Fiery Transformations in Ancient Greece

Fire was more than warmth and light in the ancient world. Archaeologist and JHI Faculty Research Fellow Sarah Murray explains how cremation, animal sacrifice, and the birth of iron technology reshaped ideas of life, death, and rebirth in the centuries after the Bronze Age collapse. Her research reveals how fire transformed what it meant to be human in ancient Greece.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
(mysterious music)
- In ancient Greece,
around the period of 1000 BC,
cremation was a new methodfor dealing with the deceased.
And to do it, you needed fire.

(00:21):
Lots and lots of fire
that sometimes had to burn for days.
Once the body was burned,
the remains were wrapped inan expensive purple cloth
that was then placed in a bronze vessel.

(00:43):
These vessels sat on a tripod,
and they were a lot bigger
than how you'd picturea typical urn today.
- You know, something likethree feet maybe across.
So these are very elite burials,
and it suggests there's something special
about getting cremated that, like,
is some sort of privilege.

(01:03):
- Sarah Murray is anarchaeologist and historian
who researches thesocioeconomic institutions
of early Greece.
She's interested in why these vessels
came to hold the crematedremains of elites.
- I find certain interestingclues in later Greek myths
about tripod cauldrons,

(01:23):
because they do appear ina number of kind of tropes
in Greek myth.
Probably the most famous example
involves the Greek anti-heroine Medea.
And she meets this Greek hero,
Jason of "Jason and the Argonauts,"
because he's been sent on this mission
to get the Golden Fleece from the kingdom,
where Medea is a princess.

(01:45):
She helps him get the Golden Fleece
because she falls in love with him,
and then she comes back with him
to where his evil uncle senthim away in the first place.
This old man, Pelias,
he thought that Jason would definitely die
trying to get the Golden Fleece,
so he didn't really want him to come home.
(mysterious music)

(02:05):
Medea, to get revenge upon him,
tricks his daughters into thinking
that she has the abilityto transform elderly things
into younger things.
So she has this big tripod,
metal tripod vessel,
and she takes an old goatand cuts it up into pieces
and puts it in the tripod to cook it

(02:27):
and contrives it so thatthe daughters believe
that a baby goat jumps outof the tripod instead of,
right, so that she'stransformed this old goat
by cooking it.
So the girls are very impressed,
and they take their old man
and they chop him up into little pieces
and they throw him in the cauldron.
And of course,
because they don't have the magic, right,
he's just dead.
So, to some extent,

(02:48):
I think this cremation rite,
which, again, early on is really reserved
for only very elite burials,
could've been seen as a process that,
right, if conducted correctly,
gave the dead a chance at another life.
- This example Sarah's giving,
it's one interpretation she's developing

(03:11):
to describe profound changesin the ancient world,
specifically during the LateBronze Age and Early Iron Age.
Sarah calls them fiery transformations
that turn one material into another.
And in her reading,
these transformations were weighted
with deep social and cultural meaning.

(03:33):
(mysterious music)
I am Melissa Gismondi,
and this is a brand new seasonof "Humanities at Large"
from the Jackman Humanities Institute
at the University of Toronto.

(03:55):
Over the course of this season,
we'll be exploring the theme
of Undergrounds and Underworlds.
through the work of JHI researchers.
In this episode,
Sarah Murray takes us back
to the undergrounds andunderworlds of ancient Greece.
(mysterious music)

(04:21):
- The soldiers dragged mefrom behind the curtain
and made me emperor.
I never wanted it.
I think it was a mistake.
- That was a clip
from the classic 1976BBC series "I, Claudius,"
based on the novel by theEnglish writer Robert Graves.

(04:44):
It's a fictionalisation ofthe life of the Roman emperor,
and it was one of Sarah's first forays
into the ancient world.
So I started our conversation
by asking her what it wasabout the story that resonated.
- Hmm, it's a good question.
I have to really, like,
think myself back into whatever

(05:07):
19-year-old me
thought was compelling.(Melissa chuckles)
I suppose part of what made mefeel excited about that book
was the way, I mean,
I guess we would call it world-building.
So Graves does an amazing job
of kind of taking the Roman Empire

(05:27):
and really bringing it to life
in a very vivid butalso, like, humane way,
where these emperors that you might see
in, like, marble bust inan art museum come to life
as these very complicated
and often sort of sinister,
conniving, three-dimensional people.

(05:48):
But it's also very funny.
So, yeah, it just made me wanna know more
about the ancient world, essentially.
- And this was at a time,if I remember correctly,
when you were sort of figuring out, like,
what did you wanna study in university,
what were you gonna do, basically.
- That's a nice way of putting it.
I would say that there was a time

(06:08):
where I had absolutely noidea what I wanted to do
or really even why I was in university
or whether I wanted to stay.
Yeah, so it kind of galvanised me
out of a period of malaise and muddle
into just feeling excited about something
and feeling excited aboutlearning more about something.

(06:31):
And that kind of jolted me back into,
you know, thinking about what one could do
and the kind of potentialthat life can hold.
- Mm.
So you mentioned, you know,
how Graves is really good
at making these characterssort of come to life,
and I'm curious if that hassort of impacted your style

(06:52):
as a historian,
whether it's in terms ofhow you write about the past
or teach about the past
or think about the past.
Like, the fact that sort of
one of your entry points was a novel.
Has this impacted you in any way
in terms of maybe being more attentive
to characters or stories
or something like that?
- Hmm.

(07:12):
That's a really good question.
The answer might be no,
because I have gravitatedtoward this period
in the Late Bronze Age andthe Early like Iron Age
as way earlier than the Roman period
that Graves was talking about,
for which it's really hard
to talk about individual characters
or kind of flesh out people's lives

(07:33):
in that kind of rich three-dimensional way
just because we don't have alot of, like, textual evidence.
But even the material evidence we have,
there's a lot of it,
but it leaves one wanting
for a kind of narrative structure
or insights into individual characters.
But I,
well, I can say that,

(07:53):
in terms of teaching,
I definitely try to inject
as much kind of rich three-dimensionality
into the way that Ipresent the ancient world
to students as I can.
So this includes, like,
making bespoke cartoons
that kind of show what's going on

(08:15):
instead of simply explainingit or giving a textbook.
There's a way in which
I tend to try to sell the ancient world
to students the way that I bought it,
as a kind of fun place that's really human
and where things are going on
beyond just a kind of dry series of facts

(08:35):
about the rise and fall of empires
or whatever you wanna,
whatever the textbooksare usually talking about.
And probably the reason I ended up
going into the Bronze Age,
the Late Bronze Age, is that
the story of what happened
at the end of the BronzeAge is very kind of dramatic
and almost novelistic

(08:55):
that probably reflects the same desire
to look at what could be kind of dry,
dusty, ancient historical facts
and see them actually asthe remains of complicated,
kaleidoscopically interestinghuman worlds, right,
that we might think of as lost to us

(09:17):
but that we couldactually kind of recover.
- So you mentioned this sort of
what happened in the Late Bronze Age,
you know, that there was this collapse,
some kind of collapse,
and I know you're lessinterested in what caused it,
but just to sorta help set the stage,
what do you think might've happened?
Like, what are some of the ideas
of what happened at that time?

(09:38):
- Mm-hmm, okay, yeah,
so the Late Bronze Age collapse is,
I'm obviously biased,
but I think it is one of the most,
kind of, enduring mysterious events
from the distant past
that we can kind ofreconstruct to some extent.
The Late Bronze Age,
we're talking here likethe later 2nd millennium BC

(09:59):
in the Mediterranean.
Over the course of that 2nd millennium,
various kind of complex
bureaucratic states had come into being.
Something happened around 1200 BC.
Within a couple of decades,
maybe up to 30 or 40 years,

(10:20):
pretty much all of these states disappear.
And in some places we havekind of fiery destruction
at some of the palatial centres.
And with some sites
it seems like it's morea story of abandonment.
An obvious question is, like,
what the heck happened (laughs)
to all these major statesalmost at the same time?
And,
there's been a lot, of course,

(10:42):
as one would expect,
a lot of discussionabout why this happened.
There are some texts from Egypt
that refer to a group of peoplethey call the Sea Peoples,
who they identify as akind of marauding band
of nomadic people.
The old idea of why the collapse happened
was that these people kind of showed up,

(11:02):
not unlike the way that the Goths
and the Vandals kind of swept in
and destroyed the Roman Empire,
so that there were thesenebulous migrant groups
who were hostile and came through
and kind of swept away these states.
But more recently,
people attribute actuallythe movement of those people

(11:24):
to the same kind of general disruptions
that led to the collapse of the state.
So that one doesn't cause the other,
they're both caused by aseries of other crises,
which include, probably to some extent,
climate change.
There was, for instance,
a period of increasedaridity in the Aegean,
which could have damaged theMycenaean state's ability
to levy taxes on things like grain,

(11:47):
where it created a crisis ofthe people against the state.
So I might be happy
to give the Mycenaeanking some of my grain
if there's still enough for me to survive
and feed my family.
If the climate changes such that
it becomes harder forme to feed my family,
I'm gonna be more hostile to the state.
So there's some ideathat there were, like,
problems like that that led to uprisings.

(12:09):
Political mismanagement issomething people talk about.
Ultimately, we don't really know.
It seems like,
as with any period of the human past,
there were a lot of complicated factors
that kind of all came together
and led to this kind ofcollapse of these states.
- You've heard Sarah talk
about the Bronze Age and the Iron Age,

(12:29):
two terms that, along with the Stone Age,
get used to describeperiods in ancient history.
In this telling,
human evolution is linked
to the material people use to make tools:
stone, bronze, and then iron.
But Sarah has never foundthese categorizations

(12:49):
particularly convincing.
- And this tradition comesout of a long development
in archaeological scholarship,
which started in the 18th century.
There was a guy trying toorganise a museum collection
and had all these tools made out of stone,
bronze, and iron,
and decided that the bestway to categorise them

(13:10):
would be by material type.
And that was just a matterof convenience, ultimately.
Like, if you go back in the 18th century,
we really didn't know muchabout the prehistoric past.
Like, a lot of the methodswe use now to understand how,
like, when we find something in the earth,
how do we date it, right?
How do we know where it came from?
Those, that kind ofscience of archaeology,
has really only developed

(13:31):
in the last couple hundred years.
So I kind of, like,
have been very invested in arguing
that these ages of metal names are silly
and that we don't think anymore
that what kind of tool type you have
could've completely changed society.
It's a very kind of simple way
of thinking about the human past.
So a lot of my researchover the past, like,

(13:54):
two to five years has been
pushing against the oldrickety three-age system
and trying to think abouthow we might free ourselves
of the legacy of these superevolutionary narratives
that think of humans asjust kind of little puppets
that respond to a kindof techno-economic system

(14:16):
instead of, like, more complicated actors
that have their own agency
and maybe are doingsomething more interesting.
- Mm-hmm.
And I guess also that's a very,
it's a very sort of whiggishnotion of history, too,
of, like, first we had stones,
then we had bronze,
then we had iron, like,
that we're continually getting better

(14:36):
and more sophisticated.
- Yeah, yeah.
And I think one of thethings that's been cool about
being at the JHI
is that so many of mycolleagues are doing research
that's so obviouslyrelevant and interesting
and kind of urgent.
And it's not maybe so obvious
why anyone should care whathappened 3,000 years ago,

(14:59):
but, I mean, I think that kind of
what you just said gets to theheart of why it's important,
because, of course, if wethink of all of human history
as some inevitable marchtowards the nation-state
or a series of stageson an evolutionary path
to capitalism or something like this,

(15:20):
then it really diminishes theability we can be creative
in thinking about what humansociety could look like
or how humans can interactwith each other in the world.
And, you know, I think the past shows that
there's so much more goingon in than these stages
and this sort of inevitable cyclicality

(15:41):
or this inevitable marchtowards what we have now,
demolishing as much of those boring,
old, sort of masternarratives about the past.
It gives us our human history back.
(pensive music)

(16:06):
- When it comes to thechanges that took place
at the end of the BronzeAge and the Early Iron Age.
Sarah's research considers theimportance of iron smelting
as a new technology.
To help set the scene,
I asked her to paint a picture for me
of what iron smelting would'velooked like at the time.

(16:32):
- Essentially, there wouldbe a furnace made of clay,
and the iron ore
includes iron,
but it also includes allthese waste materials.
So stuff that's bondedchemically to the ore,
the iron metal in the ore,
that you don't actually want, right?
So you take your iron ore,
you load it into your furnace,

(16:53):
and then what happens is
as the kind of oxygen
or as the heat kind of makesthe molecules in the ore,
you know, looser, as it were,
the oxygen in the air
and the carbon in the air willbind with these impurities
and then separate the metalparts of the ore that you want

(17:14):
from all the extra stuff.
And then what you'd be left with
is what's called the iron bloom,
which is a chunk of stuffthat's mostly iron ore
but that still wouldhave a lot of impurities
kinda mixed into it.
So that's when you get this classic scene
of the smith with the anvil.
So you take the bloom,

(17:35):
you put it on some hard surface,
and then you have to hammer it.
And the hammering will sortof cause the little pieces
of leftover waste to kindof shear off the bloom.
Then you heat it up again,
you continue that process,
and eventually you geta relatively pure ingot
of iron metal.
And then from that,

(17:55):
again, you can heat it further,
hammer it into different shapes,
so like a blade or something like this,
and eventually you'll get your iron,
your iron artefact that you want.
- It goes without saying
that behind all that heating was fire.
(fire whooshing)
It played another important role

(18:18):
in another importanttransformation taking place
at the time.
- In the Late Bronze Age,
your average tomb is what'scalled a chamber tomb.
And this would be arelatively large round chamber
dug out of, say, the bedrock or the soil
with a little road

(18:38):
that led down into it called,
we call it dromos.
And you would bury
bodies in these chamber tombs.
It seems like they'reprobably family groups
and they're interested
in keeping these group of people together
in the mortuary sphere.
Right after the collapse

(19:01):
at the very end of the Late Bronze Age,
we see an increasing shiftto individual burial.
So instead of puttingpeople in these collective,
probably, family group chamber tombs,
people are being buriedin individual tombs.
Usually these are kindof simple pits cut down
into the ground.
And then we also get theintroduction of cremation burials,
which basically we hadpretty much zero examples of

(19:25):
prior to about 1200 BC whenthis palatial collapse occurs.
So, that's another change,
as you start to get
these actual pyre-based cremation burials.
And by a pyre-based cremation,
I mean you build a big wooden pyre,
a funeral pyre,
you put the body on the fire,
you burn the body at avery high temperature
so that it's reducedessentially to just ash

(19:47):
and some of the more robust bones.
And then you put the contents of the pyre,
which could include all kinds of stuff,
like artefacts, offerings,
food and drinks sometimes,
and then you put that together
with the human remainsinto some kind of urn
and then put that intothese individual burials.
So, it's a pretty dramatic change

(20:08):
in the way we're treatingthis fraught transition
from life into death.
So that's, again, somethingthat is very interesting
that hasn't been very well-explained
but that suggests peopleare behaving differently
in this period.
- Well, and so to unpackthat a little bit,
you've called some of these changes,

(20:29):
or you refer to them asfiery transformations.
Tell me a little bit aboutwhat you mean by that
in terms of, like,
what is the significance,
what's behind some of these changes
in terms of maybe how people are adjusting
how they see death and life
and the afterlife and all of that.
- Yeah, so this is atough question to answer

(20:50):
with any kind of coherence, I guess,
because that's what I'mworking on this year,
and I haven't quite figured out
how it all comes together.
And, of course, that'sthe fun of archaeology,
really, is that it's hardto have certain answers.
And for this period,
we don't have any textual records.
So it's really a process of looking

(21:13):
at the material remainsof these people's lives
and trying to interpret
what they were actually thinking about
or what they were doing,
what was important to them.
So I always tell my students,
if they're uncomfortable with uncertainty,
they shouldn't everbecome an archaeologist,
(laughs) because we almostnever have certain answers.
But so when you're talkingabout fiery transformation,

(21:34):
it's a term that I decided on
because I was trying to,
again, in the aftermathof rejecting the idea
that it was the invention of iron tools
that changed society in the Iron Age,
I was trying to find some way to explain

(21:57):
or make sense of the changes
that we do see in the archaeologicalrecord around that time.
And usually archaeologists tend
to categorise things quite aggressively.
So, people who study mortuary archaeology
study mortuary archaeology.
The start of cremation burialhas really been treated
by people who are interestedin burial practises.

(22:19):
The study of iron technologyhas usually been studied
by people who studyindustrial archaeology, right?
So change in technology in the past,
the change in, sort of, craft economies.
And then there's thiswhole other phenomenon
that happens around the same time,
which is the beginning of ritual practises
that involve tonnes and tonnesof burnt animal sacrifice,

(22:43):
which we don't really have evidence
of happening in the Bronze Age.
But usually, again, like,
people who study ritualarchaeology are, like,
looking at the history of religion.
So what I found interesting looking across
all these categories of evidence
is that coincident with theintroduction of iron metallurgy,
there just seems to be a new focus

(23:03):
in all these different realms of practise
that kind of bring intransformation by fire
in ways that seem totally novel.
So, fiery transformation
to me is any processthat involves using heat
to change matter fromone state to another.

(23:27):
So, making a cow
from a cow into a pile of, like,
greasy black bones (chuckles)
is a form of transformation, right?
Changing a, like, lumpypile of clods of iron ore
into a glowing kind of metal mass
is a kind of transformation.
And again, like,
putting a human body onto a funeral pyre

(23:49):
and turning it into, again, ash and bone
is another form of, right,transformation by heat.
So I have coined the term "anage of fiery transformation"
to try to bring all these different things
into one analytical viewpoint
and try to think about
whether they might all havesomething to do with each other.

(24:12):
You know, what I've reallybeen thinking about this year
is whether it could have to do with
this new technology of iron smelting
or iron working
and whether, kind of,exposure to a new form
of transformational fire could have led
to new focusing of reflection

(24:33):
on what it means to existin one state of matter
or move from one state to another,
such as going from living to dying,
or even vice versa.
So those are some of the connections
I'm trying to work through now.
But I've really been thinking in dialogue
with things that seem very relevant today,
like the way that newtechnologies can change

(24:55):
the way we think.
And there are a lot of historical studies
along these lines too.
So for example, the inventionof mechanical clocks
made people think verydifferently about time
simply because you had access
to a method for keeping time.
And there's a guy called Otto Mayr,
I mean, he wrote a bookin the '80s that I just,
you know, I find verycompelling that works through

(25:16):
how clocks became thisvery potent metaphor
for all kinds of things,
like how states should work,
how the universe was ordered,
and these are the far-reaching effects
of new technologies on,like, the human mind
that I am thinkingabout how to reconstruct
for this Iron Age transition.

(25:36):
- Earlier you heard aboutthose bronze tripod vessels,
how they might'vesymbolised the possibility
of rebirth after death.
But there's another way
in which Sarah thinkspeople might've interpreted
this new technology.
Another fiery transformation, so to speak.
- In many cross-cultural contexts,

(25:58):
iron is thought of asquite analogical to birth.
So the furnace being the womb essentially,
and then the bloomcomes out of the furnace
in a way that is not unlike a human foetus
kind of coming out of a female at birth.
But then only through all these ordeals

(26:19):
and kind of sufferings
does the iron go from thisimmature state of the bloom
to, like, a piece of real iron.
And this has a lot of, again, analogies
to the kind of initiation ceremonies
that people go through
to progress throughvarious stages of life.
And then unlike, say, a bronze artefact,
which can easily be melted down

(26:40):
and then reconstituted if it's broken,
an iron artefact, if it gets broken,
is much harder to kind of fix.
So the death of an ironartefact is final in a way
that the death of a humanbeing is relatively final.
So there are a lot of cultural contexts
in which iron is used to kindof think through life phases

(27:01):
because of the way that its production
and demise has echoes withthe stages of a human life.
So, part of my idea is
whether that could sortof try to begin to explain
how and why people became so fascinated
with fiery transformationas a kind of nexus
for ritual practise across,

(27:23):
like, a number of different realms.
- And the shift from a collective
to individual burial andthen cremation is that,
I guess that also then suggests,
I know you've talked about this,
it's more about individual lives
as opposed to maybe afamily or a community.
- Yeah, yeah.
I mean, again,
if you wanna think aboutmetallurgy as somehow metaphorical

(27:45):
for how value accrues, say,
to something or someone,
if you're a bronzesmith,
the quality of the bronze you produce
to some extent depends onyour skill as a metallurgist,
so you have to know which kindof things to put in the alloy
to produce the kind ofartefact you wanna make.
But ultimately, you're probablystarting with a bronze ingot

(28:09):
that's a certain quality of material,
and then you can kinda melt that
and cast that into different shapes.
There's a clear connection
between what you startwith the raw material
and its quality
and the quality of thegoods that you can produce.
With iron,
it's all about the process, right?
So you make a good ironsword by being a good smith

(28:30):
who can, like, beat it in certain ways.
And if the metal undergoesall these hammerings
and quenching and kind of,like, difficult life stages,
then only then can itkind of achieve this value
as, like, a special artefact.
So to me,
there's a way in which onecould imagine those as metaphors

(28:50):
for a kind of world inwhich people have status
because of their hereditary,right, relationships.
Right, so I am made of the material
that went into making me,
and that's kind of what'simportant about who I am,
as opposed to thematerial becomes valuable
because of what it can endure,

(29:13):
that kinda has this, like,
rugged individualism valenceto that whole process.
So I wonder, again,
that there could be somekind of iron ideology
that is less about heritable status
and more about, like,
what have you as an individual achieved,
as opposed to, like, who's your dad.

(29:34):
- So you mention the clock
and the shift in terms of the way,
the influence that that technology had.
And obviously today we havetotally new technologies
all the time that arechanging so much of our lives.
I'm curious how spending time thinking
about the social impact of technology
in the ancient world sort of shapes

(29:55):
how you see things today.
- Yeah, I mean, it's almost vice versa.
Like, I doubt I would've even thought
about opening up a set of hypotheses
about how iron might've been the thing
that made all these peoplechange their behaviour.
If I didn't live in a world
where I've gone from a youth
where we didn't have anycomputers and no internet

(30:16):
to being surrounded by young people
who live their whole livesmediated by this technology,
that creates a sort of obvious
set of priors, right?
Sort of, we know almostlike intuitively now
that new technologies couldreally change people's behaviour
and the way people think about life.
I mean, when I was in college,

(30:40):
Facebook had just been invented.
And, you know,
before that time,
like, no one was talking about,
like, social networking or,
like, networking as scholarly apparatus.
And since then there's been this explosion
in people researchingnetworks and networking
and the idea of, like, network science.
And why? Because, right?
Suddenly we were confronted

(31:00):
with this new set of technologies
that showed us, like, who's in our network
and how networks kind of shape our lives
and all this kind of thing.
So, I think there are ways
in which it is a littlebit humbling as a human
because you wanna thinkthat your ideas come
from some well of intuition deep inside.
But I think the way we thinkabout very fundamental things,

(31:22):
like what's life for
or why do we do thingsa certain way, right?
They really are down to thetechnologies that surround us
and the kind of way
that those make availablecertain avenues of thought.
Again, that makes it feellike a research project
that does have someconnections to modernity
because it can go in this long line

(31:45):
of moments of the human past,
where, even if against our will,
a new technology comes into existence
that pushes us indifferent paths of thought.
- And I'm curious about howyou think about collapse too,
because obviously your projectis sort of understanding

(32:06):
how people transitionin the face of collapse.
And we are, you know,
whether it's political, social climactic,
you know, I think most people will agree
it's a period of reckoningand big, big changes.
Being able to take that long view,

(32:26):
how do you think about collapse today?
- Well, I suppose the thing
that seems salient
about the Late Bronze Age collapse
and the kind of people
that lived in the immediate aftermath
of that collapse is that,

(32:48):
you know, it's only a collapse
if you are at a certainregister of society.
Although, of course,living through a period
where things are changingrapidly can be disorienting,
right, there's a senseof uncertainty there
that's frightening.
You know, it's all aboutyour point of view.
So my sense of the Bronze Age collapse

(33:09):
is that there are a bunch of elites
who were, like, doing abad job of managing affairs
and that, like, peoplewere happy to see them go.
And in a lot of regions, like,
you do see people thriving
even though the politicalsituation has changed.
And what you've done is sort of slough off
this top layer of elites and their palaces

(33:30):
with their fancy stuff.
And if we're interested inperiods of complex states
and high inequality,
where you can have all your,like, ostrich egg bubbles
and, like, feel really good
about how much better youare than everyone else,
then maybe it's bad tosee that upper echelon
of society eliminated.

(33:51):
But if you think that theking is bad (chuckles)
and that, like, living underhis bureaucracy is onerous
and the taxes are making it hard
for you to raise your family, then,
you know, it's not necessarily true
that the collapse hasa negative connotation.
But it could be as much thatpeople didn't like the way
that people in chargewere running their affairs

(34:12):
and did something about it.
I think it's an interestingperiod and a dynamic one,
and probably there are winners and losers,
but I don't think thatthe losers were people
that we would identifywith the most right there,
the kind of Elon Musks ofthe Bronze Age, as it were.
And maybe we don't mindif Elon loses his fortune,

(34:33):
or, you know,
people with the fancy yachtsmaybe don't need them.
And if that goes away,
as an archaeologist, we might be,
"Oh no, like, therearen't any yachts anymore.
People must have had,
there must have been a disaster,"
where in fact, you know,
we're kind of losingthings we didn't need.
So that's an optimisticway of looking at it.
I think, in a way, thingshave changed so much
that thinking about collapse back then

(34:55):
doesn't necessarily help us understand
what we should be doing now.
But it does at least show us that, like,
we're not the first peopleto have to deal with complex
and scary and changing times.
The biggest change, again, is, like,
the technological worldthat we've constructed is so
it changes so much faster

(35:16):
and it's kind of harder to maybe adjust
if things really go ina different direction.
What you learn from being a prehistorian
is that millions andmillions of people have lived
on this planet before us
and probably many will come after.
Each of our individual existences

(35:38):
just doesn't matter very much.
But being a human can be very interesting
and quite fun.
People make all these interesting things,
there's so much incredibleart and creativity
and kind of optimism, like,
in the face of what we understand
to be the essential futilityof our own existences.

(36:00):
It makes it a very fun thing
to be a human alive in the world.
(pensive music)
- Sarah Murray is an Associate Professor
in the Department of Classicsat the University of Toronto.
She was a 2024 to 2025 JHIFaculty Research Fellow.

(36:25):
Earlier, you heard a clip
from the 1976 BBC series "I, Claudius,"
written by Jack Pulman
and directed by Herbert Wise.
"Humanities at Large" is produced
by the Jackman Humanities Institute
at the University of Toronto.
If you liked this conversation,
be sure to share the episodewith a friend or colleague

(36:46):
and don't forget to follow the show
and leave us a five-star review.
It really helps to get the word out.
I'm Melissa Gismondi,
and I'll be back again in two weeks.
Thanks for listening.
(pensive music)