Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know. A production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
Speaker 1: and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you should know,
Speaker 1: A good old history edition, if you ask me, by goodness,
Speaker 1: History of the World Part two. I don't think I
Speaker 1: saw that since I was maybe eight, and at the time,
Speaker 1: I was like, I have no idea what's going on
Speaker 1: or why people think this is funny? Yeah, well that
Speaker 1: was part one. Part two is out now. Oh really. Yeah,
Speaker 1: We're not getting paid for this, but I'll plug the
Speaker 1: heck out of it. It's on Hulu and they waited,
Speaker 1: you know, to like a forty year in the making
Speaker 1: sequel that they did as a TV show with mel
Speaker 1: Brooks executive producing and narrating. But it's like some of
Speaker 1: the great minds and comedy out there doing you know,
Speaker 1: history sketches. Is Michael Fossbender in it? I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Is he was great comedy minds? I think so. It's
Speaker 1: really funny, though, like genuinely laugh out loud funny. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I gotta check it out because those things are rare
Speaker 1: and few and far between. Yeah, it's good stuff, you know, sketch.
Speaker 1: So not everything is perfect, but it's I found myself
Speaker 1: laughing quite a bit so far. I've seen three of them.
Speaker 1: I think, Okay, it's on Hulu. It's on Hulu. And
Speaker 1: what happens if you don't have Hulu? Did you just
Speaker 1: go subscribe? I don't know how you can watch it.
Speaker 1: I think you just go subscribe to Hulu, is what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to say. Oh, sure, but this sounds like
Speaker 1: an ad for Hulu. I don't know about TV shows.
Speaker 1: You can just go out and buy a show, right, Sure,
Speaker 1: you want to buy whatever you want. It's the twenty
Speaker 1: first century, right, Should we talk about the Bronze Age. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's go back a few centuries, a few millennia actually
Speaker 1: to the Bronze Age. Great Age. It was. It was
Speaker 1: a great age. It was actually the first grade Age.
Speaker 1: I think most people are familiar with the term Bronze Age,
Speaker 1: but they might not know, like, just how amazing an
Speaker 1: age it really was, like just I poppingly amazing frankly
Speaker 1: if you think of it. Yeah, and it was specifically
Speaker 1: wedged between the Stone Age, which stones worked great for
Speaker 1: millions of years for a lot of things. Yeah, Bronze
Speaker 1: came along and then was followed by the Iron Age
Speaker 1: where we were plunged into the Dark Ages. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: we're talking what thirty three hundred BC to about twelve
Speaker 1: hundred BC, a little over a thousand years. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it had a lot to do with the Bronze which
Speaker 1: we'll talk about, but also just advances and almost everything
Speaker 1: you can think of, Yeah, art, architecture, politics, diplomacy, technology, religion, war,
Speaker 1: virsion of science. Yeah, the early sciences, early astronomy and math, writing,
Speaker 1: all of this stuff was born during this thousand years
Speaker 1: stretch of the Bronze Age. And again, like you might say,
Speaker 1: well a thousand years, of course, you could have been
Speaker 1: all that in a thousand years, But think about it.
Speaker 1: We were around for tens of thousands of years as
Speaker 1: modern humans and millions of years as hominids of some
Speaker 1: sort or another up to that point, and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden boom, civilization just develops out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: and it was in large part because of bronze itself,
Speaker 1: not just that Bronze tools are way better than stone tools.
Speaker 1: They're more easily sharpened, you can fashion them more easily,
Speaker 1: you can recycle them, so when they get busted up,
Speaker 1: you can re smelt them and make it brand new again.
Speaker 1: That's a huge advance in technology. But the actual bronze itself,
Speaker 1: in a really roundabout but also pretty direct way, wove
Speaker 1: people together in ways that they never had been before.
Speaker 1: That led to civilization. Yeah, it's really cool how the
Speaker 1: discovery of metallurgy just changed so much in a very
Speaker 1: you know, if you look at the big picture, a
Speaker 1: very short amount of time. Yeah, so there were If
Speaker 1: you want to make brons, you take copper and you
Speaker 1: take a little bit of tin is usually the alloy
Speaker 1: that makes bronze, and you smash them together with your
Speaker 1: hands over the course of fifteen years, and then dam
Speaker 1: you have bronze. So you well know you melt him.
Speaker 1: You smelled him, and who smelt it? Delt it? Right,
Speaker 1: that's right. And you have bronze and you can fashion
Speaker 1: it into tools. But to get copper and tin together
Speaker 1: you have to go to all sorts of different places.
Speaker 1: In the Mediterranean. You have plenty of copper, say on
Speaker 1: Cyprus that was a copper mining center, but then if
Speaker 1: you wanted tin, you had to go a couple thousand miles,
Speaker 1: a few thousand kilometers to the east, if I'm mistaken,
Speaker 1: to the east to Afghanistan, which was a tin center,
Speaker 1: and to get that tin and that copper together you
Speaker 1: had to create really extensive trade networks. You had to
Speaker 1: go through one land to another, so you had to
Speaker 1: make friends or make enemies with those people, and all
Speaker 1: of these new relationships developed just to get the component
Speaker 1: to make bronze together, and that that formed the basis
Speaker 1: of all the stuff that seemed to follow. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about the warring. There was certainly that, but
Speaker 1: there was also a lot of cooperation because everyone wanted
Speaker 1: to get their hands on that sweet bronze, and they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to play with the big fellas, then
Speaker 1: maybe become part of this trade route, allow us to
Speaker 1: go through your area with the tin or whatever, or
Speaker 1: maybe you have something that we need other than just
Speaker 1: you know, being on the way. But there's a lot
Speaker 1: of cooperation involved too as far as the bronze. What
Speaker 1: that led to ultimately was better. And this is the
Speaker 1: sort of the cascading effect that a simple not simple,
Speaker 1: but a discovery like this can have is or make
Speaker 1: is better farming techniques. And you might think, well, great,
Speaker 1: so you could farm better but that means you could
Speaker 1: farm bigger, and that means you could support more people,
Speaker 1: and that means you could get a civilization going. And
Speaker 1: because you had before, you previously had a situation where like, hey, listen,
Speaker 1: everyone's got a hunt and gather, and then later later on,
Speaker 1: everyone's got a farm because we just can't support ourselves
Speaker 1: unless everyone's kind of in on this. Right now, they
Speaker 1: had more sophisticated techniques, so fewer people had to farm
Speaker 1: to support more people even and that freed up people
Speaker 1: who were good at other stuff to do other stuff.
Speaker 1: So that's the cascading effect that you were sort of
Speaker 1: alluding to, where like this one thing led to farming,
Speaker 1: better farming, but that better farming led to division of
Speaker 1: labor where it's like, hey, I'm really good at science.
Speaker 1: Hey I'm really good. I'm a really good writer. But
Speaker 1: everyone always said, don't waste your time writing because we
Speaker 1: need you farming. Right it's brand new. It might not
Speaker 1: stick around. It could just be a fad, this writing thing.
Speaker 1: It might just go away. So yeah, and with that
Speaker 1: division of labor, the writers can write, the math, people
Speaker 1: can figure out math. The farmers can farm and feed everybody.
Speaker 1: And then one of the other big pillars of support
Speaker 1: for this division of labor that allowed it to blossom
Speaker 1: was centralized governments that said, farmers, we're in charge of you.
Speaker 1: Make x amount of grain and bring it to this
Speaker 1: central place. Everybody else come to this central place and
Speaker 1: get your grain. We're taking care of you. We're feeding you.
Speaker 1: So you guys can go off and concentrate on this
Speaker 1: other stuff and help civilization flourish. So government is a huge, sweeping, bureaucratic,
Speaker 1: hierarchical entity. Really got established in the Bronze Age as well,
Speaker 1: just because there were so many people being strung together
Speaker 1: again in the service of creating bronze Yeah, and hey,
Speaker 1: while you're at it, enslave people, why don't you build
Speaker 1: huge statues of me and big monuments of myself as
Speaker 1: the leader of you. So that's kind of what happened,
Speaker 1: you know, the establishment of government from the very beginning
Speaker 1: sort of gaveth and took it away, gaveth and that
Speaker 1: all the things you were saying, which was great about
Speaker 1: organizing large groups of people, but took of the way
Speaker 1: because every civilization was built on the backs of enslaved people,
Speaker 1: and if not enslaved, at the very least they established
Speaker 1: a real kind of like never before, a real hierarchy
Speaker 1: of high I'm in charge and you're not, so you
Speaker 1: don't matter as much. Yeah, that's that was definitely new.
Speaker 1: I mean you always had things like you know, shaman
Speaker 1: or some sort of like probably group leader, elders or
Speaker 1: something like that, right for a hunter gatherer bands, but
Speaker 1: nothing like this where you didn't even come close to
Speaker 1: to talking to or knowing personally the person who was
Speaker 1: your your ultimate leader. Like that was brand new. And
Speaker 1: what's interesting, Chuck, as you said, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: for better for worse about the government emerging. You can
Speaker 1: really see how you feel about today's world by how
Speaker 1: you in purpet what was born and what happened during
Speaker 1: the Bronze Age. It's like look in a highly polished
Speaker 1: bronze mirror. Basically, it's really interesting what reflects back, and
Speaker 1: it's not always cut and dried, like I have certain
Speaker 1: feelings about, you know, topics like government or whatever. But
Speaker 1: I also in looking back a few thousand years, it's
Speaker 1: also easy to see the other side's opinion because they're
Speaker 1: not all up in my face. They're several thousand years old,
Speaker 1: and I can kind of now understand contemporary people's feelings
Speaker 1: about say government or something as well. I think that's
Speaker 1: just fascinating. That's ultimately why history is so important, because
Speaker 1: you really do learn lessons from it. You can, like
Speaker 1: humans are not We like to think we're super advanced
Speaker 1: compared to you know, the people of a few thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, but we're still basically the same humans that
Speaker 1: we were back during the Bronze agents, So there is
Speaker 1: a lot to learn. I agree. You know, we mentioned
Speaker 1: that there was worrying obviously, when you're going to get
Speaker 1: bigger groups of people together and government's ruling those people
Speaker 1: and they're in close proximity to one another, you know,
Speaker 1: neighbored right up to each other, there's gonna be people
Speaker 1: that don't get along, and there is obviously going to
Speaker 1: be warring. But like we mentioned, there was also a
Speaker 1: lot of diplomacy and there was a very sort of
Speaker 1: golden age of this Golden age kind of square in
Speaker 1: the middle, where things were cruising along really, really nicely.
Speaker 1: I think these sort of looking back at it, it
Speaker 1: seems like the beginnings of a big, grand transition like this,
Speaker 1: things can be rough, and as we'll see at the end,
Speaker 1: given that it basically collapsed. It's obviously rough, but there
Speaker 1: was a time in the middle there where things were
Speaker 1: going pretty great. Yeah, Yeah, it's true. It's that middle
Speaker 1: Bronze Age prosperity. And it actually kind of underscores the
Speaker 1: idea that when you bring a lot of people together
Speaker 1: you can do amazing, momentous things. But if you bring
Speaker 1: a lot of diverse people together, you've got a lot
Speaker 1: of different attribute ut different contributions from different groups and opinions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and opinions and affluence and prosperity can really follow when
Speaker 1: people of diverse backgrounds interact with one another on large scales. Amen,
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. Should we take a break. Sure, it's
Speaker 1: kind of an early break, but it feels like a
Speaker 1: good stopping point. And maybe when we come back, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about the Big Eight. All right, I tease the
Speaker 1: Big Eight. We're talking about the Big Eight areas societies
Speaker 1: that dominated the Bronze Age, and they are not This
Speaker 1: is not an order of influence or preference, even alphabetical,
Speaker 1: it's not any This is just randomly assimilated, okay, or assembled.
Speaker 1: Egyptians not bad, actually hit and as we'll see, the Egyptians,
Speaker 1: they didn't completely go away. They got punched in the
Speaker 1: face during the Bronze Age collapse, but they stuck around Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycinians, Assyrians,
Speaker 1: and rounding out the top eight, everyone's favorite, the Babylonians.
Speaker 1: And this is like, not all of these groups were
Speaker 1: dominant at one time at the same time. Yeah, some
Speaker 1: were dominant at one time or another, like the Minoans
Speaker 1: were the civilization that predated the Mycinians right so um
Speaker 1: by quite several hundred years, if not longer, but each
Speaker 1: one dominated. They both controlled crete while they were in charge.
Speaker 1: And if you look at these these groups, to a
Speaker 1: lot of them are I mean, I guess you'd call
Speaker 1: them famous, Like the Babylonians pretty famous, the Manoans famous
Speaker 1: that um, the Egyptians super duper famous. Yeah, white famous.
Speaker 1: And this was the this these were the groups that
Speaker 1: created the beginning of history, Like this was the time
Speaker 1: when the pyramids at Giza were built, or when the
Speaker 1: Epic of Gilgamesh was written and the Code of Hammurabi
Speaker 1: was encoded. This is when Pharaoh's like two to common
Speaker 1: and Ramesy's the second ruled Like this was big deal
Speaker 1: capital h history that was being produced at this time. UM,
Speaker 1: and it seems to have all kind of started with
Speaker 1: the um. The Sumerians. They seem to be the ones
Speaker 1: who like kicked the whole thing off. Yeah, and we
Speaker 1: should mention too that all of those groups that we
Speaker 1: named had subgroups, a lot of Itites, you want to
Speaker 1: tell him, some ess amrites h Gergeshites, that's my favorite.
Speaker 1: And these were all all groups, and they even had subgroups,
Speaker 1: you know, under these umbrella terms like Canaanites. But Sumerians,
Speaker 1: like you said, came first. They said, hey, you like irrigation,
Speaker 1: what do you think about this? Canal right, what do
Speaker 1: you think about this zigarrette? What do you think about
Speaker 1: writing things down? And now we can keep track of
Speaker 1: inventories and things like that, and log books and money
Speaker 1: or like you mentioned the Epic of Gilgamesh, great read
Speaker 1: ye've known as the first work of literature. But what
Speaker 1: you also had because of this invention of writing was
Speaker 1: other cultures writing, and in a way that sort of
Speaker 1: helps corroborate what's going on. When you have different cultures
Speaker 1: writing about things that that track or check check one another,
Speaker 1: then you sort of get a better picture of what's
Speaker 1: happening well. Plus, also, when you have these diverse cultures
Speaker 1: that have different systems of writing and language, when they
Speaker 1: communicate with one another, they're often writing in two different language.
Speaker 1: So later historians, once you crack one language, you can
Speaker 1: use that to crack like let's say you cracked hieroglyphics,
Speaker 1: you can use hieroglyphics to now crack linear B, which
Speaker 1: was I think out of crete if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1: And if you crack linear B, well wait a minute,
Speaker 1: they used linear B to write this cuneiform or cuneiform,
Speaker 1: so we can crack that now too. So like almost
Speaker 1: all tablets written during this time, we're in multiple languages,
Speaker 1: so each one's like a Rosetta stone. Yeah, it's really neat.
Speaker 1: That is super cool. So everything's going great. People are trading,
Speaker 1: people are thriving, people are farming like never before, and
Speaker 1: all these advances are happening and then boom, almost for
Speaker 1: the most part, everything stopped. Most of that development and
Speaker 1: almost all of those major civilizations kind of just went away,
Speaker 1: and like we said, the Iron Age came along. Looking now,
Speaker 1: my friend, I think this would have been the best
Speaker 1: place for a break. Sure, but it screwed that up.
Speaker 1: So we'll just dive right into what might have happened.
Speaker 1: The data the collapse is generally given as eleven sixty
Speaker 1: seven BC, but it's obviously not the kind of thing
Speaker 1: that happens overnight. I think it They generally now agree
Speaker 1: that it happened over the course of what thirty or
Speaker 1: forty years? Yeah, I think from about twelve hundred to
Speaker 1: eleven fifty, which I mean, if you're living through that,
Speaker 1: it's fifty years at the time of lifetime, probably a lifetime,
Speaker 1: but looking back historically, it's like the blink of an eye. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in a blink of an eye, things like when
Speaker 1: we talk about collapse, it was it was a pretty
Speaker 1: start collapse, like there was there's evidence of lots of disturbance,
Speaker 1: lots of upset in that region. And we'll get into
Speaker 1: everything that happened. I mean, we talked about the warring
Speaker 1: people really started warring, and when certain civilizations might have
Speaker 1: fallen out of power, that created a vacuum there where
Speaker 1: a new civilization would come in and all of these
Speaker 1: civilizations kind of going away. I believe it was like
Speaker 1: Sparta and Athens were the next to come along. To
Speaker 1: really kind of kick off the next Golden Age, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: several hundred years later, and in between there was what
Speaker 1: you would call a dark Age, the Iron Age, which
Speaker 1: iron is preferable to bronze in some ways and that
Speaker 1: it can be harder, I believe, but bronze doesn't rust.
Speaker 1: So people typically look at the Iron Age, the transition
Speaker 1: from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age as a
Speaker 1: step backward, a dark age. And it came from this
Speaker 1: collapse what's called the Late Bronze Age collapse where you know,
Speaker 1: you said that they really started boring and cities were
Speaker 1: sacked and burned. Cities have been like sacked before and
Speaker 1: burned before, but they were rebuilt during this age of prosperity.
Speaker 1: This time, after the Late Bronze Age collapse from twelve
Speaker 1: hundred to eleven fifty, they weren't rebuilt. They were left
Speaker 1: in ruins and rubble because the civilizations that would have
Speaker 1: built them were gone. Their languages were gone, their writing
Speaker 1: was gone. In very short time, people couldn't decipher things
Speaker 1: that had been written fifty or one hundred years before.
Speaker 1: It was it was just one civilization after another fell
Speaker 1: like dominoes all around the Mediterranean and this part of
Speaker 1: the world that gave the world essentially civilization for the
Speaker 1: very first time fell into this dark age, and it's
Speaker 1: it's it was such a stark, massive, all encompassing collapse
Speaker 1: of the first attempt at civilization that it just piqued
Speaker 1: historians and archaeologists curiosity from the first time they detected it,
Speaker 1: and they've been seeking to explain exactly what happened ever since. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll in a second will go over some of
Speaker 1: the causes, but after the cause, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of debate over what those were. You we have a
Speaker 1: civilization or a group of civilizations that we've talked about
Speaker 1: being very interconnected and dependent on one another. So you
Speaker 1: said they fell like dominoes. That's going to happen if
Speaker 1: you have a lot of civilizations trading with one another,
Speaker 1: depending on one another, sharing resources with one another. When
Speaker 1: one goes down, then it becomes unstable for all of them.
Speaker 1: And you know, if a civilization collapses, those people it's
Speaker 1: not like everyone literally is destroyed, Like those people are
Speaker 1: going to go to the next closest place probably and
Speaker 1: that overstresses them and then it's just like you said,
Speaker 1: it's it's just one after the other, this domino effect happens,
Speaker 1: and it just kind of happened one after the other
Speaker 1: over this very short time period. Yeah, because remember this
Speaker 1: is the first time when people follow to centralized government,
Speaker 1: and this is where you got your food, right, So
Speaker 1: when that centralized government collapsed, you no longer had access
Speaker 1: to food. And you're like, I'm a mathematician, I have
Speaker 1: no idea how to grow grain. I'm going to starve
Speaker 1: to death if somebody doesn't do something you told me.
Speaker 1: Of course, you're going to run to the next civilization
Speaker 1: that still has a central government with grain that they
Speaker 1: could possibly have. But that puts a strain on the grain,
Speaker 1: and people start to fight when there's a strain on
Speaker 1: the grain. That's just how it goes, right, that's a
Speaker 1: T shirt waiting to happen. So UM for one of
Speaker 1: the first people or one of the first theories that
Speaker 1: came along. Um was posed by an egyptologist, a French
Speaker 1: egyptologist who coined the term the sea people. I like
Speaker 1: that the sea people have long been UM. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: sound ominous in this sense, don't they. Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: capitalize the sea people, yeah, yeah, they're probably not bringing
Speaker 1: fruit baskets, you know. No, unfortunately not. They were bringing
Speaker 1: death and destruction in Mayhem, and much the same way
Speaker 1: that we today think of like the Vikings would have
Speaker 1: to the UK and the Western Europe. This is a
Speaker 1: very similar thing where a bunch of raiding pirates made
Speaker 1: land and just sacked all these civilizations. And so, um,
Speaker 1: they're they're almost hypothetical that we have a pretty good
Speaker 1: idea that they did exist in some form or another.
Speaker 1: They're they're written about in Egyptian stale stala, can't remember
Speaker 1: how to say that. Um, but inscriptions, let's just say.
Speaker 1: And they show up in art too, so we know
Speaker 1: that they they happen, but we don't know who these
Speaker 1: people are and what extent they They sacked the major
Speaker 1: great city states, and if if they managed to topple
Speaker 1: all these civilizations, then holy cow, they were They were amazing.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people are like, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: they actually were the trigger. They might have been a symptom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we don't, like you said, we don't even know
Speaker 1: for sure who they are. I believe Egyptians did identify
Speaker 1: some groups of them at the time as like the
Speaker 1: Oshawasha or the Luca or the check Lesh, but that
Speaker 1: means nothing to us these days because their contemporary names
Speaker 1: were lost to history. So what we call a lot
Speaker 1: of civilizations today were named by people who discovered their
Speaker 1: ruins years later, and that wasn't what they called themselves.
Speaker 1: For instance, Minoans were named after the Greek king Minos
Speaker 1: by an archaeologist named Arthur Evans or Arthur Evans. In
Speaker 1: some cases we do know what they called themselves, in
Speaker 1: other cases we don't. I think the Samerians we know
Speaker 1: called themselves ung song giga, which is blackheaded people, but
Speaker 1: they were named Samerians by Acadians who followed after them.
Speaker 1: So we have trouble with identifying people because the names
Speaker 1: were lost. We have trouble identifying people like to see
Speaker 1: people because there's a very murky picture of who was
Speaker 1: where and when they were there. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of different stories where you think, like one group of
Speaker 1: people maybe came in and overpowered another and drove them
Speaker 1: into oblivion, where it's like no, now we believe that
Speaker 1: they were there sort of all along and they just
Speaker 1: filled that power vacuum, or maybe those actually were those
Speaker 1: people right right. Like For a good example is the Canaanites.
Speaker 1: For a very long time, the Philistines were blamed, and
Speaker 1: I mean a really long time the Philistines were blamed
Speaker 1: for toppling the Canaanite empire. But more recent scholarship says, actually,
Speaker 1: I think the Canaanites became the Philistines after the collapse.
Speaker 1: They kind of broke up as a group and then reformed. Like, Umm,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of a band. The only one
Speaker 1: I can think of is my high school band who
Speaker 1: broke up and reformed without me. So let's just say
Speaker 1: that it was like my high school band. Oh that
Speaker 1: story just breaks my heart. Every time I hear it
Speaker 1: breaks my heart too. But anyway, that's what they think happened.
Speaker 1: So so a lot of the scholarship that we were
Speaker 1: we relied on for centuries, like the Canaanites were toppled
Speaker 1: by the Philistines. It was incorrect, and we have to
Speaker 1: figure it out by deducing Well, wait a minute, this
Speaker 1: group was here at this time, and this group was
Speaker 1: at that time. The contemporary reports don't actually help us
Speaker 1: that much because we might be totally familiar with the
Speaker 1: Czech Lash, but we call them the Mycenians, right, but
Speaker 1: is it the Mycenians. Well, let's go and look. The
Speaker 1: Myssnians were toppled by the sea people, so probably not
Speaker 1: the Mycenians. So you have to use this historical deduction
Speaker 1: to try to figure out who these people were. But
Speaker 1: the upshot of it is that now today and yes
Speaker 1: I set up shot by god, I'll say it again,
Speaker 1: the upshot of it is that today we think the
Speaker 1: sea people we're basically like pirates of the days of
Speaker 1: your or more recent days of yr. They weren't from
Speaker 1: one particular country. They were a loose confederation of people
Speaker 1: exactly which I mean, I buy that that makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes a lot more sense than some group we
Speaker 1: are totally unfamiliar with or know by a different name
Speaker 1: but haven't detected. Went and like just completely toppled every
Speaker 1: single culture in civilization in the Mediterranean at the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree, another thing that makes sense. And I'll go
Speaker 1: and spoil it and say I think all these make sense,
Speaker 1: so subscribe to them. It was probably a little bit
Speaker 1: of everything, but over extension is a big one, m
Speaker 1: if you are. I mean, this was their first foray
Speaker 1: into this kind of mass agriculturalism and massive government and
Speaker 1: these big, big groups of people, and they you know,
Speaker 1: it was just it was their first try humanities, first
Speaker 1: try it this stuff. So obviously it's gonna not go perfectly.
Speaker 1: And if you're managing that many people, like any government
Speaker 1: has a limit on how many people even today that
Speaker 1: they can probably manage successfully. Any business does, any friend
Speaker 1: group does. So the fact that they just overextended themselves
Speaker 1: is probably a pretty good factor. Yeah, that's entirely possible.
Speaker 1: So that's another theory. Just buy itself over extension and
Speaker 1: once those governments are like, oh god, I can't support
Speaker 1: everybody's like maybe a revolt or at the very least
Speaker 1: political instability in YadA YadA, YadA, right, and then dominoes.
Speaker 1: One of the problems with that theory, though, is that
Speaker 1: we have letters from one group to another, from like
Speaker 1: the Hittite empress to the like Ramsey's the second in
Speaker 1: Egypt saying like hey help, which really shows the diplomacy
Speaker 1: and the innerdependence. But they would say things like hey help,
Speaker 1: we're running out of grain. I need some food. Can
Speaker 1: you please send my people some grain? So that makes
Speaker 1: it seem like it wasn't just over extension, although it
Speaker 1: could have been over extension that led to it. Now
Speaker 1: that I kind of sessed it out, look at that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: move might just go edit that whole part out because
Speaker 1: it turned out to be totally unnecessary. Well, two natural
Speaker 1: sort of disasters came together that are obviously going to
Speaker 1: have a deleterious effect on civilizations, drought and earthquakes. We
Speaker 1: do know that there's a lot of evidence that there
Speaker 1: was a draft out, a seemingly really long one. I
Speaker 1: think they've actually, you know, have actual proof of fossilized
Speaker 1: pollen from the bottom of the Sea of Galilee that
Speaker 1: said there was at least one hundred and fifty years drought,
Speaker 1: and then other people say, now it was probably more
Speaker 1: like three hundred years. And you know, that's that's going
Speaker 1: to cause destabilization, Like nobody's business. If your whole like
Speaker 1: sort of new societies are built on mass agriculture, people
Speaker 1: are gonna start fighting. They're going to start warring with
Speaker 1: one another. I do think it's interesting that along with
Speaker 1: this theory they say that the sea people might have
Speaker 1: been climate refugees from another part of the world. Very interesting,
Speaker 1: and you know, back to what we said, like the
Speaker 1: great thing about this mass farming is all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it freed up people to do other things with the
Speaker 1: division of labor. But then when that was stressed, they
Speaker 1: had to pull people like you said, I was I
Speaker 1: was told I could do math, not that there would
Speaker 1: be no math, quite the opposite, and they were pulled
Speaker 1: back from those jobs. So all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: had an end to other advances because you had to go.
Speaker 1: You were trying to save your society. Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: the twenty thirteen study, the one that determined the drought
Speaker 1: was one hundred and fifty years long, also said that
Speaker 1: the end of the drought seems to coincide with the
Speaker 1: end of that Dark Age period and the rebuilding again
Speaker 1: of civilization. The earthquake thing makes a lot of sense too.
Speaker 1: You remember, of course, the horrific earthquakes that Turkey suffered
Speaker 1: in February. There was a seven point five followed nine
Speaker 1: hours later by a seven point eight, and that is
Speaker 1: just mind boggling. It killed forty six thousand people. The
Speaker 1: thing is that area, this area of the Mediterranean, and
Speaker 1: then the Aegean as well. There's no less than four
Speaker 1: major plates that come together in this area, the Arabian,
Speaker 1: the African, the Anatolian, and the Eurasian plates all kind
Speaker 1: of converge around here, and so it's known for its
Speaker 1: earthquakes and also quake storms, which is what Turkey suffered recently.
Speaker 1: It's like earthquake after earthquake after earthquake, and a lot
Speaker 1: of them are really really big there that this area
Speaker 1: is kind of plagued with it and has been for
Speaker 1: a very long time. And there's plenty of evidence of
Speaker 1: earthquake damage, lots of poor souls being found trapped under
Speaker 1: their houses, and foundations like um just completely disrupted and
Speaker 1: walls at weird angles, so that definitely happened around this time.
Speaker 1: But then there's also other cities that were destroyed where
Speaker 1: you find like arrowheads embedded into the walls and like
Speaker 1: people with their heads cut off and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: where it's like an earthquake didn't do that. Some other
Speaker 1: group of people who attack the city did that. So
Speaker 1: this kind of leads us to the to the the
Speaker 1: one you subscribe to, which is everything everywhere, all at
Speaker 1: once theory, which is that every like there was basically
Speaker 1: a multiplier effect where one disaster happened that triggered or
Speaker 1: other disasters and it just made those disasters worse and
Speaker 1: worse and worse, and that there was just a cascade
Speaker 1: of system failures that that created this massive collapse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again going back to what I was saying earlier,
Speaker 1: it's like, this was the first try at this kind
Speaker 1: of thing, and UM, well we'll get to maybe after
Speaker 1: the break, we'll talk about lessons we've learned. But you know,
Speaker 1: on a first attempt at this, it was a long
Speaker 1: time ago. There. There's um, there wasn't anything they could
Speaker 1: lean on in any of their histories to try and
Speaker 1: write the ship. So it just sort of went the
Speaker 1: way it went, you know, there was kind of almost
Speaker 1: no stopping it, I think. So I'll give you another
Speaker 1: anecdote of mine that kind of exemplifies this. Um, when
Speaker 1: you and I moved into our first place that we
Speaker 1: ever bought together, I was installing something or other. You
Speaker 1: in the hot water pipe, yeah, the little condo, little
Speaker 1: tiny place, yep, Um, and I broke the hot water
Speaker 1: pipe at the water supply under the sink the valve,
Speaker 1: so there's no way to turn it off. And my
Speaker 1: response to that was to get up and literally run
Speaker 1: in a circle, going, oh my god, Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, and you may had to run in
Speaker 1: and figure out what was going on, then run out
Speaker 1: and find the water main and turn it off, right,
Speaker 1: That's what I imagined, like some of these rulers did,
Speaker 1: like after the first disaster too, because they had no
Speaker 1: they had no frame of reference. I had no idea
Speaker 1: what to do right then. I didn't think like watermin
Speaker 1: They didn't even know there was a water main at
Speaker 1: the time, so they had no exactly they That's kind
Speaker 1: of the response I imagine them doing. That's pretty funny.
Speaker 1: Then there's one other one, chuck um. So you know
Speaker 1: how the Bronze Age led to the Iron Age. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the division between the two is basically right there
Speaker 1: after the late Bronze Age collapse, you've got the Iron
Speaker 1: Age almost immediately after it. And there is an idea
Speaker 1: that in Bronze Age Ireland, which suffered its own collapse
Speaker 1: later on, that it was the availability of iron that
Speaker 1: led to the collapse of the Bronze Age because anybody
Speaker 1: could go find and work iron into something. You didn't
Speaker 1: need to have a tin from over here in copper,
Speaker 1: massive trade networks and people at the top commanding everybody else.
Speaker 1: You could go out and find it yourself. And this
Speaker 1: theory that in Ireland at least, and it's possible it
Speaker 1: applies to the Mediterranean too, that it democratized it so
Speaker 1: much that it led to political instability, and hence that
Speaker 1: that same destabilization where one civilization was top, all that
Speaker 1: led to another and another and another. Boy, this is
Speaker 1: the side of history I love more than any other
Speaker 1: I think, which is are these just sort of things
Speaker 1: like this is how the Earth was, and because you
Speaker 1: could find something here it led to this, or you
Speaker 1: couldn't find something there, it led to this, Right, It's
Speaker 1: really fascinating to me. Yeah. And also they think that
Speaker 1: the reason why we're able to find metals relatively close
Speaker 1: to the Earth's surface enough so that we can mind
Speaker 1: them and therefore housing basically all technology, is because the
Speaker 1: I think a small planetoidum crashed into Earth, and that's
Speaker 1: where they think the Moon came from. And then when
Speaker 1: it smashed into Earth and pushed a lot of that
Speaker 1: molten metal to the surface where it cooled and formed
Speaker 1: and settled, allowing us to come billions of years later
Speaker 1: and dig it up and create civilization from it. It
Speaker 1: really like just makes you think it's all just a crapshoot.
Speaker 1: Then we have no control over anything. Sure that? Or
Speaker 1: we're living in a really amazing simulation. Yeah, that's right,
Speaker 1: all right, both, they're both right, They both could be right?
Speaker 1: Is it? Bluepillo? Red Bill? I can ever remember? Why?
Speaker 1: Why not take both? Yeah? All right, man, I'm into that.
Speaker 1: My I don't know if I should tell the story
Speaker 1: if it's pill based and maybe not. Probably not? All right,
Speaker 1: So we'll take that break and we'll come back and talk,
Speaker 1: like I mentioned earlier, a little bit about the lessons
Speaker 1: we hopefully have learned from the Late Bronze Age collapse. So, Chuck,
Speaker 1: we're talking about lessons for today that you can take
Speaker 1: from the Late Bronze Age collapse. And the most obvious
Speaker 1: one is don't globalize. It's a bad move when you
Speaker 1: become super interconnected and interdependent on one another. A problem
Speaker 1: or a failure in one part of the system leads
Speaker 1: to just failures throughout the system because everyone's so dependent
Speaker 1: on one another. And if you kind of peel back
Speaker 1: the curtain a little bit or scratch that lotto ticket
Speaker 1: covering off, you see that the most people who are
Speaker 1: saying that are probably nativists or anti globalists to begin with.
Speaker 1: And that's what I was talking about before, where like
Speaker 1: you can see us reflected back when we're looking and
Speaker 1: interpreting what happened back then, are the lessons from it.
Speaker 1: It really kind of reflects on what our thoughts and
Speaker 1: attitudes are today. Yeah, and this isn't you know, a
Speaker 1: big pro globalist rant or anything, but we do have
Speaker 1: to kind of look around. It a pretty great recent
Speaker 1: example of a worldwide test put on all of our civilizations,
Speaker 1: which is the COVID pandemic that happened. You know, this
Speaker 1: happened all over the world. Everyone was punched in the
Speaker 1: face all you know, societies were punched in the face,
Speaker 1: and there was no collapse. I mean, everyone got bruised
Speaker 1: up pretty bad, and I think the whole world suffered
Speaker 1: economically as we're still seeing the fallout from that up
Speaker 1: today all over the world. But no one collapsed. It's
Speaker 1: not like, you know, the the UK is now you know,
Speaker 1: just a warring society and everyone's like you can't go
Speaker 1: there anymore because they collapsed because of COVID. It was
Speaker 1: a really big test of our globalized world. And there
Speaker 1: are some very smart people who say, like, listen, you
Speaker 1: can't point to the Bronze Age collapse and say like
Speaker 1: that could happen again in modern times, because there's this
Speaker 1: one economist that you found, Zachary Jos who is basically like, listen,
Speaker 1: we're way more wealthy than they were back then. We
Speaker 1: have capital goods like we never had before, and there's
Speaker 1: a big cushion that affords us mistakes these days. That
Speaker 1: they didn't have those mistakes. That's why, like I said,
Speaker 1: it was, it was their first foray into this kind
Speaker 1: of thing, so they had a very narrow edge they
Speaker 1: were walking to begin with, so they couldn't afford mistakes.
Speaker 1: We can afford mistakes these days and still be able
Speaker 1: to take a punch of the face and get back
Speaker 1: up and continue. He also pointed out that yeah, they
Speaker 1: had a division of labor, but our division of labor
Speaker 1: is global, and that you know, we have a lot
Speaker 1: of redundancy in our systems too. So yeah, he's saying, yes,
Speaker 1: you can make comparisons, but it's definitely not apples to
Speaker 1: apples because of how far we've come and from the
Speaker 1: lessons that we learned from the times where civilization has
Speaker 1: collapsed and rebuilt and collapsed and rebuilt. The other way
Speaker 1: to look at it. There's a guy named Eric Klein
Speaker 1: who's a professor of ancient Nearie studies who also wrote
Speaker 1: a book called eleven sixty seven, The Year Civilization Collapsed,
Speaker 1: So he's a bit of an authority on this. His
Speaker 1: whole thing is, actually, no, we're probably more susceptible to
Speaker 1: collapse than the Bronze Age was because we're even more
Speaker 1: interconnected than we were before. And there's a systems dynamics
Speaker 1: term I believe called hypo hypercoherent, where the system is
Speaker 1: so homogeneous, all the different parts of so homogeneous that
Speaker 1: when one part and also interconnected, that when one part
Speaker 1: breaks down, yeah, it just spreads really quickly and the
Speaker 1: whole system breaks down. And you can really kind of
Speaker 1: look around at the complexity of our world today, like
Speaker 1: just like look at international banking. That's just one system
Speaker 1: in the larger, complex, globalized system. So when you take
Speaker 1: these complex systems and put them together with other systems
Speaker 1: like trade, stock markets, healthcare, and then realize that all
Speaker 1: those systems make up a truly global, ultimately complex system,
Speaker 1: then you're like, actually, yeah, we're possibly even more susceptible
Speaker 1: to breaking down than the Bronze age was Yeah, which
Speaker 1: is scary to think about. But like as far as
Speaker 1: anti globalists saying like we need to undo this. That
Speaker 1: ship is sailed, don't you think. I mean, things are
Speaker 1: so interconnected and we have such a globalist world that
Speaker 1: it's you can't unwind that clock. I don't think and
Speaker 1: if you could, you can, but it would be a
Speaker 1: really rough, unpopular transition. But then what you're you're the
Speaker 1: odd man out and the rest of the world is
Speaker 1: working together. And what happens if you need help from
Speaker 1: the rest of the world. How easy is it for
Speaker 1: you to get that help? There's downsides to both globalism
Speaker 1: and nativism, right, Um, neither one is just shown to
Speaker 1: be the right way to go. And also, this is
Speaker 1: a really good point to chuck Um, there's we don't
Speaker 1: know that collapse is inevitable from complexity. We also don't
Speaker 1: know that it's it's you can reach a point of
Speaker 1: complexity where it's so complex that it actually becomes more stable.
Speaker 1: We haven't figured this stuff out yet, but either one's
Speaker 1: not inevitable collapse or success. So um, the best thing
Speaker 1: we can do is just invest in ways to be resilient. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think you can even narrow that down
Speaker 1: to like secession these days, where it's like, good luck,
Speaker 1: what's that? Man? Have you really thought this through or
Speaker 1: do you just like the idea of giving the finger
Speaker 1: to the rest of the country. Yeah, for sure. I
Speaker 1: mean that's a great question. I'd love to hear it
Speaker 1: answered too. Yeah, and like I really thought out way,
Speaker 1: Like here's how that would work, exactly right. Everybody's gonna
Speaker 1: wear the same kind of flame shirt. It's gonna be awesome, Seattle.
Speaker 1: I was thinking more Kansas, the legit plannel shirts. So
Speaker 1: what else? It's another lesson too, right, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I think a more hopeful lesson is that, like you
Speaker 1: kind of touched on earlier at the beginning, when when
Speaker 1: you have diverse groups of people interacting, like what usually
Speaker 1: has followed is affluence in peace, and that is that's
Speaker 1: what happened here for a long time as well, right,
Speaker 1: even more than just the Late Bronze Age. After that collapse,
Speaker 1: I think the Phoenicians really kind of rose to power,
Speaker 1: and they were a seafaring people, and one of the
Speaker 1: first things they did was start peddling their purple dyes
Speaker 1: that they were famous for um around the Mediterranean, and
Speaker 1: they ended up establishing new trade networks with other groups
Speaker 1: that had survived the collapse and started to rise to power,
Speaker 1: and so the whole thing began again. It's so funny
Speaker 1: to think about. It's like everyone's like, what is that,
Speaker 1: and they're like, it's purple. Right, people are going to
Speaker 1: go wild for this stuff, and new civilizations will be
Speaker 1: built because people are so wild about this color. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's true. I mean that was a huge driver
Speaker 1: of it. Purple dye. Yeah, isn't it amazing? It is?
Speaker 1: But but the upshot is, sorry everybody that when we
Speaker 1: when we it almost seems like it's it's just going
Speaker 1: to happen, whether we like it or not. The more
Speaker 1: we kind of grow as a people and grow technol
Speaker 1: technologically and an intelligence, we seek out other people to
Speaker 1: interact with and trade with and become more prosperous with,
Speaker 1: and if we do it peacefully, then prosperity follows. That
Speaker 1: seems to be a huge part of not just the
Speaker 1: Bronze Age but also the what emerged from the Dark
Speaker 1: Age that followed after the Late Bronze Age collapse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a big cycle. But if it is a
Speaker 1: big cycle, then it makes you nervous, because then that
Speaker 1: means we're due for a collapse at some point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: unless we've become so resilient and um um a redundant
Speaker 1: in our system that we are going to avoid a
Speaker 1: collapse from now on. I don't think that's right. I
Speaker 1: don't think we've reached that yet, but I think it's
Speaker 1: possible to reach that. Did you touch on any of
Speaker 1: this in the End of the World with Josh Clark? Um,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. No, not really, all right, thank
Speaker 1: you for that plug though sure, you know I listen
Speaker 1: to about half of those. It was too smart for me, bs,
Speaker 1: it really was. It's not like I can't see this
Speaker 1: guy's voice. No, it's not that. What about there's one more,
Speaker 1: chuck though, we have to touch on it's a climate change.
Speaker 1: It's a big, a big deal. It's a big enough
Speaker 1: deal that it's possible that drove the collapse of our
Speaker 1: first attempts at civilization. So it's not necessarily a lesson
Speaker 1: of what to do in there, but at the very least,
Speaker 1: it's like a hey, pay attention to what's going on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we've seen, you know, when natural disasters happen large
Speaker 1: groups of people moving to another place on mass. I
Speaker 1: mean those are sort of more micro examples of the
Speaker 1: bigger picture that happened back then. But that's what happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and sometimes people stay. Yeah, some people make it. The
Speaker 1: people who like it really hot and wet, Yeah, not me. No,
Speaker 1: you like it cold, don't you like? Genuinely I love
Speaker 1: the cold weather, but I don't like, you know, six
Speaker 1: month winters. It's not like I'm have any desire to
Speaker 1: move to Minnesota and endure that stuff. But I do
Speaker 1: love cold weather. It suits me. That's great. You got
Speaker 1: anything else? They got no else. Well, since Chuck I
Speaker 1: was talking about how cold weather suits him, that triggers
Speaker 1: the collapse of this episode into the dark age of
Speaker 1: a listener mail. All Right, I'm gonna call this oh
Speaker 1: boy crossword puzzle follow up. This is a very dark age.
Speaker 1: This is the episode where people don't like us, even
Speaker 1: having the most minor of disagreement. I mean, I had
Speaker 1: people writing in they were like, you need to get
Speaker 1: rid of Chuck. That smug soob it's crazy. I was like, jeez,
Speaker 1: I hope I'm not on that cent of ice. No,
Speaker 1: you're Some people's opinions that are playing. So here's a
Speaker 1: couple of a couple of things here from two people. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: love the show. I was excited to hear you talk
Speaker 1: about crosswords. Josh talked about how all crosswords are symmetrical,
Speaker 1: and Chuck said today's was not. I thought it was
Speaker 1: cool because I distinctly remembered the New York Times February sixteenth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three was not symmetrical. After Chuck and Josh
Speaker 1: took a second look, Chuck saw he was a mistaken
Speaker 1: and the crossword did have symmetry. So the episode is
Speaker 1: probably recorded on some other day. All of this to say,
Speaker 1: asymmetric crosswords are very rarely published, but if they are,
Speaker 1: they like they have some trick or rebus in order
Speaker 1: to solve it. We didn't talk about rebus is in
Speaker 1: the show. No, but you wanted to, right, Did you
Speaker 1: want to mention that what that is? Yeah? A rebus
Speaker 1: is something I didn't know about when I started out,
Speaker 1: which is I put you at a very distinct disadvantage
Speaker 1: because it's when you include multiple letters in a single square.
Speaker 1: And John Hodgeman told me about it, and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: how are you supposed to know? He said, well, once
Speaker 1: you know it's a thing, you might be on the
Speaker 1: lookout if you're like, for sure, you know a clue,
Speaker 1: but it's not fitting. And I was like, well, how
Speaker 1: do you even do that on a phone? And there's
Speaker 1: a little Rebus button? Oh yeah, whatever, new Well it's
Speaker 1: on like the second keyboard, like the one you go
Speaker 1: to for numbers and symbols and things. Yea, it says Rebus.
Speaker 1: Oh really, I've never noticed them. Well it's it's only
Speaker 1: when you're doing the crossword. It just pops up. So anyway,
Speaker 1: that was from Alec, and then this is from David,
Speaker 1: and we got a bunch of other people that explained
Speaker 1: why I was getting tripped up because what you were
Speaker 1: describing was radial symmetry. Okay, yeah, right, which is rotational
Speaker 1: symmetry if you rotate an empty crossword one hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty degrees and it looks the same I was looking at.
Speaker 1: I think there are four types of symmetry. I was
Speaker 1: looking at whatever the one is called. Maybe it is
Speaker 1: called mirror symmetry. I don't remember where it's the exact
Speaker 1: same on the left and right. And that's why I
Speaker 1: was like, no, it's not I'm looking at it. So
Speaker 1: you were describing radial symmetry, and David from Snowy, Montreal
Speaker 1: wrote that, along with a bunch of other people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that helped me feel better that I wasn't crazy.
Speaker 1: And now I know there are four types of symmetry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the one that includes all four types is very pleasing.
Speaker 1: That's why they call it super symmetry. No, really, no,
Speaker 1: it's just I think symmetry has to do a string theory,
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure we should do an episode on
Speaker 1: string theory once. Would you? Would you be willing to
Speaker 1: give it a shot with me? Right after I retire?
Speaker 1: You can do that deal? Well, Thanks a lot to
Speaker 1: smart Alec and smart David for writing in to let
Speaker 1: us know what the deal was and why we were miscommunicating,
Speaker 1: and everybody calmed down. Chuck and I love each other,
Speaker 1: don't worry about that, and we both love Jerry, so
Speaker 1: calm down. Agree. If you want to send us a
Speaker 1: listener mail, you can send it via email too. Stuff
Speaker 1: podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
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