332. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Before The Collapse (Ep 1)

13:44William:No, I mean, it's a huge battle, a battle of Kadesh, 1274 or so. What it actually ends in is a peace treaty. It's a sort of a stalemate. 15 years, they wrangle over it. Then there's a treaty in about 1259.

13:59Anita:And we know they had a treaty because the treaty survives. I mean, things that you just think it would be impossible that they would last for thousands of years. People have found them, they've touched them, they've read them, they've deciphered them.

14:10William:No, it's extraordinary. And one of the things that it shows is this early idea of the balance of powers. So what they do is they split the Levant between them. And it pretty much sticks after that, fighting over it. What, spheres of influence, dare I say? Spheres of influence. Blimey, yeah. And it stays for about 100 years, maybe.

14:28Josephine Quinn:And another very familiar thing you seem to be having at this time, which perhaps would surprise people, is you have what looks like a kind of civil service. You have professional teams of scribes. The reason we know all this, we've been talking about these documents, is that they're on clay, which when a thing gets burnt down, actually solidifies. Well, it hardens. Yeah, it does the opposite of what you burn a library. It just goes up to smoke. But with clay, it's there forever if you burn it. And this seems to be a key to this period. These are little palace-based economies, these city-states, with little teams of scribes all communicating to each other in Akkadian, is it?

15:01Josephine Quinn:Is that the diplomatic language?

15:02William:It depends where you are. So the diplomatic language that these great kings write to each other in is Akkadian.

15:08Anita:The same Akkadian as Sargon of Akkad, is it?

15:10William:Exactly, exactly. This is Babylonian.

15:13Anita:So a quick boring thing that I always bring up any time anyone says Akkad is Eheduana, which is his daughter, apparently the first named author in human history. Don't make that face, Joe. I'm going to play poker with you, Joe. Joe has got such a poker face. I just know.

15:28William:So you're going to tell me, no. Well, the thing is, we don't know. Enheduanna existed. Yeah. She was a priestess. The idea that she was a great author, the work that's attributed to her - Are you suggesting that Alita is exaggerating - The role of a woman?

15:44Josephine Quinn:Of kick-ass women? She would never do that, ever. No. She wouldn't be the only one.

15:48William:And I hate it. I'm such a boring academic. I'm so sceptical. I would say we can't prove it. It's not, I'd love it to be true.

15:55Anita:No, be like that, Jo, that's fine. But we can't prove it. Yeah, I'll tell you what, but we are playing poker because your face is a giveaway. Okay, so moving along. I'm a terrible poker player. Talk a little bit more about these palace economies because I want to know how centralised the control is.

16:09William:So, I mean, it's a really good question because I think until maybe a generation ago, people would have said these are completely palace-based. You know, 100%, these are centralised, directed economies. and what's really been coming out of the more recent readings of the tablets. And of course, there aren't that many people who can read these thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. There's new things coming out all the time. And I would say right now what it looks like is that there's a lot of palatio-centric, can we call it? Most people in these big empires owe time, labor to the palace, which means that the palace therefore controls quite a lot of agriculture, crafts, production, that kind of thing.

16:52William:But we also can see evidence of independent landowners, including kind of religious organisations. We also can see the first references to the Damos, the people, the word that becomes demos, that gives us democracy. These groups called the Damos can be independent landowners.

17:14Josephine Quinn:So if you're a peasant with your olive trees 20 miles out of Mycenae, let's say, are you selling only to Mycenae? And is it the palace which is getting all the goodies?

17:25William:You may well be. It's not certain that you would be. You may well have to send a certain amount to the palace. If you're a craftsperson, the palace may give you some things they've had in to kind of use, but not all of it, probably.

17:38Josephine Quinn:We're talking today from Jaipur at the Jaipur Literature Festival. And in the 18th century, this was very much what was going on in places like Jaipur and the Red Fort in Delhi. The artisans producing all those beautiful things that you see in exhibitions of the Rajputs or the great moguls are palace-based artisans. The manuscripts are in one room, next door is all the guys doing the stuff in copper or excavating rock crystal or whatever it is.

18:02William:There was a huge amount of that. But there's other stuff going on as well. It's just beginning to appear. Right.

18:08Anita:So with the other stuff, I mean, are there small estates that are given the oxygen to exist? And I mean, how important are they and what are they doing?

18:15William:We don't know that much about them. We know they exist. We also know, by the way, that traders are independent or can be independent. Again, there's a lot of palace based trade, palace directed trade. It's also a lot of independent trade. So there's a kind of symbiosis going on between these great kings and these traders and farmers and so on who are working partly with them. And some of them, maybe a lot of them, working partly independently as well. But then there are a lot of people who don't get any choice in the system, who are just indentured, who are enslaved and so on. And there's going to be quite a lot of friction in a society like this.

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20:35Josephine Quinn:Welcome back, Joe. So we talked before about all these different palaces sitting around different ports in the Mediterranean, all sort of sending boats to each other and these floating department stores full of amber and lapis going from east to west, west to east and all that. Tell us about the cultural world. Are they intermarrying? Have they all got the same gods? How are they interacting? I mean, Massini's a long way from Egypt, for example.

20:59William:Right. So there's different kinds of integration, not even interactions, integrate. So you have royal marriages, you know, you have Hittite princesses marrying the pharaoh, you've got Cypriot kings kind of arranging marriages, all that kind of thing. But you've also got kings asking for specialists from each other and in kind of local knowledges. You get a letter at Amarna asking for a specialist in the interpretation of the omens given by vultures. People are interested in the knowledges and the kind of cultural practices of other people. You also get, one of the things I love is that the original Greek word for wine, it's actually winou.

21:45William:It comes from winou, which is a Semitic word. So you can begin to see the vocabulary that's reflecting the kinds of things.

21:50Josephine Quinn:So when we call someone a whino today, we're speaking West Semitic, are we? That's even very sophisticated.

21:57Anita:But Willie mentioned gods. And, you know, how do the gods cross borders? And do they transform once they've crossed a border?

22:03William:Yeah, so this is really fun. So you get it in two ways. You get the ways people relate to the gods. So this is in ancient Greece, for instance. This is the period, late Bronze Age, when people start burning sacrifices. So the smoke can waft up to the gods or pouring libations on the ground. So it can go down to the gods of the underworld. Totally leavened time. Is that the idea of libation?

22:27Josephine Quinn:It's going down to the gods? I always see them. I'm thinking, wasting all this good wine. My Scottish self is outraged at the thought.

22:36William:I think they keep back quite a bit for themselves as well. They certainly keep all the meat from the smoke sacrifices. But then you get the gods as well. And what happens is sometimes you get wholesale adoptions of gods. I mean, ISIS, Egyptian ISIS, very popular in the Levant and so on. Sometimes on a different name.

22:54Josephine Quinn:I remember sending you a picture a couple of months ago. I went to the Egyptian Museum in Turin and there was something which was extraordinary, which really took me back because it was an Egyptian picture of a Canaanite goddess. And she was this naked woman standing on a lion, which again is what we associate here in India with Durga. And there's a whole world of goddesses on lions that moves from here eastwards into India. But what I was intrigued by is that this world of Canaanite gods, I hadn't taken in that there was this whole world, which is obviously impacting on how early Israelite ideas of God, ideas of Yahweh.

23:36Josephine Quinn:And I spent Christmas actually reading these books about early Canaanite religion, having asked you for a reading list. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this idea is some scholars think that Yahweh had a goddess attached to him, that the god that we call God in Christianity.

23:54Anita:What, you're saying there's a Mrs. Yahweh?

23:56Josephine Quinn:Mrs. Yahweh. This is controversial stuff, but some scholars do think this, don't they?

24:01William:There's definite indications of that in the inscriptions. very early inscriptions where I think this happens in a lot of religions that sort of become monotheistic. You actually realize in the early stages, this happens in Persian religion to that you actually have a whole set of gods and one of them becomes kind of our god and that becomes the important one.

24:24Josephine Quinn:And true also of the way that the Canaanite gods who end up being regarded as the sort of enemy gods by the Israelites, become our devils. So Lucifer starts off as an astral deity, and Beelzebub, who's another figure in the Old Testament that reappears in the New Testament, the Lord of the Flies, is a version of Baal, a localized version of Baal, who is the main Canaanite storm god. Is that right?

24:50William:Yes, exactly. Yeah.

24:51Josephine Quinn:And they are literally demonized. They're turned into demons from gods.

24:55William:Exactly, exactly. And these kind of movements happen all the time. So there's a wonderful text by a guy called Philo of Byblos. He's writing in the Roman period, but he says he's talking about ancient Phoenician myths. There's a lot of overlap with Ugaritic things, which really are Bronze Age. So it looks pretty good. And he says, first of all, he says, oh, well, of course, this Levantine religion, this Phoenician religion, as he calls it, it's got a lot of connections with Egypt, comes from Egypt. But then he tells these stories about how the god El, the king of the Canaanite, Phoenician, king of the gods, gives cities in the Levant.

25:32William:He gives one to Baltus, who's a Levantine goddess. He gives another one to Poseidon, who's a Greek god. Then he gives Athens to Athena. And it's like, hang on.

25:43Josephine Quinn:And he is very much around El because in two ways. A, he becomes synonymous with Yahweh in some of the early texts. And you find the Psalms and some of the early bits of the Bible using the word El as the form of God. And it lives on in no less in names we have today, like my son's name, Samuel.

26:03Anita:Yes. Oh, right, El. Yes, yes, yes. Gosh, I never thought of that. It's El. It's like the king of the gods, the gods. So is it all oral tradition? Or is there, I mean, how much literacy is there? Do people write stuff down and do people read the stuff that they write down?

26:16William:See, this is one of the really interesting things. If you look at the really big empires, the top layer, Egypt, Hittites and so on, a lot of the literacy is kept in the palaces. It's professional scribes. It's used for administration and so on. The smaller societies you come down to, the less control you've got, the less conservative they are. So Ugarit, for instance, we have all the palace based stuff. We also have priests archives. We also have traders archives, as you said.

26:43Josephine Quinn:I should put in here that Joe Quinn, our wonderful guest today, is one of the few people in the world that reads Ugaritic. I think it's a very splendid thing to be able to do.

26:54William:It's not a hugely useful life skill these days. But you can read.

26:58Josephine Quinn:Does anyone else in Europe read Ugaritic? I mean, is there a whole world of Ugaritic scholars? Do you all go on holiday together and have conferences?

27:07William:You know, we could have a WhatsApp group.

27:09Anita:The conferences are so small they take place in the elevator. I mean, with Ugarit, I mean, does it look very different? Does it sound very different? Does it, you know, is it just completely impossible for people to understand? Or is it like, you know, Hindi and Urdu, for example, that there's, you know, a great deal of crossover?

27:28William:So what's brilliant is there's a huge amount of crossover. So Ugaritic is very closely related to Phoenician dialects, very closely related to Hebrew. Old Hebrew, yeah. Yeah, these are all closely related. It's not too far from Akkadian, not mutually comprehensible, but it doesn't take long to learn if you know one of them. But what they write it down in, actually, it's very unusual to write down your local language in a city. You write down Akkadian, you speak the local language. What they do is they do start writing it down and they write it down in an alphabet, which is a very Levantine thing, another thing that goes from east to west.

28:05Josephine Quinn:And Ugarit is an important part of that story, isn't it?

28:07William:Well, except it's a bit of a strange dead end, because what the people of Ugarit do is they write their alphabet not in the scripts that the Phoenicians use that then becomes Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, that kind of thing. They write it in cuneiform. They write it in the Akkadian script, not the Akkadian language, but the Akkadian script. So this is this very grand kind of international writing system, and they use it to write the alphabet. And this is, I mean, it's extraordinary. They take a technology from one place to do stuff from a very global international technology to this completely local thing.

28:47William:This phenomenon of glocalization, where alongside this globalization, all these kind of shared international tastes and so on, you get alongside it, but kind of in reaction to it as well. This new focus on the local and the sort of pride in local identity and local achievements and so on. That's what's going on with the Ugaritic alphabet.

29:08Josephine Quinn:When I grew up, I had a very clear idea in my head that sort of, you know, there were the Phoenicians who are roughly where Lebanon is. And that they're different from the Canaanites who are roughly where Israel-Palestine is. And that these are different things. But these worlds, you think, are actually, I mean, particularly the East Levantine coast, despite being different city-states, is one cultural unity.

29:33William:I wouldn't say a unity. I'd say more of a spectrum. A spectrum. Very good. For each city-state.

29:40Josephine Quinn:Like Renaissance Italy?

29:41William:Yeah, much more like that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then the thing about Canaanites and Phoenicians is that these are external labels. We use pretty vaguely. Sometimes Canaanite means something like brigand. Other times it's a geographical label for the southern Levant. Other times it's used for the land that Egypt controls. And similarly for Phoenicians, sometimes it just seems to mean sailors. Sailors speak a different language. other times it's used of places that we wouldn't consider part of like people speaking aramaic and so on um other times it's used of these city states again and then there's become the scholarly convention where the canaanites come first and then you get the phoenicians and there's no reason to think that's an ancient idea at all so and i think in all this kind of labeling you sort of

30:32Anita:lose those those city states that are the heart of it but what you seem to be talking about and And now I'm worried we're doing the wrong thing. Because you're talking about something that is so, like lace, it's all sort of interconnected. And there are branches that overlap and they weave into each other. I mean, it sounds like it's a pretty good deal. I mean, was it stable? Because we are talking about a collapse after all. I mean, it all sounds lovely.

30:56William:One of the problems is the interconnection itself. It's all very well to have lots of connections and draw on lots of other people and resources and so on. When you start depending on them, when you stop being self-sufficient, that becomes a problem. It's fine as long as everything stays the same. But if you get disruption, that's an issue.

31:18Josephine Quinn:Surely, let's just say you're sitting in my seat and you've got the locals producing all your grain and your grapes and your olives. It doesn't terribly matter if you don't get lapis coming in from Badakshan or if the amber for the Baltic doesn't turn up. That's not going to be the end of the world.

31:34Anita:If you pay for your grain with lapis, you know.

31:38William:Or if you need bronze, you need that copper from Cyprus. You need the tin from Afghanistan or Cornwall.

31:46Josephine Quinn:That's literally where the only two places tin come from.

31:48William:They're the only two substantial sources. So where were the big disruptions? I mean, you said they were warning signs. I'm calling them what you want. They're different kinds of things. So you can have climate disruption. There seem to be periods of drought. That's tricky for the system. You can have wars. sometimes wars so far away that we don't even hear about them but the tin gets cut off from one direction or another there are very mysterious wars in continental europe in this period there seems to be a lot of disruption kind of iran central asia we don't know the details but you can see people looking for new places to get their metals from that's the kind of thing that doesn't work in a super interconnected system because this is what eric klein has written about so

32:29Josephine Quinn:wonderfully in his book 1177 which i again was part of my christmas reading i had i again strongly recommend it we're having eric klein for some episodes in this series to come and we he will be telling us about the actual collapse but before the collapse just to set this scene of of this world which is about to fall this this very modern sounding world where you've got ships going back because the fords bringing goodies from abroad and and everyone's happy one question i want to ask is if you're a peasant in this world, if you are that man with the olive tree outside Mycenae, or it's equivalent in Ugarit or in Canaan, are you happy with all these fancy palaces taking all your stuff?

33:05Anita:I love that question. Are they happy? Are they happy?

33:10William:I don't think they're happy at all because they owe not just their farming labor, but in a lot of cases, they're going to have to give labor to build these palaces, the Cyclopean walls. Someone has to move those walls. They didn't need to be that big. It looks great, but somebody had to move those stones. So I think this is the other problem. It's not just the interconnectedness of the kind of global system we've been talking about. It's also, in a way, the over-interconnectedness of the local system, that over-hierarchized system. So one of those warning signs is you get these destructions by fire.

33:48William:You don't really know what's going on. They're not mentioned in the tablets and so on. Now, is this pirates? Is it brigands? Is it arson? Is it arson? Exactly.

33:57Anita:If you're somebody who's been lugging great chunks of rock and suddenly there's scarcity and you're the first one not to have dinner, of course you might torch the bloody thing. Right.

34:07Josephine Quinn:And some of these destruction lairs do not have bronze arrows heads connected with them. I mean, some, like Ugarit, clearly do have attacks. And we know that someone has come from a boat.

34:17William:Even have messages. People saying, please help.

34:20Josephine Quinn:Exactly. All this will be coming in Eric Klein's episodes in this series, in two or three episodes. But there are thick destruction layers in many cities. There's also, I think I'm right in saying, that there is signs of people rebuilding fortifications just before this collapse. That there's a sign that people are anxious.

34:39William:Yeah, there's rebuilding of fortifications. There are also places where a lot of the damage is focused on the palace, the kind of upper town, not the lower town and so on. So this is really, if you'll talk about the collapse of civilization, they don't mean everybody's civilization. In fact, they mean what looks like civilization to us, right? The palaces, writing, that kind of thing. Eric Klein will tell you all about this. There's a lot of destruction goes on, a lot of depopulation. But as with kind of the Black Death and the medieval period, there's an argument to be made that for the people who are left at the end of it, life is actually better without those kings.

35:18Anita:Just wanted to remind people, this is the age of Troy, isn't it? How sophisticated was warfare? Do we know? I mean, super sophisticated.

35:25William:So this is the height of bronze warfare in the Bronze Age. You've got siege warfare. You've got these amazing fortifications they're against. You've got bronze weapons. You know, this is, it's the height. It's also the last great moment of bronze. This is another thing that goes. Iron takes over after this. In a terrible way, I want to say it's going to be beautiful warfare. fed this is the flashing swords and so on the chariots the all that kind of stuff this is its greatest moment when it's actually on the brink of oblivion is the i i always as a child was very

36:00Josephine Quinn:interested as a young i was very keen sort of nerdy young archaeologist going around the hill forts in scotland where i grew up and i always had this idea that if you had a bronze sword and someone came along with iron that your salt your sword would just shatter in front of paper scissors exactly that exactly that is that the sort of thing that's going on are we thinking of of new peoples turning up with iron and threatening these peoples that have only got bronze or is that

36:24William:not more that iron is much easier to make so it's the bronze it's great but you need that tin from very far away you need a good very reliable source of copper you need people who know how to make it iron is hard too but it's a kind of one-off trick so iron is a super super luxury metal in the Bronze Age. Only the Hittites know how to make it.

36:46Josephine Quinn:The Hittites are the first guys to get hold of this. So no wonder that they're really giving a run to the Egyptians.

36:52Anita:So far, we've been quite landlobby about this, right? Okay, so there are fortifications going up, there are people throwing things at fortifications. But there is also a danger in the water, isn't there? I mean, the seas are not safe at this time. Can we just spend a, I mean, there be pirates? I mean, what are we talking about here? Well, who are the Sea Peoples?

37:12William:There certainly are pirates. We know that.

37:15Josephine Quinn:We got into all this when you last came on, when we were doing Philistines in Gaza.

37:19William:Even aside from that, we know there are pirates. So these letters are being exchanged, particularly at Ugarit. They're talking about these dangers from the sea.

37:29Josephine Quinn:But even in Pylos, there's a thing saying there's the watchers of the sea.

37:33Anita:Do you have to say where Pylos is in the modern?

37:35Josephine Quinn:Pylos is a very nice place for a holiday. We had a family holiday in Pylos, Okay, that doesn't help. Which is in the Peloponnese. Can I just say that helps no one but the Dalrymples? That's a considerable constituency. Bay of Navarino. Thank you. It's a very nice beach area in the Peloponnese, southern Greece. Right. And there's a very nice palace there associated in legend with King Nestle.

37:57Anita:Oh, right.

37:57Josephine Quinn:And there's a reference here, which is so, isn't it the name of a Genesis song too? Watchers of the Sea. I remember early on, all this stuff.

38:06William:But this is a clue as to just how much trade is going on. I mean, trade attracts pirates. If you don't have a big international interconnected world, there's no point in being a pirate. It's not a lucrative occupation. Too much time on your hands.

38:22Anita:It's a bit boring, bobbing about. What are you really talking about? I mean, it seems to me a really kind of sophisticated complicated world of wealth that is ultimately like more fragile than anyone at the time could have known but we look back and go my goodness you know like how's the cards kind of stuff it's two

38:42William:things it's the interconnections also the problem of empires big states they are conservative they are inherently conservative they need to keep doing what works they're too big to like a juggernaut going forward too big to change as they can't react quickly when things go wrong If they're also interdependent on each other, it's a total disaster. The House of Cards is absolutely collapsed everywhere. The thing is, you say they couldn't have known, and that's probably true. We can know this now. Right. It would be amazing if any politician had ever really looked at history and said, oh, maybe there's a lesson there.

39:20Anita:It doesn't happen as much as you'd like, really, I think, in all periods of history.

39:24Josephine Quinn:So if you're a trader, our chap, we have one name, don't we? One wonderful merchant, Altenu. If you're Altenu and you're sitting in Ugarit, you've got your fleets and you're doing all this to-ing and fro-ing, does he have premonitions that the whole thing's about to give way and disappear off the face of the earth?

39:46William:Not as much as we do now, I think. But he would have seen, he would have had a very successful career, very successful operation. He might have seen some smoke on the horizon, a burning village. He might have a messenger coming to say, oh, we've lost one of your ships, the pirates. But it would have looked like these are just little bits and pieces we can cope. He wouldn't, I think, have seen how interconnected the problems were. He would have had no idea that it was all about to end.

40:15Anita:Yeah, it's the lack of having, you know, the vista of a big picture. Listen, it's so interesting. You've set us up so beautifully for this series. And, Joey, it's always such a fabulous pleasure to have you on. Next time we've got a bit of a treat.

40:27Josephine Quinn:We have. We've got bad Stephen Fry. We've got bad Stephen Fry on.

40:31Anita:And he's going to be talking to us about Troy and Mycenae. So, I mean, do stay with this series. Which is part of this story. It is very much part of this story. So if you don't want to wait and you want a bit of Fry right now, you don't have to wait. All you need to do is go to EmpirePodUK.com. that's empirepoduk.com become a member of our club because it means you get everything all in one go in these mini-series. So that's what you need to do for less than a price of coffee. Till the next time we meet then it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon.

40:57Josephine Quinn:And goodbye from me, William Durumpur.

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