The End of Civilization (In the Bronze Age): Crash Course World History 211 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course World
History, and today we're going to talk about
the end of civilization.
Mr Green, Mr Green! Everybody knows civilization is
going to end with Y2K. We can't survive the year 2000.
Now, Me From the Past, turns out we get through
that one all right. And we're not talking about
monopolies among cable providers, or net neutrality.
In fact, we're not talking about the end of
*our* civilization, which everyone knows will
be brought about giant, transforming robots
that can become cars. If you want to learn
about the end of our civilization in video
form, might I recommend the major American
film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
Instead today we are going to talk about the
end of a civilization in the ancient Near
East at the end of the Bronze Age
So in our first world history series, we talked
about river valley civilizations, like the
Indus Valley, and Egypt, and Mesopotamia,
mainly because most textbooks split them up
into separate civilizations. You know, teachers
like textbooks, and we want teachers to like
Crash Course, so... yeah.
But the thing is we're used to imagining the
world as divided up into nation states, and
so small and geographically-bounded civilizations
fit nicely into the way we think of the world.
But that isn't the way the world was always
imagined.
So there's an argument to be made that all
of these communities in the eastern Mediterranean
-- what historians sometimes call the Levant
or the Ancient Near East, because it is closer
to Britain than it is the Far East -- these
days we often call it the Mid East. It's almost
as though there is no actual "East" and "West"
on the globe.
Anyway, you can make the argument that back
in the Bronze Age, all of that was actually
a unified coherent system. It was one civilization,
kinda.
Egypt, Mesopotamia, the states that grew up
in the Levant, and the empires of Anatolia,
all of them have quite a lot in common.
Let's begin with our old friend, Trade. So
archaeologists have found goods manufactured
in Crete in Egypt, and the names of Pharaohs
written in hieroglyphics in the Cretan palace
at Knossos. But even cooler discoveries have
been made by underwater archaeologists.
Wait a second, Stan - are there really underwater
archaeologists?
There are? Where were those people on Career
Day? Ah, they were probably underwater.
Underwater archaeologists excavate shipwrecks
and one ship at Uluburun in Turkey from the
thirteenth century BCE had products on it
from at least seven different states. There
was stuff like Egyptian jewelry, and copper
and tin (which are the raw materials for bronze,
you know it was the Bronze Age after all).
And although the Egyptians were the central
power in this Bronze Age trade network, the
Hittites were no slouches. I mean, they ruled
an empire that began in Anatolia and spread
out to include much of Mesopotamia. In fact,
they may have even gone to war with the Mycenaean
Greeks in a pre-Homeric Trojan War. How do
we know this? Well again, Archaeologists.
And this brings up another feature of the
ancient Near East in the late Bronze Age:
Warfare. There is a fair amount of it between
Egyptian and Hittites and Assyrians and many
other empires which rose and fell over many
hundreds of years. Wars were pretty common
in the period of 1500 to 1200 BCE. You know,
rulers wanted to extended their power and
prestige through military success and conquest.
And also that military success and conquest
was one of the main drivers of economic growth.
"Eh, we could increase agricultural yields,
we could come up with more efficient mechanization,
or we could go to war." They always went to war.
But there wasn't just war. There was also
quite a bit of diplomacy. And when diplomats
from these rival communities would talk to
each other, they would often call each other
by family names or imagine family relationships,
even though they weren't actually family.
But that sense that they felt like family.
You know, families do sometimes have wars,
indicates that it wasn't necessarily different
civilizations. And sometimes the wars ended
with diplomatic marriages, so rather than
just pretending that they were family, rulers
of the late Bronze Age states would actually
become family. And then they could stop fighting
and start trading, at least for a little while.
By the way, this is also the history of Post-Roman
Empire Europe. So we have a trade network,
we have a lot of interconnected familial relationships
(both real and imagined), but do we have a
civilization? Well, I would argue "yes," even
though it didn't have a single ruler, or one
form of political structure, or even one language.
But neither does "Western" civilization and
lots of people think that's a thing.
When you think about it, what people often
mean when we talk about civilizations today
are systems. Like when we talk about Western
civilization, we're not actually talking about
Greece or Rome or England or France or the
United States, we're talking about a set of
structures, and religious and cultural traditions
that are closely related enough that we see
them as forming a coherent whole. And the
same thing is true when we talk about Islamic
civilization, which spans from like Sufi mystics
in Turkey to Indonesia, the country with more
Muslims than any other on earth. So at least
according to that definition, the ancient
Near East was a civilization. But this is
an episode about the collapse of that civilization,
so what happened to it?
Well there we have one of the great historical
mysteries. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
Archaeologists have discovered that some time
around 1200 BCE, a number of the cities in
the region suffered upheaval, disruption,
and in many cases destruction. Among those
cultures that bit the dust were the Mycenaeans,
the Minoans of Crete, and our not particularly
friendly friends the Hittites. Egypt didn't disappear
but the political system there was rocked
enough that Egyptologists say that this period
marked the end of the new kingdom, so called
because it was very old. Until recently the
cause of this collapse was blamed on an invasion,
or perhaps a wave of invasions by the mysterious
sea peoples. This idea comes from the Egyptian
description from 1177 BCE that describes a
confederation of invaders.
"...They were coming forward toward Egypt,
while the flame was prepared before them.
Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjekker,
Shekelesh, Danuana, and Weshesh, lands united."
By the way, mispronouncing things is my thing.
"They laid their hands upon the lands as far
as the circuit of the earth, their hearts
confident and trusting"
The sea peoples, possibly because they were
busy destroying cities or perhaps trying to
come up with a better name for themselves,
didn't leave any inscriptions of their own,
so the idea of their invasion is kind of suspect,
but we do know that cities were destroyed,
mainly between 1210 and 1130 BCE, we just
don't know by whom. The story of the sea peoples
probably stuck around for so long because,
you know, it's a good story, and one that
provides a tidy explanation, but what if it's
wrong?
Thanks, Thought Bubble. The other thing I
wanna note here is that we like to imagine
that history is the result of like, humans
doing things. You know, humans are big fans
of human agency, we like to be in control
of things. Historians have traditionally also
been just a smidge obsessed with war, so if
we're imagining why a civilization ended,
we're gonna imagine that it probably involved
humans and y'know, likely involved war. So
what happened? Well, it could have been the
sea people. Like, there's a letter from a
town in northern Syria, which was burned sometime
between 1190 and 1185 BCE, the town was burned,
not the letter, obviously, that's how we found
it.
It read, in part: "My father, now the ships
of the enemy have come, they have been setting
fire to my cities and have done harm to the
land." Now, that fits with what we know about
the sea people: come from the sea, burn the
land, but the dating of the letter is uncertain.
And there's a different, very compelling,
non-human possibility: earthquakes.
Now, I'm not an archaeologist, but archaeologists
tell me that when an earthquake destroys a
city, its walls fall down in a particular
way, and you often find people crushed beneath
them. When a city is sacked, the architectural
remnants look very different: there are arrowheads
stuck in walls or in the bones of skeletons.
And we know there were earthquakes, thanks
to archeo-seismologists, who are in competition
with underwater archaeologists to have the
best job ever. They've determined that between
about 1225 BCE and 1175 BCE, the eastern Mediterranean
experienced "an earthquake storm." Wait, did
I just say earthquake storms? Must be time
for the open letter. But first, let's see
what's in the globe today. Oh, that's a nice
little village. Wait, why did you do that,
Thought Bubble, that's very sad!
An Open Letter to Earthquake Storms:
Dear Earthquake Storms,
What a fantastic term. I would say that you're
an example of historians naming something
brilliantly for once, but in fact, you were,
of course, named by an archeoseismologist.
The idea here, originally proposed by a guy
named Amos Nur is that one large earthquake
can actually lead to a series of extremely
large earthquakes. They just kind of go down
the same plate boundary, going baa-b'baa-b'baa-b'baa.
That's the technical term for what earthquakes
do. And earthquake storms, in addition to
having an awesome name, you are terrible.
You just keep happening down the fault line,
like, for decades, it's not cool, earthquake
storms, stop it!
Best wishes, John Green
As you can imagine, this earthquake storm,
pretty destabilizing to the region both physically
and politically. You know, if I lose like,
four hands of blackjack in a row, I start
railing against the fates. An earthquake storm
would really challenge my, like, political
and religious world views.
And then there's the non-earthquake environmental
calamity possibility. Again, contemporary
science paints an interesting portrait here.
So, fossilized pollen has demonstrated that
the period between 1200 and 850 BCE was notably
drier than earlier periods. And we also have
records of famines from what I'll just call
the Near East Civilization. Actually, I should
think of a better name for it. The Lovely
Levant, the Bronze Age Brouhaha. You know,
this is harder than it seems, actually. Anyway,
as we've seen in other episodes, drought and
famine are consistently devastating, but they
don't usually lead to full-on meltdowns of
a social order. And interestingly, that's especially true
of the region that we're talking about today.
Then there's the theory that the region experienced
peasant uprisings. And there's another that
trade disruptions caused the economic system
to collapse. And then there's a theory that
emerged in the 1990s that shows us a lot about
how present thinking can influence the way
we imagine the past. This theory goes that
the rise of private entrepreneurial traders
undermined the palace based trading system
and created a disruption, similar to the ones
that Silicon Valley likes to create. This
has become a very popular way of talking about
the late Bronze Age, but it's also a bit problematic.
For one thing, kings were not replaced by
entrepreneurs. They were replaced, you know,
by less powerful kings, this is the way the
civilization ends, not with a bang, but with
a whimper.
All right, so you might be saying, this was
a really long time ago, and the people involved
didn't even leave pyramids for us to enjoy.
And we don't even really know what happened.
And that's not history, is it, and also, can
anything that brought down a civilization
3000 years ago really be a threat to my way
of life? Yes. The interconnected trade and
diplomacy based systemic civilization of the
ancient Near East is at least somewhat similar
to the interconnected trade and diplomacy
based systemic civilization that we live in
today. It's just that, for us, that system
extends around the entire planet. And some
argue that it was, in fact, the very interconnected-ness
of the late Bronze Age civilization that made
it unstable. Sometimes, in extremely complex
systems, the failure of one segment can disrupt
the whole thing. Like, according to historian
Eric Cline, "If Late Bronze Age civilizations
were truly globalized and dependent upon each
other for goods and services, even just to
a certain extent, then change to any one of
the relevant kingdoms such as the Mycenaeans
or the Hittites would potentially affect and
destabilize them all." 3000 years later, a
credit crisis in the United States leads to
30% unemployment in Spain. An outbreak of
bird flu in China dramatically increases the
price of chicken in Canada. And in 1914, the
assassination of an archduke leads to war
in Japan.
In the end, whether you take meaningful lessons
away from the story of the collapse of this
particular civilization depends on how much
you see it as an analogy to our own world.
If you believe that the Mediterranean world
between 1500 and 1200 was, as one historian
put it, "A cosmopolitan and globalized system
such as has only rarely been seen before the
current day", then understanding what happened
3000 years ago can be pretty helpful. That
said, it could have been global interdependence
or entrepreneurial disruption, it also could
have been sea people. It's certainly important
for us to imagine the present in the context
of the past. But insofar as possible, we don't
want too much to imagine the past through
the lens of the present. And that's why I
think, in general, it's a good idea to be
suspicious of any single cause imagining of
why historical events happened. Could the
sea people, whoever they were, really have
been powerful enough to destroy this civilization?
It's no coincidence that around the world,
people are always talking about some version
of barbarian invasions, and that is rarely
the true straightforward explanation of what
happened -- I mean, unless you're talking
about the Mongols.
It's true, though, the Mongols were the only
barbarian invasion that showed the ability
to like, single-hoardedly collapse a civilization.
Anyway, thanks for watching, I'll see you next week.
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