Original subtitles

[Music]

The ruins of the great city of

Hattusha are an awe-inspiring sight. They

sit right in the center of modern Turkey

on a rocky outcrop overlooking a bend in

the Kizilirmak River. Hattusha's

crumbling walls of grey limestone stand

out against the tawny yellow

grassland of the hills, lying where they

fell over three thousand years ago. One

look will tell you that Hattusha was

once a mighty fortress. Its double wall

was defended by over a hundred towers,

its thick gateways decorated with

carved sculptures of lions. For centuries,

this was the capital of the mighty

Hittite Empire which ruled a large

portion of Turkey during the Bronze Age.

Hattusha's people cultivated wheat,

barley, and lentils, and wore clothes spun

from the wool of sheep they kept in the

surrounding hills. But if you dig down

into the ruins of Hattusha, what you

find is a thin black layer right above

the city's ancient floors. This layer is

made up of ash, charred wood, and rubble

scorched in a fierce fire. It dates back

to the end of the 13th century BC, around

the Year 1200 before the start of the

Christian calendar, and when you step

back and take in all the details, it's a

little breathtaking. Walls and roofs

collapsed, bricks shattered and melted,

and it's clear that whatever happened to

Hattusha, the destruction was savage,

unrelenting, and total. After that, the

archaeological record here ends except

for the signs of a few scattered

scavengers eking out an existence among

the rubble. The ruins of Hattusha

remained empty for centuries, a haunted

place where most feared to go.

20 kilometers to the north, the ancient

city of Alaca Hoyuk where the Hittites

buried their kings in opulent tombs,

shows the same thing. It is completely

covered by ash and rubble at the same

level. A hundred kilometres to the

east of that, at another fortified

Hittite town known as Karagolan, you can

find arrowheads littering the earth like

fallen leaves and the bones of men, women,

and children left lying in the streets,

right where they fell. In fact, if you

zoom out right across the Eastern

Mediterranean, anywhere you go in the

entire region across an area spanning

over a thousand kilometers, you will find

this layer of destruction.

Archaeological evidence is quite clear;

at some point between the year 1200 and

1100 BC, right at the end of the period

we call the Bronze Age, a wave of

destruction washed across the entire

region.

It wiped whole civilizations off the map

and left nothing in its wake.

One by one, vast and ancient empires like

the Hittites, Ugarit, the Minoans, and

the Mycenaean Greeks collapsed all

together. They collapsed so

completely that they disappeared from

the historical record. It took some of

these areas nearly a thousand years to

recover after the violent end of the

Bronze Age and exactly what happened is

still one of humanity's most fiercely

debated mysteries.

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

My name's Paul Cooper and you're

listening to The Fall of Civilizations

Podcast. Each episode, I look at a

civilization of the past that rose to

glory and then collapsed into the ashes

of history. I want to ask, what did they

have in common? What led to their fall?

What did it feel like to be a person

alive at the time witnessing the end of

their world? In this episode I want to

look not at the collapse of one

civilization but at the collapse of many.

This catastrophe which historians have

called The Late Bronze Age collapse, has

become one of the enduring puzzles of

archaeology. I want to explore how so

many societies could collapse all at

once and seemingly without warning. I

want to look at the conditions that led

up to this collapse and examine the

lessons it might teach us in our

increasingly globalized and

interconnected world.

[Music]

Historian Robert Drews puts it bluntly.

Within a period of 40 to 50 years, almost

every significant city in the Eastern

Mediterranean world was destroyed, many

of them never to be occupied again. For a

long time after the Year 1200, it is safe

to say that there were no cities in the

eastern Mediterranean area. One of the

ways in which the memory of the Late

Bronze Age collapse may have survived

into the modern day is through the epic

poetry that was written about this time.

You may have heard of some of it; it

relates the destruction of a great

walled city in the Eastern Mediterranean

called Troy. The epic poems known as

Iliad and Odyssey are ancient pieces of

oral poetry attributed to a man named

Homer who may or may not have existed.

These poems were passed down for

centuries through the period that

followed the Bronze Age collapse which

we call the Greek Dark Ages. They

survived by word of mouth, with each poet

singer using astonishing skills of

memory to memorize and pass them on,

lengthening and embellishing them along

the way until they were finally written

down in the eighth century BC. The poetry

of the Iliad especially relates the

story of a great 10-year war that took

place in Eastern Mediterranean and took

up most of the manpower of Greece. This

war was led by a man named Agamemnon, a

king of Mycenae. In the second

millennium BC, the city-state of Mycenae

was one of the major centres of Greek

civilization, a mighty city to rival the

Hittite capital of Hattusha. About 90

kilometers southwest of Athens, Mycenae

was a military stronghold which

dominated much of southern Greece and

had a population of over 30,000 at its

height. Like Hattusha, it decorated the

gates of its mighty citadel with carved

stone lions.

Over a millennium later in the second

century AD, the Greek travel writer

Pausanias wrote breathlessly about his

visit to the ruins. The wall, which is the

only part of the ruin still remaining,

is a work of the Cyclopes made of

unwrought stones, each stone being so

big that a pair of mules could not move

the smallest from its place to the

slightest degree. Classical Greeks

believed that only the mythical

one-eyed giants, the Cyclopes, would have

had the strength to move the enormous

boulders that made up the walls of

Mycenae. It's a second century version of

The History Channel's Ancient Aliens

conspiracy theories today. Even then,

people found it hard to believe that

people so distant to them could have

possessed such ingenuity and skill and

then disappeared forever. But Mycenae's

leading role in the Trojan War is what

cemented its place in the Greek

imagination. Exactly how much of the

actual historical event of the Battle of

Troy has survived in Homer's epic is

still subject to bitter historical

debate. For the longest time it was

assumed that the Trojan War was an

invention of the imagination and that

the city of Troy was a myth. But that

all changed with the discovery of the

ruins of Troy in modern Turkey at the

end of the 19th century.

Now, many historians agree that Troy may

have been a coastal outpost of the

Hittite Empire and we now know that it

was a grand city much as Homer describes,

with an impressively fortified citadel.

According to legend, the walls of Troy

were built by the gods Poseidon and

Apollo, and at the time the Iliad may

have taken place, they were certainly

impressive; nine meters high with towers

soaring up to 18 meters.

Outside of this, a ranging curtain wall

enclosed a larger area of the city. But

the ruins of Troy are strangely silent.

That is, there has been almost no writing

uncovered in any excavations of the city.

Many scholars now agree that the Trojan

War related by Homer may have been a

real event or at least a composite of

events filtered through the lens of

mythology and refracted by the Chinese

whispers effect of oral transmission.

Archaeology shows that Troy was attacked

repeatedly and had to defend itself

again and again, which is indicated by

repairs undertaken to the citadel's

fortifications. We can see traces of fire

on its stones, while human remains are found

in houses and in the streets. Bronze

arrowheads have also been found

littering the ground in Troy's fort and

citadel and in fact, it seems Troy was

burnt twice towards the end of the 13th

century, right around the time the

destruction was beginning to rain down

on the whole region. Today, most scholars

date the events of the Trojan War to just

the period we have been discussing; the

end of the 12th century BC and the Late

Bronze Age collapse.

As a novelist and a student of

literature, I tend to have a bias towards

giving literary sources more weight than

a formal historian might. But for my part,

I don't think it's unreasonable to argue

that these poems may have incubated, at

least in a hazy form, an authentic memory

of those days; the feeling of apocalypse

that must have washed over the region

and a war that seemed to dwarf all

others since.

The Greek poet Quintus Smyrnaeus, in his poem

The Fall of Troy, gives us just a glimpse of

the violence of that time. Blood ran in

torrents, drenched was all the earth, as

Trojans and her alien helpers died. Here

were men lying quelled by bitter death,

all up and down the city in their blood.

Others on them were falling, gasping forth

their life strength, others clutching in

their hands their bowels that looked

through hideous gashes forth, wandered in

wretched plight around their homes.

Before we go into just what happened at

the end of the Bronze Age, I think it's

worth pausing and painting a picture of

what it was that collapsed; this vibrant

and varied region that had survived for

so many centuries and fell so suddenly.

[Music]

We often make the mistake of thinking of

the ancient world as a series of insular

and isolated states. Something about the

monumental remains of their societies

makes us think of them in this way and

it's true that their worlds were smaller

than ours today. The known world for

someone living in the Eastern

Mediterranean around the Year 1200 BC

would have extended from Greece to

perhaps the far east of what today we

would call Iran. It was populated by the

Mycenaean people of Greece in the west

and the New Kingdom of Egypt in the

south, just emerging from a period of

civil war. Their world took in the

islands of Cyprus and Crete as well as

coastal city-states like Ugarit.

Another big player in this region was

Babylon, a city in the verdant marshes of

southern Iraq, which was ruled by a

dynasty known as the Kassites. To the north

of them was the great warlike Empire of

Assyria which governed the plains of

northern Iraq and Syria. To the north

of them, the Hittites. These small

city-states were suspicious of each

other and they often fought wars, but

this isn't the whole story. The societies

of the Bronze Age were as entangled and

interdependent as the nation-states of

today,

and perhaps in some ways they were more

so. Firstly, trade was the lifeblood of

this region. The Mediterranean Sea is

essentially a vast inland lake,

relatively free of waves and storms when

compared to the open Atlantic. Across

this relatively placid water, trade

boomed. One shipwreck found off the coast

of Uluburun in southwestern Turkey

gives us just a glimpse into the rich

exchange of materials that occurred

during this time. The ship is built of

Lebanese cedar wood and dated to about

the Year 1300 BC. Just listen to this

list of what archaeologists found in its

cargo. 10 tons of copper ingots and 1 ton

of tin, logs of ebony, elephant and hippo

tusks along with more than a dozen

hippopotamus teeth, a jar filled with glass

beads, more with olives and terebinth

resin, almonds, pistachios, figs, grapes and

coriander, whole pomegranates, and a

golden scarab beetle inscribed with the

name of Nefertiti, arrowheads, daggers,

turtle shells and ostrich eggs, quartz

crystals and gold, pottery and oil lamps

from Cyprus, along with the blocks of raw

colored glass in cobalt blue and

lavender. The Uluburun shipwreck

contained goods from at least seven

different lands so it's easy to see how

this rich trade would have drawn all of

these disparate nations together.

People passed between these states, too. For

instance, we know that Minoan artists

from Crete came to decorate the walls of

Egyptian palaces in the city of Peru-

Nefer. Kings frequently requested the

services of physicians, artisans, weavers,

musicians, and singers from other

kingdoms, and intermarriage was also

common. To give just one example, we know

that Ammurapi, the last king of the

coastal nation of Ugarit, had married and

subsequently divorced a Hittite woman,

with their divorce proceedings dragging

through the court system for years.

While much of this exchange was in

luxury goods and services, other

resources that flowed down these trade

routes were utterly essential to the

survival of these large and complex

nations. Of all these resources, the

most critical in the Bronze Age was of

course the one that gives the era its

name. Bronze is an alloy of copper and

tin on a roughly ten-to-one ratio. The

amount of copper and bronze found on the

Uluburun wreck; ten tonnes of bronze and

one ton of tin, was exactly the amount

needed to smelt 11 tons of bronze. Since

its discovery sometime in the fourth

millennium BC, this reddish-gold wonder

metal had become critical to the

manufacture of just about every weapon,

tool, and household object. Just like

aluminium or steel today, bronze had

become completely indispensable to the

societies it supported. Without a steady

supply of this metal, armies would have

no weapons, chariots would be unable to

shod their wheels, and craftsmen would

have no tools. The British historian

Carol Bell has drawn a striking parallel

to the reality of our modern world. The

strategic importance of tin in the Late

Bronze Age was probably not far

different from that of crude oil today.

The availability of enough tin to

produce weapons-grade bronze must have

exercised the minds of the Great King in

Hattusha and the Pharaoh in Thebes in

the same way that supplying gasoline to

the American SUV driver preoccupies an

American president today. Of the

components of bronze, copper was

relatively easy to find.

But tin was a rare metal. At the time, the

only source readily available was from

mines in the Badakhshan region of

Afghanistan. From there, it had to be

brought overland on caravans of donkeys

following the ancient route known as the

Silk Road. It was a long and perilous

journey that crossed mountains and rivers

until it reached the great cities of

Mesopotamia. From there, the cargo of tin

spread out across the region and over

the sea to Greece. The entire military

might of the region's superpowers of

Egypt, Assyria, the Hittites, Ugarit,

Babylon, and the Mycenaean Empire in

Greece; all of them depended on this

precarious supply which at the time must

have felt as fragile as a cobweb. So, as I

relate the events of the next century or

so, I want you to keep this idea in mind,

that these nations were not entirely

distinct and separate entities. So much

as a complex and entangled web of

societies, each is dependent on the other

as the next. While peace largely held

in the region and trade could continue,

they achieved a kind of stability but

for a number of reasons, peace wasn't to

last. One thing I want to make absolutely

clear at this stage is that our

knowledge of this period is very limited.

There's so much guesswork involved

around the dates and the events of some

of what I'm about to describe that it

would be very easy to get lost in a

cloud of maybes. History is not a science

although it involves sciences. History is

a fluctuating series of interpretations,

hypotheses, and narratives that are born

out in lively debates on just about

every detail of past events. But I think

it's worth noting that when talking

about this period, there are essentially

two sources we use and each has their

problems. The first is the archaeological

record. We can learn a lot from digging

down into ancient sites and seeing what

we find, but a set of ruins doesn't mean

anything on its own. It needs an

archeologist to interpret and

hypothesize and argue about what they mean. The

other source is the written texts of the

time but those can be just as unreliable

as the ruins, and they're too often

frustratingly vague on the things we

really care about. These texts are

usually commissioned by kings and rulers

as well, and if you can't see the problem

with that, imagine trying to piece

together this week's news by only

looking at the American president's

Twitter feed. I don't want to get lost in

endless discussions about the

reliability of sources or the debate

that rages around every detail of an

archaeological site. I want to tell as

clear a story as possible that's

consistent with available evidence but

if we're really going to delve into what

might have happened to collapse so many

societies all at once in a time so

distant from our own, we will have to

enter the fray of historical debate.

[Music]

When casting around for causes of the

late bronze age collapse, historians have

long relied on one particular set of

culprits. These they refer to by the

mysterious name the 'Sea Peoples'. Even the

names Sea Peoples seems to evoke

something terrifying and foreign,

something not of this world.

They sound like monsters rising up from

the deep to wreak devastation on the

land and if the sources of the time are

anything to go by, they certainly did

wreak destruction. Who the Sea Peoples

were, where they came from, or what

language they spoke is a mystery. Many

historians have offered their guesses

which range from Sardinia and Sicily to

Libya and closer by in the Eastern

Mediterranean. But wherever they

originated, one thing is for sure; around

the time of the great collapse, a vast

horde of these invaders began landing on

the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean

in huge numbers and with fearsome force.

The Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses the Third

wrote about this invading armada on the

walls of his temple in Medinet Habu, near

the Valley of the Kings. No lands could

stand before their arms, from Khatte,

Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, all were

cut off. They desolated its people and its

land was like that which has never come

into being.

In some of these ancient sources, the Sea

Peoples begin to sound like something

from a Hollywood movie like Independence

Day or War of the Worlds, an invasion

force of insurmountable power landing

all at once and completely by surprise,

sweeping away one nation after another.

At least some of the societies that

fell during the Late Bronze Age collapse

fell because of this single cause. One

example of these is the city-state of

Ugarit, a booming trade city on the coast

of northern Syria. At this point,

Ugarit had ruled a coastal kingdom of

merchants and sailors for at least six

centuries. It stood at the very end of

the Silk Road where this great trade

route from as far as China met the

Mediterranean. Think of all those items

found nestled in the hold of the Uluburun

shipwreck. At Ugarit, each one of

them would have been taxed and with this

wealth, its citizens built a resplendent

city by the sea. Like most successful

trading towns, Ugarit was multicultural

and diverse, using at least seven

languages in its records. It was a city

in love with the written word and it

kept expansive libraries in its palaces

and temples. It even fostered the first

private libraries, one of which we know

belonged to a diplomat named Rapanu.

To Ugarit, we also owe the oldest

surviving written music in the world, a

hymn dedicated to the moon goddess

Nikkal which can still be played today.

You can almost imagine this piece of

music playing from the temples of Ugarit,

washing over its streets and markets. But

this thriving city was soon to come to

an end.

In Ugarit, archaeologists have found a

clay tablet containing a letter. It's a

message from the city's last king, a man

called Ammurapi, the same one who spent

years trying to divorce his Hittite wife.

In it, he begs the ruler of nearby Cyprus

to come to his aid. My father, now

ships of the enemy have come. They've

been setting fire to my cities and have

done evil in my land. Doesn't my father

know that all of my troops and chariots

are stationed in Hatti, but all of my

ships are in the land of Lukka? They have

not arrived back yet so the land is

abandoned. No help arrived because the

letter was never sent. It burned along

with the rest of the city, its clay

baked hard in the ensuing fires. When

excavating the ruins of Ugarit,

archaeologists have found a layer of

destruction that lies two meters thick

in places, made of ash and broken brick.

The city's roofs are caved in and

scorched and its streets are littered

with arrowheads. People buried their

valuables in a panic and never returned

to dig them up again. It's hard to say

how large the force was that attacked

them, but another letter found in the

city's kilns asks another king to equip

150 ships to send to their aid,

suggesting that it was an enormous force.

This letter, too, was never sent. The fact

that all of Ugarit's troops and ships

were stationed elsewhere when they were

attacked shows just how much it came as

a surprise. Across the region,

it seems the Sea Peoples employed the

same tactics; they appeared without

warning, wreaked havoc, destroyed cities,

and then disappeared over the horizon

before anyone knew what had happened.

Other cities along the Palestinian coast

suffered the same fate. The city of

Aleppo in Syria was destroyed around the

same time. The city of Emar on the

Euphrates River burned, too. A tablet

found there describes how hordes of

enemies had attacked it. This is an

unusual phrase to use since it seems the

citizens didn't know the names of their

attackers or where they came from. The

city of Megiddo, known in the Bible as

Armageddon, held out the longest of any

city in the region but it was finally

destroyed so violently that when the

Israelites later moved into its ruins,

they were unable to clear the debris.

They simply filled in the ruined

buildings with rubble and built on top

of them. In Cyprus, where the king of

Ugarit had tried to send his plea for

help,

similar destruction can also be found. On

the site of Kokkinokremos,

archaeologists have found evidence that

the whole town was abandoned in a hurry.

The bronze smith buried his tools in the

courtyard of his workshop, the

silversmith hid his silver between two

stones of a bench, while the goldsmith

hid all of his sheet gold in a pit. What

happened to them all we may never know,

but they never returned to retrieve

their precious things. One thing is for

certain;

wherever the Sea Peoples went,

destruction followed. For a long time,

historians were happy to attribute the

collapse of so many complex societies

all at once to these antagonists. They

provided a convenient scapegoat. These

Sea Peoples were imagined to be

something like the vikings that ravaged

medieval Europe, crossed with Attilla's

horde of Huns. In common conceptions, they

were a marauding mass hell-bent on

destruction. Since the Sea Peoples

have played such an important role in

how people have traditionally viewed

this collapse, I think it's worth

spending some time on them. Who were

these mysterious conquerors? Some of

these questions we can never answer and

in this story, the Sea Peoples don't get

to speak for themselves. They left no

written sources and precious few

material traces have ever been found

that could trace back to them or give us

clues about their origins.

But a little unusually for this time, we

do have a pretty good idea of what the

Sea Peoples looked like. That's because of

the vast low-relief carving that the

Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses the Third chose

to adorn in the outer wall of his

cavernous temple at Medinet Habu. It

shows an image of a number of prisoners

taken during Egypt's battle with the Sea

Peoples, and the carvings are very

detailed. The figures on the carving

aren't the inhuman monsters you might

have been imagining. They wear kilts and

a very distinctive kind of headdress

that looks like a sheaf of feathers or

perhaps reeds,

fixed in place with a strap that goes

under their chin. Not all of the Sea

Peoples are the same; some wear skull

caps while others appear to wear horned

helmets. Together with Egyptian

sources of the time, this points to them

not being one cohesive army, but a loose

confederation of different peoples

choosing to sail under the same banner.

Some of the names of these different

peoples are known to us from Egyptian

texts. The Danuna, the Tjekker, the Peleset,

the Shardana, and the Weshesh. Even if the

motives and identity of the Sea Peoples

are unknown to us, evidence suggests that

at least some of the ethnic groups that

made up the Sea Peoples weren't so

unfamiliar to the Egyptians. In fact, it

seems Sea People of certain groups had

sought employment in Egyptian courts and

armies in the past, and there's evidence

they had diplomatic contact for as long

as a few centuries before the great

collapse occurred. One group of Sea

Peoples known as the Shardana even

supplied mercenaries to the Egyptian

Pharaohs such as Ramses II but that's

just about as much as we know. At some

point, this unknown mass of people

arrived in Eastern Mediterranean by sea.

No leaders or kings of the Sea Peoples

are ever mentioned. They sacked cities

where they could and even made

incursions onto the land. With this

mysterious force in mind, it's time to

turn to the other really major player in

this story, and it's worth noting at this

point that the nations of the Eastern

Mediterranean basically fall into two

categories during this event; first, there

are those that collapse under the

pressures of the Late Bronze Age, and

they do so utterly and completely. They

disappear without a trace and leave only

ruins behind. Into that group we can

place Mycenae, the Hittites, Ugarit,

and others. But the second category is

those that survive, although in a

diminished and weakened form. The two

great Empires that survive this collapse

are Egypt and Assyria, and Assyria, which

ruled the area of northern Iraq today,

does this by essentially cutting its

losses. It withdraws from all its less-

defensible territories and falls back to

its Imperial heartland around the great

city of Nineveh between the Euphrates

and Tigris Rivers. It recoils like a

tortoise in its shell.

The example of Egypt is much more

interesting. Egypt is also going to fall

into that second category of survivors

and the man who's perhaps the most

responsible for that is the Pharaoh of

the time, a man named Ramses the third.

Ramses was a determined and tenacious

ruler.

Looking at the perfectly preserved mummy

uncovered in Medinet Habu, it's easy to

imagine what he looked like during his

life. His cheekbones were narrow and high,

with a tall, cerebral look to his

forehead. Looking at the photos, I kept

thinking of Captain Picard from the old

Star Trek series; a thinker and a planner.

But Ramses can't have felt that secure

in his position. He was the son of a

usurper, a man named Setnakhte who

had seized the throne in a bloody civil

war and begun the 20th dynasty of Egypt.

After winning the crown in battle,

Setnakhte only managed to rule for

four years before dying and passing the

crown on to his son Ramses. This was

when the young Emperor was only 31 and

it's fair to say that this young Pharaoh

must have felt a fair amount of pressure

to prove himself.

This can perhaps be seen in the name he

chose to rule under; the last Pharaoh to

hold the name Ramses was Ramses the

Great, the Pharaoh of the Bible who ruled

ancient Egypt for 67 years during the

Golden Age of the New Kingdom almost a

century before. For the most part,

Ramses seems to have been a relatively

good ruler, although it's worth

remembering that we have only his

inscriptions to go by. But it's clear

Ramses at least wanted to be seen as a

king who did the best he could for his

people. He mentions planting trees to

increase the shade along the harsh

desert roads and protecting the rights

of women so they didn't fear walking about

the streets. He mentions allowing

soldiers to go home to their families

during peacetime, and other records show

that he donated huge amounts of land and

wealth to Egypt's temples and also

undertook vast reconstruction projects.

He sent expeditions across the Red Sea

to Yemen where he discovered long-lost

copper mines that boosted Egypt's wealth,

and he brought back rare plants in pots

to cultivate in his gardens. By all of

this, it seems in another time he might

have been one of Egypt's great rulers,

but his destiny was to preside over one

of the longest and deepest declines in

Egypt's history, the twilight of its

Empire. This decline, as far as we can

tell, wasn't his fault.

In fact his actions would ensure that

Egypt's cities didn't follow the fates

of those like Mycenae and Ugarit, where

only ash and desolation remain. When news

of the Sea Peoples attacks came to

Ramses, he had been Pharaoh for eight

years. Upon hearing of the destruction of

other cities of the region, he must have

felt a chill run down his spine. Great

nations were being wiped off the map,

and Ramses resolved that Egypt would

not follow the fate of its neighbors.

Egypt couldn't react to this threat the

way the Assyrians had, by retreating and

consolidating their defenses. Egypt had a

long Mediterranean coast, making it

vulnerable to invasion from the sea, and

maritime trade was the backbone of its

economy.

Ramses knew he had to come up with a

plan but it wasn't going to be easy. The

ancient Egyptians had a poor reputation

as seagoers. They were essentially a

land-going power and usually left the

messy business of watery warfare to

smaller nations. The Egyptians were used

to dominating ancient battlefield using

vast assemblages of archers and swift

units of horse-drawn chariots. Their

tactics were to advance with a wall of

infantry, all the while pelting the enemy

with arrows from light chariots, before

using charges of heavy chariots to sow

panic and break the enemy lines.

This had allowed them to conquer lands

all the way up the Palestinian coast and

defeat the Hittites in battle, but these

tactics required a large, open

battlefield. Since members of the Sea

People tribes had served in Egyptian

armies in the past, perhaps they knew

this weakness. The Sea Peoples seemed to

have known that the one way to

neutralize Egypt's tactics would be an

attack on its very lifeblood; the Nile

river itself. All of Egypt's great cities

lay on the Nile, and if Egyptian

resistance broke on the river, its cities

would fall one by one and the riches of

their land could be taken. It was a huge

gamble but the Sea Peoples believed it

would pay off.

The decisive battle would take place in

the Nile Delta; that's the part of the

river that splits out into multiple

branches before it reaches the

Mediterranean Sea. It's a green land in

the middle of a rolling desert, banked

with fertile silt. Red lotuses bloom here

in the autumn and papyrus hedges grow

along the banks. At this time, Nile

crocodiles and hippopotamus still ranged

wild in the Delta. It was in this

challenging terrain that Ramses knew he

had to mount his final stand against the

Sea Peoples. Ramses decided to play to

what strengths the Egyptian army still

had. He decided to lay in ambush and give

the Sea Peoples a surprise attack of

their own. As the enemy's ships

amassed in the waters outside the Delta,

Ramses gathered a vast army of his own.

He gathered archers on the banks

supported by spearmen in their thousands,

all crouching in the reeds. The tension

must have been tremendous; all the

soldiers of the Egyptian army holding

their breath and waiting for that first

sign of an enemy ship to come in from

the sea. Then at last, a ship came around

the bend in the river. After that came

another and another until the whole sea-

born might of the Sea Peoples was in

sight. The Egyptians must have been able

to hear the creak of 10,000 oars, the

beating of the drums below the deck, the

shouts of the helmsman and soldiers

within. The ships of the Sea Peoples drew

nearer until they were within range, and

then Ramses unleashed hell. The Medinet

Habu inscription recounts what happened

next. Those who reached my frontier,

those who came forward to give on the sea,

the full flame was in front of them at

the river mouths, while a stockade of lances

surrounded them on the shore.

The chaos of this battle is

encapsulated in a sprawling, low-relief

carving in Medinet Habu. As the Sea

People advanced in their full force,

Ramses' archers kept up a continuous

volley of arrows into the enemy ships.

Panicked, the Sea Peoples attempted to

land on the banks but as they did, the

Egyptian lancemen advanced out of the

reeds and met them. While the enemy was

held at bay,

trapped and frantic on the river, the

small Egyptian Navy sailed in and

attacked them, too. They used grappling hooks

to haul in the enemy ships. It's clear

that this was a frantic struggle of

ship-to-ship fighting; men are impaled on

spears, clambering onto the sides of

ships, ducking arrows that whizzed

overhead. Boats overturn, spilling men

into the river, and bodies float upside

down in the frothing water. They were

dragged in, enclosed, and prostrated on

the beach, killed, and made into heaps

from tail to head. I have made them turn

back from even mentioning Egypt, for when

they pronounced my name in their land, they

are burnt up with fear. In the brutal

hand-to-hand struggle which ensued, the

Sea People were overwhelmed. Ramses'

plan had worked. The Egyptians were the

first people to ever turn back these

seagoing invaders and stopped their

campaign of destruction. Their hearts are

taken away, the soul is flown away. The

weapons are scattered in the sea. Another

key source for these tumultuous events

is a document called the Harris Papyrus

found near Ramses' tomb in Medinet Habu.

It's the longest known papyrus ever

uncovered from Egypt,

coming in at 41 metres long. That's

longer than the wingspan of a Boeing 737,

just for reference. In it,

Ramses boasts about his triumph over the

various groups of the Sea Peoples.

I overthrew those who invaded. I slew

the Daununa from their islands, the

Tjekker

and the Peleset were made ashes.

The Shardana and the Weshesh of the sea

were made as those that exist not.

I brought as captive to Egypt, numerous as the

sand of the shore.

The Egyptians were victorious; they had

repelled the invasion, but this alone

would not save them. To see why, you just

have to look at the situation that

surrounded it. Egypt now stood alone in a

devastated region, like the hero at the

end of a disaster movie. Every land

around them had been gutted and reduced

to ash, vast and ancient civilizations;

the Mycenaeans, the Hittites, Ugarit,

the Kassite dynasty of Babylon. All of

these venerable societies had collapsed

utterly and civil order had given way to

chaos.

Those precarious trade routes we talked

about at the start of the episode were

now broken and Egypt's economy went into

a steep and unstoppable decline. By the

end of the Late Bronze Age, Egypt was

utterly diminished, a shadow of its

former self. As other enemies encroached

on its borders, Egypt was able to fight

them off, but its treasury became so

depleted that it would never fully

recover its imperial power. The

first-known worker strike in recorded

history happened during the 29th year of

Ramses the Third's reign. It happened when

Egypt could no longer provide food

rations for its elite royal tomb

builders and artisans in the village of

Deir el Medina. Ramses the Third ruled

for a total of 31 years, but his death

was followed by years of bickering among

his heirs. Three of his sons would become

king at different times, reigning as

Ramses the IV, Ramses the VI, and

Ramses the VIII. Meanwhile, Egypt

was increasingly beset by droughts, lack

of seasonal floodwaters, famines, civil

unrest, and official corruption. While the

power of the Pharaoh fell, that of the

priests in Thebes grew. The last Pharaoh

of the dynasty, Ramses the XI, grew

so weak that these priests became

essentially the true rulers of Egypt. The

Egyptian Empire finally fractured. It was

lost forever less than 80 years after

Ramses the Third's reign.

Earlier, I used the example of the

city-state of Ugarit to show the vast

destruction that could be wrought by the

Sea Peoples and to paint them as a

terrifying alien invasion responsible

for the Bronze Age collapse. But we

shouldn't be so easily seduced by the

lure of this easy scapegoat. That's

because the fate of other sites is

actually a little more uncertain. The

great city-state of Mycenae, for instance,

the main belligerents in the Trojan War,

was certainly wiped out along with all

of its surrounding cities sometime

around the 13th century BC. But modern

archaeologists believe this was actually

not the work of the Sea Peoples, and

today it's thought that the culprits

were the Mycenaeans' belligerent northern

neighbors, the Dorians.

We do have evidence of Sea Peoples

activity around the Mycenaean Coast, but

it seems more likely that while weakened

and distracted by this outside threat,

the Mycenaeans were no longer able to

defend their northern border and the

Dorians seized their chance. The Hittite

capital of Hattusha, where we opened

this story, is another example. It lies

far inland in the mountains of Turkey,

and it wasn't likely to be the Sea

Peoples who sacked it. A more likely

explanation is that this was done by

their long-term rivals the Phrygians,

groups from the Balkans who seemed to

have migrated south during this time.

These invaders must have seen their

opportunity the moment raids by the Sea

Peoples disrupted Mediterranean trade

routes and caused famine in Hittite

lands. Perhaps a key part of

understanding this is seeing how much

states of this era depended on their

allies to help them out when they were

threatened. But if a crisis like the

attacks of the Sea Peoples happens

across the whole region, suddenly

everybody's military forces are tied

down. Alliances that had previously kept

everyone safe would suddenly become

ineffective. No one could come to anybody

else's aid.

One great example of this happening is

in Babylon. Babylon was a mighty city, one

of the most ancient and powerful of the

region, mentioned at great length in the

bible and located about a hundred

kilometers south of modern Baghdad. At

the time leading up to the collapse,

Babylon was ruled by a dynasty known as

the Kassites who for five hundred years

had ruled the great ancient city. The

Kassites had long depended on their allies

in Assyria and the coastal regions to

help defend it. But now those nations

were busy defending themselves and

Babylon stood alone. To the north was the

land of Elam, a hardy people who lived

in the mountains and lowlands of

southern Iran. The Elamite King was a man

named Kutir-Nahhunte. He believed

that the crown of Babylon belonged to

him. He threatened an invasion with

fearsome rhetoric. I, who am a king, son of

a king, seed of a king, why do I not sit

the throne of the land of Babylon? I will

destroy your cities, demolish your

fortresses, cut down your orchards. You

may flee up to heaven but I'll pull you

back down. You may flee down to hell, but

I'll pull you up by your hair. Kutir-

Nahhunte led an invasion into

Babylonia in the year 1158 BC. With all

its allies tied down, Babylon stood alone

and the Elamite invasion succeeded.

Kutir-Nahhunte went on to do most of what

he promised and he laid waste to the

land. While Babylon burned, its last

Kassite King was led to Elam in chains,

along with the statue of the Babylonian

God Marduk. The theft of this statue

seems to have traumatized the Babylonian

people more than the loss of their king.

Babylon was sacked and left in ruins. One

sacred Babylonian text, the Nabu-kudurri-

usur, recalls the terrible vengeance

of the Elamite King. His crimes were

greater and his grievious sins worse than

all his father's had committed. Like a

deluge, he laid low

all the peoples of Akkad and cast in

ruins Babylon and all the noblest cities.

These examples show that the

situation in this region isn't quite as

simple as that classic alien-invasion

style scenario I had you imagine. In

Hollywood, the writers always imagine

the world coming together to fight the

outside threat. It makes a better story

that way and we get to hear some

inspiring speeches, but the example of

the Bronze Age collapse teaches us that

it's just as likely that if aliens ever

arrive and begin blowing things up, some

might see that as an opportunity. The

story of the Bronze Age is of large

complex states successfully defending

themselves against the smaller states at

their borders, with less complex societal

structures. Part of the collapse that

ensued is perhaps also down to the

increasing power of these smaller, less

complex nations. During the Bronze Age,

Empires like Egypt, Mycenae, and the

Hittites had monopolies over the

production of weapons, the importation of

horses, and the building of chariots.

Smaller, less complex states simply

couldn't compete in those areas. But the

power of these smaller states was

beginning to grow at this time due to

one very important thing, one thing that

would bring the Bronze Age to an end

forever, and that thing was iron.

Iron had been in limited use since as

early as 3000 BC, and early people even

worked the iron they found in meteorites

that fell to the earth. It was considered

a sacred metal perhaps due to its

magnetic qualities, but as an everyday

practical object, iron presents a number

of problems. It's much harder to work

than the copper and tin that go into bronze.

Tin, for instance, has a very low melting

point of 232 degrees Centigrade. If you

wanted, you could melt it on your kitchen

stove, but iron requires a huge amount of

heat to melt, over 1500 degrees. This

requires advanced furnaces and special

technology that took millennia to

develop but at this time was beginning

to permeate across the region. But iron

on its own isn't that useful. It's

brittle and it easily breaks. The

knowledge of how to turn iron into steel,

mixing it with the right proportion of

carbon, would transform it into a metal

just as sharp and hard as bronze but

much cheaper and more readily available.

Soon, even tribal societies and tiny

kingdoms could afford cutting-edge

weaponry. It acted a little like the

introduction of cheap assault rifles

like the AK-47 in our time, a great

leveler that destabilized whole regions.

We know that after the Bronze Age

collapse, bronze was no longer in use

across the region. Steel weapons took its

place and the Iron Age began. Armies of

chariots such as Egypt employed gave way

to armies of massed infantry and some

historians point to this factor alone as

the great shift that caused the collapse

of so many societies. So, this is another

theory; for the Sea Peoples and other

tribes on the land, newly armed with iron

weaponry, were a significant element in

the collapse and certainly sacked some

cities themselves. But a large part of

the destruction was also due to

opportunistic wars and infighting

between rival nations. These combined

served to pick apart the complex web of

interdependency that had sustained

these great empires for so long.

But some historians go even further and

their work reconfigures the roles of

this story completely. They ask what if

the Sea Peoples aren't the villains in

this story? What if they weren't the

perpetrators in the collapse of

civilization but another set of victims?

This final theory allows us to shift

up perspectives completely. One thing we

do know for sure about this time is that

the climate of the Eastern Mediterranean

at the end of the 13th century BC

underwent a sudden and rapid change.

Lands that previously boiled over with

greenery suddenly became dry and arid.

Analysis of ancient pollen in the region

shows the plants suited to a more desert

landscape flourished during this time.

Analysis of sediment cores and oxygen

isotopes in mineral deposits in caves in

Israel have all shown that the 13th and

12th centuries BC saw much less rain

than the previous era. This all

points to a period of climate change in

the region, during which the crops that

people knew how to grow must have died

in the earth. Alongside this scientific

evidence, we can see marks of severe

droughts and famines in the region's

written records, too. The Hittites in their

dry, stony mountains were hit

particularly hard. Letters from Ugarit

write about sending large quantities of

rain up to the hill roads to feed the

mighty cities like Hattusha and the

crisis seems to have lasted a long time.

In the mid 13th century, one Hittite

Queen sent a short but dramatic message

to the Egyptian Pharaoh.

I have no grain in my lands. Another

tablet sent from the Hittites is equally

telling. Did you not know there was a

famine in my lands? Elsewhere, letters

sent from a servant to his master, who

was a merchant in Ugarit, show that

there was a famine in the city of Emar,

in Syria at the time of its destruction.

There is a famine in your house. We will

all die of hunger. If you do not quickly

arrive here,

you will not see a living soul from your

land. I want to make it clear that

there had been famines and droughts in

the region before; it was simply a fact

of life for people living in the

precarious reality of the Bronze Age. But

the climate change that occurred around

this time seems to have happened so

quickly and been so dramatic, the

scientists have been looking far afield

for an explanation. To get to the

bottom of why this happened, one answer

might lie nearly 4000 kilometers to the

north. Let's zoom out and soar around the

globe, across Europe and the stormy

waters of the North Atlantic, until we

come to rest on the slopes of the snowy

mountains of southern Iceland. This is a

harsh landscape, a snowy tundra over

which the shadow of an enormous volcano

looms. Its name is Hekla and it's one

of the world's most active volcanoes. In

the ancient and medieval imagination,

Hekla was thought to be the gate to

hell and the prison where the traitor

Judas was tormented. The Cistercian monk

Herbert of Clairvaux wrote about it with

particular colour. Mount Etna, the

renowned fiery cauldron of Sicily which

men call Hell's Chimney, that cauldron is

affirmed to be like a small furnace

compared to this enormous inferno. So, can

it be a coincidence that the most

cataclysmic eruption of Hekla we know

about was the one that took place

sometime around the Year 1100 BC, right

as the Bronze Age collapse reached its

height? This eruption is known as Hekla

3. It threw nearly seven-and-a-half

cubic kilometers of volcanic rock into

the atmosphere and covered the sky in a

dark shroud of dust that would have

lasted for years after the event. In

Ireland, studies done on bog oaks, those

are trees half-fossilized in marshy

waters, have shown that for 18 years

after the eruption of Hekla 3, the trees

barely grew at all.

Across the Atlantic in the United States,

Bristlecone Pines, the oldest living

trees on earth, still show similar

records of this time of darkness and

cooling which seems to have lasted about

two decades. The effect on our

region would have been dramatic; crops

would have failed, soils would have blown

away, and more than that; the dark cloud that

seemed to hang over the sun would have

spoken to people of something dreadful

on its way, a punishment from the gods

and perhaps even the end of the world. As

people looked up and saw the sun, only a

pale white through the haze, they must

have asked what did we do wrong? Why have

our gods forsaken us and why haven't our

kings protected us? When we dig into an

archaeological site and find traces of

destruction, we can never really tell who

it was who burned this building,

destroyed this wall, or buried this city

in rubble, but some historians now think

that some of the destruction of the

Bronze Age may have occurred due to

uprisings and rebellions within the

kingdoms. If the gods were angry at the

king, so were the people. The spread of

iron weapons would have also empowered

these mobs and allowed them to arm

themselves with weaponry previously

unseen outside of a professional army.

I don't want to do too much

speculation but with famine, drought, and

disease spreading, I think there's a good

chance that the citizens of some of

these ancient empires simply rose up and

burned their own cities to the ground.

The thing is, if we buy the theory of

the Hekla 3 eruption, it forces us

to reevaluate our portrait of the Sea

Peoples as a marauding armada of

destruction. Were the Sea Peoples in fact

refugees? Imagine the situation; you were

a citizen of an island in the

Mediterranean, say Sardinia or Sicily, and

one year the sky turns dim, the sun peeks

through the gray haze a pale white,

drought soon follows, and the crops no

longer grow. Starvation begins to set in

on your island. Chaos begins to spread.

There are riots for food and everywhere

people are saying the gods are angry,

that the world is dying. Then the

next year at harvest time, the same thing

happens. The sun is still weak and the

crops still don't grow, and now waves of

people begin arriving in your lands,

hungry people from the far north where

the sun is even dimmer,

where the worst winters in living memory

are ravaging the lands when nothing

grows. What do you do? Do you stay and

hope the sun comes back? Hope the crops

grow next year? Do you hope that your new

and hungry neighbors are friendly or do

you band together? My guess is that you

do one of the things you do best;

you build ships and then you set sail

for somewhere else, somewhere where the

sun might still shine. It's easy to

imagine this band of seagoing nomads

starting small. They go from place-to-

place trying to find somewhere the gods

haven't abandoned, but it's the same

everywhere.

Society is disentangling in the wake of

famines and droughts that last for

years and wherever they go, more

desperate people join them. They get

stronger and in desperation, they resort

to theft. They steal from merchant

vessels and then small villages. They

capture prisoners and gain new recruits.

Their strength grows and grows until it

becomes truly overwhelming, an army of

the sea. It seems no one can stand in

their way, a roving band of refugee

warriors roaming the oceans in search of

somewhere to call home.

I find this portrait of the Sea Peoples

the most convincing. I think it makes

sense of their mystery, how such a vast

force of diverse peoples suddenly looms

out of the sea with seemingly no

direction, no leaders, and no command

structure.

If this portrait of them is true, then

the Sea Peoples must have been anarchic,

probably changing leaders frequently.

There would have been opposing goals

within the group; some would have wanted

to find land to settle, others just to

loot and burn. When they met their

deaths in a shady shallows of the Nile

Delta at the hands of Pharaoh Ramses

the third, they must have felt the utter

hopelessness of their situation bear

down on them. They were people without a

land who had brought so much destruction

to the homes of others and their final

desperate gamble to seize the lands of

Egypt had failed. If this sounds like too

much of an unhappy ending, then I should

at least mention that some of the sea

peoples at least escaped total

destruction in the marshes of the Nile.

In fact, one of the groups that made up

their wandering army seems to have

settled down in the region of what is

today Gaza in southern Palestine. There,

they put down their roots as a people.

They were known as the Peleset who the

Hebrews later called Peleshet, and we

today call Philistines. They would come

to be remembered as one of the great

rival nations to the Kingdom of Israel,

and the word Philistine has given us the

modern name of the region; Palestine.

So, as we weigh up the evidence, a picture

begins to emerge of a complex, entangled

web of societies so dependent on each

other that they could not allow each

other to fall. These societies sent food

to each other in times of famine. They

sent artists and artisans to work on

each other's palaces, and merchants took

luxury goods between the markets in

their great cities. While this

interdependency was a strength, it was

also their greatest weakness. With

the climate changing and people from

other lands fleeing, perhaps invaders

landing on their coasts, this

interdependent system began to come

apart at the seams. One by one, these

great civilizations fell. The trade

routes that had sustained them fell

apart and the basic necessities that

allowed their empires to continue were

no longer available. Meanwhile, the spread

of iron weapons allowed smaller, less

complex kingdoms to amass vast hordes of

infantry and challenge the typically

chariot-based warfare of the previous

era. Rebellions seemed to have rocked at

least some of these nations, further

weakening them and toppling them over

into chaos. The events of the Late Bronze

Age remind us just how fragile a thing

civilization is. It reminds us that in

our world today, we are not isolated

nations either; that we, too, live in a

complex and interdependent world. But

once war and violence are set into

action, we can rarely contain its

consequences. Think about how it must

have felt to be a person alive at this

time, to see the collapse of so many

great civilizations all at once and how

it must have felt to pass from a Golden

Age of civilization to one of rubble and

ruin.

Thank you for listening to The Fall of

Civilizations Podcast. I've been Paul

Cooper. I love to hear your thoughts and

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