RE-AIR Conversations: When the Network Went Down, the Bronze Age Collapse w/ Dr Eric H Cline

This episode originally aired in April 2024 as part of our Bronze Age Collapse episode series. Liv is joined by Dr Eric H Cline to look at what we know of the end of the Bronze Age, what did and did not contribute to its collapse, and so much more. Learn about the books 1177 BC and After 1177 BC, and more, here https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/cline-eric-h. AVAILABLE NOW! The Odyssey: a Modern Retelling. https://geni.us/TheOdysseyBook Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourhttps://www.mythsbaby.com/contactpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributionsmythsbaby.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). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv 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.

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• 2:01Liv Albert?

  Hi, hello, welcome. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, here with the final episode in our series on the Bronze Age and its collapse. We've brought you through the Bronze Age civilizations of Greece into a little bit, as much as we could, about the wider Mediterranean during this period, then its collapse, and all the many things that contributed to it. And so today I have for you a conversation with Dr. Eric Klein, who is honestly probably the biggest name in Bronze Age slash the end of the Bronze

• 2:43Liv Albert?

  Age and its collapse. Like, you Google Bronze Age collapse, you're probably going to get his book. It's called 1177 B.C. And then there's a new one that's just come out very recently that is a sequel after 1177. So that comes up a lot in this conversation where we talk about what little things contributed to the collapse, what we do, what we don't know, what is still being learned, what has changed in the many, many years that we have been studying this stuff as humans and finding new things and using new technologies, like all the ways this stuff changes all the time, just because we change and therefore we have better ways of interpreting the past. It's utterly fascinating. Eric and I had a really, really fun conversation,

• 3:28Liv Albert?

  such a joy, and just, oh, I cannot wait for you to listen. So I'm just gonna stop rambling and let you get right in to this incredible conversation.

• 3:52Liv Albert?

  Conversations: When the Network Went Down, the Bronze Age Collapse with Dr. Eric Klein.

• 4:14Liv Albert?

  But thank you so much for doing this. I'm very excited to talk to you.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Well, it's fun for me and thank you for having me on. It's looking forward to it.

• 4:24Liv Albert?

  Good. I'm so glad. I have an assistant producer who's been working on a lot of the research because she's currently, my background is in mythology and my degree is quite old, but she's currently studying and obsessed with the Bronze Age. And so she is very excited that I'm talking to you. And she gave me some questions to ask and stuff. So there's a Michaela's somewhere being very excited.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Sounds good. And Michaela's at UBC at the moment, right?

• 4:50Liv Albert?

  Yes, exactly. Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Good, good, good. Well, hopefully I'll be able to meet everybody in person at some point, but over the internet will do for now.

• 5:01Liv Albert?

  It's, it's nice. At least we have this, right? I feel like it's opened up a lot in the last few years, so.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  It has. Yeah. Just saying to my son that when previous books have come out, I mean, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was all radio interviews. And now it's all podcasts. The technology has totally changed.

• 5:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and podcasts are great. I mean, it's so easy to record remotely. And I started it in the pandemic where I was having these conversations with experts. And yeah, I mean, it's just easy and fun. And my, my show started out as a very casual, just like silly mythology podcast and grew to being an incredibly deeply researched and accurate mythology podcast where I touch on history. But yeah, no, it's great.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  That's good. And we need, we need more of those, the ones that are fun, interesting, and historically accurate. So there you go. You touch all the buttons.

• 5:52Liv Albert?

  That is my goal always. I do have to share too. I was in, it would have been just last year. Last year I was on a boat ride from Naxos to Delos. And there was this American couple sitting across from my friend and I, and they started, they struck up a conversation and were chatting about, you know, where we were going and everything. And, and the, the man holds up a book and he was like, oh, I'm so excited. I've been reading all about, you know, the ancient world and we're going to Delos and I'm, and it was your book. I was like, oh, yeah, no, I know. I know that book very well. Like, I was like, I'm hoping to have it on my show eventually. So yeah, it was very, it was fun. Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  It is fun. You never know the ripple effects. You never know who's reading it, you know? As they say, you put it out into the wild and then you don't know where it goes. So that's cool. Thank you for sharing that.

• 6:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, you're welcome. I recently had an experience like that myself where I, I wrote a book, but it was a book of mythology out and it was commissioned by the publisher, which tends to mean that they do a lot of things without bothering to tell me. And I just find out later. And I recently had someone send me a picture of it in Turkish. And so that's how I learned that it exists in Turkish and I would love to see it myself, but at least I have a photo for now.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you have it in your contract that they have to talk to you about it when it's translated, then you find out. If it's not on the contract, then you have no idea.

• 7:16Liv Albert?

  Oh, it is in the contract. I actually used to work for Penguin Random House in contracts, so I know what's in my contract. They just don't do it. But that's okay. I emailed them and eventually I'll follow up.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  But did they send you a copy of it?

• 7:28Liv Albert?

  They are technically supposed to. So that's what my email was, was because I found out that it existed a couple of months ago and I emailed and my editor was like, oh, yeah, it does. And I was like, okay, great. Can I get a copy? And she was like, yeah, we'll send you one. And now I see that it's in bookshops. So I sent another being like, okay, where, where is it now?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  That's funny. Well, congratulations.

• 7:48Liv Albert?

  Oh, thank you. Well, I'll get us right in. So we, you know, use up all of our time on this. I'm so excited. The Bronze Age, like I said, has very much been Michaela's pet project, but I've been working through all of her research and unfortunately have a good grounding now before we speak. But yeah, essentially, I'd love to, love to know more details about sort of all the different, I mean, obviously so many things went into the collapse of the Bronze Age. And I'm fascinated in sort of the, I guess, the outside forces, maybe could we can focus on of, or the, the theories rather. And, but maybe we'll start it off with just very, something very simple, which is, you know, do you have, do you have

• 8:30Liv Albert?

  a favorite thing to talk about when it comes to this aspect, the end of the Bronze Age? Do you have like a pet bit that's your favorite?

• 8:41Speaker 03

  What is my favorite part of the collapse?

• 8:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Good question, good question. I actually think my favorite part about the collapse, if one is allowed to put it that way,

• 8:56Speaker 03

  is the fact that

• 8:59Speaker 03

  out of all the things that have been suggested and somebody says, choose one, which one do you like? Was it earthquake? Was it disease? Was it migration? Was it drought? And my answer is yes. Like, yes, it's all of the above. And as my kids would say, it was a series of unfortunate events to quote Lebanese Snicket, right? So I think that's my favorite part is it's all of the above. Right? So it's not one. You don't have to choose. You can take them all.

• 9:30Liv Albert?

  Well, and I think that's what makes it so much more interesting, too, like it, and so much more believable because, I mean, I have this, this video I saw years ago that just keeps coming up in this series because it's all I can think of. And it was this, one of those guys on Instagram, you know, who, who talks about history in that really loud and fast way, where they can kind of make it sound like they know what they're talking about, even if they're spouting utter nonsense. And this guy had this whole thing about, you know, the greatness of the Mycenaeans and how incredible they were. And then how one day they just disappeared and all died out. And the people of the Greek mainland lost the ability to understand written word. And then from the Dark Ages, Homer came up,

• 10:13Liv Albert?

  you know, fully formed, like Athena out of Zeus's head and, and gave us these, this language and these, these stories. And it's just like the confidence with which these people say this. And then, of course, so many people believe them. And so it's the thing I keep returning to when it comes to this topic of, you know, how, no, lots of things happened. We know generally why, you know, why the Mycenaean period ended, why the Bronze Age ended. And, and, you know, to say they, that humanity like lost the ability to understand written word is perhaps a little cruel to humanity.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Just a little exaggerated, but yeah. Yeah, I'm seeing things on YouTube now where you've got all these people pontificating on the Late Bronze Age collapse and everything else like that. And they're going on and on and on. And not giving any credit to the actual people who have worked on this. So that their listeners think that they came up with all of it. I'm just like, whoa. First of all, give credit where credit's due. And secondly, it's like, I mean, in this case, you know, stop mansplaining to me, you know? That's what they're doing. So anyway, but at least, at least the Late Bronze Age is getting out there into the broader world.

• 11:27Liv Albert?

  Well, and it's, it's things like this that, that make me want to do the series of episodes that I get to do, you know, when I see this kind of nonsense and, and the lack of sources and, you know, all of those different things. I, a couple of years ago, I did a similar series on Atlantis because people were going off about all the different theories on Atlantis. And, you know, so I released a, a series of episodes, basically breaking down all the reasons why Atlantis is literally nothing.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yes, yes, yeah. Yeah, I could, I could honestly see somebody starting a podcast that would be called Yes, But, or No, Not Actually, you know, going from there.

• 12:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, you sound confident, but.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Exactly. But you're right. Atlantis lends itself perfectly to it. Yeah. And I talk about that in my archaeology course. And there I'm leaning towards, well, is it Santorini? If it's anything? Or, you know, is it really just Plato making it up about his ideal state?

• 12:30Liv Albert?

  Well, and yeah, I kind of landed on, you know, it is Plato making everything up, but maybe he was inspired by the general shape and history of Santorini.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what I, I, I tend to think, and I don't know how this would go in with, with your podcast, but I tell my students, I think there is a kernel of truth at the basis of most of the myths and legends. So you can point, you know, to the Trojan War. Yes, there is some stuff, something happened. You can point to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur and look at the ruins of Knossos. Yes, maybe, you know, so I think same thing. So Atlantis, maybe evocative memories of Santorini, but who knows?

• 13:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. And I think those are important because it does gives you some kind of basis for how these stories come about. And then you can look at, you know, but where the accuracies lie and where it's mostly just, you know, invention.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I like the idea of some things being, I think the word is t in the electrical, where you're making something up to explain something you can see. So, yeah.

• 13:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, I, you know, in, in my Bronze Age series, I'm talking a lot about, you know, the, where the, where the oral tradition and the mythology, you know, ties in, because obviously that's what I'm most interested in. And, and I think it's what's going to connect well with my listeners, you know? I, I love the, the Knossos of it all, you know, you look there and you're like, well, I could see how this can look like a labyrinth. Like, there's a lot of bulls too. They had a real thing for bull iconography. Like, you can see kind of where these things come about when there is, you know, 500 years gap in between.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Right. And absolutely. And when you get like wall paintings in Egypt that show people leaping over bulls in front of a labyrinth, and then you go, whoa, okay. But that dates to 1700 BCE. You're like, wait a minute. Okay. Are the Minoans in contact with Egypt at that? Yes, they are. Okay. And you go from there. But, and same thing with the Trojan War, which I think is part and parcel of the whole Late Bronze Age collapse. I've got no problem at all with something having happened at Troy. You know, and you can point to the Hittite records where they mention not one, not two, not three, but four wars that they fought in and around Troy. So the question for me is not, was there a Trojan War?

• 14:49Speaker 03

  The question for me is, which Trojan War was Homer talking about? And how does it link to the ones that the Hittites were talking about? So I do think that there's a lot of interplay between history, archaeology, mythology. And, and that's where all of this comes in and is so much fun.

• 15:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and it, it is, I mean, that's, yeah, that's what I love so much about it. And what I've been trying to like, dig into all of my scripts for this series is just where I can link in the mythological references, the ways that, that, you know, the, what, what the people later were looking at and how they were able to tie it to whatever cultural memory they had. And then, you know, transform it into the myths that we have today.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  And then you look at things like systems collapse, which is probably what the Late Bronze Age collapse is. And you realize that if you're Colin Renfrew working in the late seventies and you're defining a systems collapse, one is that you've got a so-called Dark Age afterward, in which people are looking back at the Golden Age and reminiscing and, you know, hello Homer. Right? And hello Hesiod. So I'm like, yeah, okay. You know, that poor Hesiod, I, I wish that I were not living in an age of iron. And like, yeah, you are, deal with it. So.

• 16:09Liv Albert?

  Oh, the idea of poor Hesiod. Yeah, okay.

• 16:13Liv Albert?

  Oh, well, I mean, is it the perfect way to dive a little deeper into, you know, all the, all the different kind of things that went into it? So, you know, you, you mentioned the, the wars of the, in the Hittite record and like what, what are some, I'm trying to think of a, a better way of phrasing a question, but I'm just so curious in, you know, all the different, I suppose, records I'm quite interested in, the records that we have that give us, you know, some sense of what was happening. And, you know, if it can be tied later to myths that come out, I mean, even better. But I'm just so curious in, in what the records say, because I know, obviously, we're dealing with so many different, different bits and pieces when it comes to how we learn about this collapse.

• 16:56Liv Albert?

  But in terms of what they were writing, like what, you know, what do we know?

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that's a very interesting question because in addition to all the archaeology where we've gone and we've dug up the cities and yes, this one's destroyed, no, this one isn't. And this one gets hit by an earthquake, this one gets hit by humans. We do have a lot of written records, as you say, but they differ from society to society, which is probably not surprising. And they differ in the amount of information we can get from them. And in how much we can trust them at face value versus exaggeration. So, for instance, we don't have nearly as much information from the Mycenaeans

• 17:41Speaker 03

  because they're writing in Linear B and their clay tablets are concerned with accounting from the palaces. So they're, you know, they're talking about how many chariot wheels you've got and how many sheep. They, they do not, perhaps surprisingly, talk about, and we traded with Egypt and we traded with Cyprus. There's actually no real mention of trade or anything like that in the Linear B.

• 18:07Liv Albert?

  Really? I was totally wrong about that. Oh, that's so interesting. I knew it was all palace records.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's all palace records. What we do have, what we do have though, are like the names of items where the foreign name comes with the foreign item. Some of which might surprise you. I mean, there's a name of a spice, Cyprus, which, you know, may or may not come from Cyprus. It's not spelled quite the same, but the word for ivory comes from the Hittite. The word for gold, the word for Chiton. I mean, a lot of these things come from the Near East. The word for sesame, sasama, in Linear B comes directly out of Akkadian and all, all of that. So, and we have the names of a couple of people. There's one guy named Apikuti, Apikutio, the Egyptian.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  And he's in charge of like 80 sheep at Knossos. Like, why is a guy named the Egyptian in charge? Anyway, so the Linear B tablets from mainland Greece and Knossos are not as much help as you might expect. On the other hand, the Hittite records, as I mentioned, talk about wars, conflicts, problems with an area in northwestern Anatolia, modern Turkey. In a region called Asua. And Asua seems to be a confederation of like twenty-two cities and states. In fact, the word Asua gave rise to Asia. That's where we get the name Asia from.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  And in among the twenty-two cities and towns is one called Tarusa. And another, Willusa. Willusa seems to be the name for Troy, for the Hittites. And Tarusia or Tarusa is apparently the area around. It's like the Troad versus Troy.

• 19:57Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  But, you know, in Greek, we've got Troy, which is Ilios, of course. And there would have been a digamma originally. So it would have been like a W, it would have been Willios. And the W drops out over time.

• 20:13Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Willios in Greek, Willusa in Hittite. Hello, it's Troy. So there, and they're talking about, as I say, about four conflicts, starting back in the fifteenth century B.C. So I'm actually wondering if the Trojan War stories that come down to us from Homer and the Epic Cycle might not be telescoping of two or three hundred years of on-again, off-again conflict. At any rate, the Hittite records also talk about the fact that there is drought and famine towards the end of the Late Bronze Age. And they talk about campaigns that their kings do.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  We know from archaeology that they've actually abandoned their capital city of Hattusa just before the end. So when part of it's burnt, it's already abandoned. So we've got some info from the Hittite records. The Egyptians, of course, are useful, and that's where the sea peoples come from. Because twice, Pharaoh Mernepta in twelve oh seven and Pharaoh Ramses the Third in eleven seventy-seven B.C. And that's where the title of my first book in this series came from. They talk about a coalition attacking Egypt twice within, you know, thirty-year period. We call them the sea peoples.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  That's the name that the French Egyptologists came up with. But the Egyptians actually tell us their names. The Pelset, the Denian or Danuna, the Sardana or Sheridan, the Shekales. And so we've been playing linguistic games with them. Are the Sardana or the Sheridan from Sardinia, for example? Are the Shekales from Sicily? Are the Danuna or Denian, is that Homer?

• 22:05Liv Albert?

  That's what I, yeah, that was my thought. Sounds a lot like Danians.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Exactly. And actually, in the earlier wave, there's a group called the Ekwesh. Are the Ekwesh the Achaeans? And so do we have one group from the Aegean coming in twelve oh seven and another group coming in eleven seventy-seven? And the Egyptians, who don't know better, call one wave the Ekwesh and the next wave the Danuna or Denian. So anyway, the only group that we think we can actually identify is the Pelset. Those are the Philistines. And in the Hebrew Bible, it claims the Philistines come from Crete, from Cthulhu. So, you know, there may be something to that. Now, the Egyptians say that they beat the sea peoples both times.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  But, you know, can you take the Egyptian records at face value?

• 22:58Liv Albert?

  Are they gonna say when they lost?

• 23:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. Do the Egyptians ever say when they lost?

• 23:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah. We got beat really badly, like, they're not gonna write that.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  No, even the Battle of Khadash, which was a draw back in about twelve seventy-four, that we know. You know, we know it was a stalemate, but the Egyptians claim a victory. So, so do the Hittites for that matter, but never mind. So, you know. So, one place that has provided really interesting records is the site of Ugarat, a port city on what is now the north coast of Syria. And there, we have archives from three or four different private merchants who were also working for the palace. And they talk about life, on the one hand, going on just as per normal, right up until the end.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  I mean, there's even one guy who's sending his ships back and forth to Crete. But then, all of a sudden, we get reports of enemy ships being seen, that enemy troops have landed at Rasibenhani, which is right there on the coast. And that troops are advancing towards Ugarat. And we know that Ugarat is destroyed by humans. There are arrowheads on the walls. There's a meter, three feet of destruction. And yet, we don't know who the enemies are, because they, they just say the enemy.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  So from Ugarat, we then get an idea of the end. And some of the other texts, and these were ones that have only just been published. They came out in French in twenty sixteen. And then, an English translation, published by Yuri Cohen in twenty twenty, where the texts from Ugarat are talking about a famine. And that they're all dying. And that they're writing to the Pharaoh of Egypt, including Mernepta, the same guy who fought the sea peoples. And the king of Ugarat writes to Mernepta, saying that, "We're dying here, there's a famine. Can you send us anything?"

• 25:16Speaker 03

  And interestingly, we're missing that letter, but we have Mernepta's response, in which he quotes the letter. He says, "You wrote to me saying X, Y, and Z." And so here, "I'm happy to help." And he sends seven thousand dried fish, plus beads and textiles. And I'm not sure how the beads and textiles would help the famine, but the dried fish went a long way, I'm sure.

• 25:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there, we would have no reason to doubt it. It's not exaggeration, it's not a public record. It's a private letter between kings. And so that, for me, is a very useful textual source. So, like I say, we've got a number of different sources from different cities. The question is, how much can we take it face value? And how much can we say, "Okay, that really was the situation"? But I would love to have more. For instance, we don't have anybody writing contemporaneously, saying, "Help, help, the sky is falling, we're collapsing. Oh, send help, we've got earthquakes." You know, we don't, we don't have that.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  We do have people saying, "We're being invaded, send reinforcements." But, you know, was anybody aware at that time that they were collapsing and wrote about it? You know, was there somebody, who was it, Clytemnestra? That was, you know, predicting the future, or other people like that?

• 26:46Liv Albert?

  Cassandra, yeah.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  You know, was there anybody like that, and a soothsayer? And, you know, was she ignored? So we don't have that, unfortunately. But we do have a lot of information.

• 26:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's really interesting that, that what the textual sources we do have don't talk about the natural disasters that we know were happening. Like, I, I have a real pet obsession with the eruption of Thera, just because I love a good volcanic eruption, like, they're just fascinating. And I went to Akrotiri a couple of years ago, and just, you know, game changer. And it is fascinating that, I mean, I know that it's considerably earlier, you know, than, than when things are collapsing. But I know, but still, that there were earthquakes happening so often. And it's interesting that they don't ever, you know, write that down. Of course, I think probably a big problem with this time period and the writings is that they were much more practical than they were later. You know, there was, the writing was much more about whether it was going to be useful

• 27:42Liv Albert?

  versus like, recording things for posterity.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. And they weren't busy doing that, that is for sure. But we do know that there is a period of about fifty years when there's earthquakes back then. And earthquake storm, as Amos North from Stanford has called them. And they're affecting many of the cities at the time, including Troy. We know that Troy six is destroyed by earthquakes. So then there's another earthquake at Komelhathan in Egypt, where Amenhotep the Third's palace was, and at Mycenae? Maybe at Tiryns, that's a bit debated now, but yeah, we've got all that. And, and yet, earthquakes were a big factor. And yet, nobody's writing about them, which, okay, you know, so it goes.

• 28:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting, though. The earth shakes. Like, you'd think you'd what, write it down, or like, say it to somebody. But I guess, you know, i- i- it's not necessary for any kind of record keeping, maybe. But it's, yeah, i- it's interesting. So I feel like this is now just me being like, a nerd for, um, natural disasters. But like, I feel like if there's an earthquake at Mycenae, they'd probably feel it at Tiryns. Like, it's not far.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. You would think so. You would think so. Right, right. And I, I realized I misspoke. Not quite, I'm necessary, of course. It's Cassandra, who does all the prophesying, right? So, you know, were there any Cassandras back then? I'm sure there were, but they didn't write their words down. So, um, and that's where, where, I mean, the archaeology comes in, because, you know, as one of the books that I read when I was younger, the mute stones speak. You know, we've got to get archaeology to tell its story. Um, and it's wonderful when the written text can supplement it, you know, and that's something that we especially find in the Iron Age, when you've got the Neo Assyrian texts and

• 29:35Speaker 03

  all of that. But here, at the end of the Late Bronze Age, we're, we're, I would say, uh, so reliant on what the archaeologists are finding, and how they interpret it. But that's why there's so much room for agreement and disagreements, when you're looking at the same data. And two people can see two different stories there. But, um, we definitely have tons of evidence for the Late Bronze Age, some written, and some not.

• 30:03Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Well, and I know, you know, when it comes to writing, especially during this period, we're really dealing with the elites, right? The, the people who have the ability not only to write, but to have it preserved. Um, and, and I think that that's something that, you know, if you're just coming to this as an outsider, like, interested in the subject, it's harder to remember, because now anyone can write something down and have it preserved. But back then, like, you know, there, there's a lot that has to go into something, not only being recorded, but surviving for us today. And that does mean that it is really the people, the rich people, the, the elites in power that can do that.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that is very much a problem from back then. And that was some of the comments that I got, uh, on the first book, including in some reviews. He's telling the story of the 1%. What about the 99%? And my response is, yeah, what about them? I'd love to be able to talk about them. Show me, show me the evidence, because, and that even after the collapse, you know, uh, in the aftermath, in the Iron Age, again, and what I say in the sequel that's just about to come out, the After 1177 B.C. In the front of the book, in the preface and the prologue, I explicitly say, I can only report what I know. I can only report what we found in archaeology, or from the written text. And

• 31:21Speaker 03

  in the case, and I give the example of the Neo Assyrians, they're talking about the king and the administration. They're talking about the 1%. I said, so I can't really tell you what it was like for a peasant out in the hinterlands, unless somebody has gone and excavated it. So I say, unfortunately, this is the story of the elite, and I just can't tell you the story of the unnamed millions out there, much as I would want to do that. So we are, our hands are tied by the evidence that's been left to us, that's for sure. Um, and the, the least we can do is acknowledge that, and say, you know, there's a lot that remains untold.

• 32:17Liv Albert?

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• 32:59Liv Albert?

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• 33:42Liv Albert?

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• 36:12Liv Albert?

  Well, I imagine the archaeological record does give us certainly more when it comes to, you know, some level of normalcy, like, obviously not deep out in the country unless you suddenly figure out where to excavate and can manage it. But in terms of, you know, even the palatial structures and stuff, the archaeology would, would, I imagine, give us some idea of, of what a slightly more normal person lived like?

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Assuming somebody has found a site and excavated it. Absolutely, right. But even there, it's, it's, um, we're at the mercy of our technology to a certain degree. I mean, it, it used to be thought that, um, in the aftermath of the Bronze Age, on the Greek mainland, that, um, between 70 and 90% of the people had died, or had migrated. We've now lowered that. Um, a maximum 60% died or migrated, maybe more like 40%. Um, Sarah Murray and Ian Morris have suggested the population plummeted from 600,000 down to about 330,000 people on the Greek mainland. Um, but part of that, part of the reason

• 37:18Speaker 03

  why we've ratcheted it back and said, oh, it wasn't 90% that died, it's only 40%, is because now we're finding more Iron Age sites that we hadn't been able to find before. And so with every new site, you're like, okay, more people survived, or whatever. So, um, again, uh, keep in mind that when, when we're calling something like the aftermath of the collapse a dark age, it's frequently a reference of the fact that we don't know what happened. It's dark to us, which is why you've got so many scholarly articles where the title is, "New Light on the Dark Age." You know, new light, it's like, eventually

• 38:00Speaker 03

  there's enough light, it's not a dark age anymore. And in fact, I don't think, um, that the Iron Age, uh, is a dark age. And that's what a lot of scholars are arguing now. The problem is that the general public doesn't know that yet. So you still see the centuries after the Late Bronze Age collapsed, like, 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, even down into the 8th, still called the world's first dark age. I mean, even the PR for, for 1177, talked about the aftermath being the world's first dark age. So in the sequel, at the end, I make the argument, and I agree with the, my colleagues, and say, stop calling

• 38:42Speaker 03

  this a dark age. Just like the Middle Ages, they don't want theirs called the dark age anymore. Same with us. So, um, I'm in the camp that says, can we just call it the Iron Age? Which is accurate, doesn't cause, you know, cast any aspersions. But, so, anyway. So it's part of, um, how much we know. And that's where the technology that archaeologists are using, including remote sensing and better surveying techniques and all that, um, is, um, if you'll excuse me, shedding more light on this period.

• 39:22Liv Albert?

  No, I think it's really important to emphasize that like it's something that I've been aware of in writing this of, you know, both noting that it used to be called or and it's still sometimes called a dark age, but all the reasons why that's not really applicable. And and just is misleading because I think that people do really consider a dark age more to be about, like, you know, what is happening versus this idea of a lack of sources. And that's really applicable to the Middle Ages too, where, you know, people consider it a dark ages in terms of like, you know, human intellect and stuff. And that's just, it's very unfortunate for the people that were living then. And I think about that with the Iron Age a lot because, I mean, the Iron Age is when we get the development of everything that I certainly obsess over when it comes to ancient Greece. Like, they weren't doing nothing. They weren't some suddenly dumbed down group of people.

• 40:06Liv Albert?

  Like, just a lot of things changed and they stopped, you know, recording things in the same way. And so we don't know and but that doesn't mean it wasn't happening.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  Exactly. It doesn't mean it wasn't happening and it doesn't mean they they weren't trying their best. And even a dark age, it's not, you know, the total collapse and degeneration with wild dogs howling and, you know, people. And I do talk about this at the, towards the end of the sequel. But yeah, you know, we're going to get the standardization of the alphabet, courtesy of the Phoenicians, who then bring it over to Greece and to Italy for that matter. And so our people in Greece are going to be able to start writing certainly by the eighth century. And maybe even earlier, there's some new research that is debating whether the alphabet made it over as early as the 11th century,

• 40:58Speaker 03

  which I'm in total favor of because that's when it gets standardized over in the Near East. And I'm, why would Greece be 300 years behind? No, bring it on over. And, you know, we've got, I think, at some point, there's 33 different variations of the early alphabet. So they're experimenting. So, yeah, this is a time of innovation. It's the time of invention. And not only do you get the standardization of the alphabet, you also get iron. I mean, it gives the name to this. You get the invention of iron, which is probably courtesy of the Cypriots. It's looking like right now.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  And they're making bi-metallic knives and weapons where the blade is made of iron and the hilt, you know, inlaid with bone or wood or ivory, but fastened on with rivets made of bronze. So you've got both bronze and and iron. And it looks like the Cypriots are kind of making the transformation from the segue, if you will, from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. And that on Cyprus, they've been working with copper all this time. And now they're, they move into iron. And along, along with the exportation of these objects, both to Greece and the southern of on.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  It looks like they're also exporting the know-how, the technology. And then, of course, you've got iron ore in every country, and so everybody's then able to make it. So this is a period of invention, innovation, transformation. And one thing that I I take a look at in this sequel, I borrow the adaptive cycle, which is something you frequently see in environmental studies, biology and such. But the basic idea is, you know, empires rise and fall, right? That's the adaptive cycle. You get a release phase and then you get an innovation phase and then everything comes back. I think that's what we're looking at here.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  The Bronze Age collapse is the release phase, the omega phase in an adaptive cycle. And then the Iron Age, not a dark age, but it's the alpha phase, which is defined as a period of invention and innovation, trying to grapple with what's just happened. And I think that's the perfect analogy right here. So it's almost the opposite of a dark age. And in fact, some scholars like John Papadopoulos and Sarah Morris at UCLA have argued that this is not a dark age. It's far from it. And so have some of the people that are studying the Near East.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  So I'm just literally jumping on the bandwagon and agreeing with you that this is a time of invention and innovation. It's actually a very exciting time. I mean, I'm a, I'm a Bronze Age person. That's where my heart lies. But I have to admit that the Iron Age is pretty darn interesting, so I'll give them that.

• 44:09Liv Albert?

  Well, I'm, I'm really big on the classical and archaic, so we can kind of find the middle ground there in the iron. And but I mean, it's so interesting to me that it's ever been called the Dark Age because regardless of what we did or did not know, like what we've known for a long time is that it did give rise to the oral tradition that would become like the Homeric epics. Like, the idea of referring to the time when those were being created, you know, as a dark age is so ironic, given that, you know, so much of quote unquote, Western civilization has been attributed to the Greeks like during and from that. It was like, why, like, there, there's just so much kind of happening there that seems contradictory.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. But but if you think back to the, the Greeks themselves never talked about a dark age.

• 44:55Liv Albert?

  No.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  That, that's as James Whitley once said, the dark age of Greece is our own conception. And, you know, and that's where, again, John Papadopoulos said the Greeks didn't know of a dark age. Why not trust their better judgments? And I'm like, yes, why not trust their better judgment? Right. So, yeah, I would absolutely agree. Any age that's got everyone from Homer to Hesia to Sappho and onward is not, in my mind, a dark age.

• 45:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, they're giving us amazing stuff that we all still love. So, yeah. Now, the, the alphabet that you mentioned, you know, the, the sort of new research coming through about when it was, you know, happening on Gre- in Greece. Was that the, some of the stuff that's been published recently about on Andros? I noticed that there was something that recently came out about that.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know if it is or not. I'd have to look. But I'm thinking of the research that Wilhelmina Wall has been publishing out of, I think, I think she's at Leiden, but doing really interesting work on the origins of the alphabet. But, yeah, this is new stuff, really. And there's a couple of Greek archaeologists working on this as well. So I don't know what the pushback is going to be from the, the actual philologist or linguist or anything like that. But from an archaeological point of view, looking at the earliest Phoenician alphabet

• 46:27Speaker 03

  and the earliest inscriptions and in Greece. I think it, I think we can push it back further. But like Boryo Yanis has been talking about this. Anyway, the field is definitely alive and well. And I think it may shake up some of the, the tried and true things that we've been teaching for years. So, I mean, there are other things that we're going to shake up. I mean, I start my book by dismissing the Dorian invasion.

• 46:59Liv Albert?

  Lovely. I'd love to hear more about that.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Well, there's nothing here. It didn't happen.

• 47:03Liv Albert?

  Okay, so just know.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  No, just know, exactly. All the maps that have the Dorian's coming down. I'm like, no, exactly. So I actually start the book with that.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  I end the book pleading for no dark ages. It's an Iron Age. I begin the book with the Dorian's. In fact, I start out with, the Dorian's came down from the north, brandishing their weapons of iron. They overran Greece and took over and da, da, da, da, da, da. And then I pause, figurative, literally, and then say, but it probably never happened. And what? Wait, that's a good way to start to open the book, right? Right? So, yeah, but it probably never happened. The problem is that you see it all over the internet. You see it in online encyclopedias and I actually call out one or two by name in the book with the link.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  So which means I'm pretty sure within three weeks of the book appearing in mid-April that the online encyclopedias will have changed their entry. And either the, the link will be dead or they will have changed it to not say what I've got. So I've got screenshots. I've got the receipts, right? So, but, yeah, they still talk about the Dorian's coming sweeping down from the north at about 1200 B.C. and ending Mycenaean civilization. And I'm like, no. And I reached back and quote scholars all the way back to like Reese Carpenter in the sixties, saying things like the Dorian invasion is a mirage, that it's an invasion without invaders,

• 48:40Speaker 03

  that everything they're supposed to bring with them is already there and can't be attributed to them. So, you know, I think it's like Herodotus and Thucydides were trying to, in a way, make this up so they could explain the dialects of Greece, you know, Ionic versus Doric versus whatever. But archaeologically speaking, there's no evidence for it. Now, of course, we do have the problem with evidence of absence or absence of evidence is not and all that. Right, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We can't find the Dorian invasion. One could argue that doesn't mean it didn't exist. I do think it didn't exist. What we've got instead, how about if it's not an invasion, but it's a migration?

• 49:25Speaker 03

  We do have people moving back and forth at that time, not a problem. But there is a world of difference between a migration and an invasion, two very different things. So I start out the book saying, if we're wrong about the Dorian invasion and we have to change our textbooks, because they're in the textbooks. I mean, the textbook that I was using for my ancient Mediterranean civilizations class, it's got a page and a half, two pages on the Dorian invasion. And I would tell my freshmen, because it's a freshman class, I would say, you know, rip those pages out of the textbook because that's wrong, right? Or if we're going to discuss it, let's discuss it. But so it's still around and we just have to,

• 50:10Speaker 03

  we have to let the general public know that that stuff is not right. So, you know, there's another episode for you, yes, but, or, or no, not so much. The Dorian invasion, did it happen? No, right? But again, this is not news to scholars, but it is news to the general public. And everywhere I look on the internet, they're like, ah. And I'm, I'm fully expecting that after the sequel comes out, we'll see a whole nother slew of podcasts of people mansplaining why the Dorian invasion either happened or didn't happen, and taking credit for everything that, you know, that we've done. But anyway, there's lots of, I guess one could say myths and legends about this period,

• 50:56Speaker 03

  some of which are accurate and some of which just aren't. And, and we got to figure out which is which.

• 51:02Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. It's funny, I'm trying to think of, you know, because I really don't touch on history too much as outside of like, you know, the kind of classical period history surrounding the playwrights, because I love them. And they talk about myths. But, you know, so I've, I've touched in into history a couple of times on, on the show, you know, in my own research. And one of them was last year I did a series on, on Sparta. And it was broadly about the Sparta, sorry, the Spartan mirage, you know, the, the myths that Sparta created for themselves.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:31Liv Albert?

  And I think that's the only time I've ever touched on the Dorian invasion. And I'm trying to remember what I said, but I, I, from what I remember of looking into it, it felt to me more like a Spartan myth than it did history. And so I'm, I'm hoping that that's kind of where I landed at the time, because that's what it, it felt like. It's just like another of the things that the Spartans kind of, you know, mythologized about themselves. And that kind of took, it sort of caught hold and lasted.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would agree. I would absolutely agree that it was part of the Spartan mirage, all the stuff that Paul Cartlidge and other people talk about. And yeah, the Dorian's are part and parcel of that. They were very important for the Spartans. So, yeah, I absolutely agree. And, and in my history of ancient Greece course, when I teach it, I say the exact same thing. I touch on it as well.

• 52:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I, I feel like I thought it was a myth. Well, clearly I didn't, I don't know, now I'm fascinated. But yeah, I mean, it always seemed unlikely to me, like why? It just, yeah, it, it feels like an unlikely explanation for what happened and, and.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Well, the thing is unlikely or not, I mean, the Dorian invasion, it could happen. It, it's very much like the sea peoples. I mean, in the original eleven seventy seven book, I start with the sea peoples. And so now in the sequel, I thought, okay, let me start with the Dorian's. And so we have the same sort of questions, like if the sea peoples actually did invade like the Egyptians, then why couldn't the Dorian's have invaded also, right? And one could ask that. And part of the problem is that for the Dorian's, as I said, there's no archaeological evidence. For the sea peoples, there's no archaeological evidence either. You know, we can't find them anywhere.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  We do have textual evidence, right? The shard, and that's part of the problem, the shardana or the sherdan, they're mercenaries. We see them fighting in the Near East, both for Egypt and against Egypt from like the fourteenth century on, they're known quantities. And yet, point me to a site anywhere that you can say, this is where the shardana come from, right? In Sardinia or wherever, there isn't one yet, right? And even Ugarat, where they talk about the enemy ships showing up. They don't say the shardana, there is one text that mentions a shardana.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  But so we've got the same sort of thing for the sea peoples and for the Dorian's. And so I guess one could ask, and I'm just talking off the top of my head here, but why do we accept the sea peoples and not the Dorian's? Well, the sea peoples, I now think are, as I mentioned, are part of the equation in terms of being victims as opposed to oppressors. They are migrating because of a drought. And I would have no problem with the Dorian's doing that as well. I have no problem with the Dorian's migrating at the end of the late Bronze Age.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  I just don't want the Dorian's invading. And similarly, I'm not so sure the sea peoples invaded per se. I think they're migrating and we've got evidence, especially in the southern Levant now, for the Philistines, who are part of the sea peoples, as having been a much more peaceful assimilation into the region than one would expect. So maybe that's the answer. And I guess what I'm doing in both books is arguing for a migration rather than an invasion for both the sea peoples and the Dorian's. And I think that explains the evidence we've got. It explains some of the texts that we've got. And it doesn't do away with them completely.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  It just massages it slightly to fit the evidence that we've got. So, you know, you want to call it a Dorian migration? I'm cool. Call it a Dorian invasion? I'm not so sure about that, but you know, again, but this is nuances. This is semantics. And, you know, somebody out in, in the general populace is going to say invasion, migration, whatever. I'm like, no, not whatever. Let's talk about it.

• 55:52Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Well, and that's, I'm so glad that, that you brought it up that way because I think, I mean, one of the things that we've been really trying to drill in in this whole series is the way that the ancient Mediterranean was broadly about migration. Like the way that, you know, it wasn't about, you know, this group of people lived in this land and only in this land, and they are the indigenous peoples. And, and, you know, across Mediterranean, it was a very shared space. There was a lot of going back and forth, a lot of migration, especially if we're dealing with drought and other like climate change things that would force people to migrate. And I think that especially because of the myth of Western civilization,

• 56:33Liv Albert?

  you know, we have this idea that like ancient Greece existed in a little bubble, a little vacuum of like just them. And they were very Greek and they started everything. And it's like, even the ancient Greeks are like, well, the Phoenicians gave us the alphabet. And, you know, Aphrodite probably came from Cyprus. And, you know, like they give us so much evidence for migration, both of culture and language and people. But I think it really is important to remind everyone that this wasn't like set, you know, it, it, migration happened a lot and a lot of people, a lot of different people from different places lived together in the same place quite peacefully and, and quite happily.

• 57:16Liv Albert?

  And it wasn't always about an invading force. Like I think we think about it because of later colonialism. We imagine that, that if there is a large group of people, it is always going to be an invading force. And I think that that's a really important myth to break and, and, you know, and really just point out all the evidence that suggests that that's not really what was happening broadly.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  I agree. And if you look, if you look closely at the sea peoples' inscriptions in Egypt, the one I'm thinking of Ramses the third and his inscription on his wall at Meden at Habu, in addition to a scene of the naval battle between the Egyptians and the sea peoples, he's got right next to it a scene of the sea peoples literally migrating. You see the women and the children sitting on an ox cart, you know, with their Samsonite luggage in the cart with them. You know, it's a migration. It's not a bunch of men popped up on testosterone, just raiding. It's an entire family migrating and we see the picture. So I actually said,

• 58:24Speaker 03

  In the original book that I thought that the analogy for the sea peoples would be the Dust Bowl in the nineteen thirties in the United States where the people moved from Oklahoma to California. Um, more recently, I would say the people fleeing the civil war in Syria would be the equivalent of sea peoples. You know, they're just looking for a better home where they're, you know, not in the middle of a war zone. Um, people migrating, trying to get to Europe, for example. These are all, I would say, um, examples where I, I wouldn't call that an invasion per se. I would call it a migration. And I think it's

• 59:09Speaker 03

  the same. At the end of the late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, we definitely have evidence for lots of migration, not just in Greece, but elsewhere as well. Um, there may be, that may be where the kingdoms of like Moab and Amun, uh, and even Edom, even people, uh, they're either migrating or they're nomadic at the time, at the end of the late Bronze Age. And of, of course, I think it was Herodotus that talks about the Etruscans migrating from Anatolia because of a drought in about twelve hundred B.C. So, you know, there you go. There's your Herodotus talking about a drought and a migration at the end

• 59:54Speaker 03

  of the late Bronze Age. Whether it's accurate or not, you know, who knows? But

• 59:59Liv Albert?

  Sure. But, but when they're writing it into their myths or their, you know, history, or what Herodotus wanted to be history, like, it still is coming from somewhere. It, it's, I, I just recently read yesterday, somebody, it, it was a whole thing on, on Twitter, but essentially it was like this, the notion that Rome was like not a city of, of immigrants, which is so absurd. And, and, and Rome, obviously, like, yes, you know, I won't pretend that the Aeneid is not a gust of propaganda, but the idea of Romans coming from, from Troy, like, had to have come from somewhere, even if they just imagined themselves as a city of immigrants. That's an incredibly important, like, cultural tradition that they established

• 1:00:42Liv Albert?

  for themselves. And I, I think that it, it's really important to point this stuff out because today our modern ideas are so based in like, fear mongering and all these different things about migrants. And, you know, it's like, it's just horrible stuff. And, and I think that often, especially like, you know, just what I call history bros, but I appreciate that you call them mansplainers of these, like, you know, that the YouTuber guys. And it, it like, I think that that mentality comes into the, that kind of telling of this idea of invasions instead of migrations. And, and it just kind of perpetuates these problems that we have in the modern world and which have like, you know, really, really important modern i- issues attached to them, but then are being put on the ancient world.

• 1:01:24Liv Albert?

  And, and when we put that kind of stuff on the ancient world, it, it almost gives legitimacy to the, to the actions of today, right? The suggestion that, oh, well, it was an invasion and it was bad and they fought back or whatever it is, you know? Um, but yeah, whereas a lot of it was migration, not to say that they weren't having wars, obviously, but like, it's important to point out what things are migrations versus invasions.

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And I think that's where a lot of the, uh, what did you just call them? The history bros on YouTube? Yeah. Um, they, they lose the, or they never knew the nuances. And, and the, the, what's the saying? The devil's in the details. So the nuances matter at this point. Yeah, absolutely. So, especially if you're commenting and trying to compare the modern world to the ancient world, you know, you, you need, you need to have the facts straight. And the, uh, a lot of the people on YouTube, uh, let's just say do not have their facts completely in order.

• 1:02:22Liv Albert?

  No, yeah, it's not the best. I mean, not to say that there aren't some good, some good work being put out there, but unfortunately, the loudest ones tend to be the ones that are the most wrong.

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  Right. Yes, there are some very good ones. I should not lump everybody together. But, uh,

• 1:02:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  There are others where you would definitely want a yes, but, or a no, not so much.

• 1:02:43Liv Albert?

  Well, sensationalizing gets you views, unfortunately, right? It's like, all the documentaries that we see that have utter nonsense infused in them, because sensational is exciting. So.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  It is. It is.

• 1:02:55Liv Albert?

  I, I would love to hear more about, uh, you know, what's happening at the, at this period beyond Greece, because obviously I focus mostly on Greece, but I want, you know, I, we've talked a little about the Hittites and the Egyptians, which is wonderful. But I know a lot was happening more further inland, wasn't it? Like even into Mesopotamia and stuff? Were, were they having like a similar kind of collapse or their own version?

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Yes and no. And this is where, um, this is first of all, where it gets very interesting. But also where the sequel becomes even more important. So, on the face of it, at the end of the late Bronze Age, um, you know, everyone goes down. Um, actually, what happens is it's the network that goes down, the globalized Mediterranean network, uh, as Susan Sharrett and others have called it. The ones that are linking everybody where nobody is more than three hops away from anybody else, so that it's a small world network. That network

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  collapses at the end of the late Bronze Age. The links are cut. Um, the actual societies are each affected in different ways. And that's what I'm, um, exploring in the sequel.

• 1:04:09Liv Albert?

  Oh, wonderful.

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• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  So, but that's where it comes in because at the end of the Late Bronze Age, on the surface of it, it looks like the Assyrians and the Babylonians do better than many of the other people. And indeed, they're all the way in inland Mesopotamia, as you said, they're on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They are too far inland to be hit by the sea peoples. They, at first at least, don't seem to have been hit by the drought and the famine, maybe because they're on Tigris and Euphrates. And in other words, they seem to have survived better. Well, as it turns out, and I go into this in the sequel, the answer is yes and no.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  They do survive longer, at least at first, without the drought and without the famine. They're not impacted immediately. They're not impacted necessarily at 1177, like the others, nor do they have to fight or anything like that. But they do keep records, and this is what's nice, is that they don't collapse. It's not a systems collapse. They still have the king, they still have the administration, they still have the economy, they still have the standing army, they still know how to write, right? They haven't lost civilization per se. They're definitely not in a dark age.

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  But we are missing royal records for about 75 years at that period. There just aren't any, right? They're still around, but we don't have records. We don't know why. Are they writing on some other material or whatever? And then when we do start getting records again, about 75 years into it, down at about, say, 1100 B.C., they start saying, "We now have a drought. We now have famine. We are now resorting to cannibalism." So they do get hit, but it's like almost 100 years later than anybody else.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  But what happens is they also rebound because they never lose everything entirely. And so by the ninth century, the Neo-Assyrians are not only back up and running, but they're busy conquering all of the ancient Near East. In fact, one thing that has changed, back in the Bronze Age, like the Assyrians and the Babylonians, they were good commercial partners. They were trading with everybody else, right? We even have Minoan sandals that are sent over to Hammurabi of Babylon in the 18th century.

• 1:09:47Liv Albert?

  That's adorable. I don't know why. It's so cute.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  It is cute, but it's even better because he didn't like them and he returned them.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  And it tells us that in the records. And I've always wondered, oh, why did he return them? Are they too small, you know, too last millennium? But anyway, so the Assyrians and the Babylonians in the Bronze Age were good, dependable, trading partners.

• 1:10:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  Now, in the aftermath of the collapse, the people that the Assyrians and Babylonians were trading with, many of them had collapsed, right? The Assyrians go down, the Mycenaeans go down. What the Neo-Assyrians do when they come back up in the ninth century is they start attacking and taking the stuff. Whereas before, they'd be like, "Look, I'll give you this for this and this for this." Now they're like, "Give me what you got, right? Give me what you got." And they are either demanding in tribute or actually capturing everything. So that changes in the Iron Age is the nature of the relationships with the Assyrians and Babylonians.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  So, you know, it's changed a little bit and the, what's happening in the Iron Age is quite different in some ways from the Bronze Age. But I would say that's where the combination of doing the research for the first book, 1177 B.C., added to the research for the second book, the after 1177 B.C., has given me, and hopefully the readers, a more nuanced look at what happened before, during, and after the collapse. So not just in terms of resilience and everything, but in how the different relationships were affected.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  So one of the things that I say in the sequel is, "The collapse of the Late Bronze Age is messy. The aftermath is even more messy."

• 1:11:44Liv Albert?

  Mm-hmm. I mean, makes sense.

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47Liv Albert?

  When something that big goes down, yeah, it's gonna leave a mess behind.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  This is true, and it's interesting. But, you know, again, from the archaeology and the textual records, we only have bits and pieces. So I compare it to a kaleidoscope where you're looking through and you've got all these pieces. And sometimes they can form a picture and other times they're just, you know, disjointed fragments. And we've got to put them all together.

• 1:12:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. I, it, it kind of, you can kind of see how a, a culture would, would kind of get to that point if they're having their, their, you know, drought and famine late, and they've seen that everyone else has kind of fallen around them. Like I can, I can see how a mentality would develop of like, well, if we can't do the trading, like, but we're also the ones who kind of, you know, stayed the strongest as everyone else crumbled. Like the, the immediate reaction, that kind of time period is like, well, I guess we'll take what we, you know, used to trade for, right?

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely. We've still got our standing army. You don't. We're just gonna come and take your stuff, right?

• 1:12:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, when, like, you know, they, they used to have diplomacy, but it wasn't possible anymore. And it's so interesting. Yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Liv Albert?

  Well, and it, it's, it's interesting how much, you know, being inland can help. And it makes sense, you know, like even in just in terms of like the, the natural, the earth factors, you know, it is such a different place compared to like when you're right on the coast of the Mediterranean and...

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  Exactly. But look, you know, the Phoenicians who were on the coast, look, they were able to take advantage. And in contrast to the Neo-Assyrians, the Phoenicians are busy trading with everybody. You don't see, you know, the Phoenicians conquering, you know?

• 1:13:31Liv Albert?

  Okay, so after, so they're still doing that?

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you do eventually get the Phoenician colonization, just like you get Greek colonization. And so you get, you know, the Phoenicians on Cyprus, you get the Phoenicians founding Carthage and all of that. And there would be obviously some military to go with that. But some of the earliest evidence, we have them as, I would say, more peaceful maritime ventures in which they're going out and trading for what they need and polluting as far west as Spain. So, but, you know, then eventually you, you can't blame them, just, I mean, I don't know, maybe you could blame them. Just like Greece, you know, in the archaic period and the colonizing period,

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  they start sending out, well, in the Greeks' case, start sending out their excess population. And so we get the Phoenicians expanding that way too. But again, at first, it's, I like to imagine it much more peaceful. "We got this, you got that, we need it, let's go." As opposed to the Assyrians with, "You got that, we want it, give it to us." But again, one thing I would hasten to add is that we're coming at this from the Neo-Assyrian written records for the most part.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  And I do not know that we can take them all or most or any at face value. Because again, the Neo-Assyrians are very much like the Egyptians. Neo-Assyrians never lose a battle. They always win. They always conquer. They always take loot, you know? And really? Actually?

• 1:15:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Is that likely? Just, you know, statistically?

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, and there is some intimation that in some of the battles, like when the Assyrians and the Babylonians are fighting, that, that the Assyrians may have lost a couple of times. But again, this is where we have to be careful of taking ancient inscriptions at face value, especially when they're obviously being used as propaganda, when they're put up on blocks in the king's palace for people to see, where he's definitely boasting. I mean, there's one, one of my favorite inscriptions, he calls himself a stormtrooper. And I'm thinking, "Oh, you're in Star Wars? Huh? You're a stormtrooper? Okay, that's pretty cool, right?"

• 1:16:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah. What would the word be, like, what would be like a more literal definition that, than we could call it a stormtrooper?

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  This is a good question. I'd have to go back and look at the actual Lacadian and see. But he does call himself a stormtrooper and compares his opponents to little, little desert rodents hopping away as he comes after them. So, like, yeah, okay, fine. So...

• 1:16:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Liv Albert?

  Maybe, maybe we don't take that fully as truth, you know?

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  Exactly. So this is part of the problem, and this is, again, what I say towards the beginning of the book, is not only do I only have the information from the top 1% and don't really know how the bottom is doing, except in some cases where they give us like annual crop yields, which are sometimes on the records. But I also can't say for sure that we can take this at 100% believability, you know? Are they gaslighting us? Are they exaggerating? You know, "Did you really kill that many, you know, wild bulls?" Right? And so on.

• 1:17:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, I mean, it's, yeah, it's so interesting, especially the textual record stuff. Like I think about that, you know, when it comes to, eh, just even mythology, right? Like it, it's, yeah, we, we still only, even when it comes to mythology, we still only have the stuff that not only they back then deemed, you know, worthy of being written down, but then whoever, you know, in the last thousand years or the thousand years that followed, decided to keep it like and record it again and long enough for us to have it. Like, there's so much missing. And I think it's, yeah, it's important to remember, you know, the, the nuance of what we do have and also what's possible that we don't have.

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  Right, right, exactly. There's too much information. It's a plethora. It's a smorgasbord.

• 1:17:58Liv Albert?

  Um, I feel like, okay, I'm gonna look at a couple of, I have some questions from Michaela, just as we, you know, get closer to the, the time. I, I'm sure we've kind of touched on a number of these things, but are there any, you know, really big misconceptions about the Bronze Age and its collapse that you feel like are very relevant and we haven't talked about already?

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  Yes, so the biggest misconception about the collapse that we haven't talked about, but that you touched upon, not in relation to this, but you like volcanoes. You like the eruption of Santorini.

• 1:18:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  And who doesn't like a good eruption, right? Yeah, right. The biggest misconception is that the eruption of Santorini contributed to the late Bronze Age collapse. Um, I see that everywhere. I still see it everywhere, uh, even though we've managed to hammer hone to some degree, the idea that the eruption of Santorini was back in the 16th century, maybe the 15th at the latest, but somewhere between 1628 and 1550. And the collapse is at 1200. So that's, you know, 350, 400 years. Santorini had nothing to do with the late Bronze Age collapse. I know, I know.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  But I'm still seeing the history bros. I like that. I'm going to start using that.

• 1:19:22Liv Albert?

  I'm very glad.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm still seeing them on the internet going, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, fine, but it did impact Crete. And I'm like, yeah, and the Minoans bounced back. And they're like, but it could have had a centuries long ripple effect. I'm like, coulda, didn't, you know? And then others saying, well, maybe it exploded again. And I'm like, well, one scholar has suggested there might've been renewed activity in about 1200. But no, that's some, for me, that's the biggest misconception.

• 1:19:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  And when people are watching some of my lectures from back in 2016, uh, the comments are like, he didn't even mention Santorini. And then I'm like, uh, watch the Q and A because I dismiss it there. But so I, that's, yeah. So I said, that's the biggest misconception. Santorini and the eruption, uh, has nothing to do with the late Bronze Age collapse.

• 1:20:20Liv Albert?

  Fair, fair. All right, I'll take it. Uh, and then, uh, sorry, now I'm looking at my questions again. Usually I just go with whatever I'm thinking about. Um, uh, do you think that there's anything in, in this period that is not getting, you know, the attention that it deserves?

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  Do I think things aren't getting the attention? Well, yeah.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  I would say.

• 1:20:49Liv Albert?

  The question is broad.

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, but no, I'm thinking of how to phrase this because on the one hand, most of the things that contributed to their collapse, I see around today.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, you can check the boxes off. Yes, climate change, yes, drought, yes, famine, yes, earthquake, yes, disease, yes, invaders, yes, migrants, you know, we've got everything that they had back then. Plus we've got, you know, nuclear weapons, so.

• 1:21:18Liv Albert?

  And human made climate change.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  And human made climate change. And hello, they collapsed, you know? The late Bronze Age came to an end. There's no question about that. Why you think we're not going to come to an end? I don't know. That's hubristic. Every civilization has either completely collapsed or had to transform so that it was basically not recognizable again. Uh, why you think that's not going to happen to us? I have no idea. So.

• 1:21:46Liv Albert?

  I think it's gonna happen to us.

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  I agree. I think it's not a matter of if, it's, it's when, when is it gonna happen, you know?

• 1:21:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah. How fast are we gonna let it happen by letting human made climate change continue on? Yeah.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, climate and, and think back to 2008 with the financial crisis on Wall Street. I mean, we came really close to having a globalized meltdown right there. But especially with the pandemic, I would say. Um, a- and with climate change, that's my other worry. That's where I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors.

• 1:22:22Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, no.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, definitely the scientific evidence is showing that there was climate change back in the late Bronze Age. Scientific evidence is also showing there's climate change now. Why stick your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening? And this is one of the common sense things they come up with at the end of the sequel is, look, prepare for extreme weather events. Just go ahead and do it. We're seeing it all the time anyway. If you prepare for it and an extreme weather event does not occur, fine, not a big deal. If you prepare for it and it does occur, good, now you're in a good position.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  So this was something, I was interviewed by, uh, Adam Frank on NPR after the first volume came out. And I was happily blithering and blathering on about, well, you know, the Hittites didn't know what was happening to them. They had climate change and no, it wasn't caused by Hittite SUVs. It was Mother Nature.

• 1:23:33Liv Albert?

  They weren't pulling petroleum from the earth.

• 1:23:35Speaker 03

  Exactly. And, but I said, we're much more advanced technologically and everything else. And we know all about climate change. We know what's causing the droughts and all that. And, um, Adam Frank just said to me, yes, but are we advanced enough to do anything with our knowledge? And that I had no answer to. So that is something I would point to again. I don't think enough is being done. I think we're giving too much airtime to the naysayers. There's definitely climate change. Come on, people, right? So what are we gonna do about it? Let's do something. And if we're ready, we're ready. And if we need it, it's there. And if not, it's not.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  And, you know, again, hello, late Bronze Age collapse. Look what happened to them, you know? And hard on the heels of that is, okay, what about after collapse? What about resilience? What about transformation? Don't you understand? What about coping versus adapting? There's so many lessons from the ancient world if we're just willing to listen.

• 1:24:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I am so thrilled. I, I'm so thrilled that this is, you know, what you wanted to mention. And it, it is almost identical in a brilliant way to my conversation with Flint that will have aired just a few days before this. And honestly, like, the, the, the way we as humanity are not doing enough about climate change is my pet obsession in my daily life. Like, it's literally, I, I, I'm sure some of my friends would argue I talk about it too often. Like, I am completely obsessed with how capitalism is the, a main reason why we're just are not actively saving ourselves because the money is in, is in the stuff that's destroying us. And I didn't know that that's what this Bronze Age series was going to become because I just

• 1:25:29Liv Albert?

  had not learned enough about the climate change aspect of the collapse. So I'm just so thrilled that, like, that not only that it is this major talking point when it comes to this, but that so many people working on this and working in this field are connecting it to what's happening now in the way that you are. And it just, it fills me with like, just a little bit more hope than I had before. Not enough, not enough hope, but like some.

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  Some hope.

• 1:25:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:55Speaker 03

  A little hope is better than none.

• 1:25:57Liv Albert?

  Exactly, exactly. And I mean, this is something I've made into like a talking point on the show before. My show is like, you know, more political than a mythology show probably needs to be, but it's just who I am as a person. Um, and so it's, it's like a fairly regular thing that I talk about, especially, you know, in connection with the elites. So it's been quite fun to be able to be like, oh, well, I'm gonna just also be able to talk about, uh, climate change and the collapse of the elites when it comes to the ancient world. So that's.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  Well, it also shows how relevant all of this is, that this isn't just ancient history. It's not just ancient mythology. It is relevant to us today. And, you know, in part, that's part of the enduring legacy of myths and legends and all of that is their continuing relevance. But in this particular case, it's relevant to whether or not we survive as a species, which I think is just a little bit important.

• 1:26:55Liv Albert?

  It's a tiny bit important. Yeah, you know, we might care. Yeah.

• 1:27:01Liv Albert?

  Well, to kind of close on a slightly more upbeat question, is there anything, any particular in a research field of study when it comes to this topic that you think is quite exciting? Like new, new research that's being done or coming out? I know you touched upon some, you know, adjustments to when we think the alphabet, which is very exciting, but you know, is there anything else that's kind of thrilling?

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's actually a lot, but the one thing that I would, the one thing I would point to is the work with ancient DNA. That is so, so important, so interesting, and yet so fraught with potential problems. So, you know, just to get the ancient DNA out of the ancient skeletons can be difficult, but then interpreting it also. So, on the one hand, we have great new stuff, like there were four Philistine infants that were excavated at Aschelion underneath the floors of the houses. And those infants are probably the

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  grandkids of the sea peoples who settled down in Canaan, because the genetics show, and I know genes don't work quite this way, but the little kids are like forty percent local Canaanite and sixty percent from elsewhere. And the computer models indicate that the elsewhere is most likely to be either Crete, or Spain, or Sicily. And that's exactly where we thought the Philistines were coming from anyway. You know, the kids have been identified and the houses as Philistine because of the pottery and everything else. But there, the

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  DNA matches. Of course, the problem is, four kids is too small a sample. But still, you know, it fit what we were already thinking. So that is interesting. The problem is, when modern pundits and such get hold of the data, and start saying, things like, let's look at the DNA of Binoans and Micaeans, and relate it to people in Greece today, and start making comparisons, you know, so and so's always been here, so and so migrated in. This is where we have to be careful of, A, the proper interpretation of the actual results, and

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  then B, how you use it, and maybe making it relevant or not. Because

• 1:29:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and the modern dangers of that. Like, that's, yeah, with, yeah, that's dangerous.

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  Right. And, and the scientists are already pointing this out, that you've got oftentimes a huge difference between the actual scientific report that might come out in Nature, or Science, or something, and then the media's interpretation of it, where the article and the headline are almost clickbait, like you, you know, implied earlier. And, and I do that all the time, where I see something on the internet, or somebody sends it to me, and I'm like, oh, that's sensational, interesting. But to their credit, even those articles usually have a hyperlink buried somewhere in the article, right? You have to look for

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  the blue word. And you click on it, it takes you to the original publication in the scientific peer-reviewed journal. And you read that, you're like, oh, that's what they were saying. Yeah, that doesn't really match with what the media reported. So, and again, that's what we can learn. But the general public, they don't go and see the original, they just see the media report. And, you know, and even if we later, this happens all the time, if we later come out and say, yes, but, we never get the bandwidth for our rebuttal that the original story had, right? Same thing with Atlantis, you know?

• 1:31:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, you never get to reach the same people, or as many people. Yeah. Well, and I just think of the, the ways that that kind of thing can be used to justify.

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. And yet, and yet, this work with ancient DNA, and the other, what people are calling the exact life sciences. This, as some of my colleagues have called it, this is the third wave in archaeology, where we're using all the new scientific stuff. And so, I think the next couple of decades, the next generation in archaeology is going to be very exciting. And topics like the Bronze Age collapse and the aftermath are going to go along with that, and that we're going to have a lot more data coming in the future. Such that, I don't know, I was thinking the other night, if

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  the next generation is going to look back on what we're doing now, and go, yeah, they were right about this, they were wrong about that, you know, always, we can look back at our predecessors and go, yeah, right, right, wrong, wrong, wrong, right, wrong, right, no Dorian invasion, migration.

• 1:32:12Liv Albert?

  I was gonna just say, yeah.

• 1:32:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Right, no Dark Ages, no Dark Ages, and Iron Age. So I wonder what, you know, our students, or the students of our students, or the students of our students of our students are going to say about our work at some point. But, who knows?

• 1:32:29Liv Albert?

  Provided we solve climate change.

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  Provided we solve climate change. There is that, yes.

• 1:32:35Liv Albert?

  There, there have to be students of students of students.

• 1:32:39Speaker 03

  One hopes.

• 1:32:40Liv Albert?

  Oh, dear.

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  One hopes.

• 1:32:41Liv Albert?

  That's, that's how I make my apparently lighthearted end question back into

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, and that's ending on an upbeat note?

• 1:32:47Liv Albert?

  Yep, that's what I do. That's what I do here. Thank you so much for doing this. This was absolutely fascinating. I learned so much. I'm so excited. I'm a little annoyed that I can't talk about Thera, but that's okay. That's my fault.

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  We can do Thera, we can do Thera some other time. So, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:33:08Liv Albert?

  Well, just before we close up, do you want to tell my listeners, I mean, you've mentioned your books a couple of times, but I think this episode will be coming out on April 30th. So I think the sequel will be out. So if you want to tell my listeners just like, reiterate those titles and where they can buy them, which I imagine is everywhere?

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  Yes, certainly. So, the, the sequel that is coming out on April 16th, is called After 1177 B.C., The Survival of Civilizations. And, yes, that'll be available from Amazon, direct from Princeton University Press, or your local booksellers, if you would like to support them. That will actually be coming out on the very same day as another publication. The original book was 1177 B.C., the year civilization collapsed. And that came out from Princeton in 2014, with the revised edition, which is what people should read,

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  that came out in 2021. Now, the other publication that's coming out on the same day as my sequel is the graphic version of the original, which is brilliant. It's drawn by Glynnis Fox, who's an archaeologist and cartoonist, and she has essentially translated the original into another language, the language of cartoon and graphic version. The drawings are beautiful, it's huge. I mean, it is thick, heavy glossy paper, beautiful drawings. And what she has

• 1:34:45Speaker 03

  done is translated my text into the story, told through the eyes of two young kids from that time period. We've got Pell, short for Pelaset, a young boy about 12 years old, and his friend, Shisha, again, about 12 years old, she's Egyptian, and she is a scribe. She knows how to read and write. And the two of them are running around the Aegean and Mediterranean, trying to figure out why everything is collapsing, and what has happened, and whether grandpa, Pell's grandpa, who was a sea person, what he actually did in

• 1:35:30Speaker 03

  the battles. And so you see it through the eyes of the kids. But you also have both me and Glynnis parachuting in from time to time, up in the corner of the panel, telling the reader, things that the two kids could not possibly have known, right? You know, it's like, oh, well, when Schlemann came here, he did this. And so, so it's basically four new characters introduced. It is so compelling, it's so wonderful. I'm so excited about it. And I'm hoping we get a whole new readership, everybody from age seven to 70, you know, especially like, if you don't like to read, but you like comic books, this is, this is it for you. And if you're too young, or you have only just started reading,

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  you can, you know, there's the pretty pictures. And anyway, and you can play Where's Waldo with, you know, with me, and with Glynnis. Anyway, so those two, both the sequel and the graphic version of the original will come out mid-April. And I'm very excited about both of them. So, thanks for the opportunity to mention them.

• 1:36:36Liv Albert?

  Oh, I'm thrilled. I've seen photos you've posted, like, the cover of the graphic, and it looked gorgeous. So I'm thrilled to know what's inside. And, I mean, it sounds like it'll be really beneficial broadly. But I know, there's also a lot of people who just learn visually, you know? And, and I think that that's so beneficial for so many people. That's great. And also just fun. Like, who doesn't love a fun, little graphic novel version?

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  It is. And she really, it's interesting, in order to put it in the graphic version, she distilled it. So, you know, it's got the most essential 25% of the original text, you know, that kind of thing. So, the process was fascinating. And she and I did a webinar the other day, in which she walked the viewers through her process of drawing. Oh my God, the work that it went, that went into it is amazing. Yeah, so.

• 1:37:28Liv Albert?

  I can only imagine. Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful, wonderful. Well, I will link to everything in the episode's description, so people can find it. And that's great. And is there any last thing you want to share with my listeners before I let you go?

• 1:37:40Speaker 03

  No, I just, I thank you, and, you know, contrary to what I might have sounded like, I am optimistic about our future. But, but we'll see. It's up to us, isn't it?

• 1:37:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, thank you so much. This was such a thrill.

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  My pleasure. Thank you. It's been an honor and a pleasure.

• 1:38:14Liv Albert?

  Nerds, thank you so much for listening to this entire series. Holy crap, it was, it was quite a thing to create. Probably our, this was probably our, our biggest, maybe in line with Sparta, but man, the Bronze Age is wild because, because it's the Bronze Age, because it's so much older than all the other stuff that we work with, because it is so heavy in archaeological evidence and so lacking in text. It's just such a departure, but one that is utterly fascinating. I mean, I just, I've learned so much. I hope you have too. These have been such joyful and fascinating conversations. I'm just so thrilled to have brought them all to you. You can find in the episode's description, links to the books and things

• 1:38:57Liv Albert?

  that were mentioned by Eric Klein, and I hope you, you know, check out more on the Bronze Age, or maybe just, you know, the next time you hear a history bro trying to tell you about the Dark Ages and how everyone suddenly became incapable of, of intelligence, until Homer sprung out, now you'll know, now you'll know why that's all nonsense. I mean, it's, it was pretty obviously nonsense because that's just not how humanity works. But now you have the receipts. Let's Talk About Myths Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians, my assistant producer. And honestly, I mean, she's the person behind this Bronze Age series of episodes. Couldn't, it wouldn't possibly have existed without her.

• 1:39:42Liv Albert?

  She might be existing in the, the background of this, but I want to make clear, it's a lot of Michaela's doing. And Laura Smith is the incredible audio engineer and production assistant who works on all of these conversation episodes, doing technological things that I never learned how to do. Thank you, Laura. Laura's also working to make my website helpful. So stay tuned for more on that. The podcast is part of the iHeart Media Network. Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. And help me continue bringing you all of this incredible mythological and historical stuff by becoming a patron, where you'll get access to loads of past bonus episodes. Patreon.com/MythsBaby, or the link is in the episode's description. Thank you all.

• 1:40:27Liv Albert?

  Oh my God, I can't believe this series is over. It's absolutely, it's been a wild ride. I just love the ancient world so much, and I really love that you do too. I am Liv, and I, I love this shit, I just said.

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