At last we have all the pieces. Now it's time to put together the puzzle of how the Bronze Age collapses.
In this episode we're going to do something that we generally try to avoid here. We are going to speculate.
There's just no conclusive historical data on this or even general consensus among scholars, so today
we're going to present to you the line of reasoning that made the most sense to us and share with you one of the most
interesting theories about societal collapse that we found along the way
So here's how we see it. Everything starts with food shortages. At first these shortages are probably happening outside
what we think of as the Bronze Age world. They're probably in Europe or maybe the Eurasian Steppe but somewhere out there in the wild
food is scarce and people are starting to move.
Meanwhile harvests begin to decline in Anatolia. More food has to be traded for. Reserves start getting depleted.
Unrest begins. The underpinning of the social fabric of these societies starts to unravel.
Priests and kings, the mainstays of the social order, had one job in the eyes of the people: to make sure that the gods
granted a good harvest, and as harvests decline, people begin to talk.
Quietly at first, away from the centers of power and then more openly.
Maybe these princes and prelates and their palaces aren't what the gods want. Maybe they've even angered the gods
Then reports start coming in. Pirates in the Aegean sea.
New raiders. Strange people who no one recognizes.
Because of this, trade starts to decline. And then, one by one, the great palace centres of the Mycenaeans start to go dark.
International trade begins to come apart. The Hittites panic.
They move troops to Cyprus to secure their copper supply. Emergency smithies are set up, working day and night, to produce weapons of war.
Refugees from the Aegean start to turn up on Egyptian and Hittite shores.
They bring tales of an unstoppable tide of barbaric sea people burning everything on the coast. They talk of
melting down their sacred objects to make weapons of war. Some refugees are embraced, but many have to be turned away.
There's just no food.
There's no time to integrate these foreign peoples into society. Some leave peacefully. Others arm themselves.
If there's no sanctuary, then there is only force.
Then, something happens. The evacuation order is given for Cyprus.
Smithies are abandoned. Weapons are buried. Plans are made to return and collect these weapon caches, but no one will ever return.
Then, the dark tide reaches the mainland. Sea people crash into the Bronze Age shore.
Everywhere, there's chaos. Minor kings send desperate letters back and forth asking for help,
but there's no help to be had.
Everyone's barely contending with their own disasters. And so the international diplomatic system that they had so long relied upon
begins to break down.
Meanwhile the great chariot armies begin to fall apart too. They were designed for rich kingdoms facing each other in formal warfare.
They were meant to be rolled out once or twice a year, but this is a battle of attrition.
This is a continuous war. Not the kind of neat, organized,
singular battles that they're used to. The fighting doesn't stop. And so, expensive machines and
irreplaceably trained men are lost. And yet the sea people's numbers seem endless.
The grain stores of the giant Bronze Age cities are burnt or pillaged. Famine spreads. Disease sweeps the land.
People start to abandon the coastal cities. They retreat to the defensible points, to the mountains and the hills.
Finally, international trade breaks down completely.
The complex supply chain that allowed for the production of arms and even for the farming tools of the Bronze Age is gone.
Economic capacity nosedives, and even the ability to replace losses dwindles away.
Central authority now begins to fall apart. Many kings and local rulers are already dead.
Those who aren't have little claim to legitimacy. The armed men that they used to employ, now see a better opportunity
and join the chaos. Without the central authority to direct the command economies of the late Bronze Age,
production finally grinds to a halt. Work becomes much more primitive and localized. Kingdoms no longer exist.
Only small groups trying to find a way to get by.
At last, there is nothing left to burn. Nothing left to pillage. And so the sea peoples begin to dissipate.
Egypt and Assyria were too robust to crumble completely,
but with the rest of the world collapsing around them, even these peerless kingdoms are diminished and fall into a state of decline.
Rebuilding this will take centuries.
So what does that mean for us today?
It would be easy to see this as a morality tale. A warning against complex societies and international trade.
But I think that's too simplistic of view. The Bronze Age societies were better for their complexity. Take that complexity away,
and you're just left with that same post collapse Dark Age. It's pretty hard to collapse further than that.
Without that complexity, you don't have the high levels of production to maintain cities. To provide
better tools to workers and better arm the military. Without that complexity, you can't support a population
anywhere near the size these societies grew to. And as we see, during the collapse, once you can't support that population,
there's no nice way to bring that number down. People starve and die.
Without that complexity, we don't have the social capacity for leisure required to produce art or support innovation.
Without that complexity,
we're all left scrabbling in the dirt, or killing each other for our next meal.
And it's easy to see these societies as nicely built houses of cards.
Where removing any one piece will cause them to come crashing down.
But that's not quite accurate either. These kingdoms were actually more
resilient to minor shocks than less complex societies would have been.
A smaller less organized group of people could be wiped out by just one bad harvest.
But these kingdoms were nowhere near as vulnerable to such catastrophes. Because the kings and the priests managed and
stockpiled the grain, there were always reserves if something went wrong in the short term.
But, these complex societies are more susceptible to major shocks.
In preparing for this series, James read a number of books on how societies collapse,
and there was one particular theory that resonated with him. It was the idea of Systems Collapse.
This theory, in a very, very, simplified form, is that societies add
complexities to deal with problems. If you want better sanitation, you add a sewer system.
But, each solved problem usually comes with ongoing costs.
Now you need people to run and maintain those fancy new sewer systems.
So, as a society grows more and more complex, the ongoing cost for maintaining your society grows,
and the cost for solving new problems increases. In a normal environment, this is totally fine.
The loss of efficiency due to maintenance costs on previously solved problems is offset
by the discovery of new efficiencies, better manufacturing techniques, beneficial foreign trade, new technologies.
Solving problems often creates new efficiencies as well, and so the more complex the society,
The larger the pool of resources it has to draw from, thus it can support solving ever more expensive problems.
Unless it can't. The crux of the idea sort of lays out two ways that a society collapses.
There's a slow collapse, where the cost of maintenance eventually exceeds the society's output,
and yet going back, unsolving any of your problems, costs more than you can recoup.
This is sort of what happened to Rome. To maintain their population, Rome expanded,
but then, due in part to outside factors, the cost of garrisons for all of these places
they'd expanded to essentially grew to exceed the value holding all of those places provided.
but their society had grown to depend on so many of the resources from those places
that simply giving them up would be even more costly than not doing so.
And so, since the system couldn't be unwound or realigned, eventually it simply fell.
But there's also another kind of collapse. When a series of major problems hit all at once,
and a society is complex enough that the cost of dealing with them is very high,
the society has no recourse. All of its systems are so interconnected that it can't sacrifice any one system
to deal with problems in another. And, as pieces start to fall out of the system,
their very interconnected-ness becomes a weakness and society falls apart.
So, to me, the lesson to me is not that we should make our societies less complex
Or that we should give up everything we've achieved and go back to a more basic time.
I mean, I would rather be a person of middling means today than a wealthy person even 200 years ago.
Rich folks still had to use chamber pots back then.
You couldn't call someone far away.
Getting an orange in the middle of winter was near impossible, and a simple infection could just end your life.
Rather to me, the lessons of Bronze Age collapse teaches is that even today,
we are not invulnerable. With all of our technology and industry and military might,
we stand on a fragile edifice. We can weather shocks today
that would have destroyed earlier civilizations. Droughts, the appearance of some new disease? No problem,
we can handle it, but we still have to be careful. We have to handle these incredible cultures
we've built thoughtfully and with respect.
For today, in this modern era where we can probably weather most any crisis?
If we fool ourselves into believing that we're immune, we may go on to create so many
crises of our own that we bring about the collapse of our own systems.
See you next time.