[Issue 2] A Golden Age On Fire

The collapse of a world order - and lessons for today

The Odysseus Files, Issue 2

Chaos, Collapse, & Finding Your Ithaca, Part 2

A City in Crisis

[Note: this is Part 2 of a miniseries within the broader Odysseus Files called “Chaos, Collapse, & Finding Your Ithaca.” These miniseries will group broad topics thematically, helping you connect the dots between them more easily.]

Sometime between 1190 and 1185 BC, the king of Ugarit -? a city-state in what is now northwestern Syria and a vassal of the Hittites - sent the following letter to the Hittite viceroy in the nearby city of Carchemish:?

“To the king, my lord, say, thus Ammerapi, your servant: … I wrote you twice, thrice, news regarding the enemy! ... May my lord know that now the enemy forces are stationed at Ra’?u [modern Ras Ibn Hani] and their avant-garde forces were sent to Ugarit. Now may my lord send me forces and chariots to save me and may my lord save me from the forces of this enemy!”?

The requested help never arrived: soon after, the city would be violently overthrown and burned to the ground, its 8,000 inhabitants scattered.?

Ugarit’s fall came suddenly. Up until the invasion, the city was an important trading hub on the Syrian coast.?

For example, one local merchant, Urtenu, oversaw long distance trade connections on behalf of a large commercial firm run by the Ugaritic royal family. Tablets found at the remains of his residence document communications with Egypt, Cyprus, Assyria, the Hittites, the Mycenaeans across the Aegean, and multiple other city-states and small kingdoms.?

Connecting Dots

Ugarit’s trade connections are one small piece of the much larger picture occurring in the late Bronze Age Near East.?

The 300 years or so from roughly 1500 to 1200 BC were a Golden Age of trade, cultural exchange, and political interconnection.?

Largely based around prosperous, centralized states that dominated the political, economic, and religious spheres of local populations, powerful monarchies controlled trade routes stretching all the way from southern Italy to Afghanistan.?

These trade routes were crucial to the survival of these states. One of the key trade goods was so important to the societies of the time that it would give its name to this period in history: bronze.?

Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. In the ancient Near East, copper came from Cyprus, but tin was only found in a specific region of modern Afghanistan. Tin would be brought along trade routes from today’s Afghanistan to northern Iraq and Syria, from where it would be distributed north, south, and west.?

The importance of tin to the kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean was comparable in many ways to oil today. It played an outsized role in driving geopolitical and economic decision-making by the ruling elites.?

Therefore, maintaining their status as elites depended heavily on controlling trade. Many of the cultures surrounding the Mediterranean were what is known as “palace economies.” Vast palaces, consisting of royal living quarters surrounded by storage facilities, served as collection and distribution points for trade goods of all types: from agricultural products to fabric and pottery to bronze weapons and tools.??

Introducing Our Cast

Regular warfare took place at the periphery of empire:?

The Levantine coast (parts of modern Israel, Lebanon, and Syria) was a regular hot spot between Egypt and the Hittites (based in modern Turkey and northern Syria).

As we covered in the last issue, western Anatolia (most of modern Turkey) saw multiple uprisings by local cities and kingdoms against their Hittite overlords, in some cases supported by the Mycenaean Greeks.?

And northern Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq and eastern Syria) saw the ebb and flow of power between the Assyrians and the Mitanni on the eastern flank of the Hittites.?

(To round out our cast of characters, Cyprus and the Kassite Babylonians - based in modern southern Iraq and Kuwait - were two other major players. Other smaller - yet still important - cast members were the Canaanites in today’s Palestine, often controlled by Egypt, the Elamites in western Iran, and many small vassal kingdoms and city-states, like Ugarit.)?

Despite the ebb and flow of warfare that regulated the balance of power, the royal elites of these kingdoms oversaw a system of delicate yet direct relationships with each other.?

Based on trade (in the form of “gifts”) and diplomacy, there was a clear hierarchy: the most powerful kings referred to each other as “brother” to signify equal status, while the “father/son” titles were applied when one king “outranked” the other.?

Thanks to centuries of archaeological work, we can piece these relationships together via records, letters, treaties, shipwrecks, and trade goods found at sites all over the eastern Mediterranean.???

What’s harder to determine, though, is what caused this vast, complex, globalized network to suddenly unravel, almost seemingly overnight.?

Making the Leap

Within approximately 50 years, from roughly 1225 to 1175 BC, the world order that had reached its pinnacle over the preceding three centuries collapsed.?

Trade networks fell apart. Populations were uprooted. Dynasties ended. Some mixture of natural disasters, internal rebellions, and external invasions by migrating peoples caused the destruction of sites all across the region, from Greece to Mesopotamia.?

Ugarit was by no means the only city where archaeologists have found countless bronze arrowheads amongst the rubble, signifying the role of conflict in the fires that hollowed out so many sites.?

The reasons for collapse are varied and many. The current state of the evidence means that, in many cases, it’s impossible to even tell whether a city was destroyed by man made or natural causes, much less to determine who might have done the destroying.?

One theory that sidesteps the chronic scholarly debates over the issue is that the interconnectedness of the international system in the eastern Mediterranean actually made it fragile.?

In other words, each centralized state was so interdependent on its relationships with each of the other states (both for trade & for preserving a balance of power) that destabilizing events within one part of the system created a ripple effect throughout the whole system.?

(Starting to sound familiar?)

The powerful kingdoms of the region could absorb the impact of war, rebellion, famine, drought, natural disasters, or trade collapse individually. Possibly even multiple of these factors.?

But when these factors accumulated all at once, and against the entire system rather than just one kingdom, it was too much. It created a domino effect.?

And that effect was quite dramatic:?

• The Mycenaean civilization ended entirely, leading to 400 years known as the “Dark Ages” in Greece
• The Hittite empire disappeared
• Egypt survived the onslaught of migrating invaders (unlike many others), but would be weakened and decline for at least two centuries
• Assyria, who had just conquered Mitanni shortly before this collapse, was forced to retract their borders
• A weakened Babylon was captured by invading Elamites
• Canaanite culture was largely subsumed by new arrivals in the area, except in a handful of cities in modern Lebanon (where they would go on to be known as the Phoenicians)
• Cyprus seems to have been the only state to emerge largely intact, although it had to undergo significant political changes to do so???

To recap:?

• A globalized world order saw multiple powerful states become so interconnected and interdependent that the system became fragile.?
• A cascading, compounding series of events put so much pressure on this system that it buckled and snapped.?
• The result was the cataclysmic end (or at least weakening) of nearly every single state that had made up the world order.?

In case it's not obvious, so far the first half of this decade puts our world today squarely in the middle of the second bullet point above.?

You wouldn’t be wrong to see within the description above a chillingly accurate depiction of our current state of affairs.?

So much so that professor of history and archaeology Dr. Eric Cline, in his book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, calls attention to the analogy. He quotes archaeologist Susan Sherratt in saying that:?

“...the situation at the end of the Late Bronze Age provides an analogy for our own ‘increasingly homogenous yet uncontrollable global economy and culture, in which … political uncertainties on one side of the world can drastically affect the economies of regions thousands of miles away.’”

Optimizing for Sustainability in a World of Chaos

There are a number of lessons we can learn from studying the Bronze Age Collapse. Some of which we highlighted in last week’s issue.?

One of these is that our world works in rhythms: what it’s experienced before, it will experience again (both good and bad).?

While identifying these rhythms historically won’t help us predict exactly what will happen next, it can give us a sense of where we’re going.?

And that awareness is the first step to creating a sustainable life: it provides your “why,” helps you know what’s possible, and shapes how you respond to chaos.?

Today’s environment of constant commitments, exhausted consumerism, and social media as our main source of connection and community makes maintaining this awareness difficult.?

But having a rough sense of where we’ve come from, what’s happening in the world around us, and where we might be going puts us in the place to regain some agency over our lives. To build our response in advance, rather than waiting until it’s too late.?

Awareness is the first step; intentionality the second.?

This is what I’m building in my own life, and what I hope The Odysseus Files will help you do for yours as well.?

Takeaways

For now, here are your takeaways from this week’s issue:?

• The Late Bronze Age was a Golden Age of trade, cultural exchange, and globalization in the ancient Aegean and Near East, at its pinnacle from roughly 1500 to 1200 BC.?
• This world order collapsed dramatically and rapidly, due to a range of causes. One hypothesis is that the level of interdependence within the system created enough fragility that, when stressed by multiple triggers at once, the entire structure came crashing down.
• This scenario is an analogy for our world today - an interconnected, globalized network, one where what happens in one part affects many others. One where the occurrences of events that contributed to the Bronze Age Collapse are increasing in number and scope.
• Understanding where we’ve been, what’s happening around us, and where we might be heading is the crucial first step to being able to craft a sustainable life that makes us resilient to change, and able to discover opportunities within that change.?

Next week, we’ll wrap up this miniseries on the Bronze Age Collapse as a model for today’s world. We’ll examine some of the specific contributors to the collapse and consider a model for using history to understand where we’re headed.?

After that, we’ll switch course and delve into a series on sustainability in our current world. A brief overview of the topics in this series will equip you to start crafting your vision for a sustainable lifestyle, business, and legacy.??

P.S. - The material in these first few issues is heavily drawn from Dr. Eric Cline’s book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. If you’re interested in going deeper on the historical topics in this series, consider grabbing a copy for yourself. (Amazon)?

If you decide to get it, shoot me a DM and let me know. I’d love to have a more in-depth conversation about it.?

(And if not, stick with me. We’ll stop nerding out over the historical stuff soon to go deeper into building a sustainable lifestyle and business you love.)

P.P.S. - If you enjoyed this, subscribe to my Substack to make sure you get every issue, delivered to your inbox Saturday mornings. Go to www.odysseusfiles.com.