335. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Solving The Mystery of The Collapse (Ep 4)

15:37Professor Eric Cline:Wow, demanding. You want textual evidence too.

15:40Anita:I mean, I know you've been generous, but yes.

15:43Professor Eric Cline:Well, you are in luck because yes, we have that too. We do. We have the text written on the clay tablets. And different people, different societies. We have Hittite kings and Hittite queens mentioning food shortages. Send grain. It's a matter of life and death. We now have relatively, well, they're not new tablets, they're old tablets, but they have been newly translated and deciphered. They were just found at the site of Ugarit a couple of decades ago on the coast of what is now northern Syria. The French have been excavating at Ugarit since the 1920s or so. I'm proud to have spent a night in a sleeping bag in a trench at Ugarit in my 20s.

16:28Professor Eric Cline:I am dutifully envious of you.

16:31Anita:His host of sleeping bag stories. It's a family show. So we might do a compilation near Christmas, but there are a few.

16:40Professor Eric Cline:Okay. Well, you will be happy to know that in 2016, they published a new set of letters. And one of them, the king of Ugarit says that there is a famine in their city and is asking the Egyptian pharaoh for grain. And the Egyptian pharaoh, we know, actually, he sends some grain, but he sends 7 ,000 dried fish and textiles. The dried fish, I can see that would help the famine. I'm not sure where the textiles come in, but maybe their sleeping bags were not warm enough. Who knows? I don't know.

17:16Anita:Or let them eat coats kind of thing. I mean, look, if everybody is short of food and they depend on each other, then, I mean, it's, as you said, with the banking crisis. If you depend on your neighbors to export food to you to make up any shortfalls, but nobody's got anything, that's a desperate, desperate situation to be in.

17:36Professor Eric Cline:Yeah, if you can't turn to your neighbor for help because they don't have anything. In fact, in terms of knowing whether they were collapsing, I actually think that that would have given them some idea that things were not going well. But the Egyptians also seem to have had some idea because there is a study that was published a couple of years ago showing that the Egyptians were crossbreeding their cattle at that time. And they were taking their usual cattle and crossbreeding with zebu or zebu cattle. That's what we get in India, the humped cattle. Yeah, absolutely. And they're able to survive in much more arid conditions.

18:16Professor Eric Cline:So, the Egyptians are doing this, and it looks like they were over-planting, if I can use that term, some of the areas that they were in control of in Canaan at the time, which means that they were trying to get enough grain for themselves and for the other people. What's interesting is they are shipping grain not only to their friends, but also to some of their erstwhile enemies. So, you know, everybody in a time of need, okay, fine, we'll help you out here. We'll go to war later, but for now, here's some grain. Who do they ship them to? Which enemies? Well, like the Hittites. I mean, they're on and off again.

18:57Professor Eric Cline:And at this time, as we see, for example, in the Amarna letters from the 14th century BC, there are a bunch of little proxy wars that are being fought in Canaan, basically on behalf of the Egyptians and the Hittites. That's going to break out, of course, in a full-scale war by the time of the Battle of Kadesh, 1279, 1274. But for right now, we've got proxy wars going on. The Battle of Kadesh is one of the great set pieces in your book. It's an ambush, isn't it? The Egyptians get ambushed. They get ambushed, and it's disinformation. It's one of the first examples where the Hittites send out two spies knowing they're going to be captured and have told them, And by the way, we're leaving.

19:41Professor Eric Cline:And so when the Egyptians capture the spies, they say, yeah, the Hentai's have gone back up to Anatolia, when in fact they were still right there behind Kadesh. And yeah. Anyway, so we've got people that are, you know, sometimes erstwhile enemies, but also helping themselves out.

19:58Anita:But are they hungry? I mean, are you getting the sense that, you know, things are so desperate that people are, you know, sort of skin and bone on the streets and, you know, the civil unrest that goes with that? Do you get all of that?

20:08Professor Eric Cline:We don't get that per se like that. And you wonder how much is exaggeration. I mean, we did have previously in the previous publications, we had a letter, one of the firms in Ugarit had a branch office further inland in Syria in the site of Imar. And the representative in Imar says there's a famine here. If you don't send food, everyone's going to starve. So we had known about that already. But, you know, you chalk that up as that's just some guy, you know, embellishing and exaggerating. But now we have this newly published letter in Ugarit itself saying, yeah, we've got famine here as well. And there's a couple other letters again in Ugarit because we have at least three different archives there from private merchants that were also working with the palace.

21:00Professor Eric Cline:And they're saying, your citizens are going to die if you don't feed us.

21:04William:And then we come to the original cause, in a sense, the one that was still being touted when you were at college, the Sea Peoples, which is a modern construction. The Egyptians don't talk about the Sea Peoples as such. They give individual names, don't they, to various groups, some of whom seem to come by sea. Is that right?

21:24Professor Eric Cline:Yes, absolutely. It's our name for them, the Sea Peoples. Actually, it was some of the early French Egyptologists that made it up. The Egyptians themselves tell us the exact names for the nine different groups that come in two waves. First wave comes in 1207 BC during the reign of Mernepta. And then the second wave comes in. I feel I should now down a shot of vodka at this point. There you go. Right. Well, get that ready because the second wave comes in the time of Ramses III. There you go. There you go. And that is 1177. So you can now know where the title comes from.

22:11William:That's Medinet Habu, this wonderful inscription, which has a sort of massive picture of the pharaoh, even the macro picture. There's little ones too, aren't there? But there's one massive picture of him sort of taking people by the scruff of their necks and sort of dashing them somewhere.

22:28Professor Eric Cline:Always, always. But we also have a nice picture of the naval battle that is fought, because in that second invasion in 1177, the pharaoh, again, this is if we can believe what he says, but I think it's pretty believable. They come by land and by sea, right? It's kind of like Paul Revere, you know, one if by land, two if by sea. But they come by both. There's a land battle and a naval battle, which is probably fought in the Nile Delta. But anyway, Ramses and Mernepta both tell us the names. So we've got like the Peleset, the Tajekar, the Shekhalis, the Denian, the Weshesh. And we've been playing linguistic games for 100 years, trying to figure out who these people are.

23:12William:I've read various articles of yours, Eric, where you go into some detail about these people, even more than you do in the book. Do you want to give us a quick summary of where you think these guys come from? Because it's a good game, this. This is another good, tricky game.

23:27Professor Eric Cline:Yes, all right. And it is just a game. It's a guessing game. But for instance, the Shekalesh, what I usually tell my audience when I'm lecturing is, can you name me another place in the Mediterranean, and I'll give you a hint, Western Mediterranean, that sounds a lot like Shekalesh, like who has the same consonants that might be in there? I know the answer, Anita, so you're the contestant of this one.

23:51Anita:Okay.

23:53Professor Eric Cline:Let me add in another because this will help you. There's another group called the Shardana or the Sherden. Where is the place near that sounds like Shardana?

24:04Anita:Just tell the class, Eric.

24:05Professor Eric Cline:Okay. Okay. Oh, man. Okay.

24:08Anita:Go on.

24:08Professor Eric Cline:Shardana, Sardinia.

24:10Anita:Sardinia. Right. He said she's Shardana. Okay.

24:13Professor Eric Cline:Shekalesh or Sickles, Sicily.

24:16Anita:Oh.

24:17Professor Eric Cline:And Pelissette, Philistines, Palestine.

24:19Anita:Palestine. time. Well, they came up with our Joe Quinn episode.

24:22William:We did a Gaza series, Eric, where we had a big Pellicet presence with Joe.

24:27Professor Eric Cline:Okay, good. But the question is, did they come from there or did they go there after they lost? So, which way did they go? The early French Egyptologists thought that the Sea Peoples went to the Western Mediterranean and settled there after they were beaten by the Egyptians and then gave their names there. Nowadays, many, including myself, reverse that and say, No, they came from the Western Mediterranean and came to Egypt. But then there are two more, which I'll just mention, the Denian and the Equish. And the Denian, could they be Homer's Danaans? Oh, that'd be fun. The Equish, could they be Homer's Achaeans?

25:06Professor Eric Cline:And they don't come at the same time. One comes in the first wave and one comes in the second wave. So do we have groups of Mycenaeans in both waves with two names, just like Homer has two names for them? So we may have them as well.

25:22William:In that inscription that we talked about at Medinet Habu and this picture, on the side of the picture, there's a crucial clue, isn't there? You've got, as well as all this sea battle-y stuff going on, perhaps in the Nile Delta, you've got pictures of wagons filled with men, women, and children. You compare that to the Okies and Grapes of Wroth, these guys leaving a drought and sort of heading off looking for peaches to pick in California. This is the kind of world we're talking.

25:50Professor Eric Cline:Yes, exactly. They're migrating. These are not warriors just coming in and conducting a raid and then going back home with loot. These are people, and as you say, we can see it in Ramses III, on the wall of Medinet Habu. We've got the women, we have the children, we have the ox carts, we have the Samsonite luggage. They are moving. And yes, I do say it's probably comparable to the Dust Bowl, 1930s United States, moving out of Oklahoma, heading for California. And I think that's the case here. They're fleeing the drought. They're trying to move to a better place.

26:32Anita:Okay, but fleeing, I mean, that sort of sounds very, very passive. But sometimes these migrations through necessity, as you're describing them, they lead to a great deal of destruction. I mean, you yourself have excavated at Megiddo. Anyone who has watched The Omen, since you like a popular reference, will know Megiddo is quite important. The site of Armageddon, if you read a Bible and care about that more than popular culture. So, I mean, what does archaeology actually show about, the transitions of people and the destruction that they bring in their wake?

27:05Professor Eric Cline:So, migration versus invasion, this is an interesting question. And in fact, it pops up at the beginning of the sequel of After 1177, where I take on the Dorian invasion, and I say, look, it's not an invasion. At best, it's a migration.

27:20William:We should explain that little reference quickly. These are the guys who passed through Greece and may be responsible for extinguishing Mycenae or part of that whole jigsaw.

27:30Professor Eric Cline:Yes, that's what the later historians like Herodotus Thucydides, they claim the Dorians brought an end to the Mycenaeans. But archaeologically, there's no evidence for that. And so it's an invasion that doesn't look like an invasion. And I say, look, it's a migration. And that may be splitting hairs, but invasions are usually quick, dirty, fast. And migrations can take quite a long time. So, I think here with the Sea Peoples and everything, it's more of a migration, but you're right. They are not always passive. Sometimes they're aggressive. And we can see this at some of the cities. And again, let me use Ugarit where we have the archives.

28:12Professor Eric Cline:That's one of the reasons they're preserved is because that city is burned to the ground. There are arrowheads in the walls. There are bodies in the streets. When the French excavated, there was a meter of destruction of ash and wood and everything else. And Ugarit was then abandoned for 400 to 600 years. And we actually, one of the new tablets that was just published says the enemy has overrun our port city and they are advancing on Ugarit. Send me help. Send me reinforcements. Well, they obviously didn't get there because Ugarit is burnt to the ground. And there are other cities like that as well.

28:53Anita:Okay. And let's just remind people, Ugarit in today's money is northern Syria is what we're talking about.

28:58William:And it's this sort of capitalized paradise. It's this sort of Switzerland where full of bankers and merchants sending out expeditions. Maybe not Switzerland. What would be a better analogy? Where's a big sort of mercantile hub today? Guangzhou. It's like the Chinese sort of mega cities and richer than anywhere else and sending out sort of mobile department stores that may be the Uluburun shipwreck that Joe told us about.

29:26Professor Eric Cline:It turns out that Ugarit was so important that when it and the Hittites went down at about the same time, our computer simulations have showed that that's what brought the whole network down, was Ugarit and the Hittites coming down at the same time, which is interesting. But you mentioned Megiddo, Armageddon, biblical Armageddon. You've actually dug there. You've held a trowel in your hand. I was there for 20 years. My kids have shirts that say I survived Armageddon. Yes. So, but yes, there is one of the levels. I mean, Megiddo has 20 levels, one on top of another. It's like Troy, isn't it? It's one of these archaeological sites just goes on and on and on.

30:06Professor Eric Cline:Exactly. Troy's got nine levels. Megiddo's got 20. Wow. And level number seven at Megiddo is destroyed at exactly this time. We don't know what caused it or who caused it, but it is one of the cities that is destroyed right now.

30:21Anita:Can I just ask, what is it like standing in a place like Megiddo? You know, like when you're standing on top of layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of human history. Do you even think about it? Or are you just sort of so focused on this tiny square of where I'm actually, you know, with my trowel trying to find something?

30:37Professor Eric Cline:You feel it with every step you take. Absolutely. Right? Every step you take, every breath you make, you know.

30:44Anita:Drink. You've done it again. It's okay.

30:48Professor Eric Cline:Yes, I actually, a couple years ago, I published a book on University of Chicago's excavations at Megiddo in the 20s and 30s. But I wrote it also from the point of view of having dug there. I was there 1994 to 2014. And I said, as you're walking up the mound, which is now 70 feet tall, it had been 110 feet tall, but now it's 70 because archaeologists have taken off the layers. I said, every step you take, you can feel what's underneath you. And you're wondering, what am I stepping on? Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. There's no feeling like it. And same thing like with Troy. When I go to Troy and I'm wandering around, I'm like, what am I stepping on?

31:31Professor Eric Cline:What is underneath my feet? If I stopped and dug right where I'm standing, what would I find? And for me, that's the magic of archaeology. That's why I keep going into the field every year when I can. and excavating. It's this mystery of what is there that's left to be discovered. And there's a lot left. I mean, oh boy. Yeah. I mean, don't even get me started. We've probably found maybe 10 % of what there is to be found. People ask me, is there anything left to find? I'm like, we haven't even started.

32:05William:Yeah. Eric, let's go back to O 'Garratt again from Megiddo, because one of the only moments I felt you were spoiling one of my favorite stories in your book is that this joe has in her book and the older books you get this the story of the cuneiform tablet that was still being baked when the raiders come and it's in the oven and the reason we have it is it's in the oven but you say it wasn't in the oven it was just fell from the ceiling above or something i know i know that was

32:32Professor Eric Cline:such a lovely story and then we punctured the balloon yes okay so that goes back to when i was being taught about the Sea Peoples and all that. One of the critical texts is this letter written on a clay tablet that was found at Ugarit and translated and published very early on, I mean, 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And it says something like, we have seen the, or the ships of the enemy have come. They are burning all of the cities. My troops are away up in Anatolia. My ships are away. I am undefended. Please send help before it's too late. And the story went that the tablet was found by the French excavators in the kiln, ready to be baked, because frequently you would bake these before you sent them.

33:26Professor Eric Cline:Because first of all, it helped preserve it so that it wouldn't shatter, but also so that nobody could change the text, right? If you've just written it on regular clay, you can smear water on and rewrite it. So the idea was it was being baked in the kiln, and the invaders came and burnt the city before it could be sent. And they're like, ooh, and it was incredibly dramatic. Well, when later archaeologists went back and restudied the notes and everything, turns out it's not quite as dramatic. That it's not in a kiln. It was probably in a basket, a wicker basket.

34:01William:I love that you can tell this. It's fantastic.

34:04Professor Eric Cline:Yeah. And when the palace was destroyed, that basket fell from the second floor down into the courtyard, turning upside down with all the clay tablets still in it. The basket itself disintegrated, but it left the tablets in a pile that looked like they had been in a kiln, even though they hadn't been. So, if that means that it wasn't in a kiln or anything, that means all sorts of things or implies all sorts of things. One, it might be a copy of a letter that had been sent or it may be the real letter, but which destruction was it? And which raid? Was it 1207 or was it 1177? And, you know, did it get sent?

34:52Professor Eric Cline:Did it not get sent? And anyway, the story kind of collapses a bit. It was wonderful.

34:58Anita:Oh, you love a collapse, you. I know. You're all about the collapse.

35:02Professor Eric Cline:I know, I know. But we also have a saying in archaeology, if it's too good to be true, it's probably not true. And that story turned out to be too good to be true. But we now have these other ones where we have the new tablet, newly translated tablet, that does actually say the enemy has overrun Ras Ibn Hani. the port city. They're coming towards us. Six boats have landed. That's right. Exactly. So now we, you know, that replaces it. And this is a good story. But I could happily throttle the ancient scribe because instead of saying the Peleset are here, the Shekeles are here, the Ekwesh are here, he simply says the enemy.

35:44Professor Eric Cline:I'm like, could you tell us who the enemy is, please? Nope. The enemy. But I suspect that he didn't know who they were either. Like, he didn't run down and say, excuse me, excuse me, before you kill everyone, who are you? And they're like, oh, yeah, we're the Shek Lesh. We're going to leave a calling card. So we don't know who it was, but we do know that it happened.

36:04William:One thing I thought when I heard that was that six boats seems rather little to destroy a major trading city, isn't it?

36:10Professor Eric Cline:Yes and no. Yes and no. If you look, for example, at the story of the Trojan War, and yes, we have a huge armada that goes over to rescue Helen, right? Right. The face that launched a thousand ships. A thousand ships, exactly. And six seems a bit of a swizz. It does. It does. But if I may input right here, it wasn't a thousand. I actually counted in the catalog of ships. I was very bored. I was taking the train from London down to Penzance. That's a long trip. Yes, a long trip with the Buffy car and everything else. But I had at that time, what was the new translation by Fagels of the Iliad. And so, 1 ,067 ships.

36:53Professor Eric Cline:So, I've been trying to get the, you know, Helen, the face that launched 1 ,067 ships. It hasn't caught on, but I'm trying. But if you look at the earlier, there is an earlier expedition to Troy by Heracles in the time of Laomedon, right? Like Priam's father, if I remember correctly, could be the grandfather. And he has six ships. And that's it. And he sacks Troy. But he's Heracles. He's Hercules. I mean, he's Lydda. Exactly. But that's only six ships. He's a Marvel superhero. He's Eken. We, I mean, we're told there are, what, 50 people per ship. So, you know, even six ships is not that small.

37:33Professor Eric Cline:It's like 300 people. So, saying that six or seven ships have been spied was a goodly number. But we even have gaslighting back then because one of the texts from, I think it's the governor of Cyprus to the king of Ugar, it says, actually, are you sure they're not your own people rebelling against you? Have you checked who's on?

37:54Anita:Are you sure your people don't hate you?

37:56Professor Eric Cline:Exactly. Exactly.

37:57William:The Cypriots. We better take a break, Eric, but we could go on like this with our drinking games all afternoon. But take a break. We'll be back to take this forward.

38:11William:Hello everybody and welcome to The Book Club, a new podcast from Goalhanger. Hosted by me, Dominic Sandbrook.

38:19Anita:And me, Tabitha Syrod. As some of you may know, I've been Dominic's producer on The Rest is History. And we even did a mini-series last year about all things books.

38:28William:And since we enjoyed that so much, we have decided to roll it out as its own show. So it'll be coming out every Tuesday. we'll be doing a different book each time and digging into all the stories behind them.

38:40Anita:And we are going to be talking about the historical contexts behind some of the greatest and most famous books of all time. We're going to be digging into the remarkable people behind them, the unexpected stories behind the stories, and also unravelling the plot of each book a bit and delving into the depths of the story.

38:58William:Now, you don't have to have read the books to listen to the show, but we hope that by the end of each episode, you will be able to pretend to people that you've read them. That is the key thing. And either way, whether you read them or not, we hope that you'll learn lots of fascinating facts. You'll do lots of great stories and maybe, Tabby, the odd laugh.

39:14Anita:We will be looking at thrilling gothic bodice rippers like Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, as well as iconic stories like The Great Gatsby or Little Women. And then also some more modern stuff. So Game of Thrones, Normal People, The Hunger Games, Hamnet, all manner of exciting stories.

39:34William:So please join us on our journey into all things books, wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for The Book Club every Tuesday, and hopefully we will see you there.

39:58Anita:at Starbucks that's made perfect for you. Choose your sweetness, dial it up, or keep things light. Add a touch of pistachio, a hint of strawberry, or vanilla, or make it a spring classic with lavender. Because this season, there's endless ways to chai at Starbucks. Tax Act knows filing taxes can be confusing, so we have live experts on hand who can help answer any questions you may have. Questions like, can I claim my SUV is my home office if I answer work emails in my car? If I adopted 12 dogs this year, can I list them as dependents? And am I doing this right or am I doing this very, very wrong?

40:40Anita:Our experts have the answers to those questions and many others. Tax Act. Let's get them over with.

40:50Anita:welcome back so um before the break eric was happily taking some of our most cherished stories about the bronze age and smashing them to pieces like the clay tablets that didn't come from where we thought they'd come can i i mean at the risk of you ruining this as well talk about some of the some of the sculptures that have been found in ancient egypt now these seem to be sculptures of battles with the Pellisset. And at the edge of them, there are really interesting things in these sculptures because you have women and children in carts, which is exactly what you were talking about before, which is the migration of people with everything that they loved and everything that they had.

41:27Anita:I mean, is that real? Am I reading that wrong or am I completely wrong about that as well?

41:31Professor Eric Cline:You're not wrong, but I will correct one thing. Good.

41:35Anita:You wouldn't be Eric if you did. That's fine. Go on then, Eric.

41:38Professor Eric Cline:Let's change the word. They're not sculptures because they're not like freestanding. What they are, it's a drawing. I mean, it's a picture that is inscribed into the wall. I mean, they have put the picture on the wall. So you're looking at a drawing, basically. And not only do we see the naval battle, which is so detailed that people have written books about what the ships look like and all of that.

42:04William:You've gone into some fair detail yourself about the horned helmets and the feathered helmets. Are they the Shekinesh and the Pellicet?

42:12Professor Eric Cline:Yes, but there I'm leaning on my colleagues who have published on that. And I'm trusting what they've said. But we've also got these women and children that we talked about with the ox carts and the luggage and all of that. And so, we've got what's called the push-pull effect. Something is pushing them out of their own homeland and something else is pulling them to the new area. And I think in this case, it's drought for both of them. Right. And what they didn't realize, let's say for argument's sake that they are coming from Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, which is where I think they started. And there's a drought there.

42:49Professor Eric Cline:We now have evidence definitely for a drought in that region. What they did not realize is that there was also drought in the area that they were heading to. So, out of the frying pan into the fire, I think is the saying. At any rate, they're looking for a new place to live and they are pretty desperate. But when they lose to the Egyptians, when especially Ramses III beats them, he says, I settled them in strongholds bound in my name. Meaning that he settled them in Egypt, which was his country, but also in Canaan because the Egyptians controlled that region. And so, especially we know like Tel Dor is known as a Tejeker or sickle city, which is one of the sea peoples.

43:32Professor Eric Cline:We've also got further north, like up in Byblos and that area. We've got, for example, down south in Canaan. That's where it looks like the Peleset end up, because the Peleset are the Philistines, right? It's the one that we're pretty sure we know about. And the Philistines, of course, are eventually going to give their name to all of that region when the Romans come in and it becomes Syria-Palestina. Oh, Herodotus. Yeah, before that. Yes, exactly. So, that is where, and of course, the Philistines, we get the Philistine Pentapolis, the five cities, right? Ashkelon and Ekron and Gaza and all of that.

44:12Professor Eric Cline:That is when they get there and the Pelesets settle down. They actually seem to be, I would say, less aggressive. They seem to have assimilated and actually - And intermarried, yeah. And intermarried because there's a couple of grandkids that were excavated a decade ago in Ashkelon, and the DNA shows that they are part Canaanite and part other, and the computer simulation models say other is most likely Crete or Sicily or Spain. So we do know that that's where the Philistines come from. And in fact, if you look at their pottery, it's long been thought that it was degenerate Mycenaean, if I can put it that way.

44:55Professor Eric Cline:And degenerate, not in a bad way, meaning this looks like Mycenaean vessels, the stirrup jars and all that. But it's made with local clay from Cyprus or Rhodes or even in what is the Levant today. So, I think, I mean, we all think that the Philistines may actually be Mycenaeans who have migrated to the Eastern Mediterranean. So, we're learning a lot, but we're not there yet. There's a lot more for us to go for.

45:26William:In preparation for this, Eric, I went to the Philistine Gallery at the British Museum last week. I was slightly disappointed because I've had Joe talk about how the Philistines are a lot less Philistine than they are made to be in the Bible, that Gath and various of these cities seem to be very sophisticated. But the stuff in the British Museum was pretty crutty. There were these sort of rather nasty sort of clay versions of Egyptian sarcophagi with sort of rather ghoulish face masks on. They weren't great. I mean, they weren't those nice things you get in Mycenae with nice ducks and sort of buffaloes.

46:02Professor Eric Cline:Yes. That might be a bit harsh. The fill of some of it's nice. But yes, we're definitely in an era where they're having trouble, I would say.

46:12Anita:On sort of, you know, just taking this idea of systems collapse even further, can we talk about some of the specific areas that we've been talking about? Because, I mean, we've been talking about Troy, and that's sort of 1200 BC. And we were talking about Homer, how much can he be trusted? Is he even a person? You know, everything, mind blown. So, what do we know, actually, as fact, about that?

46:36Professor Eric Cline:What do we know and what we don't know? What we know is that we don't know a lot more than we know. It's all a mystery. Like you just said, is Homer even a real person? Right, exactly.

46:48Anita:Do we know? What do we know about anything that appears in Homer being true? I mean, do we know how big Troy was? Do we know? Because Simon Galton was suggesting -

46:58William:You were very upset yesterday that he was destroying your Troy.

47:01Anita:He painted it like some sort of bargain basement kind of small shack. And I was like, hang on a minute, that's not what I read. You know, we didn't even get into the horse business, but, you know, he just completely traduced what my ideas of what Troy was. What have you found?

47:17Professor Eric Cline:Oh, my word. All right. Wow. We could have like another five episodes just on this. But okay, let's see if we can unpack some of that. Okay. So, you know, there, as you may have already discussed, there are nine levels at Troy. So, which one is Homer's Troy? It's probably either Troy VI, of which there were many phases. 7A, some people think that. So, it's either 6H or 7A, exactly. And in fact, 6H is destroyed 90%, I would say, by an earthquake. I mean, 90 % chance that it's an earthquake. And I think that's the case. And that's about 1300 BC, somewhere in there. But then the next phase, Troi 7a, is destroyed by humans.

48:01Professor Eric Cline:That's another example where we have unburied bodies in the streets. We've got arrowheads in the walls. And the arrowheads are Aegean type. I mean, Korfman, the German excavator recently, back 2000, 2003, found those. And specifically Aegean. That's very nice. That's specifically Aegean. So, I think that 6H is an earthquake and 7A is the destruction. But who does the destruction? Is it the Mycenaeans? Is it the Sea Peoples? Which is conceivable. And it was also, if you go back in the archaeological records, you know, 6H and 7A, 7A is a rebuilding of 6H. And in fact, one of the earlier excavators, Dortfeld, Carl Blagen from Cincinnati said to him, you know, we shouldn't have called it 7A, it should be 6I.

48:51Professor Eric Cline:And Dortfeld said, yeah, it should be the next level of 6. But they said, by this point, it's too late. We got to call it 7A. And that dates to somewhere 1 ,200, you know, 1175 for the destruction of 7A. So, I do think that one of the two is Homer's Troy. But two things. One, I think Homer might have conflated the two of them because 6H is a lovely, wonderful, huge city, the one that you wanted, right? With the big, wealthy. Thank you. Yes. Yes. But 7A is that same city now destroyed and inhabited either by people under siege or by people rebuilding from an earthquake.

49:36Anita:Right.

49:36Professor Eric Cline:So, I tell my students when we study this, I have an entire seminar that goes a whole semester just on Troy and the Trojan War. I say, what if it's both of them? What if it's six and seven? And Homer, who is compiling all this 400 years later, conflates the two. He telescopes. And I mean, after all, it's an epic. And that's where the horse comes in because there was a German scholar, Schackermeyer, in the 50s that said that the horse is a metaphor for an earthquake. Because if you think about it, you've got Poseidon as the god of earthquakes and Poseidon's animal, like Athena had the owl, Poseidon has the horse.

50:19Professor Eric Cline:So, earthquake equals Poseidon equals a horse. Bingo, there's the Trojan horse.

50:25Anita:I don't know why I'm wasting time with you, Willie. I want to do his course. I'm just suddenly rethinking all my life choices. This is much more interesting.

50:34Professor Eric Cline:Before you do that, you know, as they say, but wait, there's more. You wanted text. We have text. What we have is not just Homer. Homer's on the Greek side. You've got some Hittite stuff, haven't you? Exactly. From the Hittites, we've got mentions of not just one war at Troy, which they called Willusa, and not just two and not just three. We have four different conflicts that are fought in this same time period. And so my question, as I always say, is not was there a Trojan War? I was like, yes, there was. Which one? Which one was Homer talking about?

51:13William:And just to clarify for those who haven't got the geography here. So the Hittites are sitting in sort of close to modern Ankara, the middle of modern Turkey, just sort of to the northeast of Ankara. Is that right?

51:23Professor Eric Cline:Yeah. Yeah. Mostly to the east, but slightly northeast. But they controlled all of Anatolia at this point, all the way to the western coast.

51:31William:And Troy, which is near the Dardanelles, near Gallipoli, near all that sort of stuff, is on the edge of that world and not completely conquered, but sort of on the satellite city.

51:40Professor Eric Cline:Yes, they would be at various points probably a vassal, owned, you know, a vassal to the Hittites, yes. And so that's why they were interested, and they called it Willusa. and in fact, one of them says that the king of Willusa had been deposed by an unknown enemy and the Hittites put him back on the throne. There's another one where they actually sign a mutual defense treaty with a guy named Alexandru of Willusa. And I mean, you tell me, doesn't that sound like Alexander of Ilios, aka Paris? So, people have been, again, debating this since about, oh, about 1911, right? more than 100 years. This is post-Sleeman or after Sleeman?

52:24Professor Eric Cline:After Sleeman, but just as the Hittite texts were being deciphered. The first Hittite texts were founded about 1906 at Hattusas. By 1916, we could read Hittite. And so already things start up where they're actually looking to see if they're mentioning the Greeks and such in the Hittite texts.

52:46William:Eric, let me take you away from Troy now back to Egypt, because you mentioned these two waves of attacks. And let's just go into that a little bit further. The first wave of attack is interesting, isn't it? Because Maneptus Stella, the tablet that he puts up, is the first mention out of the Bible anywhere of Israel. And this is obviously a crucial marker in the sand in Middle Eastern history. So take us through Mernephtha's stela. Am I pronouncing it right?

53:16Professor Eric Cline:Yes, yes, yes. And this is, it's absolutely fascinating. Yes, in Mernephtha's reign in what I would call 1207 BC, I mean, the actual year depends on what chronology you're following, but Mernephtha mentions the Sea Peoples coming for the first time. But in that same year, he has an inscription that mentions Israel. And it's the first time that word is used outside the Bible, right? What we would call an extra-biblical reference.

53:47William:And then in 1187, for the second inscription, which is the one that records the battle coming down into the delta over land from Israel-Palestine, that is where you first get the Pelisep, which is the root of…

54:02Anita:Palestinian.

54:02William:Yeah, Philistines and then Palestinians. So, these two people who've been rabbi-exed each other and who are, you know, in the headlines every single day today, appear within about 13 years of each other.

54:12Professor Eric Cline:Yeah, things go back 3 ,000 years. Yep. Extraordinary. Right. So, this inscription, which is like in his fifth year or so, 1207, I'm fascinated by the fact that the Sea Peoples and Israel are mentioned in the exact same year. And in fact, Merneptah seems to be, to some degree, much more concerned about the Sea Peoples than about Israel. But he has a campaign up to Canaan, and he mentions Israel. Israel is laid waste, his seed is not. What's interesting about that mention is it's got a determinative before. There's a sign before the name, and that sign indicates what comes next is a people rather than a place.

54:57Professor Eric Cline:And then he has Israel. So the people of Israel are up there. But he also mentions -

55:03William:Implying they're nomadic, or what's the implication of that?

55:06Professor Eric Cline:Something like that, which is where it's kind of interesting, especially if you think about the Exodus. You know, people have argued, when did the Exodus take place? Did the Exodus take place? I mean, if you look at the Bible and add up the years, it should be 1450 BC. But that's the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. There's no way. But 1250 BC fits into the general collapse that we're talking about. And so, I personally think that if the Trojan War and if the Exodus did take place, and they're not just stories, that both of them fit into this period of the collapse. In which case, you do have a migration of people coming out of Egypt and going to Canaan.

55:51Anita:So, just to get this straight in my head. So, then you're saying that these people that he refers to with the determinant before it.

55:59Professor Eric Cline:The people of Israel.

56:01Anita:The people of Israel. But where were they running from, do you think?

56:05Professor Eric Cline:He doesn't say, but if they were running from anywhere, and if you believe the biblical account, they're running from Egypt. But that's not necessarily so. I mean, this has been a debate. This is much debated over for centuries, isn't it? Decades, for sure. But yeah, and there are some people like Israel Finkelstein who say, no, they were already in Canaan. The Israelites were up in the highlands. In which case…

56:28William:What about the Hyksos? That's another theory, isn't it? These are Canaanites that invaded and took over Egypt. Some scholars think that, that they retreating back into Canaan is the Exodus.

56:41Professor Eric Cline:But that's much earlier. Yes, the Hyksos take over Egypt 1720 to 1550 BC.

56:48William:600 years before this. 400, 500. Yeah.

56:53Professor Eric Cline:And the Egyptians expel them. So there are some people that say the story of the Exodus is a folk memory of the expulsion of the Hyksos, which happened much, much, much earlier. But yes, the Hyksos do come down from Canaan.

57:08William:And in general, you're getting throughout history at this early period, a lot of people coming down from what is now Israel-Palestine, Canaan then, which is much poorer, to Egypt, which is the New York, the Bay Area, where all the money's made. It's the rich.

57:25Professor Eric Cline:But there again, we're hard-pressed to find Canaanites in Egypt itself. Right. So, you know, we got to figure out what the archaeology is telling us versus the story. So, it may well be, but I think even if the Israelites are already in Canaan, which I think is quite likely, what they do then is take advantage of the chaos. They are, you know, again, they're taking advantage. It's brilliant. anti-fragile, and they come down. I don't think the Israelites could have taken on the Canaanites by themselves. But what if the Canaanite cities like Megiddo, like Hatzor, like, you know, even Jerusalem had already been destroyed because of earthquakes, the Sea Peoples, then the Israelites come on down.

58:12Professor Eric Cline:Thank you very much. We'll take it from here. We're going to be coming back to this

58:15William:in much more detail in our last episode with you, Eric. But in the meantime, this is just, this is such a rich picture. And what's so attractive about your theory is that you bring all these different elements together. You have all the different causes and you have all the different stories. You have Troy, you have the Exodus, everything that we know from this period. And it all sort of fits together with a very neat click.

58:38Professor Eric Cline:Right, we dumped it all in. It's everything but the kitchen sink and then we try to make it fit, right.

58:42William:So we're going to come back to this because this is obviously such incredibly interesting stuff. And as I say, this is the perfect end. You get all the different causes, the drought, the collapse of urban civilization. Plus you get every movie you've ever seen about the Middle East, the fall of Troy, the exodus, the whole thing. And Eric's wonderful book, 1177, the year that civilization collapsed, shuts click with a perfect click. Anyway, we are coming back for more with Eric in the next episode. We're going to take the story forward. But you do not have to wait a week. You can join our club.

59:18William:This is normally Anita's pitch. but I'm going to do it today.

59:21Anita:You always say this because you just want me to know this is so, can I just say, unacceptable.

59:26William:She normally does the sales pitch, but I will do it today.

59:29Anita:And now over to William to tell you why you should join our club.

59:33William:You can hear Eric immediately go on and tell you about the next exciting chapter of the Bronze Age collapse and how this whole house of cards falls down. That's all from me, William de Rimpel.

59:46Anita:And me, Anita Arnan.

59:56Anita:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card. and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.