335. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Solving The Mystery of The Collapse (Ep 4)

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to MPa Club at www.mpaapoduk.com Hello and welcome to MPaI with me, Anita Arlin. And me, William Durinpool. Now over the next three episodes what we're going to do is we're going to take you to the place we've been promising quite some time because for the last three episodes we've been talking about the bronze age collapse and here it is. We've seen those sophisticated interconnected fingers that stretch in between these different kingdoms making this tapestry world and it's been a chance for us to explore my scene. It's been a chance to explore Troy and to examine how Homer perhaps preserved the memories of a lost world if not the actual facts of what happened which was a shock to me. So that's what we're going to do. That's why we're here to understand what really happened today. And to guide us through this territory we have the wonderful Eric Klein, Professor Eric Klein whose books have kept me very happy over Christmas. I read both of them in Kerala and just finished the last chapter and the last one today and they are absolutely wonderful. 1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed, there's been a massive international bestseller and after 1177 BC comes with an even rarer thing which is a nice quote from my friend Nassim Nicholas Tullib who's not known for his happy adjectives. He had one who follows him onto it. Well, no, he's the rassable fellow when he wants to be. But here he is and he loved this book. I've had a long chat with him about it after 1177 BC and Eric you have a third volume plan. You just let slip. I do. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here and it's wonderful to talk about my favorite period in history. But yes, I do have a third book in the unintended trilogy as I'm calling it that I'm working on now. Stay tuned for after after 1177. Is that actually the title of the name? No, I suggested that. No, it's going to be called 776 BC, the clashing of civilizations, thousands of Greeks, Persons and Greeks and Athenians and Spartans and everybody fighting everybody. Well, I'm delighted. I'm delighted. I like your title. I mean, it could have been, you know, the rest is 1177. It's a theme on this podcast. Well, so well done for picking something very unique. Now, your book argues that the collapse wasn't caused by a single factor. You call it a perfect storm of catastrophes. But before we get into the causes, I've always wanted to know what it would feel like to live in that kind of collapse. What did it look like for the people living in these places? What was happening around them? It's a good question. I think in terms of whether some of them would have even realized what was happening, I think for some, it was in hindsight. They went, uh-oh, what just happened. But it's a pretty dramatic story. It happened, I think, with a pretty shocking speed. I mean, 500 years, they had been doing quite well and then within 20, 30, 40, 50 years at most, everything is basically gone. The network that connected them all has broken. We're talking like between 1,200 and 1,150 BC. Some were in there and, well, I mean, what happened? The hit tights fell. The Mycenaean palaces were all destroyed. Lots of cities in the Levant and elsewhere are burnt. Egypt makes it through, but barely. It's weakened. Cyprus temporarily devastated. What there was, it was a complete systems collapse, a complete failure of the system. And it took them a while. I mean, a while, it took them up to 400 years to recover and get the network back up there. So, we're looking at a huge population decline. Used to be thought that up to 90% of the people in Greece had died. Now it's been ratcheted back. So only 40 to 60% died. Only. Exactly. Same with Mesopotamia. At one point, there was an estimate that about 75% of the population died there. Again, that's been ratcheted back. The other thing is literacy. That disappears in Greece. It's got to come back courtesy of the Phoenicians. All the trade networks that they had so carefully built up, those were broken. That collapses. And we've got all the centralized economies and such. They take a hit. Some of them collapse completely. And a lot of places, including like Greece, they revert to lower social, political, economic conditions. They basically have to rebuild from the ground up. Others come through a bit better, but we'll talk about that. But this was a catastrophe. I do call it a perfect storm in the book. I also call it a series of unfortunate events. Very lemony SNKs of you. Exactly. For lemony SNKs, yes. I have a game I play with the editors and publishers to see if I can slip pop culture references past them. So yeah, I have a series of unfortunate events. I also, at one point, I say resistance was futile. Oh my goodness. Look at you, Trekkie. So Willie, did you even get that? We are both. I got it. I got it. I was impressed by that. But there's another one. You also have house and cards. Yes. So, and then after 1177, I worked in three or four references to Hamilton. You're so cool. I just, I have fun with it. I'm like, well, we decided during the pandemic when we were watching Hamilton every night that there was a quote from Hamilton for every situation. So yeah, I mean, after 1177, empires rise, oceans fall or something like that. Yeah. Anyway, anyway, so this was a catastrophe. I mean, is this you in rebellion against some of university presses and finally, we allowed it right what as you want to? You could say that or it could just be me having fun. These are both Princeton University Press. So you're still within the, within the fold. I mean, I'm genuinely thinking here, Eric, that we would turn reading your books into some kind of drinking game. I'm just saying, I'm so thrilled with this. The dark ages, let's cheer it up with a drinking game. It would be very easy. I'd be happy to work with you on that. Yes. This could be a source of a fortune to need you. You're going to put your finger on it. My students on the excavations did that at one point. I was lecturing and every time I mentioned an Egyptian Pharaoh's name, they would drink. I realized this about halfway through. And so I just at one point I went, so we're here on the new kingdom. So that's how Chapsa, Tommosas III, King Tartraim and there you go. Why did I never have professors like you? I am miserable now. Let's go through these different causes of the collapse, Eric, that you call it a, I wouldn't say a cluster. A cluster fudge. A cluster fudge was the very word I was thinking for. But let's go through them one by one because each one of them has been raised before by different scholars. And different decades have gone by. Different things have become more fashionable. I mean, I think drought and climate change is the one that's getting all the grouts from the university departments 10 years ago, maybe less so in the current climate. But let's go through them. Drought. Yes. So excellent question. And when I was in college back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was told that the sea people had caused it and they were the, they were the sole cause. That was it. But then over the years, as you say, other people have suggested. In fact, they were suggesting things over the past decades. They were just not in favor as much. So one of the things that I did in the book was to look at each of the suggestions and look at the pros and cons. So people, yes. So people suggested invaders like the sea peoples. So suggested an earthquake or an earthquake storm had done it. And in fact, a most noranide contributed some of that information. Drought and famine. Yeah, that's kind of the flavor of the moment. But it's not necessarily hopping on the climate change bandwagon, if you will. There is very good evidence that there was drought back then. Internal rebellion frequently comes hand in glove with all of that. So when I looked at these, I was trying to figure out which one of them caused it. And I ultimately concluded, yes, they all did all of them, all of them. Yes. And in fact, I think it works because any one of them was survivable. I mean, if you get hit with an earthquake, there are going to be thousands of people that die, but it's not going to bring down your society. Same thing with drought or famine. A lot of people are going to suffer, but your civilization is not going to come to an end and so on. And then I was thinking, okay, but what if they all happen in rapid succession or if almost simultaneously so that you can't recover from one before you got the next? So let's say hypothetically, you've got a drought that is causing famine that causes people to start migrating, looking for a better world and then toss in disease, which frequently accompanies all of this and then all of a sudden you're hit with an earthquake as well. So you can survive one of those, maybe even two of them, maybe even three if you're pushing to luck, but what if you have four of them all in within a decade or so? At some point, you're going to throw up your hands and just say, okay, enough and you will go ahead and collapse. And I actually think this may be getting our head of ourselves, but the financial crisis that hit Wall Street and the world back in 2008. What if that had happened a dozen years later? What if it had coincided with the beginning of the pandemic? I think we wouldn't be here talking right now. I think that would have been enough to put us all down. So same thing back then. I think the individual catastrophes were survivable, but you put them all together. That's that. So when you talk about drought, I mean, then describing it that way, it's more of a mega drought than a drought. Is there actual evidence? Can you sift through piles of ash and rubble and find evidence that says, actually, you know what? There really was this systemic failure in multiple different areas. The answer is yes, but you don't have to sift through the ash and all of that. What you actually have to do is go down into lakes and pull up the sediment that has accumulated at the bottom of the lake. You need to take a look at wood, like structures that were built of wood and look at the tree rings. In fact, very recently, there was a study published that showed that wood from the site of Gordian in Turkey, ancient Anatolia, as in Gordian knot, as in the Gordian knot, as in our friend Alexander the Great, exactly, that there was a drought that hit there from, I think, 1188 to 1186, something that specific. If you go into a cave and look at the stalagmites, there's one particular one that's been studied. Brilliant. Yeah, the stalagmites stopped growing because there wasn't enough water. And you can date a stalagmite like you can date a tree ring. Yes. Absolutely. Yes, we are advanced enough that we can do that. Yeah. We can now show there's a map that David Kaniyevsky from France published in 2019. It's a little red dot, so all over the map. And it goes from northern Italy, all the way over to Iran in modern terms, and from Turkey down to Egypt again in modern terms. And there are dozens of red dots. Each of them marking a place that a scientific report has shown there was a drought. And like you said, it's not just a drought, it's a mega drought. 150 to 300 years in some places that it lasted from 1200 down to 900 or 1250 to 950. Somewhere in there, we've got a huge drought that goes on. They've tested underneath Lake Tiberius, Sea of Galilee, the shores of the Dead Sea. I mean, the evidence is coming from everywhere. So I referred earlier to jumping in the bandwagon of climate change. This is not, this is scientific studies. This is also using pollen analysis to see that the plants are adapting to a more erud condition. And then we can see it all change back by about 850, 800 BC. And that is what allows them to get back up on their feet everywhere. So this is really impressive data that we've got. And it's from multiple sources and many different places. So it's extremely believable. And this is something, I mean, the idea of suggesting drought is not new. It was already suggested by Reese Carpenter, who was a professor at Brynmar. In the 1960s, he said the Maesanians had come to an end because of a drought. And he didn't have the full data. He had some migration ideas, things like that. We now have the data that he wanted. So he was right. Drought did contribute to the end of the Maesanians and pretty much to everybody else. So we now have the hard science, which is really interesting. And documentary evidence, do we have letters and canaes on tablets talking about food shortages and descriptions? Wow, demanding. You want textual evidence too. I mean, I know you've been generous, but yes, well, you are in luck because yes, we have that too. We do. We have the text written on the clay tablets and different people, different societies. We have Hittite kings and Hittite queens mentioning food shortages, send grain. It's a matter of life and death. We now have relatively, well, they're not new tablets. They're old tablets. But they have been newly translated into Cypher. They were just found at the site of Ugarit a couple of decades ago on the coast of what is now northern Syria, the French have been excavating at Ugarit since the 1920s or so. I'm proud to have spent a night in a sleeping bag in a trench into Garrett in my twenties. I am, I am dutifully envious of you. His host of sleeping bag stories. It's a family show. So we might do a compilation of Christmas, but there are a few. OK, well, you will be happy to know that in 2016, they published a new set of letters. And one of them, the king of Ugarit says that there is a famine in their city and is asking the Egyptian Pharaoh for grain and the Egyptian Pharaoh, we know. Actually, he sends, we have sent some grain, but he sends 7,000 dried fish and textiles. The dried fish, I can see that would help the famine. I'm not sure where the textiles come in, but maybe their sleeping bags were not warm enough. I don't know, let me coat kind of thing. I'm so, I mean, look, if everybody is short of food and they depend on each other, then I mean, it's, as you said, with the banking crisis, you know, if you depend on your neighbors to export food to you to make up any shortfalls, but nobody's got anything, that's a desperate, desperate situation to be in. Yeah, if you can't turn to your neighbor for help because they don't have anything, in fact, in terms of knowing whether they were collapsing, I actually think that that would have given them some idea that things were not going well. But the Egyptians also seem to have had some idea, because there is a study that was published a couple years ago showing that the Egyptians were crossbreeding their cattle at that time. Really? And they were taking their usual cattle and crossbreeding with Zebu or Zebu cattle. That's what we get in India, the Humpt Cattle. Yeah, absolutely. And they are able to survive in much more air in conditions. So the Egyptians are doing this and it looks like they were overplanting if I can use that term. Some of the areas that they were in control of in Canaan at the time, which means that they were trying to get enough grain for themselves and for the other people. What's interesting is they are shipping grain not only to their friends, but also to some of their erstwhile enemies. Everybody in a time of need, okay fine, we'll help you out here. We'll go to war later, but for now, here's some grain. Who do they ship them to? Who, which enemies? Well, like the Hittites. I mean, they're on and off again. And at this time, as we see, for example, in the Amarna letters from the 14th century BC, there are a bunch of little proxy wars that are being fought in Canaan, basically on behalf of the Egyptians and the Hittites. And that's going to break out, of course, in the Full-Scare War by the time of the Battle of Kadesh, 1279, 1274. But for right now, we've got proxy wars going on. Battle of Kadesh is one of the greatest set pieces in your book. It's ambushes that the Egyptians get ambushed. They get ambushed and it's disinformation. It's one of the first examples where, yeah, where the Hittites send out two spies knowing they're going to be captured and have told them. By the way, we're leaving. And so when the Egyptians capture the spies, they say, yeah, the Hittites have gone back up to Anatolia. When, in fact, they were still right there behind Kadesh. And yeah, anyway, so we've got people that are, you know, sometimes erstwhile enemies, but also helping themselves out. Are they hungry? I mean, are you getting the sense that, you know, things are so desperate that people are, you know, sort of skin and bone on the streets? And, you know, the civil unrest that goes with that, do you get all of that? We don't get that per se like that. And you wonder how much is exaggeration. I mean, we did have previously in the previous publications, we had a letter, one of the firms in Ugarit had a branch office further inland in Syria in the site of Emar. And the representative in Emar says there's a famine here. If you don't send food, everyone's going to starve. So we had known about that already. But, you know, you talk that up. Is that just some guy, you know, embellishing and exaggerating? But now we have this newly published letter in Ugarit itself saying, yeah, we've got famine here as well. And there's a couple other letters again, Ugarit, because we have at least three different archives there from private merchants that were also working with the palace. And they're saying your citizens are going to die if you don't feed us. And then we come to the original cause in the sense, the one that you were, that was still being touted when you were at college, the sea peoples, which is a modern construction. The Egyptians don't talk about the sea peoples as such. They give individual names, don't they? To various groups, some of whom seem to come by seas, that right? Yes, absolutely. It's our name for them. The sea peoples, actually, it was some of the early French Egyptologists that made it up. The Egyptians themselves tell us the exact names for the nine different groups that come in two waves. First wave comes in 1207 BC during the reign of Merneptah. And then the second wave comes in. I feel I should now down a shot of vodka. There you go. Right. Well, get that get that ready because the second wave comes in the time of Ramses III. There you go. There you go. Right. And that is 1177. So you can now know where the title comes from. That's Medinette Habou, this wonderful description, which has a massive picture of the Pharaoh, even the macro picture. There's little ones too out there, but there's one massive picture of him sort of taking people by the scruff of their necks and sort of dashing them somewhere. Always, always, but we also have a nice picture of the naval battle that is fought because in that second invasion in 1177, the Pharaoh again, this is if we can believe what he says, but I think it's pretty believable. They come by land and by sea. Right. It's kind of like Paul Revere, you know, one if I land two of by sea, but they come by both. There's a land battle and a naval battle, which is probably fought in the Nile Delta. But anyway, Ramses and Mrenept have both tell us the names. So we've got like the Poleset, the Tejeker, the Shekolas, the Denion, the Weshash, and we've been playing linguistic games for a hundred years, trying to figure out who these people are. I bred various articles of yours, Eric, where you go into some detail about these people, even more than you do in the book. Do you want to give us a quick summary of where you think these guys come from? Because it's a good game. This is another good to keep game. Yeah. Yes. All right. And it is just a game. It's a guessing game. But for instance, the Shekolas, what I usually tell my audience, what I'm lecturing is, can you name me another place in the Mediterranean? And I'll give you a hand Western Mediterranean. That sounds a lot like Shekolas, like who has the same consonants that might be in there? I know the answer to this is you all you all the contestants of this one. Okay. Let me add in another because this will help you. There's another group called the Shardana or the Shardin. Where is the place near that sounds like Shardana? Just tell the class, Eric. Okay. Okay. Oh, man. Okay. Shardana, Sardinia. Sardinia. Right. He's actually shouting out. Okay. Shekolas or Sickles, Sicily. Oh. And penicet, Philistines, Palestine. Palestine. Well, they came up with our Joaquin episode. We did it. We did a Gaza series, Eric, where we had a big palisette presence in the joke. Okay. Good. But the question is, did they come from there or did they go there after they lost? So which way did they go? The early French Egyptologist thought that the sea peoples went to the Western Mediterranean and settled there after they were beaten by the Egyptians and then gave their names there. Nowadays, many, including myself, reversed that and say, no, they came from the Western Mediterranean and came to Egypt. But then there are two more, which I'll just mention, the Denyan and the Equish. And the Denyan, could they be Homer's Danaan's? Oh, that'd be fun. The Equish, could they be Homer's Achaeans? And they don't come at the same time. One comes in the first wave and one comes in the second wave. So do we have groups of mycenians in both waves with two names, just like Homer has two names for them. So we may have them as well. In that inscription that we talked about at Medinat Habu and this picture on the side of the picture, there's a crucial clue, isn't there? You've got as well as all this sea battle and stuff going on, perhaps in the Nile Delta. You've got pictures of wagons filled with men, women and children. And you compare that to the Oki's and grapes of roath. These guys leaving a drought and heading off looking for peaches to pick in California. This is the kind of world we're talking. Yes, exactly. They're migrating. These are not warriors just coming in and conducting a raid and they're going back home with loot. These are people, and as you say, we can see it in Ramses III on the wall of Medinat Habu. We've got the women. We have the children. We have the ox crates. We have the Samsonite luggage. They are moving. And yes, I do say it's probably comparable to the Dustball 1930s, United States, moving out of Oklahoma, heading for California. And I think that's the case here. They're fleeing the drought. They're trying to move to a better place. Okay. So fleeing, I mean, that sort of sounds very, very passive, but sometimes these migrations through necessity as you're describing them, they lead to a great deal of destruction. I mean, you yourself have excavated it. Megito, anyone who has watched the Omen since you like a popular reference or no, Megito is quite important. This site of Armageddon, if you read a Bible and care about that more than popular culture. So I mean, what does archaeology actually show about, you know, the transitions of people and the destruction that they bring in their wake? So migration versus invasion, this is an interesting question. And in fact, it pops up at the beginning of this equal of after 1177, where I take on the Dorian invasion. And I say, look, it's not an invasion at best. It's a migration. We should explain that little reference quickly. These are the guys who pass through Greece and may be responsible for extinguishing my senior or part of that old jigsaw. Yes, that's what the later historians like Herodotus through Cidudies, they claim the Dorians brought an end to the Mycenaeans. But archaeologically, there's no evidence for that. And so it's an invasion that doesn't look like an invasion. And I say, look, it's a migration. And, you know, that may be splitting hairs, but invasions are usually, you know, quick, dirty, fast. Migrations can take quite a long time. So I think here with the sea peoples and everything, it's more of a migration, but you're right. They are not always passive. Sometimes they're aggressive. And we can see this at some of the cities. And again, let me use Ugarit, where we have the archives. That's one of the reasons they're preserved is because that city is burned to the ground. There are arrowheads in the walls. There are bodies in the streets. When the French excavated, there was a meter of destruction, ash and wood and everything else. And Ugarit was then abandoned for 400 to 600 years. And we actually, one of the new tablets that was just published says the enemy has overrun our port city. And they are advancing on Ugarit, send me help, send me reinforcements. Well, they obviously didn't get there because Ugarit is burned to the ground. And there are other cities as well. Okay, and let's just remind people of Ugarit in today's money, is Northern Syria, is what we're talking about. And is this sort of capitalized paradise? It's this sort of Switzerland, where full of bankers and merchants are sending out expeditions, maybe not Switzerland, what would be a better analogy? Where's the big sort of mercantile hub today? Guanzhou, it's like the Chinese sort of mega cities and richer than anywhere else. And sending out sort of mobile department stores that may be the Unubarun shipwreck that Joe tells about. It turns out that Ugarit was so important that when it and the hitites went down at about the same time, our computer simulations have showed that that's what brought the whole network down, was Ugarit and the hitites coming down at the same time, which is interesting. But you mentioned Magito, Armageddon, Biblical Armageddon. You've actually dug there. You've held a trial in your hand. I was there for 20 years. My kids have shirts that say I survived Armageddon. Yes. But yes, there is one of the levels. I mean, Magito has 20 levels, one on top of another. It's like Troy, isn't it? It's one of these archaeological sites. It just goes on and on and on. Exactly. Troy's got nine levels. Magito's got 20. Wow. And level number seven at Magito is destroyed at exactly this time. We don't know what caused it or who caused it, but it is one of the cities that is destroyed right now. Can I just ask what is it like standing in a place like Magito? When you are standing on top of layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of human history, do you even think about it or you just sort of so focused on this tiny square of where I'm actually with my trial trying to find something? You feel it with every step you take. Absolutely. Every step you take, every breath you make, you know, drink. Yes. I actually a couple years ago, I published a book on University of Chicago's excavations at Magito in the 20s and 30s, but I wrote it also from the point of view of having dug there. I was there in 1994 to 2014. And I said, as you're walking up the mound, which is now 70 feet tall, it had been 110 feet tall, but now it's 70 because archaeologists have taken off the layers. I said, every step you take, you can feel what's underneath you and you're wondering, what am I stepping on? Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. There's no feeling like it. And same thing like with Troy, when I go to Troy and I'm wandering around, I'm like, what am I stepping on? What is underneath my feet? If I stopped and dug right where I'm standing, what would I find? And for me, that's the magic of archaeology. That's why I keep, you know, going into the field every year when I can and excavating. It's this mystery of what is there that's left to be discovered? And there's a lot left. I mean, oh boy, yeah, I mean, don't even get me started. We've probably found maybe 10% of what there is to be found. Wow. People ask me, is there anything left to find? I'm like, we haven't even started. Yeah, Eric, let's go back to Ogarit again from Magiddo because one of the only moments I felt you was spoiling one of my favorite stories in your book is that this Joe has in her book and the Elder Books, you get this. The story of the Kuneiform tablet was still being baked when the Raiders come and it's in the oven and the reason we have it is it's in the oven. But you say it wasn't in the oven. It was just fell from the ceiling above or something. I know. I know. There was such a lovely story and then we punctured the balloon. Yes. Okay. So that goes back to when I was being taught about the C.P. Pills and all that. One of the critical texts is this letter written on a clay tablet that was found at Ogarit and translated and published very early on. I mean, 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And it says something like we have seen the or the ships of the enemy have come. They are burning all of the cities. My troops are away up in Anatolia. My ships are away. I am undefended. Please send help before it's too late. And the story went that the tablet was found by the French excavators in the kiln ready to be baked because frequently you would bake these before you sent them because first of all, it helped preserve it so that it wouldn't shatter but also so that nobody could change the text. Right. If you've just written it on regular clay, you can smear water on and rewrite it. So the idea was it was being baked in the kiln and the invaders came and burnt the before it could be sent. And they're like, and it was incredibly dramatic. Well, when later archaeologists went back and re-studied the notes and everything turns out it's not quite as dramatic. That it's not in a kiln. It was probably in a basket, a wicker basket. I love that you can tell this. It's fantastic. Yeah. And when the palace was destroyed, that basket fell from the second floor down into the courtyard, turning upside down with all the clay tablets still in it. The basket itself disintegrated, but it left the tablets in a pile that looked like they had been in a kiln even though they hadn't been. So if that means that it wasn't in a kiln or anything, that means all sorts of things or implies all sorts of things. One, it might be a copy of a letter that had been sent or it may be the real letter, but which destruction was it? And which raid was it? 1207 or was it 1177? And did it get sent? Did it not get sent? Anyway, the story kind of collapses a bit. It was wonderful. Oh, you love a collapse, you're all about the collapse. I know. I know. But we also have a saying in archaeology, if it's too good to be true, it's probably not true. And that story turned out to be too good to be true. But we now have these other ones where we have the new tablet, newly translated tablet, that does actually say the enemy has overrun Rossib and Haney, the port city. Now coming towards the sixth boat, surrounded. That's right. Exactly. So now we, you know, that replaces it. And this is a good story. But I could happily throttle the ancient scribe because instead of saying the Poleset are here, the Seculess are here, the Equest are here. He simply says the enemy. I'm like, could you tell us who the enemy is, please? No, the enemy. But I suspect that he didn't know who they were either. Like he didn't run down and say, excuse me, excuse me, before you kill everyone, who are you? Oh, yeah, we're the Sec Less. We're going to leave a calling card. So we don't know who it was. But we do know that it happened. One thing I thought when I had that was that six boats seems rather little to destroy a major trading city. Yes, and no, yes, and no. No, if you look, for example, at the story of the Trojan War, and yes, we have a huge armada that goes over to Rescue Hill and right, the face that launched a thousand ships, exactly. And six seems a bit of a swiz. It does. It does. But if I may input right here, it wasn't a thousand. I actually counted in the catalog of ships. I was very bored. I was taking the train from London down to Penzance. That's a long trip. Yes, a long trip with the Buffy car and everything else. But I had at that time, what was the new translation by Fagels of the Iliad? And so I, one thousand and sixty seven ships. So I've been trying to get the hell out of the face that launched one thousand sixty seven ship. It hasn't caught on, but I'm trying. But if you look at the earlier, there is an earlier expedition to Troy by Heracles in the time of Leo Mieden, right? Like Prime's father, if I remember correctly, could be the grandfather. And he has six ships. And that's it. And he's X Troy. But he's Heracles. He's Hercules. I mean, he's Lydde, exactly. But that's only six ships. He's a Marvel superhero. He's a Hikin. We, I mean, we're told there are what, 50 people per ship. So, I don't know about even six ships. It's not that small. It's like 300 people. So saying that six or seven ships have been spied was a goodly number. But we even have gaslighting back then because one of the texts from I think it's the governor of Cyprus to the King of Bulgaria says, actually, are you sure they're not your own people rebelling against you? Have you checked his on? I'm like, are you sure your people don't hate you? Exactly. Exactly. Yes, Cybrids. We, we better take a break, Eric, but we could go on like this without drinking games all afternoon. But we're taking a break. We've been back to take this food. Hello everybody and welcome to the Book Club, a new podcast from Goldhanger hosted by me, Dominic Sambrook. And me, Tabitha Cyrod. As some of you may know, I've been Dominic's producer on the rest of history and we even did a mini series last year about all things books. And since we enjoyed that so much, we have decided to roll it out as its own show. So, to be coming out every Tuesday, we'll be doing a different book each time and digging into all the stories behind them. And we are going to be talking about the historical contexts behind some of the greatest and most famous books of all time. We're going to be digging into the remarkable people behind them, the unexpected stories behind the stories, and also unraveling the plot of each book a bit and delving into the depths of the story. Now, you don't have to have read the books to listen to the show, but we hope that by the end of each episode, you will be able to pretend to people that you've read them, that is the key thing. And either way, whether you read them or not, we hope that you'll learn lots of fascinating facts, you'll be lots of great stories, and maybe Tabitha the odd laugh. We will be looking at the really Gothic bodice rippers like weathering heights and Frankenstein, as well as iconic stories like the Great Gatsby or Little Women. And then also some more modern stuff. So, Game of Thrones, Normal People, The Hunger Games, Hamlet, or Manor of Exciting Stories. So, please join us on our journey into all things books, wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for the book club every Tuesday, and hopefully we will see you there. Hi, this is Hannah Remykel from Gohangers, The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. 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For more information about cancer research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Welcome back. So before the break, Eric was happily taking some of our most cherished stories about the Bronze Age and smashing them to pieces like the clay tablars that didn't come from where we thought they'd come. Can I, I mean, at the risk of you ruining this as well, talk about some of the sculptures that have been found in ancient Egypt. Now these seem to be sculptures of battles with the penises, and at the edge of them, there are really interesting things in these sculptures, because you have women and children and cats, which is exactly what you were talking about before, which is the migration of people with everything that they loved and everything that they had. I mean, is that real? Am I reading that wrong or am I completely wrong about that as well? You're not wrong, but I will correct one thing. Good. You wouldn't be Eric. If you did, that's not cool. Then Eric, let's change the word. They're not sculptures, because they're not like freestanding. What they are, it's a drawing. I mean, it's a picture that is inscribed into the wall. I mean, they put the picture on the wall. So you're looking at a drawing, basically. And not only do we see the naval battle, it's so detailed that people have written books about what the ships look like and all of that. You've gone into some fat detail yourself about the whole helmets and the feathered helmets and the different, are they different, are they the Shacklesche and the, and the Panicette? Yes, but there I'm leaning on my colleagues who are published on that. That's right. And I'm trusting with what they've said. But we've also got these women and children that we talked about with the ox skirts and the luggards and all of that. And so we've got what's called the push pull effect. Something is pushing them out of their own. Homeland and something else is pulling them to the new area. And I think in this case, it's drought for both of them. And what they didn't realize, let's say for, you know, for argument's sake that they are coming from Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, which is where I think they started. And there's a drought there. We now have evidence definitely for a drought in that region. What they did not realize is that there was also drought in the area that they were heading to. So out of the frying pan into the fire, I think is the saying, at any rate, they're looking for a new place to live. And they are pretty desperate. When they lose to the Egyptians, when especially Ramses III beats them, he says, I settled them in strongholds bound in my name, meaning that he settled them in Egypt, which, you know, was his country, but also in Canaan, because the Egyptians controlled that region. And so especially we know like Tell Door is known as a Tejeker or Sickle city, which is one of the sea peoples. We've also got further north, like up in Biblos and that area. We've got, for example, down south in Canaan. That's where it looks like the Paleset end up, because the Paleset are the Philistines, right? It's the one that we're pretty sure we know about. And the Philistines, of course, are eventually going to give their name to all of that region when the Romans come in and it becomes Syria, Palestine. Oh, right. Yeah, before that. Yes, exactly. So that is where, and of course, the Philistines, we get the Philistines pentapolis, the five cities, right? Ascolon and Ekran and Gaza and all of that. That is when they get there and the Paleset settle down, they actually seem to be, I would say, less aggressive. They seem to have assimilated and actually, and to married, yeah. And to married because there's a couple of grandkids that were excavated a decade ago in Ascolon. And the DNA shows that they are part Canaanite and part other and the computer simulation models say other is most likely Crete or Sicily or Spain. So we do know that that's where the Philistines come from. And in fact, if you look at their pottery, it's long been thought that it was degenerate Mycenaean, if I can put it that way. And degenerate, not in a bad way, meaning this looks like Mycenaean vessels, the, you know, the stirrup jars and all that. But it's made with local clay from Cyprus or roads or even in what is the Levant today. So I think, allow me, we all think that the Philistines may actually be Mycenaeans who have migrated to the Eastern Mediterranean. So we're learning a lot, but we're not there yet. There's a lot more for us to go for. In preparation for this, Eric, I went to the Philistine gallery in the British Museum last week. I was slightly disappointed because I've had Joe talk about how the Philistines are a lot less Philistines than they are made to be in the Bible that that gath and various of these cities seem to be very sophisticated. But the stuff in the British Museum was pretty cruddy. They were, they sort of, these sort of rather nasty sort of play versions of Egyptian sarcophagi with sort of rather ghoulish face masks on. They weren't great. I mean, they weren't. There's nice things you get in Mycenaean with nice ducks and buffaloes. Yes, that maybe that might be a bit harsh. The Philistines are nice, but yes, we're definitely in an era where they're having trouble, I would say. On sort of, you know, just taking this idea of systems collapse even further. Can we talk about some of the specific areas that we've been talking about? Because we've been talking about Troy and that's sort of 1200 BC. And we were talking about home, how much can he be trusted? Is he even a person? You know, everything mind blown. So what do we know actually as fact about that? What do we know and what we don't know? What we know is that we don't know a lot more than we know that it's all a mystery. It's all like you just said, is home or even a real person? Right. Exactly. Do we know what do we know about anything that appears in home being true? I mean, do we know how big Troy was? Do we know? Because I mean, Gautam was suggesting you were very upset yesterday that he was destroying your Troy. He painted it like some sort of bargain basement, it's kind of small shack. I was like, I don't know if that's not what I read. We could even get into the horse business, but he just completely produced what my idea is what Troy was. What have you found? Oh my word. All right. Well, we have, we could have like another five episodes just on this. But okay, let's see if we can unpack some of that. Okay, so you know, there as you may have already discussed, there are nine levels of Troy. So which one is Homer's Troy? It's probably either Troy six of which there were many phases. Seven A is some people they name it. So it's either six each or seven A exactly. And in fact, six H is destroyed, 90% I would say by an earthquake. I mean, 90% chance that it's an earthquake. And I think that's the case. And that's about 1300 BC somewhere in there. But then the next phase, Troy seven A is destroyed by humans. That's another example where we have unburied bodies in the streets. We've got arrowheads in the walls. And the arrowheads are a gene type. I mean, of course, when the German excavator recently back 2000, 2003 found those unspecifically a gene. That's very nice. That's specifically a gene. So I think that six H is an earthquake and seven A is the destruction. But who does the destruction? Is it the mysonians? Is it the sea peoples? Which is conceivable. And it was also, if you go back in the archaeological records, six H and seven A, seven A is a rebuilding of six H. And in fact, one of the earlier excavators, Dortfeld, Carl Blagan, from since Nadi, said to him, we shouldn't have called it seven A. It should be six I. And Dortfeld said, yeah, it should be the next level of six. But they said, by this point, it's too late. We got to call it seven A. And that dates to somewhere 1200 or 1175 from the destruction of seven A. So I do think that one of the two is Homer's Troy, but two things. One, I think Homer might have conflated the two of them because six H is a lovely, wonderful, huge city. The one that you wanted, right, with the big wealthy, yes. But seven A is that same city now destroyed and inhabited either by people under siege or by people rebuilding from an earthquake. So I tell my students when when we study this, I have an entire seminar that goes a whole semester just on Troy and the Trojan War. I say, what if it's both of them? What if it's six and seven? And Homer, who is compiling all this 400 years later, conflates the two. He tele scopes. And I mean, after all, it's you know, it's an epic. And that's where the horse comes in because there was a German scholar, Shachrmeyer in the 50s that said that the horse is a metaphor for an earthquake. Because if you think about it, you've got Poseidon as the god of earthquakes and Poseidon's animal, like Athena had the owl Poseidon has the horse. So earthquake equals Poseidon equals a horse Bingo, there's the Trojan horse. I did a while wasting time with you, Willie. I wanted to do his course. I just want to be rethinking all my life choices. Before you do that, you know, as they say, but wait, there's more. You wanted text. We have text. What we have is not just Homer, Homer's on the Greek side. You've got some Hittites stuff. I mean, exactly. From the Hittites, we've got mentions of not just one war at Troy, which they called Willusa, and not just two and not just three. We have four different conflicts that are fought in this same time period. And so my question, as I always say, not was there a Trojan war? It was like, yes, there was. Which one? Which one was Homer talking about? And just to clarify for those who haven't got the geography here, so the Hittites are sitting in sort of close to modern anchor in the middle of modern Turkey, just sort of to the northeast of anchor, is that right? Yeah, mostly to the east, but slightly northeast, but they controlled all of Anatolia at this point, all the way to the western coast. And Troy, which is near the Dardanelles, near Galipoliniere, all that sort of stuff, is on the edge of that world and not completely conquered, but sort of on the Sakleite city. Yes, there would be at various points, probably a vessel owned, you know, a vessel to the Hittites. Yes. And so that's why they were interested in, and they called it Willusa. And in fact, one of them says that the King of Willusa had been deposed by an unknown enemy, and the Hittites put them back on the throne. There's another one where they actually sign a mutual defense treaty with a guy named Alexander of Willusa. And I mean, you tell me, doesn't that sound like Alexander of Ilios, aka Paris? So people have been again debating this since about, oh, about 1911, right? More than a hundred years. It's his poshlimin, yeah, after slimmin, but just as the Hittite text were being deciphered. First Hittite text were founded about 1906 at Hattousa's. By 1916, we could read Hittite. And so already things start up where they're actually looking to see if they're mentioning the Greeks and such in the Hittite text. Eric, let me take you away from Troy now back to Egypt, because you mentioned these two ways of attacks. And let's just go into that a little bit further. The first wave of attack is interesting, isn't it? Because Maneptus Stella, the tablet that he puts up, is the first mention out of the Bible anywhere of Israel. And this is obviously a crucial marker in the sand in Middle Eastern history. So it takes us through Maneptus Stella. Am I perhaps to get right? Yes, yes, yes. And this is, it's absolutely fascinating. Yes. And in Maneptus reign in what I would call 1207 BC, I mean, the actual year depends on what chronology you're following. But Maneptus mentions the sea people's coming for the first time. But in that same year, he has an inscription that mentions Israel. And it's the first time that word is used outside the Bible. Right? What we would call an extrabiblical reference. And then in 1187, the maneptus for the second inscription, which is the one that records the battle coming down into the delta overland from Israel, Palestine, that is where you first get the palestine, which is the root of Palestinian. Yeah, Palestine is, and then Palestinian. So these two people have been rabbiics each other and who are, you know, in the headlines every single day today appear within about 13 years of each other. Yeah, things, things go back 3000 years. Yeah. Extraordinary. Right. So this inscription, which is like in his fifth year or so, 1207, I'm fascinated by the fact that the sea peoples and Israel are mentioned in the exact same year. And in fact, Maneptus seems to be to some degree much more concerned about the sea peoples than about Israel. But he has a campaign up to Canaan and he mentions Israel. Israel is laid waste. His seed is not. What's interesting about that mention is it's not, it's got a determinative before there's a sign before the name. And that sign indicates what comes next is a people rather than a place. And then he has Israel. So the people of Israel is are up there. But he also, you can then nomadic or what's the implication of something like that, which is where it's kind of interesting, especially if you think about the Exodus. You know, people have argued when did the Exodus take place? Did the Exodus take place? I mean, if you look at the Bible and add up the years, it should be 1450 BC. But that's the time of Hatshepsut and Homoesus III. There's no way. But 1250 BC fits into the general collapse that we're talking about. And so I personally think that if the Trojan and if the Exodus did take place and they're not just stories that both of them fit into this period of the collapse, in which case you do have a migration of people coming out of Egypt and going to to Canaan. So just to get this straight in my head. So then you're saying that these people that he refers to within the determinant and before it. The people of Israel. The people of Israel. But where were they running from? Do you think he doesn't say, but if they were running from anywhere, and if you believe the biblical account, they're running from Egypt. But that's not necessarily so. I mean, this has been a debate. It's debated over centuries, isn't it? Yeah. Decades for sure. But yeah, and there are some people like Israel, Finkelstein, who say, no, they were already in Canaan. The Israelites were up in the Highlands. In which case? What about the Hixas? That's another series. These are Canaanites that invaded and took over Egypt. Some scholars think that that they retreating back into Canaan is the Exodus. But that's much earlier. Yes. The Hixas take over Egypt 1720 to 1550 BC. 600 years before this. 5405. And the Egyptians expelled them. So there are some people that say the story of the Exodus is a folk memory of the expulsion of the Hixas, which happened much, much, much earlier. But yes, the Hixas do come down from Canaan. And in general, you're getting throughout history, at this early period, a lot of people coming down from what is now Israel, Palestine, Canaan then, which is much poorer to Egypt, which is the New York, the Bay Area, where all the money is made. It's the rich. But there again, we're hard pressed to find Canaanites in Egypt itself. So we got to figure out what the archaeologist is telling us versus the story. So it may well be, but I think even if the Israelites are already in Canaan, which I think is quite likely, what they do then is take advantage of the chaos. They are, again, they're taking advantage. They're anti-fragile. And they come down. I don't think the Israelites could have taken on the Canaanites by themselves. But what if the Canaanites cities like Maghito, like Hotsor, like even Jerusalem had already been destroyed because of earthquakes, the sea peoples, then the Israelites come on down. Thank you very much. We'll take it from here. We're going to be coming back to this in much more detail in our last episode with you Eric. But in the meantime, this is such a rich picture. What's so attractive about your theory is that you bring all these different elements together. You have all the different causes. And you have all the different stories. You have Troy, you have the Exodus, everything that we know from this period. And it all sort of fits together with the very neat click. Right. We dumped it all in. It's everything but the kitchen sink. And then we tried to make it fit. Right. So we're going to come back to this because this is obviously such incredible interesting stuff. And as I say, this is the perfect end. You get all the different causes that droughts the claps of urban civilization. Plus you get every movie you've ever seen about them at least. The fall of Troy, the Exodus, the whole thing. And Eric's wonderful book, 1177, the year that civilization claps, shuts click with a perfect click. Anyway, we are coming back for more with Eric in the next episode. We're going to take the story forward. But you do not have to wait a week. You can join our club. This is this is normally Anita's pitch, but I can do it today because you just want me to know this is so. Can I just say I can't accept it normally does the sales pitch, but I will do it today. And now, over to William to tell you why you should join our club. You can hear Eric immediately go on and tell you about the next exciting chapter of the Bronze Age Claps and how this whole house of cards falls down. That's all from me. William and me, Anita Arden.