Pod Insights Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! | Greek Mythology & the Ancient Mediterranean RE-AIR: Not With a Bang, but a Whimper, the Collapse of the Bronze Age Mediterranean About this episode This episode originally aired in April 2024 during our series on the Bronze Age Collapse. A brief look at the causes behind the societal collapse of the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Help keep LTAMB going by subscribing to Liv's Patreon for bonus content! http://www.patreon.com/mythsbaby
CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.
Sources: The Landmark Thucydides edited by Robert B. Strassler, translated by Richard Crawley; The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean edited by Eric H. Cline; 1177 B. C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline.
Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.
Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand).
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Liv Albert? Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com grouptrip.
0:38 Speaker 01 I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed and the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.
1:14 Liv Albert? The late return of the Helenes from Ilium caused many revolutions and factions ensued almost everywhere. And it was the citizens thus driven into exile who founded the cities. Sixty years after the capture of Ilium, the modern Boeotians were driven out of Arne by the Thessalians and settled in the present Boeotia, the former Cadmian land. Though there was a division of them there before, some of whom joined the expedition to Ilium. Twenty years later, the Dorian's and the Herakles became masters of the Peloponnesus, so that much had to be done and many years had to elapse before Helles could attain to a durable tranquility, undisturbed by removals,
1:58 Liv Albert? and could begin to send out colonies, as Athens did to Ionia and most of the islands, and the Peloponnesians to most of Italy and Sicily and some places in the rest of Helles. All these places were founded subsequently to the war with Troy.
2:41 Liv Albert? Well, hi, hello, welcome. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with the beginning of the end of the Bronze Age, a look into the so-called collapse of not only the Minoan and Mycenaean people of ancient Greece, but the wider ancient Mediterranean. What makes a collapse, though, really? The word itself is an accurate descriptor of what happened, but it carries with it this desire to make the collapse of these cultures into something, if not bigger and more dramatic, then certainly, at least, mysterious. The idea of a collapse, the end of these once-great people lends itself to the history bros who
3:24 Liv Albert? blend fact with conspiracy and pseudo-history, or to the conspiracists more directly. It lends itself to the idea that the end of these people was a mystery to be solved, that they simply disappeared from human existence only to be replaced by an entire different group. But of course, as I hope you can all gather, that isn't what happened. There is no great mystery, no moment in time where the Mycenaans or the Minoans just suddenly, out of nowhere, ceased to exist. Instead, it's far more complex and much more interesting, and ultimately is better described as a collapse of elite power structures, a collapse of the super-rich,
4:06 Liv Albert? if you will. The regular people just kept going. They moved on, they adapted, they transitioned to something different. Because when your climate is changing and unrest is rising, the elites, who hoard wealth in their great palaces, who live like kings while the rest of the world scrambles to find food... Well, that never ends well for the elites. Are you listening, Bezos, Musk, Weston?
4:38 Liv Albert? Today, we look at the end, the collapse, the transition from a cultural structure where the elites ruled from palaces to one where regular people with sense and knowledge of the world shifted with the changes that they saw around them and adapted themselves and their world. As always, that quote I read at the top of the episode was another from Thucydides, this ancient Athenian trying to wrap his head around this very thing, the end of the Bronze Age. But we will look at the actual history. Today, I give you the basics of what happened and when, and then on Friday, I will be joined by returning guest Flint Dibble to talk about some of the reasons for the Bronze Age's end.
5:21 Liv Albert? Particularly, we'll look at food, how they ate before, during, and after the end of the Bronze Age, and how we can look at those things and see in them the changing climate of the Mediterranean, the end of the palatial power structure, and a return to a more simple way of living, one that suited those who remained, these regular people just trying to get by. And then next Tuesday, to cap off this series on the Bronze Age of Greece and its collapse, a conversation with Eric Klein, who literally wrote the book on the end of the Bronze Age Mediterranean, and a new one that's just coming out now about what came after. The Bronze Age is the period most aligned with Greek mythology.
6:04 Liv Albert? It's the age in which many myths were understood to have happened. It's when the Greeks were believed to have traveled to Troy in search of a woman, when they waged this 10-years war that changed the face of the Mediterranean. It's the time when the heroes were believed to have roamed the Greek world, defeating monsters, battling centaurs, and bickering with gods, and, you know, whatever Theseus was always fucking around with. It's a time that's been blended with myth in fascinating ways, but it's also blended with myth in frustrating ways, ways that can obscure the history in favor of a mythological past.
6:44 Liv Albert? For all the fun in imagining a Bronze Age like that of the Iliad, it's important to remember still that it was a very real-time period. And really, the mythological sources that were believed to be situated in the depths of the Bronze Age, like the Homeric epics, were very much products of their time, full of references and technologies from the periods in which they were developed and then written down. They are a blending of anachronisms. You heard it on Friday's episode with Joel Christensen. There are archaic weapons and notions, Iron Age concepts, Bronze Age cultures, like all nestled together in this epic poem. The Bronze Age is a time and place, separate from the epics, in the same way that the monsters defeated by Heracles
7:28 Liv Albert? are separate from the real Greece that people lived and died in. Instead, in those sources, we can learn about the people that came after the Bronze Age, how they saw their world, their cultural history and memory, and their future. I say all that because, well, I'm me, and I'm too fascinated by the mythology and epics and what they do and do not say about the Bronze Age, and then the later Iron Age, and into the Archaic period. And beyond that, what was the actual Bronze Age like? Like, how did it and how didn't it resemble the world of epic? And of course, how did it end, and why? With a bonus of, let's take a little dive into what it looks like
8:11 Liv Albert? when a super-rich Iliad power structure crumbles, and who and what is left when it does.
8:33 Liv Albert? This is episode 259. Not with a bang, but a whimper. The Collapse of Bronze Age Greece.
8:56 Liv Albert? Finally, we get to the end, or rather, an end that's also a beginning. The end of the Bronze Age also marks the beginning of the Greece that we know a little better, where the alphabet will be developed and perfected, where the oral storytelling of the Homeric tradition will arise and give us everything that we love so dearly. In order for any of that to begin, the Bronze Age and its palatial world had to end. The Bronze Age collapse is the term that bounces around this topic and generally describes the total collapse of the various states of the Bronze Age Mediterranean and surrounding cultures. It is a ridiculously complicated subject that we don't have the clearest answers about. The word "collapse" is both accurate and a little misleading.
9:40 Liv Albert? It was a collapse, yes, but one that marked a transition, too. What we can say with enough certainty when it comes to the end of the Bronze Age is that sometime during the 12th century BCE, a number of events occurred that caused many of the major sites around the Mediterranean to be destroyed and a decline in population to take place. The word "lost" is thrown around a lot when it comes to what exactly happened here. I don't love the word. It presents the idea that humanity forgot something, rather than simply no longer had use for it. For instance, it's said that monumental building was "lost," large cities were "lost," and
10:23 Liv Albert? the interconnectedness that permeated every bit of the Bronze Age falls apart. The interconnectedness certainly does fall apart, and monumental building does stop happening in the same way, and the large cities were no longer in use. They weren't "lost," though, so much as they lost relevancy.
10:43 Liv Albert? That isn't to say that the collapse wasn't a big deal and a very real event. I just don't want to be like the history bro, I will never forget, who suggested that the people of the Bronze Age straight up disappeared and/or lost the ability to understand written language. It wasn't magic or some kind of wild collective amnesia of human intelligence. It was a huge collapse of society across the region and a transition to something totally different. In fact, most of the cultures that were active in that region during the Bronze Age, they do just fall apart completely, with only really Egypt coming out and with some sort of presence still intact. It was a collapse of society as the region knew it. The Mediterranean changed completely.
11:28 Liv Albert? The cultures that had existed before the collapse just ceased, especially in Greece, and in terms of what we can find or have already found. And what was left behind, you know, these palatial sites like Mycenae and Tiryns that we have found were basically abandoned, and because they weren't still being occupied in the same ways, they instead served as this inspiration for the mythological history that would go on to exist in the region. The people of Iron Age Greece, just a few generations from the Bronze Age that had collapsed, lost the cultural memory of those sites and saw only what was left, the palatial compounds that looked utterly and completely epic, that were so monumental and enormous
12:11 Liv Albert? that they would have housed so many people in such riches, and they could only construe of these as the palaces of their heroes. These sites, the cities, the tombs would live on in this collective mythical history, developed, in some part at least, as a means of explaining what the people before them had left behind. And as these stories were developed and grew into something so much bigger than what they started as, they were passed down through the ages until they became the archaic Greeks' de facto historical past.
12:46 Liv Albert? And so by the time we get to the Iliad and the Odyssey as we know them, the heroes that came out of the Mycenaean cities that were scattered around the Peloponnese were real and had walked the land. Agamemnon was the king of Mycenae and Menelaus was king of Lacedaemon and Minos was the king of Knossos, Nestor of Pylos. And this remained, of course, to the point where even today, we still call the gold mask found in Mycenae, the mask of Agamemnon, despite him almost certainly not having been real. And of course, we still call the palace at Pylos, the palace of Nestor. But how does such an enormous societal collapse happen? A total system collapse is a huge thing that doesn't just happen because of one or
13:31 Liv Albert? two small events. Multiple catastrophes and troubles needed to occur in order to shake up this system so thoroughly that it just falls apart after having thrived for hundreds of years. There are lots of theories for why this one collapse happened, from the infamous sea peoples to famine, to earthquakes and climate change. But all of these by themselves just aren't enough to cause a big enough disruption to destroy such an established system. Instead, it's likely that it was all of these things occurring around the same time or in close enough succession that the systems in place just cracked and broke and eventually fell apart.
14:16 Liv Albert? Just so many game-changing events and threats and disasters coming together at just the wrong time and poof, your society collapses. But remember, we mean this society collapsed. Everyone doesn't just disappear, but the elite structures that had been established crumbled. And what was left was just the regular people who, for the most part, kinda just figured it out. They adapted, transitioned to something entirely new. And unfortunately, either what they left behind wasn't found or wasn't impressive enough to quell the idea of this Dark Age, this loss.
15:01 Liv Albert? But what it really was is that either what they left behind just didn't last for us or we haven't found it yet.
15:10 Liv Albert? And you all know how I love a good natural disaster, let alone one combined with so many other wild events. So let's look at all the things that came together to collapse the societies of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.
15:35 Liv Albert? Obviously, we are starting with my favorite topic, one that I've touched on before because it aided in a certain conspiracy about a certain so-called lost mythical city that's really just a wild thing Plato made up. That's right. We're talking about the eruption of Thera. And fine, not because it had anything to do with the Bronze Age collapse, but instead because I want to talk about it and it is often referenced as a cause of the Bronze Age collapse despite not being a cause of the collapse. Because, fine, it happened like 400 years before the collapse, but it is still evidence of the volcanic and tectonic happenings in the area, which did indeed contribute to the collapse. It's generally understood that the major collapse of the Bronze Age happened around
16:20 Liv Albert? the 12th century BCE. Meanwhile, the exact date of the eruption of Thera is still up for debate. There's a whole lot of science that I simply cannot and will not wrap my head around, but it's likely that it was toward the end of the 17th century BCE. So again, 400 to 500 years before. The eruption was, to put it simply, massive. The event would have lasted about two to three days, and even before the volcano erupted, there would have been major earthquakes in the region. This is super common, even at Pompeii, before Vesuvius erupted, there were earthquakes leading up to the actual event. Actually, just the other day, I read about 200 earthquakes happening right off the coast of where I live in quick succession, and apparently the scientists were just like, "Yeah, it's cool, like a little bit of magma is going to erupt into the Salish Sea, but
17:05 Liv Albert? it's nothing to worry about." I mean, I trust them, but still, I digress. The point is volcanic eruptions come with earthquakes. And when Thera did finally erupt, and I should have said this already, Thera is Santorini. It basically blew out the center of the island completely. Like, have you ever looked at the shape of Santorini? It is essentially a circular island that's had the center blown out. It's why Santorini has the cliffs that are so famously beautiful and horrifically packed with tourists. It's literally a popped off volcano. Popped is the technical term.
17:40 Liv Albert? The town that we know of on Bronze Age Thera, Akrotiri, was covered in a layer of pumice and volcanic ash. It was closely connected with Crete to the south and likely forced refugees who were able to escape south to that island. And fun fact about Akrotiri too, unlike Pompeii, the preserved Bronze Age city, Bronze Age city, does not have a single body that's been found, which either means everyone got out, people returned after to mourn and care for their dead, or they just haven't been found yet. Regardless of Akrotiri, which in the grand scheme of the Mediterranean was nothing particularly special, the resulting ash cloud would have spread over the Aegean and the effects on the surrounding land would have been noticeable.
18:23 Liv Albert? Still, if this happened 400 to 500 years before the collapse, how is it relevant? Well, aside from my insisting that we include it in this series because Akrotiri is a magical place where Bronze Age fantasies are born, and I love a good volcanic eruption story, it demonstrates to us the type of environmental events that happened in this area. Because again, fine, it did not contribute to the collapse, let's make that very clear. But it does remind us what's possible. Because there were definitely, certainly tectonic happenings that did contribute to the collapse. Not necessarily volcanic eruptions, but earthquakes. The Mediterranean and the Near East all exist along active fault lines that can and do still
19:07 Liv Albert? affect the people that are living there. The last time I was on Crete, there was an earthquake in Heraklion, like big enough that it did some damage even to the modern island. Earthquakes can be devastating for a city, especially one with buildings that are not built to withstand that kind of movement. And when you don't fully understand why they're happening or how to handle them, like, they're gonna be a pretty big issue. And toward the end of the 13th century and beginning of the 12th century, there was a series of earthquakes that took place along that fault line.
19:39 Liv Albert? Earthquakes of varying intensity were happening all up and down the fault line at this time, and obviously, they were causing major destruction. And when you think about how monumental building was done at this time, like, basically stacking big stones on top of each other, they're not going to survive the earth violently shaking beneath them. Still, it can be hard to say whether a site was destroyed by an earthquake or human intervention, other than, you know, sometimes there are telltale signs, like, if a site is destroyed because of an earthquake, you would not expect to find lots of people with arrows sticking out of them. You know, that's a bit of a giveaway. But in case of an earthquake, you might, what you might have is people trapped under debris or walls that have shifted and moved and show visual signs of that movement.
20:23 Liv Albert? You know, not to say that they couldn't have had a thing for, like, wavy walls, but one does have to stick with the most obvious explanation sometimes. And still, earthquakes alone, you know, did not collapse these entire societies. We do see efforts across the Mediterranean to rebuild after earthquakes, you know, but there needed to be more to take these people out so completely. This is where other people come in.
20:49 Liv Albert? Sea people, to be dramatic and specific. Have you not heard of sea people? Well, you must be a normal person who does not spend their entire life devoted to people who've been dead for thousands of years. Lucky you. Basically, the sea people are a theorized group of people who just kinda sailed around fucking shit up. There's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of sensationalizing around them, lots of memes, you know the type. Which is why I would like to start with a caveat. The Medenat Habu inscriptions of the late 13th and early 12th century from Egypt are the only definitive mention of the sea peoples, and they don't, like, use a term like "sea peoples." This is a modern phrase that current scholars and others use to describe what is mentioned in these inscriptions.
21:34 Liv Albert? Ultimately, what is described are battles between the Egyptians and outside forces that can be understood as having come from islands or somewhere else by sea. And other than that, we don't have much explicitly about these sea peoples. There's a debate about one letter from Ugare that could possibly be mentioning the sea peoples, but it's not agreed upon widely. So what we understand about the sea peoples comes from extremely limited sourcing and ultimately does not give us enough information to fully understand them. My conversation next Tuesday is going to go into much more detail on this. But if we're going to, you know, not to jump into this sensationalizing that is the sea
22:18 Liv Albert? peoples, like, how are we going to understand what's happening? You know, because we can see from sites all across the Mediterranean that there was violent destruction happening and, and someone, some people were causing it. So who could they be? Like, yes, the sea peoples are an option, but like, who are they? Really, when we look at it, is what we have is, once again, people moving around the Mediterranean, you know, movement and connection, albeit in a rather more violent way in this case. And this is what defines the Mediterranean even during the collapse. There absolutely was destruction and invasion happening from outside sources during the collapse, you know, there were people moving around the Mediterranean from a variety of places and who were indeed sometimes invading other cities.
23:01 Liv Albert? There's plenty of evidence for sites that were destroyed because of humans, like, for example, you know, when we find people with the aforementioned arrows. You know, it's not always so explicit, but what we have found are people who have met some kind of violent and unnatural end. You know, I think it would be pretty safe to say that if we find people who have obviously died because another human came at them with something sharp and pointy, that such a thing was done with, you know, dubious intentions. And there are enough sites that were destroyed because of this kind of human violence that we can certainly say that, you know, there were people destroying cities, purposefully in some way. But that begs another question, you know, because if we can't say who the people were
23:46 Liv Albert? that were doing the destroying, like, can we say why they were traveling the seas and ultimately destroying what they found?
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26:01 Speaker 01 I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh. Anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Addition terms apply for all offers.
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27:53 Liv Albert? During this period of collapse, not all of the cities that are destroyed by people are destroyed for the same reasons. And this is found in what remains of the sites, you know, well over 3,000 years later, which is your periodic reminder that archaeology is seriously fucking cool, especially from this time period where we have minimal text sources to go off of. Now, you know, archaeologists are scientists, as you will hear in the conversations that are coming, you know, where I try to understand very sciencey things with my background in literature and mythology. But today's episode is just me, so we are keeping it simple. Through many scientific ways, I won't try to understand, the sites that remain have been examined and through them, we get an idea of how and why they were destroyed.
28:36 Liv Albert? Like, if we find a city that has destruction absolutely everywhere, from the top governmental buildings down to the neighborhoods of the everyday person, you know, it's most likely caused by an invasion. Especially if we find human remains that have these marks of violence on them, you know, and then that gets tied with any textual evidence that we might have that talks about invasions and fights happening in those areas, you know, and suddenly, we've got probable invasion. But, you know, what about the sites that have destruction, but it's limited, say, to the palatial centers and bureaucratic buildings? Remember, it is a collapse of the elite. You know, I won't say it's the dream, but if Bezos ever goes down, I will be celebrating in the streets.
29:19 Liv Albert? So if all the elite structures in an area show signs of destruction, you know, but the neighborhood where the people are living is untouched, hmm, hmm, it's in instances like this, you know, it's probably not invasion that's responsible for the destruction. It's probably something more akin to internal factors, to the people living in the region rising up against the ruling elite and, you know, well, eat the rich. Good for them. These are things that we can learn from ancient history, you know? Like, let's make a free grocery store out of one of Galen Weston's houses. Like, it seems only fair. Ultimately, the point is that while many of these sites show widespread destruction
30:00 Liv Albert? at the hands of humans, we can't always assume some outside invasion by sea peoples or anyone else. Sometimes, the most dangerous people in a culture are the ones that have been fucked over and marginalized for generations. This, this is entirely me making stuff up here, but if you've spent hundreds of years working for an elite palatial complex where the rich are living their best lives and bathing in gold and you're poor as shit, well, you know, when the opportunity arises, revolution isn't new and maybe we need to return to some roots, you know? Apropos of nothing, yesterday I bought coffee and eggs and like three other basic staple foods at a grocery store and it cost over $50.
30:41 Liv Albert? Eat the rich. But what does this destruction look like? You know, this, this specific type of internal disruption? Well, where we're gonna go next, the most important factor in the destruction is fire. Remember these Linear A and Linear B tablets? You know, Linear A and B are the two Proto-Greek languages that developed during the Bronze Age. Linear A is primarily coming from Minoan Crete and its colonies, and Linear B from the mainland of Mycenaeans and theirs. Linear B is translated, Linear A is not, you know, which is why I have a bunch of fun little symbols tattooed on my finger in the hopes that one day we'll translate it and I'll know that I have like grain or olive oil trade tattooed on my fingers. Because that's the thing about Linear B, it's primarily focused on these palatial
31:26 Liv Albert? records from the Bronze Age period. I'm reiterating a lot of this stuff to you, just as this reminder of what they are, because, you know, during this time, Linear B is the only textual evidence that we have coming out of Mycenaean culture. And how do we have these tablets, these palatial records today? Because of fire. The fiery destruction of various Bronze Age Greek sites is this main reason why we have these tablets containing Linear A and B. The fires that took down these monumental buildings also just happened to bake those clay tablets for us, you know, like firing a clay pot in a kiln to preserve it. These fires preserved the tablets.
32:08 Liv Albert? And this is just so fucking lucky for us, because Linear B tablets are this invaluable research when it comes to understanding the palatial complexes in which they were found. Like, sure, they were mostly these palace records and no one came right out and told us that Achilles was like a real dude, but, you know, knowing how much olive oil and wine and foodstuffs were kept in the palaces is super helpful, if less thrilling than if they contained a Bronze Age myth. That would have been cool.
32:37 Liv Albert? Still, I have so much to say. Let's hang around these Bronze Age sites just a little bit longer. It was during this late 13th century and into the early 12th that we date a lot of the destruction of the mainland Greek sites specifically.
32:53 Liv Albert? At Mycenae, it appears that at first, there was an earthquake sometime in this mid 13th century. Then, some 50 years later, there was another destruction event. This one was marked by fire. But this fire seems to be localized to the citadel and not the surrounding areas. You know, like, say, maybe someone returned from war to find his city in shambles and his wife pretty angry that he sacrificed their daughter for a bit of wind, you know, and violence ensues. Okay, fine, again, probably not that. But still, eat the Mycenaean rich, you know, particularly if they're Agamemnon.
33:43 Liv Albert? Meanwhile, over at the nearby palatial site of Tiryns, the palace where Heracles was said to have kicked a guy off a wall and started a whole mess for himself, we see more evidence of an earthquake destroying the buildings in the citadel at the end of this 13th century. And then if we quickly pop over to Pylos, we once again see evidence of destruction in the early 12th century. By fire. Poor Nestor. I mean, you know, I'm all for toppling the aristocracy, but comparatively, like, he was a pretty okay guy.
34:15 Liv Albert? Again, fictional Iliatic heroes aside, you know, I can't resist making references to them. We can look all over the Mediterranean and inland to the east and see this evidence of this, you know, the similar kinds of destruction. It's found in the Mesopotamian people of ancient Iraq, in the Hittites of Anatolia, ancient Turkey, and Cyprus, Phoenicia, down into Egypt. And this early 12th century date, around the time as this destruction in Pylos was when also Troy VII fell.
34:47 Liv Albert? But it's worth mentioning that just because these sites were destroyed doesn't mean that they were then abandoned. You know, this is really important for understanding this Bronze Age collapse. This is an event where what is lost is this centralization, not the people or really the culture. At all these sites, the thing that is lost is this centralized government that's at the top of the social ladder. This highly organized system that we have become so familiar with in the Bronze Age disappears for a period of time that, you know, varies depending on the region. In Greece, it was gone for a good while, but elsewhere, you know, they popped up quicker than you might expect.
35:31 Liv Albert? Because while this centralization in administration disappears, people and human ingenuity do not. Which is why, you know, we don't want to keep calling what followed the Bronze Age this Dark Ages, because it wasn't dark, like it isn't even marked by a lack of sources, which is, you know, where the word originally came from. It was simply a transitional period that becomes the Iron Age, and it's when a whole lot of other amazing stuff happens. So, calling it dark is mean at the best. The vast majority of these sites continue to demonstrate people living in and occupying the buildings that are still present.
36:13 Liv Albert? You know, maybe not in the most upper parts of the citadel, but in the cities and the surrounding regions. And this tells us so much, because what gets assumed is that, you know, this Mediterranean after these events gets catapulted into this time of lack and loss, and quite frankly, that's just, it's not what is actually happening. Even in Greece, sure, like the upper classes of society are seemingly gone, but the people? Like, the people that lived on and worked the land and fought for their cities, like, they are still going about their day-to-day lives in whatever way they can. In Greece at least, they went on to establish and formalize the Greek alphabet among everything
36:57 Liv Albert? else, you know, to develop this oral tradition of storytelling that will eventually give us the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Ages that followed, they were not dark.
37:10 Liv Albert? And maybe this is what we should take from these instances of destruction and the people that are moving around the Mediterranean at this time. You know, for the most part, this is not necessarily people looking to destroy and take over regions. Maybe it's people moving around, trying to find a better place to live, because maybe an earthquake took out their old home and a couple of families packed up what they had, jumped on a ship, and moved around. This is not an unfamiliar occurrence. You know, maybe, and this is where we'll head next, it was this change in climate that forced people to leave the areas they were living because they simply could no longer sustain themselves. They left in order to find a land where they could survive.
37:55 Liv Albert? But once again, and this is Michaela screaming in the background, like, the Bronze Age at every point is defined by people moving around, interacting, and existing amongst each other. It is a time period that is defined by its interconnectivity and diversity, even during its collapse. Climate change was definitely a major factor for movement within the Bronze Age collapse. Droughts and the resulting lack of food and resources would, of course, have pushed people to move themselves and their families to, hopefully, better horizons, and this is a seriously natural, human response. We know that people are moving around not just from accounts of the "see peoples," but
38:40 Liv Albert? also from the continued movement of artifacts that are found in these various sites. But how do we look back and find evidence of things like drought and famine? These seem to be things that could be particularly difficult to find within the archaeological record. What kind of evidence would we expect to find that would help us see that these things are happening at this time? Well, the first and probably the most obvious is textual evidence. While we tend to focus on Greece for a lot of things during the Bronze Age, we need to expand our horizons and look at this Mediterranean as a whole. The textual evidence that we get from Greece is pretty much just these administrative records of various resources that the palatial centers had.
39:23 Liv Albert? But if we look toward other areas, we get different kinds of sources, better, more detailed sources. For this, we're going to head back to the Levant and the people at the city of Ugarat, which really was hit with pretty much everything that we have talked about so far. You know, there was an earthquake, there was famine, we'll get there, and there was invasion. Like, really, this is a great case study for understanding the various elements at play during the Bronze Age collapse. So at Ugarat, which is in northern Syria, by the way, what has been found are letters that have been sent between various individuals, from those with power all the way to people who are just involved with commerce. And within these letters, which we'll hear about in more detail in my conversations,
40:08 Liv Albert? we hear about famines across the region. These accounts are evocative and very telling to the seriousness of the situation at hand, with the most relevant of sources saying, "There is famine in your house. We will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land." This isn't a light account.
40:34 Liv Albert? It's very notable today, perhaps, human-caused famine being a bigger issue. It's this very telling account, though, of just how dire a situation like this is, particularly during the collapse. You know, in Ugarat, the situation was so tense that those in charge felt the need to reach out to neighboring kingdoms in order to seek aid. There were these requests for grain and other food sources so that they would be able to feed their people. But textual sources are not the only forms of evidence that we have for these droughts and famines. Science also comes in and gives us much more explicit evidence for droughts in the region. This is done through examining pollen, of all things.
41:17 Liv Albert? Like, the long and short of how this works is that scientists have gone to the Levant and the Near East and taken these core samples from soils, specifically along the areas where streams and rivers would have been in antiquity. Then they examine the samples that they retrieved to see what kind of pollens are present in them. And, and what these various pollens can tell us is that the kinds of plants and crops that were being grown at the time were more akin to those that do well in these more arid, dry environments. And so what comes out of this study is evidence for incredibly long, and for all I can assume, arduous drought that occurred during the late 13th century and lasted until like, the 9th century. Something like 300 years.
42:02 Liv Albert? Other studies that examine other sources have shown us that there was a drop in the sea surface temperatures that would have resulted in less precipitation on the land. And so, all in all, the evidence that comes out of these various studies points to a drastically different climate in the early Iron Age from the one of the Bronze Age. And, and a change like this, especially if a society doesn't have much space for adaptability and really relies on what resources that they can bring in from their land, like, would have really devastating effects on the economic output and the ability to sustain a larger population. So what we end up seeing all across the Mediterranean and Near East is quite a drastic drop in their population. You know, there are less people. This is what happens during a famine.
42:47 Liv Albert? Of course, we're to assume the worst. And so, looking at the end of the Bronze Age as a whole, what we see is drought and climate change, devastating natural disasters that lead to destruction of sites, invasion, migration, war.
43:04 Liv Albert? All these things by themselves are not totally devastating. They're recoverable individually. But that's the thing, you know, they were not happening one at a time. They were all happening at once or in quick succession. And this is what was so just wholly devastating to the region. It wasn't just one earthquake that a couple of sites spent a couple of years recovering from. It was a series of earthquakes over a long period of time, causing this continual destruction and disruption to all these sites. It wasn't just one war or one invasion. It was a series of wars and invasions across the Aegean and Near East. It wasn't a small drought in one region.
43:44 Liv Albert? It was this prolonged and persisting drought, this drastic event of climate change that affected the regions for decades to come. And of course, all of those things are going to come with refugees, with people seeking safety. All these events in succession are just not easily recoverable, like especially during a period so as early as the Bronze Age. This is what makes this time period so important to study and learn from. It's a case study of the various types of events that can affect a world so highly connected and cause it to just fall apart. But it's also important to remember that just because this occurred, just because
44:28 Liv Albert? some organized civilizations collapsed entirely, that doesn't stop people from living and building and continuing on in their individual worlds. The Mycenaean kingdoms of mainland Greece fell apart, but all the everyday, normal people that survived this didn't disappear off the face of the earth. They continued to find ways to survive in their new landscape and to build a new life for themselves. The stories of who they used to be or who they came from continued to live on in this oral tradition that they passed down to their children through the ages and which became the stories that even today I survive on.
45:08 Liv Albert? Most of the myths that we love and talk about on this show came out of this persistence of the people living in this region at this time. It came out of their understanding of who they used to be and what they could understand from the built world around them and what little they understood of it a couple hundred years later. Mycenae continued to stand and the stories of Menelaus and Helen persisted, or came into being. The various monumental palatial structures continued to stand and people visited the enormous tombs built into the landscape and imagined that this is where Ajax and Diomedes and Achilles and Odysseus were laid to rest. Supposedly
45:51 Liv Albert? even Alexander the Great on his campaigns into the Persian Empire stopped by the believed site of the Trojan War and went to this tomb of Achilles and made a sacrifice there. That's an Alexander story, but still, like, life would never be the same after the collapse, but life would continue to still be life. And that's important to remember when thinking about this end of the Bronze Age and about the collapse as a whole. It does mark an end, but not in totality. And maybe the people we should focus on are the people who are left after these events. The you and me, the ones who are going to keep going and give these stories of what was and who we were to their children for generations to
46:36 Liv Albert? come. The Bronze Age as a whole is not just an example of where these cultures that we love come from, but it's this example of human resilience and determination in the face of these uncontrollable events. It's also an example of how, if the world dies, the elites die with us. Or rather, they die first.
47:19 Liv Albert? Oh, nerds, thank you so much for listening. That was one of the longest scripts I've read in a while, and we're just gonna wrap it all up. I have two more conversations coming for you, so this is not the end of the Bronze Age. It is just my, and by that I mean Michaela's incredible script and my attempt to read it, my attempt to, to wrap up this collapse in a narrative episode, but oh, I have two conversations still coming about this collapse, so we are gonna go into much more detail with the actual archaeologists who know this stuff. It's going to be amazing. On Friday, you will hear Flint Dibble talking about climate change. The way this series turned into a rant against humanity's inability to act about
48:03 Liv Albert? climate change when the Bronze Age people were able to fucking do it and they weren't causing it themselves and they didn't know about it, I just, I wasn't expecting it. But you can have that to look forward to. Worlds colliding, worlds colliding. This is, it's such a relevant period in time, both historically and just out of interest, and also like for us today, to look back on and see, hey, they survived climate change. They didn't even know it was happening and they certainly weren't causing it. So maybe if we can convince capitalism to stop being quite so evil, we'll have a chance. Or maybe get rid of it entirely. Speaking of, I will finish off today's episode with a review
48:48 Liv Albert? from one of you amazing listeners. I got a few recently and they made me smile really, really big. So thank you so much for those. If you are interested, consider leaving me a review on Apple Podcasts, or you can do a rating on Spotify. They just don't let you write something nice and have it sent to me. So that's why I like the reviews. This one comes from a user called Lil Maru from the States. "You have a fun and nice voice. I like listening to your podcast because of the subject matter and you obviously love what you're talking about and it shows. Also, I agree. Death to capitalism." That's right. Thank you. "Death to capitalism. It's evil. The Western world of capitalism is evil."
49:31 Liv Albert? Anyway, back soon with more. I can't wait for you guys to hear these conversations. Yeah, they're gonna be so good. "Let's Talk About Myths Baby is written and produced by me, except not in this case, Michaela absolutely wrote most of this entire series. I contributed minimally, other than my voice. Thank you, Michaela. You are the existence behind this Bronze Age series. Laura Smith is the production assistant and audio engineer who worked so hard on all of the conversation episodes and always does. Select music in this episode was by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the iHeart Podcast Network. Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts and help me continue bringing you the world of Greek mythology and the ancient Mediterranean by becoming a patron,
50:14 Liv Albert? where you'll get access to lots of past bonus episodes, hopefully some new ones, but definitely helping the show. Helping the free show. Visit patreon.com/mystbaby or click the link in this episode's description. Oh, my voice is going. Thank you all so much. This was so fun. What a series. Stay tuned for really the best parts of it. Let's be honest, the conversations are the best part of this series. Stay tuned. I am Liv and I love this shit and I'm excited to return to mythology, a thing that I feel more confident talking about.
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