THE END IS ALWAYS NEAR

Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

Dan Carlin

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Dan Carlin 2019

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Cover image © Getty Images/flubydust

Dan Carlin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008340926

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008340940

Version: 2019-09-24

Dedication

To Brittany, Liv, and Avery

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1: Do Tough Times Make for Tougher People?

Chapter 2: Suffer the Children

Chapter 3: The End of the World as They Knew It

Chapter 4: Judgment at Nineveh

Chapter 5: The Barbarian Life Cycle

Chapter 6: A Pandemic Prologue?

Chapter 7: The Quick and the Dead

Chapter 8: The Road to Hell

Afterword

Further Reading

Footnotes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

DO YOU THINK that modern civilization will ever fall and our cities will ever lie in ruins?

It sounds like an overused science fiction theme, with the archaeologists of the future carefully poking around the rusting skeletons of New York, London, or Tokyo’s skyscrapers, subways, or sewers; removing our dead from their graves and studying them like we do ancient Egyptian mummies; trying to decipher our language, unlock the code that is our writing, and figure out who we were. To imagine our tombs, buildings, and human remains being treated the way we today treat ancient archaeological finds might seem unimaginable, but there’s a pretty good chance that’s what the mummy being excavated thought about his time and place, too.

There’s no right answer to a question like that, of course. Many of the questions raised in this book fall into that same unanswerable class. Maybe that’s part of what makes them intriguing.

Just noting past evidence and extrapolating it out to future events can get weird quickly. To imagine things that have happened many times in history repeating in the modern era is to dabble in science fiction. It is a very thin membrane that separates factual history from unprovable and speculative fantasy. The instant in which we all live is the point at which those two things—the hard chronology of recorded names and dates and the what-ifs and alternate realities of possible futures—intersect. To imagine the twenty-first-century world being hit with a great plague like the great disease pandemics of the past is fantasy, yet it’s also extremely possible and has happened many times before. What’s the connection between the factual past and the speculative future?

I am told that any conventional book should answer questions or should at least provide an argument. If that’s true, this will not be a conventional book. It’s more of a collection of loosely connected vignettes. I have no argument, which is consistent with the approach we take in the podcast as well. My approach is that of a nonexpert, for that is what I am. Historians, political scientists, geographers, physicists, sociologists, philosophers, authors, and intellectuals in general have all weighed in over the eras on all the sorts of issues we ponder in this book, each doing so using their own methods and viewing them through their own eras, specialties, and cultural lenses.

While a modern geographer might cite global historical analogies to make an argument about a civilization “falling,” or a physicist provide the math to determine the likely probability of a dark age–creating asteroid striking Earth, the approach of a storyteller or journalist is to look at the human angle.[1] What sort of human stories are going on as a civilization collapses? A bombing raid destroys a person’s city, or a pandemic begins to unravel the bonds holding a society together? Seeing things through that lens engages different parts of the brain, including emotions, and can often have an impact that the data, graphs, and research studies don’t. Think of it as another tile in a vast mosaic as many disciplines try to restore an image of the past.

Do tough times make tougher people? Does how we raise our children have an impact on society at large? Can we handle the power of our weapons without destroying ourselves? Can human capabilities, knowledge, and technology regress? There’s a very Twilight Zone sort of element to such ideas, with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) overtones that seem to speak to our present times. They are ideas that cross the boundaries of modern academic disciplines and tread into territory usually occupied by drama, literature, and the arts.

But even without agreed-upon answers, such questions are both fascinating and potentially valuable. Many of them are the types of proverbial “deep questions” that have always been at the heart of philosophical works. Simply thinking about them more often may have value. Others may offer some practical usefulness. Reminding us all, for example, of how many times similar occurrences have taken place in the past may help add a layer of believability to many future possible occurrences that seem more like far-fetched movie plots right now. A history professor once told me that there are two ways we learn: you can put your hand on the hot stove, or you can hear tales of people who already did that and how it turned out for them.

Hardcore History fans have long been asking about a book. I had so much existent material, research, and ideas in the archives that it just seemed natural to use them as the nucleus for such a work. Going back and sorting through it became something of a personal Rorschach test. When one considers all the reading and research that goes into these shows, it’s imperative that the subject be of great interest to me.

If a person’s bookshelf is a window into their interests, apparently mine lean toward the apocalyptic—although it was a bit surprising just how often the shows eventually factored down to a related version of the same idea: the End of Civilization in one form or another and not just how we humans might react or respond to that based on past experience, but what kind of people these experiences might make us.

Can you blame me? The rise and falls of empires, the wars, the catastrophes, the high-stakes situations—the “Big Stories”—are intense and dramatic by their very nature.[2] The combination of material that is entertaining as well as (potentially) philosophical, educational, and practical is an age-old winning formula. Historians and storytellers from Homer and Herodotus to Edward Gibbon and Will Durant recognized that long before Ajax and Achilles were spearing their way dramatically and bloodily through The Iliad while making “History.” There’s a reason a guy like Shakespeare mined the past so often for his material.

But it isn’t just about diversion or amusement. One is often moved to a form of historical empathy and personal reflection. These events happen to real flesh-and-blood human beings who were often relentlessly trapped in the gears of history. It’s hard not to wonder how we would cope if we found ourselves in similar situations.

One of the things that I kept noticing when burrowing into the archives was a recurring, unanswerable either/or historical question. Will things keep happening as they always have, or won’t they? It is an unbelievably intense and scary question in some circumstances. Some of those types of case studies, if you will, are discussed in this book.

Will we ever again have the type of pandemics that rapidly kill large percentages of the population? This was a feature of normal human existence until relatively recently, but seems almost like science fiction to imagine today.

There have always been large wars between the great powers. Any next such war would involve nuclear-armed states. World War III sounds like a bad movie concept, but is it any more unlikely than eternal peace between the great states?

Finally, as we asked earlier, can you imagine the city you currently live in as a desolate ruin? Will it one day be like most cities that have ever existed, or not? Either outcome seems fascinating.

While much of what follows is rather dark, looking at history has a way of putting our circumstances in better perspective. Hearing about what, for example, people dealt with as their cities were carpet-bombed or while enduring monstrous medieval plagues has a way of making your problems seem small. Premodern dentistry alone is enough to convince me things are pretty good now, no matter what.

And yet, despite all the differences between people over the ages, some events and eras seem, as Barbara Tuchman wrote, like looking into a distant mirror. It’s hard not to wonder how we would cope in similar circumstances. My grandfather loved the phrase “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Thanks to a bit of cosmic luck, we were born at the time we were, and in the place we were. It could’ve easily been any other time and some other place. I find that recalling that makes having historical empathy somewhat easier.

However, despite the seeming stability of our time, there’s also no guarantee that our current situation won’t change drastically. The examples in this book dramatize some times in which this happened. At the risk of sounding like a low-rent Nostradamus wearing a sandwich board sign reading “The End Is Near,” a modern version of the Bronze Age collapse could happen to us. Or the global superpower could implode unexpectedly, as ancient Assyria did, creating a huge geopolitical vacuum. Our version of Rome could fragment as the Roman Empire did. A pandemic could easily arise and if bad enough could remind us what life was like for human beings before modern medicine. A nuclear war could occur, or environmental disaster could await us. We may yet find ourselves in a reality that future ages read about in books on examples of extreme human experiences or warnings about things to avoid doing.

Hubris is, after all, a pretty classic human trait. As my dad used to say, “Don’t get cocky.”

Chapter 1

DO TOUGH TIMES MAKE FOR TOUGHER PEOPLE?

FOR AS LONG as humans have been writing history, some historians have suggested that hard times somehow create better, tougher people, that overcoming obstacles—through war or privation or some other hardship—creates stronger, more resilient, perhaps even more virtuous, human beings.

“History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up,” Voltaire reportedly said. The observation refers to the argument that fortunes of nations or civilizations or societies rise and fall based on the character of their people, and this character is heavily influenced by the material and moral condition of their society. The idea was a staple of history writing from ancient Greece until it began to decline in popularity after the middle of the twentieth century.[1]

Nowadays, the wooden shoes–silk slippers concept has been largely dismissed by modern historians. There are all sorts of very good reasons for this, starting with the lack of data. It is hard to prove or quantify an amorphous human quality such as toughness or resilience[2] and then justify its inclusion in a fact-driven, and peer-reviewed, academic history book. But that doesn’t mean it has no impact at all.

Let’s try a little mental exercise: Imagine that two boxers step into the ring together. They are the same height, weight, and skill level. They have had the same conditioning; they even shared a trainer. All possible variables have been eliminated. What is most likely to be the deciding factor in determining which boxer wins? Is it this hard-to-quantify concept we call “toughness”? It’s difficult to say one boxer won because he was “tougher.” For a start, why do we tend to assume that tougher is better? Toughness is this vague concept that we all believe exists, and we all use “tough” as an adjective, but it is a relative term, and one person’s or culture’s idea of what’s tough may be different from another’s.[3]

Now instead of individual boxers lining up against each other, imagine the contest on a larger scale, with entire societies facing off. For example, how about if the United States of America of today went to war against another country just like it—the same geographic size, the same population size, the same economic output, the same military capability, the same weapons and equipment and technology. And this war is going to be brutal, fought to an unconditional surrender, with cities left in ruins on both sides. The only difference between the two countries is that the people we are fighting against, in that mythical mirror country, are our grandparents.

Most of the people born between 1900 and 1930 are gone now, but they were part of an age-group popularly dubbed “the Greatest Generation”[4]—but there have been so many tough eras and generations in history that singling out “the greatest” of anything seems a bit silly. Nonetheless, by our standards the members of the Greatest Generation seem very rough and tough indeed. And there’s a reason for that. Even before they fought the Second World War, these men and women had lived through more than a decade of extreme economic hardship—the worst in modern world history.

Andrew Mellon, the secretary of the treasury under President Herbert Hoover when the 1929 stock market crashed, which initiated more than a decade of economic collapse, thought the coming hardship would be a good thing. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system,” Mellon said, as reported in Hoover’s memoirs. “High costs of living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

From Mellon’s point of view, maybe he got his wish. The Depression put an end to the Roaring Twenties, a time remembered for high living, speakeasies, jazz, flappers, the Charleston, and the advent of motion pictures. What Mellon might have thought wasteful frivolity was simply fun to others. Things got a lot less fun when money became more scarce.

When the collapse came, it didn’t ruin everyone, but about half the population found itself suddenly below the poverty line. It was a decade of hard times. And the accounts from that era are heartbreaking, so much so that it’s hard to imagine any good coming from it. Certainly, few in our modern world would choose to experience an economic disaster like the Great Depression for the potential positive side effects.

By the time the Second World War arrived, an entire generation had been through deprivations. And then they got the worst war in human history right on top of it. The war itself was very bad, entirely different from twenty-first-century conflicts. Today, a first-class power might suffer casualties from a single incident that number in the dozens—perhaps from the mechanical failure of a helicopter, or maybe a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED). Compare this with the hundreds of thousands of casualties the United States experienced in the Second World War—at Iwo Jima, for example, the thirty-six-day conflict left nearly seven thousand Americans dead, of at least twenty-six thousand total casualties. And that’s just American numbers; imagine the millions of casualties suffered by the Germans, or the tens of millions suffered by the Chinese and Soviets. It’s interesting to speculate how we today would react to such mortality.

And it’s not just about weathering the damage; it’s also about inflicting it. Maybe we could take it, but as US general George Patton pointed out, that isn’t how you defeat your adversary.[5] Think about the kind of bombing runs the American military had to make—a thousand planes loaded with tons of bombs heading toward cities where ten or fifteen thousand people might be killed in a single night. Or imagine living through the Blitz in London, when German bombers unleashed their payloads on the city nearly every night for more than eight months. The Greatest Generation knew there was a solid wall of planes above them, and they also ordered the bomb bay doors to be opened.

And then there was the ultimate weapon, nuclear bombs. History shows that our grandparents certainly could, and did, use them.[6] Is there currently a scenario in which the citizens of our societies (as opposed to their governments) would find that an acceptable course of action?

We seem almost too civilized now to do something that seems so barbaric. But then, we haven’t lived through what the World War II generation did. Assuming that one could measure a generation’s relative toughness on a scale of one to ten, perhaps the Greatest Generation gets a seven; if we were to imagine ten of these people born between 1900 and 1930 together in a room, maybe seven of them meet our qualifications for “tough.” Generation X has tough people, too—some became Navy Seals, a few have crossed Antarctica on foot—but maybe only two out of every ten members of that generation could be said to be tough enough to do such things. So rather than each individual being tougher, perhaps there is simply a higher percentage of tough people in what is considered a resilient generation. That is one way to try to conceptualize how toughness might apply to societies, and yet at the same time it helps highlight how strange it would be to try to quantify such a thing.

In the moralistic histories of the ancients, the “tough times make tougher people” formula worked both ways. Soft times made softer people. To Plutarch and Livy, for example, sloth, cowardice, and lack of virtue were the fruit of too much ease and luxury and money. And a lot of softer people in a society meant a softer overall society. In times and places where the citizenry might have to don armor and use a sword to defend their state in hand-to-hand combat, this could potentially be a national security concern. Perhaps we’re living in a time when toughness in the old sense doesn’t matter as much as it used to. If that is the case, then what advantages might a “softer” society have over a tougher one?

The great twentieth-century historian Will Durant wrote about the Medes, an ancient people who lived in what is now Iran. At the time Durant wrote,[7] the Medes were thought to have been a relatively poor, pastoral people who had banded together to help throw off the domination of the Assyrian Empire and who had then become a major power in their own right.[8] But soon after, wrote Durant, “the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways. Wealth came too suddenly to be used wisely. The upper classes became slaves to fashion and luxury, the men sporting embroidered trousers and the women cosmetics and jewelry.”

The pants and earrings were not themselves the cause of the Medes’ fall from power, but to Durant and many of his contemporary historians, they were outward signs of how this society had changed and become corrupted, along the way losing the qualities born of harder times that had made them tough enough to win the empire in the first place.[9]

The mid-twentieth-century historian Chester G. Starr wrote about Sparta, an entire society geared toward creating some of the finest fighting men in the ancient world. The soldiers of Sparta propelled this agrarian Peloponnesian Greek city-state to heights it had no right to expect given the size of its population and its relatively modest economic output. But the entire society and culture in Sparta supported and reinforced the army and soldiery. Every male citizen was trained for war and was liable for service until age sixty.

The trained citizen militia approach was common to many societies, especially in ancient Greece, but Sparta took it to extremes. There, it was nothing less than a human molding process that started at the very beginning of life: newborns were deemed the raw material of the military, and a Spartan baby was subjected to judgment by a council of Spartan elders who would decide whether the baby was fit enough to live. “Any child that appeared defective was thrown from a cliff of Mt. Taygetus, to die on the jagged rocks below,” wrote Starr.[10]

The infants who were deemed worthy of living were subjected to “the Spartan habit of inuring their infants to discomfort and exposure.” At seven years old, children were taken from their families and sent to a camp to train. As young adults, Spartans ate in communal military mess halls with their brethren, never knowing the comforts of home. They were deliberately underfed to encourage them to steal food and be resourceful, but then they were harshly punished if caught. These Spartan children grew up to be the best fighting men in Greece precisely because their whole culture worked to create them that way. Supposedly, the Spartans even eschewed money during their heyday,[11] because they thought it corrupted their upstanding morals and martial values.[12]

Then over time, according to the traditional narrative, the Spartans became “luxury-loving and corruptible,” as Starr wrote, and this eroded their toughness and military superiority, eventually leading to their downfall on the battlefield. The Spartans of 380 BCE might not have beaten their very formidable grandfathers of 480 BCE, but the Spartans of 280 BCE would definitely not have beaten their grandfathers.[13] The hated Persians are sometimes credited with deliberately contributing to this. The “Great Kings” of Persia, who could not defeat the Spartans on the battlefield, found that gold was a more effective way to neutralize them. Over time, the premodern sources portray Spartans, especially some Spartan kings, as a good deal more materialistic and money loving than the more “spartan” Spartans of old. It’s as if these “soft” Persians, as the ancient Greeks often portrayed them, spreading their softness like a virus, equalized the toughness between the two sides.[14]

There are other ways to explain Sparta’s rise and fall than “toughness”—better training and conditioning, for example—but it seems strange to assign no value to it at all.

WAR AND POVERTY are not constants. They may create a heightened resilience on the part of the humans affected by them, but not all people are. Some people get lucky and avoid combat and economic privation. But everyone gets sick.

It may seem strange to suggest that high levels of illness might make human beings tougher, but the effect on a society of relatively regular and lethal epidemics and the mortality they cause certainly might have created a level of resilience that most of us today probably don’t possess. A husband and wife who have lost several of their young children to disease and have stoically pushed forward with their lives would probably seem tough and resilient to us. People around the world still do this, and we consider it one of the great tragedies of life to lose even a single offspring. But it has been only relatively recently in human history that this experience has become less than commonplace. Before the modern era, the number of people who lost multiple children to illness was astonishing. One wonders what effects this might have had on individuals and their society as a whole. The historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was one of seven children. All six of his siblings died in infancy. That was a pretty high rate even in the early eighteenth century, but the terrible regularity of losing children before they reached adulthood was common. However, focusing on what disease might do to children is to ignore the wider effects that high levels of illness can have on a society. A really bad epidemic might kill everyone.

When it comes to disease, the world is a vastly different place in the modern era than it was at any previous time in history.[15] Yes, there are parts of the developing world that have been virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages and are still disease ridden, but by and large the technologically advanced societies of the modern world have scant concept of the way human existence was affected by disease from the beginning of humankind until just a generation ago. It’s startling to think of the many pandemics that have erased large percentages of the global population over the ages. Reading the contemporary accounts is like reading very dark science fiction. If we lost a quarter of the human population to a modern plague, it would seem obscene to suggest there was the positive side effect of making us more resilient.

In some ways, illness makes us tougher, because immunities often develop in those who have been sick. That’s hard science. But do people who suffer the regular loss of loved ones to disease become tougher or more resilient individuals? Do societies with large numbers of such people living in them become tougher societies? These questions fall into that gray area of things that we intrinsically feel might be important, but that can’t really be measured or proved. Clearly, there were times in our history when only the strong survived, so a person had better be tough. But a case might be made that toughness isn’t as important a qualification for survival as it used to be.

Connecting this to the wooden shoes–silk slippers ladder, one might suggest that timing is important. If tough times call for tough people, what if the times are less tough? In addition, the silk slippers stage can come with some potentially offsetting benefits.

The early-twentieth-century German military historian Hans Delbrück[16] had a theory that everything that characterizes the modern military—the organization, tactics, drill, logistics, and leadership—is designed to help offset the natural advantage of the toughness that people at a lower level of civilization possess. “Compared to civilized people,” he wrote about the ancient Germans who kept getting beaten by the more refined Romans, “barbarians had the advantage of having at their disposal the warlike power of the unbridled animal instincts, of basic toughness. Civilization refines the human being, makes him more sensitive, and in doing so, it decreases his military worth, not only his bodily strength, but also his physical courage. These natural shortcomings must be offset in some artificial way … The main service of the standing army consists of making civilized people through discipline capable of holding their own against the less civilized.”[17]

By Delbrück’s way of thinking, the whole reason that city-states first started organizing their farmers—who generally tended to be more peaceable than the barbarians right outside their borders—was to create a superior military, which requires training and discipline, so that they could hold their own against people whose harsher environment made them fiercer or more warlike.[18] “If a given group of Romans normally living as citizens or peasants had been put up against a group of barbarians of the same number,” Delbrück wrote, “the former would undoubtedly have been defeated; in fact, they would probably have taken flight without fighting. It was only the formation of the close-knit tactical body of the cohorts that equalized the situation.”

The seemingly softer society’s use of technology, superior organizational capabilities, and money against a potentially tougher and hardier society is a dynamic that’s visible in many historical eras. The modern Afghans may be one of the toughest people on the planet right now, but their individual and societal resilience is offset by Western military forces that might as well be playing the part of the Romans in this story. However, if the Western militaries were forced to fight using the same weapons as the Afghans—AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and IEDs—and they, in turn, used our drones, fighter planes, and cruise missiles, then the question of our toughness versus theirs might be crucial. Remember, the Afghans have been a people at war for forty years, against a multitude of opponents. In some ways, they might be more like our grandparents when it comes to toughness than we are.

The weapons and technology are so advanced now that we can have a modern warrior engaging his foe in Afghanistan from an air-conditioned room in Kansas—a virtual pilot whose skills were likely honed growing up on video games the same way that a Japanese youth two centuries ago practiced for a future of sword fighting in kendo class. Instead of combat weapons drill, today’s trained killers, many of whom may never see a dead enemy up close, fly drones that shoot tough-as-nails tribal soldiers in the harsh, mountainous terrain.[19] Modern militaries have, like Delbrück’s Romans, found ways to work around the toughness deficit.[20] Yet toughness may still make a difference in who wins or loses the war. It may be the key factor that decides who has the willingness to continue the ongoing body count and financial costs indefinitely.[21] But if it were, how could a historian prove it conclusively in a peer-reviewed paper?

Chapter 2

SUFFER THE CHILDREN

HISTORY IS AKIN to traveling to a distant planet, but one inhabited by human beings. Biologically the same, but culturally alien—and a major reason is that they were raised differently.

The importance of parents and parenting is almost universally accepted. Like toughness, it is an aspect of humanity that we almost intrinsically understand to be extremely influential in how a person turns out as an adult, but it’s challenging to assess its impact on individuals in the past or on human history as a whole. Yet it would seem strange to suggest that the way parents reared children was of no great historical import at all. What if they reared everyone wrong?

“Wrong” is a culturally determined concept, of course. Every age and culture has its own ideas on the best way to raise progeny. But while parents in any place or time usually try to do what’s best for their offspring, in the past much of the information they had was fallacious. Out of ignorance they may have harmed children while doing things they believed would be beneficial. Today the modern understanding of health and science, and the widespread dissemination of parenting information, has probably created the most knowledgeable generation of parents ever. Of particular emphasis is early childhood development. The effects of poor childhood nutrition, prenatal damage from alcohol and drugs, bad hygiene, child abuse, and just awful parenting during a child’s formative years are well known. Parents deemed unfit or abusive or who can’t meet minimum societal standards often lose custody of their children. In very bad cases, they can go to prison.

There’s no doubt that these measures have, over time, tremendously improved the child-raising climate in our modern societies. The benefit to individual kids is incalculable. But trying to determine how this adds up at the societal level is extremely difficult. It’s obvious that it has to make a large difference, and yet it’s almost impossible to say exactly how or to what degree it actually has. Do huge cultural improvements in child rearing create a better society? Conversely, how much did poor childhood environments affect the societies of the past?

Some of the theories on the subject can seem far-fetched, but they definitely prompt us to think about things that might have slipped below the radar scanning for the traditional names, dates, and events we usually seek out when we’re trying to understand history. Could you, for example, suggest that child-rearing practices can affect a nation’s foreign policy? If it seems unlikely, imagine a world where half the adults are child abuse victims, and then consider the many strange and unforeseen consequences that might manifest. It’s a fascinating question.

One of the earlier voices exploring the potential historical importance of child-rearing practices was Lloyd deMause.[1] DeMause specializes in psychohistory, a controversial discipline that focuses on, among other things, child-rearing practices and the effect they might have on the way history unfolds. He takes a rather dim view of parents in the past, writing in The Emotional Life of Nations, “Parents until relatively recently have been so frightened and have so hated their newborn infants that they have killed them by the billions, routinely sent them out to extremely neglectful wet nurses, tied them up tightly in swaddling bandages lest they be overpowered by them, starved, mutilated, raped, neglected, and beat them so badly that prior to modern times, I have not been able to find evidence of a single parent who would not today be put in jail for child abuse.”

DeMause and the psychohistorians look at societies of the past in the same way psychologists and psychiatrists look at individuals today, trying to figure out if the early development of and influences on children affected the societies they created later.[2] DeMause believes that most children up until recent times would likely have met modern criteria as child abuse victims, which he and others like him believe may help explain why, for example, eras like the Middle Ages were so barbarous.[3]

But human cultures are so varied that such blanket statements seem too sweeping. While such theories might appear applicable to some complex urban societies, many premodern and tribal societies had age-old patterns of human upbringing that involved plenty of parental and extended family love and nurturing. Yet members of such societies too often involved children in practices and activities that we today would assume would cause lasting damage. But some of these things were merely aspects of living life in another era. The violence, for example, that a child growing up several thousand years ago may have seen on a regular basis may have had little or no negative effect on her compared with its effect on a modern child. It just might have been part of life in her world.

One of the important variables in this discussion concerns whether culture can be said to have shielded the children of past eras to any degree from the effects of what we today would call abuse, neglect, or emotional and psychological trauma. If a behavior that we moderns consider horribly deviant were viewed in a more positive and culturally reinforced way in the past, some argue that the effects would have been less damaging. It feels a bit like grading child abuse or bad parenting on a historical curve, but if something is more socially accepted and lacks the stigma it would have today, does that lessen its damage? Some would argue that the damage is a constant regardless of the society or era, others that it is culturally influenced. Either these people of the past were basically normal and well-adjusted adults despite their childhood experiences and the differences in parenting, or they were, as deMause argues, almost universally what we would today classify as abused children living in a society created by, operated by, and led by abused children.

The easiest way to imagine how bad things might have been for children growing up in past societies is to simply imagine what our own would look like if we removed today’s prohibitions, investigations, and enforcement concerning such things as child abuse and neglect. Even with our modern attention and efforts, children are abused, mistreated, and neglected in every society on earth. Without those rules and enforcement, such mistreatment would almost certainly be much worse. Imagine how bad it might get if a society actually encouraged such behavior.[4]

BEATING CHILDREN WAS a common form of discipline from the earliest days of human history to relatively recent times. Many in the Greatest Generation, for example, grew up in a culture that did not think the general practice unusual whatsoever.[5] In fact, beating was considered by many to be the preferred and proper way to raise good, well-adjusted adults. It was routinely done to students in schools. And while a parent today who regularly struck his child with a belt twenty or thirty times would be considered abusive by the vast majority of people, he would have been considered positively lenient by the standards of past eras, when a belt might seem a poor substitute for something designed specifically for the task of beating kids.

DeMause’s The History of Childhood describes various implements of corporal punishment, including

• whips of all kinds,

• cat-o’-nine-tails,

• shovels,

• canes,

• iron and wooden rods,

• bundles of sticks,

• “disciplines” (whips made of small chains), and

• “flappers” (school instruments with a pear-shaped end and a round hole, used to raise blisters).

Today there is almost no chance we would countenance the use of a discipline tool specifically designed to raise blisters on a seven- or eight-year-old child. Yet the oft-cited line “spare the rod and spoil the child” asserts that a parent who is too lenient with physical punishment on children is doing them harm. People took this admonition seriously for a long time.[6]

It’s hard to blame parents for not seeing the potential damage they were doing to their children, because, after all, this is how they themselves had been raised. If we are imagining what a society of abused children might be like to live in, consider for a moment how they might raise their own offspring. The historian M. J. Tucker in an essay in The History of Childhood gives an account of the harsh treatment Lady Jane Grey[7] endured at the hands of her parents and then writes that “Jane’s parents were typical … Common usage decreed that parents who love their children will beat them.” He says that this is how the children often saw it as well: “Little girls, like Lady Jane Grey, never doubted that her beatings issued from parental concern and blessed herself that her parents took their responsibility so seriously.” Lady Jane Grey would be executed as a teenager after being caught up in a royal succession crisis. Had she lived, though, and wished to have been a good mother by the standards of the time, how would this beaten child have been likely to behave toward her own kids?

While child beating has gone out of fashion, corporal punishment is still practiced in some public school systems in the United States, and there are still people who defend its use as valuable (albeit not to the degree of severity we just talked about). The same cannot be said for some of the other kinds of abuse that many children of past ages were subjected to. For instance, some societies and cultures of the past held wildly differing ideas of what should and shouldn’t be okay sexually between adults and children.[8] It not only makes it difficult for us today to relate to those cultures and peoples but it’s hard to imagine that such cultural perspectives didn’t have a large effect on their reality. It wasn’t particularly uncommon in many cultures in past eras for children to be viewed as sexual objects and sometimes to be used as such. There are four-hundred-year-old accounts of sailors who encountered overtly sexual women on Pacific Islands, but some of these “women” were as young as ten. To us, such sexual relations may seem bizarre or even obscene, but what if the society these sailors existed in didn’t think so?

In other ages, antiquity for example, the mores were often very different from our own when it came to sex and children.[9] In the ancient Mediterranean, both heterosexual and homosexual sex between adults and children was in many places an accepted part of the culture. Would the children in those ancient cultures experience the same long-term adverse effects we would expect to see in children who had sex with adults today? If they did, one wonders how this might have affected how those societies developed. If they didn’t, that’s also interesting—one would have to wonder why.

Even parents who wanted to do the best for their children and were perhaps less inclined to outright beat them could do great damage to them by simply following the prevailing wisdom at the time—inadvertent child abuse, if you will.

One common practice throughout much of human history was to give children liquor or opium to relieve teething pain or to help them sleep. As recently as the 1960s, it wasn’t unusual for a doctor to prescribe sleeping medication for children, or for parents to rub whiskey on a teething infant’s gums. We know now these substances are harmful, but there were some people who recognized the problem even hundreds of years ago. The History of Childhood quotes a British doctor named Hume, who complained in 1799 of thousands of child deaths caused by nurses “forever pouring Godfrey’s cordial down little throats, which is quite a strong opiate, and in the end as fatal as arsenic.”

Once upon a time, it was considered good parenting to teach your children a moral lesson in right and wrong by taking them to witness public executions. To make the lesson really stick, parents sometimes beat their children as they watched, forever linking the spectacle with physical pain. And the practice of beating a child so he or she wouldn’t forget was done for other reasons, too. Anglo-Saxons sometimes beat kids so that they would recall a given day for legal reasons, such as presenting evidence at trial—physical violence as a kind of notary public service, or long-term reminder note.

In modern times, we worry about our kids’ exposure to simulated violence on television or in video games and whether it desensitizes them to real-life atrocities. But in many past eras it may have been actual violence, not the made-for-TV variety, that desensitized children to more of the same. Think of the children who grew up in cultures where they would have seen real-life killings and torture up close by the time they were five, six, or seven years old. In some cases, they might have even participated in it.[10]

If we heard of a modern child with such a bloody or violent upbringing, we would assume he or she would be a very damaged person in need of counseling and help. It’s hard to determine, though, if all children in all times and all cultures would be affected the same way by such experiences. It’s possible that people in earlier eras who grew up seeing animals butchered and people killed as a matter of course weren’t affected the way a person with modern sensibilities would be. Today we might assume certain things would hurt any human being at any time, but this may not be true. Actions don’t have to cause obvious harm to create a significantly different version of a human being. A child (either today or in the past) who has witnessed several very violent live public executions is going to be different from the other children in our society. Any modern child with the same life experiences would probably be prescribed some sort of therapy and perhaps medications for a long time.

After considering such heavy-duty abuse, you might think something like physical or emotional child abandonment would sound like a lightweight issue—but modern experts who deal with children have no doubt about the lasting negative impact that a lack of sustained contact between parents and children can have. The psychohistorians assert that such situations may have damaged a lot of children in the past. This seems like a no-brainer on the surface, but trying to determine how this might have affected the past on a macro scale is seemingly impossible.

In many past societies, parents and children had less contact than we are accustomed to today.[11] Even the bonding experience of a mother feeding her infant was something often farmed out. For thousands of years, in many societies and cultures, the human institution of the wet nurse was very popular. There are stories of wet nurses—women who breastfeed other women’s babies—in the Bible and going back to ancient Babylon. Roman wet nurses gathered at a place called the Columna Lactaria (the “milk column”) to sell their services. For mothers who couldn’t produce milk or had died in childbirth, the wet nurse filled a real need, especially when many such societies didn’t believe in giving infants animal milk.

Yet the practice often still meant sending children away from their homes to live with a wet nurse, sometimes for years. The casual giving away of children in past eras can astound; in various writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, children sometimes sound like litters of puppies rather than human beings. The mother-in-law of one nineteenth-century gentleman wrote about a baby that had been promised to another family: “Yes, certainly the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned,” she wrote, “and if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others.”

The trauma didn’t end with the sending away. After the child spent years bonding with the wet nurse, they were eventually returned to their biological parents, essentially ripping him or her away from the only parent he or she had known.[12] Sometimes the wet nurses were unkind to their charges, making returning home a blessing, but either way, the child was now faced with complete strangers. Lloyd deMause quotes a piece written by the chief of police in Paris in 1780 estimating that of the, on average, 21,000 children born in that city every year, only 700 were nursed by their biological mothers. (Marie Antoinette, writing in a letter to her mother, noted after her daughter recognized her as her mother in a room full of people, “I believe I like her much better since that time”—which suggests she hadn’t liked her all that much before.)

Children could also be seen much more like a commodity than a family member. Selling children was a profitable business (and there are parts of the world where it still occurs). Children were also farmed out for labor. The Middle Ages institution of the apprenticeship took kids as young as five or six to a neighboring castle or community to begin their working life. This wasn’t seen by parents as a form of punishment or abuse, but more like an internship in which the child would learn valuable foundational skills necessary for later adult success. And farm families since agriculture began have used every strong hand available to work the land and keep food on the table.[13] But seeing children as nothing more than easily exploitable low-wage labor was all too common. It wasn’t until the late 1930s in the United States that child labor in such dangerous industries as mining and manufacturing was outlawed. There was much more opposition to the reform attempts at the time than might be thought. But today the idea of sending a thirteen-year-old into a mine or a twelve-year-old onto an assembly line seems like one destined to stunt the child’s development.

It makes one wonder why our ancestors—many of whom were perfectly smart people—didn’t see how damaging these practices were. Yet perhaps our concept of what constitutes “damage” is different from theirs. They were raising kids to live in their world, a world alien to us. Besides, who knows what child-rearing experts of the future will think about our current practices? Maybe our best practices now will be deemed abusive or damaging to children by future standards. In our defense, we could probably say that we did the best we could knowing what we know now—but that’s also probably what our ancestors would have said.

Chapter 3

THE END OF THE WORLD AS THEY KNEW IT

THE IDEA OF “progress” is not without bias. Is transitioning from a hunter-gatherer society to one where humans live in cities an advance, or do we just think it is because that’s where we mostly live now?[1] If a society that is literate is supplanted by one that is not, is that a backward step in the progress of civilization? If the economic vitality and wealth of a society is reduced to a level far below its highs, is that necessarily a “decline”?[2]

Since human civilization first arose, societies have “risen” and “fallen,” “advanced” and “declined”—or so the histories written decades ago often said. More commonly now, historians refer to societies in “transition,” rather than use terms that denote forward or backward development. Continuity, too, is often emphasized, instead of the emphasis found in earlier historical accounts of hard breaks from a previous era.

So, did the Roman Empire “fall” to the “barbarians,” or did it transition to an equal yet more decentralized era, one with a more Germanic flair?

In the period after the Roman Empire disappeared in the West (the time formerly called “the Dark Ages”), many of the capabilities of the people who lived in its wake deteriorated. Eventually, those who lived in what formerly were Roman lands couldn’t repair or build anew the infrastructure that had previously existed. The aqueducts, monetary system, and trade routes were not what they had been. Literacy plummeted in most areas, and other groups and outlets began to perform some of the functions that formerly had been provided by an organized central authority.[3] What would we call it today if we could not emulate the technological, economic, or cultural achievements of our forebears?[4]

The 1968 film Planet of the Apes provides an instructive illustration of the inherent fallacy of the position that our version of humanity represents its final incarnation. In the movie, a bedraggled Charlton Heston (in a loincloth, no less) screams, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” In his character’s mind, the apes are beneath him, but to the apes, humans are the inferior species.

At the very end, Charlton Heston escapes, and in the final moments of the film, you see him riding a horse down a beach with a preverbal (i.e., inferior) human girl he’s rescued. When he rounds a bend, he’s confronted with the Statue of Liberty, from the bust up to the crown, sticking out of the sand at an angle, and we realize that the movie is set on earth in a far-flung future.

“You maniacs! You blew it up!” Heston bellows, his fist pounding the sand.

We moderns almost unconsciously consider ourselves exempt from outcomes such as this, which is one of the reasons why that final scene in Planet of the Apes is so effective.[5] It is unimaginable to us that we could have descendants who might live in a world more primitive than our own. Likewise, it was just as impossible for Romans living in the era we now label “antiquity” to envision a future in which the place they knew as “the Eternal City” would ever be a ruin.

THE EARLIEST PIECE of storytelling in the Western canon appeared around the eighth century BCE. The Iliad was supposedly composed by the blind Greek poet Homer, though historians have long thought its text was actually distilled from an oral storytelling tradition that was far older.

The Iliad tapped into a potent mix of dramatic elements that humans have shown an enthusiasm for ever after. The epic poem features facets of superhero films mixed with the J. R. R. Tolkien–style mythical golden age of a far-flung past. It’s the original and ultimate “sword and sandals” epic, an action-packed saga of gods, demigods, and swashbuckling heroes, where the “Greeks” leave their homeland to rescue the kidnapped oh-so-fair wife of a king and embark on a quest that leads them across the sea to fight a great war for a decade and eventually topple a powerful, glorious kingdom led by a rich and lofty monarch. The story has everything—magic and spearplay, dead characters that come back to life as ghosts, the gods fighting among themselves and taking sides with the mortals, sex and romance between star-crossed adversaries, bloody single combats, and heroic loss. It’s even got a sequel, if you consider the Odyssey to be such. But whereas our modern fantastic tales and epics are intended—and are taken by the audience—as fantasy, the ancient Greeks, Macedonians, and Romans often considered their versions more like history.[6]

One of history’s greatest military leaders, Alexander III of Macedon (known as “the Great”; 356–323 BCE), allegedly slept with a copy of Homer’s Iliad under his pillow, and he may have considered himself inspired by, and a direct descendant of, the story’s überhero, Achilles.[7] Before attacking the Persian Empire in 334 BCE, Alexander visited a site the locals said was the tomb of Achilles, and the classical writers say that he donned the “ancient” armor he found within.[8] To him, Troy was history from a long-gone great age, and he had the antique armor of a demigod to prove it.

Later scholarly opinion disagreed that the Iliad was history, however. Starting with increasingly skeptical and evidence-based academic approaches in the eighteenth century, historians trying to disentangle truth from fable considered the tale of the Trojan wars to be legendary. In the late nineteenth century, however, a German named Heinrich Schliemann, one of several people who believed in the existence of the ancient city and was actively looking for it, found the remains of one on a hill in modern-day Turkey. Over time it became clearer and clearer that the site Schliemann had found was indeed the location of the city at the center of the West’s oldest written tale. Somehow, through hundreds of years of oral storytelling, the Greeks had kept alive a distant memory of an advanced and prosperous time that existed on the far side of an intervening dark age.[9]

This discovery of “Troy” by an amateur (as most archaeologists were in that era) searching for artifacts caused an international sensation and helped jump-start the modern era of archaeological discovery. Digs, excavations, and fieldwork all over the Mediterranean and the Near East began to unearth and illuminate a world that was already ancient when the Athens of Pericles (495–429 BCE) and the Sparta of Leonidas (540–480 BCE) were young. Troy was but a tiny fraction of it. A snapshot from about 1500 BCE would show a multipower geopolitical landscape encompassing the whole region: ancient Egypt at its pharaonic height in the New Kingdom; the powerful and important Hittite Empire, controlling a large chunk of modern-day Turkey and down into Syria; Assyria and Babylon, strong societies in what is now Iraq; the Elamite people, occupying southwestern Iran; Minoa, a great maritime trading state based in Crete; and the Mycenaeans, who occupied Greece.[10]

It was an era of great cities, many of them crowned with ornate palaces, and urban life was at its highest level of sophistication so far seen. It was a golden age of wealth, power, writing, trade, military sophistication, and long-distance communication. This era, which modern history calls the Bronze Age (approximately 3000 to 1200 BCE), represents a high-water mark in the region’s development in many measurable areas. The last stage of the Bronze Age was the most golden of all.[11]

But the glory of the Bronze Age wouldn’t last. By the time of the Iron Age, the classical Greeks of Athens and Sparta were beginning to rise to levels of wealth, trade, and literacy that were comparable to the lofty heights of the previous era (in probably around 700 BCE-ish)—in fact, those earlier states and civilizations of the late Bronze Age could well have been represented to the Iron Age as Planet of the Apes represented ours. The remnants of their former greatness were nearly totally in ruins, and their history was relegated to myths and legend.

The “collapse of the Bronze Age” is a transformation on par with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but what caused it has become one of the great mysteries of the past, a whodunnit that casts historians in the role of detectives trying to determine a cause of death for one of humankind’s great time periods.

It apparently happened relatively quickly. That’s why words like “collapse,” “destruction,” and “fall” are often used when talking about how this literal end of an era concluded. Unlike the Roman Empire, there would be no “decline and fall”—the Bronze Age would tumble from its highs like a stock market crash. An older person alive in the regions most affected during the steepest dive (from about 1200 to 1150 BCE) would likely have seen a very different world than the one she had been born into.

Histories written a century or even a half century ago have relatively definite conclusions about the fall of the Bronze Age (and a hundred other subjects). Times have changed. Modern standards and methods in many fields have subjected any and all theories to acid tests that historians of the past never dreamed of. From dating technology to DNA sampling to a thousand other tools, modern researchers have resources that can unlock—or debunk—information as never before.

It is in the nature of such scrutiny that existing theories get shot down more easily than new ones garner support. The historian John H. Arnold pointed out that history is an ongoing process—it never can, nor will, reach its final conclusion, and revisions will always be happening, as more facts and data become available and older theories are modified or disproved.

One by one, modern researchers are debunking (or at least casting reasonable doubt on) many of the theories about the end of the Bronze Age. But though today’s experts have immeasurably more information about the time, they are less sure about what befell it than ever before.

A good detective might have two questions to set the parameters for any investigation:

1 What happened?

2 How (why) did it happen?

If question number one can’t be answered, it becomes extremely difficult to answer question number two. And the truth is, experts still disagree about that first question.

Traditionally, the explanation behind “the fall of the Bronze Age” says that sometime between about 1250 and 1100 BCE, something horrifying happened to the areas in the ancient world that were anywhere close to the Mediterranean Sea. Some sort of phenomenon or event or series of events affected states and peoples from the central Mediterranean all the way east into modern-day Iraq. Hundreds of cities were destroyed or abandoned. Famine, war, disease, political upheaval, volcanoes, earthquakes, piracy, human migration, and climate changes such as drought are mentioned in the sources and found in the data. Somehow and at some point, the complex, interconnected system of trade and communication supporting the very centralized states in this era was disrupted. By about 1100 BCE, many of the formerly centralized societies had reverted (or fragmented into) more localized, smaller political entities, while wealth (such as evidenced by grave goods included in burials) declined in opulence.

Most of the states that did survive the era emerged looking like bruised and battered boxers who’d survived a grueling bout—somewhat diminished, if not permanently reduced, in power and influence. Egypt would never be the same. Writing would almost die out in Greece. And the powerful Hittite Empire, a large and strategically placed kingdom for two and a half centuries, was somehow destroyed.[12] Several major states never made it out of the Bronze Age at all.

The historian Robert Drews has said that the end of the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age was one of history’s most frightful turning points and a calamity for those who experienced it. According to Drews, almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean was destroyed over a fifty-year period running from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the twelfth century BCE. He ran down the list of damages:

In the Aegean, the palace-centered world that we call Mycenaean Greece disappeared: although some of its glories were remembered by the bards of the Dark Age, it was otherwise forgotten until archaeologists dug it up. The loss in Anatolia was even greater. The Hittite empire had given to the Anatolian plateau a measure of order and prosperity that it had never known before and would not see again for a thousand years. In the Levant recovery was much faster, and some important Bronze Age institutions survived with little change; but others did not, and everywhere urban life was drastically set back. In Egypt the Twentieth Dynasty marked the end of the New Kingdom and almost the end of pharaonic achievement. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean the twelfth century B.C. ushered in a dark age, which in Greece and Anatolia was not to lift for more than four hundred years. Altogether the end of the Bronze Age was arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the western Roman Empire.

So much for the “what happened” side of the investigation.

The second part of the investigation concerns how or why it happened.

Theories have never been in short supply:

1 The sea peoples (and related causes)

2 Famine/climate change/drought

3 Earthquakes/volcanoes/tsunamis

4 Plagues

5 Internecine warfare

6 Systems collapse

7 Any or all of the above in combination

There’s more.[13] But the problem isn’t one of finding evidence—there seems to be data available in one form or another to support cases for and against all of these suspects in some places and during some times—but rather, the damage that was done seems so extensive that it’s hard to imagine any single cause capable of wreaking such widespread and long-lasting havoc.

In addition, the evidence is tricky.[14]

Take destroyed cities: Often when destroyed cities from thousands of years ago are found, visible signs of their end are present. Soot and ash layers from torched buildings are the most obvious evidence at most sites, but bodies lying where they fell, weapons such as arrowheads embedded in walls, and other forms of damage are also sometimes found. This certainly tells you that the city died a violent death, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you who was responsible. One normally thinks of a force of alien outsiders, but the perpetrators could also have been the city’s inhabitants fighting a civil war among themselves or going through a political upheaval.[15] It’s hard to finger the culprit based solely on the archaeological evidence.

The written word might be used to cross-check the archaeological findings, but words come with their own problems. First, the Bronze Age was obviously a long time ago. The Hebrew Bible was still centuries in the future when the Bronze Age ended. Despite a surprising amount of written material (again, a sure sign of an advanced era), far less than enough is available to solve this riddle.

Yet there are inscriptions from this period that discuss subjects that might be germane to this mystery.

If, for example, you find destroyed cities in the archaeological record, and then get written accounts of invasions by marauders in that same area and around the same time, the evidence looks damning. In Egypt, there are official records (with pictures!) carved into stone of violent encounters with the mysterious “peoples of the sea.”[16] The Egyptians made it sound as though these sea peoples were raping and pillaging and burning cities throughout the entire eastern Mediterranean like a horde of Bronze Age Vikings. They were thought by historians decades ago to be a primary reason for the chaos at the end of the era.

But can the Egyptian records be taken at face value? Could they be misleading, or an outright lie? Historians are specifically trained in the fine art of disentangling and interpreting evidence with a skeptical eye, and they’ve found problems with the Egyptian account.

Multiple Egyptian rulers documented violent encounters with peoples whom they themselves connected to the sea or to islands. They would say of this or that tribe that they were “of the sea” or “of the countries of the sea,” or mention them “in their isles.” These sea peoples are made out to be different tribes or states of warlike and seaborne groups whose origin isn’t clear.[17] Just as the crisis period of the late Bronze Age began, at least one pharaoh was using some of these tribes of “sea people” warriors as mercenary soldiers fighting for Egypt, so it’s unlikely that they would have been totally alien or unknown. We may not know who they were, or from whence they came, but it’s very possible the Egyptians might have.

Ramesses III (1217–1155 BCE) claimed to have defeated some groups of sea peoples in a battle that is often dated to right in the middle of the crisis period (1180 BCE).[18] His surviving written accounts portray him as a sort of bulwark of civilization, fighting off a coalition of alien forces that he said had launched a conspiracy together and had been unstoppable. Ramesses tells that these peoples or tribes had already overthrown several other great states, raping and pillaging the coasts and seas like ancient Norsemen—until they ran into him: “The foreign countries conspired in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could resist their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on being cut off at one time. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people and its land was like that which had never existed. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared for them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denen, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts were confident and trusting as they said ‘Our plans will succeed!’”[19]

The pharaoh said the plans of these many united foreign tribes failed, that the Egyptians crushed the invasion and the survivors fared badly: “As for those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and their soul are finished forever and ever. As for those who came forward together on the seas, the full flame was in front of them at the Nile mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore, prostrated on the beach, slain, and made into heaps from head to tail.”

It’s not unusual for people who aren’t historians to assume this is an accurate retelling of events, and indeed this could be extremely important information. But can we fully believe it?

Some historians point out that Ramesses III may have taken a small encounter and magnified it to enormous proportions to exalt his own greatness. Others suggest that he was simply retelling an event that had happened in the time of a previous Egyptian ruler (the pharaoh Merneptah, who reigned from 1213–1203 BCE and carved a victory report in the walls at the Temple of Karnak) and claiming the earlier pharoah’s victory as his own. He was certainly fibbing to some degree, as historians and archaeologists have proved that some of the cities he says were destroyed were not. And it may have been that he was writing for a particular audience and had certain things he wanted them to know or believe. The question of motive and context are crucial when deciding how far to believe a contemporary account.

Finally, there’s all the data that modern scientific methods and technology can add to the picture, the value of which is immeasurable. The list of specialties working on aspects of the Bronze Age mystery includes people who study climate, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, agricultural trends, underwater archaeology, the paleoenvironment, and a host of other fields. But extrapolating actual answers from such information to help clear up the mystery itself seems no easier to come by. At least not yet.

If we look again at our list of prime suspects and the cases for and against them, it becomes clear just how difficult solving a case as cold as this can be.

Suspect #1: The Sea Peoples (and Related Causes)

Part of what makes really ancient history so interesting is that there are lots of peoples who seem to just appear from nowhere in the historical records. It’s like Star Trek without the space travel. One minute there aren’t any people like the Arameans or Phrygians or Kassites, next minute they’re seemingly everywhere you look.

History, especially the further back one travels, has a way of compressing the events of the past, so that trends that occurred over generations seem to us to happen almost in an instant. The “sudden appearance” of a new tribe or people into ancient history may have actually occurred over many lifetimes. What history has called “invasions” may sometimes have been more like migrations, and what history has termed “migrations” and portrayed as entire peoples simultaneously on the move may in many cases have been more like gradual long-term immigration.

It’s possible that’s how it was with the so-called sea peoples.

The sea peoples were public enemy number one in what might be termed the “invasion theory.” In the mid-twentieth century, it was popular to portray the urban “civilized” world of the Bronze Age as an oasis of development ringed by a sea of antagonistic barbarism. There was an osmosis-like dynamic that kept attracting the hardscrabble tribal types on the outside to the rich (but perhaps soft) “civilized” peoples. That human sea was kept at bay only through great effort. At times, the barbarian tribes would break through and overwhelm a given city, region, or even state.

In this view, the crisis at the end of the Bronze Age was akin to a perfect storm that set in motion many of these outsider peoples, creating a “time of troubles” led by fierce tribal warriors who overwhelmed all but the strongest of political entities.

As the historian Chester G. Starr wrote in 1965:

The [Bronze Age] monarchs failed until too late to notice that new waves of invasion were mounting. From the desert Semitic tribes lapped against the strongpoints of the cities; from the north a terrific assault broke forth in the late thirteenth century. Ugarit was burned and destroyed forever, as were many other Syrian centers; the Hittite realm vanished from the map shortly after 1200, as did also the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece. Egypt, attacked by land and sea under Ramesses III (1182–51), barely rode out the storm. So too Assyria survived, but lost any capabilities of expansion for the next few centuries.

Several other once popular hypotheses could also be wrapped into the invasion theory. For example, the idea that much of the calamity from this era can be attributed to the discovery and wide use (among some) of iron fits nicely into any idea that warfare was a prime component of the Bronze Age catastrophe. Many once thought that iron was the secret superweapon of the ancient world in this age, and that once some peoples acquired the ability and know-how to produce it, they gained a huge advantage militarily over their enemies. People who had this capability (such as the Hittites) were said to jealously guard the secret of its manufacture.

This idea is much less popular than it once was, but it has evolved somewhat and now forms a component in other theories relating to, for example, the collapse of regional trade. The exchange among developed states in copper and tin was a key pillar of the economy in the interconnected Mediterranean Bronze Age.[20] Few places had both those metals, so trade was vital and lucrative. Iron’s main value had less to do with its hardness than with its abundance.[21] If it was cheaper to outfit soldiers with iron weapons than bronze ones, that certainly would have had military implications. If it severely damaged the economies of the major trading states, that would have had ripple effects as well.[22]

Then there are the last two elements at play here that may fall under the “sea peoples and friends” category—piracy and human migration. These also overlap with the next potential suspects on the list.

Let’s start with piracy. Whether it’s the Egyptians talking about “northerners in their isles,” or written correspondence from the coasts of the Levant, there’s a general feeling about the late stages of the Bronze Age (and what happened in the famed “Viking Age,” from about 700 to 1100 CE) that periodic outbreaks of large-scale piracy were not an unusual historical occurrence. In addition to the raiding of coastal settlements and the burning of villages, towns, and even major cities, the taking of ships and cargoes at sea could wreak havoc on the all-important Mediterranean maritime trading network. A small amount of piracy in this region was no doubt normal,[23] but if conditions fostered an explosion in the number of seagoing bandits, it could be system threatening. The sea peoples were once blamed for the majority of pirate activity, but unearthed records have shown that in at least some cases the pirates may have been from the same city-state as their victims, a case perhaps of turning to piracy when economic conditions deteriorated.

But pirates are hit-and-run entities, and some of these humans may have wanted to move en masse to the more advanced or wealthy states permanently. The idea of a Bronze Age version of the Germanic Völkerwanderung[24] (essentially, a migration), disrupting the equilibrium and setting in motion the collapse of the age, has been around for a long time. The Egyptian inscriptions depict families in wagons accompanying some of the “sea people” and Libyan tribes. The implication is that whole peoples were looking for new places to settle, and they were willing to conquer new lands with the sword if need be. The Egyptians were somewhat used to this, as they occupied a comparatively rich breadbasket in their region; Libyan peoples from the west, Nubian people from the south, and all manner of “Asiatics”[25] were often trying to gain entrance to raid or settle. It can be hard to draw a fine line between human migration and invasion in some of these cases.

The invasion theory assumes that this late Bronze Age outbreak of barbarian violence was a somewhat widespread phenomenon, perhaps one involving differing groups of peoples from the Balkans to the edge of China, and occurring at roughly close to the same time.

The theory is less popular today, if for no other reason than some of the invasions offered as evidence are now more doubted. Did the “Dorians” invade and conquer Greece as part of this calamity? Eighty years ago, a majority of historians would have likely thought so and would have blamed those invasions for plunging Greece into a dark age. Today, fewer historians believe those “invasions” ever happened. If multiple invasions didn’t happen—if, instead, warfare and raiding were more piecemeal and less widespread—it becomes tougher to blame them for bringing the entire system down. Some historians have even suggested they may be a historical myth.

While there are still big supporters of the idea that the peoples of the sea were of pivotal importance to the end of the Bronze Age, they are perhaps seen by most these days as more of an effect than a cause. The migrations, piracy, and even invasions may have been a response to something else …

Suspect #2: Famine/Climate Change/Drought

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are commonly given the names Conquest (or Pestilence), War, Famine, and Death. In much of the modern world, the horsemen don’t seem as scary as they used to. War and conquest are still around, of course, but no World War III (yet). We are no longer able to relate to what our forebears went through with disease (pestilence).[26] And mass, society-wide famine is almost unheard of in most of the world. It seems like much of the darkness that humankind lived with from time immemorial has been banished from our future.

But it’s never wise to bet against any of the Four Horsemen long term. Their historical track record is horrifyingly good.

One of the things most of us take for granted is our access to food. There are malnourished and hungry individuals in every nation on earth, but times when food is scarce for whole societies is much, much rarer in most of the world than it’s ever been. Mass food insecurity was more the norm than the exception up until very recently, though. It’s only because of relatively recent changes that enough food can be produced to support our current population levels. Our modern delivery and logistics systems allow large amounts of food to be reliably shipped and to stock the shelves of even distant islands. When scenes of the ravages of modern famine appear on television charity ads, the reality displayed on camera is almost incomprehensible to most of us. But try feeding three hundred million people in the United States today with the farming technology of even two hundred years ago.

There are some incidents of mass fatality–level famine in modern advanced cities or states in the mid-twentieth century. The unusual sight of humans dying from starvation next to modern buildings and on modern streets clashes with the image in our minds of poor, war-torn, drought-stricken, underdeveloped societies on the edge of the globalized world. We are conditioned to think that way by recent history. It’s hard to picture London or Tokyo or New York with mass deaths in the street from starvation.

But that’s the human experience that we need to imagine when thinking about famine. The tales that modern observers and victims of famine tell are of societies that fall apart because there’s no food. Imagine if the region where you live were cut off from food supplies today. As Garry J. Shaw suggests, it might explain why you get sea peoples, migrations, invasions, or insurrections.

When enough people are driven by desperation, not even the greatest state can stop them; symbols of wealth and prestige mean nothing if enough people reject their meaning. In such times, some will rise up, burn, and rebuild on the ashes. Others will leave. And so, in this time of instability, disease, violence, famine, and drought, the assorted ‘Sea Peoples’ took the second option: they travelled eastwards, bringing their families and possessions along with them, leaving their homeland behind. To support themselves or when attempting to settle, sometimes they turned to violence, probably supported by mercenaries, creating their legend.

There’s good evidence for famine during the last few centuries of the Mediterranean Bronze Age in many places around the region. The Hittites, especially, seemed to be facing a dire food crisis over an extended period; a last desperate letter sent from the capital, before the destruction of the city, refers to starvation. In Egypt, cemetery finds show evidence that the population of this era often suffered malnourishment. And people from Libya seemed to always be threatened by hunger; they would raid or even migrate to Egypt periodically over many centuries for food.[27]

Lots of things can cause famine. Insects can eat or spoil food; rivers and water sources can dry up or change course, or complex irrigation systems can be destroyed; poor farming practices can deplete the soil. Usually, though, the weather itself is the greatest threat. Even in the modern age, the utter dependence of agriculture on the right range of favorable climatic conditions is humbling. No nation is immune. Arid weather in the American Midwest created the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, during the Great Depression, which in turn spawned a migration of people and sent forth ripples of historical change that are still felt today. Similar events must have happened innumerable times in humanity’s past.

Weather-related explanations for the end of the Bronze Age are extrapopular right now given the general spotlight on climate change, but historians for many decades have theorized that drought was what really unleashed the Four Horsemen. A prolonged drought, leading to severe famine, could certainly have been the spark that set into motion chain reactions that in retrospect explain things like piracy, migrations, and perhaps internal unrest.

As the historian Malcolm H. Wiener writes: “Warfare and migrations may be both the result and the cause of food crisis, and particularly where the carrying capacity of the land is already stretched to the utmost. The effects may be cumulative, with food shortages leading to overuse and degradation of available land; to rebellions by troops, populace, or captives; and/or to the loss of legitimacy of rulers believed to have lost divine favor.”

It’s hard to know how much localized famine was normal and to be periodically expected, and how much a particularly bad situation represented an unusual larger threat. Studies have shown evidence of a prolonged drought roughly around the relevant time in some of these areas.[28]

A counterargument by some experts, however, is that droughts are not uncommon in this climatic zone, because much of the eastern Mediterranean is somewhat arid to begin with. Why, suddenly, did a particularly dry period bring down a chain of ancient societies in a region where droughts weren’t so terribly rare? And why, if drought explains why peoples began to relocate, did those people sometimes leave known dry areas and migrate to ones that have been shown to be even more arid?[29]

Famine prompts a similar question: If famine wasn’t that rare, why did it topple the structure at the end of the Bronze Age rather than any of the other times it occurred? It certainly may have done so, but proving it is the task still facing historical investigators.

If something like drought or famine was the cause of the Bronze Age collapse, it didn’t wreak its changes by starving everyone to death. Famine would have been more of a spark that set off side effects. Yet it’s terribly difficult, especially thousands of years later, to tie the ripple effects back to whatever rocks were first thrown into the stream. How do you connect the dots, for example, between an attack by the sea peoples and evidence of a drought in their homeland? Having relatively accurate dates for when events occurred would be of great help solving such a puzzle. A drought, for example, a hundred years after the sea people invasions, couldn’t possibly have been its cause, but if it happened ten years before the great attacks chronicled by the pharaohs, then it might indeed have spurred a subsequent migration. But how close can science get to actual specific years when something occurred more than three thousand years ago?

That leads to the next suspect:

Suspect #3: Earthquakes/Volcanoes/Tsunamis

First, let’s step out of our timeline to the year 1815, when the Mount Tambora volcano erupted in what’s now part of Indonesia. It is the only eruption in the last thousand years that merits a 7 out of a maximum 8 rating on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI).[30] It caused tsunamis and earthquakes, darkened the skies, and unleashed enough ash to cover a one-hundred-square-mile area to a depth of twelve feet. The effect on global climate was profound—1816 was known as “the year without summer.” And, among other things, it was thought to have brought on famine.

There have only been a handful of volcanic eruptions to reach that high on the VEI since humans began keeping a written record of their history. One happened near the end of the Bronze Age, in the eastern Mediterranean, in an area that was right at the heart of the whole Mediterranean Bronze Age world.

Today, the location of the volcano is actually the Greek island of Santorini, but the ancient Greeks called the island Thera. Like Tambora, the Thera eruption was one of the most powerful volcanic events in human history; unlike Tambora, we have no surviving contemporary accounts of it. Scientists can find the evidence of its eruption all over the region, but they can’t yet pinpoint the year it happened. If they could, it would become a specific marker that would help date other events.[31] Experts can get close to a date, within a century or so—usually between about 1630 and 1500 BCE—but while that’s a tiny margin of error when compared with the intervening thousands of years, it’s still enough to muddy this investigation. Since the fall of the Bronze Age is usually dated to around 1200 BCE or so, the later the eruption is dated, the more likely it is to have had an effect on the catastrophe.[32]

Experts argue about most things connected to the Thera eruption. In addition to the dating, the amount of damage done to the surrounding areas is in question. If it somehow played a role in the downfall of that age, how did it do so? Tsunamis are one proposed vector of destruction. That one or multiple tsunamis were generated by the eruption seems universally accepted, but disagreements occur over their size and what sort of damage they would have caused. Most of the Thera volcano’s tsunamis would have been created by the quick addition of massive amounts of material into the sea, which generates waves that can reach enormous heights (the same way that a glacier’s calving produces large waves).[33] These waves, known as megatsunamis, are quite different from the more familiar seismic variety of tsunami. Whereas the seismic tsunamis are almost too small to be noticed while moving through the open sea, and they explode in height only when they approach land, megatsunamis start at maximum height upon generation and lose force and height as they move across miles of water. Seismic tsunamis are often preceded by a strange receding of the beach tide, only to have the water roar back later, but megatsunamis are more like rogue waves—they can come out of nowhere.

The reason waves matter is that one of the theories about how a volcano might be tied to the end of the Bronze Age argues that the tsunamis may have decimated the coastal areas of nearby states. Ships in port would be damaged by a tsunami of any sort, but a megatsunami could also have wreaked havoc on ships in the open sea. A huge wall of water speeding across the ocean might sink anything in its path.[34]

The island of Crete, the heart and soul of the powerful maritime Minoan state, was close to Thera and is often thought to have been a likely victim of the volcano’s explosion.[35] If the ships, facilities, and perhaps settlements and coastal population of Crete were badly damaged or destroyed by the sea, the resulting effect on the economy of the region might have been huge.

It’s also been suggested that widespread damage on a large scale might have weakened the Minoans in a way that made them a tempting target for geopolitical predators in their region. Sometime between about 1450 and 1370 BCE, most of the great palaces from the heyday of the Minoans were destroyed, and eventually the area and culture was taken over by the Mycenaeans.[36] But if the Minoan state declined around 1400 BCE or so, that’s still two or more centuries removed from the other parts of the collapse manifesting. It’s possible that the volcano and the resulting tsunami might have been responsible for this, a chain reaction of events that destabilized what had been a stable system, but that would constitute a long lag time between cause and effect.

The other natural disaster that gets brought into the conversation about the end of the Bronze Age is earthquakes. There’s overlap here, because the Thera eruption may have sparked or been preceded by earthquakes, and these might have contributed to the damage spawned by the volcano. And earthquakes are also one of the primary causes of tsunamis.

There’s no doubt that earthquakes were a relatively regular ancient visitor to this very seismically active region. Damage from earthquakes in ancient times (sometimes including crushed bodies found where they fell) has been discovered in structures all over the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. In fact, there seem to have been several big earthquakes dated to around the time of the Bronze Age’s end, and lots of important cities in that area show earthquake damage. In the age before stabilized buildings and modern construction, and when open fires were common, the damage done by earthquakes may have been worse than what we’d find today. Certainly, the ability to deal with an earthquake’s aftermath is better in modern times. An earthquake and a resulting tsunami that killed fifty thousand people today would be much easier for us to clean up and recover from than it would have been for a Bronze Age society.

Yet the evidence points often to rebuilding after the historical quakes, which shows that such events weren’t totally fatal and that the affected society could continue. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that population, prosperity, or geopolitical power and influence would return to predisaster levels.

A single phenomenon (such as earthquakes, droughts, volcanoes, or tsunamis) can explain why a particular city or area suffered damage, but it can’t by itself explain why the entire Mediterranean and west Asian region was affected by something at the end of the Bronze Age. Just because there may have been a volcano on an Aegean island that erupted and caused tsunamis, why did Babylon and Assyria, located in landlocked modern-day Iraq, have problems?

Suspect #4: Plagues

Smallpox is one of the most infamous diseases in history. To give an idea of its virulence, it killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone,[37] but the disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980[38]—meaning half a billion people were killed by smallpox in just eight decades. Those who didn’t succumb to the illness were often left blind, and severely disfigured by scarring. Mercifully, we don’t deal with smallpox anymore, but the illness goes back millennia. When the Egyptian mummy of Pharaoh Ramesses V (r. 1149–1145 BCE) was examined, the body revealed smallpox scarring. (He may have died from the disease.)[39] Smallpox killed multiple reigning European monarchs and five Japanese emperors, and it was likely the cause of many early plagues of history, such as the one in ancient Athens in 430 BCE.[40] Smallpox was also one of the main killers of the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia after first contact, the majority of whom may have died from the disease before the Europeans who first transmitted it across the oceanic disease barrier actually encountered them.[41]

Just as it is difficult for most of us today to imagine the food insecurity that was common in most human populations in most eras, it’s difficult to conceptualize the range of illnesses and diseases against which earlier cultures had no defense. Pretty much nothing separates us more from human beings in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us. We are still victimized by illness and disease of all kinds, but unlike in the distant past, we now have so many more ways to fight back, and such a better understanding of the underlying reasons for maladies. Real plagues—a common experience in all of human history—are thankfully rare today. Some of our greatest modern fears over disease are simply that we might ever again have one plague as bad as any average plague in earlier eras.[42]

Sources make it sound as though Hattusa (the Hittite capital) was dealing with both famine and plague in this general Bronze Age era.[43] Two successive Hittite rulers succumbed to one plague in around the 1320s BCE. There are reports of plague in the Levant, Cyprus, and Egypt. Several regions in Greece saw depopulation during this era that might have been related to an outbreak of disease.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse often ride together, though, and just as famine and pestilence are interconnected with each other, they are often also linked with war.

Suspect #5: Internecine Warfare

We’ve already discussed violence in different forms leading to the problems in the Bronze Age. From sea peoples to revolutionaries to the Trojan War, there was no shortage of bloody outbreaks as the era came to its close. How is one to make a distinction between the “normal” level of violence and something system threatening? Was there anything about the end of the Bronze Age in a military sense that was different or stood out? Yes, there was: Assyria.

Assyria would become the first of the great empires of the next era, the Iron Age.[44] It was in the later Bronze Age that this Semitic-speaking superpower-to-be began to alter the map of the Near East in ways that could easily upset the region’s geopolitical equilibrium. The Assyrian state, located in modern northern Iraq, and centered on several already ancient cities,[45] had an extensive history and had long been a part of regional power struggles. By about the 1390s BCE, Assyria was about to go on another multigenerational historical winning streak, and much of this would come at the expense of neighboring states in the region.

After falling under the domination of another powerful state in the region (Mittani) in about the 1450s BCE, the Assyrians wrested back their independence after a couple of generations, and then began to take their former overlords apart piece by piece. Leading an increasingly fearsome and effective fighting force, aggressive and energetic Assyrian kings like Ashur-uballit I, Tukulti-Ninurta I, and Tiglath-Pileser I expanded the boundaries of their kingdom and added to its resources.

Assyria’s increasing might eventually began to alarm the other great powers. The Hittites, especially, were right in the crosshairs. The Hittite Empire’s territory formed a key international crossroads in the Bronze Age, a potentially indispensable link in the structure of economic, diplomatic, and military interconnectivity that supported that version of an international system. If something damaged the Hittite state, many others in that system could have felt the effects.

Sometime around 1237 BCE, the Hittites were defeated by the Assyrians at the Battle of Nihriya. The resulting loss of territory meant ceding important resource outlets to the Assyrians.[46] There’s a sort of death spiral that can be created in war when a state’s treasury is drained by extended conflict, when manpower is decimated by battlefield defeats, and when possession of the resources that are indispensable for recovering from those losses is lost to the enemy. The year 1237 is right around the start of the traditional era when the Bronze Age seemingly began to come under severe strain, so if we are trying to correlate dates with ripple effects, we can see that the extension of Assyrian power corresponds with some of the large geopolitical changes quite well.

War can be a net positive or negative to a combatant power.[47] War (and the resulting conquests) has often benefited the state doing the conquering. In this case, it might have benefited Assyria.

And while it goes without saying that wars are bad for those who lose them, in many circumstances, wars can be a negative for all involved. By the last year of the First World War, for example, all the nations that had begun the war four years before had been ground down by it. The economies that were paying for the costs of the conflict were in shambles. The damage the war caused to the global system meant that the conflict was harmful even to nations that were not a part of the fight.[48]

The subsequent negative effects of that early twentieth-century war involved many of the same factors we’ve targeted in our discussion of the end of the Bronze Age. By 1918, due to the conflict, Europe was experiencing famine and pestilence to go along with its war and death. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were running rampant through some of the most advanced societies in the early twentieth century—an eventuality that was made possible only because the war opened the door to it. It’s not hard to imagine, then, how a multigenerational and eventually losing struggle with another great power may have challenged the Hittite state.

Assyria’s wars of expansion during this era were in the military history foreground and are hard to miss. But in the background were lots of conflicts that didn’t involve the great powers fighting their peers at all (which doesn’t mean they weren’t potentially important, or possibly fatal, should a great power have been defeated). Lots of “barbarian” peoples and tribes, for example, nibbled at the fringes of the great states, always seemingly ready to exploit weakness or take advantage of opportunities. In the case of the Hittites, their local troublesome “barbarians” were people like the Phrygians and a lesser-known people known as the Kaska (or Gasga). The Kaska are portrayed by the Hittite sources as aggressive wild tribesmen who had sacked and burned the Hittite capital in the past. Some historians think that, as the Hittite state got weaker, its ability to resist these peoples declined. If major conflicts with other powerful states like Assyria weakened the Hittites, it may have made them less able to fend off their traditional “barbarian” neighbors. And, just to tie it all together, if those barbarian neighbors were starving due to a famine caused by arid conditions and poor harvests, does that explain why the Hittites might have had to fend them off in the first place?

If one credits the Assyrians with a large amount of responsibility for bringing down the state of Mittani,[49] and then possibly mortally wounding the Hittites, that would amount to a great deal of political and military change occurring around the thirteenth century BCE. And this might have been enough to spark a chain reaction that disrupted a whole system.

Suspects #6 and #7: Systems Collapse, Multiple Causes

We live in a world of complex systems—economic, cultural, social, administrative-bureaucratic. Many things must function together to make an interconnected system work, and a breakdown anywhere can mean a breakdown everywhere. For that reason, most systems have some flexibility and redundancy built into them to deal with stresses, breakdowns, and unforeseen circumstances—in short, they are made to be resilient. But when these backup systems become overwhelmed, the cascading nature of a problem can ripple throughout the entire system like an economic version of a communicable disease. So in a Bronze Age trading network that reached from Spain to Iran and from northern Italy to Nubia, a disruption of something like Mediterranean commerce could affect all those regions.

And while the loss of things like luxury products and the money generated from trading activity would have had an enormous effect, it’s important to remember that food constituted one of the major categories of goods being shipped in the late Bronze Age. The Egyptians were sending food to multiple places (including the Hittite lands) via ship to alleviate starvation. If those ships were unable to reach their destinations, it wasn’t a question of loss of income or a lowering of living standards, it was a potential famine.

When people don’t have food, under certain circumstances all law and order and societal controls can break down. Plagues can cause the same problems if they’re bad enough. Anarchy, revolution, and civil war can sometimes do to a society what outside invaders can’t manage. All it can take is too little food or too much disease.

There are other scenarios that can lead to the same outcome. Mass migration in a short time (for example, the Libyan and sea peoples’ “invasions” of Egypt) can disrupt norms and break down culture and amicable coexistence. Insufficient military defense can leave a population and its food supplies open to predation by other armed groups.

Some experts have suggested that the Bronze Age system was somewhat fragile or brittle. Undergirded by highly centralized, very bureaucratic states, with a small rich elite presiding over large numbers of peons,[50] such a system might have been vulnerable to all sorts of rebellion and social upheaval. Think of an ancient version of the French Revolution, for example. If such destabilization were sparked by a system’s inability to deliver food to a starving population, what’s ultimately to blame: The famine, or the brittle, inequitable social system? If the sea peoples’ piracy helped destroy the maritime trading system, does the damage come from the piracy or the resulting collapse of the trading system? This is where the multiple-causes suspect begins to look like a good bet.

WHILE WE FEEL somewhat safer from those Bronze Age suspects than our ancestors did, we have managed to add new potential threats that previous eras never had to face: nuclear weapons, global environmental damage, potentially catastrophic scientific innovations, and more.[51] And the ongoing threat of certain types of potentially dark age–inducing wild cards seems pretty consistent over the ages. Whether you live in an era when a scary-size asteroid hits the earth or a supervolcano explodes in Yosemite seems merely the luck of the celestial roulette wheel.

When the Soviet Union suffered a political system collapse[52] in the early 1990s, did some of the USSR’s successor states have something we might consider a mini–dark age? That unsettled era saw an extended and difficult transition period. In newly created nation-states like Russia, birth rates and life expectancy dropped drastically. Alcoholism and suicide rates rose; the social safety net was shredded; the nation’s military and infrastructure seemed to atrophy; its political system seemed unsteady, corrupt, and chaotic; and its national resources were seemingly up for grabs to the highest or most corrupt bidder. If the history of the post-USSR era were being written by historians a century ago, would they have called it “The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union”? Would they have identified the period afterward as a “dark age”?

Perhaps how long any societal, economic, or civilizational downturn lasts is a key factor in whether or not we agree that something qualifies as a dark age. Both the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s and the post-Soviet breakup of the 1990s lasted roughly a decade or so. That length hardly seems to meet the minimum standard for a dark age. However, had the direct fallout from either instead lasted a century or two, that might have been enough to turn a statistical civilizational blip into an extended negative trend.

One of the modern theories on societal collapse argues that because of the entire planet’s connected nature in the twenty-first century, individual or localized “dark ages” of the sort that formerly occurred are nowadays absorbed by the rest of the global body and civilization as a whole.[53] Others have suggested that the depth and severity of any potential “dark age” are lessened due to modern interconnectivity. So you might have another Great Depression or the fall of a superpower, but you won’t have a century of global decline and technological backsliding. It’s sort of a global diversification of risk in our modern civilization, a redundancy that allows the system to survive local blackouts.

But perhaps our bias is showing. Maybe such changes are not decline or backsliding at all. It all might depend on the criteria we’ve decided to use. Depending on your point of view, things might not be considered better or worse … just different.

Earlier we brought up the idea of “progress” having an innate bias attached to it. If literacy declines in a later era because reading is less important, is this indicative of living in a “dark(er) age”? Or would it be more a case of people adjusting their skills based on their needs? And who gets to decide this—we moderns looking backward at the past, or the people actually living in the earlier era? Our ideas of what was good for the inhabitants of an earlier time might be different from their own.

This brings up the question of how much the people living in a dark age would even realize it. If you were born in Greece in 1000 BCE,[54] did you know (or care) that there was a greater age before yours? Take a kid born in the United States in 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression. On his tenth birthday, the world was still mired in the effects of the crash. To that child, the privation and lowered sense of expectations felt normal; he had no experience or memory of anything else. His parents, however, likely felt that times had gotten tougher. While it sounds like a bad thing to be living in a society off its technological, cultural, or economic highs, it’s very possible the happiness level of individual human beings adjusted and evened out comparatively quickly. It’s hard to know what you’re missing after it’s been gone for a couple of lifetimes.

Maybe we are looking at this entirely wrong. If we lived in an era when our history books taught us that Ben Franklin’s eighteenth-century Revolutionary War generation had landed a spacecraft on Mars and could completely cure cancer (which of course we can’t do or haven’t done yet), would we care? Of course we would want the things of the past that seemed like improvements, but would we want the rest of the package that came along with it? If, for example, a Native American from five centuries ago had a bad tooth, she might really want our modern dentistry to deal with it. But if in order to get the modern medicine she had to become modern in all the other aspects of her existence, she might not consider the deal worth it.

There are multiple ways that any account or story can be viewed, but it’s helpful to be reminded from time to time. Certain narratives, such as “golden ages” and “rise and falls,” are so ingrained in our thinking that it’s easy to forget there might be other ways to see things. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter said that in some regions the Roman Empire taxed its citizens so highly, and provided so few services in return, that some of those people welcomed the “conquering barbarians” as liberators.

A similar theory exists about the Bronze Age: that perhaps the very bureaucratic and tax-heavy structure of the palace cultures of the Mediterranean states stopped working well for the majority of people, and one way or another they abandoned or stopped actively supporting it. In such a case, if things become too complicated to work well, or too centralized to be in touch with ground-level problems, is reverting to a greater level of simplicity and local control moving in a negative or a positive direction?[55]

As with so many things, it may depend on whom you ask. No doubt at least some of those living back then would think we were romanticizing how wonderful the “good old days” of their lives were. Indeed, the successors of Rome would spend hundreds of years trying to put it back together again (in some form or another), and a certain blind poet named Homer would make a living recalling tales of the good old heroic days of the Bronze Age centuries after it ended.

Chapter 4

JUDGMENT AT NINEVEH

TWENTY-ONE YEARS AFTER Planet of the Apes was released, at an excavation of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, archaeologists from the University of California began slicing into what, to the naked, untrained eye, appeared to be a naturally occurring hill. But like so many other mounds in the area, it was actually a man-made stone-and-brick structure that the passing of thousands of years had worked to transform. Underneath twenty-five centuries’ worth of dirt, evidence of disaster was revealed: a layer of destruction and burnt material just beneath the soil. Pieces of weapons were discovered, and a corridor of sorts emerged, with cut stonework and a pebbled floor.

Then the archaeologists found the dead.

There were at least twelve skeletons in the passage, multiple adults and children, and also a horse. The bodies appeared to lie where they had fallen. There was no indication of looting, which in any case would have been difficult, because at or near the time of these people’s death, the corridor had collapsed and buried them. Investigators determined the roof had been burning when it fell, and some of the dead were scorched before they expired on that terrible day two and a half millennia ago.

Had the site been discovered closer to the time of the events, the findings would have been grisly in the extreme, but time has a way of sanitizing even a mass killing. There is no longer any flesh or blood or viscera, and the facial expressions have been erased by decay.

The Halzi Gate, as the site was later identified, was one of fifteen external openings in the walled defenses of perhaps the greatest urban center of the ancient world—Nineveh, the heart of the Assyrian Empire in northern Mesopotamia.

At its height, around 650 BCE, the city and its surrounding villages may have had as many as 150,000 inhabitants and covered an area of about two thousand acres, or just under three square miles. The city was a wonder of its age, huge and grand, the center of gravity of the Assyrian Empire’s government and the primary residence of its ruler, a figure whose many self-proclaimed titles included “king of the universe.” The defenses of this metropolis were mammoth, with walls sixty feet tall and fifty feet thick stretching more than three miles on each side, and deep ditches carved out below them. The Halzi Gate itself had a 220-foot-tall facade and was flanked by six towers.

Yet in the same way the ash-covered corpses from the Roman-era volcanic destruction of Pompeii are frozen in the moment of their death, the dead at the Halzi Gate are frozen in the instant of their final agony. The bodies show the unmistakable signs of mortal hand-to-hand combat, including defensive wounds and, in some cases, clear evidence that a final killing blow was administered. They died as their city was dying.

What had Assyria done to deserve such a fate?

In the scope of human history, there are two kinds of cultures that have had a large geopolitical impact on the historical stage. The first are the societies and cultures that can trace their lineage back to much earlier versions of themselves, like the Chinese and Egyptian civilizations. They’ve had their high points and low points, but they’ve always been a political force to reckon with through thousands of years of history, and they’re still here. Perennial players.

The second are societies that seem to have had a glory-filled golden era, then fell into obscurity. Their historical moment in the sun, so to speak. The Mongol people are one example. Today, the Mongols are on the periphery of world events, a seemingly poor and out-of-the-way and behind-the-times culture, at least compared with what we call the “developed world.” But the Mongol people at one time ruled most of the known world and did so for several hundred years. This may have seemed like a long stretch at the time, but it was a blink of an eye compared with the ancient Assyrians.

The great state of Babylonia, to the south of Assyria, was the empire’s great adversary throughout their Bronze and Iron Age histories. Babylonia’s capital city, Babylon, located some fifty-five miles south of modern Baghdad, was one of the greatest cities ever built. It was likely the first metropolis inhabited by more than two hundred thousand people, and at its height had maybe twice that many. Remarkably, in this era before modern sanitation and modern medicine and with so many people living in such close proximity, Babylon managed to stay largely plague-free. (Babylon would outlive its great Assyrian rival to the north and would eventually seem like an urban refuge from a previous age in the new world to come.)

Some two hundred years after Assyria’s fall, a Greek general named Xenophon recorded an encounter with what was left of Assyria’s grandeur when he saw cities—places that were larger and more formidable than anything he’d seen back in Greece—dissolved into ruins. Xenophon wrote the Anabasis—now considered a classic of Western literature—about his experience commanding Greek mercenaries in a Persian civil war. As Xenophon and ten thousand Greeks fought a running battle trying to escape from their pursuers after fighting on the losing side of that war, they stumbled upon enormous fortifications and cities decomposing in the sand in what’s now northern Iraq—the ruins of something greater than his own civilization had ever produced. Almost 2,500 years ago Xenophon wrote, “The Greeks marched on safely for the rest of the day and reached the River Tigris. There was a large deserted city there called Larissa, which in the old days used to be inhabited by the Medes. It had walls twenty-five feet broad and one hundred feet high, with a perimeter of six miles. It was built of bricks made of clay, with a stone base of twenty feet underneath.”

Later, they came upon yet another city.

From here, a day’s march of eighteen miles brought them to a large undefended fortification near a city called Mespila … The base of the fortification was made of polished stone, in which there were many shells. It was fifty feet broad and fifty feet high. On top of it was built a brick wall fifty feet in breadth and a hundred feet high. The perimeter of the fortification was eighteen miles.

These cities were gargantuan by Greek standards, and Xenophon asked the locals about them; they said the structures had been built by the Medes, because that’s who’d preceded the Persian Empire they were then living under. But in fact these weren’t Median cities, they were Assyrian. The one “near a city called Mespila” is thought to have been Nineveh—Xenophon was marveling at its majestic remains two hundred years after its demise.

Xenophon was someone whom we today would think of as inhabiting the old world. Ancient Greece is, after all, a very early European civilization. But he was looking at something that was already ancient in his day—the equivalent of a Statue of Liberty in the sand from a Near Eastern empire that had been the superpower of its age a mere two centuries previously, and one that now seemed so thoroughly erased that the locals didn’t even know to whom it had belonged.[1]

Before its fall, the Mesopotamian culture that Assyria was a part of was akin to Civilization 1.0. Babylon and Assyria represented the apex of that civilization’s version, with a growth in power, sophistication, and development that had begun in places like Ur, Akkad, and Sumeria. This basically unbroken civilizational tree lasted longer than any of the versions since. By way of comparison, if we were to date our modern civilization to the beginning of the Renaissance, we could count it as so far lasting around five or six hundred years. Assyria and its world was three to five times older than that, depending on how you date it, but their own records show an unbroken line of kings dating all the way back to the 2300s BCE,[2] and Nineveh, their greatest city, fell around 600 BCE. That’s nearly two millennia that these people were a recognizable regional entity. The oldest work in European literature is often credited to Homer and dated between 800 and 1000 BCE—compare that with The Epic of Gilgamesh, from Mesopotamia, which was put into writing in about 2100 BCE and had been an oral story earlier than that. Civilization 1.0 had deep roots.

It’s difficult to understand just how urban this culture was, and how much in some ways it reminds us of our own modern society. If you were to look at a map of the Mediterranean and west Asia in the Bronze and Iron Ages, it would look a lot like a map of early twentieth-century, pre–First World War Europe. There were several powerful states intertwined with one another through diplomacy and alliances. When they went to war, they often went as coalitions, as the Triple Entente and the Central Powers did in the First World War, and the Allied and Axis powers did in the Second.

To continue the analogy, the Assyrians would be the Germans, because the Germans have always had a reputation for being militarily tough, not just in the twentieth century, but throughout history. An oft-cited rationale proposed for this is that the area of modern Germany is surrounded by other powerful peoples and doesn’t have a lot of natural frontiers, making it difficult to defend. From a social Darwinian perspective, you might say the only people who could survive in an area like that would be those who were tough and warlike. The same is often said about the Assyrians, because ancient Assyria was also ringed by powerful states and suffered a lack of natural frontiers, so the Assyrians had to be very tough, very centralized, very efficient, and very good warriors to survive.

As with the citizens of most powerful states throughout the ages, though, it is highly unlikely that the citizens of ancient Nineveh ever thought their culture would be wiped off the map.

But the fall of Nineveh is probably one of the most significant geopolitical events in world history. It is certainly the geopolitical event of the Near East Iron Age. It’s like the fall of Berlin in the Second World War in that it forever and decisively ended an empire, but the destruction of Nazi Germany toppled a twelve-year regime while Assyria’s fall meant the end of an ancient power. And the Assyrians were often cast, especially by their neighbors, as the equivalent of the Nazis in the biblical era.[3]

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.