337. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Philistines, Israelites, & Rebuilding The Levant (Ep 6)

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.mpa.orguk.com Welcome back to MPa. I'm William Durimple but I'm afraid there is no any to this week as she has got her back trouble back again and she can't sit down in front of a microphone poor woman. But we have the great compensation of the company of Professor Eric Klein who's been taking us through his extraordinary trilogy of books on the Bronze Age claps. We've followed him through the claps, through the aftermath and we're now going to talk in this final episode of our series about the recovery, the very different world that emerges after the claps. Particularly we're going to look at the Eastern Mediterranean. What happens in Israel Palestine? What happens in Lebanon, Phoenicia, the early Israelite kingdoms and the Philistines? Eric, welcome back and thank you for joining us. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to explore this period with you and I'm glad that we can actually end all of this with how people rebuild after the catastrophes. So there is light at the end of the tunnel if you will. And it is a very different world. It feels completely different with different names and a very different looking world to the world we had when we opened with this. Yeah, it's a new world order. It's fundamentally a very different world from what had existed before the collapse, what had existed in the late Bronze Age. Now in the Iron Age, all of the great palace centers are gone. The international diplomatic networks have broken down. The long distance trade was cut. There were supply chain shortages. Literacy disappeared in many areas, especially Greece. What else? Population, population levels declined significantly. Many fewer occupied sites in the early Iron Age as compared to the late Bronze Age. Population claps across the region. I mean, equally or it looks like it can be sometimes difficult to determine this archaeologically. But yes, I give you one example that we've mentioned previously. It used to be thought that the population in Greece had declined 90% through either death or migration. Now that's been ratcheted back. It's not quite as catastrophic. It's only 40 to 60% had died or migrated. That's still a... It's a hefty chunk of change. We noticed that if it happened today. Yeah. So I think the latest estimate I've seen is that there might have been about 600,000 people in Bronze Age Greece in like the 13th century. So 600,000 by the 11th century, it's down to 330,000. So that's not quite 50%. But it does give you some numbers and Mesopotamia similar things. So there are significant declines in population levels and everything that we had had all the beautiful pottery, the monumental architecture, all the sophisticated bronze and gold work. All gives way to much simpler forms. Basically they've gone back. They've stepped backwards. It's a lower level of political organization, lower social, lower economic. And now we've got small kingdoms, small city states, tribal groups, villages, rather than huge kingdoms like the hittytes or the Egyptians. So everything has decreased markedly pretty much around the entire area. Eric, the most obvious example of something that I was certainly brought up with, it was very familiar to me in my education was obviously the collapse of Rome, where in a place like Britain you have wonderful Roman villas with floor mosaics and hypercores systems and nice bath houses for people to recover from the fogs of siren cester or whatever. And then some of these places of burnt, some of them deserted, some of them become little farm steds with grottie forges in the middle of lovely mosaics. Is it similar to that or is it fundamentally different? No, no, it's absolutely similar to that. When you look at a collapse, whether it's the collapse of Rome or the Maya or Harappan civilization or in our case late Bronze Age, if you look very closely, you will notice it's not uniform. Different places go down at different times and the flip side, the recovery, it didn't happen at the same pace, it didn't happen in the same way in all the regions. Some areas recover pretty much right away relatively quickly. Others, it took, 400 years to recover. So I frequently say it's like a foot race. Everyone's starting at the same starting line, namely the collapse. But everyone finishes at different times and some don't finish at all. So both the collapse is not uniform and the recovery is not uniform. I'd like to start in the Eastern Mediterranean and particularly in this fascinating world where we talked last time how within a few years of each other, we get the very first reference to Israel, his seed is not or in the Maneptus stellar. And then a few years later, the Philistines or the panacellas, the Egyptians, called them turn up, who are the ancestors of, or are certainly etymologically of the modern Palestinians. So this world, which had previously been canonite and been a Egyptian province and run very much from Egypt with the nice wine from Gaza being sent off in special seal vessels down to be drunk by Rhabisis II in Thebes or whatever, this world is changed completely. Suddenly, we get two new players who are very minor players, if at all, before this and are now suddenly dominating. So let's talk first of all about the Philistines because they are obviously in a very bad rap in the Bible. And I'm made to be the eternal enemy of these relights that they are still to this day, to be a Philistine is to be someone without culture. Is that biblical picture fair or do archaeologists have a very different view of the Philistines? It's not fair. We have a very different view. They're the bad boys of the Bible, if you will. Right. And there are other, you know, other small kingdoms that appear too. These two are not alone. You've also got the etymites, the Moabites, the Ammonites, Jebusites. Yeah. Everything, all theites, as I tell my students, all theites. So, but what has happened is, as you said, it's replaced the canonite society that was there in the Bronze Age. And now we have these new groups. Let's quickly talk about the canonites for those who are not familiar with them. This is a group that stretches right up to a Garrett, which is now in modern series. So it's not just modern Israel, Palestine and modern Lebanon, but it's actually as far north as the Turkish border almost. And some of the best canonite sources we have are again from a Garrett where you have figures like Bale and all those canonite gods being discussed. Yes. It stretches all the way from, you know, what is now the Sinai, all the way up, as you say, to the border between Turkey and Syria. Right. So we have northern canon, we have central canon, we have southern canon. Right. And we do have all kinds of information, including like the Amarno letters, the 14th century, Jerusalem, Hutsor, Maghiro, Beirut, Biblis. They're all canonite cities that are interacting and we're all vassal to the Egyptians at that point back in the Bronze Age. That is now all ended. The cities keep going. You know, we still obviously have Jerusalem at Beirut and Damascus, even today. We've also got them in the Iron Age, but the Egyptians are no longer in control. And now what we get are these smaller kingdoms like Israelites, like Philistines, and like Phoenicians whom we will talk about. But the Philistines show up. They are the Poleset as near as we can figure. They are one of these groups of the sea peoples that Ramses III specifically fights. They're one of the groups that he names. And then when he beat them, he settled them, as he says, in strongholds bound in my name, meaning in Egypt and in canon, because they're still barely in control up there. I mean, this is 1177. The Egyptians will be gone by 1140. So, you know, 30, 40 years they're gone later. overseeing these newcomers and then leaving them to their end devices. Exactly. And so the Philistines take advantage of this. And they settle along the coast in southern Canaan. Faces like Gaza, Ash Kalan, modern Gaza Strip, modern Israel, coastal Israel, and inland sort of halfway to Jerusalem. Is that right? Yes, you're correct, they have five major cities, what we call the Pentapolis, literally five cities. And this becomes Felistia. Felistia, let's see, the Fiverr, as you mentioned, there's Gaza, there's Ash Kalan, there's Ash Dodd, there's Ekron, and there's Gath. And most of these four, at least four of them have been excavated. So I think Gaza has been touched and ongoing excavations. This is stuff when Lenny Bat still ongoing excavations. In fact, discoveries for the Philistines at Ash Kalan just in the last decade or two. Ekron was excavated in especially the 80s and the 90s. Gath is still being excavated. And so, yeah, we're still learning all about these. So the Philistines take over the coast and we've also got these relights a bit more inland. Now in the Hebrew Bible, you very much have the impression of the poet king, like David sitting with his harp and this highly civilized figure in a kind of wonderful Jerusalem, not quite the Temple of Solomon yet, but something approaching that. And the Philistines are depicted in the biblical narrative as these sort of barely civilized savages and chip and Dale style bodybuilders on the coast. The reality dug up by archaeologists is almost the reverse, isn't it? The big cities are the Philistines. And in fact, the site is sort of shaggy looking shepherds and rural landlords are these renights. Yes, again, I think the Philistines have gotten a bad rap. They were identified as early as about 1899. We started being able to identify Philistine pottery, Philistine culture, shall we say. And they, Philistine pottery, as we've mentioned, looks distinctly nice in the end. It's quite pretty, nice ducks, lots of sea birds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with their own unique motifs, birds, ducks, fish. You can always, when you're excavating and you find, you know, when you find Philistine pottery, you've done this yourself. Exactly. Yes. Right. And I have friends who have been excavating at a number of these Philistine sites. So, but it definitely looks mycenaean derived, but it's with local clay. And siprate derived to the sky, borrowing of the Cypress. Yeah. Just some degree, just some degree. Yeah. We've got siprate influence as well. Now Eric, there's a controversy I'd love to discuss with you because I've been reading around this and I came across a long article in Hierots, the Israeli newspaper by Shirley Bendoor, Evian of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. And she slightly argues against what you consistently argue in your books that the Philistines are in commas. She says that they're not a GM power, it's after all. And she has quite an elaborate and complicated argument about why they're actually just the local peoples who've been on the move. And like your Oakeys, you know, the hard scrabble and they're looking for new pastures and looking for new lands. Do you not agree with her? This is an argument you've come across and reject. I'm going to agree to disagree with Shirley. Yes. Shirley, a good friend of mine, we dug together at Megito. Really interesting ideas, really interesting research that she does. But this one, yeah, I'm going to push back. They are others, I would say, they are from outside. They're not local at least not to begin with. I do think they come from the Aegean or somewhere else like that that makes sense. You know, if you want to use the Bible, it says that they come from Crete. I don't think we need to use that. But the pottery, as I mentioned, looks very much like degenerate Mycenaean as if you've got people from the Aegean now living in the region of Canaan. But I also think that the newest DNA evidence that has been found in Ashkalon, in Ashkalon, exactly where they excavated a Philistine cemetery. That's fine. We know it's Philistine from the pottery and everything else there. But they also excavated the settlement, so we say, not the cemetery, but the settlement next to it. In some of those houses, they have what we call intra-mural burials, that is under the floor. This is what you frequently do, especially with little kids. It sounds unhygienic. You don't want a dead body, a new living room. Well, if it's the dead body of your child, you want them to be close to you. So, you know, aegean's one thing, having your dead kid near you is quite another. So, sure, anyway, they excavated and from four of those infant burials, because they really were young, that were underneath the floors. They were able to get DNA out of them. And the DNA, when they looked at it, and I know this isn't how genetics works, but these kids were basically about 40% local canaanite and 60% other. And then when you ran the computer models, the other, the most likely came up as creaks. And then after that, the other possibilities were Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain. So, what I would argue, and what they suggested in that article that was put out about the DNA, is that we have the palesat, if you will, coming in, settling down, but peacefully, one looks like, because they assimilate, and they have children. They're into marrying. They're into marrying. Now, that might have been forcible, or it might have been, you know, do we know if the locals that came in nights are women, and you could tell male and female DNA, can't you, in these tests? Yes, but I'm not actually sure. I'd have to go back and look at the actual study. The impression in the study was that it was a peaceful, coming together of two different peoples and an mixed population emerging. Yes. Well, the archaeology of what we're seeing at these five sites and more is suggesting, I mean, a South Yosor landau from University of Hifa, in his book that came out in 2010, suggests that it was a much more peaceful infiltration and assimilation than one might expect. And this DNA, I think, kind of corroborates that because however it happened, there are kids that were the result of unions, of local canonites, and incoming others. These infants that were found are not the sea peoples themselves, or even the children. They're from almost a century later. So I would say they're like the grandkids or the great-grandkids of the sea peoples. But to my mind, that means that what Shirley Bendoor-Evian is suggesting is that Philistines were basically canonites or Levantians that maybe half of them of each person, they were half that. That makes sense. But the other half that somebody else. Yeah. So you can come across a compromise here, you and Shelley can find a way to... Yes. So Shirley and I can continue to be friends. Yes. So that's where I think it's coming from. So you do have external people that come in. The very interesting thing, though, is that same study showed that within like another century, or so, that genetic material had basically dissolved and you could no longer see the outside influence. So it was kind of temporary. And then everybody became local again. And you're back to being Philistines, relates, whatever. Or maybe there was just a small minority who got some bread out of... Maybe. Now the other thing which has been turning up in some recent articles is a second Philistine state, which is further north around Aleppo. And we get the same word of panacea or palastu being used far to the north of what is now Palestine or Philistia. Right. So this is from the neo-Hitite city states, such as Carcamiche, Antilepo and others. This is on the border of modern Turkey and Syria. This is an area that was hit by the earthquake four or five years ago. Yes. And these are the remnants of the Hittites that have survived. These are the neo-Hitite states. And there's one site, Tel Tayyana, the Tim Harrison University of Chicago, XGV, and so on. So some of the texts up there, which are written in Luvian, hyperglyphic Luvian, which again is a remnant of the Hittite empire. There is a mention that had been deciphered as Wallis, Wallasstein with a W, Wallasstein. And then a number of years ago that was re-read with a P instead of a W. And instead of Wallasstein, it was Palestine. Well, Palestine. But it's not where Palestine is. It's far to the north. Yeah. It's far to the north. And so there's been a whole debate now. Was there a second or secondary state up there? Or was that where the Polesat first landed and then came south and then came south? And it is in the region of Ugarits and Omuru. I mean, it does fit with what Ramsey's the third has said. So these critons or whatever they are landed to Gharit. Then they worked their way south and they ended up in Ashkelon and Gaza. Exactly. And interesting too, even before that text had been reinterpreted, the pottery that was found at sites like Tel Tayyana and elsewhere in that region, it's a gen. It's originally a gen. It's mycenaean. And then it's this mycenaean local or mycenaean light, if you will. So to say that the Polesat and all that are from the Aegean actually makes sense. But do you then have an earlier or simultaneous kingdom up north called Palestine or Palestine up there or Wallasstein? That debate is still ongoing. We are still debating that right now. But it's absolutely fascinating that we might have had originally the the Philistines up north and that they migrated south. But that would fit that would fit with the general picture. Now the even more contested story, of course, is the origins of the Israelites. And this runs into the whole question of the historicity of the Bible. And there's a whole range of different positions from those who think the Bible is the word of God and every word of it is true through to the bunch of guys in Denmark, the Copenhagen school, you think it's all, you know, it's just kind of a story like the like the Leonardo the Odyssey. It's just it's basically literature with gods and we shouldn't treat it as history. You kind of pivoted the middle of this, don't you? You're sort of halfway between the two schools. Is that right? Oh, yes. I would be like Israel Finkelstein with whom I dug it, Megito, for 20 years. He calls himself usually a centrist. And I I would say yes, I'm a centrist. Yes, I'm in the middle between the minimalist and the maximalist, right? You just refer to some of them, the so-called Copenhagen school, which said that history has had a minimum in the Bible. I'm in the middle. You believe that the Bible is a useful tool that can be used but with care and selectively and just using what you can. Yes. And redising it's written many many centuries later like like home. Like Homer, you took the words out of my mouth. Absolutely. Looking at what the Bible says and using it, yes, there are nuggets of history in there. I mean, the Bible is not written as a history book and it's not it was never meant to be used that way, but that doesn't mean that there aren't nuggets of history. It doesn't contain folk memories and so on. Folk memories and even actual facts. When you get down into the first millennium, there's a lot of things that are absolutely sure. They're correct. The kings and the battles and and all that. And so I use the Bible with a grain of salt. I mean, to be heretical, I use it as I do any other ancient source. So the ugaritic archives, the Hittite archives, New Kingdom records, Neo-Acerian records, Hebrew Bible. I treat them all pretty much the same way. Can I believe this? What can I use? What can I not use? And yes, Homer, same way. I do think that there are parts of the Iliad that can be used, especially the obvious things like the catalog of ships in book two. There are memories that are definitely borst husk helmets. They're not using them in Homer's day and yet they are in the text. And there they are exactly, but you know, force book wheels versus six book. So Israel and the history and the Bible, same type of thing. So in the Bible, we obviously have the story of the people of Israel who arrive with Abraham, then go off to Egypt and you have the Exodus and they come back. And then you have this sort of picture of total destruction during the age of Joshua when they smash through Jericho, knockdown walls, then assault all the Canaanites there, violently wipe them out. There's a sort of prehistoric knuckbar when everyone is expelled. You do not find that archaeologically, I understand. No, we do not find that archaeologically. And in fact, what's interesting is if you look at the Bible itself, you actually have two different stories and two different versions. If you look at the book of Joshua, it's exactly as you just described. It's a genocide that come in and they kill everybody and take over. But if you look at the book of judges, it's a completely different story. What does it say there? Well, they come in. It's much more peaceful. They assimilate. They live side by side in the same towns, it says. And it's much more civilized, if you will. So the Bible itself has two different versions. How interesting. I saw from the Bible that you got two different creations. You got two different arrivals of the Israelites. Yeah, always. So, you know, people believe what they want to believe. I, from the archaeology and from what people, my colleagues have said, I would go with the more peaceful, the assimilation. But there we get into, I mean, and again, this is a huge debate with an archaeology, which is very fun to teach. And in fact, we could have six series, you know, six part series just on that. Come back, Eric. Come back. So we have like, all right, William F. Albright, the dean of American Biblical archaeology. He held to the biblical narrative. He said, conquest narrative. Yes, just like, you know, like we had in Joshua. And he was in the 50s and 40s. From the 30s, 40s, 50s. Yeah, exactly. And then he is displaced by a Brit, Kathleen Kenyon, who excavates Jericho, and doesn't find what is in the Bible. Exactly. She doesn't find it. This has been actually another Brit, Garstang, John Garstang, who excavated a lot up in Anatolia, the Hittites and all that. He actually had excavated at Jericho and said he had found evidence of the destruction, right, by Joshua and everybody. But the pottery didn't look right and people called his findings into question. And so they brought in Kathleen Kenyon. Dame Kathleen Kenyon. Dame Kathleen Kenyon. Exactly. Daughter of the director of the British Museum. Wonderful archaeologist, Doug at Samaria and Terusselum. And she came in specifically to look at the pottery. This is now early 60s, late 50s. 50s, 60s, somewhere in there. Yeah. And she promptly said what every archaeologist ever born has always said. We need to do more digging. We need to excavate more. Yeah. And she then said this is not Joshua's destruction. This is a thousand years earlier. This is not 1200. It's more like 2200 or 2300, 2400 BC. So are we now in a world where the earliest relights are just canonites that have taken on new religion and they're doing different things, like not eating pork or so on? Or are we talking about there's another theory that they're brigands appero, who which might be the same word as he brews or not. Take us through that. It depends to whom you speak. And in fact, in which decade you were speaking to them. Because yes, we had a upright saying it was an invasion. We then had a couple German scholars saying it was peaceful infiltration. We then had scholars saying no, no, they were always there. They were proto-Israelites, meaning they were already canonites. So we're still arguing about it. And we do get these sort of interesting things whereby, for example, a canonite lunar deity, Lucifer ends up becoming a demon in the New Testament or indeed, Bal, Bialzebub and Bialzebub. So you get the demonization of canonite deity. So implying that it's a religious change. Yeah. As I have mentioned in various lectures, again, here in Israel, I can agree. It's like a it's a porous membrane. So most of canonite society and culture goes away overtaken by the small kingdoms we're talking about now. But especially in religion, it sticks around and you still get these gods and goddesses continuing on in here. And El, as in Samuel and Bethlehem, who is another version of Yahweh. Exactly. Right. And El and Bal, they're all canonite gods that then continue on. And Yahweh has a wife in some inscriptions. Yes, Asra. This will be a surprise to many people. Just before we go to the break, this quickly, do deal with God's wife. Yeah, did God have a wife. There's actually a book with that title by Bill Deaver. Exactly. There's all kinds of things. And none of these are settled. We're all still arguing about them and archaeology and biblical studies and all of that. And even some of the things that we thought we knew, like for example, if you find a site where they're eating pork, that's obviously not an Israelite site. It would be a Philistine site for example. And that still seems to hold true, but there are always some exceptions. Cath is one of these places where we have I think you do have pulpit. That's right. Because it's on the fetus time. You do. But Cath is one of the Philistines. Exactly. Right. But where you have a what's called a four-roomed house, a four room house, they always said that was Israelite. Well, maybe not. And there was a type of pottery, the the colored rim jar. Oh, if you find that type of pottery, urine and Israelite settlement, no, not so much. So this is a problem. But you know, it's a problem in all of archaeology. When you get too close to something for which there's been a grandiose law made, right? If it's four roomed house, if it's iron, yeah, there are always exceptions. So the upshot is we don't know where these Israelites are from. We don't know where they lived. We don't know what they are. A lot of questions for something of which in a modern nation state to pass. In a sense, always, always. This is the problem with doing something like that. But I'm going to go with their mostly local canonites and that they took advantage of this. But if you do want to hold on to the Exodus narrative, I would say that the time of the chaos is the best time for such an Exodus to have happened. But as I tell my students, you don't have to have a huge Exodus all at once. It could have been a much smaller series of migrations over time. And much like Homer, I think, telescopes things under the Trojan War. So I think the biblical writers tell the scope things into what we know as the Exodus. And it may have taken over a much longer period of time. Eric, we are just gripped by this. But after the break, we again discuss the top of the class from your post-clapps scenario, which are the Phoenicians after the break. Hi, this is Hannah Remykel from Gohango's The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Radio therapy is over a century old, but it is still changing. Cancer Research UK helped lay the foundations of Radio Therapy in the early 20th century and has driven progress ever since. Radio therapy remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment today. Every year, millions of people worldwide benefit from cancer research UK's work to make it more precise. Scientists are still refining how Radio Therapy is delivered. And one example is an experimental treatment called Flash Radio Therapy, which delivers radiation in fractions of a second up to a thousand times faster than standard Radio Therapy. An early studies suggest that speed could make a real difference. Flash Radio Therapy may cause up to 50% less damage to healthy cells. But scientists don't yet know why healthy cells seem to be spared, so Cancer Research UK are working to answer that. Understanding it could be key to reducing side effects in the future. 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. Well, Eric Klein is still with us for the final half episode of our amazing series on the Bronze Age Claps, very much inspired by Eric's books, 1177, The A Civilization Clapsed, and after 1177 BC, The Survival of Civilizations. Now, at the end of the second volume after 1177, you kind of rank the different civilizations and how they cope with this sort of terrible crisis that takes place at this time. And the people that come top of the class are the people who by the recovery period are known as the Phoenicians, but who are actually just the people that have been living, the Canaanites has been living in the middle of Canaan all along and who are the kind of most commercially minded, the big seafarers, take us through the Phoenicians and where they come from and where they go. Absolutely. So the Phoenicians are basically the Canaanites and Central Canaan. What today we would consider to be Lebanon. Your book is blurbed by our friend, Nassim Nicholas Talib, who is himself a Phoenician, St. Lebanese superstar. Absolutely. And in fact, I borrowed from him in, I think it was 2014, he had a book that he put out called Anti-Fragile. And to my mind, that is how one describes the Phoenicians. They are anti-fragile, meaning that they've flourished in a time of chaos. They took advantage of it. So yes, I'm quite indebted to him for that idea. So the Phoenicians, they are the Canaanites that survive the collapse in Central Canaan again today, Lebanon. But as you know, they would not have called themselves Phoenicians. That's the later name. That's what Herodotus calls them. The Greek name for these guys. They would have said Phoenician, what's that? I'm from Tyre. I'm from Siden. I'm from Biblos. I'm from Beirut. They would have identified with that. This is actually something you see very much at this period, isn't it? People identify with their cities, very strongly in many many places. And we're trying to impose sort of nations on odd people who were often just city states. I'm actually wondering if the fact that they were decentralized, if you will, that it was a series of city states, rather than a big kingdom or empire, if that is what allowed them, did that allow them to survive? Were they more resilient because of that? That they're one of the things we talk about with the systems collapses that the central economy collapses. Well, if you don't have a central economy, there's nothing to collapse. If you don't have a centralized government, there's nothing to collapse. So maybe they were able to survive precisely because they were decentralized. So take a through these guys. So at the beginning of this series, five episodes ago, Joe told us about how the Ugarit people were these great merchants with ships running out of this port, full of all the goodies from Afghanistan, from Cornwall, stopping off selling things, making a huge profit. Ugarit goes down, but that same spirit survives in towns like Biblos, Tahr, and inside them. Yes. In fact, this is where they are antifragile down in the Phoenician cities. They take advantage of the chaos, and in particular, they take advantage of the destruction of Ugarit. When Ugarit is destroyed, it's not rebuilt and re-enhabited for another 400 to 600 years. Phoenicians say, excuse us, and they step into the breach. So as some of my colleagues have said, the Mediterranean becomes a Phoenician lake. They take over. What allows these people to be so successful? Just that they've got a mercantile mindset, they've got better boats. What is the USP? It's an excellent question. What I would argue, like just off the top of my head, out of all the people, the Bronze Leeds that had ships seafaring and navies, the Phoenicians are the ones that survive. The Hittites had a navy, they don't survive. Mycenaeans and Minowans, they more than likely had their own boats. They're not in shape to do anything. They had to go to the treasure. That's somehow. Exactly. There's their thousand ships all gone. Egypt had a navy, they are now not in a position. It would only be people like Cyprus and the Phoenicians that have ships, navies, and are still in a position to do something about it. Low and behold, those are the two groups that take over the Mediterranean in the Iron Age. You hinted in the last episode that the Cypriots and the Phoenicians may actually be working together or even regard themselves as one people. They have this mercantile naval-based sort of merchant navy that's now taking over the Mediterranean. We establish this, they're going out to North Africa. They're going to Spain. They're even going down the African coast. Is that right? They're going all over the place. In fact, if you want to really intertwine them, we know the Phoenicians were on Cyprus at this time. So we do know that. The Phoenicians and the Cypriots, I say in my book, I'm not sure if their competitors or colleagues, I would go more with their colleagues at this point. They don't seem to be fighting. Definitely in most of the places like on Crete and on mainland Greece, where we find Phoenician stuff. We also find Cypriot stuff. But on Cyprus itself, and this is a bit of a problem. In the Iron Age, we don't have that many inscriptions on Cyprus. But it does look like the Phoenicians have a to hold, a foothold on Cyprus. So I do think that they're kind of acting in tandem rather than in competition. But for some of these cities, like Tyre and Sidon and Biblios, we do have inscriptions at the cities. We know the names of the kings, not just Tyre and Mourph Tyre from the Bible. But we know the predecessors. So we can actually reconstruct the names of the kings in the Phoenician cities during this time period, which means we're getting a pretty detailed history of what's going on. But we don't have the economic records per se from there. But we do know what the neo-eserians wanted of them and those goods. Now, we've managed in this mini series to encompass the fall of Troy, the Exodus, great chunks of the Bible. One story we haven't included yet is Dido Neneas. Now, so Dido, Queen of Carthage, the founding of Carthage, take us there from the Phoenician hotlands. So the Phoenicians become the Carthaginians, right? When Rome fights the Punic Wars, they are fighting against the descendants of the Phoenicians who worship versions of the Canaanai gods still, but in the middle of what's now Tunisia. Right, exactly. Right. You've got new city, you've got Carthage and all that. So yeah, and it does look like this story of Dido fleeing from one of the Phoenician cities and going over to that region. The earliest the archaeology shows that the earliest pottery architecture, all that, does come from like the 8th century. It does fit the story or the time the context of the story of Dido. Now, again, how much faith can you put in a story like that? It's hard to tell, but the archaeology does not, you know, disown it. You know, it's possible. And take us beyond Carthage. They found cadizzis, is that right? In Spain, yeah, yeah, they're all the way over there. What are they doing that? That's a long way from now. Well, and this is where the newest archaeology is getting more and more interesting. We are now finding, and by we, I mean all my colleagues, are finding that the Phoenicians were going over to Spain, to Iberia, definitely by the 8th and 9th centuries, possibly by the 10th, maybe even the 11th centuries, which means right after the collapse, and they appear to be going after silver. At least that's what it looks like. They're bringing silver back that you could mine in Iberia, in Cadiz, in various areas, and the earliest Phoenician pottery and settlements definitely go back 9th century, maybe even 10th and 11th. So this is where the newest finds in archaeology. It's a very exciting time to be doing this, and we're finding more and more connections that we've got, and when they're analyzing silver in hordes that have been found in what is today modern day Israel and elsewhere, they're finding that among other places it is silver from Spain. So at the beginning of this series, we were in a very globalized world where Lapis from Afghanistan was kind of meeting in a ship with tin from Cornwall, and we're kind of back there again by what appeared. How long has it taken for us to get back to this? Good question, and I don't have a definitive answer, but in my mind, we are back to that globalized network. We're back to a small world network by the early 8th century BC. We had had this network back in the Bronze Age. 200, to rank them. I would say 400 at the most. And I put it down that late because of Greece. Greece is the last one back of the ones that made it back, leaving out the hit sites and all that. Of the groups that are trying to make it back, Greece is the last, and they're back by the early 8th century. Some of the early parts of the network are already up and running, which is the period when Homo is writing just quickly put that in there. Homer is going to be 750, 700 at the latest, but the early 8th century, 776 BC, first Olympics. And that's why you mentioned you made a reference. Your next book is going to be, yeah, you referenced the trilogy, and I'm working on the third book on the in the unintended trilogy, because I never meant to do this. It was the one book, and then the sequel, and now, and this trilogy will go from the, the third one will go from the early 8th down through the death of Alexander the Great, and it's going to be the 776 BC, the coal, the clashing of civilizations. Brilliant. That's in this case, this is Persia versus Sparta and Athens. Yeah, Persia versus Greeks, but it's also Athens versus Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. And it's of course, Alexander the Great versus the rest of the world, if you will. But what has happened is by the early 8th century, we've got this network back, but there are bits and pieces that are already up and running, as I say, by at least the 10th century, and maybe even the 11th. And that is where Phoenicians and Cypriots come in, and that's why they're at the top of my list. Now, you'll stop a foe month. Yeah. There are my star performers exactly. If your society collapses, you should emulate the Phoenicians. Before we go to that, I'm going to ask you as to close the series with your reasons why these guys, you think, succeed, what others fail. But before we go there, we started the series with Jo Quinn, and her big thesis in her last book is how far the West learns from the East, that the ideas that we've thought are central to Western civilization are coming in, in her view, a lot of them from the Levant beyond. Now, one of these things is the idea of the alphabet. How does that get to Greece? Tell us that story. So the Phoenicians, they do not invent the alphabet, but they standardize it. The alphabet had been around already for a couple hundred years, even Ugarit had already had a version of the alphabet before it collapsed. But what the Phoenicians do is standardize it and then spread it. So they bring their standardized alphabet to Greece where the Greeks add in vowels. That's a Greek invasion, is it? Yes, they take some of the letters and make them into vowels, right? And in some semitake languages still, we don't have vowels. I mean, Arabic doesn't have vowels. Yes. Yeah. It can be true, right? Exactly. Right. So, yeah, so I kind of, I see it as the Greek saying, thank you, we'll take the alphabet and look, we've improved it. It's right. But they also, the Phoenicians also bring the alphabet to Italy and it becomes the Latin alphabet. And of course, we are still using the Latin alphabet today to write English, French, German, Italian, Spanish. I mean, we're using the Latin alphabet. So if you want, we're still using the Phoenician alphabet. So we are, I mean, that's one of the six, you know, we are the successors. That's very nice. Can you, can you say that? We are using a version of the Phoenician alphabet, absolutely. Yes. That's a very nice thing. So take us back then to the lessons. We've, we've had six episodes. We've had six hours of extraordinary and absolutely fascinating. A textual stuff with people like Stephen Frye and Simon Goldhill. We've had archaeology from you and archaeology and text from Joe Quinn. What are the lessons to be taken from this? Who are the survivors? Why are they doing better than other, other people's? What, as we approach this era of climate change of possible people's ahead? I mean, it feels a very fragile moment. What are the lessons of the Bronze Age claps for us today? This is a question. Yes. So I wanted to give readers some hope towards the end of the book and some take away. We need it. We need it at this victim over there. We definitely do. So I created a table of like seven take away, seven common sense things that you should know. But I would also say, you know, in the spirit of ending on a good high note that it is amazing how resilient people are that they, they can bounce back. So like when we study collapse, it's very easy to focus in on the destruction, the loss and all of that. But and certainly, you know, people suffer, there was a very real loss. Like I say, the collapse of the late Bronze Age is only really comparable to the collapse of the Roman Empire. I mean, it was catastrophic in some ways. It was even worse. Why would you say that? Well, because we lost so much. We absolutely lost so much. I mean, even with the fall of Rome, you still got the Eastern Roman Empire that keeps going for another thousand years, right? You know, Byzantium, Constantinople. Right. So, you know, and even Rome, you know, we teach our kids over here in the United States. Rome fell in 476 or something like that. No, no. It took the fifth century. It took a hundred years. So anyway, but it also took a hundred years for the late Bronze Age to collapse. So my 1177 is just a benchmark there. But the thing is in the aftermath of the late Bronze Age collapse, they didn't just give up. They rebuilt. They adapted some, some just coped, some adapted, some transformed, right? Cypriots and Phoenicians. They transformed, created whole new societies to some degree, like in Greece. They were more simple than they had been. But then they gradually grew and we get great things after that. I mean, look at the Greeks. They went on to create small things like, you know, democracy and small buildings like, well, the Parthenon, you know, little things like that. So they flourished. And basically what happens is, and I argue this in the book, in the aftermath, it's not a dark age, it's the Iron Age, it's the period of invention, it's the period of innovation. And so in my takeaways, I focused in on that, the lessons that we can get from the Bronze Age collapse. And one of the things I would say is be careful about being interconnected. It will bring you up to the greatest heights, but it will also bring you down to the lowest lows. Greater inventibles. Exactly. Oh, you're an expert. When it's working well, it's great. When it's not working well, you know, you can't get toilet paper or computer chips or cars or anything like that. But I do say, don't be isolationist. We're not off to Montana with the shotgun man. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I would not run out to Montana and hide out with a shotgun. No, you need to keep your friends. You need to be self-sufficient, but depend on your neighbors. Help them out. They help you out. All of that. Because when you're working together, you're much more likely to survive. But along those lines, you need to be inventive. You need to be innovative, adaptable, adaptable, absolutely. And this is where things got me worried. Like, you know, it used to be that people said, like Carol Bell, wonderful archaeologist. She's like 10 in the ancient world was like, is like petroleum today. Well, yeah, it was. And it still is. I think it's more like rare earths like lithium that are used now to make chips. It was the rare earth. Of course it was. Yeah. That's where we need to find other alternatives and not depend on those. And again, look at the pandemic when there was a shortage. Suddenly, we couldn't get cars. We couldn't get computers because you couldn't get the chips. So innovation, inventiveness, that's incredibly important. The other things I would say and not everybody will like me to hear this. But we need to prepare for extreme weather conditions. We really do. They're happening more and more frequently. I think there's no denying that you're looking at climate change, whether it's heating and cooling, whatever. We're definitely we're getting more extreme weather conditions. Let's just put it that way. Every single summer, they bet a train in Zomphah. Yeah, we see it. Yeah. A wild fires in California and Greece. My personal feeling is what is the harm in preparing for extreme weather because if it comes, you're ready. And if it doesn't come, what have you lost? So I would prepare for extreme weather conditions. I live on a farm where I grow my own vegetables on the edge of Delhi, but the water which we depend on has disappeared now beyond all the bohors. Yeah, you go. We have when it gets hot in summer, we have to have it brought in. And if there was a if they if that water did not come, we would have to move out of this farm. Exactly. So two things to work off of that. One, I was fortunate enough when I was a kid to watch John Wooden coached the last couple of years of UCLA Bruins basketball back when they won 88 games on a row. And he used to tell his teams that if you are failing to prepare, then you're preparing to fail. So we need to prepare just in case. But water, you're absolutely right. Water is essential. And that's one of the points that I make. It did for the hepatites. Exactly. The hepatites were the odd man out in terms of not being on a river system. And they're the ones that fail. And I've been told I'm pretty good authority. And it's happening already that the wars for in the next century, many of them will be fought over over water control of water. Absolutely. So that is also a takeaway. Be very careful about your water resources. I'm from Scotland. One thing we do not lack is rain. Well, good. Well, good. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I think my last point was and I think most historians would agree you got to keep your working class happy, right? Keep your, you know, the lower client, you got to keep them happy. Or they're going to be bad repercussions. So and I think we see that with the internal rebellions and such back then. Eric Klein, this has been a complete pleasure. I have you were with me all my Christmas holiday reading your wonderful books. I've still got the 10 LMR and letters to come. And it's actually like I got a third volume of the trilogy to go when it comes out eventually, eventually. Thank you so, so much for being with us. We'd love to get you back on the show another time. But for the moment, Eric, thank you. It's goodbye from me. I need to we'll be back in the next episode where we will be starting a spectacular new series. And I have so enjoyed reading for this on the extraordinary life of Chairman Mao, who is one of the most important and controversial figures in history. And someone who I said, and he knew almost nothing about and that didn't realize how little I knew until I dived into this series. So strongly recommend the next six episodes. Goodbye from me, William Drempel and Anita will be back in the next episode.