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Eric Cline is great - when i had a tooth removed in a somewhat nasty procedure i spent a Caturday hepped up on goofballs watching his videos on LBA while playing Hatshepsut on Diety in Civ VII 1.4 (i got to play test 1.3.2 via Firaxis via discord, ooh la la i call a car hole a garage)

in my personal "immersive learning" period starting 2021, i discovered acoup.blog when Old World came out and extended into reading while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action

EDIT: in the blind i'm guessing the port city of which you speak is Ugarit, which i had never heard of. IIRC everything was weakened by drought and famine, and Ugarit's armies were pulled over to the Hittites who abandoned Ugarit to The Sea Peoples. and the Sea Peoples always came off like a "cosmological constant" fudge factor where constant advances in shipwreck archaeology should provide more clarity in its merry time

history is dope. it never repeats itself but it always rhymes :)

The OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting:

> there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.

It injects some really interesting color into the Tanakh/Old Testament - I'm not sure anyone has definitively lined up the Bronze Age Collapse with Biblical events, but it sure seems to have happened somewhere between the Exodus and King David.

One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.

One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. It was a systems collapse. The societies of the time were likely resilient enough to deal with "just a drought", "just a war", "just a big earthquake", or just some "international trade hiccups". What happened during the collapse was all of these things at once. It was the combination that proved so difficult to handle.

To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline.

Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.

The drought explanation seems particularly plausible for the Hittites, IMO. They had grain storage, but ~3 years of drought would exhaust that. So if the climate becomes just a bit drier the chance of such a three year run increases enough to likely crash their society.

Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.

Shameless plug for my favourite YouTuber of all time https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=GviYcvEtOAJ1mln7

I'm being pedantic here, of course, but "nation-states" is perhaps not the right expression to use for that era. Nation states are primarily a thing of the nineteenth century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state). The article seems to talk about "imperial states" and "palace states", and I'm not sure I've ever seen the expression "palace state" before.

The fantastic Fall of Civilizations podcast also had an episode about it: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/01/21/episode-2-...

He's also recently been on Empire [1], the Goalhanger podcast — and sister show to the great The Rest is History (which I hope will cover this period someday, though they tend not to go back that far in time) — in a series of episodes on the late Bronze Age collapse, which had Stephen Fry as a guest as well.

Cline does cover the evidence of destruction, which is also talked about in the other episodes. But the thing about drought is that we have written communications between different rules documenting that they were struggling with food supply.

An aside: For some reason I find Cline super annoying to listen to — his voice, drawl, and odd cadence triggers something visceral in me. But I admit he knows his stuff.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire-world-history/i...

I don't think Bret (the author of ACOUP) omits drought - he leads his section on plausible theories with "period of drying and consistent crop failures". While Bret dismisses the out to in migration/invasion theory, he does support the idea of intra-region migration/warfare (perhaps induced by drought/crop failures).

Eric Cline has an interview on "Tides of History" podcast.

I think it's a popular topic because so many people are wondering when our civilization will fall.

> deterioration of international shipping routes

like a closing of a certain straight that was essential for a large percentage of a necessary resource?

I'm reading Proto which is about the Proto-Indo-European language family and it discusses exactly this, where the hunter gatherer nomads of PIE moved from the Caucuses to more farming oriented areas like plains they settled down and also interbred with the local farmers. But, when droughts happened and food got more scarce from farming, many of the farmers in turn became nomads again. The DNA shows this change apparently.

It's important that we learn about this so we don't repeat it. Sadly, we are repeating it. Perhaps it's impossible to prevent the cycle because it can only be prevented by those who benefit from it.

> "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."

pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :)

i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute

just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky.

i'll see myself out

Given my extensive study of civilization, the collapse was caused by Gandhi launching nukes.

The closest to that would be the ideas in “ the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind”

The people of that era would have thought so. The Iliad and the Odyssey (if they have any basis in reality) might be examples of that period seen through a lens of mythology.

And angry gods stopped rain

People have always downplayed the number of things their gods can get angry about, while it often escalates beyond sustainability.

>Late Bronze Age Collapse

It was a little late but it had to happen sooner or later.

For those in power there may not be many other opportunities to set the standard for archaic leadership, so better get it while they can.

As we have seen :\

The Greeks lost writing as a technology during the collapse, so the two alphabets aren't related. They just represent the same language.

The author has been an established blogger since well before the modern AI boom. It is of course not impossible that their writing technique has changed, and they now use AI heavily, but preferring BC/AD over the alternative/not always clarifying which strikes me as incredibly weak evidence.

I'm very curious what part of the article you're drawing on to suggest that their reliance on copper and tin was the cause of the collapse. The article that I read seemed to suggest it was climate related.

I have no idea where you're from, but oil is not what it once was, especially in the United States. In fact, we have a very recent case study substantiating this claim: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait sees 20% of the entire world's supply transit through when under normal conditions. Yet after being completely closed (then slightly reopened, and now almost completely closed again), the world is functioning relatively normally and is much less impacted than it would have likely been even 20 years ago.

My conclusion from the article is entirely different: collapse doesn't necessarily occur all at once. And given that, maybe to someone living through this collapse, they wouldn't have even recognized it.

There's nothing wrong with using AD/BC instead of CE/BCE. They're identical and one even saves a character!

That's Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory[0]. Personally I don't buy it because we haven't seen convincing evidence of it in pre-civilization populations that still existed in isolated places on earth until recently.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

Is this the old "breakdown of the bicameral mind" theory? I don't know. I think that tin trade routes breaking down + rise of iron-wielding civilisations are more plausible.

Thank you.

On an unrelated note: I found this map where you can view the changes in political geography over time via scroll at the bottom. It's my goto with historical posts.

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/regions#position=5/...

"we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans"

As a tongue-in-the-cheek retort, if the Greeks were really doing that (i.e. only playing ball in the grand building up of civilization), then the Roman Empire wouldn't ended up speaking Greek and looking so different in the period in which it is nowadays being called "Byzantine". Romans revered various Greek aspects, and somehow that privileged status that (everything) Greek enjoyed inside the empire played a role into the movement of the empire's capital to the Greek city of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople). It surely feels more like taking (the reigns, and not doing much afterwards, other than holding out for as long as possible).

It's why I love visiting Greece so much, you can feel the history slapping you in the face and it's an awesome feeling. It's a wonderful place.

That's just the Sea Peoples hypothesis

The Ottoman embargo of Western Europe leading to the collapse of the Aztecs supports your hypothesis. The other sea people.

>There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field > geological proof

This is an interesting theory. My question is: What methods are you using to test the change in magnetic fields? Put another way, what is your middle range theory from an archaeological perspective? How are you dating your samples? etc.

Mhmm. Take your meds.

Robert J. Sawyer wrote a series of sf books called The Neanderthal Parallax which proposes that human sentience (and Neanderthal sentience) originated, and ended, with changes in the Earth's magnetic field. It explored some very interesting social and anthropological ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax

The real reason for dark ages was not the fall of the western roman empire, but the arabian conquests, which turned the international trade highway (the Mediterranean sea) into a highway by which pirates and slave traders had easy access to their prey.

The Iron Age can be researched at your Town Center, but the Post-Iron Age isn't a real age, it's just an extra setting on the map settings menu that starts you in the Iron Age with everything already researched.

At least it medaled. The same can't be said for the information age.

After the one where humans first harnessed water power, the Dam Age, and when we started wearing clothes, the Garb Age.

Financial Imperialism is the reason why US is rich in terms of resources and because of material richness, lot of raw brainpower is attacted to America. Read the book "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire" by Michael Hudson.

There's a Portuguese saying "há mouro na costa" which is literally "there are moor at the coast" and means that there is something fishy going on.

In an alternate timeline, The Sea Peoples are Romans sailing to England, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans. Things became fuzzy when the English themselves became other civilization's Sea Peoples.

I wish the author would go into detail about the sea peoples. From what I read, one theory is that they were subject allies of the Hittites; once the Hittites collapsed they went in search of better farmland with their entire families.

yep, that's my first thought came to my mind as well. it's a great talk fueled with the passion of engineer, especially relevant in the era of LLM.