337. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Philistines, Israelites, & Rebuilding The Levant (Ep 6)

16:41Eric Cline:Yes. Well, the archaeology of what we're seeing at these five sites and more is suggesting, I mean, Asafios Orlandau from University of Haifa, in his book that came out in 2010, suggests that it was a much more peaceful infiltration and assimilation than one might expect. And this DNA, I think, kind of corroborates that because however it happened, there are kids that were the result of unions of local Canaanites and incoming others. These infants that were found are not the Sea Peoples themselves or even the children. They're from almost a century later. So I would say they're like the grandkids or the great grandkids of the Sea Peoples.

17:27Eric Cline:But to my mind, that means that what Shirley Ben-Dorevian is suggesting is that Philistines are basically Canaanites or Levantians, that maybe half of them of each person, they were half that. That makes sense. But the other half was somebody else.

17:46William:Yeah. So, you can come across a compromise here. You and Shirley can find a way to…

17:51Eric Cline:Yes. So, Shirley and I can continue to be friends. Yes. So, yes. That's where I think it's coming from. So, you do have external people that come in. The very interesting thing, though, is that same study showed that within like another century or so, that genetic material had basically dissolved, and you could no longer see the outside influence. So, it was kind of temporary. And then everybody became local again, and you're back to being, you know, Philistine, Israelites, whatever.

18:23William:Or maybe they were just a small minority who got sort of bred out of… Yeah.

18:28Eric Cline:Maybe.

18:28William:Now, the other thing which has been turning up in some recent articles is a second Philistine state.

18:34Eric Cline:Yes.

18:35William:Which is further north, around Aleppo. And we get the same word of Peleset or Palashtu being used far to the north of what is now Palestine or Philistia.

18:48Eric Cline:Right. So, this is from the Neo-Hittite city-states, such as Carchemish and Aleppo and others.

18:56William:This is on the border of modern Turkey and Syria, the sort of area that was hit by the earthquake four or five years ago. Yes.

19:03Eric Cline:And these are the remnants of the Hittites that have survived, right? These are the Neo-Hittite states. And there's one site, Tel Tayanat, that Tim Harrison, University of Chicago is excavating, and so on. So, some of the texts up there, which are written in Luvian, hieroglyphic Luvian, which again is a remnant of the Hittite Empire, there is a mention that had been deciphered as Wallastin with a W, Wallastin. And then a number of years ago, that was re-read with a P instead of a W, and instead of Wallastin, it was Palestine. with Palestine. But it's not where Palestine is, it's far to the north.

19:51Eric Cline:Yeah. It's far to the north. And so, there's been a whole debate now, was there a second or secondary state up there? Or was that where the Palessit first landed? And then came south. And then came south. And it is in the region of Ugarit and Omuru. I mean, it does fit with what Ramses III has said.

20:14William:So these Cretans, or whatever they are, land at a garret, then they work their way south, and they end up in Ashkelon and Gaza.

20:22Eric Cline:Exactly. And interesting, too, even before that text had been reinterpreted, the pottery that was found at sites like Teltayanat and elsewhere in that region, it's Aegean. It's originally Aegean. It's Mycenaean. And then it's this Mycenaean local or Mycenaean light, if you will. So, to say that the Palesa and all that are from the Aegean actually makes sense. But do you then have an earlier or simultaneous kingdom up north called Palestine or Palestine up there or Wallis-Stine? That debate is still ongoing. We are still debating that right now. But it's absolutely fascinating that we might have had originally the Philistines up north and that they migrated south.

21:12Eric Cline:But that would fit with the general picture.

21:16William:Now, the even more contested story, of course, is the origins of the Israelites. And this runs into the whole question of the historicity of the Bible. And there's a whole range of different positions from those who think the Bible is the word of God and every word of it is true, through to the bunch of guys in Denmark, the Copenhagen school, who think it's all, you know, it's just kind of a story like the Iliad or the Odyssey. It's basically literature with gods and that we shouldn't treat it as history. You kind of pivot in the middle of this, don't you? You're sort of halfway between the two schools.

21:51William:Is that right?

21:52Eric Cline:Yes, I would be like Israel Finkelstein, with whom I dug at Megiddo for 20 years. He calls himself usually a centrist. And I would say, yes, I'm a centrist. Yes, I'm in the middle between the minimalist and the maximalist, right? You just referred to some of them, the so-called Copenhagen School, which said that history is at a minimum in the Bible. I'm in the middle.

22:17William:You believe that the Bible is a useful tool that can be used but with care and selectively and just using what you can. Yes. And realizing it's written many, many centuries later, like Homer.

22:30Eric Cline:Like Homer. You took the words out of my mouth. Absolutely. Looking at what the Bible says and using it, yes, there are nuggets of history in there. I mean, the Bible is not written as a history book, and it was never meant to be used that way. But that doesn't mean that there aren't nuggets of history. It doesn't contain folk memories and so on. Folk memories and even actual facts. When you get down into the first millennium, there's a lot of things that are absolutely sure, they're correct. The kings and the battles and all that. And so I use the Bible with a grain of salt. I mean, to be heretical, I use it as I do any other ancient source, right?

23:13Eric Cline:So the Ugaritic archives, the Hittite archives, New Kingdom records, Neo-Assyrian records, Hebrew Bible. I treat them all pretty much the same way. Can I believe this? Can I, you know, what can I use? What can I not use? And yes, Homer, same way. I do think that there are parts of the Iliad that can be used, especially the obvious things, like the catalog of ships in Book 2, right? There are memories that are definitely. Boris Tuss helmets, right? They're not using them in Homer's day, and yet. Darrell Bock That they are in the text, yeah. Darrell Bock And there they are, exactly. But, you know, four-spoke wheels versus six-spoke.

23:52Eric Cline:So, Israel and the history and the Bible, same type of thing.

23:57William:So, in the Bible, we obviously have the story of the people of Israel who arrive with Abraham, then go off to Egypt, and you have the Exodus, and they come back. And then you have this sort of picture of total destruction during the age of Joshua, when they smash through Jericho, knock down walls, then assault all the Canaanites there, violently wipe them out. There's a sort of prehistoric Nakba when everyone is expelled. You do not find that archaeologically, I understand.

24:30Eric Cline:No, we do not find that archaeologically. And in fact, what's interesting is if you look at the Bible itself, you actually have two different stories and two different versions. If you look at the book of Joshua, it's exactly as you just described. It's a genocide. They come in and they kill everybody and take over. But if you look at the book of Judges, it's a completely different story. What does it say there? Well, they come in. It's much more peaceful. They assimilate. They live side by side in the same towns, it says. And it's much more civilized, if you will. So, the Bible itself has two different versions.

25:11Eric Cline:How interesting.

25:12William:Yeah. That's so often with the Bible. You've got two different creations. You've got two different arrivals of the Israelites.

25:18Eric Cline:Yeah, always. So, you know, people believe what they want to believe. I, from the archaeology and from what people, my colleagues have said, I would go with the more peaceful, the assimilation. But there we get into, I mean, and again, this is a huge debate with an archaeology, which is very fun to teach. And in fact, we could have six series, you know, six-part series just on that. Come back, Eric, come back. So, we have like Albright, William F. Albright, the Dean of American Biblical Archaeology. He held to the biblical narrative. He said conquest narrative. Yes, just like, you know, like we had in Joshua.

25:58Eric Cline:And he was in the 50s or 40s? From the 30s, 40s, 50s. Yeah, exactly.

26:04William:And then he is displaced by a Brit, Kathleen Kenyon, who excavates Jericho and doesn't find what is in the Bible.

26:12Eric Cline:Exactly. She doesn't find it. This has been actually another Brit, Garstang, John Garstang, who excavated a lot up in Anatolia, the Hittites and all that. He actually had excavated at Jericho and said he had found evidence of the destruction, right, by Joshua and everybody. But the pottery didn't look right, and people called his findings into question. And so they brought in Kathleen Kenyon. Dame Kathleen Kenyon. Dame Kathleen Kenyon, exactly, daughter of the director of the British Museum, wonderful archaeologist, dug at Samaria and Jerusalem. And she came in specifically to look at the pottery.

26:55Eric Cline:This is now early 60s, late 50s? 50s, 60s, somewhere in there. Yeah. And she promptly said what every archaeologist ever born has always said. We need to do more digging. We need to excavate more. Yeah. And she then said, this is not Joshua's destruction. This is a thousand years earlier. This is not 1200. It's more like 2200 or 2300, 2400 BC.

27:23William:So, are we now in a world where the early Israelites are just Canaanites that have taken on a new religion and they're doing different things like not eating pork or so on? Or are we talking about, there's another theory that they're brigands, apiru, which might be the same word as Hebrews or not? Take us through that.

27:46Eric Cline:It depends to whom you speak, and in fact, in which decade you were speaking to them. Because, yes, we had Albright saying it was an invasion. We then had a couple German scholars saying it was peaceful infiltration. We then had scholars saying, no, no, they were always there. They were proto-Israelites, meaning they were already Canaanites. So, we're still arguing about it.

28:14William:And we do get these sort of interesting things whereby, for example, a Canaanite lunar deity, Lucifer, ends up becoming a demon in the New Testament, or indeed Baal, Beelzebub, and Beelzebub. So you get the demonization of Canaanite deities. So implying that it's a religious change.

28:35Eric Cline:Yeah, as I've mentioned in various lectures, again, here in Israel, like in Greece, it's a porous membrane. So, you know, most of Canaanite society and culture goes away, overtaken by the small kingdoms we're talking about now. But especially in religion, it sticks around and you still get these gods and goddesses continuing on in here.

28:59William:And El, as in Samuel and Bethlehem, who is another version of Yahweh.

29:08Eric Cline:Exactly, right. And El and Baal, they're all Canaanite gods that then continue on. And Yahweh has a wife in some inscriptions. Yes, Asra.

29:18William:This will be a surprise to many people here, just before we go to the break, let's quickly deal with God's wife.

29:24Eric Cline:Yeah, did God have a wife? There's actually a book with that title by Bill Deaver, exactly. There's all kinds of things, and none of these are settled. We're all still arguing about them in archaeology and biblical studies and all of that. And even some of the things that we thought we knew, like, for example, if you find a site where they're eating pork, that's obviously not an Israelite site. It would be a Philistine site, for example. And that still seems to hold true, but there are, you know, always some exceptions.

29:56William:Gath is one of these places where we have, I think, you do have pork bones. That's right, because it's on the Philistine. You do, but Gath is one of the Philistines.

30:04Eric Cline:Exactly, right. Right. But where you have a what's called a four roomed house, a four room house, they always said that was Israelite. Well, maybe not. And there was a type of pottery, the collared rim jar. Oh, if you find that type of pottery, you're in an Israelite settlement. No, not so much. So this is a problem. But, you know, it's a problem in all of archaeology when you get too close to something for which there's been a grandiose law made. right if it's four-roomed house if it's iron yeah there are always exceptions so the upshot is we don't know where the israelites are from we don't know where they lived we don't know what they are a lot of questions for something of which a modern nation state depends in a sense yeah yeah always always this is the problem with doing something like that but i'm gonna go with their mostly local Canaanites and that they took advantage of this.

31:02Eric Cline:But if you do want to hold on to the Exodus narrative, I would say that the time of the chaos is the best time for such an Exodus to have happened. But as I tell my students, you don't have to have a huge Exodus all at once. It could have been a much smaller series of migrations over time. And much like Homer, I think, telescopes things into the Trojan War. So, I think the biblical writers telescope things into what we know as the Exodus, and it may have taken over a much longer period of time.

31:38William:Eric, we are just gripped by this, but after the break, we are going to discuss the top of the class from your post-clapse scenario, which are the Phoenicians. After the break.

32:00William:I'll see you next time.

32:26William:Mit VisoSteuer.

32:31William:Welcome back. Well, Eric Klein is still with us for the final half episode of our amazing series on the Bronze Age Clapsed, very much inspired by Eric's books 1177, The Year Civilization Clapsed, and after 1177 BC, The Survival of Civilizations. Now, at the end of the second volume, after 1177, You kind of rank the different civilizations and how they cope with this sort of terrible crisis that takes place at this time. And the people that come top of the class are the people who, by the recovery period, are known as the Phoenicians, but who are actually just the people that have been living, the Canaanites have been living in the middle of Canaan all along and who are the kind of most commercially minded, the big seafarers.

33:18William:Take us through the Phoenicians and where they come from and where they go.

33:22Eric Cline:Absolutely. So, the Phoenicians are basically the Canaanites in central Canaan, what today we would consider to be Lebanon.

33:30William:Your book is blurbed by our friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is himself a Phoenician-stroke Lebanese superstar.

33:39Eric Cline:Absolutely. And in fact, I borrowed from him in, I think it was 2014, he had a book that he put out called Anti-Fragile. And to my mind, that is how one describes the Phoenicians. They are anti-fragile, meaning that they flourished in a time of chaos. They took advantage of it. So, yes, I'm quite indebted to him for that idea. So, the Phoenicians, they are the Canaanites that survive the collapse in central Canaan, again, today, Lebanon. But, you know, as you know, they would not have called themselves Phoenicians. That's the later name. That's what Herodotus calls them. It's the Greek name for these guys, yeah.

34:20Eric Cline:They would have said, Phoenician, what's that? I'm from Tyre. I'm from Sidon. I'm from Byblos. I'm from Beirut. They would have identified with that.

34:30William:This is actually something you see very much at this period, isn't it? People identify with their cities very strongly in many, many places, and that we're trying to impose sort of nations on people who were often just city-states.

34:44Eric Cline:I'm actually wondering if the fact that they were decentralized, if you will, that it was a series of city-states rather than a big kingdom or empire, if that is what allowed them, did that allow them to survive? Were they more resilient because of that? One of the things we talk about with the systems collapse is that the central economy collapses. Well, if you don't have a central economy, there's nothing to collapse. If you don't have a centralized government, there's nothing to collapse. So, maybe they were able to survive precisely because they were decentralized. Take us through these guys.

35:22William:So at the beginning of this series, five episodes ago, Joe told us about how the Ugarit people were these great merchants with ships running out of this port full of all the goodies from Afghanistan, from Cornwall, stopping off, selling things, making a huge profit. Ugarit goes down, but that same spirit survives in towns like Byblos, Tar, and Sidon.

35:47Eric Cline:Yes. In fact, this is where they are anti-fragile down in the Phoenician cities. They take advantage of the chaos, and in particular, they take advantage of the destruction of Ugarit. When Ugarit is destroyed, it's not rebuilt and re-inhabited for another 400 to 600 years. The Phoenicians say, ah, excuse us, and they step into the breach. And so, as some of my colleagues have said, the Mediterranean becomes a Phoenician lake. They take over.

36:23William:What allows these people to be so successful? They've got a mercantile mindset. They've got better boats. What's their USP?

36:32Eric Cline:It's an excellent question. What I would argue, like just off the top of my head, out of all the people, the Bronze Age, that had ships, seafaring, and navies, the Phoenicians are the ones that survive. I mean, the Hittites had a navy. They don't survive. Mycenaeans and Minoans, they more than likely had their own boats. They're not in shape to do anything. They had to go to the Trojan War. Yeah, they had to get there somehow. Yeah, exactly. There's their thousand ships all gone. Right. Egypt, they had a navy. they are now not in a position. It would only be people like Cyprus and the Phoenicians that have ships, navies, and are still in a position to do something about it.

37:15Eric Cline:Lo and behold, those are the two groups that take over the Mediterranean in the Iron Age.

37:20William:You hinted in the last episode that the Cypriots and the Phoenicians may actually be sort of working together or even regard themselves as one people, that they have this mercantile naval-based sort of merchant navy that's now taking over the Mediterranean. And just so that we establish this, they're going out to North Africa. They're going to Spain. They're even going down the African coast. Is that right?

37:47Eric Cline:They're going all over the place. Yeah. And in fact, if you want to really intertwine them, we know the Phoenicians were on Cyprus at this time. All right. So, we do know that. So, the Phoenicians and the Cypriots, I say in my book, I'm not sure if they're competitors or colleagues. I would go more with that they're colleagues at this point. They don't seem to be fighting. And definitely in most of the places like on Crete and on mainland Greece, where we find Phoenician stuff, we also find Cypriot stuff. But on Cyprus itself, and this is a bit of a problem. In the Iron Age, we don't have that many inscriptions.

38:26Eric Cline:on Cyprus. But it does look like the Phoenicians have a toehold, a foothold on Cyprus. So, I do think that they're kind of acting in tandem rather than in competition. But, you know, for some of these cities like Tyre and Sidon and Biblios, we do have inscriptions at the cities. We know the names of the kings, right? Not just Hiram of Tyre from the Bible, but we know, you know, the predecessors. So, we can actually reconstruct the names of the kings in the Phoenician cities during this time period, which means we're getting a pretty detailed history of what's going on. But we don't have the economic records per se from there, but we do know what the Neo-Assyrians wanted of them and those goods.

39:11William:Now, we've managed in this miniseries to encompass the fall of Troy, the Exodus, great chunks of the Bible. One story we haven't included yet is Dido and Aeneas. Now, so Dido, Queen of Carthage, the founding of Carthage, take us there from the Phoenician heartlands.

39:31Eric Cline:So, the Phoenicians become the Carthaginians, right? When Rome fights the Punic Wars, they are fighting against the descendants of the Phoenicians.

39:40William:Who worship versions of the Canaanite gods still, but in the middle of what's now Tunisia.

39:46Eric Cline:Right, exactly, right. And you've got New City, you've got Carthage and all that. So, yeah, and it does look like this story of Dido fleeing from one of the Phoenician cities and going over to that region. The earliest, the archaeology shows that the earliest pottery architecture, all that, does come from like the 8th century. It does fit the story or the time, the context of the story of Dido. Now, again, how much faith can you put in a story like that? Hard to tell. But the archaeology does not, you know, disown it. You know, it's possible. And take us beyond Carthage.

40:27William:They found Cadiz, is that right?

40:30Eric Cline:In Spain, yeah, yeah. They're all the way over there. What are they doing there? That's a long way from home. Well, and this is where the newest archaeology is getting more and more interesting. We are now finding, and by we I mean all my colleagues, are finding that the Phoenicians were going over to Spain, to Iberia, definitely by the 8th and 9th centuries, possibly by the 10th, maybe even the 11th centuries, which means right after the collapse. And they appear to be going after silver. At least that's what it looks like. They're bringing silver back that you could mine in Iberia, in Cadiz, in various areas.

41:07Eric Cline:And the earliest Phoenician pottery and settlements definitely go back 9th century, maybe even 10th and 11th. So, this is where the newest finds in archaeology. It's a very exciting time to be doing this, and we're finding more and more connections that we've got. And when they're analyzing silver in hordes that have been found in what is today modern-day Israel and elsewhere, they're finding that among other places, it is silver from Spain.

41:39William:So, at the beginning of this series, we were in a very globalized world where Lapis from Afghanistan was kind of, you know, meeting in a ship with Tin from Cornwall. And we're kind of back there again by what period? How long has it taken for us to get back to this?

41:56Eric Cline:Good question. And I don't have a definitive answer, but in my mind, we are back to that globalized network. We're back to a small world network by the early 8th century BC. We had had this network back in the Bronze Age. 200-year sort of interregnum. I would say 400 at the most. 400-year interregnum. And I put it down that late because of Greece. Greece is the last one back of the ones that made it back, you know, leaving out the Hittites and all that. Of the groups that are trying to make it back, Greece is the last, and they're back by the early 8th century. Some of the early parts of the network are already up and running.

42:36William:Which is the period when Homer's writing, just to quickly put that in there.

42:41Eric Cline:Homer's going to be 750, 700 at the latest. But early 8th century, 776 BC, first Olympics. Huh. And that's why you mentioned you made a reference. Your next book is going to be, yeah. Right. You referenced the trilogy, and I'm working on the third book in the unintended trilogy, because I never meant to do this. It was the one book and then the sequel, and this trilogy will go from the third one will go from the early 8th century down through the death of Alexander the Great. And it's going to be the 776 BC, the clashing of civilizations. Brilliant.

43:21William:In this case, this is Persia versus Sparta and Athens.

43:26Eric Cline:Yeah, Persia versus Greeks, but it's also Athens versus Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. And it's, of course, Alexander the Great versus the rest of the world, if you will. But what has happened is by the early 8th century, we've got this network back. But there are bits and pieces that are already up and running, as I say, by at least the 10th century and maybe even the 11th. And that is where Phoenicians and Cypriots come in. And that's why they're at the top of my list. They're your star performers. They're my star performers. Exactly. If your society collapses, you should emulate the Phoenicians.

44:07William:Before we go to that, I'm going to ask you to close this series with your reasons why these guys, you think, succeed while others fail. But before we go there, we started this series with Jo Quinn. And her big thesis in her last book is how far the West learns from the East, that the ideas that we thought are central to Western civilization are coming in, in her view, a lot of them from the Levant beyond. Now, one of these things is the idea of the alphabet. How does that get to Greece? Tell us that story.

44:40Eric Cline:So, the Phoenicians, they do not invent the alphabet, but they standardize it. The alphabet had been around already for a couple hundred years. Even Ugarit had already had a version of the alphabet before it collapsed. But what the Phoenicians do is standardize it and then spread it. So they bring their standardized alphabet to Greece, where the Greeks add in vowels. That's a Greek innovation, is it? Yes, they take some of the letters and make them into vowels, right?

45:10William:And in some Semitic languages still, we don't have vowels. I mean, Arabic doesn't have vowels. Yes.

45:15Eric Cline:Yeah, yeah. Hebrew, right, exactly. Right. So, yeah, so I kind of, I see it as the Greek saying, thank you, we'll take the alphabet, and look, we've improved it. Right. But they also, the Phoenicians, also bring the alphabet to Italy, and it becomes the Latin alphabet. And, of course, we are still using the Latin alphabet today to write English, French, German, Italian, Spanish. I mean, we're using the Latin alphabet. So if you want, we're still using the Phoenician alphabet. So we are, I mean, that's one of the, you know, we are the successors. That's very nice. Can you say that? We are using a version of the Phoenician alphabet.

45:56Eric Cline:Absolutely. Yes.

45:57William:That's a very nice thing. So take us back then to the lessons. We've had six episodes. We've had six hours of extraordinary and absolutely fascinating textual stuff with people like Stephen Fry and Simon Gold Hill. We've had archaeology from you and archaeology and text from Joe Quinn. What are the lessons to be taken from this? Who are the survivors? Why are they doing better than other peoples? What, as we approach this era of climate change, of possible upheavals ahead, I mean, it feels a very fragile moment. What are the lessons of the Bronze Age collapse for us today?

46:40Eric Cline:This is a question, yes. So, I wanted to give readers some hope towards the end of the book and some takeaway. We need it. We need it at this particular moment. Yeah. We definitely do. So, I created a table of like seven takeaways, seven common sense things that you should know. But I would also say, you know, in the spirit of ending on a good high note, that it is amazing how resilient people are, that they can bounce back. So, like, when we study collapse, it's very easy to focus in on the destruction, the loss, and all of that. And certainly, you know, people suffered. There was a very real loss.

47:21Eric Cline:Like I say, the collapse of the late Bronze Age is only really comparable to the collapse of the Roman Empire. I mean, it was catastrophic. In some ways, it was even worse. Why would you say that? Well, because we lost so much. We absolutely lost so much. I mean, even with the fall of Rome, you still got the Eastern Roman Empire that keeps going for another thousand years, right? Byzantium, Constantinople, right? And even Rome, we teach our kids over here in the United States, Rome fell in 476 or something like that. No, no. It took the fifth century. It took 100 years. So, anyway, but it also took 100 years for the Late Bronze Age to collapse.

48:02Eric Cline:So, my 1177 is just a benchmark there. But the thing is, in the aftermath of the late Bronze Age collapse, they didn't just give up. They rebuilt. They adapted. Some just coped. Some adapted. Some transformed, right? Cypriots and Phoenicians, they transformed, created whole new societies to some degree, like in Greece. They were more simple than they had been, but then they gradually grew, and we get great things after that. I mean, look at the Greeks. They went on to create small things like, you know, democracy and small buildings like the Parthenon, you know, little things like that. So, they flourished.

48:47Eric Cline:And basically what happens is, and I argue this in the book, in the aftermath, it's not a dark age. It's the Iron Age. It's the period of invention. It's the period of innovation. And so, in my takeaways, I focused in on that, the lessons that we can get from the Bronze Age collapse. And one of the things I would say is be careful about being interconnected. It will bring you up to the greatest heights, but it will also bring you down to the lowest lows. Grow your own vegetables. Exactly. Grow your own vegetables. Right. When it's working well, it's great. When it's not working well. You can't get toilet paper or computer chips or cars or anything like that.

49:32Eric Cline:But I do say, don't be isolationist. We're not off to Montana with a shotgun. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I would not run out to Montana and hide out with a shotgun. No, you need to keep your friends. You need to be self-sufficient, but depend on your neighbors. Help them out. They help you out, all of that. Because when you're working together, you're much more likely to survive. But along those lines, you need to be inventive. You need to be innovative. Adaptable. Adaptable. Absolutely. And this is where things got me worried. It used to be that people said, like Carol Bell, wonderful archaeologist, she's like, tin in the ancient world is like petroleum today.

50:18Eric Cline:Well, yeah, it was, and it still is. I think it's more like rare earths, like lithium, that are used now to make chips.

50:26William:It was a rare earth. Of course it was, yeah.

50:28Eric Cline:That's where we need to find other alternatives and not depend on those. And again, look at the pandemic. When there was a shortage, suddenly we couldn't get cars, we couldn't get computers, because you couldn't get the chips. So, innovation, inventiveness, that's incredibly important. The other things I would say, and not everybody will like me to hear to say this, but we need to prepare for extreme weather conditions. We really do. They're happening more and more frequently. I think there's no denying that you're looking at climate change, whether it's heating or cooling, whatever. We're definitely, we're getting more extreme weather conditions.

51:07Eric Cline:Let's just put it that way. Every single summer, the Mediterranean is on fire. Yeah, we see it. Yeah, wildfires in California and Greece. My personal feeling is, what is the harm in preparing for extreme weather? Because if it comes, you're ready. And if it doesn't come, what have you lost? So I would prepare for extreme weather conditions.

51:29William:I live on a farm where I grow my own vegetables on the edge of Delhi, but the water, which we depend on, has disappeared now beyond all the boreholes. There you go. When it gets hot in summer, we have to have it brought in. And if that water did not come, we would have to move out of this farm.

51:49Eric Cline:Exactly. So two things to work off of that. But one, I was fortunate enough when I was a kid to watch John Wooden coach the last couple of years of UCLA Bruins basketball back when they won 88 games in a row. And he used to tell his teams that if you are failing to prepare, then you're preparing to fail. So we need to prepare just in case. But water, you're absolutely right. Water is essential. And that's one of the points that I make. It did for the Hittites. Exactly. The Hittites were the odd man out in terms of not being on a river system, and they're the ones that fail. And I've been told I'm pretty good authority, and it's happening already, that the wars in the next century, many of them will be fought over water, control of water.

52:40Eric Cline:Absolutely. So that is also a takeaway. Be very careful about your water resources. I'm from Scotland. One thing we do not lack is rain. Anyway. Well, good. Well, good. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I think my last point was, and I think most historians would agree, you got to keep your working class happy, right? Keep your, you know, the lower class, you got to keep them happy or there are going to be bad repercussions. So, and I think we see that with the internal rebellions and such back then. Yeah. Eric Klein, this has been a complete pleasure.

53:15William:You were with me all by Christmas holiday, reading your wonderful books. I've still got the Tell Alamarna letters to come, and it sounds like I've got a third volume of the trilogy to go when it comes out. Eventually. Eventually. Thank you so, so much for being with us. We'd love to get you back on the show another time. But for the moment, Eric, thank you. It's goodbye from me. Anita will be back in the next episode, where we will be starting a spectacular new series. And I have so enjoyed the reading for this on the extraordinary life of Chairman Mao, who is one of the most important and controversial figures in history and someone who I certainly knew almost nothing about and didn't realize how little I knew until I dived into this series.

54:02William:So strongly recommend the next six episodes. Goodbye from me, William Drimple, and Anita will be back in the next episode.