincidence?
It's also interesting because isn't this a big time period in the Bible? Like I'm just thinking maybe if it was so catastrophic and tales were verbally passed down you could get people writing about the old testament (google says it was written between 1200-165 bc), and the sea peoples became the great flood, and the 10 plagues were the cascade of errors which lead to this collapse, and the Israelites went into exile and found their land, etc. Seems rife for mythology. Like Moses survives the catastrophe and leads slaves from Egypt after the fall (maybe they were part of an uprising? with all the trade there could be communication for a rebellion of the masses :p ). Maybe the parting of the red sea was just a fancy way of their struggle across the Nile and the Red Sea tributaries, and Canaan was mostly destroyed so that's free real estate.
I've been looking at maps now lol. There is a large area in Europe that is like proto-celtic or germanic(?) but then I doubt they would come down that far having to go around all the mountains plus be great with ships, seems far fetched. There is also a big area that is in Russia and they have a clear shot through the Black Sea. There is the Italian peninsula which is close. The idea that it was an uprising due to a cascade of problems seems the most logical but then why didn't they rebuild the area?
Did the Thracians have some big empire building up there?
Was it just a whole bunch of different civs attacking at the same time by coincidence?
It's also interesting because isn't this a big time period in the Bible? Like I'm just thinking maybe if it was so catastrophic and tales were verbally passed down you could get people writing about the old testament (google says it was written between 1200-165 bc), and the sea peoples became the great flood, and the 10 plagues were the cascade of errors which lead to this collapse, and the Israelites went into exile and found their land, etc. Seems rife for mythology. Like Moses survives the catastrophe and leads slaves from Egypt after the fall (maybe they were part of an uprising? with all the trade there could be communication for a rebellion of the masses :p ). Maybe the parting of the red sea was just a fancy way of their struggle across the Nile and the Red Sea tributaries, and Canaan was mostly destroyed so that's free real estate.
Who Wrote The Bible, And When? The History Of The Book | HistoryExtra
The origins of the Bible are still cloaked in mystery. Spencer Day charts the evolution of arguably the most influential book of all time
www.historyextra.com
Probably hard as fuck for most, pretty easy for the elites..... kinds like today :)
I don't believe anyone (outside of religious people) thinks the Old Testament dates to 1200. It was mostly written around the time of the Babylonian exile (early 6th century BCE?). As you move away from that date, you get more and more myth and legends passed down verbally generation to generation. They really aren't accurate depictions of history at all. Moses and the trip from Egypt is hypothesised by some to be a remnant memory of the hyksos expulsion, for example, but the expulsions of the Hyksos happened centuries before the exodus was supposed to have happened, so, who knows. It's very likely that large people moving from Egypt happened lots of times in history and that just got slowly absorbed into local mythology. The semetic peoples that became jews were always local though: Canaanite pastoralists that started coming down from the highlands around the time of the Sea PEoples... IIRC, which I might not be.
The bronze age was more ancient to the vikings than they are to us.
All it takes is cascading systems collapse accompanied by a breakdown in the ability to record information. For back then, that wouldn't have required much.
The general answer seems to have already been posted, so I'll just pile in on the likelihood of something on the scale of environmental disaster triggering growing waves of refugees, at least some of whom turned to raiding either by opportunity or force if places tried to block refugees from entering.
You get one collapse going and you've already got a bunch of experienced soldiers, commanders and equipment available to move on cities, bolstered by the general population joining along to a size that probably overwhelmed most standing forces.
Huge parallels to modern times and the near future. If some countries become simply uninhabitable, and/or unable to sustain their populations, where will those people go? What happens when countries try to turn them away when they have nowhere else to go and can't go back? Will their militaries and any remaining leadership just let it happen?
It's going to get nuts when things start landsliding that way.
The general answer seems to have already been posted, so I'll just pile in on the likelihood of something on the scale of environmental disaster triggering growing waves of refugees, at least some of whom turned to raiding either by opportunity or force if places tried to block refugees from entering.
You get one collapse going and you've already got a bunch of experienced soldiers, commanders and equipment available to move on cities, bolstered by the general population joining along to a size that probably overwhelmed most standing forces.
Huge parallels to modern times and the near future. If some countries become simply uninhabitable, and/or unable to sustain their populations, where will those people go? What happens when countries try to turn them away when they have nowhere else to go and can't go back? Will their militaries and any remaining leadership just let it happen?
It's going to get nuts when things start landsliding that way.
wasn't there an Egyptian dynasty of Sea People? They are mysterious but we have a lot of info about them.
Except it didn't really? At least as far as I recall?
The general area we associate nowadays with China has been settled, overthrown, overthrown again and again, and culturally and ethnically intermixed with other surrounding peoples for most of its entire existence, same with any other part of the world in Antiquity and beyond. Heck, it contains one of the most well-known cases of a civilization/ethnic group being conquered and subsumed by a neighbor, that being when all of China was conquered by the Mongol Empire which then split off and eventually transitioned to what we know as the Yuan dynasty, though it was later reclaimed by what became the Ming.
While the various dynasties and ruling powers throughout the region's history do claim a shared history and ethnic identity to an extent (which is the same for most European and Middle East powers after the Bronze Age collapse), they most certainly do not represent parts of any single Chinese political "entity" that persisted through millennia.
Actually this period of time is part of the Bible! It's right before the Israelites were fighting the Phillistines, because the Phillistines are believed to be one of the sea peoples that Egypt relocated to the region after the collapse. So their appearance would match up with the period right after the 40 years of wandering in the biblical narrative, very close to the Exodus.
The problem is that anything we have from the archeological record that could potentially line up with any events from the actual Exodus story in any vague way took place over the span of around 800 years IIRC. It definitely was most likely to have occurred around the 1300s, so right before things started spiraling. But it still does not make much sense because Egypt is known to have controlled Canaan during this time, using it as a buffer from the Hitties and whichever empire lay to their East that I forgot the name of. There are ruins of Egyptian administrative centers from that period in many Canaanite cities and evidence to suggest there was cultural integration happening.
We also have contemporary reports of a "shasu [nomadic or shepherding people] of yhw" around the lands south/southeast of Israel such as Midian, which borders the Red Sea. There is nothing else in the archeological record to tie this specifically with YHWH or Israelites, but it is definitely an interesting potential connection. I think it's pretty conclusive at this point that Judaism arose from the Canaanite religion and would have still been polytheistic here, and El & YHWH were originally separate gods in that pantheon. Texts (especially Exodus) already seem to place great importance on that south/southwest region in their YHWH myths. At some point during the Iron Age the two gods merged, and it's hypothesized groups from Midian or Edom migrated into Israel/Judea which caused that. There is no evidence in the archeological record for a systematic destruction of Canaanite cities, though.
What this suggests to me is that the Exodus as we know it is an amalgamation of multiple oral traditions based on these different groups' own experiences during the Bronze Age/early Iron Age. Even the Philistines, because the record suggest they slowly integrated into Canaanite culture during their existence. The Old Testament is in fact one of only a few documents we have which discuss the dark age after the Collapse in detail. Of course a lot of the actual stories being told are is stylized, hyperbolized, stretched, smashed, and skewed, but scholars can still use it to glean information about how people lived, worshipped, organized, wrote, spoke, recounted their histories, and generally saw each other during the time period.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, I am not an expert