"During the Bronze Age metal-making fueled specialized industries, and ignited the demand for new innovations:" "tools for farming and hunting, objects for religious rituals and elite burials," "weapons for war." "Weapons show up in the archaeological record, and proliferate pretty much all at once." "So, they learn the technique for making weapons and everyone wanted to get it on the fun." "Competition and conquest ushered in a new age of organized warfare," "with professional armies that sought to expand empires, defend territory, and defeat their enemies." "It's not known exactly where or when bronze-making first began, but it revolutionized the way tools and weapons were made, and the new technology spread quickly throughout the ancient world." "Bronze is so important because it's such a versatile material." "So, when it was discovered that one could alloy copper with tin to make bronze, it was a great improvement, because copper's really soft and it doesn't make a good working edge for a tool or a weapon, but when allied with tin" "it becomes harder and more durable, and it keeps a sharper edge." "Therefore, the tools are better." "The weapons are better." "Bronze Age tools and weapons were often interchangeable, and consisted of axes, swords, daggers, and spears." "In the early Bronze Age, warfare was localized." "Small groups of men attacked nearby settlements for land, resources, and women." "But, as the wealth and size of settlements grew, and societies became more urbanized, warfare spread." "By the middle of the third millennium B.C., the earliest professional, standing armies were organized to defend communities in southern Mesopotamia." "The normal political situation in southern Mesopotamia was that of the city-state." "And, each important city had its own political area that it controlled." "They were very competitive." "They fought with one another, or sometimes they conquered one another." "There would be these ambitious rulers like Sargon, around 2300, who tried to unify all of them." "For a while that worked, and then it would fall apart again, and they'd go back to their city-states again." "The Sumerians were the first to use body armor and helmets in battle." "They're credited with the invention of the sickle sword, and the earliest known chariots." "The Sumerians executed well-disciplined formations in battle, and launched the first missile troops, using men armed with javelins." "Their military techniques and weapons were quickly adopted around the region, giving other ancient adversaries a greater advantage." "The new innovations and new technology usually do give you an edge, whether it's in war, or society, or elsewhere." "So, we do see these new adoptions." "For instance, there's a group called the Hyksos that come in, and they invade Egypt in about 1720 B.C." "Don't quite know where they come from, but it's probably the region that, today, we would call Israel, Lebanon, Syria." "They come in and they take over Egypt because they have a new type of chariot, and they have a new type of bow, the composite bow." "This particular bow, made out of composite materials, could shoot probably twice as far as a regular bow." "With these new types of chariots, and the new type of bow, the Hyksos overrun, and take over Egypt." "They rule it until about 1550 B.C." "By that point, the Egyptians have adopted that chariot, and the composite bow, and return, and they're able then to kick the people back out again." "By the late Bronze Age," "Egypt was a military powerhouse." "It turned from a relatively peaceful kingdom, protected by the natural boundaries of the Nile River, and Mediterranean Sea, to a leading, Bronze Age empire." "A rich, warrior class joined the military as charioteers." "Army divisions, numbered 5,000 strong, launching fierce battles to conquer their enemies." "We have from Egypt, from the town of Amarna, a cache of over 300 letters, written in Akkadian, in cuneiform." "These letters detail the relationships between not only Pharaoh in Egypt, but the different rulers of small city kingdoms and large powerhouses like Babylon, and Assyrian Mesopotamia." "In the letters, the openings will begin by saying," ""Brother, how are you?" "How is your wife?" "How are your chariots?"" "The chariots are very, very important, and if you look at the art from this time, coming from various different societies, you see the chariot very heavily stressed." "These chariots seem to have been a sort of international symbol of power and prestige, at the time." "As Bronze Age empires grew, so too, did their need to control land and resources." "There are the great powers like Egypt, and Assyria, and Babylon, and especially the Hittites." "So, you've got the Egyptians fight the Hittites." "Hittites fight the Assyrians, and so on." "And, there are winners and losers in the battles, and the wars." "In the Aegean, the Mycenaeans emerged as a powerful, warrior-based society." "Their militaristic culture produced great wealth for their elites." "The Mycenaeans are best known for their famous attack on the ancient city of Troy." "According to legend, after a fierce ten-year battle, the great Mycenaean king, Agamemnon, finally conquered Troy." "The Trojan War became the basis for Homer's Iliad, written some 400 years after the end of the Mycenaean era." "We don't know if the Mycenaeans saw themselves as an independent nation, in the way we would think of a nation." "They might have saw themselves as inhabitants of a particular city, for instance, or the speakers of a certain language, or the worshiper of a certain god, rather than someone in a nation." "But, having said that, they were kind of teetering between fighting with each other, and kind of getting along." "It probably was a kind of uneasy alliance, and they probably came together to fight off external invaders, but when there was no one invading them, they probably were at each other's throats." "The Mycenaeans celebrated their victories in their artwork, and buried their prized weapons in tombs along with their dead." "They had spears." "They had short swords." "They had these figure-eight shields made of wood, draped with cowhide." "They had boar's tusk helmets." "Hunting a boar was a very potent symbol of Mycenaean male power." "We know that they possessed horses." "There are horses and chariots in fresco paintings, and illustrated on weapons themselves." "The chariot is certainly part of the picture, but because of the terrain in Greece being so rugged, it's not very hospitable for chariots." "Therefore, we don't really think that chariots were a major part of warfare in a practical sense." "Chariots were, however, a very strong symbolic element of the elite." "So, elites depicted themselves in chariots." "Of course, this is something that they extracted from the east, from places like Egypt, where chariots were actually practical tools of warfare." "The elites of the late Bronze Age may have possessed powerful weapons, and controlled large armies, but it wasn't enough to save their empires." "In the end, their greatest enemy was an unexpected one that led to the collapse of the ancient world." "I would argue that the collapse of the late Bronze Age was so calamitous, and so catastrophic, that a similarity would not be seen again until Rome collapsed, which is 1500 years later." "In the late Bronze Age, you have these large kingdoms that dominated the whole region." "It wasn't an era of city-states, so much anymore, like the early Bronze Age was." "The late Bronze Age, already, you have large regional states, even nation-states, you could call them." "These nation-states were highly sophisticated, and urbanized, bolstered by a thriving, international trade network and the spoils of war." "Yet, they were vulnerable to numerous threats." "None of these societies were really built to last a long time." "They had kind of inherent fragilities and weaknesses that would sooner or later, come to tell on them." "No one knows exactly why" "Bronze Age civilizations collapsed the way they did, but their highly stratified societies may have been a factor." "One theory points to a growing inequality between the ruling elites, and their dependents." "Over-taxation, poverty, and oppression sparked internal dissent." "People began to flee their kingdoms seeking refuge in other lands, and causing unrest throughout the region." "They were clearly posing a problem to the rulers, to the settled society, the elites of the late Bronze Age." "Sometimes, there's treaties between the different kings of the late Bronze Age, and the treaties include clauses about fugitives." "How, if a fugitive from your kingdom comes into mine, then I am liable to send them back to you." "So, clearly, there's a problem that these rulers are dealing with people that are running away all the time." "Another theory adds climate change to the mix." "During the end of the late Bronze Age, there is increasing evidence that the climate was much drier, and drought became a persistent issue." "Agriculture in Greece is something which is always a struggle in terms of rainfall, and would have been potentially precarious." "One of the suggestions that scholars are kind of working with now, is that if they were to have several bad seasons in a row during one of these dry spells, and you think of a moment like the Dust Bowl here in the States." "What you end up having is the basis of these societies, you know, what we all cannot do without, food, starts to become a scarce resource." "If you didn't have the same supplies of water that you were used to, you couldn't produce the same amount of crops and sustain the same numbers of people, particularly all those people that weren't food producers themselves," "all these elites, and the specials that are working for the elites." "If the agriculture's failing, then that whole system of all these parasitical people that are living off of the actual farmers, and herders, and so forth, that's all gonna fall apart, if they can't be fed." "While drought and famine may have helped topple these Bronze Age societies, it's possible the land itself created even more instability." "There's evidence that powerful earthquakes once rocked the region." "Mainland Greece, and the islands, are a sight of high seismic activity." "They're right on a fault line." "There are frequent earthquakes." "The palaces were producing large quantities of olive oil, and large quantities of wine, and storing them in these giant pithos jars as tall as you or I, full of oil." "You combine that with lamps that would have been inside, like candles burning, earthquake, and these large drums of oil, and you get this recipe for disaster." "By the end of the 13th century B.C., it was clear that many of the ruling elites were hitting a crisis point." "We see in texts, that people are writing letters back and forth to one another." "For example, we hear evidence that there are groups that are attacking Cyprus." "We also hear this from various different places along the Levantine Coast, and from Egypt itself." "This is the so-called sea peoples." "No one knows exactly where the sea people came from, or why they were attacking cities, and settlements along the coasts." "Some believe they may have been refugees or disaffected people fleeing from hardship in their own homelands." "We have examples of letters going back and forth, letters from the Hittite king, to the king of Ugarit saying," ""You've gotta let that shipment of grain get through." "The people need it." "They are starving."" "A letter from the king of Ugarit, to the king of Alashiya," ""I can't help you." "All of my troops are in the Hittite realm, and I'm being attacked, so I'm left here vulnerable."" "It's very clear that there were disruptions." "There were people moving around, perhaps, the so-called sea peoples, of disaffected people moving around, and attacking the coastal areas." "Little is known about the mysterious sea peoples, a name given to groups of invaders who raided coastal towns and cities throughout the Mediterranean for nearly 100 years." "They're mentioned in ancient Egyptian texts, attacking in two separate waves, about 30 years apart." "They talk about these people coming from the north." "They talk about them coming from overseas." "They actually give us the names of the groups." "They talk about the Shardana, and the Shekelesh, and the Weshesh, wonderful names, and the Denyen, and the Peleset." "Who are these people?" "The Shardana sounds a lot like Sardinia, doesn't it?" "But, we don't know for sure if it is." "Same with the Shekelesh." "It sounds a lot like Sicily, so people have suggested that's where they came from." "It's really only the Peleset that we think we know." "They're probably the Philistines, and the Philistines were mentioned in the Bible as coming from Crete." "So, that might actually work." "But, you know, again, we don't know that much about them." "External invasions, internal unrest, climate change, and natural disasters." "Scholars now believe it was a perfect storm of conditions that rocks the ancient world at the end of the Bronze Age." "Geographically, the collapse goes all the way from Italy in the west, to Iraq and Afghanistan in the east, and it goes from Turkey in the north, to Egypt in the south." "From the western to the eastern Mediterranean, all that collapses." "It would be Italy, Greece and the Middle East, as we look at it today." "All that went down." "It went down hard." "In less than 200 years, many of the great civilizations of the Bronze Age were in ruins." "Their central economies collapsed." "The elites died off." "The art of writing was lost, and the great architecture disappeared." "And, with it all, came the end of the vibrant, international trade network that had long sustained the region." "Think about America's dependence on oil from the Middle East." "The equivalent back then would have been this dependence on tin." "Tin's only coming from Afghanistan." "You cut the supply routes to the tin, and everybody's in big trouble." "I think that's probably what happens at the end of the late Bronze Age." "But, in the end, these trade routes were cut." "Suddenly, you don't have tin, which means you don't have bronze, which means you either collapse, or you adapt." "Some collapse, some adapted." "For the next 300 years, the region plunged into what's known as the world's first Dark Ages, where fragmented, localized cultures lived more simply, and freely, without the structure of a complex, organized, interconnected society." "For decades, we have treated the time after the collapse, as the Dark Ages." "This mainly suggests that we, archaeologically, have kind of a moment of darkness because some of the means that we have of getting at these societies, text being a major one, disappear." "That doesn't mean that life ceased." "What we lose is kind of the grandeur that archaeologists, and that all of us, love." "You know, palaces with wall paintings covering their walls." "Gold, and ivory being imported, the industries that might have been connected to the palaces, and to kind of, the jockeying for social status, linked to palace life." "That is what seems to diminish, but that does not mean that the culture and society, somehow, you know, just disappeared." "I've argued that actually the collapse at the end of the late Bronze Age, while it was horrific for them, was not the end of the world for us, because out of that, the beginnings of western civilization were born." "The rise and fall of empires, and ages." "It's an ancient, yet familiar story, and a cautionary tale for our own age." "Can we take any lessons from the failures of the Bronze Age?" "We could, if the powers that be paid attention to the archaeologists and the historians of the Bronze Age." "I mean, we like to think, those of us who study those societies, that we're actually learning something that we can profit from." "As we look at life in the Bronze Age, as it became more and more complex, the kind of technological innovations brought in their train, problems." "As they developed the ability to create metal, or better implements, better tools, they were also made into tools of destruction." "So, as we become more complex, and as we develop technologies, we can see that every technology that has a good purpose, also has a kind of evil use." "So, this is something that they began to learn already in the Bronze Age, and of course, we know this today very well." "As our societies become more advanced, and we develop more complex technologies, we face similar vulnerabilities, and potential upheavals." "The lessons of the Bronze Age may be well worth paying closer attention to with an even greater urgency."