332. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Before The Collapse (Ep 1)

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast add free listening and a weekly newsletter sign up to MPa club at www.mpa.orguk.com We've seen many MPa's rise and fall but in the next six episodes we're going to look at the most dramatic Imperial claps in history. MPa after MPa disappearing in a wave of violence, droughts and catastrophes. This is the Bronze Age claps 2000 BC. Hello and welcome to MPa I'm William Durimple and I'm Anita Arnand. Now William and I since we began this podcast we've been looking at the rise and fall of MPa's why it happens when it happens who's involved but over the next series what we're going to be doing is we're going to be exploring which something that really has to be one of the most dramatic Imperial collapses of all time in human history and it's a period that is much earlier than you know the things that we normally look at here. We are leaving the world of the East India company we are leaving the Mughals we're leaving the Mutiny far far behind us and instead we are heading 3000 years into the past to a world which in many ways actually looks surprisingly like the one we're in today. I hope it's not too similar because this is a period when MPa's claps in a range of connected crises that raiders, brigands, droughts, a whole variety of different crises that bring down first my senior then Troy then a whole range of city states on the Mediterranean this is the Bronze Age claps 2000 BC. And to help us understand this extraordinary period of time and a period of time that I'm sure you you don't know much about we've got such Stella guest lined up and we're starting actually on a high we've got Professor Josephine Quinn who you've heard of the podcast before. Professor of Ancient History Cambridge University and her work on ancient Mediterranean cultures has completely transformed the academic field so it makes us think of a show again about sort of global connectivity we think of that far behind and I suppose normally we think about little enclaves of humanity but it was much more sinuous and connected than you might imagine. Exactly yeah thanks for having me back and to talk about one of my favourite subjects this incredibly interconnected world of the ancient Mediterranean even as far back as the Bronze Age were absolutely not looking at pockets of civilization or isolated economies here we're looking at this huge network of states and societies and communities and at the heart of it you've got this group of big empires Egypt the hit heights in Anatolia the Babylonians and so on and that's a completely interconnected world of trade trade agreements royal marriages diplomatic correspondence I mean that's a world where people are in contact all the time a kings are in contact all the time and at the same time they're also in contact they're also kind of dealing with this much kind of vast a number of other communities other states and so on some of them subordinate to them others of them just foreign and this is a world that reaches from Afghanistan across to Morocco Scandinavia Eurasian step down to down to Sudan basically possibly even further into the Indian Ocean at this point this completely immeshed world in a way that I think it's really hard to imagine now Joe what surprised me about reading about this era is the incredibly detailed sources I always imagine that when you get to the 18th of the 17th you got diplomatic letters and you know register of merchants and all the stuff that they're selling and so on and I imagine that this sort of period 2000 BC that we're dealing only with sort of dusty bits of pots dug up by archaeologists but it's actually got really rich sources there's incredible archives at Hattushan Hittite Anatolia which is near modern anchor in near modern anchor exactly in central Anatolia you've got you've got a uglot on the coast of Syria incredibly well I spent a night and see if you beg what's part of time in my 20th birthday my first night in Syria was spent because I couldn't afford a hotel they bedded down in a trench in the dig I am super jealous have you ever been to our mana in Egypt I haven't that cheap because that's where the biggest archive of all is like the most important one that's the one where you get all the correspondence to the Pharaoh to Akhenartan toon Karmoons dad and in the 14th century sometimes said to be the first monotheist debatable certainly very fashion that one but it's in the Philip Glass opera so brilliant but no it would be a totally reasonable thing to say about him he was also great correspondence and this is kind of the thing that's been really useful for historians is you have this letters not only from all the other great kings the kind of emperors of the era but also from their subjects and the great kings call each other brothers well you know if siblings squabble and you've got squabbley messages going between some of these rulers oh I mean some of them are incredibly miffed with each other they Egyptian Pharaoh he controls the gold the gold is in Egypt and everyone else wants gold so you get these letters that say things like you haven't sent me enough gold but it grows like dust in your country why haven't you sent me enough the king of Cyprus writes to Pharaoh's mum to say your son sent me these statues but they weren't gold they were gold plates how very dare you how very dare you and just give us a sense of scale you know you say these places are interconnected how much of the planet did they cover I mean how many people did they go just give us the scale well I mean one way to get at that is a shipwreck off the coast of the cape of Britain in Turkey around 1300 BCE this ship it's got a ten tons of copper on it it's got a ton of tins this is the perfect ratio for making bronze but it's also got amber from the Baltic it's got ebony from Africa it's got enormous jars of resin from the Levantes it's got ivory it's got it sounds like a sort of sort of Bronze Age harrowed or something exactly but the other thing it's got a little a figurine of eleven time gods and eleven time weights and measures on it so you can tell where the crew are from but they've bringing things from all over the world carrying them around so when you say they I mean who are they they're moving all this great stuff around well yeah this is your friends either the people your first book the Felitions absolutely they're called canineites they've been called Phoenicians what they were people from the city states of the Levantes are tire side bibbloss modern bay route is one of these city states are still survives and these are the people who are actually moving the stuff much smaller states kind of running under the radar of the great kings a little bit behaving well making the trade work they're really the glue in this kind of huge imperial system and these kind of maritime geniuses so you've got all of this economic activity wherever you have economic activity you have turmoil you have disputes you have people wanting to get the upper hand yeah is that happening at the same time all the time these these kingdoms fall out all the time in particular Egypt and Hittite Anatolia those are the two great enemies they're particularly fighting over the Levantes there's a huge bat on 12 74 are they I mean are they equal because you know we we go to Egypt to we see all that stuff yeah there's a lot of stuff yeah in Egypt less so in Anatolia I mean even even when you see the Hittites in picture books it's always those two lines that are quite sort of cruddy looking lines there and look at the entrance to her tusha were the Hittites really a big deal yes they really were in this period I mean these were pretty much balanced powers and the remains aren't as impressive the archives are extraordinary and actually if you can get to them some of these Hittites cities are amazing so I mean okay they are considerable but the way I think about the world today is that you have superpowers and then you have medium powers and then you have those who are often crushed under those powers can you categorize that way you can bring out a sort of three that sort of three level you can have the powers of the top Egypt Hittites the Babylonic cast sites in Babylonia the rising Assyrians those those the guys the right at the top the other sort of medium layer Cyprus controls a lot of copper they're pretty big in the system my senior in Greece is places a bit to the west that's sort of the rising powers you're wonderful book which we have actually mentioned yet how the world made the West which was my holiday reading the summer I sat very happily deep in that in that book I highly recommend anyone listens to this but in that you have a picture where quite a lot of the ideas perhaps counter intuitively for anyone that's been brought up on a sort of western civilization course or something one that they give it all those American universities a lot of the ideas that we perhaps you associate with western civilization with the with the camera. capital W and a capital C, actually coming from the eastern side of the Mediterranean and traveling westwards to the less civilized western Europe. One of the kind of problems with this is this whole idea of civilization. It's sort of invented at the same time as the idea of the west. It's my wonderful friend George Osfarak's arcassist new book, The West, History of an Idea. He traces it to the same period kind of early to mid 19th century and the idea of civilization is taking off as well. So I think those two ideas, civilization, the west have become incredibly bound up with each other. But actually one of the things that's glorious about the Bronze Age is that you see how many things come from elsewhere. So different kinds of metal technology from Anatolia but also early ideas of peace treaties, of legal codes come from Anatolia. Greek themselves talk about how much philosophy and history come from Egypt and so on. Roderto is very keen on that idea. But things are coming from the west and the north at the same time. So things, Amber is coming down from the Baltic tin is coming from Cornwall. And the lapis from Asfar away is Budukshan in Afghanistan. Absolutely. And I was just before I came here. It's in Mumbai for a few days. I saw this wonderful new hall in the big museum in Mumbai. Can't leave based on the golden road. I'm very happy. I really do. It's just open last month, I think. And it has a harapensity in Indus Valley, an ancient Indian city, grid plans, private toilets in the houses, absolute extraordinary. Things that people have been saying for a couple of hundred years. Oh, the Greeks invented this or even the Minoans invented this. Actually, no, it's modern. Exactly. As friends of ours would say, I'm going to squish us, me, Indian. Can I just go back to this superpower idea? Because you know, not that I'm saying it's happening right now, but superpowers tend to try and destroy the world. And if the two sort of superpowers that we're talking about this time of the hit eyes and the Egyptians, they do clash as superpowers tend to, but it doesn't end in cataclysm interestingly enough. Not me. It's a huge battle, a battle of Kadesh, 1274 or so. What it actually ends in is a piece of history. It's a sort of a stalemate 15 years they wrangle over it. Then there's a treaty in about 1259. And we know they had a treaty because the treaty survives. I mean, things that you just think it would be impossible that they would last for thousands of years. People have found them. They've touched them. They've read them. They've deciphered them. No, it's extraordinary. And one of the things that it shows is this early idea of the balance of power. So what they do is they split the Levant between them. And it pretty much sticks after that. I have a fighting over it. What spheres of influence, do I say? The spheres of influence. Yeah. Yeah. And it stays for about a hundred years maybe. And another very familiar thing you seem to be having at this time, which perhaps would surprise people, is you have what looks like a kind of civil service. You have a professional teams of scribes. The reason we know all this, we've been talking about these documents, is that they're on play, which when I think it's burnt down actually solidified. Hard to explain. Yeah, it does the opposite of what the burner but library, you know, it just goes up to smoke. But with play, it's there forever if you burn it. And this seems to be a key to this period. These are little palace-based economies, these city states, with little teams of scribes, all communicating to each other in a cadian, is it? Is that the diplomatic language? It depends where you are. So the diplomatic language that these great kings write to each other in is a cadian. That the same cadian is Sargon of Accad, is it? Exactly, exactly. It's Babylonian. So a quick boring thing that I always bring up anytime anyone says Accad is a Hendoana, which is a storta. Apparently the first named author in human history. Don't make that face to it. I'm going to play poker with you, Joe. Joe has got such a poker face. I just know. So you're going to tell me, no. Well, the thing is we don't know. And Hendoana existed. Yeah. She was a priestess, the idea that she was a great author, the work that's attributed to her. Are you suggesting that the leader is exaggerating that you have a woman? Or kick ass women. She would never do that. She wouldn't be the only one. And I hate it. I'm such a boring academic. I'm so skeptical. I would say we can't prove it. It's not. I'd love it to be true. No, to be like that, Joe. That's fine. But we can't prove it. Yeah, I tell you what. But we are playing poker because you're face. It's a giveaway. OK. So moving along. I'm a terrible poker player. Talk a little bit more about these palace economies. Because I want to know how centralised the control is. So I mean, it's a really good question. Because I think until maybe a generation ago, people would have said these are completely palace based. You know, 100% these are centralised directed economies. And what's really been coming out of the more recent readings of the tablets. And of course, there aren't that many people who can read these thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. There's new things coming out all the time. And I would say right now what it looks like is that there's a lot of polachocentric. Can we call it most people in these big empires? Oh, time, labour to the palace, which means that the palace therefore controls quite a lot of agriculture, craft, production, that kind of thing. But we also can see evidence of independent landowners, including kind of religious organisations. We also can see the first references to the damos, the people, the word that becomes demos, it gives us democracy. These groups called the damos can be independent landowners. So if you're a peasant, make with your olive trees 20 miles out of my senior, let's say, are you selling only to my senior? Is it the palace which is getting all the goodies? Or you may well be. It's not certain that you would be. You may have to send a certain amount of the palace. If you're a craft person, the palace may give you that some things they've had in to kind of use, but not all of it, probably. We're talking today from Jaipur at the Jaipur Literature Festival. In the 18th century, this was very much what was going on in place like Jaipur and the Red Fort in Delhi, that you didn't. The artisans producing all those beautiful things that you see in exhibitions of the Rajputs, or the great moguls, are palace-based artisans, the manuscripts from one room, next doors, all the guys doing the stuff in copper or excavating rock crystal, whatever it is. There was a huge amount of that. But there's other stuff going on as well. It's just beginning to appear. Right, so with the other stuff, I mean, are there smaller states that are given the oxygen to exist? I mean, how important are they and what are they doing? We don't know that much about them. We know they exist. We also know, by the way, that traders are independent or can be independent. Again, there's a lot of palace-based trade, palace-directed trade, also a lot of independent trade. So there's a kind of symbiosis going on between these great kings and these traders and farmers and so on who are working partly with them and some of them, maybe a lot of them working partly independently as well. But then there are a lot of people who don't get any choice in the system, who are just indentured, who are enslaved and so on. And there's going to be quite a lot of friction in a society like this. Welcome back, Joe. So we talked before about all these different palaces sitting around, the different ports in the Mediterranean, all sort of sending boats to each other and these floating department stores full of amber and lapis going from east to west to west to east and all that. Tell us about the cultural world. Are they into marrying? Are they all got the same gods? How are they inter-ready? I mean, Mercedes a long way from Egypt, for example. Right. So there's different kinds of integration, not even interactions integrated. So you have royal marriages. You know, you have hit-type princesses marrying the Pharaoh, you've got Cypriot kings kind of a ranging marriage, all that kind of thing. But you've also got kings asking for specialists from each other and in kind of local knowledges, you get a letter at a Marna asking for a specialist in the interpretation of the omens given by vultures. People are interested in the knowledges and the kind of cultural practices of other people. You also get one thing I love is that the original Greek word for wine, it's actually a 'wainu', kind of a 'wainu', which is a symmetric word. You can begin to see the vocabulary that's reflected in the world. So we'll be called someone 'awai' there today. Yeah. We're speaking west-semitic, are we? It's a mystic. But will he mention gods? And how do the gods cross borders and do they transform once they've crossed a border? Yeah, so this is really fun. So you get it in two ways. You get the ways people relate to the gods. So this is in ancient Greece, for instance. This is the period late Bronze Age. When people start burning sacrifices, so a smoke can waft up to the gods or pouring libations on the ground, so you can go down to the gods of the underworld. Totally leavens aren't there. It's something I do have libations going down to the gods. I always see them and think, "Well, they're wasting all this good wine." My Scottish self is outraged at the thought of it. I think they keep back quite a bit for themselves as well. They certainly keep all the meat from the smoke sacrifices. But then you get the gods as well. And what happens is, sometimes you get wholesale adoptions of gods. I mean, I assist Egyptian gods. my sister's very popular in the Levant and so on. Sometimes on the different neck. - I remember sending you a picture a couple of months ago. I went to the Egyptian Museum in Turin and there was something which was extraordinary which really took me back because it was an Egyptian picture of a Canaanite goddess. And she was this naked woman standing on a lion. Which again is what we associated here in India with Durga and there's a whole world of goddesses and on lines that moves from here, eastwards into India. But what I was intrigued by is that this world of Canaanite gods, I hadn't taken in that there was this whole world which is obviously impacting on how early Israelite ideas of God, ideas of Yahweh. And I spent the Christmas actually reading these books about early Canaanite religion, having asked you for reading this. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And this idea is some scholars think that Yahweh had a goddess attached to him, that the God that we call God in Christianity. - What, you think this is Yahweh? - Well, this is Yahweh. And this has got traversal stuff. But some scholars do think this, no, no. - There's definite indications of that in the inscription. It's very early inscriptions where I think this happens in a lot of religions that sort of become monotheistic. You actually realize in the early stages, this happens in Persian religion too, you actually have a whole set of gods and one of them becomes kind of our God and that becomes the important one. - And true also of the way that the Canaanite gods who end up being regarded as this sort of enemy gods by the Israelites become our devil. So Lucifer starts off as an astral deity and Bialzebub who's another figure in the Old Testament that reappears in the New Testament, the Lord of the Flies. Is a version of Bial, a localized version of Bial who is the main Canaanite storm god, is that right? - Yes, exactly, yeah. - And they are literally demonized. They're turned into demons from gods. - Exactly, exactly. And these kind of movements happen all the time. So there's a wonderful text by a guy called Filo of Biblos. He's writing in the Roman period. But he says, he's talking about ancient Venetian myths. There's a lot of overlap with the Gyrithic things which really are bronze age. So it looks pretty good. And he says, first of all, he says, oh well, of course, this levantime religion, this Venetian religion, as he calls it. It's got a lot of connections with Egypt, comes from Egypt. But then he tells these stories about how the god L, the king of the Canaanite Venetian, king of the gods, gives cities in the Levant. He gives one to Balthus, his elevantime goddess. He gives another one to Poseidon, who's a Greek god. Then he gives Athens to Athena. And it's like hang on. How does that come to that? And he is very much around L because in two ways, A, he's becomes synonymous with Yahweh in some of the early texts. And you find the Psalms and some of the early bits of the Bible using the word L as the fungal. And it lives on in no less in names we have today, like my son's name, Samuel. Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Gosh, I never thought that. It's extraordinary. I never thought the gods, the gods. So is it all or all tradition? Or is there, I mean, how much literacy is there? Do people write stuff down? And do people read the stuff that they write down? See, this is one of the really interesting things. If you look at the really big empires, the top layer, Egypt, it heights and so on, a lot of the literacy is kept in the power of seers. It's professional scribes. It's used for administration and so on. The smaller societies you come down to, the less control you've got, the less conservative they are. So ugrate, for instance. We have all the palace based stuff. Also have pre-sarcats. We also have traders archives, as you said. I should put in here that Joe Quinn, wonderful guest today, is one of the few people in the world that reads ugaritic. I think there's a very splendid thing to do. It's not hugely useful life skill, but you can read. Does anyone else in the ugaritic? I mean, is there a whole world of ugaritic scholars? Do you have, could you all go and holiday together and have conferences? No, we could have a WhatsApp group. Yes, the conferences are so small, they take place in the elevator. I don't think so. Maybe it's with ugarit. With ugarit, no. I mean, does it look very different? Does it sound very different? Does it, you know, is it just completely impossible for people to answer? Or is it like, you know, Hindi and Urdu, for example, that there's a great deal of cross-aver and all that? So what's brilliant is there's a huge amount of cross-aver. So ugaritic is very closely related to Phoenician dialects, very closely related to Hebrew. Old Hebrew? Yeah. Is it all closely related? It's not too far from akadian, not mutually comprehensible, but, you know, if you don't think long to learn, if you know one of them, but what they write it down in, they actually, it's very unusual to write down your local language in a city in this way. You write down akadian, you speak the local language. What they do is they do start writing it down, and they write it down in an alphabet, which is a very leaven time thing, another thing that goes from east to west. And ugarit is an important part of that story, isn't it? It, well, it says. Where they are-- It's a bit of a strange dead end. Because what the people of ugarit do is they write their alphabet, not in the scripts, that the Phoenicians use, that then becomes Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, that kind of thing. They write it in Quneiform. They write it in the akadian script, not the akadian language, but the akadian script. So this is very grand, kind of international writing system. And they use it to write the alphabet. And this is-- I think it's extraordinary. They take a technology from one place to do stuff from a very global international technology. Do this completely local thing. This phenomenon of globalization. Where alongside this globalization, it's kind of shared international tastes and so on, you get alongside it, but kind of in reaction to it as well. This new focus on the local and the sort of pride in local identity and local achievements and so on. That's what's going on with Ugaritic alphabet. When I grew up, I had very clear idea in my head that sort of-- there were the Phoenicians who are roughly where Lebanon is, and that they're different from the Canaanites who are roughly where Israel Palestine is. And that these are different things. But these worlds, you think are actually-- I mean, particularly the East, Levantine coast, is despite being different cities, is one cultural unity. I wouldn't say a unity. I'd say more of a spectrum. A spectrum, right? The each city state. Like Renaissance Italy? It get much more like that, yeah, exactly, exactly. And then the thing about Canaanites' Phoenicians is that these are external labels. We use pretty vaguely. Sometimes Canaanite means something like brigand. Other times, it's a geographical label for the southern Levant. Other times, it's used for the land, the Egypt controls, and simply for Phoenicians. Sometimes, it just seems to mean sailors. Sailors speak a different language. Other times, it's used of places that we wouldn't consider part of people speaking aramea, can so on. Other times, it's used of these city states, again. And then this become the scholarly convention, where the Canaanites come first, and then you get the Phoenicians. And there's no reason to think that's an ancient idea at all. I think in all this kind of labeling, you sort of lose those city states at the heart of it. But what you seem to be talking about-- and now I'm worried we're doing the wrong thing-- because you're talking about something that's so inter-- like lace is all sort of interconnected. And there are branches that overlap, and they weave into each other. And it sounds like it's a pretty good deal. I mean, wasn't it stable? Because we are talking about collapse after all. I don't know. It all sounds lovely. One of the problems is the interconnection itself. It's all very well to have lots of connections and draw lots of other people and resources and so on. When you start depending on them, when you stop being self-sufficient, that becomes a problem. It's fine as long as everything stays the same. But if you get disruption, that's an issue. Surely, let's just say you're sitting in my seat, and you've got the locals producing all your grain and your grapes and your olives. It doesn't terribly matter if you don't get lapis coming in from Badakshan, or if the amber for the Baltic doesn't turn up. That's not going to be the end of the world. But if you pay for your grain with lapis, you do. Or if you get bronze, you need that copper from site price. You need the tin from Afghanistan or Cornwall. That literally where the only two places can come from. They're the only two substantial sources. So where were the big disruptions? I know you said they were warning signs. So there's different kinds of things. So you can have climate disruption. There seem to be periods of drought. That's tricky for the system. You can have wars. Sometimes wars so far away that we don't even hear about them, but the tin gets cut off from one direction or another. There are very mysterious wars in continental Europe in this period. There seems to be a lot of disruption, kind of Iran, Central Asia. We don't know the details, but you can see people looking for new places to get their metals from. That's the kind of thing that doesn't work in a super interconnected system. 'Cause this is what Eric Klein has written about so wonderfully in his book, "1177." Which, again, was part of my Christmas reading. I get strongly recommend it. We're having Eric Klein for some episodes in this series to come and we, he will be telling us about the actual clouds. But before the clouds just to set this scene of this world, which is about to fall, this very modern sounding world where you've got ships going back [BLANK_AUDIO] forward, bringing goodies from abroad and everyone's happy. One question I want to ask is, if you're a peasant in this world, if you are that man with the olive tree outside my scene, or that it's equivalent in a carrot or in a canine, are you happy with all these fancy palaces taking all your stuff? - I love that question. Are they happy? (laughing) - Are they happy? - I don't think they're happy at all, because they, oh, not just their farming labour, but in a lot of cases they're gonna have to give labour to build these palaces, the cyclopheon walls. - Someone has to move those walls. - They didn't need to be that big. - Right. - But it looks great, but somebody had to move those stones. So I think this is the other problem. It's not just the interconnectedness of the kind of global system we've been talking about. It's also in a way the over interconnectedness of the local system, that over-higher archived system. So one of those warning signs, is you get these destructions by fire. Do anybody else going on? They're not mentioned doing the tablets and so on. Now is this pirates? Is it brigands? - Is it awesome? - It's awesome. - Yeah, it's awesome. - If you're somebody who's been lugging great chunks of rock and suddenly they're scarcity, and you're the first one not to have dinner, of course you might torch the bloody thing. - Right. - And some of these destruction layers do not have bronze-arrow heads connected with them. I mean, some like, oh, got it, clearly do have attacks. And we know that someone has come from a boat. They even have messages. We'll find police help. - Exactly, all this will be coming in Eric Klein's episodes, in this series in two or three episodes. But there are thick destruction layers in many cities. There's also, I think I'm right in saying, that there is signs of people rebuilding fortifications just before this collapse, that there's a sign that people are anxious. - Yeah, there's rebuilding of fortifications. There are also places where a lot of the damage is focused on the palace. The kind of upper town, not the lower town and so on. So this is really, if you'll talk about the collapse of civilization, they don't mean everybody's civilization, about they mean what looks like civilization to us, right? The palace is, - Right. - Writing that kind of thing. Eric Klein will tell you all about this. There's a lot of destruction goes on, a lot of depopulation. But as with the kind of the Black Death, the medieval period, there's an argument to be made that for the people who are left at the end of it, life is actually better without those kings. - Just wanted to remind you, this is the age of Troy. - Yes. - How sophisticated was warfare? Do we know? - I mean, super sophisticated. So this is the height of bronze warfare in the Bronze Age. You've got siege warfare, you've got amazing fortifications there again, so you've got bronze weapons. You know, this is, it's the height, it's also the last great moment of bronze. This is another thing that goes, iron takes over after this. In a terrible way, I want to say it's going to be beautiful warfare. This is the flashing swords and so on, the chariot, all that kind of stuff. This is its greatest moment when it's actually on the brink of oblivion. - Is the, I always, as a child was very interested, as I was very keen, sort of nerdy young archaeologists going around the hill forts in Scotland, where I grew up. And I always had this idea that if you had a bronze sword, and someone came along with iron, that your sword would just shatter in front of them. - So papers scissors. - Exactly, absolutely. - Exactly that. Is that the sort of thing that's going on? Are we thinking of new people's turning up with iron and threatening these people that have already got bronze? Or is that not? - Or that iron is much easier to make. So it's that bronze, it's great, but you need that tin from very far away. You need a good, very reliable source of copper. You need people who know how to make it. Iron is hard too, but it's a kind of one-off trick. So iron is a super, super luxury metal in the Bronze Age. Only the Hittites know how to make it. - The Hittites are the first guys to get hold of this. - And it's a new one that they're really giving a run to the Egyptians. - We say far we've been quite land lobby about this, right? Okay, so there are fortifications going up. There are people throwing things at fortifications. But there is also a danger in the water, isn't there? I mean, the seas are not safe at this time. Can we just spend, I mean, there be pirates? I mean, what are we talking about here? - Wow, who are the sea people? - There certainly are pirates. We know that. - We got into all this when you last came on, where we were doing phyllis dines and gaza, yeah. - Even a side of that, we know there are pirates. So these letters are being exchanged, particularly at Ugrit, they're talking about these dangers from the sea. - But even in Pilos, there's things saying there's a watchers of the sea. - Do you have to say where Pilos is in the modern? - Pilos is very nice place for a holiday. We had a family holiday in Pilos, which is in the Pelloponees. - So they just say that helps no one but the Dalry House. - A considerable constituency. - Bay of Navarita. - Thank you. - It's a very nice beach area in the Pelloponees, southern Greece. - Right. - And there's a very nice palace there, associated in legend-wooking Nestel. - All right. - And there's a reference here, which is so, it isn't the name of a Genesis song, too, Watchers of the Sea. I remember early on, yeah, a lot of this stuff. - But this is a clue as to just how much trade is going on. I mean, trade attracts pirates. If you don't have a big international interconnected world, there's no point in being a pirate. - Yeah, there's no lucrative occupation. - Too much time on your hands. - Yeah, no, it's been boring. - Yeah. - It's been boring about. I mean, what are you really talking about? I mean, it seems to me a really kind of sophisticated world of wealth that is ultimately more fragile than anyone at the time could have known. But we look back and go, my goodness, you're like, house of cards kind of stuff. - It's two things. It's the interconnections also the problem of empires. Big states, they are conservative. They are inherently conservative. They need to keep doing what works. They're too big to do. Like a juggernaut going forward, too big to change. As they can't react quickly when things go wrong. If they're also interdependent, I shall tell you. It's a total disaster. The house of cards is absolutely collapsed everywhere. The thing is, you say they couldn't have known, and that's probably true. We can know this now. - Right. - It would be amazing if any politician had ever really looked at history and said, "Oh, maybe there's a lesson there." - It doesn't happen as much as you'd like. I think in all periods of history. - So if you're a trader, our chap, there's this, we have one name that we have one wonderful merchant, old to do. Let's feel, if you're old to do and you're sitting in a juggernaut, you've got your fleets, you're doing all this, doing and throwing. Do you have any, does he have premonitions that the whole thing's about to give away and disappear off the face of the earth? - I mean, not as much as we do now, I think. But he would have seen, he would have had a very successful career, very successful operation. He might have seen some smoke on the horizon, a burning village. He might have a messenger coming, so we've lost one of your ships, the pirates. But it would have looked, like these are just little bits and pieces we can cope. He wouldn't, I think, have seen how interconnected the problems were. He would have had no idea that it would go back to end. - Yeah, it's the lack of having, you know, the vista of a big picture. It's so interesting, you've set us up so beautifully for this series and Joey, it's always such a fabulous pleasure to have you on. Next time we've got a bit of a treat. - We have, we've got Stephen Fry. - Stephen Fry on. And he's going to be talking to us about Troy and my Sini. So I mean, do say with fear. - Which is part of the story, which is very much part of this story. - So if you don't want to wait and you want a bit of fry right now, you don't have to wait. All you need to do is go to empypoduk.com, that's empypoduk.com, become a member of our club, because it means you get everything all in one go in these mini series. So that's what you need to do for less than a price of coffee. Till the next time we meet then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. - Goodbye from me, William Durantpur. (upbeat music) [Music]