Transcript of 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed – Eric Cline

Akhenaten, the famous heretic pharaoh. King Tut, that’s the man that everybody knows. Ramses II, Ramses III. This is the time period that we’re talking about.

During these centuries, everything flourished. It was, in fact, a time that was almost globalized, if we can use that word and project it back into the past. But with that comes other things too. Not just trade, not just diplomacy, but things like wars.

For example, we’ve got the Battle of Kadesh between the Hittites and the Egyptians. We’ve got a little thing called the Trojan War. You may have seen a movie that Brad Pitt was in. We also have things like the Exodus, which, if it took place, will have taken place at about this time period.

A Globalized Bronze Age Society

What we’ve got is a globalized society in which everyone is interconnected. If you know the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, we’ve kind of got that here as well. This is a social network diagram that my wife, Diane Klein, made. And you can see that pretty much everybody is interconnected in some way. If the Mycenaeans and the Hittites aren’t directly connected, they know somebody who can connect them.

In fact, we’ve got writing from that time period, such as this. This is a typical cuneiform tablet. Looks like a bird has stepped in ink and walked across the page. There’s an archive that dates to about 1350 BC in which we found about 400 of these tablets. And they’re letters to and from the kings of that time period – the king of the Hittites, king of Egyptians, king of Babylon, king of Assyria, and also to the vassal kings, the ones that owed them allegiance.

If you map them, you can see that we really are talking about a small world effect, which is where, again, if you don’t know the person, at least you know somebody in between. And usually there’s no more than about three leaps that separate any particular person. So if you map these out, as my wife did here, you can see with a couple of huge nodes with the king of Egypt and the king of the Hittites and so on, that pretty much everybody is in contact with everyone else.

I know that saying that time period is globalized is a loaded term, and yet I think we can use it. It was globalized for its time period. And that is from Italy on the west to Afghanistan on the east. Everybody is in contact. They’re trading. They are swapping raw materials, gold, silver, copper, tin. They’re also trading finished goods.

The Bronze Age and Its Materials

This is the Bronze Age, which starts in about 3000 BC. It’s all going to come collapsing down at about 1200 BC. So what I actually want to do tonight is to build this up, show you what they were doing, what was there, and then collapse it all down by the time we’re done. We don’t know why they collapsed. That’s part of the mystery, and that’s part of what I will talk about. But before I collapse it, let me build it up.

So this is the Bronze Age. To make bronze, you need tin and you need copper. By the way, if you don’t have tin, you can also use arsenic. I don’t recommend that, but you won’t live very long. But you can make arsenical copper. But tin is much better. 90% copper, 10% tin, and you’ll get your bronze.

Now the copper is not a problem. The copper is going to come from Cyprus. In fact, that’s where the name comes from, Kypros. It means copper. The tin is a little bit more difficult. There’s some tin, of course, up in Cornwall. There’s some in southeastern Turkey, but not enough. Most of the tin seems to be coming from an area off this map. You can see the arrow going off. It is, in fact, an area in what is modern-day Afghanistan, the Badakhshan region. And in fact, not only tin comes from there. Lapis lazuli jewelry also comes from that region.

Ancient Trade Networks

What we’ve got is the need to get tin all the way into the region of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aegean. And this is going to involve trade routes that can be hundreds or even thousands of miles long. And in fact, we know that they are doing this.

There is a letter at Mari, which is in Syria on the river there. Not sure if Mari actually exists anymore. ISIS has occupied it and is looting it. So we don’t know if it’s still there. But there was a cache of letters found. And among them was an itinerary in which it describes tin coming from Afghanistan to Mari in what is now Syria, then going on to Ugarit on the northern coast of Syria, and then going from there over to Crete.

And in fact, it says that at Ugarit, which is right up there, that there is in fact a man from Crete, a Minoan, who can speak the local language. He is the translator. So we know that they are sending tin all over there.

A good friend of mine, Carol Bell, a British archaeologist, has said that their need for tin is basically the equivalent of our need for oil. And that the search for tin would have occupied the king of Egypt and the king up in the Hittite region in Turkey, just as the search for oil today occupies a U.S. president.

So if you can think of that kind of a parallel, that’s what we’ve got here.

Luxury Goods and Trade

But as I say, they’re not only trading for raw materials, they’re also trading finished goods. And in these Mari letters, which actually date a little bit earlier than our period, they date to about 1800 BC, so just under 4,000 years ago, we have one text that describes a weapon that’s being brought from Crete.

It says, “one Kafdorian weapon, Kafdor is their name for Crete and the Minoans. The top and the base are covered with gold, its top is encrusted with lapis lazuli.” So it would have looked something like this, though this isn’t it because this is from the death pits of Ur, dating to about 2500 BC. But nevertheless, it’s quite nice and I wouldn’t actually mind having one of these. Not sure I’d be able to carry it, but I wouldn’t mind.

This is one good example of what they’re sending back and forth. But my absolute favorite, and it shows that nothing has really changed, is a text that talks about what must be sandals, that says “one pair of leather shoes in the Kafdorian style.”

Now if anybody’s been to Crete, you know that Kafdorian style or Minoan style are either sandals or boots. You can still get a nice pair of boots at Chania. I suspect they’re sandals, but I’m not sure. But the text then says, “which to the palace of Hammurabi, the king of Babylon, and yes that is the Hammurabi, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, Bach the Lim carried them, but which were returned.”

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they were returned. Were they too small? Were they too last millennium? And in fact, I asked my students once to read through the whole law code, there’s about 272 laws, and I said, find me the law with the penalty for returning shoes. And they came back and they said, there isn’t one, we can’t find it. I said, exactly, he got away with it. But I still don’t know, wouldn’t you have kept them and at least regifted them? So things have not changed all that much.

International Trade and Diplomacy

Basically, my point here is they are trading finished goods and raw materials, and they are in fact going back and forth between the different countries. We know, for example, that Hatshepsut sends an embassy down to Punt. We don’t quite know where Punt was, or at least we didn’t know until recently, but on her mortuary temple, she has descriptions and pictures of the ships that went. She even has pictures of the goods that are brought back. And she even tells us in the lowest picture there, that the queen is named Eti. So we know all about this.

The problem was, as I said, we didn’t quite know where Punt was until recently. And then someone did an analysis of some baboon mummies in the British Museum and determined that they were most closely related to baboons in Eritrea or Ethiopia. And that was one of the possibilities for Punt, so that’s probably where it was. She wasn’t the first person to send embassies there, and she’s not the last, but that’s what she is known for.

Egypt and the Aegean World

Other embassies though, other trade missions, may have gone over to the Aegean, to Greece. Here is the tomb of Rechmere, and in here, Rechmere is the vizier, like the right-hand man to the pharaoh. We see people from Greece. These are Minoans or Mycenaeans, and they’re bringing typical Aegean goods to Egypt. Same thing here, in this tomb again, we have, you can see somebody is carrying a bull’s head. That’s straight out of Knossos. So we know that Egypt and Greece are trading already back at, well, about 1400, 1450 BC would be when this has taken place.

And it continues. This is Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple. I wager that some of you have seen these, the Colossae of Memnon, they’re about 60 feet tall, and in fact there were Greek and Roman tourists that went to see these. They scratched their names, Kilroy was here, but in Greek. What you don’t see is the missing mortuary temple that these were at the entrance to, because it was stolen by the later pharaohs. Why go out and quarry more stone when you can just take this from a dead pharaoh and make your own temple? So most of them are now gone.

The Aegean List and International Relations

Now much more interesting to my mind than the big 60 foot tall ones are the smaller ones that were probably only about 10 feet tall. You can’t see these statues anymore. They’re gone. You just see the feet here. But in the 1960s, German archaeologists were excavating and they found five of these statue base lists. They hypothesized there were 10. In fact, the new excavations that are there now have revealed more than 40 of these statue base lists.

On each of these bases are the names of foreign powers, foreign countries. One mentions places that we know belong to the Hittites. Another one mentions the Babylonians and the Assyrians. But this particular one is the one that caught my interest, the Aegean list. It has names that had never appeared in Egypt before and would never appear again for the most part.

Because what you see on one side is two names over here, which are the head names for the list. Keftiu and Tanaia. Keftiu is the Egyptian name for Crete. Just like they called it Kafdor up in Mesopotamia, in Egypt they call it Keftiu. Tanaia is probably mainland Greece. So we’ve got Crete and mainland Greece.

And then on the other side, and going around the edge, we’ve got a series of 14 names that mention, again, places that had never been written down in Egypt before. Amnisos, Festos, Kaidonia, Mycenae, Katozakro, Naphtheon, Ilios, Knossos. And Amnisos again, which is kind of interesting.

Now the very first time it was deciphered, when it was translated into English, Ken Kitchen, a rather preeminent British scholar, published, and he said, “I’m rather hesitant to suggest this, but this looks uncomfortably like Mycenae and Knossos.” Well uncomfortable enough, it was Mycenae and Knossos, and this list is basically one of a kind.

But if you go over to Greece, and you look at the sites that are mentioned on that statue base, you actually find objects with Amenhotep III’s name on it. Or his wife, Queen T, they seem to have married for love. But here we’ve got a faience plaque with Egyptian hieroglyphs, and we’ve got, on the right side, you can see Netra-Nephra, the good god, and then the name of Amenhotep III.

And at a number of the sites that are on the statue base, we’ve got objects with his name on it. So for instance, at Knossos on Crete, here is a scarab of Amenhotep III. So I think that this is not just boasting or bragging. I actually think it might record an itinerary of the way to get from Egypt up to Greece and back again. And I would suspect that maybe that’s why Amnisos is on here twice. It’s a round trip. So you’re going from Egypt, you get up to Crete, and you stop. It’s the first place. Get off, everybody use the bathroom, it’s time for a coffee.

The Mediterranean World in the Late Bronze Age

And then you go, and you’ve known the Minoans for quite a while. The Egyptians had known them already for a couple hundred years. But the Mycenaeans are new upstarts at this time, at about 1350 BC.

So let’s go up to mainland Greece and see what’s going on up there. Then we come back down to Crete, and here we are at Amnisos again. Everybody use the bathroom. It’s going to be a long ride until we get back to Egypt. Sound familiar? So I think that we might actually have an itinerary here. I can’t prove it, but I think it’s a definite possibility.

The Uluburun Shipwreck: A Time Capsule of Bronze Age Trade

One of the reasons why I say this is because we have the remains of actual ships that were going around and around the Mediterranean at that time. This is the rather well-known Uluburun shipwreck, which went down off the coast of Turkey in about 1300 BC. It’s been excavated by George Bass and Cemal Pulak of Texas A&M Institute of Nautical Archaeology.

They found what you’re looking at here. You can see the stones going right down through the middle with the holes in them. Those are anchors. There are 14 stone anchors on here. But the majority of the cargo, 300 copper ingots, which you see here. The copper is 99% pure and it comes from Cyprus.

This particular ship is carrying, actually it’s more than 300 ingots. You can carry them on your shoulder. Each weigh about 60 pounds. It’s got 10 tons of copper. It also has a ton of tin on this same boat. So if you mix the copper and the tin, you’re looking at an awful lot of bronze.

In fact, George Bass at one point estimated that there is enough raw material on board this one ship that you could have outfitted an army of 300 soldiers with swords, shields, helmets, greaves, everything that you would need to get a Bronze Age army back then. So when this ship went down, somebody lost a fortune. And I actually hope they were insured.

Now seriously, there was insurance back then. We know it from the text. So it’s not out of the question that this was insured.

The Diverse Cargo: Evidence of International Trade

So we’ve got lots and lots of copper, lots and lots of tin. In fact, we have other things as well. The top left-hand column picture there, you actually have tin. You can see the round bun ingot there. You’ve also got in the top right-hand picture, also round ingots, but this is raw glass colored with cobalt. And in fact, when the Corning Museum of Glass analyzed these, it matched perfectly with glass from Mycenaean Greece and New Kingdom Egypt.

So they’re all getting their glass from the same place. We’ve also got in the lower line there, all the way down bottom on the left, terebinth resin, which comes from the pistachio tree. You use it in making perfume. In the middle, ivory of course, but not just from elephants, also from hippopotamus. And it actually turns out that about 90% of the ivory in the late Bronze Age is from hippo, not from elephant, which people found surprising. And then new unused pottery from Cyprus and Canaan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria.

For me, this is a microcosm of the international trade that was going on at the time that this ship sunk in about 1300 BC. And in fact, if you plot this on a map, which National Geographic did, by the way, if you’re interested, it’s December 1987. It’s my favorite issue ever.

They on this map put the objects from the ship on the map as to where they came from. They thought the ship was going around and around and around, hence the blue arrows. I’m actually not so sure that they were doing that. I think it might be a gift from one king to another, in which case it’s going straight across. But it’s not out of the question it was also on a shopping expedition, because everything they needed would have been used by a Mycenaean palace. So we need raw glass. We need more pistachio resin. We need some tin. We need some copper. And get some milk while you’re out. But the ship never came back.

Written Evidence of International Trade

But we’ve also got the writing. A text from Ugarit on the north coast of Syria dates to about 40 years after this ship went down. It’s called the Sinaranu text because it mentions a merchant, a private merchant named Sinaranu.

It says, “From the present day Amastamru, the son of Nicmepa, king of Ugarit, exempts Sinaranu, son of Siginu. His grain, his beer, his olive oil to the palace he shall not deliver. His ship is exempt when it arrives from Crete.”

So we have a private merchant in about 1260 BC who is importing olive oil, beer, and grain, and he’s exempt from taxes. I actually think this might be the first corporate tax exemption in history, but can’t be sure about that. So when you combine the physical evidence from the shipwreck and the written evidence from the Sinaranu text, I think it’s pretty clear that we’ve got international trade going on.

The Collapse of Bronze Age Civilization

So basically what we’ve got. We’ve got a globalized society, and I do use that term warily, but interconnection, merrily going along, 17th century, 16th, 15th, 14th, 13th, everybody’s having fun being diplomatic and trading and there’s reciprocity going on. And then into this, a little chaos was dropped.

And one by one, each of the civilizations winked out. Actually they did it pretty fast. The only one that was left standing was Egypt, and even they were so weakened that they were never the same again. The new kingdom is the high point. So just after 1200 BC, we get what we call the collapse, or the calamity, and pretty much everything gets destroyed. Everything that had been good, everything that had been ticking along merrily, suddenly goes out as if somebody had just snapped their fingers.

Now the question is, what caused it? And that’s been one of history’s great mysteries. One thing we can say is that the magnitude of the collapse, when it did take place, was enormous. I don’t think anything comes close to it until the Roman Empire collapsed, and that was 1500 years later.

But as I say, the question of what caused it is a bit of a problem, and that’s where my book comes in. Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press asked me if I would write a book about the collapse, and I said sure, but I also want to write about what collapsed. So the beginning and the end are about the collapse, and the middle is what I’ve just described to you, what collapsed, telling the stories about that.

Studying Collapse in Historical Context

Now I also realize that I’m not the first person that’s discussed the collapse of civilizations. There was a guy named Edward Gibbon who wrote a little book about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Joseph Tainter in 1988 put out a book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, which has been an absolute marvelous book for all of us. And then of course I imagine a number of you have read Jared Diamond’s book on collapse.

The difference though is that when the Late Bronze Age collapsed, it was a multitude of interconnected and intertwined civilizations that all went down at once. These books mostly are talking about the decline of a single civilization at a time, Roman Empire, Maya, Mongols, Indus Valley.

We are rather unique here in the Late Bronze Age in that that is one of the few times when you actually had interconnected civilizations, much as we have today. So I actually think the parallels between us today and them back then are much stronger than you might suppose, even though they were 3200 years ago. So anything that we can learn about their collapse I think is not just idly studying ancient history, but may contain some lessons for us today.

The Sea Peoples: Mysterious Invaders

But the big problem is trying to figure out why they collapsed. And it used to be the easy solution. Everybody said, oh, it was the Sea Peoples. Why not? Sure, Sea Peoples. Well, we actually know these from the Egyptians. We know that they came through twice, 1207 B.C. and 1177 B.C., and you can see right there that’s where the title of the book comes from.

But actually, it would be better to say the fifth year of Merneptah or the eighth year of Ramses III, because the Egyptologists keep changing the chronology. Everything is on a sliding scale. So in fact, when the book came out, a senior colleague of mine up in New York sent me an email in which he said, “Nice job, congratulations, the title should have been 1186.”

I sent him back a two-word email. And no, it’s not what you think. My email to him simply said, “It was.” And in fact, in the contract I signed, the title was originally 1186 B.C. But in the years that I was doing the research and the writing, the Egyptologists changed the chronology again, and so it became 1177. In the interval since the book has come out, they’ve changed the chronology again, and so the next edition is going to have to be called 1188. Anyway, so for us, let’s just say the eighth year of Ramses III.

Egyptian Records of the Sea Peoples

Well, what happens here, he actually tells us in both pictures and text, and he shows us the naval battle and talks about the land battle. And he says, and I’ll quote here:

The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms. From Hatte, Kode, Kharkhmesh, Artsuwa, and Alashia on.

Now we know where those places are. Khatti, those are the Hittites up in Turkey. Kode and Kharkhmesh, that’s where Turkey joins Syria. Artsuwa is on the western coast of Turkey. Alashia, that’s the ancient name for Cyprus. So we can see that these people are basically coming across Greece to Turkey to Cyprus and then into Canaan.

Because he continues:

A camp was set up in one place in Amur. Amuru is by Ugarit on the north coast of Syria. They desolated its people, its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt while the flame was prepared before them.

And then he gives us the names of the peoples. Because there’s not just one Sea Peoples. In fact, he doesn’t call them the Sea Peoples. That’s our name for them. He gives us the actual groups. The Peleset, the Tegekr, the Shekelesh, the Denyan, and the Weshesh.

And then he says that he defeated them. And we know this from his year 12, Papyrus Harris says:

I overthrew those who invaded from their lands. I slew the Denyan who are in their isles. The Tegekr and the Peleset were made ashes. The Shardana and the Weshesh of the sea, they were made as those that exist not.

So you can see how we’ve got the name, the peoples of the sea. But he actually gives us the names. In fact, when you combine this with the earlier invasion, 30 years previously, there’s nine of these groups that all come in.

Who Were the Sea Peoples?

So the big question that we’ve got is, who are these people? Where did they come from and where did they go to? Now, we know what they look like because Ramesses shows us them. These are pictures of captive sea peoples. In fact, if you want to dress up at Halloween, it’s quite easy to do it. But trying to find where they came from is more and more difficult.

So people have been playing, for example, linguistic games. So Shardana, name me a place in the Mediterranean that has similar consonants where they could have come from. I’ll give you a hint. Look in the Western Mediterranean. Sardinia. People have suggested that’s where they came from.

Same thing with Shekelesh. Nearby? Sicily. Possibly. Tegekr, maybe somewhere in Italy or Turkey. The Denians, some people have suggested that these are the Danans, Homer’s Mycenaean Greeks. Weshesh, we’re not quite sure about. Maybe from Wilusa. It’s only the Peleset that we think we know. The Philistines.

And in fact, Jean-Francois Champollion, the guy who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics, he had already suggested that the Peleset were the Philistines way back in 1823 or so. Now, one of the problems we’ve got, though, is did they come from there or did they go there afterward? Are they from Sardinia or is that where they fled after they were defeated? And we don’t know the answers. All I can tell you right now is that no site has been excavated where we can definitively say that’s where the Sea Peoples come from. They are a mystery.

The Philistines and Migration Theory

We do know where some of them ended up. The Philistines, the Peleset, they wind up in what is now Israel, Lebanon, Syria. And in fact, you can see from this Philistine stirrup jar, it’s what we would call degenerate Mycenaean. It looks like somebody from Greece is still making their pots, their stirrup jars, but they’re now using local clay from Rhodes or Cyprus or even Canaan, ancient Israel. So it really looks like at least part of the Mycenaeans had joined the Sea Peoples maybe after they lost.

And in fact, I suspect that that’s why we’ve got the disparate groups. As these people swept over the lands, some of the people they were vanquishing joined in. So what we see in Egypt is the end of the process, this motley crew. But they’re not Vikings. They’re not raiders. We shouldn’t be thinking like that.

Because in the pictures that Ramesses shows us, he shows us. And you can see on the left and also the drawing on the right there. They’re coming with their possessions. They’re coming with ox carts. They’re coming with wives and children. This is a migration. This is a movement. Think 1930s Dust Bowl and everybody moving from Oklahoma to California. That’s what this is. It’s a migration. It’s not just Viking raids.

So then the question is, well, what caused that? And for the longest time, there was a very simple, logical, linear explanation that there was a drought and that drought led to famine and that led to the movement of the Sea Peoples.

The Collapse of Bronze Age Civilization

That led to havoc and the cutting of the trade routes. And that led to collapse. It’s a nice, easily told bedtime story—or perhaps not bedtime.

But the problem is it’s too logical. It’s too messy. Nothing is that logical. I think it’s too simple. So what really happened? Well, that was what I wanted to investigate. If everything was gone, what caused it? Why did everything collapse so suddenly? The Sea Peoples were usually blamed for it.

But I actually think they were as much the victims as they were the oppressors. I think they’ve been given a bad name. They got bad press. Yes, they were there. Yes, they did some damage. But I think they actually had problems themselves.

So what else could have caused it? Well, drought has been suggested. Famine’s been suggested. Invaders have been suggested. Earthquakes have been suggested. So if we have to pick and choose one of them, I respectively decline. I would choose them all.

I think there’s a perfect storm. I think they all happened. Let me present the evidence to you rather quickly and then see what you think.

Evidence of Drought

Drought is not a recent suggestion. In fact, Rhys Carpenter, who was a professor at Bryn Mawr, suggested this in the 1960s. He said that the Mycenaeans had declined and gone downhill very quickly because of drought. But he didn’t have proof for it. He didn’t have any hard data. And so people gradually forgot that he had suggested this.

But we now have that data. We’ve got it in the last five years. Connie Yusky, a French professor, has been going with this team to a number of different places. They went to the north coast of Syria, a place called Gibala. They took cores from dried up lagoons and lakes. Then they looked at the pollen that was in there.

They decided they could see that the plants had changed. And there was what they call a 300-year dry event. In other words, a drought. The pollen shows that there were drier climatic changes back then from about the 12th century or the 13th century, right around our time period, just after 1200, all the way down to the ninth century. So 300 years. North Syria looks like it had a drought.

They went over to Cyprus, did the same thing at Hala Sultan Teki. Same thing. There is a drought there as well from 1200 to about 850 BC, judging from the pollen.

Then Brandon Drake pulled together a bunch of different data in a study that was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, including things like the temperature of the sea, which dropped. And when you do that, you get less rain on the, in this case, the Mycenaean or Greek mainland. And he said that took place about 1250 down to 1197 BC.

Now, Brandon’s article was so good, I did something that I rarely do. I wanted to contact him and give him my congratulations. A superb article. So I googled him. All I knew was that it was Brandon Drake from University of New Mexico. And Google came up.

And the very first thing it said was, “You are friends in Facebook.” Really? So I sent an email to him and he’s like, “Hey, Eric, how’s it going? I haven’t seen you since Megiddo in 2006.” All right. We dug together. So you may know people you don’t even know. You know the power of the Internet.

The most recent of these scientific tests has taken place with Daphne Langruth, who you can see in the picture down there, and Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Litt, a German scientist. They also did the coring and the pollen analysis, this time from the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. And they showed that in Israel, too, there was a drought.

It didn’t last quite as long. It was from about 1250 down to 1100 BC. But so we’ve now got that missing data that Rhys Carpenter was looking for, that there was a dry event, a drought that lasted from, well, at least 1300 or 1200 BC down to, take your pick, 1150, 900, somewhere in there. And it’s in Israel. It’s in Syria. It’s in Cyprus. It’s in Greece. So at least the science is telling us that there is a drought.

And of course, the media went wild over this. New York Times: “Pollen study points to drought as culprit in Bronze Age mystery.” L.A. Times got into the act: “Climate change may have caused demise of late Bronze Age civilizations.” Archaeology magazine and National Geographic didn’t want to be left out. There’s Nat Geo. Here’s Archaeology. New York Post got into it. They tossed in globalization for good measure: “How globalization and climate change destroyed ancient civilization.”

And then you may remember that NASA-funded study that turned out to be not so funded by NASA that said that we were going to collapse in just a couple of decades. And at that point, I was a little fed up. So I put an op-ed in The Huffington Post: “The Collapse of Civilizations: It’s Complicated,” which it is.

Famine in the Ancient World

With drought, you frequently get famine, but famine can be difficult to discern in the archaeological record unless you find bodies and things like that. But that’s where written texts come in. And in fact, we’ve got archives at Ugarit, which tell us that, in fact, that’s what’s going on.

Here is a letter from the house of Ortenu. He’s another one of those private merchants like Sinaranu, only a hundred or more years later. He has an outlying office in the city of Emar in inland Syria, and he gets word back:

There is famine in our house. We will all die of hunger if you do not quickly arrive here. We ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land.

So I think you can agree with me that there’s probably famine going on there. We’ve got the written records and we’ve even got this from the king of Ugarit. Another letter: “Here with me, plenty has become famine.”

I think this is incontrovertible evidence. Even the Hittite king: “Do you not know that there was a famine in the midst of my lands? It is a matter of life and death.”

And in fact, we know from other records that the Egyptians, who until recently had been mortal enemies of the Hittites, were sending grain ships up to help relieve the famine in the Hittite lands. So we’ve got that going on, which we see the same sort of things today.

Invaders and Destruction

Now, adding insult to injury, do we have invaders? Well, yes, we do. Sea Peoples, remember them, the Egyptian records. But it can be tough sometimes to figure out who’s causing your destruction. It could just as easily be internal rebellion.

And in fact, we’ve got yet another letter from the king of Ugarit, in this case, being sent to the king of Cyprus. And he says:

My father, now the ships of the enemy have come. They’ve been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land. Doesn’t my father know that all of my infantry and territory are stationed in Hatti? Seven ships have been sighted. If any more are coming, then please let me know.

Now, the story that was told for decades was that this text had been found in a kiln at Ugarit. It was being baked before it was shipped over to Cyprus so it wouldn’t fall apart. But that the destroyers had shown back up, those ships had come again and that the kiln and the whole city had been destroyed before it could be sent.

Makes a great story. Again, too good to be true. Reexamination has now shown that it was not in a kiln. It was, in fact, probably in a basket up on the second story, which fell and landed upside down. And in that basket were this tablet and about 70 others. And as the basket disintegrated, it left a kiln-shaped lump with all these tablets.

So in fact, we now think that it was sent. And this could actually be a copy that was left. So we don’t actually know if it’s from the last Sea Peoples or the previous one 30 years earlier. So it’s not as much of a help as we thought. And yet it’s definitely evidence for invaders.

We’ve even got another letter, a private letter, one of the last from Ugarit, which says:

When your messenger arrived, the army was already humiliated and the city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floor was burnt and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it. May you know it.

So somebody is coming in and destroying this area. And in fact, Koniewski, the same guy that took the pollen samples when he was at Gibala in north Syria, he actually identified a destruction layer as Sea Peoples. But this is a bit hasty. There’s definitely a destruction layer, but it’s not necessarily by the Sea Peoples. We don’t actually know who did it.

The Challenge of Identifying Destroyers

And in fact, I give you one example. Canaanite Hazor in the north of Israel was definitely destroyed somewhere around 1200 BC. We know this because we’ve got the archaeological evidence of the Late Bronze Age palace that is completely torched. The mud bricks are burnt red and black. A fire destroyed this.

And in fact, the excavator is actually two excavators, Amnon Ben-Tor and Sharon Zuckerman, who just recently passed away. They were directing the site and Amnon Ben-Tor said, “You know what? It’s probably not Egyptians that did this destruction because there are Egyptian statues that are in the destruction level and they’re defaced. They have their arms hacked off and so on.”

So no Egyptian would have done that. And same thing with the Canaanites, because there’s also Canaanite statues in the destruction and they are also defaced. So it’s not Canaanites that are doing this. He says that leaves the Israelites and the Sea Peoples. And this is too far inland for Sea Peoples. And I would actually debate that Sea Peoples got quite far inland, but he didn’t want them. And that left the Israelites, Joshua. And in fact, Hazor is mentioned in the Bible as one of the cities that Joshua burned down.

Well, Sharon Zuckerman said, “Wait, not quite so fast. This is definitely burnt down, that’s for sure. But how do you know who did it?” And he says, “Well, what do you mean?” She says, “Well, if you look and see what’s destroyed, it’s the palace and a couple of temples. But the actual domestic areas where the people are living and working, they’re untouched. They’re not burnt. They’re not destroyed.”

She said to me, “That’s the sign of an internal rebellion of the lower classes rising up against the upper class when they don’t have enough food or enough money or whatever.” So she said it’s an internal rebellion. And my point here is very simple. If the two co-directors can’t decide who destroyed their site, then how are we ever going to decide? All we know is that it is destroyed by somebody or maybe by some thing because we can’t rule out earthquakes.

The Earthquake Storm Theory

And in fact, if you take a map of the sites that are destroyed in this collapse from about 1225 to 1175, everything you see here with the red X is destroyed. And if you overlay it on top of a map of earthquakes that have happened just in the last century or a little bit more since about 1900, you can see that most of the sites are actually in active seismic zones.

In fact, we’ve got a number of fault lines. You’ve got the North Anatolian fault line in light blue. Got another fault line in green. You’ve got an orange one coming up the Great Rift Valley. So there are lots of fault lines and lots of earthquakes in this region.

And in fact, we have something that I find absolutely fascinating. This is the North Anatolian fault line running across the top of Turkey. It has had what is called in modern terms an earthquake sequence over the last 60 or more years. In fact, specifically about 1939 to 1999, an earthquake sequence is when you have an earthquake and it doesn’t release all the pressure.

There’ll be another earthquake right next to it or nearby sometime in the future, a week later, a year later, maybe a decade later. If that one doesn’t release all the pressure, you’ll have another one and another one until the fault line unzips. This is stuff that Amos Norritz at Stanford studies.

So earthquake sequence is what they call it when it happens in modern times. But it happened in antiquity as well. And they have a much cooler name for it. It’s called an earthquake storm. When you have this earthquake storm and it unzips over a period of 50 or 60 years, it then takes about another 400 years to generate enough steam and start the whole process over again. And it looks like if we look at some of the sites that are destroyed, that there is a 50-year earthquake storm right around our period.

So I think that there are earthquakes taking place here. For instance, Mycenae, I hear on the land gate and you can see the Cyclopean masonry on the left side. And it’s built on top of what looks like bedrock there. That’s actually one side of a fault zone. All the geoarchaeologists went there and just started laughing. They’re like, “Wait a minute. They built the major city on top of an active fault zone. Who would do that?” Yeah. The people from San Francisco just kind of shook their head.

And in fact, we’ve got victims that are obviously killed in an earthquake. Here is one young lady. It’s actually the same one in both pictures here. And you can see the rock that’s lying to the side of her head in the right picture. That rock was actually embedded in her skull. She had taken shelter in a doorway, which is usually the best place to do it in the basement. But the whole thing had collapsed and had killed her.

The Collapse of Bronze Age Civilizations

So Mycenae, Tiryns, just three kilometers away. Same sort of thing. In this case, we’ve got a woman and a child killed by a collapsing building at the same time period.

If you go over to Troy with the Trojan War and all that, Troy six, you’ve got a wall that is not supposed to look like that, right? That one that’s leaning. Trust me, it wasn’t built that way originally. And even at Ugarit, this is a slightly earlier one. You see how that wall undulates. It’s not supposed to do that. So there are earthquakes at this time.

So here my point would be that if you see a site that’s destroyed, it might not be who, it might be what that destroyed it in this particular case. But if you do have a “who,” then you’ve got the cutting of these international trade routes. And that is going on.

I bring us back to one of our original slides here where you’ve got this long trade route with the bronze and the copper and the tin. If you imagine it had been cut at any point along that and you suddenly couldn’t get your tin anymore, then how are you going to make your bronze? Now, that’s not going to bring your Bronze Age to a complete halt in and of itself. But if you add that in to the great mix, then I think you can see you’ve got a problem.

And in fact, they were lucky that they were able to turn to iron to take over. In the Bronze Age, they are already using iron – in King Tut’s tomb, there’s an iron dagger. It’s just that they’re using bronze much more. And even in the Iron Age that takes over, they’re still using bronze, but not as much. So in this particular case, we see basically an innovation taking over to fill a gap where they don’t have bronze anymore.

Understanding What Happened

And they’ve got iron. So in terms of what happened? Well, it’s still a mystery, but I think we can sum up. If I give you three points that I think you will agree with me and there’ll be no arguments, we can then proceed from there.

First point, would you agree that we have a number of separate civilizations that are flourishing between, say, the 15th and the 13th centuries? We’ve named some of them: Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Egyptians, Canaanites, Cypriots. They’re all independent, but they are all interacting with each other, especially through trade routes. Would you agree with me with that point? OK, so we’ve got that.

Second point, it’s pretty clear that many of the cities were destroyed and that the late Bronze Age pretty much came to an end right around 1177 or soon thereafter. We all agreed with that. No argument there. Everything is destroyed. Everything goes down.

But point number three, there’s no proof as to what or who has actually caused this. All we know is that it did collapse. So we’ve got three main points that everybody agrees on. And yet it, in a way, doesn’t help us all that much.

And in fact, people are still even today going with that same linear progression. They still say – I heard it last November – drought, famine, cutting of the trade routes, movement, all that. I still say that is too linear. It was much, much messier.

Multiple Causes of Collapse

So if you were to say to me, well, what is it? Earthquakes, famine, drought, movement of peoples. I would say yes to all of the above. In fact, the only thing that’s missing is plague. There’s no evidence for plague. And I actually do find that surprising. I think there should be, but no evidence for that yet. But everything else? Absolutely.

We’ve got the whole thing. The problem is, I don’t know that we can point to any one single driver or stressor. Certainly climate change seems big, but is that the major stressor or driver? Well, that can be argued because some of the others may have caused a problem as well.

And in fact, different parts of this region ranging from – remember, we’re going from Italy and Greece all the way over to Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan – different problems may have arisen in different places and they may have reacted differently. But the ending is the same. They all end.

They are depending on each other for both raw materials and finished products. And therefore, when one went down, there is a domino effect. What happens to the Hittites affects the Mycenaeans, which affects the Cypriots, which affects the Assyrians and so on. So anything that gets destabilized in a system like this is ultimately going to affect everything.

Systems Collapse

And in fact, what we’re looking at is a systems collapse. This isn’t an explanation for it. It’s just a name for it. When you’ve got a systems collapse, and Colin Renfrew was talking about this already back in about 1979, you have a collapse of the central administration. You’ve got the disappearance of the traditional elite. You’ve got the collapse of the economy.

If you’ve got a centralized economy and you have entire population shifts and decline. Now, this doesn’t happen overnight. Systems collapse, which we can see in a number of different places, takes about 100 years.

And in fact, I would say that 1177 is the wrong title for my book. Civilization did not collapse in that year. That is just shorthand for the whole collapse. Just as we say that Rome fell in 476, even though we know it didn’t, it took most of the fifth century. And even then, you’ve still got the Eastern Roman Empire continuing on. We still say Rome fell in 476. It’s shorthand, if you will. That’s what 1177 is. It’s a shorthand.

Perhaps a better way to say it would be that the world in 1200 was very different from the world in 1100 and completely different in the year 1000. But that doesn’t really fit on a book cover. So we’re looking at something that takes about a century.

And when everything does fall, you get a dark age. And in fact, we’ve got that. We’ve got the Greek Dark Ages that go for about 300 years. And in the systems collapse, you frequently get myths about the Golden Age that came just before. So think, for example, about Homer and a story about the Trojan War. That’s a perfect example.

So what I would say that we’re looking at is indeed a systems collapse from that time period.

Lessons for Today

What are the takeaways? What lessons can we learn from this? Well, one of the questions we can ask is, are we facing a similar situation today? Now, that might be – I mean, it’s 3200 years. But let me ask you, is there climate change today? Well, we could argue about that till the cows come home. But I think most people now would say yes. Famines and droughts somewhere in the world? Absolutely. Earthquakes going on? Yes. Rebellions? Sure.

In fact, I think the only thing we’re missing are the Sea Peoples. And in fact, I’m not so sure we’re missing the Sea Peoples, because there could be two different groups that you can interpret as the Sea Peoples. It could either be ISIS, which is busy destroying everything in the Near East. Our antiquity is going to be gone if we don’t do something about it. Or they could be the refugees that have fled from Syria and elsewhere that are now in Europe.

It depends if you see the Sea Peoples as victims or oppressors, or maybe both. So I actually think we do have the Sea Peoples today as well, just with a slightly different name.

And in fact, if we take a look at headlines from around the world from, say, the last two or three years: Greece’s economy is tanked, right? That’s been in the news. Internal rebellions have engulfed Libya, Egypt and Syria. Outsiders and foreign warriors are fanning our flames. Yes, not news. It’s on TV every night. Turkey’s afraid it’s going to be involved, as does Israel. Jordan is crowded with refugees. Iran is bellicose and threatening, and Iraq is in turmoil. All of this ripped from the headlines in the last couple of years.

Well, what if we had newspapers from 1200 BC? What would the headlines have read? Pretty much the same thing.

If a similar globalized society collapsed 3200 years ago, might we not want to study it a little bit to find out what we could learn and maybe stop ourselves from doing the same thing?

So my question is, we are more technologically advanced. We are also more aware of our surroundings. That is, the Hittites did not have SUVs. They did not cause climate change. But Mother Nature did a pretty good job of it back then. I also think the Hittites were not aware of what was happening. What was a drought? Why didn’t it rain? I mean, you pray to the storm god and it works or it doesn’t work. We know what is happening. We know what’s causing it and we might know what to do about it. The question is, will we do it?

Now, I look backwards. That’s my job as a historian. It is the job of others, including in this audience, to look forward. So I would simply say that if a similar globalized society collapsed 3200 years ago, might we not want to study it a little bit to find out what we could learn and maybe stop ourselves from doing the same thing? Food for thought. Thank you.

Q&A Session

STEWART BRAND: Thanks, Eric. Have a seat. Say more about the Dark Age. 300 years of what was lost. I mean, you said you wanted to live in the Golden Bronze Age. There’s lots of apparently good things. But we’re like, you know, language is lost. Technology is lost. Cities emptied. What does darkness mean in this case?

ERIC CLINE: Darkness means totality. I mean, you ask what’s lost, what isn’t lost. They lose the art of writing. They lose the art of writing. Well, if you want to call it the art of writing, they forget how to write. Now, remember that only 1% can read or write back then. So when you talk, when you take off that traditional elite, including the Scrabble class, you’re left with not many people who know to read and write. So Linear B goes away, which the Mycenaeans are using and so on. So they lose writing.

They lose the monumental architecture. They lose much of what we would call the hallmarks of civilization. Now they’re going to get it back, but it’s going to take a while. It takes a different period of time depending on where you are. So in Greece, for example, it takes about two to 300 years to come back. But in other places, it takes them far less.

For example, remember, Egypt doesn’t really collapse. It’s just weakened. And Assyria and Babylon, they bounce back in a couple of decades. And I think the secret there is they’re all on major rivers. You’ve got the Nile. You’ve got the Tigris and the Euphrates. So even if you’ve got a drought, I think they’re less affected. But even they have dark ages. So it’s what happens.

STEWART BRAND: So was there a renaissance where people sort of rediscovering stuff from before and there’s a continuity or was it a completely new invention of these things?

ERIC CLINE: Both. There’s both a renaissance and new inventions. But in fact, there is a period of Greek history that we call the Greek Renaissance. And this is the period when you have Homer, Hesiod and then Sappho and the Greek poets. The eighth century is when they’re coming back up and rediscovering. But in the meantime, you’ve got new things.

For example, the Phoenicians have brought their alphabet. And so when they’re now writing in the eighth and seventh centuries, they’re using an alphabet, which is completely different from what they had done with Linear B, which is basically pictograms. So there’s both a renaissance and new ideas.

And one of the things that occurred to me is, you know, I hate to kind of put it this way, but if you have an old growth forest, sometimes a forest fire is good. It clears away the underbrush and lets new things grow. And that’s kind of what happened here.

Because think about – what if this hadn’t collapsed? Would you have the Israelites coming in? Would you have Moses and monotheism? Would you a couple of centuries down the pike have Greece and democracy? I mean, it’s all kind of. So because this collapsed, we’ve got our world today. So one of these days I want to write something about a what if. What if it hadn’t collapsed? What would we be doing? Smart dinosaurs idea, right?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Please illustrate the scale of the cities, kingdoms, armies and navies. What was the population of Knossos and so on? What how many people are we talking about?

ERIC CLINE: It’s very tough to estimate population. And it depends. Yes, three different people. You get three different answers.

STEWART BRAND: They have a range, probably.

ERIC CLINE: Yeah, they’ve got a range. And in fact, there’s a new article out saying Knossos is three times larger than we ever thought it was at this time period or actually in the Iron Age, a new theory or new data, new data that’s just coming out.

But the upshot is in terms of cities. I mean, we’re talking a couple of thousand people. We’re talking armies that are maybe a couple of hundred people. They’re not huge. There is in the Battle of Kadesh, an army of a couple of hundred people, a couple of hundred people can do pretty devastating attacks.

STEWART BRAND: Not even a division, you know.

ERIC CLINE: Yeah. There is in the Battle of Megiddo, for example, there are 900 chariots that are captured. That’s a huge fighting force. That’s actually is actually a lot of tanks.

STEWART BRAND: Armored cavalry, armored cavalry for that time period.

ERIC CLINE: We have another Hittite text that talks about a force in the region of Troy in about 1500 BC. And it says so and so landed with 100 men. That was a lot. So we’re not talking huge amounts. We’re talking a couple of thousand. I think of a city is 10 or 20,000. It’s big. It’s huge.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: And what was in these cities that people would want? I mean, I can see this sort of the not invasion, but refugee approach. But some of these sound like they were, you know, and we’re going to take down your city.

The Collapse of Bronze Age Civilization

And what was there that they would want? Well, in a lot of these cases, what it seems is at the end of the Late Bronze Age, they’re burning down the cities and then reoccupying them. This is a migration – they’re actually looking for places to settle.

In fact, some of the archaeological evidence is indicating that the assimilation was much more peaceful. The Canaanites and the Philistines, as Orlando of Haifa has evidence, may represent much more peaceful settling down. Yes, there is some warfare and destruction, but they’re not pillaging, burning, and moving on. Even at Gibala, where Kanayuski was looking, there is a destruction and then an immediate reoccupation with Philistine-looking pottery, which is why he thinks sea peoples were involved.

Had there been a long peace before all of this breakdown that made these societies more vulnerable in some sense, more relaxed about things? It’s possible, quite possible. This is definitely an era of prosperity from the 14th century onward – a growing prosperity where people are growing better off across generations.

They may have been lulled into a sense of false security. I was at a conference on climate change from this time period, and one researcher suggested there was actually a time in the 14th century of more rain and better conditions, and perhaps they overextended themselves. So when the ending came, it was all the more drastic.

Everything’s going really well until suddenly it’s not. It’s not like things were going badly for a while. In Ugarit, for example, the letters from the merchants and kings show everything is going great until suddenly the city is destroyed.

Historical Records and Languages

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do these societies have histories of themselves? Are they telling stories of their own past or are they living in a kind of rolling present?

ERIC CLINE: Depends on the city. Ugarit, for example, has a cottage industry of Ugaritic studies. They’ve got history, king lists, queen lists, epics. But from others, we have nothing. It just depends where you are.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Can you comment on the languages of the period? Was there a lingua franca?

ERIC CLINE: Excellent question. Yes, the lingua franca of that day is Akkadian. The Amarna letters that I cited at the beginning demonstrate this. If you were Hittite and you could read or write, you would know Hittite and Akkadian. If you were Egyptian, you would know Egyptian and Akkadian. Even probably the Mycenaeans would know Linear B and Akkadian. If you lived in Assyria and Babylon, you’re home free because you’re doing Akkadian anyway.

That is the lingua franca, and we see the diplomatic correspondence being written in it. Some of the Amarna letters are written in Hittite, but that’s unusual. Most are in Akkadian. Everybody’s got their own language, and then there’s one diplomatic language – the Bronze Age lingua franca, much like English now.

Bronze vs. Iron Technology

AUDIENCE QUESTION: When did the iron business start? Can you tell us a little about bronze technology versus iron technology?

ERIC CLINE: This is a much debated point, but basically iron, once you are able to master the smelting, is going to be much better than copper. But copper seems to be easier to manipulate in some ways. There is a good reason why they used bronze for almost 2000 years and iron doesn’t take over until it absolutely has to.

The actual date for the invention of iron is debated. There’s an old wives’ tale that the Hittites invented it and had a monopoly, which is why they were able to capture most of the Middle East at one point. That turns out to have been a mistranslation of one of the texts. While the Hittites did know iron, so did everybody else. But it’s the type of thing where you’re not going to actually do it until you have to.

As I said, if your supply of tin is cut off and you can’t make bronze anymore, you will turn to iron – which turns out to be better anyway. Bronze does not hold an edge as well as iron, though I still would not want to get attacked by it.

Could the Collapse Have Been Prevented?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: What could they have done in 1177 to prevent the collapse?

ERIC CLINE: I’ve been wondering that myself. Who would be the “they” in this case? It might be Egypt.

In fact, I think Egypt did prepare. If Ugarit is destroyed between 1190 and 1185, and the Sea Peoples don’t wind up in Egypt until 1177, that gives them a good seven to fifteen years to figure it out. I think Egypt was plenty prepared.

There’s some new evidence by a colleague of mine suggesting the land battle and naval battle were separate. She thinks the land battle was actually fought earlier up in Syria as a kind of offensive defense. The Egyptians went all the way up, and then later they fought the naval battle down below. I think they had some time to prepare, and that’s probably why they were successful.

For others, what can you do if your supply of a crucial raw material is cut off? It can be difficult if you’re hit by an earthquake – I don’t know anything that can prepare you for that.

If an earthquake hits, you can survive it. If a famine hits, you can survive it. People will die, but societies can survive. Drought? Yes. Invaders? Yes. Somebody always survives. But what if you have one, then two, then three, and then four? What if you have the perfect storm with a multiplier effect where everything gets worse and worse?

I think that’s what we’ve got here. If it had been just a famine, they could have survived it – they’d done that before in the 14th century. We know there were invaders they survived. But when you’ve got them all at once, how do you prepare for that? I’m not sure that you can.

Cascading Effects and Population Movements

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So you’ve got cascading effects, chaos leading to chaos. You mentioned four things: the loss of the administrative center, the loss of economic apparatus, the loss of the elites, and population declines and movements. Do the cities really empty out in these circumstances?

ERIC CLINE: Some of them did. There are actually population movements. That’s what Reese Carpenter was basing himself on. He didn’t have the data about the pollen and everything, but he did notice the population shifts. He said one of the only reasons that could have caused it was drought, and then the whole thing collapsed.

People go away from drought and chaos, but toward what? Ironically, one of the major suggestions is that if the Sea Peoples – the Shardana and the Shekelesh – really did come from Sardinia and Sicily (which I believe they did), the hypothesis is that there was an original drought up in Europe or the western Mediterranean that started them moving. In which case, they had the worst luck because they’re moving from one drought into another drought in the eastern Mediterranean.

And what do you do if you have a 300-year long drought? That’s pretty hard to survive.

Egypt’s Decline

AUDIENCE QUESTION: You described Egypt as going into a steep decline. Even though they were prepared and survived, what does survival mean under these circumstances?

ERIC CLINE: In this particular case, there is still upheaval, turmoil, and rebellions in Egypt. Everything is not hunky-dory. They do survive, but Ramses III himself, the man who saved Egypt from the Sea Peoples, was assassinated in a harem conspiracy – which is an interesting way to end your life.

We know about it because it was written in a famous papyrus describing an assassination plot. It names a minor queen who had just had a son, with about 40 accomplices in the harem. They’re all put on trial and put to death, but the report doesn’t say whether the assassination succeeded.

Ramses III’s mummy was x-rayed and CAT scanned not long ago. His mummy has a scarf around his neck, and when they looked through it, they saw an incision by a knife that cut his throat. He would have died almost instantly, so it looks like the assassination did take place.

In the same tomb, they found a young man wrapped in a goatskin and not mummified – which is what you do when you don’t want somebody to survive into the afterlife. That mummy shows evidence of having been strangled to death. The hypothesis is that this was the young prince involved in the plot, buried with his father after the assassination. So even though you beat the Sea Peoples, you might have trouble at home.

Archaeological Discoveries

AUDIENCE QUESTION: There are lots of mysteries. What one piece of information would you as an archaeologist most like to find that would solve most of the questions you have?

ERIC CLINE: At Megiddo, where I worked for the last 20 years – which is in northern Israel’s Jezreel Valley (Megiddo is Armageddon; Har-Megiddo in Hebrew is the mound of Megiddo) – we know that the king of Megiddo, Biridia, in 1350 BCE was writing to Amenhotep III. We have six letters from him in the Amarna archive in Egypt.

What we don’t have are the responses. They are somewhere at Megiddo, and that was why I joined the project originally in 1994. I wanted to find that archive. I think I know where it is, because the University of Chicago, who excavated there from 1925 to 1939, uncovered half of the Late Bronze Age palace. The other half is still there waiting to be excavated, and that’s probably where the archive is.

I was so sure we were going to find it in ’94 that I brought my Akkadian textbooks. I was prepared to translate them on the spot, but we never found them.

At my other site of Kabri, which is a Canaanite palace right on the Lebanese border, we’ve found the oldest and largest wine cellar from the ancient world in 2013 and 2015. We’ve got evidence of about 16,000 liters of wine. Organic residue analysis can tell you what was in the jars, but we don’t have a scrap of writing.

The Missing Tablets and Future Archaeology

ERIC CLINE: I would love to know if they were writing, were they writing too? Because they’ve got connections to Greece. So it’s the missing tablets that have me in a conundrum. That’s in my wildest daydreams. That’s what I would want to find—another couple of archives.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: You realize that if civilization collapses about 30 years from now, there’ll be no writing at all recording what the hell happened. It’ll all be in the cloud.

ERIC CLINE: Absolutely. And that for me as an archaeologist is a fascinating question: what are people going to find from our civilization if and when we do collapse? And if there are any future archaeologists, what are they going to think when they excavate, say, the Smithsonian Museum or the Washington Zoo or all the Starbucks that are out there?

Comparing Historical Collapses

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Well, do a little taxonomy of collapse here. So the one clearly that we in the West take most seriously was the collapse of the Roman Empire. Compare and contrast what happened then with what happened 1,500 years earlier, 1177.

ERIC CLINE: Well, I think the collapse of the late Bronze Age was at least as great as the collapse of the Roman Empire in terms of what we lost. I mean, the Babylonians and Assyrians are doing complex mathematics and astronomy and medicine. We’ve got the text from them and from the Egyptians.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: That’s right. All sorts of things that were lost.

ERIC CLINE: All that astronomy is lost. All that was gone. And now it’s later reincorporated. I mean, we’ve got the Neo-Babylonians and the Neo-Assyrians who rise up in the first millennium and they continue. Like I said, for them, they only go down for a couple of decades. So they are able to have the Renaissance right away. And so we’ve got Neo-Babylonian astronomy, for example, is quite advanced. But in other cases, I mean, it’s so lost. We don’t even know what they had. The Mycenaeans, their language was only deciphered in 1952 as an early version of Greek.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: One gets a sort of sense of trauma that happened in the West after Rome went down. Do you think it was that kind of traumatic in the Mediterranean when the Bronze Age went down?

ERIC CLINE: Yes, I think it was absolutely traumatic, especially for the survivors that probably didn’t know what hit them and what really what to do about it. I mean, think if you’ve got a complex society and everything’s ticking away merrily and then into it, like I said, you just drop a little chaos. You know, you’ve got everything. It’s like a fine race car where if you throw a rod from your engine, suddenly you’re driving a piece of junk. Same thing here. I think it had been absolutely marvelous and wonderful. And they were going places and suddenly it’s a screeching halt and everything stops.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So these were monumental civilizations. And so you’ve got the thing that we saw in a sense after Rome and after the later demise or slowdown of Egypt, of people sort of camping out in the ruins of a former civilization.

ERIC CLINE: Yes. And we do have that. We have squatters in most of these places. In fact, Knossos with them thinking that now in the Iron Age, it’s three times bigger in the immediate aftermath. There probably was squatters. In fact, Mycenae, for example, Agamemnon’s Mycenae. There are squatters that continue. It doesn’t just go down. It continues on a trickle.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: But squatters show up. How in archaeology?

ERIC CLINE: It’s hard to tell sometimes. But when they’re living in what are obviously ruined buildings and yet they’re still living there, that’s a pretty good indication.

Archaeology of the Future

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Say a little more about—you mentioned when we were talking before, you’re working on a couple of stories now, one being Megiddo, one being archaeology of the future. We at Long Now Foundation are very interested in archaeology of the future since we’re trying to create some with a 10,000 year clock. What have you got? What’s what is you bear down on what future archaeologists will find? What stands out?

ERIC CLINE: Well, it’s an interesting question. Actually, it comes from “The World Without Us.” A couple of years ago.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: He gave a talk.

ERIC CLINE: Exactly. It got me thinking about that. And there were a couple of specials on TV at the time. So now, you know, when I fly into a major city, I try and imagine what I would find as an archaeologist in, say, 2,000 years. And of course, what would be left are the plastics and the things that are non-biodegradable, probably. But then I do come to the question of how you would interpret it. Because in archaeology, for example, we’ve got a saying, of course, it’s tongue in cheek. But if we don’t understand something, then it’s cultic or religious.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Or fertility, right?

ERIC CLINE: Sorry. Or fertility or fertility. Exactly. So, for example, I mean, if you were excavating some of the Smithsonian museums, that’s going to throw you for a loop. Like, what’s the whole diamond doing next to an elephant doing next to it?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: But, you know, Nabanitis in the sixth century B.C., he had a museum.

ERIC CLINE: I was going to say, there must be historic museums that look like that. Like it’s everything cobbled together. And that through the archaeologists for a loop when they’re finding Sumerian stuff next to Babylonian stuff, they’re going, what’s going on? They suddenly realized we’re digging an ancient museum. So what if you have something like that? Or what would be left, say, of the zoo, San Francisco Zoo, Washington Zoo? If the animals got out and you just have empty cages or if the animals don’t get out and they’re still there, what are you going to do with that? And then really, what are you going to do with all the McDonald’s and Starbucks that are on every corner? Are you going to interpret it religious? You’ve got that green-haired goddess.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So I can think of it. We were talking earlier about “Motel of the Mysteries,” which a wonderful book where they misinterpret a motel and they’ve got somebody lying in the sacred chamber and they’re on the sacred platform and they have the sacred communicator looking at the altar. And you realize it’s a TV with the remote and he’s on the bed.

ERIC CLINE: Right. And then he’s shouting into the toilet, which makes it this great echoing sound.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: It was absolutely.

ERIC CLINE: And my favorite picture is where she is wearing toothbrushes dangling from her ears and she’s got the “sanitize for your protection” around her head and was wearing a toilet seat. And it’s a deliberate recreation of Sophie Sleeman wearing Prime’s Treasure from Troy. Absolutely marvelous.

The Future of Archaeology

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So what’s the future of archaeology? I mean, don’t we run out of things to dig up after a while?

ERIC CLINE: Fortunately, no. There is no—there’s so much past and there’s so much stuff and so many places we never run out.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Right. We will. There’s no such thing as is peak antique.

ERIC CLINE: No, there will always be something. The question, though, on a serious note is, how are we going to do archaeology? And that’s one of the things I’ve been wrestling with. There have been so many advances, for example, just in the last couple of decades. Now we’re using satellite imagery.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Right. Sarah Parkak, the space archaeologist, is finding stuff from space. Some of you may have seen her on Colbert and drones that can go right over the area.

ERIC CLINE: Absolutely. LIDAR can see through the jungles. So I’m actually getting a bit frustrated, to be honest, of digging blind, as I say, where we put a trench down and we’re not sure if we’re going to hit something. So there are ways to look through electromagnetic and resistivity and conductivity and things like that. But there’s got to be something out there that can actually tell us more what we’re looking for. And I suspect it’s there that somebody here in Silicon Valley or whatever is already using it. And I just have to talk to the right person who says basically, oh, yeah, we got that.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So, you know, what can what can we find? For instance, looking into a mound like Megiddo, which has 20 cities, one on top of another. We don’t do that anymore. We don’t stack our cities.

ERIC CLINE: No, we do not stack our city. More is the pity.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Yeah. Going to be helpful for future archaeologists. The coastal cities may do that as the sea level rises.

ERIC CLINE: Perhaps. But no, but they did it. They stacked them. But I would love to be able to say something that would tell me, yes, 20 feet down there is a plaster floor. It should be able to be something that would detect the components of plaster.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I would think you don’t just drill on these.

ERIC CLINE: No, you don’t. So I think we had a major revolution with these new sensing devices, but that was for the most part 30 years ago. I think it’s time. It’s ripe for a new revolution. The question is, what’s it going to be? Now, the people that were digging in the 60s could never predicted LIDAR or satellite images, at least not the archaeologists.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Microbiome analysis of, you know, what’s in the wine jars.

ERIC CLINE: Exactly. The organic residue analysis. Absolutely. So what’s it going to be like 30 years from now? Well, that’s one reason that we don’t do 100 percent excavation of a site. We leave part of the site knowing that the next generation is going to either be better than us or have better equipment than us.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I’ve always admired the long term thinking involved in that. Is it actually the case that people do go back and do another trench? And and so there is a sort of a.

ERIC CLINE: Absolutely. The problem is that each time somebody else comes, they take away a little bit more. So, for instance, Heinrich Schliemann was at Troy first, and he actually dug right through the layer that he was looking for and threw it out on his back pile.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Right.

ERIC CLINE: Right. If I had $50,000, I’d go dig through the back pile at Troy because that’s where all the good stuff is, because Schliemann threw it out. So the next person, Dortfeld, had to dig around the edges. And then the next person after him, Blagen, had to dig around his edges. And it was only until Manfred Kurfman got there in 1988 with new technology that he was able to figure out that what we know of as Troy is just the citadel where the king and his retainers were. There is a lower city in the plain below that expands the size of the city by 10 or 15 times.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Oh, boy. Yeah.

ERIC CLINE: So that gets closer to the city we hear about in Homer.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Exactly. So now now it fits better. But in that particular case, had Schliemann realized there was a lower city? I’m sure there’d be nothing there for anybody else to ask. So there’s two things being discovered here. One is more, well, better tools to discover more stuff. Probably more archaeologists now alive than there have ever been.

ERIC CLINE: I would think so. Yes.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: And archaeology is now there’s not only more of us, it’s more scientific than it ever was. It’s more theory based as well. And it’s more both inter and cross disciplinary theory in terms of theory of archaeology, a theory of what’s being discovered.

ERIC CLINE: Both.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: OK, both. I would say we’re trying to ask bigger questions. We’re no longer digging just to dig. We’re not digging just because, oh, it’s a city. Let’s see what’s there.

ERIC CLINE: For example, at Cabri, our Canaanite palace, we are our larger questions. We’re trying to investigate the rise of rulership. We’re trying to look at the Canaanite economy and try and compare palatial versus non-palatial. So we’ve actually got bigger questions that the digging can help us answer.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: This story continues. They’ll keep finding more stuff. And what I love is you keep finding new stories emerging from the stuff. Thank you for the stories tonight.

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