Historian Eric H. Cline has multiple books citing this time period, specifically 1117 BCE as the inflection point for the bronze age "collapse", defined by a deterioration of international shipping routes that weakened the nation-states of the era. I've learned about it recently because YouTube began recommending videos about it.
The drought explanation seems particularly plausible for the Hittites. IMO. They had grain storage, but ~3 years of drought would exhaust that. So if the climate becomes just a bit drier the chance of such a three year run increases enough to likely crash their society.
Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.
It's unlikely that rich countries would experience famine as severely as poor ones and consequently they would probably still demand meat. Grain that could feed people would still feed livestock.
A draw down of animal stocks increases meat supply in the short term. As grain gets more expensive, farmers sell animals for meat rather than keeping them to reproduce.
The standard counter-argument is that the corn grown for animal feed and for ethanol production is not suited for human consumption.
But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.
There are 4 types of corn. Dimple/dent corn, pop corn, sweet corn, and flint corn. Each variety can be eaten. Prepared differently of course as they have different starches and flavors but the vast majority of corn fields in the United States grow dent corn for feed and biofuels.
Yeah, we're pretty good at making pretty damn anything "fit for human consumption", including quite a few things that are outright poisonous if consumed unprocessed.
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
Everyone acts according to personal interests. There's a whole branch of political science, Public Choice Theory, that deals with this. Where did you get this idea that altruism was common?
How did you get the idea they think anyone is being altruistic? Usually the complaint that people won’t vote in rational self interest is suggesting that people are voting based on irrational evaluations of their self interest: for the benefit of their unlikely future selves.
Public choice theory explains why irrational collective results obtain from individual rational behavior. To get rational collective results requires that people act altruistically, favoring the collective over themselves.
And they are asking why it is so hard to get rational collective results, aka in your wording why is it so hard to get people to act altruistically. So the answer to your question “why do you think altruism is common* is still “what are you talking about”.
Altruism isn't common because we're created by evolution, and nothing is created by evolution without a selfish (for the genes) payoff. Supposed altruistic behavior in evolved creatures always has a selfish alterior motive (group selection, tit-for-tat payoff, for example).
Public Choice theory is "a whole branch of political science" the same way "historic materialism" is though, with Buchanan instead of Marx, as it was created with the same kind of ideological motivations, with “state bad” instead of “capitalism bad” as the alpha and omega of the discipline. Interestingly enough, both share the same contempt of democracy.
While Bush Jr was definitely doing it to give yet another handout to corn growers, it solved a real problem.
After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.
Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.
So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.
> So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.
The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture. They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use. The alternative is to just use slightly less of that land, because the animals are going to have to replace that feed from somewhere. Distillers grains are valuable because the fat and protein are used for finishing cattle for human consumption in feedlots so the sugars are either going to the cows or the biofuels.
The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
Actually, the first thing we tried generally WAS ethanol. The company that made TEL discarded it as a fuel additive because they couldn't patent and control it.
We poisoned the world with lead because it was more profitable for a single company.
> The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture.
I have no idea about the US, but in Europe it's absolutely not the case. We've replaced huge quantities of land that was twenty/thirty years ago dedicated to other crops.
Also, we could actually convert them to pastures, that have a much better ecosystemic value (or even let them grow into unexploited forests, for even better environmental effect).
> They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use.
Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
In fact, in Europe the most fertile soils have long been destroyed by urbanization (because they were where the population density was the highest in agrarian times and where the megalopolis arose).
> The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
We only got there because it was promoted by denying scientific evidences for many decades. Diesel engines have their own issues but they don't require these additives and you cannot pretend they don't exist.
That's my fault, I should have prefaced that I'm just talking about the US. I have no idea what the situation is like in Europe (for some reason I assumed biofuels weren't big there). Due to US density and geography, most marginal land here wouldn't be returned to little more than pasture. It depends on the state but most of that land was never forest to begin with.
> Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
What do you mean by engineered? The most fertile places in the US (i.e. the southwest) run on multi-million year old alluvial plains where micronutrients are deposited from mountain runoff. NPK and some micronutrients are supplemented but the most fertile regions tend to be the least "engineered". The engineering goes into the massive irrigation projects, not the soil, precisely because engineering the latter is so much harder.
In a pasture for instance, grass can grow because the plant incorporate enough organic matter in the soil to be consumed by microorganisms that will in return fixate the nitrogen from the air into nitrates that can be consumed by the plant. Then you have some equilibrium-ish (it depends on the seasons and the precipitation so it's not an actual equilibrium) amount of nitrogen and organic compounds in your soil.
When you plow the soil, you accelerate decomposition of organic matter that was previously sitting there (because you bring excess oxygen). In the short term, it favors the fixation of nitrogen by the microorganism of the soil (which is why fallow works) but the following years you have less nitrogen fixation than you'd have had otherwise (because there's less organic mater to provide energy to the microorganisms).
Enters the nitrogen fertilizer: with them you don't need microorganisms to provide the nitrogen for your plants, and as such you don't care about the organic matter load of your soil. That's what I call “engineered soil” in opposition to the soils that are driven by the microorganisms who balance the carbon/nitrogen content of the soil.
I think at that point the phrase "engineered soil" loses all utility. We've been engineering soil with domesticated herd animals since prehistory, bringing fertilizer from pasture to arable land at the very least. If we look further at the most recent archaeological research on cultivation, there's growing evidence that soil engineering is how societies move from cultivation-assisted hunter gatherers to fully sedentary agriculture (and the strongest evidence, i.e. from extant isolated tribes in jungles, is that even the so called hunter gatherers participate in extensive soil engineering to support cultivation).
Absolutely. We've just been better at engineering over time, and with synthetic fertilizer we gained access to a lot more of fertilizer than when we used manure.
The same way, humans have engineered forests since prehistory, but there's still a massive difference between a prehistoric forest and a modern exploited one.
> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?
It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).
I don't think Bret (the author of ACOUP) omits drought - he leads his section on plausible theories with "period of drying and consistent crop failures". While Bret dismisses the out to in migration/invasion theory, he does support the idea of intra-region migration/warfare (perhaps induced by drought/crop failures).
I'm really annoyed that Patrick gave up on that. I mean, I know he's been doing it a decade, and I can't chain him to a desk, and I'm being entitled, but...
I listened to a couple. The first (current?) run on Past Lives was about slavery, and was a bit too "misery porn" for me. The historical fiction component of the show was always my least favourite bit.
It injects some really interesting color into the Tanakh/Old Testament - I'm not sure anyone has definitively lined up the Bronze Age Collapse with Biblical events, but it sure seems to be in the neighborhood of the period between the Exodus and King David.
One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.
For the rest of HN, while that video is from someone who takes the Bible seriously, you can also view it as an interesting examination of the historical time period, even if with a particular lens and slant. Who doesn't have a particular lens and slant anyhow?
It's worth noting that historically, Israel and Judah are iron age settlements. This makes references to the authors of the tanakh "bronze age sheepherders" wildly inaccurate at best and mostly offensively reductionist.
Taken as an intentional insult though, it could be very historically literate. The south of Canaan seems to have peaked in prestige in the Neolithic and early bronze age. Afterwards, other than a handful of Canaanite sentinel cities, it was kind of an irrelevant rural backwater, and those cities fell off drastically in the iron age. The kingdom of Israel was a regional player with a lot of manpower, but compared to its neighbors of Aram-Damascus and the Sidonians, it didn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Judah may as well have not even existed. When Israel was turned into Samaria, it was right back to being a footnote.
Painting the kingdoms as LARPing pastoralists who belonged to an older time is basically exactly what it would have looked like to the Tzorim, who had apparently bad relations with Israel from the mid-iron age onwards. Reinvoking that imagery is basically stoking a 2500 year old brotherly inferiority complex, if a highly esoteric one.
> The kingdom of Israel was a regional player with a lot of manpower, but compared to its neighbors of Aram-Damascus and the Sidonians, it didn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.
Not sure if you mean it this way but: I don't think the Tanakh itself claims otherwise. Its portrayal is basically an ~80-year run of David and Solomon accumulating a ton of land, wealth, and prestige; then the kingdom splits, and it's a directionally downward spiral from there, with near-constant pressure and incursion from greater powers.
The OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting:
> there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.
One possibility I've wondered about is the emergence of a new crop pathogen. This might be addressed by looking at DNA of modern crop pathogens, and possibly looking if there was a change in the crops being grown before/after the LBAC.
Eric Cline is great - when i had a tooth removed in a somewhat nasty procedure i spent a Caturday hepped up on goofballs watching his videos on LBA while playing Hatshepsut on Diety in Civ VII 1.4 (i got to play test 1.3.2 via Firaxis via discord, ooh la la i call a car hole a garage)
in my personal "immersive learning" period starting 2021, i discovered acoup.blog when Old World came out and extended into reading while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action
its been a while since ive read a comment somewhere that I am so completely bewildered by. I understand about half the words, and none of the references, that you wrote.
the point is sort of both (i've been nerdy and signalling enough in these general and personal trying times, so why stop there)
- Chris Crawford created Balance of Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)) and had some writings saying games are more important to / have a greater capacity to aid learning than the modern education system at large, citing the little games mother cats play with kittens to teach them how to survive (or something to that effect). that stuck with me but either way, without BoP and WarGames you don't have, say, Twilight Struggle
- Another thing later on that stuck with me are media theorist Marshall McLuhan's concept of hot versus cool media (perhaps more famous for the medium is the message / massage). I am not going to consult AI for this, but I contextualized it as how much work the "recipient" has to do. I.e. baseball or War of the Worlds on the radio is "cooler" than red-hot NFL football or Independence Day on the screen
So then Contagion is hot media, passages from David Quammen's Spillover are cool(er) media, and Plague Inc.'s porridge is just right. or play Augustus while I, Claudius is one while getting ripshit on Ovid and wine
Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat
LBA -> probably supposed to be LBAC, Late Bronze Age collapse
Civ -> Civilization, a series of historically inspired strategy games, where you play as the historical leader of a civilization through the ages of human development
Hatshepsut -> an Egyptian Pharaoh who is one of the leaders you can play as in Civ VII
Deity -> the name of the highest difficulty level in Civ VII
Firaxis -> the company that develops the Civilization series
Discord -> a chat app/service often used in gaming communities
ooh la la i call a car hole a garage -> a reference to a joke in The Simpsons, where a character complains someone else thinks they're fancy because they use the word "garage", and when challenged on an alternative, he calls it "car hole"
Old World -> a game similar to the Civilization series
CK III -> Crusader Kings III, another game similar to Civilization
Plague -> probably Plague Inc, a game where you play as a pathogen trying to infect and kill the entirety of humanity
Contagion -> a movie about the start of a pandemic
Rest of the references I can't help with. Also no idea why they would mention the playtest of Civ VII version 1.3.2.
hepped could also just be "hopped" as in "hopped up on X" which is a relatively common phrase for being on some drugs or medication, but using kawaii speak which often softens vowel sounds, turning the open "ah" sound of the 'o' in hopped into a pronunciation of 'eh'. They couldve taken it further and said "hipped up" for no change in meaning. this may not have all been consciously decided, as many chronically online social circles use forms of this speech routinely and linguistics is a funny thing like that where the brain can adopt and make up things to fit it. May also be more of a 'fedora' speech pattern that younger online generation uses ironically in a nerdy voice
always ahrd to tell exactly whats influencing the speech of the chronically online folk, but the mention of discord and well everything else about the post seem to strongly indicate it. all this to say, i doubt they were looking to be understood as much as they were just talking to talk and sending some in-group signaling
That is actually a reference to the underrated Mark Belanger, who has the second highest dWAR ever behind Ozzie Smith, and a few percentage points ahead of teammate Brooks Robinson: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/belanma01.shtml
that he has a .228 lifetime batting average makes him more endearing, although shortstops couldn't really hit then
> Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat
There's a well-known underground nightclub in Seattle which has a monthly event called "Caturday" - I had no idea there was another meaning for the portmanteau! Makes sense, though.
I don't think that's "another meaning" but rather assume their name is a reference. Caturday is a widespread and long standing online meme event (20+ years) to post pictures of cats on saturdays. I have no idea what community it originated in or even when.
I'm being pedantic here, of course, but "nation-states" is perhaps not the right expression to use for that era. Nation states are primarily a thing of the nineteenth century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state). The article seems to talk about "imperial states" and "palace states", and I'm not sure I've ever seen the expression "palace state" before.
One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. It was a systems collapse. The societies of the time were likely resilient enough to deal with "just a drought", "just a war", "just a big earthquake", or just some "international trade hiccups". What happened during the collapse was all of these things at once. It was the combination that proved so difficult to handle.
To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline.
Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.
He's also recently been on Empire [1], the Goalhanger podcast — and sister show to the great The Rest is History (which I hope will cover this period someday, though they tend not to go back that far in time) — in a series of episodes on the late Bronze Age collapse, which had Stephen Fry as a guest as well.
Cline does cover the evidence of destruction, which is also talked about in the other episodes. But the thing about drought is that we have written communications between different rules documenting that they were struggling with food supply.
An aside: For some reason I find Cline super annoying to listen to — his voice, drawl, and odd cadence triggers something visceral in me. But I admit he knows his stuff.
Curious, in Spanish we have the same saying, but always in the negative version ("no hay moros en la costa") which is something you say when you're doing something secret and there is no one around who could see, hear or cause trouble.
In the UK we say 'the coast is clear' when telling someone that 'there is no-one around to see any misdeeds you're about to do'. Nothing about Moors, nor even Spaniards!
The Iron Age can be researched at your Town Center, but the Post-Iron Age isn't a real age, it's just an extra setting on the map settings menu that starts you in the Iron Age with everything already researched.
The people of that era would have thought so. The Iliad and the Odyssey (if they have any basis in reality) might be examples of that period seen through a lens of mythology.
Very possibly a subset of the Sea Peoples were Greek. Egyptians reported the "Ekwesh" (which might the Egyptian word for Achaeans) and the "Denyen" (which might the Egyptian word for Danaans) among the Sea Peoples.
Patrick Wyman—of the Tides of History podcast—just put out a new book, Lost Worlds, which is worth a read if this is your bag. The basic premise is that the way ancient history is typically taught, "that we moved linearly from foraging to farming, and then from country farmers to city-dwelling, tax-paying subjects of kings and emperors," is essentially wrong. He goes on:
>All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....
>That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.
It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
> "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :)
i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute
just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky.
I think the same, we are headed for the tech version of the Dark Ages, all with feudalism. The corporations will be the feudal lords, because they have more capital than most of the countries in the world.
I'm just wondering how will conflict and fighting for resources play out during this time. Will the corporations simply hire military groups with their infinite money?
Are you familiar with the term techo-feudalism coined by economist and former minister of finance of Greece Yanis Varoufakis?
The dark ages were fine. Feudalism replaced a violent slavery based empire and evolved towards greater human rights and democracy. We now risk a real step backwards.
I'm reading Proto which is about the Proto-Indo-European language family and it discusses exactly this, where the hunter gatherer nomads of PIE moved from the Caucuses to more farming oriented areas like plains they settled down and also interbred with the local farmers. But, when droughts happened and food got more scarce from farming, many of the farmers in turn became nomads again. The DNA shows this change apparently.
It's important that we learn about this so we don't repeat it. Sadly, we are repeating it. Perhaps it's impossible to prevent the cycle because it can only be prevented by those who benefit from it.
What is your evidence to support that? there is no 1:1 comparison here. The groups that likely survived these collapses were largely nomadic or at the fringes of society, used to sustaining themselves without the support of the existing power structures.
> Chang established the basis of this research in a previous publication with an intentionally simplified model that ignored such complexities as geography and migration
This seems like a very impactful simplification. Especially given the relative limited mobility of peoples up until very recently.
>There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field
> geological proof
This is an interesting theory. My question is: What methods are you using to test the change in magnetic fields? Put another way, what is your middle range theory from an archaeological perspective? How are you dating your samples? etc.
Robert J. Sawyer wrote a series of sf books called The Neanderthal Parallax which proposes that human sentience (and Neanderthal sentience) originated, and ended, with changes in the Earth's magnetic field. It explored some very interesting social and anthropological ideas.
I briefly searched while between work and looking to fill time as to whether the boundaries for the collapse are widely accepted several years ago. According to the archeological evidence that had been found by 2020, there was some ironclad evidence that the proto-states of the Albanian and Bulgarian valleys had essentially zero change to their economies and material cultures decade on decade throughout the time period and may have not noticed the collapse occur but the Caucasus situation was unclear and controversial among the archeological community.
Our favorite pedant should have a new post up today, I think he posts in the afternoon though. At least, checking in the morning and saying “ah, dang, the acoup post hasn’t come out yet, maybe I’ll reread an old one…” is a Friday morning ritual for me.
My pet hypothesis is : That trade networks, in times of collapse- become sort of superspreader networks of downfall. Think about that city state who runs out of food by the sea! It still has all the trading vessels- whats more logic then to go - and take over somebody elses city and ships! Piracy of the damned! Stealing the food from the starving, just to give there families one more day! Following the coast- until you run out of city- and the civilization is gone!It should also not affect the country interior cities - who then would murder the upstart pirates who took over the old capital near the sea..
The study of the LBAC is compelling these days because of the similarities to our present day situation. Other commenters have noted the the possibility of AI driven collapse, but another possibility is our dependence on oil.
Bronze is the combination copper+tin. Copper is common in earths composition, but tin is much more scarce. The scarcity of tin necessitated the expansive trade networks to acquire the resource. To my way of thinking this correlates to our dependency on oil which while not exactly scarce, is not evenly distributed across the world. Our global supply chain for oil is fragile in the same way that the supply chain for tin was to the bronze age empires.
As for the article: I found the authors use of dating systems inconsistent and confusing. Some references are listed with the BC/AD nomenclature while others omit it entirely leaving the reader confused as which era he is referring to. Also, the use of the BC/AD has been supplanted by the use of the BCE/CE nomenclature in scientific references for 20+ years. This could simply be due to the fact that the author is a historian, but one would think a PhD would know better. All of this made me wonder if perhaps the author relies too heavily on AI.
The author has been an established blogger since well before the modern AI boom. It is of course not impossible that their writing technique has changed, and they now use AI heavily, but preferring BC/AD over the alternative/not always clarifying which strikes me as incredibly weak evidence.
I would describe it as entirely normal. My experience working in a research organization where the majority of my colleagues hold Phds is that education level has a strong inverse correlation with ability/willingness to care about such mundane chores as spelling, grammar and arithmetic.
I'd call him a little bit sloppy, in need of proofreading. Certainly not an overuser of AI. He writes at least one of these monster posts a week on top of (IIRC) teaching in college, so it's understandable if he's in a rush.
And yeah, it's not the best, but it's really not worth discounting his writing more than he himself already does at the end. Lots of smart people have imperfect language skills.
The lack of consistency in the usage is also telling. Also, perhaps the author simply a christian apologist. I am an archaeologist with 10+ years of experience, so now you know my bias.
Lack of consistency seems entirely normal to me for a blog post.
At a certain point the information is simply redundant. The meaning of the naked number can and will easily be inferred from context. You don’t even notice it. Both while writing and also while reading. A proper proof reading will catch that (maybe, though I myself am actually hilariously bad at proof reading and miss obvious stuff all the time, so being able to properly proof read and catch things always seemed like a super power to me) but I don’t think this blog author does that (and I don’t really expect it? It’s fine …)
It totally get that there are people who will be endlessly annoyed by that – I’m also annoyed by people using quotation marks the wrong way. But it doesn’t really impact readability of the context is clear enough (as it obviously is in this case).
Consistency: the only case where he used BCE is in an image caption. The description on Wikimedia Commons uses BCE, so my guess is that he defaults to writing BC but reading that subconsciously put him in the frame of mind to write BCE. From a skim, he never uses CE or AD in this article.
Omission: this confused me at first, but really the entire article is set 3000 years ago, so it's not particularly ambiguous. If you think in the context of "lecture on the bronze age" you wouldn't expect him to specify every time.
I'm very curious what part of the article you're drawing on to suggest that their reliance on copper and tin was the cause of the collapse. The article that I read seemed to suggest it was climate related.
I have no idea where you're from, but oil is not what it once was, especially in the United States. In fact, we have a very recent case study substantiating this claim: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait sees 20% of the entire world's supply transit through when under normal conditions. Yet after being completely closed (then slightly reopened, and now almost completely closed again), the world is functioning relatively normally and is much less impacted than it would have likely been even 20 years ago.
My conclusion from the article is entirely different: collapse doesn't necessarily occur all at once. And given that, maybe to someone living through this collapse, they wouldn't have even recognized it.
The article mentions bronze production (thus indirectly mentioning copper and tin) not as a root cause, but rather a factor that spread the crisis from one region to another:
> What is clear is that once the collapse started, it was contagious, likely for two reasons: first that collapsing areas produced invading forces and refugee flows that destabilized their neighbors and second because as you will recall above, these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze) as well as to acquire key prestige goods necessary to maintain the loyalty of the aristocracy.
Yep, agree. I was mostly focused on the cause, but supply chain disruption certainly seems to have exacerbated the collapse.
I think the supply chain was probably disrupted mostly because as the empires contracted inwards, there may have been a lack of policing throughout the hinterlands. So, getting from state to state would have been more dangerous.
In today’s terms, this might have implications for the policing of the world’s physical trade corridors: the oceans. What might happen if the world’s global oceanic police force (the United States) decides to no longer spend the trillions of dollars required to police these vast stretches of ocean?
As mentioned by the other commenter,it is called the _bronze age_, so the components of the bronze alloy are part of the discussion. My point is that extended supply chains are vulnerable. And yes, in my view climate was a proximate trigger. However, once triggered, the collapse became more impactful because of the extended supply chains.
> I have no idea where you're from
I'm from the US and looking out my window to the street below I notice that that more than 90% of the vehicles are still running on petroleum. The impact of high petroleum prices seems obvious to me.
An unrelated question, but why do you think petroleum prices are not correlating with with the straight closure. If, as you opine, the world has changed then why did prices rise in the first place? Was it market speculation based on an outdated worldview, or was it something else? I do not know.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing. I am saying the prime mover was probably climate change and you’re saying the disruption of supply chains exacerbated the collapse. Both can be true. I was focused on the cause.
To follow the red herring about crude oil, you’re making my point for me: you’re looking down at a busy road full of petroleum-fueled automobiles when 20% of the world’s oil supply has been completely eliminated.
To be more specific, the difference between now and 20 years ago is the United States is a net exporter of oil. Horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other nearly unbelievable technological leaps have turned the United States into an oil superpower within less than 2 decades. Aside from all of that, I truly believe that in 10 years everyone with a home (rented or owned) and a daily commute will be driving an EV. Consumer demand is far less than transportation/travel/industrial demand for oil, but it is the tail that wags the dog.
We are definitely disagreeing. How much more completely can I express that without being disagreeable. I have no further use for this conversation. Go to sleep.
Although it's not its main topic, I enjoyed Ian Morris' Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, which goes over this in a way that really fascinated me. The book's ideas seem contested but as a layman it was a great tour of many years of humanity.
Financial Imperialism is the reason why US is rich in terms of resources and because of material richness, lot of raw brainpower is attacted to America. Read the book "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire" by Michael Hudson.
On an unrelated note: I found this map where you can view the changes in political geography over time via scroll at the bottom. It's my goto with historical posts.
As a Greek I feel proud that we passed through all history tides: multiple cycles of thriving and decline, the last one being the Classical century of 5th BC, then the Hellenistic period of Alexander until we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans.
This lasted for a full thousand years and it continued the in the same manner for two more until today.
It seems the reasons of decline were most often the boring ones: variable scale fightings and climate change. Any resemblance to modern times is not coincidental.
"we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans"
As a tongue-in-the-cheek retort, if the Greeks really were doing that, then the Roman Empire wouldn't ended up speaking Greek and looking so different in the period in which it is nowadays being called "Byzantine". Romans revered various Greek aspects, and somehow that privileged status that (everything) Greek enjoyed inside the empire played a role into the movement of the empire's capital to the Greek city of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople). It surely feels more like taking (the reigns, and not doing much afterwards, other than holding out for as long as possible).
I saw a slghtly odd youtube video by a small creator who thinks it was at least partly because the gods stopped talking to people.
No, hear me out.
Obviously they weren't real, but the Youtuber said (based on sources) people used to talk to the gods, like you might talk to a cat. And the gods spoke back (and we all know cat owners who insist the cat is replying).
As societies became more sophisticated, this stopped. Around the time of the collapse, rulers complained that the gods were silent. The usual interpretation is that the gods did not help, but what if they literally stopped "hearing" the god's replies?
You couldn't have a conversation with Zeus in the town square anymore without people saying you were nuts, unless you were a ruler. But the sophisticated, skeptical societies also became fractured and disloyal (especially when only their rulers were arguing with Zeus over why the peasants weren't taking them seriously), and social institutions (which were stuck in the past) couldn't keep up.
Is this the old "breakdown of the bicameral mind" theory? I don't know. I think that tin trade routes breaking down + rise of iron-wielding civilisations are more plausible.
It looks very much like it: Julian James, 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' (see [1]), which influenced Neal Stephenson's writing of Snow Crash.
Scott Alexander wrote a critique of it beginning "Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact..." [2]. A response (which I have not yet read) can be found here [3].
Yes. Civilizations relying on tin were basically quite vulnerable because tin is uncommon [1]. The coincidence between late bronze age collapse and the transition to iron age seems to be explained by the fact that once the disorganization no longer allows tin trade, makers turn to the second choice, iron.
Iron making was known during bronze age, but it was technically more challenging that tin+copper because it requires higher temperatures.
It's amusing to note that it lead to the development of the iron/steel making techniques, so much so that once the tin "was back", steel was cheaper, more reliable (from the logistics perspective) and better.
That's Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory[0]. Personally I don't buy it because we haven't seen convincing evidence of it in pre-civilization populations that still existed in isolated places on earth until recently.
I'm a bit puzzled by one thing. Author writes that the Greek alphabet is based on Linear B script, and also that it is based on Phoenician alphabet. So was it a mix of both?
> The Mycenaean palaces had developed a syllabic script, which we call Linear B, to represent their spoken Greek. This form of writing is entirely lost. In the 8th century, the Greeks will adopt an entirely new script – borrowing the one the Phoenicians are using – to represent their language
You've misread something. Linear B encoded Greek, but is not related to the Phoenician-based script.
I think "Collapse" is a strange word because
we talk here about several hundred, if not thousand
of years. A good example is the old roman empire -
it expanded, it grew - until it no longer did and
then it whittled away or lost out to e. g. northern
tribes. Collapse as a word is just weird here really.
Even the old roman empire did not "collapse" per se,
if we ignore big single final battles such as 1453:
The real reason for dark ages was not the fall of the western roman empire, but the arabian conquests, which turned the international trade highway (the Mediterranean sea) into a highway by which pirates and slave traders had easy access to their prey.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 42.3 ms ] threadHistorian Eric H. Cline has multiple books citing this time period, specifically 1117 BCE as the inflection point for the bronze age "collapse", defined by a deterioration of international shipping routes that weakened the nation-states of the era. I've learned about it recently because YouTube began recommending videos about it.
For example: https://youtu.be/choxcHXhZhE?is=t5lDwQQpqPsE2k5M
One historical event that Cline focuses on is a severe centuries-long drought. It's something the ACOUP article seems to omit.
The whole channel is top quality if you want to ruminate on other civilisations that came and went.
Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.
This, plus the gigantic amount of agricultural land being used for biofuel production (almost as much as cattle food).
But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.
But yes if people get hungry enough, field corn easily qualifies as actual food.
Sweet Corn: For Fresh Eating harvested with a high moisture content which hurts preservation without freezing.
Dimple is a Field corn, harvested later resulting in a dryer product, lasts longer and has a higher yield.
Flint Corn: Mostly decorative as it looks cool, but again still edible after grinding.
Heirloom: lots of shapes and sizes but significantly lower yield.
Popcorn: A tiny slice of the market but pops when heated.
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.
Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.
So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.
I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains
The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
We poisoned the world with lead because it was more profitable for a single company.
I have no idea about the US, but in Europe it's absolutely not the case. We've replaced huge quantities of land that was twenty/thirty years ago dedicated to other crops.
Also, we could actually convert them to pastures, that have a much better ecosystemic value (or even let them grow into unexploited forests, for even better environmental effect).
> They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use.
Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
In fact, in Europe the most fertile soils have long been destroyed by urbanization (because they were where the population density was the highest in agrarian times and where the megalopolis arose).
> The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
We only got there because it was promoted by denying scientific evidences for many decades. Diesel engines have their own issues but they don't require these additives and you cannot pretend they don't exist.
> Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
What do you mean by engineered? The most fertile places in the US (i.e. the southwest) run on multi-million year old alluvial plains where micronutrients are deposited from mountain runoff. NPK and some micronutrients are supplemented but the most fertile regions tend to be the least "engineered". The engineering goes into the massive irrigation projects, not the soil, precisely because engineering the latter is so much harder.
In a pasture for instance, grass can grow because the plant incorporate enough organic matter in the soil to be consumed by microorganisms that will in return fixate the nitrogen from the air into nitrates that can be consumed by the plant. Then you have some equilibrium-ish (it depends on the seasons and the precipitation so it's not an actual equilibrium) amount of nitrogen and organic compounds in your soil.
When you plow the soil, you accelerate decomposition of organic matter that was previously sitting there (because you bring excess oxygen). In the short term, it favors the fixation of nitrogen by the microorganism of the soil (which is why fallow works) but the following years you have less nitrogen fixation than you'd have had otherwise (because there's less organic mater to provide energy to the microorganisms).
Enters the nitrogen fertilizer: with them you don't need microorganisms to provide the nitrogen for your plants, and as such you don't care about the organic matter load of your soil. That's what I call “engineered soil” in opposition to the soils that are driven by the microorganisms who balance the carbon/nitrogen content of the soil.
The same way, humans have engineered forests since prehistory, but there's still a massive difference between a prehistoric forest and a modern exploited one.
It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).
I listened to a couple. The first (current?) run on Past Lives was about slavery, and was a bit too "misery porn" for me. The historical fiction component of the show was always my least favourite bit.
like a closing of a certain straight that was essential for a large percentage of a necessary resource?
Enough of that & hardly any inter-state trading is left.
One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.
For the rest of HN, while that video is from someone who takes the Bible seriously, you can also view it as an interesting examination of the historical time period, even if with a particular lens and slant. Who doesn't have a particular lens and slant anyhow?
Painting the kingdoms as LARPing pastoralists who belonged to an older time is basically exactly what it would have looked like to the Tzorim, who had apparently bad relations with Israel from the mid-iron age onwards. Reinvoking that imagery is basically stoking a 2500 year old brotherly inferiority complex, if a highly esoteric one.
Not sure if you mean it this way but: I don't think the Tanakh itself claims otherwise. Its portrayal is basically an ~80-year run of David and Solomon accumulating a ton of land, wealth, and prestige; then the kingdom splits, and it's a directionally downward spiral from there, with near-constant pressure and incursion from greater powers.
> there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.
in my personal "immersive learning" period starting 2021, i discovered acoup.blog when Old World came out and extended into reading while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action
Hope your teeth are doing better now!
- Chris Crawford created Balance of Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)) and had some writings saying games are more important to / have a greater capacity to aid learning than the modern education system at large, citing the little games mother cats play with kittens to teach them how to survive (or something to that effect). that stuck with me but either way, without BoP and WarGames you don't have, say, Twilight Struggle
- Another thing later on that stuck with me are media theorist Marshall McLuhan's concept of hot versus cool media (perhaps more famous for the medium is the message / massage). I am not going to consult AI for this, but I contextualized it as how much work the "recipient" has to do. I.e. baseball or War of the Worlds on the radio is "cooler" than red-hot NFL football or Independence Day on the screen
So then Contagion is hot media, passages from David Quammen's Spillover are cool(er) media, and Plague Inc.'s porridge is just right. or play Augustus while I, Claudius is one while getting ripshit on Ovid and wine
if i had more time i would make it shorter
LBA -> probably supposed to be LBAC, Late Bronze Age collapse
Civ -> Civilization, a series of historically inspired strategy games, where you play as the historical leader of a civilization through the ages of human development
Hatshepsut -> an Egyptian Pharaoh who is one of the leaders you can play as in Civ VII
Deity -> the name of the highest difficulty level in Civ VII
Firaxis -> the company that develops the Civilization series
Discord -> a chat app/service often used in gaming communities
ooh la la i call a car hole a garage -> a reference to a joke in The Simpsons, where a character complains someone else thinks they're fancy because they use the word "garage", and when challenged on an alternative, he calls it "car hole"
Old World -> a game similar to the Civilization series
CK III -> Crusader Kings III, another game similar to Civilization
Plague -> probably Plague Inc, a game where you play as a pathogen trying to infect and kill the entirety of humanity
Contagion -> a movie about the start of a pandemic
Rest of the references I can't help with. Also no idea why they would mention the playtest of Civ VII version 1.3.2.
Caturday -> Saturday
Hepped -> Novel synonym for “high” likely influenced by the jazz slang word ‘hep’ which means ‘hip’ or ‘cool’
Goofballs -> 5/500 hydrocodone/APAP, aka Vicodin. The gold standard tooth pain prescription drug, an opioid. In this context.
always ahrd to tell exactly whats influencing the speech of the chronically online folk, but the mention of discord and well everything else about the post seem to strongly indicate it. all this to say, i doubt they were looking to be understood as much as they were just talking to talk and sending some in-group signaling
Another Simpsons reference.
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5cll43/while_you_wer...
that he has a .228 lifetime batting average makes him more endearing, although shortstops couldn't really hit then
There's a well-known underground nightclub in Seattle which has a monthly event called "Caturday" - I had no idea there was another meaning for the portmanteau! Makes sense, though.
I think you need to be on goofballs yourself to understand it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat
To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline.
Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.
I don't think he establishes that. It could be one root cause, and complexity in how things then fell apart.
Cline does cover the evidence of destruction, which is also talked about in the other episodes. But the thing about drought is that we have written communications between different rules documenting that they were struggling with food supply.
An aside: For some reason I find Cline super annoying to listen to — his voice, drawl, and odd cadence triggers something visceral in me. But I admit he knows his stuff.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire-world-history/i...
Very possibly a subset of the Sea Peoples were Greek. Egyptians reported the "Ekwesh" (which might the Egyptian word for Achaeans) and the "Denyen" (which might the Egyptian word for Danaans) among the Sea Peoples.
>Late Bronze Age Collapse
It was a little late but it had to happen sooner or later.
For those in power there may not be many other opportunities to set the standard for archaic leadership, so better get it while they can.
As we have seen :\",
>All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....
>That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.
It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :)
i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute
just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky.
i'll see myself out
I'm just wondering how will conflict and fighting for resources play out during this time. Will the corporations simply hire military groups with their infinite money?
The dark ages were fine. Feudalism replaced a violent slavery based empire and evolved towards greater human rights and democracy. We now risk a real step backwards.
http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/Nature...
This is an interesting theory. My question is: What methods are you using to test the change in magnetic fields? Put another way, what is your middle range theory from an archaeological perspective? How are you dating your samples? etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
Bronze is the combination copper+tin. Copper is common in earths composition, but tin is much more scarce. The scarcity of tin necessitated the expansive trade networks to acquire the resource. To my way of thinking this correlates to our dependency on oil which while not exactly scarce, is not evenly distributed across the world. Our global supply chain for oil is fragile in the same way that the supply chain for tin was to the bronze age empires.
As for the article: I found the authors use of dating systems inconsistent and confusing. Some references are listed with the BC/AD nomenclature while others omit it entirely leaving the reader confused as which era he is referring to. Also, the use of the BC/AD has been supplanted by the use of the BCE/CE nomenclature in scientific references for 20+ years. This could simply be due to the fact that the author is a historian, but one would think a PhD would know better. All of this made me wonder if perhaps the author relies too heavily on AI.
And yeah, it's not the best, but it's really not worth discounting his writing more than he himself already does at the end. Lots of smart people have imperfect language skills.
At a certain point the information is simply redundant. The meaning of the naked number can and will easily be inferred from context. You don’t even notice it. Both while writing and also while reading. A proper proof reading will catch that (maybe, though I myself am actually hilariously bad at proof reading and miss obvious stuff all the time, so being able to properly proof read and catch things always seemed like a super power to me) but I don’t think this blog author does that (and I don’t really expect it? It’s fine …)
It totally get that there are people who will be endlessly annoyed by that – I’m also annoyed by people using quotation marks the wrong way. But it doesn’t really impact readability of the context is clear enough (as it obviously is in this case).
Omission: this confused me at first, but really the entire article is set 3000 years ago, so it's not particularly ambiguous. If you think in the context of "lecture on the bronze age" you wouldn't expect him to specify every time.
I have no idea where you're from, but oil is not what it once was, especially in the United States. In fact, we have a very recent case study substantiating this claim: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait sees 20% of the entire world's supply transit through when under normal conditions. Yet after being completely closed (then slightly reopened, and now almost completely closed again), the world is functioning relatively normally and is much less impacted than it would have likely been even 20 years ago.
My conclusion from the article is entirely different: collapse doesn't necessarily occur all at once. And given that, maybe to someone living through this collapse, they wouldn't have even recognized it.
> What is clear is that once the collapse started, it was contagious, likely for two reasons: first that collapsing areas produced invading forces and refugee flows that destabilized their neighbors and second because as you will recall above, these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze) as well as to acquire key prestige goods necessary to maintain the loyalty of the aristocracy.
I think the supply chain was probably disrupted mostly because as the empires contracted inwards, there may have been a lack of policing throughout the hinterlands. So, getting from state to state would have been more dangerous.
In today’s terms, this might have implications for the policing of the world’s physical trade corridors: the oceans. What might happen if the world’s global oceanic police force (the United States) decides to no longer spend the trillions of dollars required to police these vast stretches of ocean?
> I have no idea where you're from
I'm from the US and looking out my window to the street below I notice that that more than 90% of the vehicles are still running on petroleum. The impact of high petroleum prices seems obvious to me.
An unrelated question, but why do you think petroleum prices are not correlating with with the straight closure. If, as you opine, the world has changed then why did prices rise in the first place? Was it market speculation based on an outdated worldview, or was it something else? I do not know.
[edit:corrected my formatting error]
To follow the red herring about crude oil, you’re making my point for me: you’re looking down at a busy road full of petroleum-fueled automobiles when 20% of the world’s oil supply has been completely eliminated.
To be more specific, the difference between now and 20 years ago is the United States is a net exporter of oil. Horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other nearly unbelievable technological leaps have turned the United States into an oil superpower within less than 2 decades. Aside from all of that, I truly believe that in 10 years everyone with a home (rented or owned) and a daily commute will be driving an EV. Consumer demand is far less than transportation/travel/industrial demand for oil, but it is the tail that wags the dog.
I've just uploaded an English translation to: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moyen_Orient_13e_si%...
If someone can proofread my translations that would be great.
On an unrelated note: I found this map where you can view the changes in political geography over time via scroll at the bottom. It's my goto with historical posts.
https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/regions#position=5/...
This lasted for a full thousand years and it continued the in the same manner for two more until today.
It seems the reasons of decline were most often the boring ones: variable scale fightings and climate change. Any resemblance to modern times is not coincidental.
As a tongue-in-the-cheek retort, if the Greeks really were doing that, then the Roman Empire wouldn't ended up speaking Greek and looking so different in the period in which it is nowadays being called "Byzantine". Romans revered various Greek aspects, and somehow that privileged status that (everything) Greek enjoyed inside the empire played a role into the movement of the empire's capital to the Greek city of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople). It surely feels more like taking (the reigns, and not doing much afterwards, other than holding out for as long as possible).
No, hear me out.
Obviously they weren't real, but the Youtuber said (based on sources) people used to talk to the gods, like you might talk to a cat. And the gods spoke back (and we all know cat owners who insist the cat is replying).
As societies became more sophisticated, this stopped. Around the time of the collapse, rulers complained that the gods were silent. The usual interpretation is that the gods did not help, but what if they literally stopped "hearing" the god's replies?
You couldn't have a conversation with Zeus in the town square anymore without people saying you were nuts, unless you were a ruler. But the sophisticated, skeptical societies also became fractured and disloyal (especially when only their rulers were arguing with Zeus over why the peasants weren't taking them seriously), and social institutions (which were stuck in the past) couldn't keep up.
Scott Alexander wrote a critique of it beginning "Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact..." [2]. A response (which I have not yet read) can be found here [3].
[1] https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overv...
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
[3] https://www.julianjaynes.org/2023/09/04/fact-checking-scott-...
Iron making was known during bronze age, but it was technically more challenging that tin+copper because it requires higher temperatures.
It's amusing to note that it lead to the development of the iron/steel making techniques, so much so that once the tin "was back", steel was cheaper, more reliable (from the logistics perspective) and better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_during_a...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
I'm a bit puzzled by one thing. Author writes that the Greek alphabet is based on Linear B script, and also that it is based on Phoenician alphabet. So was it a mix of both?
You've misread something. Linear B encoded Greek, but is not related to the Phoenician-based script.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...