October 2, 2020 • 63 mins
Sometime between between c. 1250 - c. 1150 BCE, civilization as we knew it simply... collapsed. Once-thriving empires fell one after another. Trade routes disintegrated. Literacy plummeted. Mysterious raiders from the sea pillaged city after city. In less than a century, the known world became a distant dream. So what exactly happened? Perhaps more disturbingly, what can the Bronze Age collapse tell us about the modern day?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decades. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. I've always thought from a very
young age that the world is ending for someone somewhere
(00:48):
every day, and it's a thought that becomes increasingly, as
we say, top of mind in these the days of
our modern era, and it has a lot to do
with what we're investigating today. Today. We are attempting to
solve a mystery, perhaps with your help, fellow conspiracy realists.
It is an old one. It is the very definition
(01:08):
of a cold case. You see, about three thousand, two
hundred years ago Ballpark, the world of human civilization as
we know it collapsed. It imploded, and even now in
the full causes of this collapse remain unsolved. We have
to wonder what would civilization be like today if the
(01:32):
civilization of the past hadn't been crippled all those millennia
go and and what does this collapse mean for our
present day? Maybe the best place for us to start
is what exactly is the Bronze Age? So here are
the facts. Yeah, the Bronze Age refers to a period
that's generally described as the third phase of development of
(01:55):
material culture among ancient civilizations in Europe, AA and the
Middle East. So you know, you have the Stone Age
which preceded the Bronze Age, the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods
collectively known as the Stone Age, and then the New
Stone Age UM. And it was a massive transformation because
before the Bronze Age, civilization was essentially a bunch of
tiny city states that were ruled by a heavy handed,
(02:19):
oppressive politico religious priests um or casts of priests, kind
of like a ruling class. And this really shifted when
the Bronze Age came into being. Yeah. Yeah, food was
out of premium in a lot of these pre Bronze
Age societies and it limited the growth of of both
(02:41):
technology and population. It made us play on hard mode
in the game of civilization. Don't sue us, admire we're
big fans. We really are if you've ever played a
lot of those games. For me, it was the Age
of Empires that really got me to understand the difference
between some of those early ages of civilization. Um, and
(03:04):
now you know we sit in Is this the Silicon age?
What do we what do we call this age? I
don't know has it been coined yet? I guess I
haven't really seen it, And maybe it's up for debate. Babe,
there's like someone we can submit ideas to, uh, like
like millennials and zennials and all that stuff. I haven't
really seen it thrown around. Yeah, I don't know. There
there are a plethora meaning too many. Uh, there are
(03:28):
a plethora of proposed names for this age. Uh. The
other posine would be one we could throw around. But
in the world of material culture, through that lens, perhaps
there is one. Perhaps Silicon is a good one. Perhaps
Information Age is another thing, because information is a substance
of its own. Perhaps the new Dark Ages. Now I'm kidding.
(03:49):
Technologies obviously great, but that's the thing to bend to
your point. I mean technology and development of new ideas.
That's a huge impetus for cultures developing and pushing forward. UM,
because material is essentially a technology. When you start thinking
outside the box or outside the rocks, I just pulled
(04:10):
that off the top of my head. You you get
these new ideas that are very important to actually make
new things that help you hunt and that help you, um,
keep order in your civilization without depending on superstition as much. Right. Yeah,
So there's there's a there's already UM what could be
called UH kind of a catch twenty two for civilizations.
(04:33):
So too, for a civilization to grow, to innovate, and
to expand, it needs to have some sort of leisure
time with necessity compelling the focused use of that free time.
But to UH to arrive at that free time, we
have to have the tools that allow that to exist.
(04:56):
My tools, I also mean socio political things. So what
see what the bronze ages? We see something? If I'm
always using cliches like catch twenty two, would be good
to use the cliche like chicken and the egg. Did
fortuitous weather lead to more leisure time, which then led
to UH farming innovations, which led to an agricultural revolution,
(05:17):
creating a surplus of food that led to the existence
of specialized UH specialized jobs and careers which led to
innovations and technology, innovations and religion and government and so on.
Or did someone just figure out a better way to
farm themselves. It's tricky to extract these things, but we
(05:38):
know regardless of the order in which those things occurred,
we know those occurred and created what we define as
the Bronze Age. It was a brand new world, a
golden dawn for humanity in what's called you know, sometimes
the Nearies, the Mediterranean, North Africa, Egypt, and so on.
And this was primarily due UH. This ability of these empires,
(06:02):
which can to be was primarily due to UH the
surplus of food at the beginning. It allowed for the
creation of big, bustling, multicultural cities instead of walled off,
isolated city states. And then it allowed these states to
institute treaties, to institute rule of law that went beyond
(06:22):
the stone walls of a citadel. So, for the first
time in human history, as far as we know, as
far as we know, for the first time in human history,
we had international trade occurring on a regular, sustainable basis.
It was no longer quite as much of a pipe
dream to say, hey, let me get some hippopotamus ivory
(06:43):
from this place, people are calling Egypt or whatever, and
and just kind of pray it shows up in six months. No,
they were able to do this. Things were flourishing. This
is also you know, it's called the Bronze Age because
it's the period in which metal was used in very
widespread ways. Like as you said, Nold, before then we
(07:06):
were really really good with stone and a lot of
a lot of stone Age stuff we built, well, not
a ton, but comparatively a lot of stone Age stuff
we built. It was pretty durable. You can see some
of it today if you travel out to uh A museum,
or if you travel to where some of these monuments
might still stand. But the Bronze Age itself, I don't know.
(07:27):
It's it's tough. It's tough to say when it began,
for which people like in China and Greece, for instance,
If we define it just by that use of metal,
we're talking three thousand b C. And that's that's so
long ago, that's more than five thousand years ago. But
if we're talking about a place like what we call
Britain today, it didn't start till b C. The technology
(07:51):
is disruptive, but it's not ubiquitous automatically has to spread.
So anyway, with all that, all those caveats and asterisks,
bronze A each thirty BC, let's say, three thousand to
b C is pretty much regarded as they cut off.
(08:12):
And we'll see why. There's a reason we have like
a more definitive grasp of that for sure. And you
know we're talking about international trade and how important that
was for the Bronze Age. Uh, it seems very elementary
right now, so very normal just to have countries and
cities across the world gathering the things that are near
(08:34):
that city, are close enough to that city or place
of civilization, and then sending some of that stuff elsewhere
so that we can so that they can then receive
something from somewhere else. Right. But as Ben was saying,
this was such a new thing, one of the one
of the big occurrences here is that there was one
(08:54):
particular place where you could find this stuff that was
called tin. We're gonna tell you a little bit more
about that in the future there, but there's one particular
place where you could get it, at least a good
supply of it that then had to be loaded onto
donkeys and then sent wherever it was going to go
to be traded with some other place. Right, and ten
(09:17):
is important because it creates bronze, right, or create It's
really interesting you combine tin and copper, I believe is
that is that correct? Guys? Tinnet copper become bronze. These
are the two medals that you need to create this
durable thing that becomes the cornerstone of civilization and everything
from uh, stuff to eat out of, two tools to
(09:41):
fix other things, to who the weapons? And that's the
really the big thing here. The weapons were made of
this substance I have. There's one theory about this that
is um woefully unproven. We'll probably never prove it, but
it's a cool story if we want to put ourselves
back in that time period. How did people figure out bronze?
(10:04):
It's a big question, like, uh, how how on earth
did someone say, ah, tin, you like it, you love it,
you want some more of it, and you make it
with copper. It's amazing, guys, let's start a war. It's
it's kind of like the story about the discovery of cheese.
The discovery of cheese story is that someone was hauling
milk in a saddle bag and the continual churning and
(10:25):
chafing of that made cheese during their journey. No way
to prove it. Yeah, there's the same story with a
lot of firsts, right, like the first person to eat
an oyster or a mushroom. It seems like a really
outlandish proposition when you think of what is actually going
into this act, and it obviously required a lot of
trial and error. Maybe caveman eating poisonous mushrooms and dying
(10:47):
off and then people noticing, oh, maybe don't eat that mushroom,
eat the one that's delicious and tasty, or maybe makes
you hallucinate because that's fun too. Um. But with this thing,
it's such a process in and of itself. The idea
of smelting, like when you melt the stuff down and
to either maybe something spilled in and they realized it
made it a cool color, or like it made it stronger.
(11:08):
I'm wondering what point along the maybe it was a
whoopsie kind of moment did they realize, oh, this is
actually a really solid idea. Or maybe someone saw the
person doing it and then did it themselves and did
it better. Again. It's interesting to think about. Yeah, so
that's what That's what I was getting to is the
is that there is a myth like that with or
a theory we can call it if we won't put
(11:30):
a tie on it, about the discovery of bronze. And
the idea is that this, like I was originally saying,
let's picture ourselves were at a camp fire, right, we
have copper, and we're hanging out. We're playing with our
copper or something, and we don't know that the rocks
lining our camp fire are naturally rich intent So how
(11:52):
amazing is it to see the h to see the
rocks and the and the copper upon them are to
melt and mold together while you're just sitting by the fire.
You know something's up, You know something's happening. That is
like the cinematic origin story of bronze. And with with this,
(12:14):
I mean it's probably again even if that's true, we
can't prove it, but we know people were always experimenting
with stuff as soon as they had that very valuable
free time. Again, right, So what we did see is
even if there wasn't this aha revelatory moment of watching
this reaction occur accidentally, uh, we knew. We know people
(12:36):
immediately started experimenting with it. We have to remember that
before this point, the most common tool in the world,
and as far as we know, in the universe, was
the stone axe, which is better than your hand, I
guess would be the tagline for it. But now that
they're able to cast bronze, they're seeing that it's it's
(13:00):
it has numerous qualities that make it superior to either
copper or tin. And like you said, Matt, it becomes
a game changer when people realize it can be used
as a weapon, far superior to stone. So they're still
they don't perfect bronze in a day, just like Rome
wasn't built in a day. We know the use of
(13:22):
copper was already well known throughout the area, and it
was beginning to infiltrate the cultures of Europe, which were
still running a little behind. They were still in what
we would call the stone acts days. During the second
millennium b c E. The use of bronze and the casting,
the smelting, the creation of it was increasingly improved. We
(13:46):
see the emergence of what is called true bronze. People
are making bronze weapons, and we know this because we
can do a little bit of forensic work, even in
places you might not expect, like Cornwall, England. Yeah, not
only the place known for you know, having lego pieces
wash up on the beach. Uh. And in fact is
also what you are indicating at the top of the show.
(14:07):
Matt Um has massive deposits of tin. So it gave
them this kind of stronghold in terms of you know, civilization,
in terms of material evolution. I guess UH to be
kind of the source for that because it was so
rich just in in them hills there there was tin,
oh for sure. And again a lot of the tin
(14:28):
carrying from the deposits there was by donkey for a
long time. But you have to remember it right around
this time. Guess what's invented the real game changer. The
wheel gets invented around this, around this age. And I
want to jump in here before anybody UH reaches out,
reaches out to ne near to us with a with
(14:50):
a question about income civilizations and why there was quote
unquote not a wheel invented in those civilizations. The invention
of the wheel is uh, is a novelty for many
ancient cultures, unless they have domesticated livestock to pull it. Also,
(15:10):
the geography of a lot of those mountainous cultures in
South America did not lend itself to a person hauling
a wheelbarrow. So these people are not somehow cognitively superior.
They were just able to make a tool that worked
with the geography and the biology of the creatures they
(15:32):
had already conquered. Yeah, because they had oxen, and you
could have They've figured out how to attach a plow
to the back of a car with an oxen. So
I mean, you've got wheels, a large animal that can
pull a lot of weight, and there you go. Now
you've got plenty of food because you can plant way
more farming revolution take that Norman borlog. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Wheat,
(15:58):
get out of your wheat. Um. But so then we
know around one thousand b C. There's a new thing
that surfaced and we kind of talked about it a
little bit, but that's the ability to forge a different metal. Iron.
That's you know, when you get the iron age, and
when iron comes around, it's like, hey, you know, bronze
(16:21):
was cool and everything. We we appreciate you. You did
a lot for us, But I'm here now, so by um,
it really was the beginning of something completely different. Uh
when when the Forging of Iron came around. However, there's
more to this story. It's not as clean cut as
(16:43):
a brand new form of metal coming out like a
brand new iPhone, right, you see. For some reason, instead
of transitioning peacefully over a gradient, over a spectrum over
time to the Iron Age, multiple Bronze Age civilizations and
cultures just imploded. And what are we talking about. We'll
(17:06):
tell you after a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
The Bronze Age did not end with a whimper, as
the old quotation goes, and ended with a bank. It
popped sort of abruptly with the near simultaneous collapse of
(17:29):
multiple Bronze Age civilizations, the biggest empires in the world.
Modern day Egypt is like a survivor of this enormous
human catastrophe. Imagine now, for example, in the modern day,
imagine if China, the US, Canada, India, and Russia all
(17:51):
fell within less than a century, within fifty years of
each other, they became dreams of bygone empire. That's a
modern day version of exactly what happened during the Bronze Age. Yeah,
so major Bronze Age civilizations like Mycenaean Greece, UMU, the
Hittite Empire in Turkey, and ancient Egypt fell within a
(18:14):
comparatively short period of time. Um. These ancient cities were abandoned.
The trade routes that we talked about they were so
important were abandoned as well, were lost, and literacy even
declined throughout that region. So um, more than just a
little over thirty two years ago, they all went from
being huge power players in the world economy of the time,
(18:37):
world class civilizations, to essentially we refer to today as
failed states or more so even nonexistent states. Um. And
you can today find crushed skeletons and scattered remnants and
debris from you know, artifacts of the time that remain.
But that's about all there is left of these once
(18:59):
incredibly influential and powerful cities. Yeah, you can see, you
know where there was something once and archaeologists like like
you said, have have have found well, I I don't
want to spoil anything here, Ben, but archaeologists have found
on a specific layer of soil of ground, essentially all
(19:20):
in the same layer where all of these various cities
all went. It seemed to be with fire and some
kind of great battle or or great terrible thing that
occurred in all of these cities within a very short
time span. Um, it's very odd, very very odd. Yeah,
within as little as the span of a century, which
(19:42):
is just like a fingersnap. It's it's a it's a
The span of his century is like a micrometer in
the timeline. But we know that other civilizations have disappeared
in the past, maybe not at this level, but very
large populated to places Cojo Kio. We did an episode
on that ancient cultures in Southeast Asia like modern day Cambodia,
(20:07):
uh South America as well. Some of those things remain
at least partially unexplained, but in most of those cases,
what we're seeing is a single community or a single
culture or a single civilization being affected. We still have
serious questions about what could have made so many massive,
(20:29):
successful cultures self destruct all at once, especially when we
know that they had a vested interest in maintaining a
status quo to a degree, supporting one another to enable
the whole to rise. And we're struggling to figure out
what happened. Here's where it gets crazy. Oh, so over
(20:53):
the centuries people have been guessing. Multiple scholars have put
forward multiple arguments of vary incredibility to explain this disturbing
historical mystery. You know, well, yeah, the first the first
one we you know, I mentioned they're kind of as
a spoiler, a precursor to this, that there is a
(21:14):
layer of ash and a lot of these citadels and
what we would call cities um back in the day
that existed around the same time. And one of the
theories that's been put forth is that some kind of
natural disaster caused these you know, various cities and civilizations
to collapse simultaneously. And one of those would be like
a massive vulcan volcanic eruption or perhaps an earthquake or
(21:38):
series of those two things occurring. You know, agent people
didn't have any way to communicate, at least through technology,
that it is a disaster was coming from some far
flowing part of the world. But it doesn't mean that
the disasters couldn't impact them all simultaneously, right, And there
are a few there are some Egyptologists that have dated
(21:59):
back the heck Of volcano. It's hecla three volcanic eruption
that was in Iceland. It occurred in eleven b c E.
They're saying that possibly it caused this the civilizations to collapse,
but not because of the eruption itself, because the volcanic
eruption may have caused a famine that affected this large
(22:20):
swath of area. Yeah, we have some uh you know,
we have evidence from Egyptian sources. We know under Ramsey's
three during the wider overall uh Bronze Age collapse called
the Late Bronze Age collapse, we we know that the
rulers of the time were addressing civil unrest and crime,
(22:42):
and it was tied into famine, right, it was tied
into migration to people becoming refugees. And I love what
you said. Man, just because they didn't see an eruption
in Iceland doesn't mean it didn't screw up the connected
weather systems equaling less food. And remember, part of the
(23:03):
reason people were so successful in the Bronze Age and
this part of the world was entirely because of that
surplus of food and the positive domino effect, the positive
feedback loop that creates. Now we're seeing the opposite. It's
evil twin. We know in eruption of that size could
definitely impact agriculture. But well, I mean, scholars still of
(23:26):
course argue back and forth about the degree to which
that's affected it. Right now, you'll hear a lot of
people say, well, that one eruption couldn't spell the end
of you know, multiple empires. It just didn't have the
size for that. And even if there is this butterfly
ripple effect, it wouldn't have lasted long enough to destroy
(23:48):
those empires by itself. But we have to keep in
mind Volcanic eruptions can also be linked to earthquakes, and
earthquakes can also do a massive amount of damage in
a short amount of time. On they can also maybe
be linked to tsunami, so flooding. We're saying, as you
can get a combo meal for natural disaster, it doesn't
(24:09):
always have to be ordered a la cart. Yeah, to
two meets, two sides, one bread, exactly. I can't, can't.
Some of those eruptions produce so much ash and nastiness
that it literally blocks out the sun like for a while.
That's what we're talking about. You could essentially disrupt the
weather systems at a large area, if not the entire
(24:31):
planner or it's also you know, the ability for crops
to get you know, the nutrients they need from from
sunlight and all of that. That's a really good point. Yeah,
because imagine you're you're a farmer, and you know the
religions of this time, uh, the ones that are authorized
by the ruling class. When it comes to the lower class,
(24:53):
they're entirely meant to keep you farming and feel like
you're vaguely in trouble and struggling his cultur rules again
and and so what do you do when this guy
goes black? Someone has messed something up. You know, you're
not a vulcanologist. Vulcanologists don't exist. You're you're you're trying
to grow food. And as politicians are so fond of saying, today,
(25:18):
feed your family. Uh. And then, just like you said, no,
the sky goes black. No one knows why. Perhaps and
then the rain disappears, right, or then the ground start yep,
and the crops are fallow. Right. You just can't grow
like you used to. There's a geophysicist named Amost Nerve
(25:39):
from Stanford, and he argues that a string of massive
earthquakes could have knocked down one of the city states
after another. You can pull up. I think there's a
really cool Google Maps layer you can pull up that
will show you the Bronze Age empires and you can
see how his argument, Uh, you can see how his
(26:02):
argument proceeds that these cities fell one by one to earthquakes.
They didn't have FEMA and have the communication or infrastructure
resources available in the modern day, so this could have
brought those empires to a premature And he also and
I thought this would be interesting, um to historical scholars
(26:22):
of the Bible in the audience. He he also argues
that earthquake activity maybe the real life inspiration for the
biblical prophecy of Armageddon. That's the site of the final
conflict between good and evil. He says, you know, the
repeated destruction of the city Moguido, probably at least in
(26:43):
this almost nurse opinion, he says, it inspired the author
of Revelation to write his prediction of the apocalypse. Like
this guy saw an earthquake, experienced that lived through it,
said this is going to happen again, and out you
know he uh, he is a co author of one
of the most famous books of all time. But that's
(27:05):
a cold comfort, you know. It doesn't get you out
of an earthquake. Yeah. Yeah, So we're talking, we're talking
about these various things we've you know, we've gone through
volcanoes and earthquakes. Well, what if what if for one
reason or another, it wasn't those things and it was
just a lack of consistent rain water for the crops
(27:25):
that were so important at the time. What if there
was a massive drought that ended up causing chaos essentially
within the civilizations themselves. And uh, you know, is that
even a possibility. Well, guess what we have good news
for you. Intelligent people have been studying it. That's right.
(27:47):
There is an article in the Journal of the Institute
of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University UM where researchers led
by a paleonologist, Dafna languet Um, put forth this very theory. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Lanna argues that drought led to the collapse of at
least the ancient Southern levant and that cascaded out to
(28:11):
the rest of the known world Like this is we
were talking about the known world at this time. Uh,
palein Ologists is sort of a word for the word
of the day for us. I don't know about you guys,
I didn't know this was a job. It's someone who
studies ancient pollens. So g cfo with your modern pollens.
(28:32):
Oh man, it reminds keeps you. Oh that's so specialized.
I love it someone because I grew up I want
to study ancient pollens. I'm sorry, what what ancient pollens? No?
But please, I really feel passionately about it. Dad, there's
how are you gonna find it? Get out of here? Well?
You know you dig it up? I guess right, But no,
(28:55):
that's a good question, dad, Ben how do you find
ancient pollen samples? I'm so glad you asked, budding, Uh, pollinologists.
You know a lot of people are gonna tell you
it's a weird dream. And I've come to your career
day to let you know that all dreams are kind
of weird. And there's no reason that you should knock
this one out of the running. Look at all the
(29:16):
pollen around today. It had to come from somewhere. Start digging,
Start reading to start digging. Uh, if you take you know,
I don't want to get I don't want to get
lost in the weeds. Your kids on how you actually
find these things? But you can if you dig through
the layers of soil in places that had pollen producing
(29:39):
plants right on a regular basis, then you can take
samples of those the same way you take samples of
tree right at different chronicles in its own uh dendo chronology,
and then you can find what Lingek calls the fingerprints
of plants. Pollen grains are the fingerprints and plants. They
(30:02):
can help scientists reconstruct the ancient natural vegetation, past climate conditions.
So I say to you in this in the simprov scene,
I say to you, go forward, start collecting all the
pollen you can, and remember that one day we don't
have to just think about you as a pollenologist. Now
(30:24):
we can think about those who come after you. So
save the pollen for them. You may end up being there, carlineus.
You may end up being there, Charles Darwin. Well, it's
so interesting though, because I mean, these are fossils, this
is part of the fossil record. They're just really really
tiny fossils um, And and you're right, they act as
kind of like a fingerprint in the same way maybe
(30:46):
ice cores only obviously much much smaller do for um,
you know, studying the layers of of collected ice, and
that core tells the story and pollen does the same thing,
and it's a story about past climate. Yeah, and we
can paint a pretty accurate picture. Of course, the only
way we can know whether it's a d percent accurate
(31:07):
is to travel back there. Uh And unless you believe
that paper by that recent undergrad there's not a way
to time travel yet that's a that's the story for strange.
So so right now we know that there's we know
that this research shows a very specific, very sharp decline
(31:29):
in the vegetation that up until that point was common.
The scientists led by Languet found that in twelve fifty
b C, the traditional plant life of the Mediterranean, the
Late Bronze Age, seemed to just take a nose dive,
just bear and in its place they saw plants that
(31:52):
you would find in semi desert areas. Yeah, and that
was in like carol trees, pine trees, oak tree, these
they're out there. And um, they also noticed that there
was a huge drop in olive trees, you know, and
that is a major thing that is being produced out
there for food sources and and for other reasons. And
(32:17):
there's any there's an indication that horticulture in general, at
in that area at the time was on the decline, right,
And really what the team came away with is that
the region was in the grip of serious regular droughts
within a drought season that lasted for several seasons essentially
(32:39):
um and the dates of researchers came up with via
all this pollen analysis that they went through, they correspond
pretty darn well with a few remaining historical records that
you know, scientists and humanity has of that period, and
they all a lot of those, by the way, mentioned
shortages of gray means, so you know, all this this
(33:03):
seems to be, like Ben said, painting a pretty clear
picture of no matter what was going on, this was
a significant factor. Right. It's spooky to build a puzzle
of this size. We're finding puzzle pieces in the twenty
century that connect with puzzle pieces from five thousand, like
(33:25):
from thousands, three thousands so years ago. That's that's a
lot of work. That's one hell of a jigsaw. And
the thing about these scant historical records is that they're
pretty informative for what they are, also pretty cryptic, and
they don't just mention shortages of grain. We're going to
pause for word from our sponsor, and as long as
(33:47):
our civilization doesn't collapse in the next couple of minutes
or so, uh, then will return and put some more
puzzle pieces of the Bronze Age collapse together, and we're
back off air. We were having a little conversation about
(34:09):
our earlier, our earlier great question. What's the name for
this age? Uh know, you proposed the plastics age. We
talked about information age, because I do think information is
a substance. Uh. Silicon age was the first one Matt
put forth. Silican age or computer age. Some people are
calling it new media age, which all goes to show
(34:30):
we don't we don't know what future historians are going
to call it. They might just latch onto one thing
and they might be calling it the Furby Age. Like
the most technologically significant invention of these ancient benighted people
was our one true God, the Furbye, and that'll be
how we're known by our descendants on Mars in the
(34:50):
moon and when when when it ends up being the
age that leads to the destruction of all civilization, Maybe
we could refer to it as the idiot age. The
Apocalypse A. I don't know, just call it just call
it the last A. Yeah, yeah, like that old that old,
that old joke. I think it was from one of
the chants about candle Jack. Do you guys remember that
(35:13):
you can't say his name or he anyway? It's okay
mean but yeah, the zoom frozen he got me. Um.
But what's so what's so interesting about that name? Aside
is that you know, we have to remember any fans
of literature. One thing that's infuriating is that, uh, several
(35:36):
while backs, uh some time ago, not as far back
as the Bronze Age, someone got the bright idea to
call a certain school of literature modernism, and what do
they call the next one postmodernism? We can't. We can't
name stuff like that. It's the same with music genre.
Just like you got rock, then you got post rock,
(35:57):
which is basically just like minimalist rock with it's got guitars,
doesn't really have many changes, it's a lot of It's
like ambient music and rock and roll had like a
weird slow child, or the same with punk and post punk.
What even is I guess post punk is just punk
that's a little more intelligent I I don't know, it's
(36:18):
interesting all of those terms. You guys, when do you
think we're going to reach the post war stage? Do
you think that's going to happen, Yeah, yeah, when humanity
is Actually no, it will still happen after humanity has
gone because by that point the machines and algorithms we've
made will continue fighting an entirely automated war. But eventually
(36:40):
they'll need repairs um and if they are successful enough
at self repairing, then if they extend past the Solar system,
the death of the Sun won't matter. So I guess
by the heat death of the universe will definitely be
in a post war economy. Yes, the universus ended, but
(37:01):
we fixed the economy. Good news, bad news, right, which
the first You're right, the war is a fundamental piece
of this. And that's why I really appreciate one of
the things you point out there, Matt, when you said, immediately,
of course some bright bulb uh, well, we can't say
bold there were no light bulbs, some some bright candle
(37:23):
around that bronze Discovery campfire. Said we could we could
use this to do amazing things. We could build plumbing,
you know, we could like probably make some medical improvements,
or we could kill like everybody, you guys, she keep
(37:46):
that's the last resort, though, gotta be a last resort.
Surely there's another way, right, And everyone's like yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know, totally totally yeah, totally just just not me, right,
I mean, I'm good. Okay, Yeah, you're great, dude, you
like put together the fire, come on, man. So so
(38:09):
uh yeah, let's just do a show with historical re
enactments that we make up. We touched that one time
behind the scenes. By the way, it was still great.
It was such a great idea, and no it was
it was not drunk history. Uh, it was weirder anyway. War.
(38:30):
The reason we're talking about it is because it is
unfortunately a very common process in human history, the fall
of a status quo or a stable government for some reason.
Regardless of how good or fair or how terrible or
authoritarian that structure might be, it inevitably leads to violence. Right.
It's the equivalent of removing those painted lines, those silly
(38:54):
painted lines that we have on the interstate highways. They
actually do reduce accidents, uh, not just as a visual aid,
but because they remind people of these intangible laws that
we all obey because we feel as though they are
constantly applied, and of course they're not. It's just in
general people tend to agree that those are good things.
(39:15):
So now those laws are removed, and people then just
like people now, started doing doing whatever they wish when
those laws were not in play, especially when they felt
like they were fighting for their own survival. That's why
the collapse of le Bronze Age is marked by what
would be described as a an upticking crime in the
(39:36):
modern world, and that is a very diluted milk soast
way to say it. We're talking about is widespread pillaging,
disruption of those precious international trade routes, civil unrest, let's
find Let's get that bastard, the king. He's had it
coming to him and I don't think his God is
going to stop us this time war over diminishing resources.
(40:00):
One of the biggest mysteries here that we we may
have to dedicate an entire episode two is the emergence
of a mysterious seafaring confederation. You could call them known
as the Sea People's. They're like, uh, they're like Matt
Max esque raiders in this scenario, or they're like um
(40:24):
in water World, they're like the smokers. They were going
to these stable, relatively stable but struggling uh thoughts of civilization,
and they were just running through them. And then that
you couldn't catch them because they were back on the votes.
They were gone and onto the next city. Yeah, it
(40:46):
becomes a pretty horrifying vision thinking about the quote See
People's and I'll tell you why, And quick shout out
to the podcast Fall of Civilizations for an episode they
did on similar topic here about the Bronze Age collapse.
They did a great job of explaining the the very
(41:10):
small descriptions that exist out there for the Sea People's
and it sounds weird. They it sounds, I think the
way they put on the podcast like a monster from
the deep. When you hear the Sea People's, it sounds like,
what are those mermon is that we're talking about? Are
we talking about something from you know, creatures from below
(41:31):
the water that emerged and attacked these towns and pillaged them. Um, No,
we're not, at least I don't certainly don't think so.
But there is so little evidence about what they actually
did and so few descriptions that it becomes I don't
know more of a more of a nightmare than I
guess it needs to be, yeah, because we know there,
(41:53):
like we the descriptions that we find are uh sometimes
it's terrified. The translations are like these plaintive things from
one authority to another saying, look, uh, my armies are
in the capital that is way way in land right
see the Hittites for example. And then uh, my ships
(42:17):
whatever would pass from my naval force is way over here,
far to the west of me, and they can't get
there in time. There's an exact quote where one authority says, thus,
the lands are prostrate to these raiders. There's no one
to defend them, you know what I mean. There's not
like a police force at this time that can stand
(42:40):
up to reavers like this. And the thing is that
the cause of the difficulties of transmitting both information and resources, uh,
they would these empires would often find out after the
fact that someone had destroyed a trade hub, or a
city um or a or a holy place. And this
(43:05):
this uh devastated the many of these empires. The Sea
People's did lose campaigns at times, but they kept coming ramseys. Three.
I think we mentioned he's got some He's got some
inscriptions that people have recovered, uh and Thebes, and in
(43:26):
those inscriptions in Mortuary Temple, you can find sources recounting
at least three different legitimate victories against the Sea People's.
But again, that's Egypt. One thing you need to remember
about Egypt in this period is that Egypt kind of survived.
There's still a country called Egypt. It's not a country called,
(43:47):
you know, home of the Hittites. But that, I will
say that is a number one on my list or
what they should have been called, just like hyphenated maybe
or maybe it all want work called home of the Hittites.
Love it and I like that is one word. Yeah,
so we um again we can we can say that
there is a wealth of insightful and valuable literature and
(44:12):
research into the ultimate identity of what is commonly called
the Sea People's. The reason that everybody speaking English and
French definitely has been using this phrase for so long
is that it comes from a French egyptologist named Emmanuel
de Rouge, who who kind of coined the term, and
(44:34):
then someone else popularized it and it started circulating in
the cannon because it answered a question a lot of
scientists and unrelated fields had had for a long long time. Uh,
they're also the explanation, they're one of the main explanations
for that common disaster, soil. I guess we could call
it disaster sentiment, right, the one groove of the historical
(44:58):
record that is food bar as the acronym. Well that
that showed clearly there was a massive fire here and
bodies were just in streets and you know, in in
houses in that same time. It's really disturbing stuff. So
so we've kind of been looking at these things individually,
is as causes, right, But as we know just throughout history,
(45:24):
just because you're dealing with one disaster one bad thing,
doesn't mean another one can't come up. Right, we're dealing
with that right now. We've got a we've got three
handfuls at least of disasters that are hitting the globe
right now. And why would it be any different during
the Bronze Age, right, Yeah, because we've been we've been
(45:47):
perhaps a little uh uh, a little misleading where we're
we're we're presenting these problems we said, natural disasters like
ongoing drought, like earthquakes like volcanoes, human problems like war
or the fact that humans are often just inherently greedy,
(46:09):
bad people, or or you just what um unrest within cities,
right yeah, and competing for things? Right? Why should why
should my children die such that yours can live? You
know that's not an even trade to me, says the
other person with kids. Uh So, each of these explanations alone,
(46:30):
taken by their themselves in a vacuum. They've all happened before, right,
A lot of them are happening now, as you said, Matt,
in the modern age, but these often were, These were
happening in the Bronze Age, but they weren't all happening
at once. Because these all happened, and these cultures, the
world's first stable, long term international trade network survived, weathered
(46:55):
every storm. But experts are arguing, I thing is very
clever that what happened is humanity met a storm and
had never seen before. It met a perfect storm. It
met an insidious geopolitical domino effect that probably, yes, began
with the natural world. I think we can determine that.
But but when we see it, it's got spooky parallels. Right. So,
(47:21):
climate change, whether it's an eruption, whether it's something abrupt
like a natural disaster eruption, whether it's a slow cycle
that maybe has nothing to do with humans, it leads
to political instability that leads to a rise in crime.
I mean, that's why the historian Robert Drew's calls this
the Late Bronze Age collapse. He calls it the worst
(47:44):
disaster in ancient history, more calamitous than the collapse of
the Western Roman Empire. And people are saying that, like
the see people's didn't just you know, wake up and say, yeah,
you know, I know, we usually fish, but what if
we just sacked. What if we just or something like that.
What if we guys, guys, what if we get into
(48:05):
pilloging like in a big way and the other people
on the boat didn't look around and just go yeah,
and maybe they did. I'm gonna start a gang. It's
called the Sea Boys, and we're gonna sorry, I was
just gonna, I was just gonna put forth. Why can't
(48:27):
we just simplify and just call them the sea people,
you know, the people from the sea. I just I
think that's just a little more straightforward. The idea of
the sea people's just makes it seem too too academic.
Let's let's let's have some fun with him. But you're
making Yes, you're making a great point, Ben. They didn't
just decide to do it. It was because they were
facing some kind of issue, likely from the natural world,
(48:48):
like you're saying, like a drought, unable to feed their
families on and they had to go and find something.
And when they couldn't trade or they couldn't find a
viable way to do it peacefully, Doon, the option then
was to take by force, or at least perhaps it
was the thought that the only option was to take
what they needed by force. Again, the parallels freaking me
(49:11):
out a little bit exactly. I mean, think about it. So, uh,
this the positive domino effect we mentioned earlier. Right, stable
populations are creating more food, right, and so those they
don't naturally want to go out into the wild. And
I would hope if people are people are creatures of
(49:33):
convenience and necessity, right, So it's it's relatively anomalous for
a group to just to to just decide to kill
people for fun rather than to kill them for resources
or something like that. So these stable populations during the
heyday of the Bronze Age, they are dependent on producing
food or importing food for their own consumption and then
(49:56):
possibly exporting it across trade networks for other things they
can't get, And so when they can't grow crops, they
cannot participate in that trade network, and most importantly, they
cannot feed themselves. That's the whole reason they're living in
this area, right, So they have to look for some
other means of sustenance. But the problem is, unless they're
(50:20):
the very first people who became these migrants and refugees,
other people have already hit the road. Other people have
been down these tracks before, been down this road before,
if you're a Hank Williams senior fan, and they have
done the same. And they already knew about these pre
existing trade routes. They already knew where the ports were,
they already knew where the cities were. The people who
(50:42):
are already pushed into a nomadic existence are therefore either
laying weight in established migration routes and waiting to pounce
on merchants and families and refugees, or they hopped in
their boats, perhaps driven by necessity, and decided to that
they instead of waiting for something to be given to them,
(51:03):
they would take it by any means necessary, and morality
doesn't really enter the equation when you're talking about survival.
And then think about it on a worldwide scale. Now,
we think about cities and empires as individuals, right, we
know that city states don't really have friends, Empires don't
really have friends, they have alliances. So these entire, uh,
(51:26):
these entire groups of people are shifting into militarism. They're
already probably pretty militaristic, but but they're protecting their own defenses, right,
their upper classes and their mid tiers from pillagers. And
they're also trying to send out their military forces to
wage wars, wars of acquisition of other resources, perhaps wars
of protection against these mysterious see peoples who keep getting away.
(51:51):
And it happens. This is the scariest part. It happens
very very quickly, you know what I mean. Uh, these
longstanding treaties thrown awake. Egypt retreats into itself, right because
it needs to. It needs to tamp down domestic unrest.
You have to fix your own house before you fix
someone else's. Just think about what we're saying and describing here,
(52:12):
just overlay it on. They started start in the late
nineties and just like, oh God, during this time, someone
figured out how to make iron. Oh there you go.
I guess what. I guess what the military has. They've
(52:33):
just come out. They're saying that they think fusion is
definitely going to be a thing. Now. They're like just
talking about it openly. Yeah, fusion, you know, for power,
fusion for power. It's only gonna be for power. It's
gonna be fine, Are you serious? Yeah, Uh, it's all good.
The first round of fusion bombs, we just gotta wait
(52:55):
for that. That's that's somebody making the first iron and going, oh,
those are those are fusion bombs for peace. But then
we get some who who gets them? You know, who
gets the fusion bombs got? I don't know. It's the
same with like these weapons. You know, it's all about
who who figured it out first, and then you know,
people backwards engineer things. I'm sure both sides of these,
(53:19):
uh these conflicts had similar weapons, but maybe the upper
hand goes to the ones that figured it out a
little better. I don't know. Yeah, and then they get
all the oil and you know, last until it all
burns out and the yeah, yeah, and this is uh there,
(53:39):
this is the the Spook is part of this story
now if we want to give it a little bit
of an epilogue. Yes, the area entered dark age. You know,
the closest thing we had to global civilization full stop collapsed. Uh.
And you know, Noel, you raised the point earlier about
the collapse and education literacy bottomed out, right? Who has
(54:03):
time to learn to read? I am trying to avoid
these pillagers impossible cannibals. I just threw cannibals in there,
and now it's who has time to read? I'm being
distracted by these cat videos. I mean, I was joking
at the top of the show about this maybe being
the new dark I don't know. It makes me think
of that movie Idiocracy, which is all about a breakdown
(54:25):
in education, a breakdown and intelligence leading to a breakdown
in civilization and society as we know it because people
can't solve problems anymore. People don't think about how to
fix these, you know, existential threats that face them. Uh.
And that's when really hits the fan. And this is
our denue mole, right, there is our epilogue. Eventually, the
(54:46):
seasonal reigns return, and experts believe that this eventually again
lead the descendants of some of those uprooted groups we
talked about to settle down once again. But make no mistake,
history was forever and permanently stunted by this collapse. We
have no idea where the world would be if this
(55:10):
had not occurred, right, Like, part of the reason we
are making this podcast now, part of the reason podcast
exists is because thousands of years ago, the world as
we knew it burned the down Like. That's true. And
most importantly, we can't mistake this from some for some
(55:34):
like long ago story from some dusty tome or I
guess some dusty time before books, some dusty tablets or hieroglyph.
We we should, and I think we must take this
as a parable. It's a warning about the fragility inherent
to all human civilization. Civilization is a covenant. It is
(55:54):
an agreement, and it only works so long as the
majority of people agree that it works. Otherwise it's just
like a thing we thought was a good idea at
the time, like, uh, you know, police Academy for it?
Has anyone? Has anyone been watching the new season of
Fargo It just started the other night? Oh no, I
(56:17):
can't wait. Well, I'm gonna This isn't really a spoiler,
but it's sort of about warring groups, warring factions, and
they have this ritual and this agreement where they essentially
one faction whether it's the Italians and the Irish or
African American gang comes in in the present day of
the show, which is like the fifties versus the Italians,
(56:37):
and they have this ritual where in order to kind
of make peace quote unquote, they exchange the youngest child
and and each of them raised the other's youngest child.
And again there's ritual involved in that, and it's an
inherent like agreement and a compact. But do you know
people don't always hold up there into the bargain and
and otherwise if they did, you wouldn't have a show. Um,
(57:00):
that's the same with history. You know, people often you know,
make these agreements and then decide, you know, and actually,
I think we're just gonna kill all of you. And
to this, like what we're talking about when we talk
about this dissolution of society is, uh, we're proposing essentially
what's what's called a general systems collapse. The argument is
(57:23):
that we made so much progress as a species during
the Bronze Age, that we built a system that was
too intricate to fix, like we didn't know how to
fix it when parts of it started breaking. If it
was if it was disrupted, then we didn't have anybody
with the vantage point to say, okay, look, what we
need to do is to first off, maintain the trade routes.
(57:47):
Let's let's do that. Everybody was panicking because the building
was on fire and we had built everything except for
a fire escape basically socio politically, and so now we
see that the things that happened in the order in
which they occurred, they exposed existing flaws in the system.
The reason that is important is because it can happen
(58:09):
again right. One of the questions that I think I
think we'd have to ask is do you think experts
are missing another explanation for the bizarre story of the
late Bronze Age collapse, this weird murder mystery of a civilization?
And what do you think we can learn about it
in the modern day? Like what what can we do?
(58:30):
We are The easy argument that a lot of people
would make is that we are somehow better armed because
we have vastly uh more sophisticated information uh technology and dissemination.
But how much of an advantage is that really? Like
to your point about cat videos, Noll, how much UH
(58:51):
does knowing? Does the potential of knowing almost everything mean
that it will be applied in a useful way? I
think that's a logical miss up. Yeah, absolutely is. I
think we've seen that too much information leads people to
silo their education and and and and you do what
only seek out what only suits them as opposed to
(59:13):
you know, because you have do you used to have
to work for knowledge, You used to have to work
for you know, this access to it was a very
exclusive thing, and now everyone has it and nobody appreciates it.
So what do you guys think is is the safest
way to ensure your family's survival in uh any coming
disaster or collapse of our society? UH? Is the safest
(59:35):
way to become a nuclear fusion engineer? Maybe we're just
play play the video games superliminal, Like right now, everybody,
go play the video games superliminal and start thinking the
way that game forces you to think. And then I
think we'll all get to a place where we can
(59:57):
solve any problem that's ever presented to us. I haven't
heard of Superliminal. Well, if you haven't heard of it,
I'm not I'm not getting paid to tell you this,
but you should play it for sure. It is a
puzzle game and it's it's it forces you to change
your perspective literally and figuratively, which is why I think
(01:00:18):
it would it's important. It could be a Yeah, that's
why you could be applied here because you know, to
to find find answers to some of these major problems
that we face, as in, you know, a global civilization
right now. We just have to think about things differently,
and it's very difficult for humans to do that. And
what are your coping mechanisms, folks? What are your heuristics
(01:00:40):
for what has sometimes been called the end of history?
I think, well, I think we'll soldier on because I
have to. But but let it let us know. What
do you think we can learn from the Bronze Age collapse?
Do you think something like this could slash would happen now?
And if so, how would it play out? We would
love to hear from you. You can find us on
the internet as long as that thing is still around.
(01:01:02):
Hopefully We're on Instagram, We're on Facebook, We're on Twitter,
we recommend here's where it gets crazy, just joined up
by saying, uh, typing in Knowle's name or Matt's name,
super producer, code name, Doc Holiday or superproducer mission control,
my name, dropped me upon something that makes me laugh, um,
or just you know, in a witty way, illustrates the
(01:01:26):
darkness of civilization. Yeah. And and in the event that
we do have some sort of like escape from l
a esque situation where you know, the Internet disappears and
all electronics, uh, this is well, this wouldn't really work. Um,
never mind forget to work through the landline. Okay, there
you go. That's what I was getting at. Ben, Thank
you for rescuing me. You can give us a call
(01:01:47):
on a landline, presuming that that infrastructure hasn't been never
that's just too depressing. One three three st d W
I t K is that number? UM, reach out to us.
You can leave us a voicemail. Well that part won't
never oicemail won't work in but you know what this
is all just we're just spitballing here. Everything's fine for now.
Leave us a voicemail. Keep it roughly around three minutes
(01:02:08):
so that we can have a nice concise story we
can use on one of our weekly listener mail episodes.
And be sure and let us know if it's okay
to use your story and play your actual voice on
the show. And if you want us to call you
something specific or not use your name or be anonymous,
We're all about that. UM. Love to hear from you.
And if you happen to enjoy looking at faces while
you hear voices talk to you, you can head over
(01:02:29):
to YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. Don't look at
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don't oh oh hants? Why do I get that it
was that specific face? Um? Yeah, but YouTube dot YouTube
dot com slash conspiracy Stuff. That's our channel. Subscribe, Tell
your friends we're going to be putting these up there,
(01:02:50):
these conversations, and there will be other things on the
way to you as soon as we can get them
to you. Just be prepared. And if none of the
at quite bags your badgers or collapses your bronze age,
as long as the as long as the electricity is
moving and the great sky net and the sky stays there,
(01:03:13):
you can always contact us through a good old fashioned
email address where we are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com.
(01:03:38):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart radio,
visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decades. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. I've always thought from a very
young age that the world is ending for someone somewhere
(00:48):
every day, and it's a thought that becomes increasingly, as
we say, top of mind in these the days of
our modern era, and it has a lot to do
with what we're investigating today. Today. We are attempting to
solve a mystery, perhaps with your help, fellow conspiracy realists.
It is an old one. It is the very definition
(01:08):
of a cold case. You see, about three thousand, two
hundred years ago Ballpark, the world of human civilization as
we know it collapsed. It imploded, and even now in
the full causes of this collapse remain unsolved. We have
to wonder what would civilization be like today if the
(01:32):
civilization of the past hadn't been crippled all those millennia
go and and what does this collapse mean for our
present day? Maybe the best place for us to start
is what exactly is the Bronze Age? So here are
the facts. Yeah, the Bronze Age refers to a period
that's generally described as the third phase of development of
(01:55):
material culture among ancient civilizations in Europe, AA and the
Middle East. So you know, you have the Stone Age
which preceded the Bronze Age, the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods
collectively known as the Stone Age, and then the New
Stone Age UM. And it was a massive transformation because
before the Bronze Age, civilization was essentially a bunch of
tiny city states that were ruled by a heavy handed,
(02:19):
oppressive politico religious priests um or casts of priests, kind
of like a ruling class. And this really shifted when
the Bronze Age came into being. Yeah. Yeah, food was
out of premium in a lot of these pre Bronze
Age societies and it limited the growth of of both
(02:41):
technology and population. It made us play on hard mode
in the game of civilization. Don't sue us, admire we're
big fans. We really are if you've ever played a
lot of those games. For me, it was the Age
of Empires that really got me to understand the difference
between some of those early ages of civilization. Um, and
(03:04):
now you know we sit in Is this the Silicon age?
What do we what do we call this age? I
don't know has it been coined yet? I guess I
haven't really seen it, And maybe it's up for debate. Babe,
there's like someone we can submit ideas to, uh, like
like millennials and zennials and all that stuff. I haven't
really seen it thrown around. Yeah, I don't know. There
there are a plethora meaning too many. Uh, there are
(03:28):
a plethora of proposed names for this age. Uh. The
other posine would be one we could throw around. But
in the world of material culture, through that lens, perhaps
there is one. Perhaps Silicon is a good one. Perhaps
Information Age is another thing, because information is a substance
of its own. Perhaps the new Dark Ages. Now I'm kidding.
(03:49):
Technologies obviously great, but that's the thing to bend to
your point. I mean technology and development of new ideas.
That's a huge impetus for cultures developing and pushing forward. UM,
because material is essentially a technology. When you start thinking
outside the box or outside the rocks, I just pulled
(04:10):
that off the top of my head. You you get
these new ideas that are very important to actually make
new things that help you hunt and that help you, um,
keep order in your civilization without depending on superstition as much. Right. Yeah,
So there's there's a there's already UM what could be
called UH kind of a catch twenty two for civilizations.
(04:33):
So too, for a civilization to grow, to innovate, and
to expand, it needs to have some sort of leisure
time with necessity compelling the focused use of that free time.
But to UH to arrive at that free time, we
have to have the tools that allow that to exist.
(04:56):
My tools, I also mean socio political things. So what
see what the bronze ages? We see something? If I'm
always using cliches like catch twenty two, would be good
to use the cliche like chicken and the egg. Did
fortuitous weather lead to more leisure time, which then led
to UH farming innovations, which led to an agricultural revolution,
(05:17):
creating a surplus of food that led to the existence
of specialized UH specialized jobs and careers which led to
innovations and technology, innovations and religion and government and so on.
Or did someone just figure out a better way to
farm themselves. It's tricky to extract these things, but we
(05:38):
know regardless of the order in which those things occurred,
we know those occurred and created what we define as
the Bronze Age. It was a brand new world, a
golden dawn for humanity in what's called you know, sometimes
the Nearies, the Mediterranean, North Africa, Egypt, and so on.
And this was primarily due UH. This ability of these empires,
(06:02):
which can to be was primarily due to UH the
surplus of food at the beginning. It allowed for the
creation of big, bustling, multicultural cities instead of walled off,
isolated city states. And then it allowed these states to
institute treaties, to institute rule of law that went beyond
(06:22):
the stone walls of a citadel. So, for the first
time in human history, as far as we know, as
far as we know, for the first time in human history,
we had international trade occurring on a regular, sustainable basis.
It was no longer quite as much of a pipe
dream to say, hey, let me get some hippopotamus ivory
(06:43):
from this place, people are calling Egypt or whatever, and
and just kind of pray it shows up in six months. No,
they were able to do this. Things were flourishing. This
is also you know, it's called the Bronze Age because
it's the period in which metal was used in very
widespread ways. Like as you said, Nold, before then we
(07:06):
were really really good with stone and a lot of
a lot of stone Age stuff we built, well, not
a ton, but comparatively a lot of stone Age stuff
we built. It was pretty durable. You can see some
of it today if you travel out to uh A museum,
or if you travel to where some of these monuments
might still stand. But the Bronze Age itself, I don't know.
(07:27):
It's it's tough. It's tough to say when it began,
for which people like in China and Greece, for instance,
If we define it just by that use of metal,
we're talking three thousand b C. And that's that's so
long ago, that's more than five thousand years ago. But
if we're talking about a place like what we call
Britain today, it didn't start till b C. The technology
(07:51):
is disruptive, but it's not ubiquitous automatically has to spread.
So anyway, with all that, all those caveats and asterisks,
bronze A each thirty BC, let's say, three thousand to
b C is pretty much regarded as they cut off.
(08:12):
And we'll see why. There's a reason we have like
a more definitive grasp of that for sure. And you
know we're talking about international trade and how important that
was for the Bronze Age. Uh, it seems very elementary
right now, so very normal just to have countries and
cities across the world gathering the things that are near
(08:34):
that city, are close enough to that city or place
of civilization, and then sending some of that stuff elsewhere
so that we can so that they can then receive
something from somewhere else. Right. But as Ben was saying,
this was such a new thing, one of the one
of the big occurrences here is that there was one
(08:54):
particular place where you could find this stuff that was
called tin. We're gonna tell you a little bit more
about that in the future there, but there's one particular
place where you could get it, at least a good
supply of it that then had to be loaded onto
donkeys and then sent wherever it was going to go
to be traded with some other place. Right, and ten
(09:17):
is important because it creates bronze, right, or create It's
really interesting you combine tin and copper, I believe is
that is that correct? Guys? Tinnet copper become bronze. These
are the two medals that you need to create this
durable thing that becomes the cornerstone of civilization and everything
from uh, stuff to eat out of, two tools to
(09:41):
fix other things, to who the weapons? And that's the
really the big thing here. The weapons were made of
this substance I have. There's one theory about this that
is um woefully unproven. We'll probably never prove it, but
it's a cool story if we want to put ourselves
back in that time period. How did people figure out bronze?
(10:04):
It's a big question, like, uh, how how on earth
did someone say, ah, tin, you like it, you love it,
you want some more of it, and you make it
with copper. It's amazing, guys, let's start a war. It's
it's kind of like the story about the discovery of cheese.
The discovery of cheese story is that someone was hauling
milk in a saddle bag and the continual churning and
(10:25):
chafing of that made cheese during their journey. No way
to prove it. Yeah, there's the same story with a
lot of firsts, right, like the first person to eat
an oyster or a mushroom. It seems like a really
outlandish proposition when you think of what is actually going
into this act, and it obviously required a lot of
trial and error. Maybe caveman eating poisonous mushrooms and dying
(10:47):
off and then people noticing, oh, maybe don't eat that mushroom,
eat the one that's delicious and tasty, or maybe makes
you hallucinate because that's fun too. Um. But with this thing,
it's such a process in and of itself. The idea
of smelting, like when you melt the stuff down and
to either maybe something spilled in and they realized it
made it a cool color, or like it made it stronger.
(11:08):
I'm wondering what point along the maybe it was a
whoopsie kind of moment did they realize, oh, this is
actually a really solid idea. Or maybe someone saw the
person doing it and then did it themselves and did
it better. Again. It's interesting to think about. Yeah, so
that's what That's what I was getting to is the
is that there is a myth like that with or
a theory we can call it if we won't put
(11:30):
a tie on it, about the discovery of bronze. And
the idea is that this, like I was originally saying,
let's picture ourselves were at a camp fire, right, we
have copper, and we're hanging out. We're playing with our
copper or something, and we don't know that the rocks
lining our camp fire are naturally rich intent So how
(11:52):
amazing is it to see the h to see the
rocks and the and the copper upon them are to
melt and mold together while you're just sitting by the fire.
You know something's up, You know something's happening. That is
like the cinematic origin story of bronze. And with with this,
(12:14):
I mean it's probably again even if that's true, we
can't prove it, but we know people were always experimenting
with stuff as soon as they had that very valuable
free time. Again, right, So what we did see is
even if there wasn't this aha revelatory moment of watching
this reaction occur accidentally, uh, we knew. We know people
(12:36):
immediately started experimenting with it. We have to remember that
before this point, the most common tool in the world,
and as far as we know, in the universe, was
the stone axe, which is better than your hand, I
guess would be the tagline for it. But now that
they're able to cast bronze, they're seeing that it's it's
(13:00):
it has numerous qualities that make it superior to either
copper or tin. And like you said, Matt, it becomes
a game changer when people realize it can be used
as a weapon, far superior to stone. So they're still
they don't perfect bronze in a day, just like Rome
wasn't built in a day. We know the use of
(13:22):
copper was already well known throughout the area, and it
was beginning to infiltrate the cultures of Europe, which were
still running a little behind. They were still in what
we would call the stone acts days. During the second
millennium b c E. The use of bronze and the casting,
the smelting, the creation of it was increasingly improved. We
(13:46):
see the emergence of what is called true bronze. People
are making bronze weapons, and we know this because we
can do a little bit of forensic work, even in
places you might not expect, like Cornwall, England. Yeah, not
only the place known for you know, having lego pieces
wash up on the beach. Uh. And in fact is
also what you are indicating at the top of the show.
(14:07):
Matt Um has massive deposits of tin. So it gave
them this kind of stronghold in terms of you know, civilization,
in terms of material evolution. I guess UH to be
kind of the source for that because it was so
rich just in in them hills there there was tin,
oh for sure. And again a lot of the tin
(14:28):
carrying from the deposits there was by donkey for a
long time. But you have to remember it right around
this time. Guess what's invented the real game changer. The
wheel gets invented around this, around this age. And I
want to jump in here before anybody UH reaches out,
reaches out to ne near to us with a with
(14:50):
a question about income civilizations and why there was quote
unquote not a wheel invented in those civilizations. The invention
of the wheel is uh, is a novelty for many
ancient cultures, unless they have domesticated livestock to pull it. Also,
(15:10):
the geography of a lot of those mountainous cultures in
South America did not lend itself to a person hauling
a wheelbarrow. So these people are not somehow cognitively superior.
They were just able to make a tool that worked
with the geography and the biology of the creatures they
(15:32):
had already conquered. Yeah, because they had oxen, and you
could have They've figured out how to attach a plow
to the back of a car with an oxen. So
I mean, you've got wheels, a large animal that can
pull a lot of weight, and there you go. Now
you've got plenty of food because you can plant way
more farming revolution take that Norman borlog. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Wheat,
(15:58):
get out of your wheat. Um. But so then we
know around one thousand b C. There's a new thing
that surfaced and we kind of talked about it a
little bit, but that's the ability to forge a different metal. Iron.
That's you know, when you get the iron age, and
when iron comes around, it's like, hey, you know, bronze
(16:21):
was cool and everything. We we appreciate you. You did
a lot for us, But I'm here now, so by um,
it really was the beginning of something completely different. Uh
when when the Forging of Iron came around. However, there's
more to this story. It's not as clean cut as
(16:43):
a brand new form of metal coming out like a
brand new iPhone, right, you see. For some reason, instead
of transitioning peacefully over a gradient, over a spectrum over
time to the Iron Age, multiple Bronze Age civilizations and
cultures just imploded. And what are we talking about. We'll
(17:06):
tell you after a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
The Bronze Age did not end with a whimper, as
the old quotation goes, and ended with a bank. It
popped sort of abruptly with the near simultaneous collapse of
(17:29):
multiple Bronze Age civilizations, the biggest empires in the world.
Modern day Egypt is like a survivor of this enormous
human catastrophe. Imagine now, for example, in the modern day,
imagine if China, the US, Canada, India, and Russia all
(17:51):
fell within less than a century, within fifty years of
each other, they became dreams of bygone empire. That's a
modern day version of exactly what happened during the Bronze Age. Yeah,
so major Bronze Age civilizations like Mycenaean Greece, UMU, the
Hittite Empire in Turkey, and ancient Egypt fell within a
(18:14):
comparatively short period of time. Um. These ancient cities were abandoned.
The trade routes that we talked about they were so
important were abandoned as well, were lost, and literacy even
declined throughout that region. So um, more than just a
little over thirty two years ago, they all went from
being huge power players in the world economy of the time,
(18:37):
world class civilizations, to essentially we refer to today as
failed states or more so even nonexistent states. Um. And
you can today find crushed skeletons and scattered remnants and
debris from you know, artifacts of the time that remain.
But that's about all there is left of these once
(18:59):
incredibly influential and powerful cities. Yeah, you can see, you
know where there was something once and archaeologists like like
you said, have have have found well, I I don't
want to spoil anything here, Ben, but archaeologists have found
on a specific layer of soil of ground, essentially all
(19:20):
in the same layer where all of these various cities
all went. It seemed to be with fire and some
kind of great battle or or great terrible thing that
occurred in all of these cities within a very short
time span. Um, it's very odd, very very odd. Yeah,
within as little as the span of a century, which
(19:42):
is just like a fingersnap. It's it's a it's a
The span of his century is like a micrometer in
the timeline. But we know that other civilizations have disappeared
in the past, maybe not at this level, but very
large populated to places Cojo Kio. We did an episode
on that ancient cultures in Southeast Asia like modern day Cambodia,
(20:07):
uh South America as well. Some of those things remain
at least partially unexplained, but in most of those cases,
what we're seeing is a single community or a single
culture or a single civilization being affected. We still have
serious questions about what could have made so many massive,
(20:29):
successful cultures self destruct all at once, especially when we
know that they had a vested interest in maintaining a
status quo to a degree, supporting one another to enable
the whole to rise. And we're struggling to figure out
what happened. Here's where it gets crazy. Oh, so over
(20:53):
the centuries people have been guessing. Multiple scholars have put
forward multiple arguments of vary incredibility to explain this disturbing
historical mystery. You know, well, yeah, the first the first
one we you know, I mentioned they're kind of as
a spoiler, a precursor to this, that there is a
(21:14):
layer of ash and a lot of these citadels and
what we would call cities um back in the day
that existed around the same time. And one of the
theories that's been put forth is that some kind of
natural disaster caused these you know, various cities and civilizations
to collapse simultaneously. And one of those would be like
a massive vulcan volcanic eruption or perhaps an earthquake or
(21:38):
series of those two things occurring. You know, agent people
didn't have any way to communicate, at least through technology,
that it is a disaster was coming from some far
flowing part of the world. But it doesn't mean that
the disasters couldn't impact them all simultaneously, right, And there
are a few there are some Egyptologists that have dated
(21:59):
back the heck Of volcano. It's hecla three volcanic eruption
that was in Iceland. It occurred in eleven b c E.
They're saying that possibly it caused this the civilizations to collapse,
but not because of the eruption itself, because the volcanic
eruption may have caused a famine that affected this large
(22:20):
swath of area. Yeah, we have some uh you know,
we have evidence from Egyptian sources. We know under Ramsey's
three during the wider overall uh Bronze Age collapse called
the Late Bronze Age collapse, we we know that the
rulers of the time were addressing civil unrest and crime,
(22:42):
and it was tied into famine, right, it was tied
into migration to people becoming refugees. And I love what
you said. Man, just because they didn't see an eruption
in Iceland doesn't mean it didn't screw up the connected
weather systems equaling less food. And remember, part of the
(23:03):
reason people were so successful in the Bronze Age and
this part of the world was entirely because of that
surplus of food and the positive domino effect, the positive
feedback loop that creates. Now we're seeing the opposite. It's
evil twin. We know in eruption of that size could
definitely impact agriculture. But well, I mean, scholars still of
(23:26):
course argue back and forth about the degree to which
that's affected it. Right now, you'll hear a lot of
people say, well, that one eruption couldn't spell the end
of you know, multiple empires. It just didn't have the
size for that. And even if there is this butterfly
ripple effect, it wouldn't have lasted long enough to destroy
(23:48):
those empires by itself. But we have to keep in
mind Volcanic eruptions can also be linked to earthquakes, and
earthquakes can also do a massive amount of damage in
a short amount of time. On they can also maybe
be linked to tsunami, so flooding. We're saying, as you
can get a combo meal for natural disaster, it doesn't
(24:09):
always have to be ordered a la cart. Yeah, to
two meets, two sides, one bread, exactly. I can't, can't.
Some of those eruptions produce so much ash and nastiness
that it literally blocks out the sun like for a while.
That's what we're talking about. You could essentially disrupt the
weather systems at a large area, if not the entire
(24:31):
planner or it's also you know, the ability for crops
to get you know, the nutrients they need from from
sunlight and all of that. That's a really good point. Yeah,
because imagine you're you're a farmer, and you know the
religions of this time, uh, the ones that are authorized
by the ruling class. When it comes to the lower class,
(24:53):
they're entirely meant to keep you farming and feel like
you're vaguely in trouble and struggling his cultur rules again
and and so what do you do when this guy
goes black? Someone has messed something up. You know, you're
not a vulcanologist. Vulcanologists don't exist. You're you're you're trying
to grow food. And as politicians are so fond of saying, today,
(25:18):
feed your family. Uh. And then, just like you said, no,
the sky goes black. No one knows why. Perhaps and
then the rain disappears, right, or then the ground start yep,
and the crops are fallow. Right. You just can't grow
like you used to. There's a geophysicist named Amost Nerve
(25:39):
from Stanford, and he argues that a string of massive
earthquakes could have knocked down one of the city states
after another. You can pull up. I think there's a
really cool Google Maps layer you can pull up that
will show you the Bronze Age empires and you can
see how his argument, Uh, you can see how his
(26:02):
argument proceeds that these cities fell one by one to earthquakes.
They didn't have FEMA and have the communication or infrastructure
resources available in the modern day, so this could have
brought those empires to a premature And he also and
I thought this would be interesting, um to historical scholars
(26:22):
of the Bible in the audience. He he also argues
that earthquake activity maybe the real life inspiration for the
biblical prophecy of Armageddon. That's the site of the final
conflict between good and evil. He says, you know, the
repeated destruction of the city Moguido, probably at least in
(26:43):
this almost nurse opinion, he says, it inspired the author
of Revelation to write his prediction of the apocalypse. Like
this guy saw an earthquake, experienced that lived through it,
said this is going to happen again, and out you
know he uh, he is a co author of one
of the most famous books of all time. But that's
(27:05):
a cold comfort, you know. It doesn't get you out
of an earthquake. Yeah. Yeah, So we're talking, we're talking
about these various things we've you know, we've gone through
volcanoes and earthquakes. Well, what if what if for one
reason or another, it wasn't those things and it was
just a lack of consistent rain water for the crops
(27:25):
that were so important at the time. What if there
was a massive drought that ended up causing chaos essentially
within the civilizations themselves. And uh, you know, is that
even a possibility. Well, guess what we have good news
for you. Intelligent people have been studying it. That's right.
(27:47):
There is an article in the Journal of the Institute
of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University UM where researchers led
by a paleonologist, Dafna languet Um, put forth this very theory. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Lanna argues that drought led to the collapse of at
least the ancient Southern levant and that cascaded out to
(28:11):
the rest of the known world Like this is we
were talking about the known world at this time. Uh,
palein Ologists is sort of a word for the word
of the day for us. I don't know about you guys,
I didn't know this was a job. It's someone who
studies ancient pollens. So g cfo with your modern pollens.
(28:32):
Oh man, it reminds keeps you. Oh that's so specialized.
I love it someone because I grew up I want
to study ancient pollens. I'm sorry, what what ancient pollens? No?
But please, I really feel passionately about it. Dad, there's
how are you gonna find it? Get out of here? Well?
You know you dig it up? I guess right, But no,
(28:55):
that's a good question, dad, Ben how do you find
ancient pollen samples? I'm so glad you asked, budding, Uh, pollinologists.
You know a lot of people are gonna tell you
it's a weird dream. And I've come to your career
day to let you know that all dreams are kind
of weird. And there's no reason that you should knock
this one out of the running. Look at all the
(29:16):
pollen around today. It had to come from somewhere. Start digging,
Start reading to start digging. Uh, if you take you know,
I don't want to get I don't want to get
lost in the weeds. Your kids on how you actually
find these things? But you can if you dig through
the layers of soil in places that had pollen producing
(29:39):
plants right on a regular basis, then you can take
samples of those the same way you take samples of
tree right at different chronicles in its own uh dendo chronology,
and then you can find what Lingek calls the fingerprints
of plants. Pollen grains are the fingerprints and plants. They
(30:02):
can help scientists reconstruct the ancient natural vegetation, past climate conditions.
So I say to you in this in the simprov scene,
I say to you, go forward, start collecting all the
pollen you can, and remember that one day we don't
have to just think about you as a pollenologist. Now
(30:24):
we can think about those who come after you. So
save the pollen for them. You may end up being there, carlineus.
You may end up being there, Charles Darwin. Well, it's
so interesting though, because I mean, these are fossils, this
is part of the fossil record. They're just really really
tiny fossils um, And and you're right, they act as
kind of like a fingerprint in the same way maybe
(30:46):
ice cores only obviously much much smaller do for um,
you know, studying the layers of of collected ice, and
that core tells the story and pollen does the same thing,
and it's a story about past climate. Yeah, and we
can paint a pretty accurate picture. Of course, the only
way we can know whether it's a d percent accurate
(31:07):
is to travel back there. Uh And unless you believe
that paper by that recent undergrad there's not a way
to time travel yet that's a that's the story for strange.
So so right now we know that there's we know
that this research shows a very specific, very sharp decline
(31:29):
in the vegetation that up until that point was common.
The scientists led by Languet found that in twelve fifty
b C, the traditional plant life of the Mediterranean, the
Late Bronze Age, seemed to just take a nose dive,
just bear and in its place they saw plants that
(31:52):
you would find in semi desert areas. Yeah, and that
was in like carol trees, pine trees, oak tree, these
they're out there. And um, they also noticed that there
was a huge drop in olive trees, you know, and
that is a major thing that is being produced out
there for food sources and and for other reasons. And
(32:17):
there's any there's an indication that horticulture in general, at
in that area at the time was on the decline, right,
And really what the team came away with is that
the region was in the grip of serious regular droughts
within a drought season that lasted for several seasons essentially
(32:39):
um and the dates of researchers came up with via
all this pollen analysis that they went through, they correspond
pretty darn well with a few remaining historical records that
you know, scientists and humanity has of that period, and
they all a lot of those, by the way, mentioned
shortages of gray means, so you know, all this this
(33:03):
seems to be, like Ben said, painting a pretty clear
picture of no matter what was going on, this was
a significant factor. Right. It's spooky to build a puzzle
of this size. We're finding puzzle pieces in the twenty
century that connect with puzzle pieces from five thousand, like
(33:25):
from thousands, three thousands so years ago. That's that's a
lot of work. That's one hell of a jigsaw. And
the thing about these scant historical records is that they're
pretty informative for what they are, also pretty cryptic, and
they don't just mention shortages of grain. We're going to
pause for word from our sponsor, and as long as
(33:47):
our civilization doesn't collapse in the next couple of minutes
or so, uh, then will return and put some more
puzzle pieces of the Bronze Age collapse together, and we're
back off air. We were having a little conversation about
(34:09):
our earlier, our earlier great question. What's the name for
this age? Uh know, you proposed the plastics age. We
talked about information age, because I do think information is
a substance. Uh. Silicon age was the first one Matt
put forth. Silican age or computer age. Some people are
calling it new media age, which all goes to show
(34:30):
we don't we don't know what future historians are going
to call it. They might just latch onto one thing
and they might be calling it the Furby Age. Like
the most technologically significant invention of these ancient benighted people
was our one true God, the Furbye, and that'll be
how we're known by our descendants on Mars in the
(34:50):
moon and when when when it ends up being the
age that leads to the destruction of all civilization, Maybe
we could refer to it as the idiot age. The
Apocalypse A. I don't know, just call it just call
it the last A. Yeah, yeah, like that old that old,
that old joke. I think it was from one of
the chants about candle Jack. Do you guys remember that
(35:13):
you can't say his name or he anyway? It's okay
mean but yeah, the zoom frozen he got me. Um.
But what's so what's so interesting about that name? Aside
is that you know, we have to remember any fans
of literature. One thing that's infuriating is that, uh, several
(35:36):
while backs, uh some time ago, not as far back
as the Bronze Age, someone got the bright idea to
call a certain school of literature modernism, and what do
they call the next one postmodernism? We can't. We can't
name stuff like that. It's the same with music genre.
Just like you got rock, then you got post rock,
(35:57):
which is basically just like minimalist rock with it's got guitars,
doesn't really have many changes, it's a lot of It's
like ambient music and rock and roll had like a
weird slow child, or the same with punk and post punk.
What even is I guess post punk is just punk
that's a little more intelligent I I don't know, it's
(36:18):
interesting all of those terms. You guys, when do you
think we're going to reach the post war stage? Do
you think that's going to happen, Yeah, yeah, when humanity
is Actually no, it will still happen after humanity has
gone because by that point the machines and algorithms we've
made will continue fighting an entirely automated war. But eventually
(36:40):
they'll need repairs um and if they are successful enough
at self repairing, then if they extend past the Solar system,
the death of the Sun won't matter. So I guess
by the heat death of the universe will definitely be
in a post war economy. Yes, the universus ended, but
(37:01):
we fixed the economy. Good news, bad news, right, which
the first You're right, the war is a fundamental piece
of this. And that's why I really appreciate one of
the things you point out there, Matt, when you said, immediately,
of course some bright bulb uh, well, we can't say
bold there were no light bulbs, some some bright candle
(37:23):
around that bronze Discovery campfire. Said we could we could
use this to do amazing things. We could build plumbing,
you know, we could like probably make some medical improvements,
or we could kill like everybody, you guys, she keep
(37:46):
that's the last resort, though, gotta be a last resort.
Surely there's another way, right, And everyone's like yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know, totally totally yeah, totally just just not me, right,
I mean, I'm good. Okay, Yeah, you're great, dude, you
like put together the fire, come on, man. So so
(38:09):
uh yeah, let's just do a show with historical re
enactments that we make up. We touched that one time
behind the scenes. By the way, it was still great.
It was such a great idea, and no it was
it was not drunk history. Uh, it was weirder anyway. War.
(38:30):
The reason we're talking about it is because it is
unfortunately a very common process in human history, the fall
of a status quo or a stable government for some reason.
Regardless of how good or fair or how terrible or
authoritarian that structure might be, it inevitably leads to violence. Right.
It's the equivalent of removing those painted lines, those silly
(38:54):
painted lines that we have on the interstate highways. They
actually do reduce accidents, uh, not just as a visual aid,
but because they remind people of these intangible laws that
we all obey because we feel as though they are
constantly applied, and of course they're not. It's just in
general people tend to agree that those are good things.
(39:15):
So now those laws are removed, and people then just
like people now, started doing doing whatever they wish when
those laws were not in play, especially when they felt
like they were fighting for their own survival. That's why
the collapse of le Bronze Age is marked by what
would be described as a an upticking crime in the
(39:36):
modern world, and that is a very diluted milk soast
way to say it. We're talking about is widespread pillaging,
disruption of those precious international trade routes, civil unrest, let's
find Let's get that bastard, the king. He's had it
coming to him and I don't think his God is
going to stop us this time war over diminishing resources.
(40:00):
One of the biggest mysteries here that we we may
have to dedicate an entire episode two is the emergence
of a mysterious seafaring confederation. You could call them known
as the Sea People's. They're like, uh, they're like Matt
Max esque raiders in this scenario, or they're like um
(40:24):
in water World, they're like the smokers. They were going
to these stable, relatively stable but struggling uh thoughts of civilization,
and they were just running through them. And then that
you couldn't catch them because they were back on the votes.
They were gone and onto the next city. Yeah, it
(40:46):
becomes a pretty horrifying vision thinking about the quote See
People's and I'll tell you why, And quick shout out
to the podcast Fall of Civilizations for an episode they
did on similar topic here about the Bronze Age collapse.
They did a great job of explaining the the very
(41:10):
small descriptions that exist out there for the Sea People's
and it sounds weird. They it sounds, I think the
way they put on the podcast like a monster from
the deep. When you hear the Sea People's, it sounds like,
what are those mermon is that we're talking about? Are
we talking about something from you know, creatures from below
(41:31):
the water that emerged and attacked these towns and pillaged them. Um, No,
we're not, at least I don't certainly don't think so.
But there is so little evidence about what they actually
did and so few descriptions that it becomes I don't
know more of a more of a nightmare than I
guess it needs to be, yeah, because we know there,
(41:53):
like we the descriptions that we find are uh sometimes
it's terrified. The translations are like these plaintive things from
one authority to another saying, look, uh, my armies are
in the capital that is way way in land right
see the Hittites for example. And then uh, my ships
(42:17):
whatever would pass from my naval force is way over here,
far to the west of me, and they can't get
there in time. There's an exact quote where one authority says, thus,
the lands are prostrate to these raiders. There's no one
to defend them, you know what I mean. There's not
like a police force at this time that can stand
(42:40):
up to reavers like this. And the thing is that
the cause of the difficulties of transmitting both information and resources, uh,
they would these empires would often find out after the
fact that someone had destroyed a trade hub, or a
city um or a or a holy place. And this
(43:05):
this uh devastated the many of these empires. The Sea
People's did lose campaigns at times, but they kept coming ramseys. Three.
I think we mentioned he's got some He's got some
inscriptions that people have recovered, uh and Thebes, and in
(43:26):
those inscriptions in Mortuary Temple, you can find sources recounting
at least three different legitimate victories against the Sea People's.
But again, that's Egypt. One thing you need to remember
about Egypt in this period is that Egypt kind of survived.
There's still a country called Egypt. It's not a country called,
(43:47):
you know, home of the Hittites. But that, I will
say that is a number one on my list or
what they should have been called, just like hyphenated maybe
or maybe it all want work called home of the Hittites.
Love it and I like that is one word. Yeah,
so we um again we can we can say that
there is a wealth of insightful and valuable literature and
(44:12):
research into the ultimate identity of what is commonly called
the Sea People's. The reason that everybody speaking English and
French definitely has been using this phrase for so long
is that it comes from a French egyptologist named Emmanuel
de Rouge, who who kind of coined the term, and
(44:34):
then someone else popularized it and it started circulating in
the cannon because it answered a question a lot of
scientists and unrelated fields had had for a long long time. Uh,
they're also the explanation, they're one of the main explanations
for that common disaster, soil. I guess we could call
it disaster sentiment, right, the one groove of the historical
(44:58):
record that is food bar as the acronym. Well that
that showed clearly there was a massive fire here and
bodies were just in streets and you know, in in
houses in that same time. It's really disturbing stuff. So
so we've kind of been looking at these things individually,
is as causes, right, But as we know just throughout history,
(45:24):
just because you're dealing with one disaster one bad thing,
doesn't mean another one can't come up. Right, we're dealing
with that right now. We've got a we've got three
handfuls at least of disasters that are hitting the globe
right now. And why would it be any different during
the Bronze Age, right, Yeah, because we've been we've been
(45:47):
perhaps a little uh uh, a little misleading where we're
we're we're presenting these problems we said, natural disasters like
ongoing drought, like earthquakes like volcanoes, human problems like war
or the fact that humans are often just inherently greedy,
(46:09):
bad people, or or you just what um unrest within cities,
right yeah, and competing for things? Right? Why should why
should my children die such that yours can live? You
know that's not an even trade to me, says the
other person with kids. Uh So, each of these explanations alone,
(46:30):
taken by their themselves in a vacuum. They've all happened before, right,
A lot of them are happening now, as you said, Matt,
in the modern age, but these often were, These were
happening in the Bronze Age, but they weren't all happening
at once. Because these all happened, and these cultures, the
world's first stable, long term international trade network survived, weathered
(46:55):
every storm. But experts are arguing, I thing is very
clever that what happened is humanity met a storm and
had never seen before. It met a perfect storm. It
met an insidious geopolitical domino effect that probably, yes, began
with the natural world. I think we can determine that.
But but when we see it, it's got spooky parallels. Right. So,
(47:21):
climate change, whether it's an eruption, whether it's something abrupt
like a natural disaster eruption, whether it's a slow cycle
that maybe has nothing to do with humans, it leads
to political instability that leads to a rise in crime.
I mean, that's why the historian Robert Drew's calls this
the Late Bronze Age collapse. He calls it the worst
(47:44):
disaster in ancient history, more calamitous than the collapse of
the Western Roman Empire. And people are saying that, like
the see people's didn't just you know, wake up and say, yeah,
you know, I know, we usually fish, but what if
we just sacked. What if we just or something like that.
What if we guys, guys, what if we get into
(48:05):
pilloging like in a big way and the other people
on the boat didn't look around and just go yeah,
and maybe they did. I'm gonna start a gang. It's
called the Sea Boys, and we're gonna sorry, I was
just gonna, I was just gonna put forth. Why can't
(48:27):
we just simplify and just call them the sea people,
you know, the people from the sea. I just I
think that's just a little more straightforward. The idea of
the sea people's just makes it seem too too academic.
Let's let's let's have some fun with him. But you're
making Yes, you're making a great point, Ben. They didn't
just decide to do it. It was because they were
facing some kind of issue, likely from the natural world,
(48:48):
like you're saying, like a drought, unable to feed their
families on and they had to go and find something.
And when they couldn't trade or they couldn't find a
viable way to do it peacefully, Doon, the option then
was to take by force, or at least perhaps it
was the thought that the only option was to take
what they needed by force. Again, the parallels freaking me
(49:11):
out a little bit exactly. I mean, think about it. So, uh,
this the positive domino effect we mentioned earlier. Right, stable
populations are creating more food, right, and so those they
don't naturally want to go out into the wild. And
I would hope if people are people are creatures of
(49:33):
convenience and necessity, right, So it's it's relatively anomalous for
a group to just to to just decide to kill
people for fun rather than to kill them for resources
or something like that. So these stable populations during the
heyday of the Bronze Age, they are dependent on producing
food or importing food for their own consumption and then
(49:56):
possibly exporting it across trade networks for other things they
can't get, And so when they can't grow crops, they
cannot participate in that trade network, and most importantly, they
cannot feed themselves. That's the whole reason they're living in
this area, right, So they have to look for some
other means of sustenance. But the problem is, unless they're
(50:20):
the very first people who became these migrants and refugees,
other people have already hit the road. Other people have
been down these tracks before, been down this road before,
if you're a Hank Williams senior fan, and they have
done the same. And they already knew about these pre
existing trade routes. They already knew where the ports were,
they already knew where the cities were. The people who
(50:42):
are already pushed into a nomadic existence are therefore either
laying weight in established migration routes and waiting to pounce
on merchants and families and refugees, or they hopped in
their boats, perhaps driven by necessity, and decided to that
they instead of waiting for something to be given to them,
(51:03):
they would take it by any means necessary, and morality
doesn't really enter the equation when you're talking about survival.
And then think about it on a worldwide scale. Now,
we think about cities and empires as individuals, right, we
know that city states don't really have friends, Empires don't
really have friends, they have alliances. So these entire, uh,
(51:26):
these entire groups of people are shifting into militarism. They're
already probably pretty militaristic, but but they're protecting their own defenses, right,
their upper classes and their mid tiers from pillagers. And
they're also trying to send out their military forces to
wage wars, wars of acquisition of other resources, perhaps wars
of protection against these mysterious see peoples who keep getting away.
(51:51):
And it happens. This is the scariest part. It happens
very very quickly, you know what I mean. Uh, these
longstanding treaties thrown awake. Egypt retreats into itself, right because
it needs to. It needs to tamp down domestic unrest.
You have to fix your own house before you fix
someone else's. Just think about what we're saying and describing here,
(52:12):
just overlay it on. They started start in the late
nineties and just like, oh God, during this time, someone
figured out how to make iron. Oh there you go.
I guess what. I guess what the military has. They've
(52:33):
just come out. They're saying that they think fusion is
definitely going to be a thing. Now. They're like just
talking about it openly. Yeah, fusion, you know, for power,
fusion for power. It's only gonna be for power. It's
gonna be fine, Are you serious? Yeah, Uh, it's all good.
The first round of fusion bombs, we just gotta wait
(52:55):
for that. That's that's somebody making the first iron and going, oh,
those are those are fusion bombs for peace. But then
we get some who who gets them? You know, who
gets the fusion bombs got? I don't know. It's the
same with like these weapons. You know, it's all about
who who figured it out first, and then you know,
people backwards engineer things. I'm sure both sides of these,
(53:19):
uh these conflicts had similar weapons, but maybe the upper
hand goes to the ones that figured it out a
little better. I don't know. Yeah, and then they get
all the oil and you know, last until it all
burns out and the yeah, yeah, and this is uh there,
(53:39):
this is the the Spook is part of this story
now if we want to give it a little bit
of an epilogue. Yes, the area entered dark age. You know,
the closest thing we had to global civilization full stop collapsed. Uh.
And you know, Noel, you raised the point earlier about
the collapse and education literacy bottomed out, right? Who has
(54:03):
time to learn to read? I am trying to avoid
these pillagers impossible cannibals. I just threw cannibals in there,
and now it's who has time to read? I'm being
distracted by these cat videos. I mean, I was joking
at the top of the show about this maybe being
the new dark I don't know. It makes me think
of that movie Idiocracy, which is all about a breakdown
(54:25):
in education, a breakdown and intelligence leading to a breakdown
in civilization and society as we know it because people
can't solve problems anymore. People don't think about how to
fix these, you know, existential threats that face them. Uh.
And that's when really hits the fan. And this is
our denue mole, right, there is our epilogue. Eventually, the
(54:46):
seasonal reigns return, and experts believe that this eventually again
lead the descendants of some of those uprooted groups we
talked about to settle down once again. But make no mistake,
history was forever and permanently stunted by this collapse. We
have no idea where the world would be if this
(55:10):
had not occurred, right, Like, part of the reason we
are making this podcast now, part of the reason podcast
exists is because thousands of years ago, the world as
we knew it burned the down Like. That's true. And
most importantly, we can't mistake this from some for some
(55:34):
like long ago story from some dusty tome or I
guess some dusty time before books, some dusty tablets or hieroglyph.
We we should, and I think we must take this
as a parable. It's a warning about the fragility inherent
to all human civilization. Civilization is a covenant. It is
(55:54):
an agreement, and it only works so long as the
majority of people agree that it works. Otherwise it's just
like a thing we thought was a good idea at
the time, like, uh, you know, police Academy for it?
Has anyone? Has anyone been watching the new season of
Fargo It just started the other night? Oh no, I
(56:17):
can't wait. Well, I'm gonna This isn't really a spoiler,
but it's sort of about warring groups, warring factions, and
they have this ritual and this agreement where they essentially
one faction whether it's the Italians and the Irish or
African American gang comes in in the present day of
the show, which is like the fifties versus the Italians,
(56:37):
and they have this ritual where in order to kind
of make peace quote unquote, they exchange the youngest child
and and each of them raised the other's youngest child.
And again there's ritual involved in that, and it's an
inherent like agreement and a compact. But do you know
people don't always hold up there into the bargain and
and otherwise if they did, you wouldn't have a show. Um,
(57:00):
that's the same with history. You know, people often you know,
make these agreements and then decide, you know, and actually,
I think we're just gonna kill all of you. And
to this, like what we're talking about when we talk
about this dissolution of society is, uh, we're proposing essentially
what's what's called a general systems collapse. The argument is
(57:23):
that we made so much progress as a species during
the Bronze Age, that we built a system that was
too intricate to fix, like we didn't know how to
fix it when parts of it started breaking. If it
was if it was disrupted, then we didn't have anybody
with the vantage point to say, okay, look, what we
need to do is to first off, maintain the trade routes.
(57:47):
Let's let's do that. Everybody was panicking because the building
was on fire and we had built everything except for
a fire escape basically socio politically, and so now we
see that the things that happened in the order in
which they occurred, they exposed existing flaws in the system.
The reason that is important is because it can happen
(58:09):
again right. One of the questions that I think I
think we'd have to ask is do you think experts
are missing another explanation for the bizarre story of the
late Bronze Age collapse, this weird murder mystery of a civilization?
And what do you think we can learn about it
in the modern day? Like what what can we do?
(58:30):
We are The easy argument that a lot of people
would make is that we are somehow better armed because
we have vastly uh more sophisticated information uh technology and dissemination.
But how much of an advantage is that really? Like
to your point about cat videos, Noll, how much UH
(58:51):
does knowing? Does the potential of knowing almost everything mean
that it will be applied in a useful way? I
think that's a logical miss up. Yeah, absolutely is. I
think we've seen that too much information leads people to
silo their education and and and and you do what
only seek out what only suits them as opposed to
(59:13):
you know, because you have do you used to have
to work for knowledge, You used to have to work
for you know, this access to it was a very
exclusive thing, and now everyone has it and nobody appreciates it.
So what do you guys think is is the safest
way to ensure your family's survival in uh any coming
disaster or collapse of our society? UH? Is the safest
(59:35):
way to become a nuclear fusion engineer? Maybe we're just
play play the video games superliminal, Like right now, everybody,
go play the video games superliminal and start thinking the
way that game forces you to think. And then I
think we'll all get to a place where we can
(59:57):
solve any problem that's ever presented to us. I haven't
heard of Superliminal. Well, if you haven't heard of it,
I'm not I'm not getting paid to tell you this,
but you should play it for sure. It is a
puzzle game and it's it's it forces you to change
your perspective literally and figuratively, which is why I think
(01:00:18):
it would it's important. It could be a Yeah, that's
why you could be applied here because you know, to
to find find answers to some of these major problems
that we face, as in, you know, a global civilization
right now. We just have to think about things differently,
and it's very difficult for humans to do that. And
what are your coping mechanisms, folks? What are your heuristics
(01:00:40):
for what has sometimes been called the end of history?
I think, well, I think we'll soldier on because I
have to. But but let it let us know. What
do you think we can learn from the Bronze Age collapse?
Do you think something like this could slash would happen now?
And if so, how would it play out? We would
love to hear from you. You can find us on
the internet as long as that thing is still around.
(01:01:02):
Hopefully We're on Instagram, We're on Facebook, We're on Twitter,
we recommend here's where it gets crazy, just joined up
by saying, uh, typing in Knowle's name or Matt's name,
super producer, code name, Doc Holiday or superproducer mission control,
my name, dropped me upon something that makes me laugh, um,
or just you know, in a witty way, illustrates the
(01:01:26):
darkness of civilization. Yeah. And and in the event that
we do have some sort of like escape from l
a esque situation where you know, the Internet disappears and
all electronics, uh, this is well, this wouldn't really work. Um,
never mind forget to work through the landline. Okay, there
you go. That's what I was getting at. Ben, Thank
you for rescuing me. You can give us a call
(01:01:47):
on a landline, presuming that that infrastructure hasn't been never
that's just too depressing. One three three st d W
I t K is that number? UM, reach out to us.
You can leave us a voicemail. Well that part won't
never oicemail won't work in but you know what this
is all just we're just spitballing here. Everything's fine for now.
Leave us a voicemail. Keep it roughly around three minutes
(01:02:08):
so that we can have a nice concise story we
can use on one of our weekly listener mail episodes.
And be sure and let us know if it's okay
to use your story and play your actual voice on
the show. And if you want us to call you
something specific or not use your name or be anonymous,
We're all about that. UM. Love to hear from you.
And if you happen to enjoy looking at faces while
you hear voices talk to you, you can head over
(01:02:29):
to YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. Don't look at
Ben's face right now if you're if you're hearing the
don't oh oh hants? Why do I get that it
was that specific face? Um? Yeah, but YouTube dot YouTube
dot com slash conspiracy Stuff. That's our channel. Subscribe, Tell
your friends we're going to be putting these up there,
(01:02:50):
these conversations, and there will be other things on the
way to you as soon as we can get them
to you. Just be prepared. And if none of the
at quite bags your badgers or collapses your bronze age,
as long as the as long as the electricity is
moving and the great sky net and the sky stays there,
(01:03:13):
you can always contact us through a good old fashioned
email address where we are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com.
(01:03:38):
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