What the Odyssey is hiding

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1:02I got a real soft spot for Greek mythology. As a kid, I read Dallaire's book of Greek myths over and over until the cover came off. And even now, I've got this weird thing where I name every gadget I have after someone from Greek mythology. So my AirPods are Hermes, you know, messenger god. My TV is Dionysus. I think that one's kind of self-explanatory. And my favorite one is my Roomba. Unfortunately, he's Sisyphus, because no matter how hard he tries, the little guy's never finished. But this summer, it might not just be me. We might start seeing a lot more garbage disposals named Charybdis. No one could stand between me and home.

1:54Because the biggest movie in the world is The Odyssey. Now these are the gods.

2:00Eric Cline:I'm both excited and dreading it. Eric Klein is an archaeologist and an ancient historian at George Washington University. I am hoping I love it. I am pretty sure I'm going to hate parts of it. Because most of the time when you see movies that take place in the ancient past, the world they depict is primitive. But the world of the late Bronze Age, when the Trojan War and the Odyssey supposedly took place, if they did take place, was way more advanced than you might think. Everyone is shocked by how modern those ancient societies seem. So here's what it's like back then. You've got nine powerful, technologically advanced societies all over the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

2:47Eric Cline:From Italy on one side to Iran and Afghanistan, and from Turkey down to Egypt. There's the Mycenaeans, aka the early Greeks, the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Babylonians. And they're all kind of shockingly interconnected. They're trading gold, silver, wine, olive oil, sandals, textiles. And their supply chains are wild. To make all their bronze, they get copper from Cyprus, and then they mix it with tin from as far away as Britain and Afghanistan. They are signing diplomatic treaties. They're marrying each other's daughters in dynastic marriages. They are doing economic embargoes. They're doing economic embassies.

3:36Eric Cline:They even have flushable toilets. It's like us today, but they were doing it 3 ,500 years ago. Toilets! They're just like us. And then suddenly around 1200 BC, it all started to unravel. Almost all of these societies took a massive hit. Some just fully collapsed, all within a few decades of each other. That globalized network was shattered, and it was not reconstituted for about 400 years.

4:21Most of the palaces were never rebuilt. In some places, the basic idea of writing disappeared for hundreds of years. We didn't get flushable toilets again until the Romans came around, like a thousand years later. And this wasn't just one empire. This wasn't the fall of the Romans or the Mayans or the Indus Valley civilization. this was the entire known world for most of these people. And a lot of it went from a technologically advanced, globalized network to a backwater. A few hundred years later, in this post-collapse world, that's when Homer composed the Odyssey. It was almost this myth of the before times, which, again, were actually pretty modern.

5:11So, if they were so advanced, what happened to them?

5:16Eric Cline:The big question that we've got is what caused it all to shatter? What caused the collapse? We don't have an answer yet. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and today on Unexplainable, what was behind arguably the biggest societal collapse in the history of the world? And can we stop it from happening again?

5:53When Eric was in school back in the 70s and 80s, there was one pretty standard explanation for what caused the collapse of the late Bronze Age.

6:02Eric Cline:The big one was the Sea Peoples. The Sea Peoples. The Sea Peoples. Okay. They invade and attack Egypt twice. And we know it from an inscription in the mortuary temple of Ramses III. He has a picture of the naval battle that he fought against the Sea Peoples and an inscription that says, Northerners coming from all lands, they invaded from their islands. Hence the name Sea Peoples. Got it. And he names places that they seem to have invaded. It looks like they are sweeping across what we would call Greece and then Turkey and then northern Syria and Cyprus. And then the French have found archives where the king of Ugarit, which is on the coast of what is now North Syria, is writing.

6:58Eric Cline:The enemy has overrun my port city and they're now advancing police and reinforcements. And so whenever a city was excavated and found to have been destroyed from about that time period, people said, oh, it's the Sea Peoples. So then what makes this collapse more complicated than just blame the Sea Peoples? Well, okay, so in Ramsey's inscriptions, although he does talk about invasions from lands to the north, he also depicts families, ox carts, where you've got the women and the children looking for a better life. You're saying basically they're like migrants? Absolutely, they're migrants. The analogy I make is to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, where you're moving from Oklahoma to California because of a drought.

7:51Eric Cline:I also think a more recent example would be the refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria. I think that's the modern equivalent of the sea people. So, they used to be the bogeyman of the late Bronze Age, and I think we need a little more sympathy for them. They may well have caused lots of destruction and upheaval and all that, But it was only because they were uprooted from wherever they came from. So even though the Sea Peoples probably played a role in the collapse, Eric thought there must have been something deeper that got them moving in the first place. And when he and his colleagues started looking at a whole bunch of late Bronze Age sites, they started seeing evidence of earthquake damage.

8:42Eric Cline:If you've got walls knocked off kilter, if you've got an arched doorway, frequently the keystone in the arch will slip. If you have bodies buried in the remnants of a house and there's no arrowheads or swords or hacked off arms and the person is a stone embedded in their head, like at Mycenae, that is probably an earthquake. And we were able to pull together quite a few examples of cities that we thought manifested destruction debris. And then it turns out that in seismology, there is something called an earthquake storm. If you have an earthquake on a fault line and it doesn't relieve all of the built-up pressure, you'll have another earthquake fairly soon thereafter, a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a couple of months at most.

9:36Eric Cline:If that one then doesn't relieve the rest of the pressure, you'll have another one and another one. And it turns out that a fault line can unzip over about 60 years. And so we see this in modern terms. In fact, the North Anatolian fault line in Turkey has been unzipping for the last 60 years or so. So the idea might be that one earthquake happened and then other earthquakes happened and kind of took out a whole bunch of cities. Yes. The period is about 1225 to 1175 BC. It's about a 50-year period. And most of the destructions that we looked at fell into that. And so, we suggested not that the earthquake storm caused the collapse, but that it contributed to it, that it was one of the factors.

10:29Yeah. So, Sea Peoples, earthquake storm, what are the other potential factors here?

10:35Eric Cline:Well, drought was one of the big ones because in the 1960s, a professor at Bryn Mawr, Reese Carpenter, had suggested that's what ended the Mycenaeans was a prolonged drought. But he didn't have the evidence for it. And so, it kind of dropped out of the mainstream in terms of hypotheses. But starting in about 2010, a couple of groups started taking course, drilling into dried up lagoons and dried up lakes and looking at pollen samples. It's actually, it's called palynology, the study of ancient pollens. They were able to see that there was a change in trees and shrubs and everything around about 1250 BC, where the type of plants that started growing were better adapted to an arid environment without water.

11:34Eric Cline:And they said, we've got evidence for a drought lasting about 300 years. 300 years. Yeah, I think some of the most compelling evidence actually comes from inside caves. There's one stalagmite in a cave in Greece that stopped growing because there wasn't enough water for it to keep going. Yeah. So, we've got multiple sources of evidence from multiple sites. It's uncontestable. It's everywhere. And so at some point, I basically said, wait a minute, what if it's all of the above? You know, okay, let's say for argument's sake that you've got an earthquake. It may kill a lot of people in your town, city, village, society, but it won't end your society.

12:21Eric Cline:Same thing with drought or famine. But what if you have more than one? The word today, which didn't exist at least a decade ago to my knowledge, is polycrisis. So I think that is what happened, is that it's everything all at once. And what does that mean exactly? Like, how does a drought and an earthquake and the Sea Peoples bring down a whole bunch of interconnected societies at the same time? The way I see it is that you originally had drought. That drought then leads to famine. Famine leads to migration. Migration leads to invasions, if you will, and fighting and battles. And then on top of that, you're hit with an earthquake.

13:12Eric Cline:And one thing that we've left out, but we touched upon it, is the trade in raw metals. So, this is the Bronze Age. To make bronze, you need copper and tin. Copper is easy. That comes from Cyprus. Yeah, that's where Cyprus gets its name, right? Exactly, right. But the tin, the vast majority is coming from Central Asia, in particular, Afghanistan. If the trade routes were cut, you had what we would call today supply chain issues. If you suddenly can't get tin, you then can't make bronze, and then you're in real trouble. Huh. So that's the big picture version of the collapse, right? Right. I wonder what this might have looked like in one place.

13:56Like, if you were there in 1177 BCE, what would the collapse of the entire known world have looked like?

14:07Eric Cline:So actually, Ugarit is probably one of the best case studies that we've got. It's its own city state, it's very close to Anatolia. And Ugarit gets hit with pretty much everything you can imagine. They write to the Egyptians. They ask for grain. The texts say, we're all starving here. We're going to be dead if you don't do something about it. They also talk about the invaders. Ugarit is hit by at least one earthquake. And then the city itself is burnt to the ground. So imagine you're in Ugarit and it's the final days. It's somewhere between probably 1190 and 1185 BC. We know there's a famine in the city, so you're probably hungry.

14:54Eric Cline:You're wondering where your next meal is coming from. We know the city is hit by earthquakes, so is it even safe to sleep in your house? Or are you going to sleep outside? We know that there are enemy ships that have been sighted. everything that could go wrong was going wrong in those final days. And so by the end, what you're going to do, because you can't carry all of your belongings with you, you're going to dig a hole like in the courtyard of your house or even underneath your bedroom. You're going to put your gold and your silver and all your wealth in there covered up nicely and then flee the city thinking you'll come back someday to get it.

15:38Eric Cline:But you never do. The city itself is destroyed. Maybe you are killed. One way or the other, you never come back. And your precious belongings are still sitting there for a French archaeologist to uncover 3 ,200 years later. And Ugarre is just one of the many cities that was destroyed at that same time.

16:07In a minute, what we can learn from the end of the world.

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17:35Eric Cline:but you're the great tactician Odysseus Well, Lady Athena and others favored me, it's true. But your Uncle Poseidon, well, I got on his bad side, I believe. Why did researchers miss all this for so long? Like, why was it so hard to see how all of these causes could be interconnected? In part because people are in their own little cubicles, shall we say. Okay. What do you mean? The Near Eastern people are not talking to the Greek people. And the people who study the Hittites are not talking to the Neo-Assyrian people. And they're not talking to the people who work on Cyprus. So you really have to bridge a couple of academic disciplines, and eventually people start looking at the larger picture.

18:28Are you basically saying in Greece, there might be more evidence for a drought and in Ugarit, there might be more evidence for an earthquake or an invasion. But if you're just studying that one place, you're just going to focus on that one cause and the best evidence you have. You're not going to be looking at the bigger picture.

18:48Eric Cline:Yeah, you're siloed, basically. And this actually happened to me when I gave a lecture in Belgium, and there were a bunch of earth scientists there. And I realized they were working on the exact same thing I was, but from a different point of view. And that was when I said, send me everything you've published. There, it was really different disciplines because I, as an archaeologist and an ancient historian, had never even looked at the journals dealing with earth science. And only belatedly realized that there was a whole slew of data that I had missed, as had everybody else, because I didn't know that it was there.

19:30It's almost like a lot of scholars might not have been appreciating just how interconnected the ancient world was.

19:38Eric Cline:Yes, exactly. People didn't really think that the Late Bronze Age was as interconnected as we now know it was. I mean, I still remember one of my dissertation advisors saying, you're collecting all the Egyptian and Near Eastern objects found in Greece. What use is that? But I pulled together about 1 ,200 objects, and I'm like, okay, this is hard evidence that they were in contact. Now, if we know they're in contact, we can now say what kinds of influence came with all of that. But the thing is, people like me who do such interdisciplinary work, I am dependent on the individual scholars, the specialists.

20:23Eric Cline:Right, right. I could not do this if it were not for the work of all of them. You know, the late Bronze Age kind of reminds me of our society in a lot of ways. We clearly are having a climate crisis. We're having massive amounts of migration and refugees. It's causing a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric. It's causing a lot of societal division. We're having supply chain disruption. Right. Do you see parallels between, you know, 3 ,200 years ago and today? Yeah, I'm afraid I do. Yeah. many of the symptoms, many of the drivers and stressors that they had that led to that collapse, we've got it around today.

21:04Eric Cline:And so I don't think it's a question of, are we going to collapse? Is our globalized network going to collapse? It is. The question is, when is it going to collapse? That's a pretty pessimistic view. Totally. But we're aware of what's happening. I'm not sure they were aware back then. So, it's up to us to choose to do something about it, because pretty much every society in human history has collapsed or has transformed so much that it's almost unrecognizable in its new iteration. And in this particular case with the Late Bronze Age, we're able to see what happened before, what happened during, and what happened after.

21:51Eric Cline:And so we can see the ramifications of it. So we can actually say, oh, if we don't respond to the problems we've got here, here's what happened in one situation 3 ,200 years ago. Let's try to make sure that doesn't happen again.

22:12It's true that understanding how this collapse happened might be the best way to avoid repeating it. But Eric's basically saying that until recently, we haven't been doing too well at the whole understanding part. We just blamed the Sea Peoples. We took this complicated, interconnected crisis and we turned it into an almost mythical invasion story. We flattened it, kind of like how Homer took the surprisingly modern late Bronze Age and turned it into gods and monsters in the Odyssey. The thing is, the ancient past is always going to be full of gaps. But we don't have to just fill them in. We can accept that the past was complicated.

22:59And hopefully, hundreds of years from now, when some future Homer is telling our story, they won't flatten us either.

23:21This episode was produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Meredith Hodnot, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from me, and fact-checking from Kim Slatterback. Joanna Salataroff is our editorial director, and Valerie Schenkman, Alex Coles, and Kareem Correa are the fact that there are three sports teams in the big four men's sports leagues that are named after works of art. Possibly four, depending on whose story you believe. But music, literature, art, all of that counts. And yes, I know lots of sports facts. But if you think you have a guess, let me know. And Bird Pinkerton still didn't understand.

24:03You're birds. Why are you helping me? So Flapton explained. There wasn't always a war. But when those beak freaks took over, everything changed. We knew we needed to do something. So we came here. And I built that guitar.

24:25Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with Bird and me. Also, a quick reminder that we are on Netflix now. So if you want to watch video versions of our Monday episodes, you can check us out over there. And if you have thoughts about the show, as always, we would love to hear from you. Email us at unexplainable at vox.com. And if you'd like to support the show, join Vox. Become a member. Just go to vox.com slash members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we'll see you right back here next time.