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But pirates are hit-and-run entities, and some of these humans may have wanted to move en masse to the more advanced or wealthy states permanently. The idea of a Bronze Age version of the Germanic Völkerwanderung[24] (#litres_trial_promo) (essentially, a migration), disrupting the equilibrium and setting in motion the collapse of the age, has been around for a long time. The Egyptian inscriptions depict families in wagons accompanying some of the “sea people” and Libyan tribes. The implication is that whole peoples were looking for new places to settle, and they were willing to conquer new lands with the sword if need be. The Egyptians were somewhat used to this, as they occupied a comparatively rich breadbasket in their region; Libyan peoples from the west, Nubian people from the south, and all manner of “Asiatics”[25] (#litres_trial_promo) were often trying to gain entrance to raid or settle. It can be hard to draw a fine line between human migration and invasion in some of these cases.
The invasion theory assumes that this late Bronze Age outbreak of barbarian violence was a somewhat widespread phenomenon, perhaps one involving differing groups of peoples from the Balkans to the edge of China, and occurring at roughly close to the same time.
The theory is less popular today, if for no other reason than some of the invasions offered as evidence are now more doubted. Did the “Dorians” invade and conquer Greece as part of this calamity? Eighty years ago, a majority of historians would have likely thought so and would have blamed those invasions for plunging Greece into a dark age. Today, fewer historians believe those “invasions” ever happened. If multiple invasions didn’t happen—if, instead, warfare and raiding were more piecemeal and less widespread—it becomes tougher to blame them for bringing the entire system down. Some historians have even suggested they may be a historical myth.
While there are still big supporters of the idea that the peoples of the sea were of pivotal importance to the end of the Bronze Age, they are perhaps seen by most these days as more of an effect than a cause. The migrations, piracy, and even invasions may have been a response to something else …
Suspect #2: Famine/Climate Change/Drought
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are commonly given the names Conquest (or Pestilence), War, Famine, and Death. In much of the modern world, the horsemen don’t seem as scary as they used to. War and conquest are still around, of course, but no World War III (yet). We are no longer able to relate to what our forebears went through with disease (pestilence).[26] (#litres_trial_promo) And mass, society-wide famine is almost unheard of in most of the world. It seems like much of the darkness that humankind lived with from time immemorial has been banished from our future.
But it’s never wise to bet against any of the Four Horsemen long term. Their historical track record is horrifyingly good.
One of the things most of us take for granted is our access to food. There are malnourished and hungry individuals in every nation on earth, but times when food is scarce for whole societies is much, much rarer in most of the world than it’s ever been. Mass food insecurity was more the norm than the exception up until very recently, though. It’s only because of relatively recent changes that enough food can be produced to support our current population levels. Our modern delivery and logistics systems allow large amounts of food to be reliably shipped and to stock the shelves of even distant islands. When scenes of the ravages of modern famine appear on television charity ads, the reality displayed on camera is almost incomprehensible to most of us. But try feeding three hundred million people in the United States today with the farming technology of even two hundred years ago.
There are some incidents of mass fatality–level famine in modern advanced cities or states in the mid-twentieth century. The unusual sight of humans dying from starvation next to modern buildings and on modern streets clashes with the image in our minds of poor, war-torn, drought-stricken, underdeveloped societies on the edge of the globalized world. We are conditioned to think that way by recent history. It’s hard to picture London or Tokyo or New York with mass deaths in the street from starvation.
But that’s the human experience that we need to imagine when thinking about famine. The tales that modern observers and victims of famine tell are of societies that fall apart because there’s no food. Imagine if the region where you live were cut off from food supplies today. As Garry J. Shaw suggests, it might explain why you get sea peoples, migrations, invasions, or insurrections.
When enough people are driven by desperation, not even the greatest state can stop them; symbols of wealth and prestige mean nothing if enough people reject their meaning. In such times, some will rise up, burn, and rebuild on the ashes. Others will leave. And so, in this time of instability, disease, violence, famine, and drought, the assorted ‘Sea Peoples’ took the second option: they travelled eastwards, bringing their families and possessions along with them, leaving their homeland behind. To support themselves or when attempting to settle, sometimes they turned to violence, probably supported by mercenaries, creating their legend.
There’s good evidence for famine during the last few centuries of the Mediterranean Bronze Age in many places around the region. The Hittites, especially, seemed to be facing a dire food crisis over an extended period; a last desperate letter sent from the capital, before the destruction of the city, refers to starvation. In Egypt, cemetery finds show evidence that the population of this era often suffered malnourishment. And people from Libya seemed to always be threatened by hunger; they would raid or even migrate to Egypt periodically over many centuries for food.[27] (#litres_trial_promo)
Lots of things can cause famine. Insects can eat or spoil food; rivers and water sources can dry up or change course, or complex irrigation systems can be destroyed; poor farming practices can deplete the soil. Usually, though, the weather itself is the greatest threat. Even in the modern age, the utter dependence of agriculture on the right range of favorable climatic conditions is humbling. No nation is immune. Arid weather in the American Midwest created the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, during the Great Depression, which in turn spawned a migration of people and sent forth ripples of historical change that are still felt today. Similar events must have happened innumerable times in humanity’s past.
Weather-related explanations for the end of the Bronze Age are extrapopular right now given the general spotlight on climate change, but historians for many decades have theorized that drought was what really unleashed the Four Horsemen. A prolonged drought, leading to severe famine, could certainly have been the spark that set into motion chain reactions that in retrospect explain things like piracy, migrations, and perhaps internal unrest.
As the historian Malcolm H. Wiener writes: “Warfare and migrations may be both the result and the cause of food crisis, and particularly where the carrying capacity of the land is already stretched to the utmost. The effects may be cumulative, with food shortages leading to overuse and degradation of available land; to rebellions by troops, populace, or captives; and/or to the loss of legitimacy of rulers believed to have lost divine favor.”
It’s hard to know how much localized famine was normal and to be periodically expected, and how much a particularly bad situation represented an unusual larger threat. Studies have shown evidence of a prolonged drought roughly around the relevant time in some of these areas.[28] (#litres_trial_promo)
A counterargument by some experts, however, is that droughts are not uncommon in this climatic zone, because much of the eastern Mediterranean is somewhat arid to begin with. Why, suddenly, did a particularly dry period bring down a chain of ancient societies in a region where droughts weren’t so terribly rare? And why, if drought explains why peoples began to relocate, did those people sometimes leave known dry areas and migrate to ones that have been shown to be even more arid?[29] (#litres_trial_promo)
Famine prompts a similar question: If famine wasn’t that rare, why did it topple the structure at the end of the Bronze Age rather than any of the other times it occurred? It certainly may have done so, but proving it is the task still facing historical investigators.
If something like drought or famine was the cause of the Bronze Age collapse, it didn’t wreak its changes by starving everyone to death. Famine would have been more of a spark that set off side effects. Yet it’s terribly difficult, especially thousands of years later, to tie the ripple effects back to whatever rocks were first thrown into the stream. How do you connect the dots, for example, between an attack by the sea peoples and evidence of a drought in their homeland? Having relatively accurate dates for when events occurred would be of great help solving such a puzzle. A drought, for example, a hundred years after the sea people invasions, couldn’t possibly have been its cause, but if it happened ten years before the great attacks chronicled by the pharaohs, then it might indeed have spurred a subsequent migration. But how close can science get to actual specific years when something occurred more than three thousand years ago?
That leads to the next suspect:
Suspect #3: Earthquakes/Volcanoes/Tsunamis
First, let’s step out of our timeline to the year 1815, when the Mount Tambora volcano erupted in what’s now part of Indonesia. It is the only eruption in the last thousand years that merits a 7 out of a maximum 8 rating on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI).[30] (#litres_trial_promo) It caused tsunamis and earthquakes, darkened the skies, and unleashed enough ash to cover a one-hundred-square-mile area to a depth of twelve feet. The effect on global climate was profound—1816 was known as “the year without summer.” And, among other things, it was thought to have brought on famine.
There have only been a handful of volcanic eruptions to reach that high on the VEI since humans began keeping a written record of their history. One happened near the end of the Bronze Age, in the eastern Mediterranean, in an area that was right at the heart of the whole Mediterranean Bronze Age world.
Today, the location of the volcano is actually the Greek island of Santorini, but the ancient Greeks called the island Thera. Like Tambora, the Thera eruption was one of the most powerful volcanic events in human history; unlike Tambora, we have no surviving contemporary accounts of it. Scientists can find the evidence of its eruption all over the region, but they can’t yet pinpoint the year it happened. If they could, it would become a specific marker that would help date other events.[31] (#litres_trial_promo) Experts can get close to a date, within a century or so—usually between about 1630 and 1500 BCE—but while that’s a tiny margin of error when compared with the intervening thousands of years, it’s still enough to muddy this investigation. Since the fall of the Bronze Age is usually dated to around 1200 BCE or so, the later the eruption is dated, the more likely it is to have had an effect on the catastrophe.[32] (#litres_trial_promo)
Experts argue about most things connected to the Thera eruption. In addition to the dating, the amount of damage done to the surrounding areas is in question. If it somehow played a role in the downfall of that age, how did it do so? Tsunamis are one proposed vector of destruction. That one or multiple tsunamis were generated by the eruption seems universally accepted, but disagreements occur over their size and what sort of damage they would have caused. Most of the Thera volcano’s tsunamis would have been created by the quick addition of massive amounts of material into the sea, which generates waves that can reach enormous heights (the same way that a glacier’s calving produces large waves).[33] (#litres_trial_promo) These waves, known as megatsunamis, are quite different from the more familiar seismic variety of tsunami. Whereas the seismic tsunamis are almost too small to be noticed while moving through the open sea, and they explode in height only when they approach land, megatsunamis start at maximum height upon generation and lose force and height as they move across miles of water. Seismic tsunamis are often preceded by a strange receding of the beach tide, only to have the water roar back later, but megatsunamis are more like rogue waves—they can come out of nowhere.
The reason waves matter is that one of the theories about how a volcano might be tied to the end of the Bronze Age argues that the tsunamis may have decimated the coastal areas of nearby states. Ships in port would be damaged by a tsunami of any sort, but a megatsunami could also have wreaked havoc on ships in the open sea. A huge wall of water speeding across the ocean might sink anything in its path.[34] (#litres_trial_promo)
The island of Crete, the heart and soul of the powerful maritime Minoan state, was close to Thera and is often thought to have been a likely victim of the volcano’s explosion.[35] (#litres_trial_promo) If the ships, facilities, and perhaps settlements and coastal population of Crete were badly damaged or destroyed by the sea, the resulting effect on the economy of the region might have been huge.
It’s also been suggested that widespread damage on a large scale might have weakened the Minoans in a way that made them a tempting target for geopolitical predators in their region. Sometime between about 1450 and 1370 BCE, most of the great palaces from the heyday of the Minoans were destroyed, and eventually the area and culture was taken over by the Mycenaeans.[36] (#litres_trial_promo) But if the Minoan state declined around 1400 BCE or so, that’s still two or more centuries removed from the other parts of the collapse manifesting. It’s possible that the volcano and the resulting tsunami might have been responsible for this, a chain reaction of events that destabilized what had been a stable system, but that would constitute a long lag time between cause and effect.
The other natural disaster that gets brought into the conversation about the end of the Bronze Age is earthquakes. There’s overlap here, because the Thera eruption may have sparked or been preceded by earthquakes, and these might have contributed to the damage spawned by the volcano. And earthquakes are also one of the primary causes of tsunamis.
There’s no doubt that earthquakes were a relatively regular ancient visitor to this very seismically active region. Damage from earthquakes in ancient times (sometimes including crushed bodies found where they fell) has been discovered in structures all over the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. In fact, there seem to have been several big earthquakes dated to around the time of the Bronze Age’s end, and lots of important cities in that area show earthquake damage. In the age before stabilized buildings and modern construction, and when open fires were common, the damage done by earthquakes may have been worse than what we’d find today. Certainly, the ability to deal with an earthquake’s aftermath is better in modern times. An earthquake and a resulting tsunami that killed fifty thousand people today would be much easier for us to clean up and recover from than it would have been for a Bronze Age society.
Yet the evidence points often to rebuilding after the historical quakes, which shows that such events weren’t totally fatal and that the affected society could continue. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that population, prosperity, or geopolitical power and influence would return to predisaster levels.
A single phenomenon (such as earthquakes, droughts, volcanoes, or tsunamis) can explain why a particular city or area suffered damage, but it can’t by itself explain why the entire Mediterranean and west Asian region was affected by something at the end of the Bronze Age. Just because there may have been a volcano on an Aegean island that erupted and caused tsunamis, why did Babylon and Assyria, located in landlocked modern-day Iraq, have problems?
Suspect #4: Plagues
Smallpox is one of the most infamous diseases in history. To give an idea of its virulence, it killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone,[37] (#litres_trial_promo) but the disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980[38] (#litres_trial_promo)—meaning half a billion people were killed by smallpox in just eight decades. Those who didn’t succumb to the illness were often left blind, and severely disfigured by scarring. Mercifully, we don’t deal with smallpox anymore, but the illness goes back millennia. When the Egyptian mummy of Pharaoh Ramesses V (r. 1149–1145 BCE) was examined, the body revealed smallpox scarring. (He may have died from the disease.)[39] (#litres_trial_promo) Smallpox killed multiple reigning European monarchs and five Japanese emperors, and it was likely the cause of many early plagues of history, such as the one in ancient Athens in 430 BCE.[40] (#litres_trial_promo) Smallpox was also one of the main killers of the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia after first contact, the majority of whom may have died from the disease before the Europeans who first transmitted it across the oceanic disease barrier actually encountered them.[41] (#litres_trial_promo)
Just as it is difficult for most of us today to imagine the food insecurity that was common in most human populations in most eras, it’s difficult to conceptualize the range of illnesses and diseases against which earlier cultures had no defense. Pretty much nothing separates us more from human beings in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us. We are still victimized by illness and disease of all kinds, but unlike in the distant past, we now have so many more ways to fight back, and such a better understanding of the underlying reasons for maladies. Real plagues—a common experience in all of human history—are thankfully rare today. Some of our greatest modern fears over disease are simply that we might ever again have one plague as bad as any average plague in earlier eras.[42] (#litres_trial_promo)
Sources make it sound as though Hattusa (the Hittite capital) was dealing with both famine and plague in this general Bronze Age era.[43] (#litres_trial_promo) Two successive Hittite rulers succumbed to one plague in around the 1320s BCE. There are reports of plague in the Levant, Cyprus, and Egypt. Several regions in Greece saw depopulation during this era that might have been related to an outbreak of disease.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse often ride together, though, and just as famine and pestilence are interconnected with each other, they are often also linked with war.
Suspect #5: Internecine Warfare
We’ve already discussed violence in different forms leading to the problems in the Bronze Age. From sea peoples to revolutionaries to the Trojan War, there was no shortage of bloody outbreaks as the era came to its close. How is one to make a distinction between the “normal” level of violence and something system threatening? Was there anything about the end of the Bronze Age in a military sense that was different or stood out? Yes, there was: Assyria.
Assyria would become the first of the great empires of the next era, the Iron Age.[44] (#litres_trial_promo) It was in the later Bronze Age that this Semitic-speaking superpower-to-be began to alter the map of the Near East in ways that could easily upset the region’s geopolitical equilibrium. The Assyrian state, located in modern northern Iraq, and centered on several already ancient cities,[45] (#litres_trial_promo) had an extensive history and had long been a part of regional power struggles. By about the 1390s BCE, Assyria was about to go on another multigenerational historical winning streak, and much of this would come at the expense of neighboring states in the region.
After falling under the domination of another powerful state in the region (Mittani) in about the 1450s BCE, the Assyrians wrested back their independence after a couple of generations, and then began to take their former overlords apart piece by piece. Leading an increasingly fearsome and effective fighting force, aggressive and energetic Assyrian kings like Ashur-uballit I, Tukulti-Ninurta I, and Tiglath-Pileser I expanded the boundaries of their kingdom and added to its resources.
Assyria’s increasing might eventually began to alarm the other great powers. The Hittites, especially, were right in the crosshairs. The Hittite Empire’s territory formed a key international crossroads in the Bronze Age, a potentially indispensable link in the structure of economic, diplomatic, and military interconnectivity that supported that version of an international system. If something damaged the Hittite state, many others in that system could have felt the effects.
Sometime around 1237 BCE, the Hittites were defeated by the Assyrians at the Battle of Nihriya. The resulting loss of territory meant ceding important resource outlets to the Assyrians.[46] (#litres_trial_promo) There’s a sort of death spiral that can be created in war when a state’s treasury is drained by extended conflict, when manpower is decimated by battlefield defeats, and when possession of the resources that are indispensable for recovering from those losses is lost to the enemy. The year 1237 is right around the start of the traditional era when the Bronze Age seemingly began to come under severe strain, so if we are trying to correlate dates with ripple effects, we can see that the extension of Assyrian power corresponds with some of the large geopolitical changes quite well.
War can be a net positive or negative to a combatant power.[47] (#litres_trial_promo) War (and the resulting conquests) has often benefited the state doing the conquering. In this case, it might have benefited Assyria.
And while it goes without saying that wars are bad for those who lose them, in many circumstances, wars can be a negative for all involved. By the last year of the First World War, for example, all the nations that had begun the war four years before had been ground down by it. The economies that were paying for the costs of the conflict were in shambles. The damage the war caused to the global system meant that the conflict was harmful even to nations that were not a part of the fight.[48] (#litres_trial_promo)
The subsequent negative effects of that early twentieth-century war involved many of the same factors we’ve targeted in our discussion of the end of the Bronze Age. By 1918, due to the conflict, Europe was experiencing famine and pestilence to go along with its war and death. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were running rampant through some of the most advanced societies in the early twentieth century—an eventuality that was made possible only because the war opened the door to it. It’s not hard to imagine, then, how a multigenerational and eventually losing struggle with another great power may have challenged the Hittite state.
Assyria’s wars of expansion during this era were in the military history foreground and are hard to miss. But in the background were lots of conflicts that didn’t involve the great powers fighting their peers at all (which doesn’t mean they weren’t potentially important, or possibly fatal, should a great power have been defeated). Lots of “barbarian” peoples and tribes, for example, nibbled at the fringes of the great states, always seemingly ready to exploit weakness or take advantage of opportunities. In the case of the Hittites, their local troublesome “barbarians” were people like the Phrygians and a lesser-known people known as the Kaska (or Gasga). The Kaska are portrayed by the Hittite sources as aggressive wild tribesmen who had sacked and burned the Hittite capital in the past. Some historians think that, as the Hittite state got weaker, its ability to resist these peoples declined. If major conflicts with other powerful states like Assyria weakened the Hittites, it may have made them less able to fend off their traditional “barbarian” neighbors. And, just to tie it all together, if those barbarian neighbors were starving due to a famine caused by arid conditions and poor harvests, does that explain why the Hittites might have had to fend them off in the first place?
If one credits the Assyrians with a large amount of responsibility for bringing down the state of Mittani,[49] (#litres_trial_promo) and then possibly mortally wounding the Hittites, that would amount to a great deal of political and military change occurring around the thirteenth century BCE. And this might have been enough to spark a chain reaction that disrupted a whole system.
Suspects #6 and #7: Systems Collapse, Multiple Causes
We live in a world of complex systems—economic, cultural, social, administrative-bureaucratic. Many things must function together to make an interconnected system work, and a breakdown anywhere can mean a breakdown everywhere. For that reason, most systems have some flexibility and redundancy built into them to deal with stresses, breakdowns, and unforeseen circumstances—in short, they are made to be resilient. But when these backup systems become overwhelmed, the cascading nature of a problem can ripple throughout the entire system like an economic version of a communicable disease. So in a Bronze Age trading network that reached from Spain to Iran and from northern Italy to Nubia, a disruption of something like Mediterranean commerce could affect all those regions.
And while the loss of things like luxury products and the money generated from trading activity would have had an enormous effect, it’s important to remember that food constituted one of the major categories of goods being shipped in the late Bronze Age. The Egyptians were sending food to multiple places (including the Hittite lands) via ship to alleviate starvation. If those ships were unable to reach their destinations, it wasn’t a question of loss of income or a lowering of living standards, it was a potential famine.
When people don’t have food, under certain circumstances all law and order and societal controls can break down. Plagues can cause the same problems if they’re bad enough. Anarchy, revolution, and civil war can sometimes do to a society what outside invaders can’t manage. All it can take is too little food or too much disease.
There are other scenarios that can lead to the same outcome. Mass migration in a short time (for example, the Libyan and sea peoples’ “invasions” of Egypt) can disrupt norms and break down culture and amicable coexistence. Insufficient military defense can leave a population and its food supplies open to predation by other armed groups.
Some experts have suggested that the Bronze Age system was somewhat fragile or brittle. Undergirded by highly centralized, very bureaucratic states, with a small rich elite presiding over large numbers of peons,[50] (#litres_trial_promo) such a system might have been vulnerable to all sorts of rebellion and social upheaval. Think of an ancient version of the French Revolution, for example. If such destabilization were sparked by a system’s inability to deliver food to a starving population, what’s ultimately to blame: The famine, or the brittle, inequitable social system? If the sea peoples’ piracy helped destroy the maritime trading system, does the damage come from the piracy or the resulting collapse of the trading system? This is where the multiple-causes suspect begins to look like a good bet.
WHILE WE FEEL somewhat safer from those Bronze Age suspects than our ancestors did, we have managed to add new potential threats that previous eras never had to face: nuclear weapons, global environmental damage, potentially catastrophic scientific innovations, and more.[51] (#litres_trial_promo) And the ongoing threat of certain types of potentially dark age–inducing wild cards seems pretty consistent over the ages. Whether you live in an era when a scary-size asteroid hits the earth or a supervolcano explodes in Yosemite seems merely the luck of the celestial roulette wheel.
When the Soviet Union suffered a political system collapse[52] (#litres_trial_promo) in the early 1990s, did some of the USSR’s successor states have something we might consider a mini–dark age? That unsettled era saw an extended and difficult transition period. In newly created nation-states like Russia, birth rates and life expectancy dropped drastically. Alcoholism and suicide rates rose; the social safety net was shredded; the nation’s military and infrastructure seemed to atrophy; its political system seemed unsteady, corrupt, and chaotic; and its national resources were seemingly up for grabs to the highest or most corrupt bidder. If the history of the post-USSR era were being written by historians a century ago, would they have called it “The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union”? Would they have identified the period afterward as a “dark age”?
Perhaps how long any societal, economic, or civilizational downturn lasts is a key factor in whether or not we agree that something qualifies as a dark age. Both the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s and the post-Soviet breakup of the 1990s lasted roughly a decade or so. That length hardly seems to meet the minimum standard for a dark age. However, had the direct fallout from either instead lasted a century or two, that might have been enough to turn a statistical civilizational blip into an extended negative trend.
One of the modern theories on societal collapse argues that because of the entire planet’s connected nature in the twenty-first century, individual or localized “dark ages” of the sort that formerly occurred are nowadays absorbed by the rest of the global body and civilization as a whole.[53] (#litres_trial_promo) Others have suggested that the depth and severity of any potential “dark age” are lessened due to modern interconnectivity. So you might have another Great Depression or the fall of a superpower, but you won’t have a century of global decline and technological backsliding. It’s sort of a global diversification of risk in our modern civilization, a redundancy that allows the system to survive local blackouts.
But perhaps our bias is showing. Maybe such changes are not decline or backsliding at all. It all might depend on the criteria we’ve decided to use. Depending on your point of view, things might not be considered better or worse … just different.
Earlier we brought up the idea of “progress” having an innate bias attached to it. If literacy declines in a later era because reading is less important, is this indicative of living in a “dark(er) age”? Or would it be more a case of people adjusting their skills based on their needs? And who gets to decide this—we moderns looking backward at the past, or the people actually living in the earlier era? Our ideas of what was good for the inhabitants of an earlier time might be different from their own.
This brings up the question of how much the people living in a dark age would even realize it. If you were born in Greece in 1000 BCE,[54] (#litres_trial_promo) did you know (or care) that there was a greater age before yours? Take a kid born in the United States in 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression. On his tenth birthday, the world was still mired in the effects of the crash. To that child, the privation and lowered sense of expectations felt normal; he had no experience or memory of anything else. His parents, however, likely felt that times had gotten tougher. While it sounds like a bad thing to be living in a society off its technological, cultural, or economic highs, it’s very possible the happiness level of individual human beings adjusted and evened out comparatively quickly. It’s hard to know what you’re missing after it’s been gone for a couple of lifetimes.
Maybe we are looking at this entirely wrong. If we lived in an era when our history books taught us that Ben Franklin’s eighteenth-century Revolutionary War generation had landed a spacecraft on Mars and could completely cure cancer (which of course we can’t do or haven’t done yet), would we care? Of course we would want the things of the past that seemed like improvements, but would we want the rest of the package that came along with it? If, for example, a Native American from five centuries ago had a bad tooth, she might really want our modern dentistry to deal with it. But if in order to get the modern medicine she had to become modern in all the other aspects of her existence, she might not consider the deal worth it.
There are multiple ways that any account or story can be viewed, but it’s helpful to be reminded from time to time. Certain narratives, such as “golden ages” and “rise and falls,” are so ingrained in our thinking that it’s easy to forget there might be other ways to see things. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter said that in some regions the Roman Empire taxed its citizens so highly, and provided so few services in return, that some of those people welcomed the “conquering barbarians” as liberators.
A similar theory exists about the Bronze Age: that perhaps the very bureaucratic and tax-heavy structure of the palace cultures of the Mediterranean states stopped working well for the majority of people, and one way or another they abandoned or stopped actively supporting it. In such a case, if things become too complicated to work well, or too centralized to be in touch with ground-level problems, is reverting to a greater level of simplicity and local control moving in a negative or a positive direction?[55] (#litres_trial_promo)
As with so many things, it may depend on whom you ask. No doubt at least some of those living back then would think we were romanticizing how wonderful the “good old days” of their lives were. Indeed, the successors of Rome would spend hundreds of years trying to put it back together again (in some form or another), and a certain blind poet named Homer would make a living recalling tales of the good old heroic days of the Bronze Age centuries after it ended.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_2b90d992-1978-5ec0-bfb1-ed52ba80bdfb)
JUDGMENT AT NINEVEH (#ulink_2b90d992-1978-5ec0-bfb1-ed52ba80bdfb)
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AFTER Planet of the Apes was released, at an excavation of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, archaeologists from the University of California began slicing into what, to the naked, untrained eye, appeared to be a naturally occurring hill. But like so many other mounds in the area, it was actually a man-made stone-and-brick structure that the passing of thousands of years had worked to transform. Underneath twenty-five centuries’ worth of dirt, evidence of disaster was revealed: a layer of destruction and burnt material just beneath the soil. Pieces of weapons were discovered, and a corridor of sorts emerged, with cut stonework and a pebbled floor.
Then the archaeologists found the dead.
There were at least twelve skeletons in the passage, multiple adults and children, and also a horse. The bodies appeared to lie where they had fallen. There was no indication of looting, which in any case would have been difficult, because at or near the time of these people’s death, the corridor had collapsed and buried them. Investigators determined the roof had been burning when it fell, and some of the dead were scorched before they expired on that terrible day two and a half millennia ago.
Had the site been discovered closer to the time of the events, the findings would have been grisly in the extreme, but time has a way of sanitizing even a mass killing. There is no longer any flesh or blood or viscera, and the facial expressions have been erased by decay.
The Halzi Gate, as the site was later identified, was one of fifteen external openings in the walled defenses of perhaps the greatest urban center of the ancient world—Nineveh, the heart of the Assyrian Empire in northern Mesopotamia.
At its height, around 650 BCE, the city and its surrounding villages may have had as many as 150,000 inhabitants and covered an area of about two thousand acres, or just under three square miles. The city was a wonder of its age, huge and grand, the center of gravity of the Assyrian Empire’s government and the primary residence of its ruler, a figure whose many self-proclaimed titles included “king of the universe.” The defenses of this metropolis were mammoth, with walls sixty feet tall and fifty feet thick stretching more than three miles on each side, and deep ditches carved out below them. The Halzi Gate itself had a 220-foot-tall facade and was flanked by six towers.
Yet in the same way the ash-covered corpses from the Roman-era volcanic destruction of Pompeii are frozen in the moment of their death, the dead at the Halzi Gate are frozen in the instant of their final agony. The bodies show the unmistakable signs of mortal hand-to-hand combat, including defensive wounds and, in some cases, clear evidence that a final killing blow was administered. They died as their city was dying.
What had Assyria done to deserve such a fate?
In the scope of human history, there are two kinds of cultures that have had a large geopolitical impact on the historical stage. The first are the societies and cultures that can trace their lineage back to much earlier versions of themselves, like the Chinese and Egyptian civilizations. They’ve had their high points and low points, but they’ve always been a political force to reckon with through thousands of years of history, and they’re still here. Perennial players.
The second are societies that seem to have had a glory-filled golden era, then fell into obscurity. Their historical moment in the sun, so to speak. The Mongol people are one example. Today, the Mongols are on the periphery of world events, a seemingly poor and out-of-the-way and behind-the-times culture, at least compared with what we call the “developed world.” But the Mongol people at one time ruled most of the known world and did so for several hundred years. This may have seemed like a long stretch at the time, but it was a blink of an eye compared with the ancient Assyrians.
The great state of Babylonia, to the south of Assyria, was the empire’s great adversary throughout their Bronze and Iron Age histories. Babylonia’s capital city, Babylon, located some fifty-five miles south of modern Baghdad, was one of the greatest cities ever built. It was likely the first metropolis inhabited by more than two hundred thousand people, and at its height had maybe twice that many. Remarkably, in this era before modern sanitation and modern medicine and with so many people living in such close proximity, Babylon managed to stay largely plague-free. (Babylon would outlive its great Assyrian rival to the north and would eventually seem like an urban refuge from a previous age in the new world to come.)
Some two hundred years after Assyria’s fall, a Greek general named Xenophon recorded an encounter with what was left of Assyria’s grandeur when he saw cities—places that were larger and more formidable than anything he’d seen back in Greece—dissolved into ruins. Xenophon wrote the Anabasis—now considered a classic of Western literature—about his experience commanding Greek mercenaries in a Persian civil war. As Xenophon and ten thousand Greeks fought a running battle trying to escape from their pursuers after fighting on the losing side of that war, they stumbled upon enormous fortifications and cities decomposing in the sand in what’s now northern Iraq—the ruins of something greater than his own civilization had ever produced. Almost 2,500 years ago Xenophon wrote, “The Greeks marched on safely for the rest of the day and reached the River Tigris. There was a large deserted city there called Larissa, which in the old days used to be inhabited by the Medes. It had walls twenty-five feet broad and one hundred feet high, with a perimeter of six miles. It was built of bricks made of clay, with a stone base of twenty feet underneath.”
Later, they came upon yet another city.
From here, a day’s march of eighteen miles brought them to a large undefended fortification near a city called Mespila … The base of the fortification was made of polished stone, in which there were many shells. It was fifty feet broad and fifty feet high. On top of it was built a brick wall fifty feet in breadth and a hundred feet high. The perimeter of the fortification was eighteen miles.
These cities were gargantuan by Greek standards, and Xenophon asked the locals about them; they said the structures had been built by the Medes, because that’s who’d preceded the Persian Empire they were then living under. But in fact these weren’t Median cities, they were Assyrian. The one “near a city called Mespila” is thought to have been Nineveh—Xenophon was marveling at its majestic remains two hundred years after its demise.
Xenophon was someone whom we today would think of as inhabiting the old world. Ancient Greece is, after all, a very early European civilization. But he was looking at something that was already ancient in his day—the equivalent of a Statue of Liberty in the sand from a Near Eastern empire that had been the superpower of its age a mere two centuries previously, and one that now seemed so thoroughly erased that the locals didn’t even know to whom it had belonged.[1] (#litres_trial_promo)
Before its fall, the Mesopotamian culture that Assyria was a part of was akin to Civilization 1.0. Babylon and Assyria represented the apex of that civilization’s version, with a growth in power, sophistication, and development that had begun in places like Ur, Akkad, and Sumeria. This basically unbroken civilizational tree lasted longer than any of the versions since. By way of comparison, if we were to date our modern civilization to the beginning of the Renaissance, we could count it as so far lasting around five or six hundred years. Assyria and its world was three to five times older than that, depending on how you date it, but their own records show an unbroken line of kings dating all the way back to the 2300s BCE,[2] (#litres_trial_promo) and Nineveh, their greatest city, fell around 600 BCE. That’s nearly two millennia that these people were a recognizable regional entity. The oldest work in European literature is often credited to Homer and dated between 800 and 1000 BCE—compare that with The Epic of Gilgamesh, from Mesopotamia, which was put into writing in about 2100 BCE and had been an oral story earlier than that. Civilization 1.0 had deep roots.
It’s difficult to understand just how urban this culture was, and how much in some ways it reminds us of our own modern society. If you were to look at a map of the Mediterranean and west Asia in the Bronze and Iron Ages, it would look a lot like a map of early twentieth-century, pre–First World War Europe. There were several powerful states intertwined with one another through diplomacy and alliances. When they went to war, they often went as coalitions, as the Triple Entente and the Central Powers did in the First World War, and the Allied and Axis powers did in the Second.
To continue the analogy, the Assyrians would be the Germans, because the Germans have always had a reputation for being militarily tough, not just in the twentieth century, but throughout history. An oft-cited rationale proposed for this is that the area of modern Germany is surrounded by other powerful peoples and doesn’t have a lot of natural frontiers, making it difficult to defend. From a social Darwinian perspective, you might say the only people who could survive in an area like that would be those who were tough and warlike. The same is often said about the Assyrians, because ancient Assyria was also ringed by powerful states and suffered a lack of natural frontiers, so the Assyrians had to be very tough, very centralized, very efficient, and very good warriors to survive.
As with the citizens of most powerful states throughout the ages, though, it is highly unlikely that the citizens of ancient Nineveh ever thought their culture would be wiped off the map.
But the fall of Nineveh is probably one of the most significant geopolitical events in world history. It is certainly the geopolitical event of the Near East Iron Age. It’s like the fall of Berlin in the Second World War in that it forever and decisively ended an empire, but the destruction of Nazi Germany toppled a twelve-year regime while Assyria’s fall meant the end of an ancient power. And the Assyrians were often cast, especially by their neighbors, as the equivalent of the Nazis in the biblical era.[3] (#litres_trial_promo)
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