Eight Empires Vanished in 1177 BC. Nobody Knows Why – Dr. Eric Cline, DemystifySci +429
About this episode
Dr. Eric Cline discusses the mysterious collapse of eight empires during the Late Bronze Age.
Eight empires stretched from Greece to Mesopotamia, trading tin and copper and olive oil and letters written in a language nobody spoke at home, and then within a single human lifetime they were gone, the palaces burned, the writing systems lost, the trade routes silent. Eric Cline, archaeologist and author of 1177 BC, walks us through the perfect storm of drought and invasion and internal revolt and supply chain failure that brought the Late Bronze Age to its knees, and asks what it means that no single cause was sufficient, that it took everything at once. What survived was stranger than what fell: the Phoenicians, the decentralized ones, the merchants who had no palace to lose, who spread the alphabet by accident and rebuilt the Mediterranean economy from the wreckage while empires became myth. We follow the evidence where it leads and ask the question that keeps pulling us back to this moment in history, which is whether a civilization can feel itself collapsing from the inside, and whether we would recognize it if we could.PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADOX LOST PRE-SALE: https://buy.stripe.com/7sY7sKdoN5d29eUdYddEs0bHOMEBREW MUSIC - Check out our new…
People in this episode
Host: DemystifySci
Guest: Dr. Eric Cline
Topics covered
- collapse of civilizations
- archaeology
- trade routes
- Bronze Age
- invasion
- internal revolt
Keywords
- empires
- collapse
- archaeology
- trade
- invasion
- drought
- supply chain failure
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: 1177 BC
Places: Greece, Mesopotamia
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