Late Bronze Age Collapse

https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-age-collapse-a-very-brief-introduction/

by dmonay • 13 days ago

431 315 13 days ago

Seems to be a popular topic.

Historian Eric H. Cline has multiple books citing this time period, specifically 1117 BCE as the inflection point for the bronze age "collapse", defined by a deterioration of international shipping routes that weakened the nation-states of the era. I've learned about it recently because YouTube began recommending videos about it.

For example: https://youtu.be/choxcHXhZhE?is=t5lDwQQpqPsE2k5M

One historical event that Cline focuses on is a severe centuries-long drought. It's something the ACOUP article seems to omit. Cline does not focus as much on destruction of bronze-age sites although there is one port city in particular which is linked to the international trade of the time. Exactly who destroyed it appears to be a mystery but it could be linked to the migration theory that ACOUP dismisses. The migration may have actually come as a result of the previously mentioned drought.

darkfloo• 13 days ago

Shameless plug for my favourite YouTuber of all time https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=GviYcvEtOAJ1mln7

CountHackulus• 13 days ago

Historia Civilis somehow distills subjects down to squares in a great way. Entertaining and informative. Fantastic channel.

moffkalast• 12 days ago

The man who singlehandedly got me to think about Rome on a weekly basis.

DicIfTEx• 13 days ago

The fantastic Fall of Civilizations podcast also had an episode about it: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/01/21/episode-2-...

pixl97• 13 days ago

Ha, beat me too it. FoC is a great channel.

antondd• 12 days ago

Here is a youtube video he did on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B965f8AcNbw

The whole channel is top quality if you want to ruminate on other civilisations that came and went.

pfdietz9• 13 days ago

The drought explanation seems particularly plausible for the Hittites, IMO. They had grain storage, but ~3 years of drought would exhaust that. So if the climate becomes just a bit drier the chance of such a three year run increases enough to likely crash their society.

Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.

idiotsecant• 13 days ago

It's unlikely that rich countries would experience famine as severely as poor ones and consequently they would probably still demand meat. Grain that could feed people would still feed livestock.

stymaar10• 13 days ago

Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals.

This, plus the gigantic amount of agricultural land being used for biofuel production (almost as much as cattle food).

icegreentea2• 13 days ago

I don't think Bret (the author of ACOUP) omits drought - he leads his section on plausible theories with "period of drying and consistent crop failures". While Bret dismisses the out to in migration/invasion theory, he does support the idea of intra-region migration/warfare (perhaps induced by drought/crop failures).

the-smug-one2• 13 days ago

Eric Cline has an interview on "Tides of History" podcast.

flir2• 13 days ago

I'm really annoyed that Patrick gave up on that. I mean, I know he's been doing it a decade, and I can't chain him to a desk, and I'm being entitled, but...

ape4• 13 days ago

I think it's a popular topic because so many people are wondering when our civilization will fall.

forlorn_mammoth• 13 days ago

deterioration of international shipping routes

like a closing of a certain straight that was essential for a large percentage of a necessary resource?

RetroTechie• 12 days ago

Probably more in general, as in: fighting between states disrupts trade between them.

Enough of that & hardly any inter-state trading is left.

Brendinooo15• 13 days ago

It injects some really interesting color into the Tanakh/Old Testament - I'm not sure anyone has definitively lined up the Bronze Age Collapse with Biblical events, but it sure seems to have happened somewhere between the Exodus and King David.

One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.

simiones12• 13 days ago

The Exodus is an entirely fictional account though, it's not based on any real historical events. Even King David seems to be mostly mythical, though there is some vague evidence of a "House of David" being something some real kings claimed descent from.

Edit: I should say "almost entirely fictional". The main scholarly agreement is that it may record some stories of some small numbers (hundreds, at most some thousands - nowhere near the 600k in the Bible) real semitic slaves' escape from Egypt and migration to the area of Canaan, mixing with the local Canaanite population that were the precursors of the Jewish populations of later Israel and Judah.

jerf• 13 days ago

You'd probably find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy2Ic_j0SnA interesting.

For the rest of HN, while that video is from someone who takes the Bible seriously, you can also view it as an interesting examination of the historical time period, even if with a particular lens and slant. Who doesn't have a particular lens and slant anyhow?

detourdog• 13 days ago

I heard that the story of the Exodus and Moses was to unite the northern and southern kingdoms of Judea behind a single figure.

cratermoon• 12 days ago

It's worth noting that historically, Israel and Judah are iron age settlements. This makes references to the authors of the tanakh "bronze age sheepherders" wildly inaccurate at best and mostly offensively reductionist.

cs702• 13 days ago

The OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting:

there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.

pfdietz9• 13 days ago

One possibility I've wondered about is the emergence of a new crop pathogen. This might be addressed by looking at DNA of modern crop pathogens, and possibly looking if there was a change in the crops being grown before/after the LBAC.

The_Blade6• 13 days ago

Eric Cline is great - when i had a tooth removed in a somewhat nasty procedure i spent a Caturday hepped up on goofballs watching his videos on LBA while playing Hatshepsut on Diety in Civ VII 1.4 (i got to play test 1.3.2 via Firaxis via discord, ooh la la i call a car hole a garage)

in my personal "immersive learning" period starting 2021, i discovered acoup.blog when Old World came out and extended into reading while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action

EDIT: in the blind i'm guessing the port city of which you speak is Ugarit, which i had never heard of. IIRC everything was weakened by drought and famine, and Ugarit's armies were pulled over to the Hittites who abandoned Ugarit to The Sea Peoples. and the Sea Peoples always came off like a "cosmological constant" fudge factor where constant advances in shipwreck archaeology should provide more clarity in its merry time

history is dope. it never repeats itself but it always rhymes :)

nchmy• 13 days ago

its been a while since ive read a comment somewhere that I am so completely bewildered by. I understand about half the words, and none of the references, that you wrote.

Hope your teeth are doing better now!

UltraSane• 12 days ago

Is this how you normally write because it is very hard to understand.

bloak• 12 days ago

I'm being pedantic here, of course, but "nation-states" is perhaps not the right expression to use for that era. Nation states are primarily a thing of the nineteenth century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state). The article seems to talk about "imperial states" and "palace states", and I'm not sure I've ever seen the expression "palace state" before.

beloch• 12 days ago

One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. It was a systems collapse. The societies of the time were likely resilient enough to deal with "just a drought", "just a war", "just a big earthquake", or just some "international trade hiccups". What happened during the collapse was all of these things at once. It was the combination that proved so difficult to handle.

To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline.

Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.

pfdietz9• 12 days ago

One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing.

I don't think he establishes that. It could be one root cause, and complexity in how things then fell apart.

atombender• 12 days ago

He's also recently been on Empire [1], the Goalhanger podcast — and sister show to the great The Rest is History (which I hope will cover this period someday, though they tend not to go back that far in time) — in a series of episodes on the late Bronze Age collapse, which had Stephen Fry as a guest as well.

Cline does cover the evidence of destruction, which is also talked about in the other episodes. But the thing about drought is that we have written communications between different rules documenting that they were struggling with food supply.

An aside: For some reason I find Cline super annoying to listen to — his voice, drawl, and odd cadence triggers something visceral in me. But I admit he knows his stuff.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire-world-history/i...

lordleft• 13 days ago

Beware the Sea Peoples

evanjrowley2• 13 days ago

In an alternate timeline, The Sea Peoples are Romans sailing to England, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans. Things became fuzzy when the English themselves became other civilization's Sea Peoples.

appreciatorBus• 13 days ago

I would wager that almost every civilization has been some other civilization’s sea people at some point in it’s history.

mannykannot2• 12 days ago

And don't forget the Vikings, who may provide the best analogy to the Sea Peoples.

forinti• 13 days ago

There's a Portuguese saying "há mouro na costa" which is literally "there are moor at the coast" and means that there is something fishy going on.

hackyhacky• 13 days ago

The Moors existed about 1900 years after the Sea People of the Bronze Age.

Al-Khwarizmi• 13 days ago

Curious, in Spanish we have the same saying, but always in the negative version ("no hay moros en la costa") which is something you say when you're doing something secret and there is no one around who could see, hear or cause trouble.

rawgabbit• 12 days ago

I wish the author would go into detail about the sea peoples. From what I read, one theory is that they were subject allies of the Hittites; once the Hittites collapsed they went in search of better farmland with their entire families.

ch4s3• 12 days ago

The actual historical evidence is super thin outside of a stele in Egypt.

onion2k2• 13 days ago

The Bronze Age was the third best age.

dn3500• 13 days ago

After the one where humans first harnessed water power, the Dam Age, and when we started wearing clothes, the Garb Age.

D-Coder• 12 days ago

And carrying stuff, the Lug Age.

inigyou2• 13 days ago

The Iron Age can be researched at your Town Center, but the Post-Iron Age isn't a real age, it's just an extra setting on the map settings menu that starts you in the Iron Age with everything already researched.

onion2k2• 13 days ago

It was a Gold, Silver, Bronze joke. :(

projektfu• 12 days ago

At least it medaled. The same can't be said for the information age.

timbits98• 13 days ago

Given the era, it seems likely that the collapse was the work of multiple angry gods. The author doesn't cover this possibility.

mr_toad4• 13 days ago

The people of that era would have thought so. The Iliad and the Odyssey (if they have any basis in reality) might be examples of that period seen through a lens of mythology.

bazoom425• 13 days ago

How so? Are the Greek the sea people then?

fuzzfactor• 13 days ago

People have always downplayed the number of things their gods can get angry about, while it often escalates beyond sustainability.

Late Bronze Age Collapse

It was a little late but it had to happen sooner or later.

For those in power there may not be many other opportunities to set the standard for archaic leadership, so better get it while they can.

As we have seen :\

lokar• 13 days ago

The closest to that would be the ideas in “ the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind”

Nicholas_C• 12 days ago

This idea of this book fascinates me but I haven’t had a chance to read it. Worth it?

Perz1val• 12 days ago

And angry gods stopped rain

panzagl• 12 days ago

Given my extensive study of civilization, the collapse was caused by Gandhi launching nukes.

Amorymeltzer2• 13 days ago

Patrick Wyman—of the Tides of History podcast—just put out a new book, Lost Worlds, which is worth a read if this is your bag. The basic premise is that the way ancient history is typically taught, "that we moved linearly from foraging to farming, and then from country farmers to city-dwelling, tax-paying subjects of kings and emperors," is essentially wrong. He goes on:

All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....
That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.

It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."

The_Blade6• 13 days ago

"Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."

pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :)

i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute

just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky.

i'll see myself out

timacles• 12 days ago

I think the same, we are headed for the tech version of the Dark Ages, all with feudalism. The corporations will be the feudal lords, because they have more capital than most of the countries in the world.

I'm just wondering how will conflict and fighting for resources play out during this time. Will the corporations simply hire military groups with their infinite money?

throwaway274484• 12 days ago

Why would you blame AI when there are dozens of other crises with far more evident impact already?

satvikpendem2• 13 days ago

I'm reading Proto which is about the Proto-Indo-European language family and it discusses exactly this, where the hunter gatherer nomads of PIE moved from the Caucuses to more farming oriented areas like plains they settled down and also interbred with the local farmers. But, when droughts happened and food got more scarce from farming, many of the farmers in turn became nomads again. The DNA shows this change apparently.

Amorymeltzer2• 12 days ago

Excellent! That's been on my TBR list for a while. There's a bit about PIE in Lost Worlds, mostly as supporting evidence for movements and connections between ancient (pardon the pun) lost worlds.

pocksuppet2• 12 days ago

It's important that we learn about this so we don't repeat it. Sadly, we are repeating it. Perhaps it's impossible to prevent the cycle because it can only be prevented by those who benefit from it.

JohnMakin2• 12 days ago

The elites and ones in power were the ones most decimated by the bronze age collapse, so this reasoning feels flawed.

usumgallu• 13 days ago

I am mobile and not at my main system with my HN login, so I made this temp, but I think I cracked the primary cause and have been slowly working on a paper to submit to the journals...

I was doing geological research trying to show how crustal displacement theory is incorrect, and stumbled upon a paper that elucidated the insight:

There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field in the Levant and in the Med (3 actual areas) starting at roughly 1200 and ongoing until about 600! Im pretty sure Im the first person to posit this theory, but the more I steelman against it the more I think I'm onto something, and the implications are huge... because it has more to do with other subjects such as the evolution of religion in the region too. My theories on that are harder to prove but will be the follow up paper, at first Im just trying to focus on the geological proof.

Essentially a localized reduction in geomagnetic shielding allowing increased cosmic ray flux and solar radiation caused destruction, migration, religious interpretations of what was being seen in the sky, and all the war and tumolt that would come along with those...

esikich• 12 days ago

Mhmm. Take your meds.

marking-time8• 12 days ago

There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field geological proof

This is an interesting theory. My question is: What methods are you using to test the change in magnetic fields? Put another way, what is your middle range theory from an archaeological perspective? How are you dating your samples? etc.

ButlerianJihad4• 12 days ago

Robert J. Sawyer wrote a series of sf books called The Neanderthal Parallax which proposes that human sentience (and Neanderthal sentience) originated, and ended, with changes in the Earth's magnetic field. It explored some very interesting social and anthropological ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax

bee_rider• 13 days ago

Our favorite pedant should have a new post up today, I think he posts in the afternoon though. At least, checking in the morning and saying “ah, dang, the acoup post hasn’t come out yet, maybe I’ll reread an old one…” is a Friday morning ritual for me.

cineticdaffodil2• 12 days ago

My pet hypothesis is : That trade networks, in times of collapse- become sort of superspreader networks of downfall. Think about that city state who runs out of food by the sea! It still has all the trading vessels- whats more logic then to go - and take over somebody elses city and ships! Piracy of the damned! Stealing the food from the starving, just to give there families one more day! Following the coast- until you run out of city- and the civilization is gone!It should also not affect the country interior cities - who then would murder the upstart pirates who took over the old capital near the sea..

vitally3643• 12 days ago

That's just the Sea Peoples hypothesis

cineticdaffodil2• 12 days ago

We should sea other people?

mohamedkoubaa• 12 days ago

The Ottoman embargo of Western Europe leading to the collapse of the Aztecs supports your hypothesis. The other sea people.

forgotmypw17• 12 days ago

Have to mention this talk by Jonathan Blow, which maps the LBAC onto software development:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

wangii• 12 days ago

yep, that's my first thought came to my mind as well. it's a great talk fueled with the passion of engineer, especially relevant in the era of LLM.

marking-time8• 12 days ago

The study of the LBAC is compelling these days because of the similarities to our present day situation. Other commenters have noted the the possibility of AI driven collapse, but another possibility is our dependence on oil.

Bronze is the combination copper+tin. Copper is common in earths composition, but tin is much more scarce. The scarcity of tin necessitated the expansive trade networks to acquire the resource. To my way of thinking this correlates to our dependency on oil which while not exactly scarce, is not evenly distributed across the world. Our global supply chain for oil is fragile in the same way that the supply chain for tin was to the bronze age empires.

As for the article: I found the authors use of dating systems inconsistent and confusing. Some references are listed with the BC/AD nomenclature while others omit it entirely leaving the reader confused as which era he is referring to. Also, the use of the BC/AD has been supplanted by the use of the BCE/CE nomenclature in scientific references for 20+ years. This could simply be due to the fact that the author is a historian, but one would think a PhD would know better. All of this made me wonder if perhaps the author relies too heavily on AI.

upfrog• 12 days ago

The author has been an established blogger since well before the modern AI boom. It is of course not impossible that their writing technique has changed, and they now use AI heavily, but preferring BC/AD over the alternative/not always clarifying which strikes me as incredibly weak evidence.

1310122• 12 days ago

Typos are frequent (including in this blog post), and have been for a while. Bret is not an AI bot.

marking-time8• 12 days ago

The lack of consistency in the usage is also telling. Also, perhaps the author simply a christian apologist. I am an archaeologist with 10+ years of experience, so now you know my bias.

whall63• 12 days ago

I'm very curious what part of the article you're drawing on to suggest that their reliance on copper and tin was the cause of the collapse. The article that I read seemed to suggest it was climate related.

I have no idea where you're from, but oil is not what it once was, especially in the United States. In fact, we have a very recent case study substantiating this claim: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait sees 20% of the entire world's supply transit through when under normal conditions. Yet after being completely closed (then slightly reopened, and now almost completely closed again), the world is functioning relatively normally and is much less impacted than it would have likely been even 20 years ago.

My conclusion from the article is entirely different: collapse doesn't necessarily occur all at once. And given that, maybe to someone living through this collapse, they wouldn't have even recognized it.

scared_together• 12 days ago

The article mentions bronze production (thus indirectly mentioning copper and tin) not as a root cause, but rather a factor that spread the crisis from one region to another:

What is clear is that once the collapse started, it was contagious, likely for two reasons: first that collapsing areas produced invading forces and refugee flows that destabilized their neighbors and second because as you will recall above, these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze) as well as to acquire key prestige goods necessary to maintain the loyalty of the aristocracy.

marking-time8• 12 days ago

As mentioned by the other commenter,it is called the _bronze age_, so the components of the bronze alloy are part of the discussion. My point is that extended supply chains are vulnerable. And yes, in my view climate was a proximate trigger. However, once triggered, the collapse became more impactful because of the extended supply chains.

I have no idea where you're from

I'm from the US and looking out my window to the street below I notice that that more than 90% of the vehicles are still running on petroleum. The impact of high petroleum prices seems obvious to me.

An unrelated question, but why do you think petroleum prices are not correlating with with the straight closure. If, as you opine, the world has changed then why did prices rise in the first place? Was it market speculation based on an outdated worldview, or was it something else? I do not know.

[edit:corrected my formatting error]

suddenlybananas• 12 days ago

There's nothing wrong with using AD/BC instead of CE/BCE. They're identical and one even saves a character!

brainlessdev• 12 days ago

Although it's not its main topic, I enjoyed Ian Morris' Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, which goes over this in a way that really fascinated me. The book's ideas seem contested but as a layman it was a great tour of many years of humanity.

worldthruword• 12 days ago

Financial Imperialism is the reason why US is rich in terms of resources and because of material richness, lot of raw brainpower is attacted to America. Read the book "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire" by Michael Hudson.

dllu• 12 days ago

in Spanish, there wasn’t an English version, but it will do

I've just uploaded an English translation to: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moyen_Orient_13e_si%...

If someone can proofread my translations that would be great.

frm88• 12 days ago

Thank you.

On an unrelated note: I found this map where you can view the changes in political geography over time via scroll at the bottom. It's my goto with historical posts.

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/regions#position=5/...

pu_pe• 12 days ago

A very pleasant and informative read. The hypothesis that climate change was the primary cause of what came after seems plausible.

tsoukase• 12 days ago

As a Greek I feel proud that we passed through all history tides during our high times: multiple cycles of thriving and decline, the last one being the Classical century of 5th BC, then the Hellenistic period of Alexander until we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans.

This lasted for a full thousand years until a little before Jesus birth and it continued in Europe and the rest of the world in the same way for two more until today.

It seems the reasons of decline were most often the boring ones: variable scale fightings and climate change. Any resemblance to modern times is not coincidental.

bamboozled• 12 days ago

It's why I love visiting Greece so much, you can feel the history slapping you in the face and it's an awesome feeling. It's a wonderful place.

userulluipeste• 12 days ago

"we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans"

As a tongue-in-the-cheek retort, if the Greeks were really doing that (i.e. only playing ball in the grand building up of civilization), then the Roman Empire wouldn't ended up speaking Greek and looking so different in the period in which it is nowadays being called "Byzantine". Romans revered various Greek aspects, and somehow that privileged status that (everything) Greek enjoyed inside the empire played a role into the movement of the empire's capital to the Greek city of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople). It surely feels more like taking (the reigns, and not doing much afterwards, other than holding out for as long as possible).

DeluluDon• 12 days ago

ITT: Gen Z argues with Millennials about the Bible.

singularity2001• 12 days ago

As the author mentions the Trojan War in the Illias could be reflections of this event

wisty• 12 days ago

I saw a slghtly odd youtube video by a small creator who thinks it was at least partly because the gods stopped talking to people.

No, hear me out.

Obviously they weren't real, but the Youtuber said (based on sources) people used to talk to the gods, like you might talk to a cat. And the gods spoke back (and we all know cat owners who insist the cat is replying).

As societies became more sophisticated, this stopped. Around the time of the collapse, rulers complained that the gods were silent. The usual interpretation is that the gods did not help, but what if they literally stopped "hearing" the god's replies?

You couldn't have a conversation with Zeus in the town square anymore without people saying you were nuts, unless you were a ruler. But the sophisticated, skeptical societies also became fractured and disloyal (especially when only their rulers were arguing with Zeus over why the peasants weren't taking them seriously), and social institutions (which were stuck in the past) couldn't keep up.

lou1306• 12 days ago

Is this the old "breakdown of the bicameral mind" theory? I don't know. I think that tin trade routes breaking down + rise of iron-wielding civilisations are more plausible.

mannykannot2• 12 days ago

It looks very much like it: Julian James, 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' (see [1]), which influenced Neal Stephenson's writing of Snow Crash.

Scott Alexander wrote a critique of it beginning "Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact..." [2]. A response (which I have not yet read) can be found here [3].

[1] https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overv...

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...

[3] https://www.julianjaynes.org/2023/09/04/fact-checking-scott-...

astrobe_• 12 days ago

Yes. Civilizations relying on tin were basically quite vulnerable because tin is uncommon [1]. The coincidence between late bronze age collapse and the transition to iron age seems to be explained by the fact that once the disorganization no longer allows tin trade, makers turn to the second choice, iron.

Iron making was known during bronze age, but it was technically more challenging that tin+copper because it requires higher temperatures.

It's amusing to note that it lead to the development of the iron/steel making techniques, so much so that once the tin "was back", steel was cheaper, more reliable (from the logistics perspective) and better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_during_a...

jbotz• 12 days ago

That's Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory[0]. Personally I don't buy it because we haven't seen convincing evidence of it in pre-civilization populations that still existed in isolated places on earth until recently.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

krzyk• 12 days ago

A very interesting read.

I'm a bit puzzled by one thing. Author writes that the Greek alphabet is based on Linear B script, and also that it is based on Phoenician alphabet. So was it a mix of both?

nand4011• 11 days ago

The Greeks lost writing as a technology during the collapse, so the two alphabets aren't related. They just represent the same language.

jccooper• 11 days ago

The Mycenaean palaces had developed a syllabic script, which we call Linear B, to represent their spoken Greek. This form of writing is entirely lost. In the 8th century, the Greeks will adopt an entirely new script – borrowing the one the Phoenicians are using – to represent their language

You've misread something. Linear B encoded Greek, but is not related to the Phoenician-based script.

shevy-java• 12 days ago

I think "Collapse" is a strange word because we talk here about several hundred, if not thousand of years. A good example is the old roman empire - it expanded, it grew - until it no longer did and then it whittled away or lost out to e. g. northern tribes. Collapse as a word is just weird here really. Even the old roman empire did not "collapse" per se, if we ignore big single final battles such as 1453:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople

Andrew_nenakhov• 11 days ago

The real reason for dark ages was not the fall of the western roman empire, but the arabian conquests, which turned the international trade highway (the Mediterranean sea) into a highway by which pirates and slave traders had easy access to their prey.

abetusk• 11 days ago

Population estimates for that era (2,000 BC to 1,000 BC) are anywhere from about 25M to 150M [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...

Late Bronze Age Collapse

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