What Caused the Late Bronze Age Collapse?

Humans’ first attempt at civilization went pretty well for the first thousand years. Important stuff like the wheel, writing, math, art, and diplomacy came out of it. But then, in the blink of an historical eye, it all mysteriously failed. What happened?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know. A production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you should know,
A good old history edition, if you ask me, by goodness,

(00:22):
History of the World Part two. I don't think I
saw that since I was maybe eight, and at the time,
I was like, I have no idea what's going on
or why people think this is funny? Yeah, well that
was part one. Part two is out now. Oh really. Yeah,
We're not getting paid for this, but I'll plug the
heck out of it. It's on Hulu and they waited,

(00:43):
you know, to like a forty year in the making
sequel that they did as a TV show with mel
Brooks executive producing and narrating. But it's like some of
the great minds and comedy out there doing you know,
history sketches. Is Michael Fossbender in it? I don't think so.
Is he was great comedy minds? I think so. It's

(01:05):
really funny, though, like genuinely laugh out loud funny. Yeah.
I gotta check it out because those things are rare
and few and far between. Yeah, it's good stuff, you know, sketch.
So not everything is perfect, but it's I found myself
laughing quite a bit so far. I've seen three of them.
I think, Okay, it's on Hulu. It's on Hulu. And
what happens if you don't have Hulu? Did you just
go subscribe? I don't know how you can watch it.

(01:28):
I think you just go subscribe to Hulu, is what
I'm trying to say. Oh, sure, but this sounds like
an ad for Hulu. I don't know about TV shows.
You can just go out and buy a show, right, Sure,
you want to buy whatever you want. It's the twenty
first century, right, Should we talk about the Bronze Age. Yeah,
let's go back a few centuries, a few millennia actually
to the Bronze Age. Great Age. It was. It was

(01:50):
a great age. It was actually the first grade Age.
I think most people are familiar with the term Bronze Age,
but they might not know, like, just how amazing an
age it really was, like just I poppingly amazing frankly
if you think of it. Yeah, and it was specifically
wedged between the Stone Age, which stones worked great for

(02:12):
millions of years for a lot of things. Yeah, Bronze
came along and then was followed by the Iron Age
where we were plunged into the Dark Ages. Yeah, but
we're talking what thirty three hundred BC to about twelve
hundred BC, a little over a thousand years. Yeah, and
it had a lot to do with the Bronze which
we'll talk about, but also just advances and almost everything

(02:35):
you can think of, Yeah, art, architecture, politics, diplomacy, technology, religion, war,
virsion of science. Yeah, the early sciences, early astronomy and math, writing,
all of this stuff was born during this thousand years
stretch of the Bronze Age. And again, like you might say,
well a thousand years, of course, you could have been

(02:57):
all that in a thousand years, But think about it.
We were around for tens of thousands of years as
modern humans and millions of years as hominids of some
sort or another up to that point, and then all
of a sudden boom, civilization just develops out of nowhere,
and it was in large part because of bronze itself,
not just that Bronze tools are way better than stone tools.

(03:21):
They're more easily sharpened, you can fashion them more easily,
you can recycle them, so when they get busted up,
you can re smelt them and make it brand new again.
That's a huge advance in technology. But the actual bronze itself,
in a really roundabout but also pretty direct way, wove
people together in ways that they never had been before.

(03:43):
That led to civilization. Yeah, it's really cool how the
discovery of metallurgy just changed so much in a very
you know, if you look at the big picture, a
very short amount of time. Yeah, so there were If
you want to make brons, you take copper and you
take a little bit of tin is usually the alloy

(04:04):
that makes bronze, and you smash them together with your
hands over the course of fifteen years, and then dam
you have bronze. So you well know you melt him.
You smelled him, and who smelt it? Delt it? Right,
that's right. And you have bronze and you can fashion
it into tools. But to get copper and tin together

(04:24):
you have to go to all sorts of different places.
In the Mediterranean. You have plenty of copper, say on
Cyprus that was a copper mining center, but then if
you wanted tin, you had to go a couple thousand miles,
a few thousand kilometers to the east, if I'm mistaken,
to the east to Afghanistan, which was a tin center,
and to get that tin and that copper together you

(04:48):
had to create really extensive trade networks. You had to
go through one land to another, so you had to
make friends or make enemies with those people, and all
of these new relationships developed just to get the component
to make bronze together, and that that formed the basis
of all the stuff that seemed to follow. Yeah, and
we'll talk about the warring. There was certainly that, but

(05:10):
there was also a lot of cooperation because everyone wanted
to get their hands on that sweet bronze, and they're like, hey,
if you want to play with the big fellas, then
maybe become part of this trade route, allow us to
go through your area with the tin or whatever, or
maybe you have something that we need other than just
you know, being on the way. But there's a lot

(05:31):
of cooperation involved too as far as the bronze. What
that led to ultimately was better. And this is the
sort of the cascading effect that a simple not simple,
but a discovery like this can have is or make
is better farming techniques. And you might think, well, great,
so you could farm better but that means you could

(05:53):
farm bigger, and that means you could support more people,
and that means you could get a civilization going. And
because you had before, you previously had a situation where like, hey, listen,
everyone's got a hunt and gather, and then later later on,
everyone's got a farm because we just can't support ourselves
unless everyone's kind of in on this. Right now, they

(06:14):
had more sophisticated techniques, so fewer people had to farm
to support more people even and that freed up people
who were good at other stuff to do other stuff.
So that's the cascading effect that you were sort of
alluding to, where like this one thing led to farming,
better farming, but that better farming led to division of

(06:36):
labor where it's like, hey, I'm really good at science.
Hey I'm really good. I'm a really good writer. But
everyone always said, don't waste your time writing because we
need you farming. Right it's brand new. It might not
stick around. It could just be a fad, this writing thing.
It might just go away. So yeah, and with that
division of labor, the writers can write, the math, people
can figure out math. The farmers can farm and feed everybody.

(06:58):
And then one of the other big pillars of support
for this division of labor that allowed it to blossom
was centralized governments that said, farmers, we're in charge of you.
Make x amount of grain and bring it to this
central place. Everybody else come to this central place and
get your grain. We're taking care of you. We're feeding you.
So you guys can go off and concentrate on this
other stuff and help civilization flourish. So government is a huge, sweeping, bureaucratic,

(07:25):
hierarchical entity. Really got established in the Bronze Age as well,
just because there were so many people being strung together
again in the service of creating bronze Yeah, and hey,
while you're at it, enslave people, why don't you build
huge statues of me and big monuments of myself as

(07:47):
the leader of you. So that's kind of what happened,
you know, the establishment of government from the very beginning
sort of gaveth and took it away, gaveth and that
all the things you were saying, which was great about
organizing large groups of people, but took of the way
because every civilization was built on the backs of enslaved people,

(08:07):
and if not enslaved, at the very least they established
a real kind of like never before, a real hierarchy
of high I'm in charge and you're not, so you
don't matter as much. Yeah, that's that was definitely new.
I mean you always had things like you know, shaman
or some sort of like probably group leader, elders or

(08:28):
something like that, right for a hunter gatherer bands, but
nothing like this where you didn't even come close to
to talking to or knowing personally the person who was
your your ultimate leader. Like that was brand new. And
what's interesting, Chuck, as you said, you know, kind of
for better for worse about the government emerging. You can

(08:48):
really see how you feel about today's world by how
you in purpet what was born and what happened during
the Bronze Age. It's like look in a highly polished
bronze mirror. Basically, it's really interesting what reflects back, and
it's not always cut and dried, like I have certain
feelings about, you know, topics like government or whatever. But

(09:12):
I also in looking back a few thousand years, it's
also easy to see the other side's opinion because they're
not all up in my face. They're several thousand years old,
and I can kind of now understand contemporary people's feelings
about say government or something as well. I think that's
just fascinating. That's ultimately why history is so important, because

(09:33):
you really do learn lessons from it. You can, like
humans are not We like to think we're super advanced
compared to you know, the people of a few thousand
years ago, but we're still basically the same humans that
we were back during the Bronze agents, So there is
a lot to learn. I agree. You know, we mentioned
that there was worrying obviously, when you're going to get

(09:55):
bigger groups of people together and government's ruling those people
and they're in close proximity to one another, you know,
neighbored right up to each other, there's gonna be people
that don't get along, and there is obviously going to
be warring. But like we mentioned, there was also a
lot of diplomacy and there was a very sort of

(10:15):
golden age of this Golden age kind of square in
the middle, where things were cruising along really, really nicely.
I think these sort of looking back at it, it
seems like the beginnings of a big, grand transition like this,
things can be rough, and as we'll see at the end,
given that it basically collapsed. It's obviously rough, but there

(10:37):
was a time in the middle there where things were
going pretty great. Yeah, Yeah, it's true. It's that middle
Bronze Age prosperity. And it actually kind of underscores the
idea that when you bring a lot of people together
you can do amazing, momentous things. But if you bring
a lot of diverse people together, you've got a lot

(10:57):
of different attribute ut different contributions from different groups and opinions. Yeah,
and opinions and affluence and prosperity can really follow when
people of diverse backgrounds interact with one another on large scales. Amen,
that's pretty cool. Should we take a break. Sure, it's
kind of an early break, but it feels like a

(11:19):
good stopping point. And maybe when we come back, we'll
talk about the Big Eight. All right, I tease the

(11:52):
Big Eight. We're talking about the Big Eight areas societies
that dominated the Bronze Age, and they are not This
is not an order of influence or preference, even alphabetical,
it's not any This is just randomly assimilated, okay, or assembled.
Egyptians not bad, actually hit and as we'll see, the Egyptians,

(12:17):
they didn't completely go away. They got punched in the
face during the Bronze Age collapse, but they stuck around Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycinians, Assyrians,
and rounding out the top eight, everyone's favorite, the Babylonians.
And this is like, not all of these groups were

(12:37):
dominant at one time at the same time. Yeah, some
were dominant at one time or another, like the Minoans
were the civilization that predated the Mycinians right so um
by quite several hundred years, if not longer, but each
one dominated. They both controlled crete while they were in charge.

(12:58):
And if you look at these these groups, to a
lot of them are I mean, I guess you'd call
them famous, Like the Babylonians pretty famous, the Manoans famous
that um, the Egyptians super duper famous. Yeah, white famous.
And this was the this these were the groups that
created the beginning of history, Like this was the time
when the pyramids at Giza were built, or when the

(13:19):
Epic of Gilgamesh was written and the Code of Hammurabi
was encoded. This is when Pharaoh's like two to common
and Ramesy's the second ruled Like this was big deal
capital h history that was being produced at this time. UM,
and it seems to have all kind of started with
the um. The Sumerians. They seem to be the ones

(13:41):
who like kicked the whole thing off. Yeah, and we
should mention too that all of those groups that we
named had subgroups, a lot of Itites, you want to
tell him, some ess amrites h Gergeshites, that's my favorite.
And these were all all groups, and they even had subgroups,

(14:02):
you know, under these umbrella terms like Canaanites. But Sumerians,
like you said, came first. They said, hey, you like irrigation,
what do you think about this? Canal right, what do
you think about this zigarrette? What do you think about
writing things down? And now we can keep track of
inventories and things like that, and log books and money

(14:25):
or like you mentioned the Epic of Gilgamesh, great read
ye've known as the first work of literature. But what
you also had because of this invention of writing was
other cultures writing, and in a way that sort of
helps corroborate what's going on. When you have different cultures
writing about things that that track or check check one another,

(14:46):
then you sort of get a better picture of what's
happening well. Plus, also, when you have these diverse cultures
that have different systems of writing and language, when they
communicate with one another, they're often writing in two different language.
So later historians, once you crack one language, you can
use that to crack like let's say you cracked hieroglyphics,

(15:07):
you can use hieroglyphics to now crack linear B, which
was I think out of crete if I'm not mistaken.
And if you crack linear B, well wait a minute,
they used linear B to write this cuneiform or cuneiform,
so we can crack that now too. So like almost
all tablets written during this time, we're in multiple languages,
so each one's like a Rosetta stone. Yeah, it's really neat.

(15:30):
That is super cool. So everything's going great. People are trading,
people are thriving, people are farming like never before, and
all these advances are happening and then boom, almost for
the most part, everything stopped. Most of that development and
almost all of those major civilizations kind of just went away,

(15:53):
and like we said, the Iron Age came along. Looking now,
my friend, I think this would have been the best
place for a break. Sure, but it screwed that up.
So we'll just dive right into what might have happened.
The data the collapse is generally given as eleven sixty
seven BC, but it's obviously not the kind of thing
that happens overnight. I think it They generally now agree

(16:15):
that it happened over the course of what thirty or
forty years? Yeah, I think from about twelve hundred to
eleven fifty, which I mean, if you're living through that,
it's fifty years at the time of lifetime, probably a lifetime,
but looking back historically, it's like the blink of an eye. Yeah,
and in a blink of an eye, things like when
we talk about collapse, it was it was a pretty

(16:37):
start collapse, like there was there's evidence of lots of disturbance,
lots of upset in that region. And we'll get into
everything that happened. I mean, we talked about the warring
people really started warring, and when certain civilizations might have
fallen out of power, that created a vacuum there where

(16:58):
a new civilization would come in and all of these
civilizations kind of going away. I believe it was like
Sparta and Athens were the next to come along. To
really kind of kick off the next Golden Age, right, Yeah,
several hundred years later, and in between there was what
you would call a dark Age, the Iron Age, which
iron is preferable to bronze in some ways and that

(17:20):
it can be harder, I believe, but bronze doesn't rust.
So people typically look at the Iron Age, the transition
from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age as a
step backward, a dark age. And it came from this
collapse what's called the Late Bronze Age collapse where you know,

(17:41):
you said that they really started boring and cities were
sacked and burned. Cities have been like sacked before and
burned before, but they were rebuilt during this age of prosperity.
This time, after the Late Bronze Age collapse from twelve
hundred to eleven fifty, they weren't rebuilt. They were left
in ruins and rubble because the civilizations that would have
built them were gone. Their languages were gone, their writing

(18:03):
was gone. In very short time, people couldn't decipher things
that had been written fifty or one hundred years before.
It was it was just one civilization after another fell
like dominoes all around the Mediterranean and this part of
the world that gave the world essentially civilization for the
very first time fell into this dark age, and it's

(18:26):
it's it was such a stark, massive, all encompassing collapse
of the first attempt at civilization that it just piqued
historians and archaeologists curiosity from the first time they detected it,
and they've been seeking to explain exactly what happened ever since. Yeah,
and we'll in a second will go over some of

(18:48):
the causes, but after the cause, and there's a lot
of debate over what those were. You we have a
civilization or a group of civilizations that we've talked about
being very interconnected and dependent on one another. So you
said they fell like dominoes. That's going to happen if
you have a lot of civilizations trading with one another,

(19:08):
depending on one another, sharing resources with one another. When
one goes down, then it becomes unstable for all of them.
And you know, if a civilization collapses, those people it's
not like everyone literally is destroyed, Like those people are
going to go to the next closest place probably and

(19:29):
that overstresses them and then it's just like you said,
it's it's just one after the other, this domino effect happens,
and it just kind of happened one after the other
over this very short time period. Yeah, because remember this
is the first time when people follow to centralized government,
and this is where you got your food, right, So

(19:50):
when that centralized government collapsed, you no longer had access
to food. And you're like, I'm a mathematician, I have
no idea how to grow grain. I'm going to starve
to death if somebody doesn't do something you told me.
Of course, you're going to run to the next civilization
that still has a central government with grain that they
could possibly have. But that puts a strain on the grain,
and people start to fight when there's a strain on

(20:11):
the grain. That's just how it goes, right, that's a
T shirt waiting to happen. So UM for one of
the first people or one of the first theories that
came along. Um was posed by an egyptologist, a French
egyptologist who coined the term the sea people. I like
that the sea people have long been UM. Yeah, it's
sound ominous in this sense, don't they. Yeah, when you

(20:34):
capitalize the sea people, yeah, yeah, they're probably not bringing
fruit baskets, you know. No, unfortunately not. They were bringing
death and destruction in Mayhem, and much the same way
that we today think of like the Vikings would have
to the UK and the Western Europe. This is a
very similar thing where a bunch of raiding pirates made

(20:55):
land and just sacked all these civilizations. And so, um,
they're they're almost hypothetical that we have a pretty good
idea that they did exist in some form or another.
They're they're written about in Egyptian stale stala, can't remember
how to say that. Um, but inscriptions, let's just say.
And they show up in art too, so we know

(21:17):
that they they happen, but we don't know who these
people are and what extent they They sacked the major
great city states, and if if they managed to topple
all these civilizations, then holy cow, they were They were amazing.
But a lot of people are like, I'm not sure
they actually were the trigger. They might have been a symptom. Yeah,

(21:39):
and we don't, like you said, we don't even know
for sure who they are. I believe Egyptians did identify
some groups of them at the time as like the
Oshawasha or the Luca or the check Lesh, but that
means nothing to us these days because their contemporary names
were lost to history. So what we call a lot

(21:59):
of civilizations today were named by people who discovered their
ruins years later, and that wasn't what they called themselves.
For instance, Minoans were named after the Greek king Minos
by an archaeologist named Arthur Evans or Arthur Evans. In
some cases we do know what they called themselves, in

(22:19):
other cases we don't. I think the Samerians we know
called themselves ung song giga, which is blackheaded people, but
they were named Samerians by Acadians who followed after them.
So we have trouble with identifying people because the names
were lost. We have trouble identifying people like to see

(22:39):
people because there's a very murky picture of who was
where and when they were there. So there's a lot
of different stories where you think, like one group of
people maybe came in and overpowered another and drove them
into oblivion, where it's like no, now we believe that
they were there sort of all along and they just

(23:00):
filled that power vacuum, or maybe those actually were those
people right right. Like For a good example is the Canaanites.
For a very long time, the Philistines were blamed, and
I mean a really long time the Philistines were blamed
for toppling the Canaanite empire. But more recent scholarship says, actually,
I think the Canaanites became the Philistines after the collapse.

(23:22):
They kind of broke up as a group and then reformed. Like, Umm,
I'm trying to think of a band. The only one
I can think of is my high school band who
broke up and reformed without me. So let's just say
that it was like my high school band. Oh that
story just breaks my heart. Every time I hear it

(23:42):
breaks my heart too. But anyway, that's what they think happened.
So so a lot of the scholarship that we were
we relied on for centuries, like the Canaanites were toppled
by the Philistines. It was incorrect, and we have to
figure it out by deducing Well, wait a minute, this
group was here at this time, and this group was
at that time. The contemporary reports don't actually help us

(24:03):
that much because we might be totally familiar with the
Czech Lash, but we call them the Mycenians, right, but
is it the Mycenians. Well, let's go and look. The
Myssnians were toppled by the sea people, so probably not
the Mycenians. So you have to use this historical deduction
to try to figure out who these people were. But
the upshot of it is that now today and yes

(24:25):
I set up shot by god, I'll say it again,
the upshot of it is that today we think the
sea people we're basically like pirates of the days of
your or more recent days of yr. They weren't from
one particular country. They were a loose confederation of people
exactly which I mean, I buy that that makes sense. Yeah,

(24:45):
it makes a lot more sense than some group we
are totally unfamiliar with or know by a different name
but haven't detected. Went and like just completely toppled every
single culture in civilization in the Mediterranean at the time. Yeah,
I agree, another thing that makes sense. And I'll go
and spoil it and say I think all these make sense,
so subscribe to them. It was probably a little bit

(25:08):
of everything, but over extension is a big one, m
if you are. I mean, this was their first foray
into this kind of mass agriculturalism and massive government and
these big, big groups of people, and they you know,
it was just it was their first try humanities, first

(25:28):
try it this stuff. So obviously it's gonna not go perfectly.
And if you're managing that many people, like any government
has a limit on how many people even today that
they can probably manage successfully. Any business does, any friend
group does. So the fact that they just overextended themselves

(25:48):
is probably a pretty good factor. Yeah, that's entirely possible.
So that's another theory. Just buy itself over extension and
once those governments are like, oh god, I can't support
everybody's like maybe a revolt or at the very least
political instability in YadA YadA, YadA, right, and then dominoes.
One of the problems with that theory, though, is that
we have letters from one group to another, from like

(26:11):
the Hittite empress to the like Ramsey's the second in
Egypt saying like hey help, which really shows the diplomacy
and the innerdependence. But they would say things like hey help,
we're running out of grain. I need some food. Can
you please send my people some grain? So that makes
it seem like it wasn't just over extension, although it

(26:33):
could have been over extension that led to it. Now
that I kind of sessed it out, look at that, Yeah,
move might just go edit that whole part out because
it turned out to be totally unnecessary. Well, two natural
sort of disasters came together that are obviously going to
have a deleterious effect on civilizations, drought and earthquakes. We

(26:57):
do know that there's a lot of evidence that there
was a draft out, a seemingly really long one. I
think they've actually, you know, have actual proof of fossilized
pollen from the bottom of the Sea of Galilee that
said there was at least one hundred and fifty years drought,
and then other people say, now it was probably more
like three hundred years. And you know, that's that's going

(27:19):
to cause destabilization, Like nobody's business. If your whole like
sort of new societies are built on mass agriculture, people
are gonna start fighting. They're going to start warring with
one another. I do think it's interesting that along with
this theory they say that the sea people might have
been climate refugees from another part of the world. Very interesting,

(27:42):
and you know, back to what we said, like the
great thing about this mass farming is all of a sudden,
it freed up people to do other things with the
division of labor. But then when that was stressed, they
had to pull people like you said, I was I
was told I could do math, not that there would
be no math, quite the opposite, and they were pulled
back from those jobs. So all of a sudden you
had an end to other advances because you had to go.

(28:06):
You were trying to save your society. Yeah, and that
the twenty thirteen study, the one that determined the drought
was one hundred and fifty years long, also said that
the end of the drought seems to coincide with the
end of that Dark Age period and the rebuilding again
of civilization. The earthquake thing makes a lot of sense too.
You remember, of course, the horrific earthquakes that Turkey suffered

(28:29):
in February. There was a seven point five followed nine
hours later by a seven point eight, and that is
just mind boggling. It killed forty six thousand people. The
thing is that area, this area of the Mediterranean, and
then the Aegean as well. There's no less than four
major plates that come together in this area, the Arabian,

(28:50):
the African, the Anatolian, and the Eurasian plates all kind
of converge around here, and so it's known for its
earthquakes and also quake storms, which is what Turkey suffered recently.
It's like earthquake after earthquake after earthquake, and a lot
of them are really really big there that this area
is kind of plagued with it and has been for
a very long time. And there's plenty of evidence of

(29:13):
earthquake damage, lots of poor souls being found trapped under
their houses, and foundations like um just completely disrupted and
walls at weird angles, so that definitely happened around this time.
But then there's also other cities that were destroyed where
you find like arrowheads embedded into the walls and like

(29:34):
people with their heads cut off and stuff like that,
where it's like an earthquake didn't do that. Some other
group of people who attack the city did that. So
this kind of leads us to the to the the
one you subscribe to, which is everything everywhere, all at
once theory, which is that every like there was basically

(29:55):
a multiplier effect where one disaster happened that triggered or
other disasters and it just made those disasters worse and
worse and worse, and that there was just a cascade
of system failures that that created this massive collapse. Yeah,
and again going back to what I was saying earlier,
it's like, this was the first try at this kind
of thing, and UM, well we'll get to maybe after

(30:19):
the break, we'll talk about lessons we've learned. But you know,
on a first attempt at this, it was a long
time ago. There. There's um, there wasn't anything they could
lean on in any of their histories to try and
write the ship. So it just sort of went the
way it went, you know, there was kind of almost
no stopping it, I think. So I'll give you another
anecdote of mine that kind of exemplifies this. Um, when

(30:42):
you and I moved into our first place that we
ever bought together, I was installing something or other. You
in the hot water pipe, yeah, the little condo, little
tiny place, yep, Um, and I broke the hot water
pipe at the water supply under the sink the valve,
so there's no way to turn it off. And my

(31:04):
response to that was to get up and literally run
in a circle, going, oh my god, Oh my god.
Oh my god, and you may had to run in
and figure out what was going on, then run out
and find the water main and turn it off, right,
That's what I imagined, like some of these rulers did,
like after the first disaster too, because they had no
they had no frame of reference. I had no idea
what to do right then. I didn't think like watermin

(31:25):
They didn't even know there was a water main at
the time, so they had no exactly they That's kind
of the response I imagine them doing. That's pretty funny.
Then there's one other one, chuck um. So you know
how the Bronze Age led to the Iron Age. Yeah,
And the division between the two is basically right there
after the late Bronze Age collapse, you've got the Iron

(31:46):
Age almost immediately after it. And there is an idea
that in Bronze Age Ireland, which suffered its own collapse
later on, that it was the availability of iron that
led to the collapse of the Bronze Age because anybody
could go find and work iron into something. You didn't
need to have a tin from over here in copper,

(32:07):
massive trade networks and people at the top commanding everybody else.
You could go out and find it yourself. And this
theory that in Ireland at least, and it's possible it
applies to the Mediterranean too, that it democratized it so
much that it led to political instability, and hence that
that same destabilization where one civilization was top, all that

(32:29):
led to another and another and another. Boy, this is
the side of history I love more than any other
I think, which is are these just sort of things
like this is how the Earth was, and because you
could find something here it led to this, or you
couldn't find something there, it led to this, Right, It's
really fascinating to me. Yeah. And also they think that
the reason why we're able to find metals relatively close

(32:54):
to the Earth's surface enough so that we can mind
them and therefore housing basically all technology, is because the
I think a small planetoidum crashed into Earth, and that's
where they think the Moon came from. And then when
it smashed into Earth and pushed a lot of that

(33:15):
molten metal to the surface where it cooled and formed
and settled, allowing us to come billions of years later
and dig it up and create civilization from it. It
really like just makes you think it's all just a crapshoot.
Then we have no control over anything. Sure that? Or
we're living in a really amazing simulation. Yeah, that's right,

(33:37):
all right, both, they're both right, They both could be right?
Is it? Bluepillo? Red Bill? I can ever remember? Why?
Why not take both? Yeah? All right, man, I'm into that.
My I don't know if I should tell the story
if it's pill based and maybe not. Probably not? All right,
So we'll take that break and we'll come back and talk,

(33:59):
like I mentioned earlier, a little bit about the lessons
we hopefully have learned from the Late Bronze Age collapse. So, Chuck,

(34:33):
we're talking about lessons for today that you can take
from the Late Bronze Age collapse. And the most obvious
one is don't globalize. It's a bad move when you
become super interconnected and interdependent on one another. A problem
or a failure in one part of the system leads

(34:53):
to just failures throughout the system because everyone's so dependent
on one another. And if you kind of peel back
the curtain a little bit or scratch that lotto ticket
covering off, you see that the most people who are
saying that are probably nativists or anti globalists to begin with.
And that's what I was talking about before, where like

(35:14):
you can see us reflected back when we're looking and
interpreting what happened back then, are the lessons from it.
It really kind of reflects on what our thoughts and
attitudes are today. Yeah, and this isn't you know, a
big pro globalist rant or anything, but we do have
to kind of look around. It a pretty great recent
example of a worldwide test put on all of our civilizations,

(35:39):
which is the COVID pandemic that happened. You know, this
happened all over the world. Everyone was punched in the
face all you know, societies were punched in the face,
and there was no collapse. I mean, everyone got bruised
up pretty bad, and I think the whole world suffered
economically as we're still seeing the fallout from that up

(36:00):
today all over the world. But no one collapsed. It's
not like, you know, the the UK is now you know,
just a warring society and everyone's like you can't go
there anymore because they collapsed because of COVID. It was
a really big test of our globalized world. And there
are some very smart people who say, like, listen, you

(36:21):
can't point to the Bronze Age collapse and say like
that could happen again in modern times, because there's this
one economist that you found, Zachary Jos who is basically like, listen,
we're way more wealthy than they were back then. We
have capital goods like we never had before, and there's
a big cushion that affords us mistakes these days. That

(36:44):
they didn't have those mistakes. That's why, like I said,
it was, it was their first foray into this kind
of thing, so they had a very narrow edge they
were walking to begin with, so they couldn't afford mistakes.
We can afford mistakes these days and still be able
to take a punch of the face and get back
up and continue. He also pointed out that yeah, they
had a division of labor, but our division of labor

(37:06):
is global, and that you know, we have a lot
of redundancy in our systems too. So yeah, he's saying, yes,
you can make comparisons, but it's definitely not apples to
apples because of how far we've come and from the
lessons that we learned from the times where civilization has
collapsed and rebuilt and collapsed and rebuilt. The other way
to look at it. There's a guy named Eric Klein

(37:28):
who's a professor of ancient Nearie studies who also wrote
a book called eleven sixty seven, The Year Civilization Collapsed,
So he's a bit of an authority on this. His
whole thing is, actually, no, we're probably more susceptible to
collapse than the Bronze Age was because we're even more

(37:51):
interconnected than we were before. And there's a systems dynamics
term I believe called hypo hypercoherent, where the system is
so homogeneous, all the different parts of so homogeneous that
when one part and also interconnected, that when one part
breaks down, yeah, it just spreads really quickly and the

(38:12):
whole system breaks down. And you can really kind of
look around at the complexity of our world today, like
just like look at international banking. That's just one system
in the larger, complex, globalized system. So when you take
these complex systems and put them together with other systems
like trade, stock markets, healthcare, and then realize that all

(38:33):
those systems make up a truly global, ultimately complex system,
then you're like, actually, yeah, we're possibly even more susceptible
to breaking down than the Bronze age was Yeah, which
is scary to think about. But like as far as
anti globalists saying like we need to undo this. That
ship is sailed, don't you think. I mean, things are

(38:54):
so interconnected and we have such a globalist world that
it's you can't unwind that clock. I don't think and
if you could, you can, but it would be a
really rough, unpopular transition. But then what you're you're the
odd man out and the rest of the world is
working together. And what happens if you need help from

(39:15):
the rest of the world. How easy is it for
you to get that help? There's downsides to both globalism
and nativism, right, Um, neither one is just shown to
be the right way to go. And also, this is
a really good point to chuck Um, there's we don't
know that collapse is inevitable from complexity. We also don't

(39:36):
know that it's it's you can reach a point of
complexity where it's so complex that it actually becomes more stable.
We haven't figured this stuff out yet, but either one's
not inevitable collapse or success. So um, the best thing
we can do is just invest in ways to be resilient. Yeah,
I mean I think you can even narrow that down

(39:58):
to like secession these days, where it's like, good luck,
what's that? Man? Have you really thought this through or
do you just like the idea of giving the finger
to the rest of the country. Yeah, for sure. I
mean that's a great question. I'd love to hear it
answered too. Yeah, and like I really thought out way,
Like here's how that would work, exactly right. Everybody's gonna

(40:19):
wear the same kind of flame shirt. It's gonna be awesome, Seattle.
I was thinking more Kansas, the legit plannel shirts. So
what else? It's another lesson too, right, Yeah, I mean
I think a more hopeful lesson is that, like you
kind of touched on earlier at the beginning, when when
you have diverse groups of people interacting, like what usually

(40:41):
has followed is affluence in peace, and that is that's
what happened here for a long time as well, right,
even more than just the Late Bronze Age. After that collapse,
I think the Phoenicians really kind of rose to power,
and they were a seafaring people, and one of the
first things they did was start peddling their purple dyes

(41:03):
that they were famous for um around the Mediterranean, and
they ended up establishing new trade networks with other groups
that had survived the collapse and started to rise to power,
and so the whole thing began again. It's so funny
to think about. It's like everyone's like, what is that,
and they're like, it's purple. Right, people are going to

(41:23):
go wild for this stuff, and new civilizations will be
built because people are so wild about this color. Yeah,
and it's true. I mean that was a huge driver
of it. Purple dye. Yeah, isn't it amazing? It is?
But but the upshot is, sorry everybody that when we
when we it almost seems like it's it's just going

(41:45):
to happen, whether we like it or not. The more
we kind of grow as a people and grow technol
technologically and an intelligence, we seek out other people to
interact with and trade with and become more prosperous with,
and if we do it peacefully, then prosperity follows. That
seems to be a huge part of not just the

(42:05):
Bronze Age but also the what emerged from the Dark
Age that followed after the Late Bronze Age collapse. Yeah,
it's like a big cycle. But if it is a
big cycle, then it makes you nervous, because then that
means we're due for a collapse at some point. Yeah,
unless we've become so resilient and um um a redundant

(42:26):
in our system that we are going to avoid a
collapse from now on. I don't think that's right. I
don't think we've reached that yet, but I think it's
possible to reach that. Did you touch on any of
this in the End of the World with Josh Clark? Um,
I don't think so. No, not really, all right, thank
you for that plug though sure, you know I listen

(42:48):
to about half of those. It was too smart for me, bs,
it really was. It's not like I can't see this
guy's voice. No, it's not that. What about there's one more,
chuck though, we have to touch on it's a climate change.
It's a big, a big deal. It's a big enough
deal that it's possible that drove the collapse of our

(43:08):
first attempts at civilization. So it's not necessarily a lesson
of what to do in there, but at the very least,
it's like a hey, pay attention to what's going on. Yeah,
and we've seen, you know, when natural disasters happen large
groups of people moving to another place on mass. I
mean those are sort of more micro examples of the

(43:29):
bigger picture that happened back then. But that's what happens. Yeah,
and sometimes people stay. Yeah, some people make it. The
people who like it really hot and wet, Yeah, not me. No,
you like it cold, don't you like? Genuinely I love
the cold weather, but I don't like, you know, six
month winters. It's not like I'm have any desire to

(43:52):
move to Minnesota and endure that stuff. But I do
love cold weather. It suits me. That's great. You got
anything else? They got no else. Well, since Chuck I
was talking about how cold weather suits him, that triggers
the collapse of this episode into the dark age of
a listener mail. All Right, I'm gonna call this oh

(44:12):
boy crossword puzzle follow up. This is a very dark age.
This is the episode where people don't like us, even
having the most minor of disagreement. I mean, I had
people writing in they were like, you need to get
rid of Chuck. That smug soob it's crazy. I was like, jeez,
I hope I'm not on that cent of ice. No,

(44:33):
you're Some people's opinions that are playing. So here's a
couple of a couple of things here from two people. Hey, guys,
love the show. I was excited to hear you talk
about crosswords. Josh talked about how all crosswords are symmetrical,
and Chuck said today's was not. I thought it was
cool because I distinctly remembered the New York Times February sixteenth,

(44:56):
twenty twenty three was not symmetrical. After Chuck and Josh
took a second look, Chuck saw he was a mistaken
and the crossword did have symmetry. So the episode is
probably recorded on some other day. All of this to say,
asymmetric crosswords are very rarely published, but if they are,
they like they have some trick or rebus in order
to solve it. We didn't talk about rebus is in

(45:17):
the show. No, but you wanted to, right, Did you
want to mention that what that is? Yeah? A rebus
is something I didn't know about when I started out,
which is I put you at a very distinct disadvantage
because it's when you include multiple letters in a single square.
And John Hodgeman told me about it, and I was like, well,
how are you supposed to know? He said, well, once
you know it's a thing, you might be on the

(45:38):
lookout if you're like, for sure, you know a clue,
but it's not fitting. And I was like, well, how
do you even do that on a phone? And there's
a little Rebus button? Oh yeah, whatever, new Well it's
on like the second keyboard, like the one you go
to for numbers and symbols and things. Yea, it says Rebus.
Oh really, I've never noticed them. Well it's it's only

(46:01):
when you're doing the crossword. It just pops up. So anyway,
that was from Alec, and then this is from David,
and we got a bunch of other people that explained
why I was getting tripped up because what you were
describing was radial symmetry. Okay, yeah, right, which is rotational
symmetry if you rotate an empty crossword one hundred and

(46:23):
eighty degrees and it looks the same I was looking at.
I think there are four types of symmetry. I was
looking at whatever the one is called. Maybe it is
called mirror symmetry. I don't remember where it's the exact
same on the left and right. And that's why I
was like, no, it's not I'm looking at it. So
you were describing radial symmetry, and David from Snowy, Montreal

(46:44):
wrote that, along with a bunch of other people. Yeah,
and that helped me feel better that I wasn't crazy.
And now I know there are four types of symmetry. Yeah,
the one that includes all four types is very pleasing.
That's why they call it super symmetry. No, really, no,
it's just I think symmetry has to do a string theory,
and I'm not sure we should do an episode on

(47:05):
string theory once. Would you? Would you be willing to
give it a shot with me? Right after I retire?
You can do that deal? Well, Thanks a lot to
smart Alec and smart David for writing in to let
us know what the deal was and why we were miscommunicating,
and everybody calmed down. Chuck and I love each other,
don't worry about that, and we both love Jerry, so

(47:28):
calm down. Agree. If you want to send us a
listener mail, you can send it via email too. Stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or where every listening

(47:49):
to your favorite shows