The Survival of Civilization: Insights from the Late Bronze Age

Dr. Eric Cline, Professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, discusses his new book "After 1177 BCE: The Survival of Civilization" and the graphic novel adaptation with host, Megan Lewis. They delve into the collapse of major civilizations in the late Bronze Age and the intriguing sequel to his award-winning work. Dr. Cline shares insights on biblical archaeology and international connections during this pivotal historical period.

Transcript

Swell AI Transcript: Eric Cline podcast interview.m4a

Megan:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Digital Hammurabi. I am your host, Megan Lewis. And today I am going to be talking to Dr. Eric Cline. And Dr. Klein is a Professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and of Anthropology at the George Washington University and the Director of the George Washington University Capital Archaeological Institute. Longtime viewers will remember Dr. Klein. We spoke a couple of years ago about a previous book but not only is Dr. Klein a highly experienced and respected field archaeologist, he focuses on biblical archaeology and international connections during the late Bronze Age, he's also an award-winning teacher and renowned author. His 2014 book 1177 BC, The Year Civilization Collapsed, examines the end of the Bronze Age and the collapse of the Ancient Near East's major civilizations, everything of which was previously attributed to the infamous Sea Peoples. The book won numerous awards and was one of the New York Post's best books of 2014. It's also an excellent read for those who are interested in this period of history. Highly recommended. And Dr. Klein is here today to talk to me about his new book, a sequel after 77 BCE, The Survival of Civilization. I'm going to be sneaking in some questions also about the new graphic novel adaptation of 1177 BC. I do have a copy of it, but I believe a child has walked away with it. So we have some screenshots to be looking at instead. Dr. Klein, thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Eric Cline: You're welcome. Thank you for having me back on. It's a pleasure to be here again.

Megan: Oh, absolutely. Pleasure is all mine. Now, before we get going and diving into the books, would you mind just introducing yourself and telling the audience how you became interested in the study of the ancient world?

Dr. Eric Cline: Okay. So I'm Eric Cline. I am a professor at George Washington University in the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, also in the Anthropology Department. and Director of the Capital Archaeological Institute. I'm an active field archaeologist. I've been in more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey. I dug at Megiddo, biblical Armageddon, for more than 10 seasons. and now I'm co-directing at Tel Kabri with Asafios Orlando, and that's a Canaanite site from almost 4,000 years ago, and we've been there for more than 10 seasons now. So I've always been interested in the ancient world archaeology since, I'd say since I was seven years old. My mother gave me a book on Hendrix Lehmann and the excavations of Troy. And I declared that I was going to become an archaeologist. And lo and behold, here I am. So I guess I've been interested since I was seven years old.

Megan: Wonderful. When I was, I think, a little older than that, maybe eight or nine, I found on my mom's bookcase a catalog, a museum catalog, of one of the Tutankhamun exhibits and spent many hours just flicking through the pages of that and enjoying the beautiful pictures and reading all about it. It didn't inspire archaeology for me, but it was definitely one of the most memorable experiences with the ancient world. It's a wonderful thing.

Dr. Eric Cline: Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing what you look at as a youngster and how it can impact the rest of your life in some way, shape or form.

Megan: Absolutely. Now, what is your personal area of specialization?

Dr. Eric Cline: Kind of hard to say in a way. All right, in a nutshell, second millennium BC, the late Bronze Age. That would be the best way to put it in terms of chronology. I'm a late Bronze Age person. In terms of geographic specialty, I don't really like to be pigeonholed. So I do, pretty much everybody who is in contact with each other across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean from about 1700 BC to 1200 BC. So I started out studying the Mycenaeans and Minoans. That was my undergraduate degree was in classical archeology, but focused on the Bronze Age. and then moved over to the Near East and studied the Hittites and the Egyptians and the Canaanites, Assyrians, Babylonians. And so I would say my area of specialization would be international relations 3,500 years ago in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. How's that for a niche occupation?

Megan: It's perfect, it's absolutely perfect and it's a really fascinating time in history and I think a lot of people don't realize or maybe understand quite how interconnected all of these different civilizations were so long ago.

Dr. Eric Cline: Right, that's in part what fascinates me about it is the interconnections, yeah.

Megan: And that plays I think a huge part in what you write about in 1177 and after 1177. So What prompted you, obviously this is a period of time that you're very interested in, what prompted you to write about it for a non-academic audience?

Dr. Eric Cline: Good question. So, let's see, I can take you back all the way to like 1991, which is when I finished my dissertation called Sailing the Wine Dark Sea, International Trade in the Late Bronze Age, a Gen. And that was essentially a catalog of everything that had been imported into Late Bronze Age Greece from Egypt, Canaan, the Hittites, Mesopotamia, and all of that. And based on that, I talked about the international relations during the Late Bronze Age. But for a scholarly audience, I mean, that was my dissertation. And actually, yeah, the dissertation was in 91. The book with that title came out in 94, which was a revision. It was essentially a scholarly version. I think it's probably sold a total of 700 copies, mostly to other scholars and libraries. And then I moved on to other things, and I, among other items, I started writing, I would say, semi-popular books. The Battles of Armageddon, on the military history of Megiddo. Jerusalem Besieged, it was a military history of Jerusalem, and so on. And then I wrote a book for National Geographic, From Eden to Exile, about mysteries of the Bible. I did a couple of very short introductions for Oxford, one on the Trojan War, one on biblical archeology. And so basically I started progressing more and more and more towards writing for a general audience and away from a scholarly audience in terms of my books. I still have a rule of thumb that for every general thing I write, I write two scholarly things. So I can maintain my street cred among my colleagues But eventually I decided I wanted to write a popularizing and accessible book on late Bronze Age trade that basically took that 1991 dissertation and the 1994 scholarly book, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea, and made it into a book that the general public might enjoy. And I wanted to write it especially so that my wife's grandmother could understand it. She was kind of my target audience. Very intelligent woman, loved archaeology, and would have appreciated something like that. And so I started talking to various publishers, including Princeton University Press, and they were interested but not quite with what I had in mind. So that was kind of the background for all of this, which turned into 1177 BC.

Megan: Thank you. Now we've talked about 1177 BC before, and for people who are interested in watching that interview, the link is in the description to the video here. So I'm not going to ask you to revisit your theory behind the Bronze Age systems collapse that you explore in the book, but I would like to ask you if you could just paint a picture of the end of the Bronze Age as you leave it in 1177.

Dr. Eric Cline: Sure, I can do that. Let me actually start a little bit earlier in a way, because What it turned out in 1177, which as you say, we won't go through it all, but basically Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press asked me if I would write a book about the end of the Late Bronze Age and the collapse and what might have caused it. And I told him that I was more interested in writing about what collapsed. So I wanted to write about who are the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, the Hittites, the Canaanites. How did we discover them? What kind of interactions were going on? And he said, fine, you can make that the middle part of the book as long as you begin and end with the collapse. So So in the book, I really established first from the 15th century BC onward, what the G8, as I call them, of the great powers of that time period in that region, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Canaanites, Hittites, Cypriots, all that, how they were interconnected. And I go down through the centuries until I get to the 12th century BC, which is when everything suddenly began to fall apart just in a matter of decades. The things that they had had in place for 300 years by that point, all of a sudden they're gone in 20, 30, 40 years. So I really wanted to talk about what collapsed as well as how and why it collapsed. And so what we get in terms of painting a picture at the end of the Bronze Age, is that as things began to collapse, and what in fact did collapse is the network that connected them all, the diplomatic network, the commercial network, and so on, that network begins to fall apart as each of the societies are impacted by what can only be called a series of catastrophes, or as my kids would have said, a series of unfortunate events, to quote Lemony Snicket. And those unfortunate events include things like drought, famine, invaders, disease, earthquakes, and so on. And so the combination of all of those, which is what I concluded, that there was a perfect storm of events. That brought everything down, but it also impacted the different societies in different ways. And that was what I especially found when I continued the research and eventually wrote after 1177 BC. So, It is a collapse, the whole network collapses, and then each of the eight societies are affected in different ways. Some kind of sail through the collapse and it's like, you know, what me worry, not a problem. And others are so impacted with it that they disappear, never to be heard from again. So I painted a rather dismal and pessimistic picture at the end of the original book, and now in this sequel. It's still a pessimistic and dismal picture, but it's a little more optimistic at the end, I hope.

Megan: Now, as you go through reading after 1177 BC, the book is arranged in a very regional view. And you say that upfront, this is how you're going to be exploring the history that you're looking at. And you go through how each civilization was impacted by the events that were described in 1177, both in terms of what they lost, but also in terms of their resiliency. Now, I was wondering if you saw any significant similarities across these different civilizations in what happened to them in the aftermath.

Dr. Eric Cline: Yeah, but there's both similarities and differences. Part of it also is the information that's available to us because it's different depending on where you look and at whom you look at. So, you know, if we're, for example, on the mainland of Greece and the Mycenaeans, we don't have writing at this point because linear B stops being used and they, at least in the early centuries after the collapse, they haven't yet adopted the Phoenician alphabet. So there we're dependent on archeology. burial customs, changes in pottery, things like that. Same thing with Cyprus, for example. But over in Egypt, they are still writing, they're still using hieroglyphics. Over in Assyria and Babylonia, they're still writing, they're still using cuneiform and all of that. So we have very different sources, and I mentioned that at the beginning of the sequel, that we're going to have differential sets of information. So that does kind of impact the quantity and quality of the evidence that we've got available to us, but it also makes it a little more difficult to talk about similarities and differences. So similarities I would say very simply are that each of them is impacted by the collapse. The differences is in how much they were impacted and their responses and whether they were successful in just adapting and coping, or whether they actually transformed, whether they made it through, or whether they disappeared. And there are significant differences for sure. In fact, I would say the differences outweigh the similarities, if you want to put it that way.

Megan: So you mentioned that it's a relatively pessimistic view of what happened, I think, rightfully so, given that so much changed and shifted and, well, collapsed. So does it seem like it was a purely catastrophic time for people who lived through it, or were there, I don't want to say bright sides or silver linings, but are there positives maybe that we can think about when we're looking at this kind of event?

Dr. Eric Cline: There are, it seems odd to talk about there being positives, but there may be some. And I used to think it was totally catastrophic and just, you know, hard stop at the end of the late Bronze Age. But in researching and writing the sequel, I ended up kind of ameliorating my views a bit, tweaking them slightly. And while it is still, a catastrophe. I would never move away from that. There are so many people that died, so many people that migrated during and after this period. I mean, at one point they thought that up to 90% of the people in Greece had either died or migrated. Now we've ratcheted it back and the latest estimate I saw is that only between 40 and 60% died or migrated. I mean, that's still quite a bit, but And to give you a hard number, I saw one set of scholars said that there had been 600,000 people in mainland Greece in, say, the 13th century, and then only 330,000 by the 11th century. So that's a drop of almost 50% right there. So hard to find a silver lining in that. So it was a catastrophe for many of the people. And that's why I don't agree with some scholars who've said, it's not a collapse, it's just a transformation. They're just dealing with it. I'm like, no, it is a collapse, but it's also a transformation. And don't forget all the people that died in going through all of this. So it is a catastrophe, and they do go back, there is in many of the cases, and again, this is where I have to be careful because it depends on where you look, right? Are you looking at Cyprus or are you looking at Assyria or are you looking at the Hittites, right? Because it's not one size fits all. You really have to say, okay, let's take a look at the Hittites. But even then, you need to separate it. All right, are you looking at the elite class, the king and his henchmen? Or are you looking at the peasants, the lower class, the 99%? Because they're affected differently. And it's not just the Hittites. Same thing with the Mycenaeans and others. And that's where our differential sources come in and are problematic because Even when we have writing, it's absolutely wonderful what we've got from the Assyrians, who by this point are transforming into the new Assyrians, the Neo-Assyrians. Most of the inscriptions, I mean, all of the inscriptions are from the king. They're royal, right? Or his accountants and other people like that. But mostly royal inscriptions from the king or the chroniclers. that are keeping track of what's happened, which means we only hear the voice of the top 1%. We don't hear the voice of the average person in the street, right? So we have to make suppositions about that. That's where archeology will come in. The people that are actually excavating the smaller sites that are not the capital cities, right? That are not Hatusa or Mycenae or whatever. And we are gradually beginning to do that. So we're getting more information from the other, shall we say, echelons of society. But I do make that warning at the beginning of the sequel that my treatment is going to be uneven because the nature of our sources and our knowledge is uneven. And I say that for that reason, I'm going to tell you in the following pages not only what we know, but how we know it. And so I want to be transparent. as to how we know what we know. And so I spell out so-and-so found this inscription in the 1890s and things like that. So there's a lot of nuances here. And that's really what I found when I would compare the original book to the sequel. At the beginning of the sequel, I say, OK, it's a little more nuanced than I had expected. You know, because there is a big divide in archaeology between people who do Bronze Age and people who do Iron Age, as this period after the collapse is called. And I had always been, I am a Bronze Age person. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to leave what happens afterward to the specialist, right? Because we've all got our own little niche specializations and the Iron Age people would have said to me, you're Bronze Age, why are you coming down into my area? Leave the Iron Age to me. And indeed, I'm sure that's what they're going to say right now, right? Cline had the temerity to write an entire book about the Iron Age. He's a Bronze Age guy. What does he know? Well, you know, I can read as well as the next person and One of my mantras in going through all of the sources for the sequel was one of these, I read it so you don't have to, right? So that was my idea was that hundreds, thousands of various articles and books, I was just like reading and summarizing and all of that. So yeah, I'm out of my wheelhouse here, but the one thing I am confident about, because I cite everybody, and I give credit where credit is due, you know, so-and-so has said this, etc., etc. I'm confident that the facts that are in the first five chapters of the sequel, which is basically a history book with archaeology in it, and each of the chapters this time are geographical rather than chronological because we literally have eight case studies about what to do and what not to do if you go through a collapse. So, you know, chapter one is Egypt and Southern Levant because they're linked. Chapter two is Assyria and Babylonia. Chapter 3, Cyprus and Phoenicia. Chapter 4 is Mycenaeans and Minoans. No, Chapter 4 is Hittites and Neo-Hittites. Chapter 5 is Mycenaeans and Minoans. And the facts in there I will say pretty confidently are the state of our knowledge now as we know it. It's basically, that's it. This is what we know. This is how we know it. This is what we understand right now. And this is why we know it. Cause look at this person and this person and this person, this is what they've published. So it's only in the last chapter, chapter six and the epilogue where I do my analyses. And that's where we're going to have all kinds of interesting discussions going forward, not just with the general public, but with the scholars and colleagues also. And that's where I think I'm going to get some pushback to what I've written there. But the rest of it, you know, I've made the transition. I now know the Iron Age pretty well, as well as anybody who's not a specialist. And we can go forward from that. And I'll end with by saying, the Iron Age is actually much more interesting than I had given it credit for. I had been an elite Bronze Age person. All right, we got 18th Dynasty Egypt. We got King Tut. What do you guys have? And now I'm like, Oh, right. Yeah, you have the standardization of the alphabet. Yeah, you've got the turning to iron. Yeah, I guess you guys are pretty cool also. So I'm kind of a convert to the Iron Age, shall we say.

Megan: I think a lot of people, most people, in fact, we get very fond of our own particular time period or civilization or and nothing else is really as interesting. And then, yes, you start diving into it and you realize, actually, I still have my favorites, but You can come as well. That's okay. So you said that the first five chapters are essentially case studies in how these different civilizations handled the collapse. I was wondering if you would tell us maybe the group that you think handled it best and the group that maybe handled it the least.

Dr. Eric Cline: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually that's what I go through in chapter six with my analyses. because I have the temerity to rank them. I assign them a numerical value and I actually put it in a chart. And what I'm doing there, there's a couple of things going on. So one, I looked at the things that really determine systems collapse, which is what we're talking about at the end of the late Bronze Age, where your central economy collapses, your central administration goes away, your elites either die or migrate, you lose the art of monumental building, you frequently lose the art of writing, that kind of stuff. And so what I did was I said, if over the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, a society managed to maintain its administration completely. They got a two. So the Assyrians, for example, they make it through with no problem for their administration. So they got a two. Others that made it through with their administration kind of sort of intact, but not quite, they got a one. Anybody that completely lost their administration got a zero. And I went through that for the economy and writing and this and that, and I came up with a final score. All right, so I've got that on the one hand. On the other hand, I have looked at something called the adaptive cycle, which is more usually used in environment and the sociobiological economic type things, where you've got this idea that there is a cycle in human history. Hamilton said, oceans rise, empires fall. So it's kind of like that. And they have an omega part to the cycle and an alpha part, which is like a release or a collapse followed by a regeneration. And I see the Late Bronze Age as that, you know, the collapse is that one phase and then the Iron Age as the next phase. So that was part two. And part three, I went to the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which those are the guys that every year they say we're all going to die because of climate change and weather and all of that. actually won the Nobel Peace Prize back in 2007. In their publications, and especially in a publication from 2012, which was on major disasters and risk management, they actually give us some really good definitions for resilience, for transformation, for coping, for adaptation. So what I did in terms of ranking, and I am getting around to answering your question here, I said, who did best in terms of transforming versus just adapting versus coping? I mean, coping is when you're like, oh my God, can we make it through till tomorrow, right? Or, you know, next week. Adapting is when you're like, okay, That didn't go very well. Let's see what we can do to get through the next month or the next year. Transforming is when you go, okay, we can never have that happen again. That was not an adequate response. Let's transform so the next time this happens, we're completely ready and we won't have the same results. So transforming is the best, then adapting, then just coping. And I rank them like that. So the end result, I have five categories with number one being the best, number five being the worst. In number one are the Phoenicians and the Cypriots. And they are so good at transforming, they're actually what I call anti-fragile. And I borrowed that term from Nassim Nicholas Tlaib, who has a book with that title. And anti-fragile is when you flourish in the age of chaos. You take advantage of the chaotic conditions to flourish. And so the Phoenicians, and I should add here, the Phoenicians are the central Canaanites. They're in the region that today would be Lebanon. And they don't call themselves Phoenicians. That's the later Greek name. Herodotus calls them Phoenicians. They would have identified themselves by their individual city-state. I come from Sidon, I come from Beirut, I come from Byblos, I come from Tyre. But collectively as a whole, they do a couple of things. One, as I mentioned, they standardize the alphabet. They don't invent it, but they standardize the alphabet and they spread it across the Mediterranean, such that it's adopted in Greece, certainly by the eighth century BC and maybe earlier, And it's also adopted in what is now Italy, where it became the Latin alphabet. And of course, we're still using the Latin alphabet today to write English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, all the Romance languages. And they also standardized the production of purple dye and spread that across. And as they're going, and I should add here, what they're doing is taking advantage of the fact that the site of Ugarit, which was on the coast of North Syria and had been a major international port in the Bronze Age, that city has been destroyed. It's destroyed by humans. We know that from a recently published text. But it also had been suffering from famine. We have that also written in the texts. And then we can see archaeologically, they're hit by an earthquake a little bit earlier, but still. And then they're actually destroyed by humans because there's three feet of destruction, a meter or two of destruction, and arrowheads in the walls. So we know that Ugarit is destroyed. And it's not inhabited for another 400, 500 years after that, which leaves the way free for the Phoenicians, if we can use that term, to take over across the Mediterranean. And so we see Phoenician ships and Cypriot ships, for that matter, going across. And as one of my colleagues has said, the Mediterranean became a Phoenician lake. And of course, they are sending out colonies also, of which probably the most famous is Carthage in North Africa, which eventually grew to challenge the Romans in the Punic Wars. much, much later. So, I've got the Phoenicians up there for being anti-fragile and the Cypriots as I mentioned in passing earlier, they're the ones that make the pivot, it looks like, from being the major copper producers to being the ones that start smelting iron and are the first to make iron weapons and tools. And it looks like, along with exporting the actual objects to Greece on one side and the Southern Levant on the other, they're also being really good at exporting the technology, the know-how, And so very soon thereafter, you know, from the 11th century on, everybody can make their own iron weapons and tools because you've got iron ore in every country, unlike copper, which is, you know, mostly found in Cyprus and tin, which is Southeastern Anatolia or Cornwall, but mostly Afghanistan. So the Cypriots are up there too, because they make the pivot and bring iron into the equation. So I give them number one. Do you want me to go on and briefly say the other ones? I can do that. I won't spend as long on each of them. But yeah, number two are the Neo-Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians, because they make it through They don't actually have to transform that much. They're able just to keep going. And that's a big question as to why they among the others are able to just keep going. They still have the administration. They've still got the language. They still do the inscriptions. They do the large buildings. They've got a standing army, nothing that much changes. And it has been suggested that that is because maybe They had the right leaders at the right place at the right time to lead them through this disaster. But also I think it's because they're on the Tigris and Euphrates, their water source keeps going. We do know they get hit by the drought, but a little bit later than everybody else. And we also know that at one point soon after the collapses hit other people, that the rivers switch, they shift. I think it's the Euphrates that shifts a bit at this time. And so there is some, drought and famine, but a little bit later in Mesopotamia than anywhere else. And we do know at one point that they're even doing some cannibalism. They had to eat their own people, they said, for a while. But then they come back up, and by the 9th century, they're off and running again, and we get the Neo-Assyrian Empire as being the first big empire of the Iron Age. And I think in that case, what they're doing, they still need all the raw materials that they had needed back in the Bronze Age. But now their trading partners, for the most part, have disappeared. And so the Neo-Assyrians, who still have their standing army, they're basically now taking whatever they want, right? They're campaigning and attacking everybody and getting the loot and then exacting tribute in the years afterward. So rather than harmonious commercial trade and diplomacy of the late Bronze Age, they are now simply taking what they want, and they're able then to continue. So I put the Assyrians and the Babylonians as well in that second category. Category three is Egypt, and they're merely just coping. All right, yeah, they make it through, but they're coping. And this is primarily the third intermediate period, as we call it in Egypt, which is traditionally defined as a period of anarchy and chaos anyway, such that you've got at one point as many as three or even four kings at the same time in different parts of Egypt. and they withdraw from the world stage. They're not doing the international trade anymore. It's not like it was back in King Tut's heyday in the 18th dynasty. But that's not to say that they don't have flashes, periods of greatness momentarily, like we've got Sheshank, the founder of the 22nd dynasty, a Libyan, around about 945, 925 BC. He's probably Shishak of the Bible, and he comes up and attacks Jerusalem and what had been Canaan, but is now the states or the new kingdoms, the small kingdoms of Israel and Judah. So they do have these flashes. Then there's another one, another guy ruling from Tannis. I think his name is Poussenes, if I remember correctly. His tomb, the grave goods, were so wealthy that he's been nicknamed the Silver Pharaoh. And had his tomb been discovered at an appropriate time, he would be as famous as King Tut. But Pierre Montaigne, the Egyptologist, found the tomb in 1939, just as World War II broke out. So nobody paid attention to it. So Egypt's in category three, they managed to cope. Category four, those are our Mycenaeans and Minoans. They don't handle the situation very well. And in fact, after about 1050 BC, the Mycenaean and Minoan societies have gone away. Nobody, as we would know, would call themselves a Mycenaean or a Minoan anymore. That's not to say that it's a hard stop. It's more, as I say in the book, it's more like a permeable membrane. So some stuff gets through, others do not. So, for instance, the religion gets through. We already know because of the Linear B tablets from the Bronze Age that they were already worshiping Zeus and Hera and Poseidon and Athena. And they continue to worship, obviously, those gods and goddesses after the collapse. And, you know, they make it all the way down through archaic and classical Greece, as we know. So that is kind of permeable. Other things, though, are kind of interesting, like back in the in the Bronze Age, in, say, Mycenae, you had the Wanox, W-A-N-A-K or A-X. The Wanox was the king. And a lower administration official was known as the Basileus. So when we get to after the collapse, there is no more Wanox. He's gone. And the Basileus, who had been the lower administrative official, the Basileus is now the king. So we see slight differences and yet kind of similarities. But it takes the Greeks, let's put it that way, the survivors, it takes them up until the beginning of the 8th century to really get themselves back, they have to build from the ground up again. I mean, very much a lower level of social, political, economic complexity. in the immediate aftermath of the collapse. But then they eventually get themselves back up. And by, say, 776 BC, which is the traditional date for the first Olympics in Greece, they're up and running. And in fact, that's where I end the sequel, because that globalized network connecting the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean has been re-established by that point. Of the people that were going to come back all of them are back by the beginning of the 8th century. I'm like, OK, fine. So there is, though, over on Crete, Sara Wallace says the Minoans had a successful collapse. I'm not quite sure how you define a successful collapse, but it does mean that there are similar permeable membranes and things do make it through on Crete, such that you later get the archaic states there. So there in number four, I might get some pushback from specialists in the Mycenaeans that, you know, we want to be up in three. No, no, no, you're down in four. And then the last one, the lowest, are the Hittites and the Southern Canaanites. The Hittites do not do well at all, and they essentially disappear. No more Hittite administration, no more Hittite society. They're all gone. But they had internal problems already. There had been a division in the royal family, for example. They had been hit by plague. They had abandoned the capital city of Hattusa such that when it was burnt, there wasn't anybody living there anymore. But even they, there are some survivors, of course, in Anatolia, it's not to say everybody died, and they assimilate, if you will, into the new societies that appear, like the Phrygians over in the West, and then you've got the Urartians who spring up on the East. But you've also got survivors in what we would now say is Northern Syria. Now these become the neo-Hittites, the new Hittites. It's kind of a rump state, if you will, where the survivors continue to write Luwian, which was one of the languages of the Hittites in the Bronze Age. They continue the Hittite gods. They continue monumental building at sites like Kharkhmesh and Tel Tayanat and others. a whole new recent book by James Osborne on the Syro-Anatolian and Syro-Hittite states that continue on. So there are survivors. And I would say the equivalent would be like the British. There's no British Empire anymore, right? That's long gone. But there are portions in the world of places that were formerly in the British Empire, where they still drink tea and play cricket and so on. So you've got traditions that keep going. And that's like the Neo-Hittites. And by the way, those are probably the Hittites that are mentioned in the Bible. because the biblical writers would not necessarily have known about the actual Hittites up in the Anatolian Plateau, what we call Turkey, but they would have known of the Neo-Hittites in North Syria because they would have interacted with them. And then, last but not least, I put the Southern Canaanites down in that bottom category because we're not quite sure what happened to them. In the Bronze Age, The southern Canaanites had little city states like at Megiddo, Hazor, Lachish, Jerusalem. And we know that they are vassals to the Egyptian kings. We've got letters from them in the Amarna archive. Those all disappear after the collapse. And that whole area is replaced by Kingdom of Israel, Kingdom of Judah. Edom, Moab, Ammon, all these little kingdoms. And the big question is what happened to the Canaanites? Are they assimilated into those? Are they killed off? Is there a genocide? If you look at the Hebrew Bible, you've got the book of Joshua and the book of Judges. One says there's a complete genocide, and the other says, no, no, they settled down and assimilated. Which one is it? You have two stories within the same book. We can't be sure. So this is, I, right now, I've said that as a society, the Canaanites and the Southern Levant did not continue. And if anything, they became part of these other new smaller kingdoms. And you could argue that means they transformed. I would argue, no, that means they assimilated. And Canaanite society, like Hittite society, like Mycenaean society, goes away in the Southern part. So I put them down in my bottom ranking, but I will say right now, and I put it in a footnote, originally I thought they had been very successful and had, you know, transformed, and they, the Southern Canaanites, were up in my Category 2. And I still think that some of my colleagues are going to come back and say, you were right, we belong up in Category 2, not down in 5. And again, as I said in the footnote, I'm perfectly willing to change my mind, right? So I'm here, persuade me. We're looking at the same data. I see it half empty and you see it half full. Okay, fine. So I definitely say that my rankings are my personal feelings, my gut reaction, and they're not the be all and end all. And that I hope that what I've put, especially in chapter six, is going to begin the discussions, not end them. And so I am optimistic that we will go from there. And as a Bronze Age person looking at the Iron Age, I literally do not have a dog in the fight. So you can persuade me that I should reorient my categories. I'm fine by that. And I think we'll have fun doing it. And I think we'll push the entire field forward.

Megan: Wonderful. Thank you so much. That was absolutely fascinating. And before we move on to talking about the graphic novel briefly, I wanted to ask if you could see any lessons that maybe modern society could draw from this period of ancient history to improve the chances that we will thrive in the face of adversity. rather than collapse and fade away.

Dr. Eric Cline: So this is why some reviewers are already saying, hey, he's anti doom and gloom in this sequel, because I did try to end on a positive note. I did say, OK, it is not for everybody looking at the past to try and solve the problems of the present and the future. But I'm a firm believer that we can. that we can learn from the past, that there are lessons if we're willing to listen. Towards the end of the book, I presented a table of seven lessons learned, common sense lessons. In fact, I think some of them are so common sense, you don't have to read the book to have come up with them anyway. But there are things like try and be as self-sufficient as you can, even while leaning on other people. Try to make sure that you have a great source of water. The Egyptians had the Nile. The Assyrians and Babylonians had Tigris and Euphrates, like I mentioned. The Hittites did not. They had the Hailes River, but it's not huge. And of those four, which I would say were the greatest of the great powers at the end of the Late Bronze Age, only the Hittites go down. So I think water and water resources are very important. And I've been told by various people that know such thing that The same thing is true today, that going forward, water is going to be impactful. In fact, I saw on the front page of the Washington Post just today, or maybe it was yesterday, something about U.S. and Mexico and water, and they're going on there. We need to watch out for our water. Other things like that, there are definitely lessons. I came up with seven of them, including try to keep the working class happy because part of the collapse was probably internal rebellion, the lower classes rising up against the upper classes. And so I do try to end on an optimistic note But I do, I kind of, what is it called? You break the third wall, I think it is. It's not the fifth wall, it's the third wall. The fourth wall, the fourth wall, thank you. I turned to the audience in the last couple of paragraphs and I say, so what are we gonna do? And what are we? If our society collapses, are we going to be Phoenicians or are we going to be Mycenaeans? The choice is up to us. We're going to have to wait for future historians to tell us how we did. But I personally hope that we're going to be anti-fragile, ready to spin on a dime. And that was one of my other seven common sense was you need innovation. You need invention, right? You know, remember the supply chain issues of just a couple of years ago, right? So we need new things that will help us. So we're not as, I don't know, like dependent on lithium for the chips in the cars and the computers and all of that. And that's where I would say the parallel to iron coming in, rather than being dependent on tin and copper to make the bronze. So that is where I try and end on an optimistic note, and I may have been too optimistic if people think I'm anti-Doom, because I also do say both at the end of the first book and at the sequel, it's not a matter of, are we going to collapse? It's a matter of, when are we going to collapse? Because we are. We're not too big to fail. And no society in human history has ever successfully made it through. Even if they didn't totally collapse, at least they had to transform such that, you know, they were almost unrecognizable after that. It would be hubristic to think that we're not going to fail. We are. And at the end of my lectures now, and I think it's in the book as well, I quote John Wooden, the former basketball coach of the UCLA Bruins, who I got to see as a kid. And he said, by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. And so I love that quote. We need to prepare, or we may well fare. I've been told since that Benjamin Franklin also may have said that. But I saw, I met John Wooden, and I never did meet Ben Franklin. So there we are.

Megan: I think that's fair. Well, thank you. I wanted to very, very briefly, because we are going to run out of time otherwise, ask you what prompted the decision to turn 1177 BC into a graphic novel?

Dr. Eric Cline: Ah, so this is a lot of fun. So the exact same day, April 16th of 2024, that the sequel appeared, also the graphic version of the original book, 1177, appeared. drawn by the marvelous Glynnis Fox, who is both an archaeologist and a cartoonist, we managed to turn the original book into a comic book, if you will. But it's not your normal comic book. It is an inch thick. It's 250 full-color pages, as you can see, absolutely gorgeous. And what we do, it's 100% faithful to the original book, but not the original original and not 2014. It's faithful to the revised version that came out in 2021, which had a lot more data and where I altered my conclusions a bit to say that climate change was more important than I had given it credit to previously. But the way that we did it, and Glynis and I worked, we were on Zoom calls almost every week going through this. She sent me at every stage and it was absolutely amazing. We decided fairly soon into it that just telling the story didn't work. And so we introduced, at first, two characters that are not in the original book. Two young kids, I would say maybe about age 12, from that period, just after the collapse. One is a young boy named Pel, which is short for Peleset, who are one of the sea people's groups. He can't read or write, but his granddad was a sea person and has been telling tales about what happened. And he's tired of hearing them and wants to go find out for himself what happened. And so he meets up with his good friend, Shisha, who is an Egyptian young lady, again, about the age of 12, but she can read and write. She's a scribe. Not only can she do Egyptian, she can do a Garret, she can do Cuneiform, Akkadian. Anyway, and she's always making fun of him because he can't read or write. The two of them go on a journey around the Mediterranean and honestly, through time, because they start in the 15th century and make their way down to the 12th century. But they explore everything that's in the chapters of the original book. The other thing that we did after getting through most of the chapters we realized that sometimes we had to tell the reader things that those two kids could not possibly have known at that time, usually dealing with modern stuff like radiocarbon dating. And so a bit reluctantly, but also with good humor, we put ourselves into the story. We're not that obvious. You'll find us in the top left corner or the bottom right corner where I am just a little cartoon caricature of myself and Glynnis. And I'm saying to Glynnis, you know, now we've got radiocarbon dating. And she's like, yes, but it's not that accurate, right? It's plus and minus. And so we, by reading what we're saying, the reader can learn what the kids can't tell them. And I think it works really well. The audience, we're hoping we reach a whole new audience. I'm hoping that we get, on the one hand, Younger. kids and adults, like, say, age 7 to 17, who prefer graphic novels to, you know, regular books, which is fine. And they, even the ones who can't read, can play, you know, like, Where's Waldo? How many times does Eric show up? And then I think we're hoping for an older audience, again, who might not like to read that much, but grew up with graphic novels and graphic versions. So we're hoping we reach them as well. And I think we will. There was already a comment that I saw on Twitter slash X where somebody said, I could never make it through Cline's original book, but the graphic version, oh my God, I read it in an afternoon. It's so great. And I'm thinking on the one hand, you know, I can hear you, right? But on the other, I'm like, great. That was a target audience that we were trying for. And to my mind, whether you read the original or look at the graphic version or listen to the audible, as long as you're learning about the late Bronze Age and now the early Iron Age, I'm happy because that means you're learning about my favorite period of history. Now, whether there's going to be a graphic adaptation of after 1177, I do not know yet. It will depend on the sales of the first graphic version, which just came out, but also on whether Glynnis is willing to devote another couple of years of her life to this, because I think once she began, I think it took her two and a half years to do this. I know she was working on it from 2020. So overall, it was four years. So we need to see if Glynnis is willing to do the sequel if it comes out. But I'm so excited. And I really do hope that even if people have the original book, that they also get the graphic version. And I'm seeing a lot of people saying, I bought this for my grandson or my granddaughter, but I'm going to read it first before I give it to them. I'm like, yes, go for it.

Megan: Absolutely. We have the original and also the revised 1177. And when I saw the graphic novel come out, I'm a huge fan of graphic novels anyway. I immediately picked a copy up and it is really, I mean, it's beautifully drawn. You can really tell that Glenys has an archaeological experience. It's incredibly detailed. And it's just it's very lively. It's wonderfully done. So, yes, if people do have a copy, a prose copy of 1177, I absolutely recommend picking up the graphic novel as well, because you get a whole new experience.

Dr. Eric Cline: I'm glad to hear you say that. And you also get a lot more jokes. Glynis is an amazing sense of humor. And there's like a joke on almost every page. Some of them are in jokes that you only get if you're an archaeologist, but others, I mean, there's one shot where there's a shepherd on Crete named Agyptios, the Egyptian, and he's standing amongst his sheep, and he's like, how did I get here? This is not my beautiful home. I'm like, tucking heads, yes. You know, there are lines in there. So lots of jokes, and I hope people will enjoy it.

Megan: I do too. Now we have two questions from various audience members before we finish up. our interview for the day. So, Jay from the Digital Hammurabi patron says, which civilizational collapse had the biggest impact on subsequent world history? Was it the late Bronze Age collapse or is there another contender?

Dr. Eric Cline: Well, this is an excellent question. In fact, I taught a class about a year ago called Collapse and Resilience in the Ancient World. Before the sequel was out, we actually went through the penultimate draft version, and I changed a fair amount because of what the students came up with. But we looked at the fall of the Roman Empire, we looked at the collapse of the Maya, the collapse of Harappan civilization, and so on. And I would say, and this is just my personal opinion, in terms of a civilizational collapse that had the biggest impact on subsequent world history, two contenders. One would be the fall of the Roman Empire, and the other is the late Bronze Age collapse. And indeed, in my lectures, I start out saying that and saying that those are the only two, I think, that are comparable. And, you know, most people have heard of the fall of Rome, but most people have also not heard about the late Bronze Age collapse. But in terms of impact on subsequent world history, I would argue those are the two biggest, right? And we've already seen alphabet, iron, and eventually democracy and so on from the late Bronze Age collapse. But the collapse of the Roman Empire also, of course, had a huge impact. So I would put those as the two top contenders. The other ones, the fall of the Maya, yes, huge locally, but not subsequent world history. And same with Harappan in the Indus Valley. Yes, local, but not everybody else. But definitely Roman and the Late Bronze Age collapse. Though admittedly, Late Bronze Age is limited to the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. But still, impactful on later world history? Yes.

Megan: Thank you. And a question from Aram, how do you structure all your sources and other materials when you're researching and then writing?

Dr. Eric Cline: So research, how do I structure all the sources and other materials? Well, as an archaeologist and an ancient historian, what I usually do is I want three independent sources. of evidence before I'll believe that anything happened, right? Call me a skeptic. So if we have something like, oh, let's just say a mention in the Hebrew Bible and a similar mention in a Neo-Assyrian inscription or a Neo-Babylonian inscription, and we've got archaeology, to back it up, then I'll say, OK, that's great. That's fine. I'll believe that. So very frequently in my works, I will say, we know this and we know it from these. And in others, I'll say, according to the account in the Hebrew Bible, but we don't have verification from anywhere else. It doesn't mean it didn't happen. It just means we can't verify. Trust, but verify, I think was the saying. And so I look at all those, but I also, I work from the raw material. I work from the sources. So when I was doing, after 1177, the sequel, the very first thing I read was all of the Neo-Assyrian inscriptions that Kurt Grayson had published. And I started with the original inscriptions. I said, okay, what do the Neo-Assyrians say that they did? And then once I had what I thought were the most interesting parts, I then said, okay, is there any corroboration for this? Is there any archeology that backed it up? So I tend to work from, again, as an archeologist and ancient historian, I work from the actual artifacts and original sources. And then only later, and this is what I did with the sequel, when I made up my mind as to what I think happened, I then said, OK, let me go see what everybody else thinks and said. And then I'm like, oh, whoa, Karen Radner says this. OK, maybe I need to rethink my position. And that's when I pull everybody else in. So that's kind of how I'm working. And I'm doing The exact same. I actually just began, and very few people know this, but I am going to do a trilogy. I'm working on the third book in the unintended trilogy, and this will go from the early 8th century, where the sequel left off, and go down through the death of Alexander the Great, so the next 400 years. And I wanted originally to call it after 1177, but Rob said no. So it will have a number though. It's going to be 776 BC. But then the subtitle is The Clashing of Civilizations, because we have the Persian Wars between Persia and Greece. We've got the Peloponnesian Wars. We've got all this. But it's also the time period of the Axial Age. It's a fascinating period. And so I'm going to continue the story. And what have I done? I am going right through, right now, I'm going through the same source material. The rest of the Neo-Assyrian inscriptions, beginning where I left off, and the Neo-Babylonian inscriptions by Grant Frame and various other people. And that's what I'm going to start with again, because it worked for me before. I'm going to start with the source material in their own words and go from there. So I'm excited about the next project. And I really do think that if you tell the story properly, that it becomes a narrative. It becomes very much creative work. It really is just the facts, ma'am. I don't make anything up. There's no fiction. In fact, some people say it's very dry what I do. I'm like, it doesn't matter to me if it's dry, as long as it's interesting. I don't know if you can be dry and interesting, but there is no need to make anything up, right? You don't have to hypothesize. It's all there. And I think the story from the ancient world is fascinating and deserves to be told in a proper manner, which is what I try to do.

Megan: I think you do an excellent job. And I have to say, I think that the stories that you tell in 1177 BC and after 1177 are not in the least bit dry. They're fascinating and full of intrigue and people, people being people, which is really all history is. And I find people endlessly fascinating. So You do a wonderful job and I'm very excited that there's going to be another one. So thank you for telling us.

Dr. Eric Cline: Now I know what I'll be doing the next, you know, four or five years, if not more. It's always good to have a plan. Always good to have a plan and know what you're going to do. But yeah, and my rule of thumb, I would just If I find something interesting, I think others will find it interesting. If I find something boring, it's going to be boring. So I tend to only talk about the most important and interesting things. And the nitty gritty details down in the weeds, we can leave that for the scholars. And my footnotes and bibliography are thorough enough that if anybody wants to go down into the weeds and read the scholarly reports, they're able to do so.

Megan: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Cline, for sharing your time and your knowledge and expertise and for writing such wonderful books. It's been a pleasure talking to you again.

Dr. Eric Cline: Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure to be on again. And let's make an appointment for five or six years from now. We'll talk about the sequel to the sequel.

Megan: I will see you then. Audience, thank you all for watching and listening. Have a wonderful afternoon, evening, whatever it is for your time zone. And we'll see you next time. 

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