336. Bronze Age Apocalypse: How To Survive The End of The World (Ep 5)

13:14Professor Eric Cline:These are a long way apart, these three sources of tin, Afghanistan, Cornwall, and Antioch. Exactly. Hundreds, if not thousands of miles apart. And think what happens if they're cut for any reason. You talk about supply chain problems, and actually, that has been suggested towards the end of the late Bronze Age that the supply chain for tin might have been cut, in which case you can't make bronze. So you have a problem. But the Hittites are happily working and controlling and doing everything for about 500 years, the whole of the late Bronze Age. But one last thing before we move on, though, you know, they should not be called the Hittites.

13:53Professor Eric Cline:That's our name for them. Yeah, that's our mistake, working from the Bible.

13:59William:So, Joe has been telling us we can't call the Phoenicians the Phoenicians. The Canaanites didn't call themselves the Canaanites, and the Hittites don't call themselves the Hittites.

14:07Professor Eric Cline:Exactly. The Hittites called themselves the Neshites, and they spoke Neshian, because the initial capital was at Karam Kanish, which is still around today. And from Kanish, you get Nesha and the Neshites. But by the time we were able to read the tablets and realize that we should call them the Neshians and Neshite, they had already been labeled the Hittites. So, it's too late.

14:33William:Now, Eric, we've talked about now this bureaucracy, everything's looking fine. It goes down slightly differently from Ugarit. Ugarit, we talked about people arriving in boats and then arrowheads and bodies in the streets. With the Hittites, there's a kind of slow emptying of Hattushash, and it's half empty when disaster strikes. There is an invasion, but it's already half ruined.

14:58Professor Eric Cline:Yes, it's one of these things like there's a saying, it went really slowly until it didn't, right? It went very fast at the end, but it was very slow up until then. The problem with the Hittites is that they themselves had internal problems. They were, it's looking now more and more, they were more vulnerable and fragile than they appeared to the outside observer, if you will. They were having problems within the royal family. The two brothers had fought. This sounds rather familiar to any of us Brits listening to this. Yeah. You know, there's nothing new under the sun. Right. So, they had actually abandoned their capital.

15:43Professor Eric Cline:Hattusas was basically empty, or at least half empty, by the time all this was happening. They are still fighting other people. One of the last Hittite kings tries to invade Cyprus. I mean, they are still being Hittites, but they have moved out. And it looks like the capital city of Hattusas, when it is finally invaded and destroyed and burned, it's only partially. And it may be that it has nothing to do with the Sea Peoples. It may be the Kashka. Who are they? Who are the Kashka? The Kashka are up to the northeast. east, they had already actually invaded and destroyed Hatusas. Modern Armenia and Georgia, that's their area?

16:25Professor Eric Cline:I don't think it'd be quite that far. It's still in Turkey, but it's up towards the shores of the Black Sea. They were, you know, age-old enemies. They had already sacked Hatusas back in 1400 BC, and it looks like they come back in 1200 as well. We're still finding out more about them. We need to do more excavation up there. But it looks like they're the ones that end the Hittite Empire. But I think the Hittite Empire would have fallen anyway. The big question for me is, okay, and again, it's very much like the Mycenaeans. The palaces go down. Same thing, you know, Hattusas goes down. How would the average person, not in the street, but out in the hinterlands, how would the average person have felt about that?

17:08Professor Eric Cline:And I think, you know, it wouldn't have affected them all that much. Life would have continued on. But, you know, now who are they going to pay taxes to? But in terms of administration and bureaucracy and the army, as I say to people in my lectures, don't be a Hittite. Do not be a Hittite. They are in my lowest category. I do, I have the temerity in the sequel to rank the societies as to how well they did in the aftermath. And the Hittites are dead last. Do not be a Hittite.

17:40Anita:Okay, okay. So do not be a Hittite. I want to do what you say. I don't want to be a Hittite. But tell me, did they just disappear overnight after facing all these difficulties? Or did you have them sort of, I don't know, sort of little gangs of Hittites going and settling and saying, you know, we are Hittite, but let's whisper it in case we get killed? I mean, how does it work out?

18:00Professor Eric Cline:So, what had actually happened, and this is absolutely, I think, fascinating, is when you have the major empire, if you will, or kingdom of the Hittites collapsing, The satellite areas continue on. And I will have the temerity to compare it to the British Empire. We no longer have. No. Yeah. Yes. I must. I must. We no longer have the British Empire today. Last time I checked. We've still got a couple of places in the Caribbean that you hang on to. Well, there are places, though, that were former parts of the empire where they still drink tea and play cricket, right? Which is the vestiges. Same thing with the Hittites.

18:46Anita:Apart from tea-drinking, cricket-playing country. I mean, I don't suppose India would pretend to be sort of Hittite-lite, if you like. They kept bits that they liked, but they wouldn't say that they were Britons. Do you know what I mean? So, did you have then Hittites just evaporate or did they influence other places and, you know, go Hittite light? I mean, just explain. I want to know. I'm worried about them, Eric. This is what it is. I want to know what happens to them.

19:14Professor Eric Cline:Right. So, the Hittites proper in central Anatolia, they do go away. I mean, there are remnants of the society that keep going, but they really do go away. And they are overtaken by new groups. the Phrygians come in, the Urarsians start their civilization, and they're going to be big in the Iron Age in there. So, no more Hittites. But in North Syria, where the Hittites had been and had been fighting the Egyptians for control, and we had had these proxy wars during the Amarna Age in the 14th century, that area keeps going and we get what we call the Neo-Hittites.

19:55Anita:Hittite light. I knew it. Okay, go on.

19:58Professor Eric Cline:You know, Neo-Hittites, meaning the new Hittites. These are the Hittites of the Bible. When the Bible talks about the Hittites, these are the Hittites they know, because they wouldn't have known about the Bronze Age. They were gone. But these are the Hittites that the Bible mentions. And these Neo-Hittites who are up in northern Syria, basically right where it meets Turkey today, this is where you've got Carchemish and various other cities. They keep going. They have the same names, Shupi Luduyuma, for example. And I do hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. That was very good. I like that. Yeah.

20:34Professor Eric Cline:One of these days, this is what I say in my lecture, I want to travel back in time and meet Shupi Luduyuma, mostly to find out if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. Right. So, they keep the names for the Hittite kings. They, in fact, keep kingship. They keep writing. They're still writing in Luvian, which is used for the royal inscriptions. They keep everything. They are the Hittites, Hittite light, if you will, but they are much smaller. They're smaller city-states, Aleppo, Carchemish, all of that. Carchemish was the site which T.E. Lawrence dug on as a youth, didn't he? Absolutely, absolutely.

21:12Professor Eric Cline:I think he might have actually been the photographer there to begin with. That's right. But he was definitely there, yes. And so, there's actually been some wonderful works. James Osborne, University of Chicago, has written an entire book on these Neo-Hittite, or now they want to call them Syro-Hittite city-states or kingdoms. And they come up against the new version of the Assyrians. We have Neo-Assyrians and then eventually Babylonians, Neo-Babylonians. So the Iron Age, which is in the aftermath of the collapse, everybody's new again. So you've got Neo-whatevers, Neo-Hittites, Neo-Babylonians.

21:51William:One thing that occurred to me reading your book, Eric, or reading your books, plural, is that the guys who do better, the Neo-Hittites and the Assyrians and the Babylonians are all further inland. They're less likely to be raided from the sea. Is that a feature?

22:07Professor Eric Cline:Yes, I think so. And actually, trying to figure out why some went down and the others didn't, or why they went down at different times is part of the mystery that we're trying to figure out. And so, yes, the Assyrians and the Babylonians are much further inland, and they are on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates. So, they've got two major rivers there.

22:29William:So, they don't subject to drought, like the Egyptians are not subject to drought because they've got the Nile? Not as much.

22:36Professor Eric Cline:We do know from the Neo-Assyrian texts that they are hit by drought, but about a century after everybody else. And even then, the drought gets so bad that at one point, one of the texts says that they are eating their own. They are cannibalism. Cannibalism, crikey. So, it is delayed. It is delayed. I think there are other factors besides the water, too. They had good leaders that were there at the right time. But the Egyptians did have the Nile. Well, the one thing to notice, we have Egyptians and Hittites as the big two. The big four are Egyptians, Hittites, and Assyrians, Babylonians. Of those four, the only one that's not on a major river system are the Hittites.

23:19Professor Eric Cline:And they're the only one of the four that do go down. So, water, water is important. So, more open to rainfall fluctuations.

23:28William:Yes.

23:29Professor Eric Cline:Right. So, water is important.

23:31William:One thing I didn't understand in your book, Eric, was the kind of chronological order. Is it a west to east tumble of the dominoes? Does it start with Mycenae, then go to Troy, then go to Hattushash and the Hittites, then go to Ugarit and Syria and finally end up at Egypt? Is that the order? Or is Mycenae and Troy collapsing alongside this? What sort of chronological order do you put this all in?

24:02Professor Eric Cline:I wish I knew. I wish we knew. We can't get that specific that way. Yes, I can tell you my gut feeling. Yes, I think it's coming west to east.

24:13William:You're starting with a drought inland in Europe, which is driving people down into Mycenae. They are then raiding Troy. Troy is then rebelling against Hattushash. All these different Okis in boats are then going to Ugarit in Syria and finally ending up in Egypt and Libya.

24:31Professor Eric Cline:Yes, though I would start it actually a little bit further west. I would say that the drought in Europe is driving people down also into Italy. And we see now that there is an exodus from northern Italy of as many as 25 ,000 people is the latest estimate by Christian Christensen and other people like that.

24:54William:This summer, I went to an Aeolian Island site, which was also part of this Bronze Age collapse. It's a beautiful evening and gorgeous headland with this sort of perfect water. But when you get there, the archaeology is exactly the same. It's a very prosperous Bronze Age trading settlement selling obsidian. It makes these little gorgeous sort of shiny glass-like black arrowheads and spears, which it's doing very nicely out of and selling over a wide area. And then one day, a bunch of boats turn up, raid it, and it's gone.

25:28Professor Eric Cline:I think that's kind of the case that we've got here. I am backed up to a certain degree because Ramses III, in the inscription that we've already talked about with the wives and the kids and the luggage and all of that, actually says no land could stand before them. And then he names them. He says, Hate, Kode, Carchemesh, Artsawa, Alashia, On. And we know these places, and they're actually kind of in order. Hati, those are the Hittites. Carchemish and Koda, that's right. I mean, those are the Neo-Hittites later. That's where Turkey meets Syria in today's lingo. Artsawa is on the western coast of Turkey, south of Troy.

26:13Professor Eric Cline:And Alashia, of course, Alashia is most likely Bronze Age Cyprus. And so, we can see that Ramses says they have come basically west to east. And he actually then says they have set up a camp in Amuru. Now, Amuru, we know from other texts, including the Amarna letters back in the 14th century, Amuru is just south of Ugarit. So, we can see that. Now, we also have these texts at Ugarit that we've mentioned where they talk about the enemy coming. Well, we actually do have a date for the destruction of Ugarit near as we can figure because there's an Egyptian chancellor mentioned. There's an eclipse that is mentioned.

26:59Professor Eric Cline:It looks like Ugarit is still existing in 1192, 1191. So, the earliest it would have been destroyed is in about 1190. The latest is probably about 1185. So, there's about a five-year window when Ugarit is destroyed by these ships and invaders that have shown up. However, Ramses III is not invaded until 1177. So, even if we take 1190 and go down 1177, that's 13 years. If it's 1185, that's what, about eight years, meaning that the Egyptians had warning of about a decade. And in that time, they could prepare. I think that is why they beat them, because they've had 10 years to get everything ready.

27:49Anita:So, they saw the storm coming, coming, coming, coming. It's going to get to us, so we better do something.

27:54William:And they had the Sea Peoples as mercenaries, so they knew their fighting techniques and their weaknesses and strengths.

27:59Professor Eric Cline:And that's where it gets even more interesting, because people like the Shardana and others, maybe even the Shekelesh, we see them in Egyptian records as early as the 14th century, and they are, as you say, they are mercenaries fighting on both sides. So now when they come back as the enemies, as the Sea Peoples, they're a known quantity. And in fact, it's been recently suggested, I mentioned before that there was a land battle and a naval battle. It's been suggested now that the land battle might actually have been fought up in what is now northern Syria. And that the Egyptians went on, if you want to call it an offensive defense.

28:39Professor Eric Cline:Let's not wait for them to come to us. Let's go and attack them. So, it may be that we have the Sea Peoples up by Ugar at 1190, and then by 1177, the Egyptians go up and attack them.

28:54William:Which explains why they would also encounter the Israelites, whose seed are no more in that first same stella.

29:01Professor Eric Cline:Could possibly explain all sorts of things. But I still kind of like the land battle being fought down by the naval battle, which is most likely in the Nile Delta. Either way, this is in part why I think the Egyptians are able to beat the Sea Peoples in 1177, is because, just as you've asked, we can trace them coming from west to east and then north down south, and the Egyptians are ready and waiting. And it might even have happened in 1207 also when they came from Libya and were allied with the Libyan chieftain. Again, the Egyptians might have had some time to prepare.

29:42William:So, Eric, if they have warning, is there any signs that the Egyptians are fortifying or anything? Can we see that? Because there are places we see Mycenae fortifying before it collapses, isn't it? And Tyrens and Pylos, the Greek cities fortified, but it isn't good enough. They fall anyway.

29:57Professor Eric Cline:You know, for Egypt, it's hard to tell. We do have a series of Egyptian forts that go up, you know, the way of the sea. But it's much easier to see in places like Mycenae, as you mentioned, where they've reinforced the outer walls, they put up the Lion Gate, they build a tunnel down to water. And we do see these elsewhere as well. But since the Egyptians are able to basically defend their country before the Sea Peoples ever make inroads into Egypt proper. I think we need to look a little bit further north at what's happening in Canaan and ask if the Egyptians helped to fortify any of the cities like Megiddo or Hazor or others that they controlled up in Canaan.

30:46Professor Eric Cline:I think that's a better place to look.

30:48Anita:It's a good place to take a break. We've been talking about the places that are collapsing and when and how and in which order they might have done. But what happens to the people in those places? We sort of dealt with the Hittites and where, you know, sort of Hittites have ended up afterwards. But what about the rest of these populations in these huge major cities? Join us after the break.

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32:45William:So Eric has led us through the Bronze Age claps. this decline and fall of a civilization that in many ways resemble ours, very globalized, very interconnected, and suddenly it is no more. Eric, in this half, perhaps you'd take us through what happens to all these different citadels and cities and peoples after the collapse.

33:05Professor Eric Cline:Sure. So, if we look at the Mycenaean palaces in Greece, the collapse there, it follows a similar pattern to other places. The problem is we don't know exactly what happened to them. We know they're destroyed. We don't know who did it. We don't know what did it. We don't know why. For example, Mycenae is destroyed around 1200 BC. It looks like it was affected by an earthquake at some point, maybe 1250 BC. But as I've said, that's not enough to stop it. But we do know that by 1200, by 1150, it's destroyed. It has been now suggested that it was an internal rebellion. And that might have been the case for other cities as well.

33:49Professor Eric Cline:Pylos is destroyed in about 1200 BC. It baked the tablets and all of that. Tyrens is damaged. Tyrens is inhabited for maybe another century. Tyrens is close to Mycenae, isn't it? It's the kind of neighboring city. Just a couple kilometers. And in fact, trying to figure out the relationship between Tyrens Mycenae is an interesting problem we've been discussing for decades now. But here, they're both destroyed within a century of each other. And Mycenaean economy ends. You know, the palatial economy ends. Literacy goes away. What they had known went away. By 1050 BC, nobody is calling themselves a Mycenaean anymore.

34:35Professor Eric Cline:It's gone.

34:36Anita:I have a question. We've repeated this a few times in this series. You know, suddenly overnight literacy disappears. Why? Why do people suddenly not write things down? I mean, the collapse of a city doesn't mean the knowledge of that writing goes away.

34:52William:Yeah, you thought it was a useful skill to have.

34:55Anita:Sort of leaving notes by the side of the road. We've gone here, just in case you look. Why does it all suddenly evaporate?

35:02Professor Eric Cline:Right. I'm glad you asked that. Yes. Writing does seem like it would be essential. But writing in the Mycenaean period, which is Linear B, which Michael Ventress showed in 1952 is an early version of Greek. It was used by the scribes in the palace to record what was going in and coming out of the palace. That was all it was used for. sheep, olive oil, cows, chariot wheels, tin, copper, right. No history, no epics, no poems, no, you know, pre-Homer type things. It is all economic, right? And that means that when the palaces were destroyed and the palatial economy went away, there was no need for that anymore.

35:55Professor Eric Cline:And remember, you know, maybe 1 % of the population could read or write. And in that particular case, it was the scribes in the palace. No palace, no economy, no scribes. And with that, I would say within a decade or who knows, they no longer know how to do linear B. They can't read or write anymore. And it's going to take until the Phoenicians come to bring the alphabet.

36:20Anita:Well, that answers that question. And do you think illiteracy is a driving factor in collapse? Or is it actually reinvention that if you don't have these old ways or any vestige or connection to those old ways, people become more innovative? They become, I don't know, better at doing things without, you know, sort of a courtly language? Is it almost good that it goes? Because, you know, people have to look to themselves to do things rather than a palace economy and scribes who tell them what's coming in and what's coming out.

36:47Professor Eric Cline:Yeah, well, yes and no, I would say. And this is becoming a major area of debate. Some scholars have said one person's collapse is another person's opportunity, right? And in fact, it's been suggested by Erika Weiberg and Martin Fine, who are at Uppsala, they have said that when the Mycenaean palaces went down, like Pylos, like Mycenae, that the ordinary people probably rejoiced because they had been abused. in building things like the Lion Gate, in draining the Copaes Basin that they had been taken advantage of.

37:26William:And delivering the chariot wheels and the wine and the olive oil that

37:29Professor Eric Cline:Lydia B is recording. Exactly, exactly. And the Mycenaeans may have been more fragile and vulnerable than they appeared. And this is also what Joseph Moran, the excavator of Tirans at the moment, he has suggested that perhaps the Mycenaean economy and the Mycenaean world was not as solid as it appears, as we have thought, and that not only the peasants might have been rejoicing when the palaces went down, but some of the second and third tier nobles might have been rejoicing, right? The ones who are not the first sons who are going to inherit everything. Sons number two and number three might have been, you know, Yahoo, thank you, Sea Peoples.

38:13Professor Eric Cline:This is now our choice. As a son number four, I'm very much on that side here. Exactly. And those might have also been some of the Mycenaeans that joined the Sea Peoples, right? Right. It's a possibility.

38:26Anita:The way I thought about it is that it's like the only people who could write were the tax inspectors and the tax officers burned down. And so, they're just not necessarily – everyone could just do what they like. So, in a way, it's a liberation, basically. It's a liberation of centralized control.

38:44Professor Eric Cline:And I would agree with that. And then to jump ahead, when the Phoenicians bring the alphabet, you know, by the 8th century, if not earlier, and by the way, I think the alphabet came earlier. I think recent publications have shown it might have been as early as the 11th century. That is very liberating because the alphabet's much easier to learn and to use than linear B. And now pretty much anybody could do it for any reason. And so I think it was very liberating when the Phoenicians bring back what becomes the Greek alphabet.

39:20Anita:A more democratic language. Much, much more democratic, yes.

39:24William:Eric, take us next maybe to Cyprus because there you also get devastation, don't you?

39:29Professor Eric Cline:Yes, we do. But there we also get innovation. And one thing I would stress is that the period after the collapse is usually called the world's first dark age. And I would rather call it the Iron Age, as many archaeologists have said. And if we look at the adaptive cycle, for instance, which people usually use in biology and environmental science, after every collapse, there's a period of innovation and invention. And that's what I think we should look at in these centuries right after the collapse. And Cyprus is a prime example because Cyprus is devastated. We do get major Bronze Age sites like Encomy, like Kydian.

40:12Professor Eric Cline:We do see that they are destroyed or have evidence for at least some destruction right around 1200 BC. Now, remember, Cyprus is where the copper came from. Tin we argue about, Afghanistan, Southeast Anatolia, Cornwall, no argument for copper. Copper is from Cyprus. That is what they did. And when the collapse happened and perhaps copper production was affected, they are the people on Cyprus that become innovative. And one of the things that they do is turn to iron. And it looks now as if they may have been at the forefront that while extracting copper and copper ore, that they figured out how to smelt iron at the same time.

41:00Professor Eric Cline:And so, it does look like the earliest iron weapons and iron tools that start being used in the aftermath of the collapse are on Cyprus. And let me emphasize, you will see on the internet and such people saying, oh, the Sea Peoples had iron weapons, and that's why they won, and that iron brought an end to the Bronze Age. No, it did not. iron comes in after the collapse, or at least during it, but it does not contribute to the collapse. It's what you do in this period of innovation and invention afterward. And so Cyprus, even though it is majorly affected, like all the other societies, they immediately pivot.

41:45Professor Eric Cline:They and the Phoenicians are in my top category as to what to do if your society is affected. And in their case, it's iron. And they also, they take the cities that have been destroyed, and they move like three kilometers away and start a new city.

42:03Anita:Can I ask about another place which we've again referred to as – I mean, we've sort of made it seem as though it's a success story of this collapsing period. That's Egypt, which doesn't collapse. But it doesn't fare well. I mean, it suffers, doesn't it? So, just can we talk about that? Because it doesn't by any stretch get away scot-free.

42:22William:Despite all the kind of victory proclamations of Medina Habu, there's something rotten in the state of Egypt.

42:30Professor Eric Cline:Exactly, exactly. And actually, in the first book, the 1177 BC, I kind of ended leaving the impression that Egypt was one of the ones that did the best. And in fact, it's not. As I show in the sequel after 1177, and as I've just mentioned, the Phoenicians and the Cypriots do the best. Assyrians and Babylonians are next best for reasons that we've talked about with the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Egyptians come in third in my category out of five. And I put them in because it's like here in the United States is what we would have called in previous generations, a gentleman's C, right? They haven't failed, but they haven't gotten an A.

43:13Professor Eric Cline:They survive, let's put it that way. The way I put it, I have three different categories. You can transform, which is the best. You can adapt, which is second best. or you can cope. And I think the Egyptians have kind of coped slash adapted. So, I put them in my third category. But it would probably be better to say it survived, but that it was like a Pyrrhic victory, right? They're still there, but they lost control over their foreign territories. They leave Canaan by 1140. Where they've been for a long while. Very long. They had been there since, oh, at least the time of Thutmose III when he fought the Battle of Megiddo, right, back in the 15th century.

44:01Professor Eric Cline:400 years earlier? Yeah, 400. Yeah. So, they've lost all that. They do remain in tenuous contact for trade. They're going up into what's now Jordan and such, but their trade networks have been completely disrupted. They are no longer a member of the great powers.

44:21William:They're not an imperial power. They're just retreated back to modern Egypt.

44:25Professor Eric Cline:Exactly. They've retreated back within their borders. And it does get worse than that because at one point, and we're into now where we've got the 19th dynasty and then until the 20th and 21st, we're now into the period that Egyptologists call the third intermediate period, which is usually described as a period of anarchy and chaos. At one point, there are three, if not four, different people, each claiming that they are pharaoh of Egypt, and each one in a different region of Egypt. So, when you compare it to New Kingdom Egypt, 18th dynasty, right? King Tut, 19th dynasty, there's no comparison.

45:08Professor Eric Cline:And so, that's why I put Egypt in the middle. But two brief comments. One, And one Egyptologist pointed out to me or said, that's unfair comparing third intermediate to New Kingdom. That's an unfair comparison. I'm like, why? I'm comparing Iron Age to Bronze Age. That's exactly the comparison. And then I was giving a lecture, and I said, Egypt in category three. And one graduate student stood up and raised his fist and said, we're number one or nothing. And I said, I guess you're nothing because I'm not going to put you in category one. I might move you up to category two and be equivalent to Assyrians and Babylonians.

45:49Professor Eric Cline:But I really do think that the Egyptians, they're hanging on by the skin of their teeth. They are surviving, but they are not what they were in the Bronze Age.

45:59Anita:Have we actually said who your number one is? Because, you know, you're dissing left, right, and center every ancient civilization, tumbling the annual ranking. Who is Eric Klein's number one?

46:10William:Number one are the Phoenicians. We are coming to the Phoenicians in the next episode.

46:15Professor Eric Cline:And we're very much looking forward to this. The Phoenicians and the Cypriots are my number one, the two of them. And we actually do see, and maybe we'll talk about this in the future, but wherever we see Phoenician goods in the Aegean, we also find Cypriot goods. So the question is, are they working in tandem or are they competitors? Maybe they're competitors. Who knows? But those are my number ones. So, you know, if you're going to survive a collapse, you should be like the Phoenicians or be like the Cypriots. But don't be like the Egyptians.

46:47Anita:And for God's sake, not a Hittite. Never a Hittite. Never been. I'm actually having T-shirts printed up to be a Hittite.

46:55Professor Eric Cline:But to round it out, for those who haven't figured it out yet, in my category four, Mycenaeans and Minoans. They're not as bad as the Hittites, but they're not even as good as the Egyptians. So, you know, to come full circle, like I said, the Mycenaeans basically had to start all over again. After 1050, nobody's a Mycenaean. That doesn't mean that they went away totally. I think the membrane is permeable. So, you know, Bronze Age Mycenaeans and Iron Age Greeks, they're still worshiping Zeus and Hera and Poseidon and Athena. Some stuff makes it through, but they really do have to start over again.

47:35Professor Eric Cline:That's not the case in Egypt. They did not have to start over again. It's just their government kind of fell apart.

47:43William:We are going to be looking at Eric's superstars, the Phoenicians, in the next episode, and also seeing how the Israelites and the Philistines emerge from this mess of the collapse in the next episode. You don't have to wait. You can join the club at empirepoduk.com for less than a frothy coffee. Anyway, see you next time. Goodbye from me, William Drimple.

48:10Anita:And from me, Anita Arnon.

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