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00:02Five thousand years ago, a simple innovation transformed the ancient world.
00:08One that was so versatile and so valuable, it generated wealth on a global scale,
00:15sparked international trade, and ushered in the rise of civilization.
00:21To get civilization, you need basically three things.
00:24You need cities and towns, irrigation and water, and you need some sort of new invention.
00:31And it turns out that at about 3000 BC, that new invention is bronze.
00:35And that kick-starts a whole new age.
00:48Throughout the ancient world, the Bronze Age arose in different places at different times.
00:55From roughly 2000 BC in China, to 3300 BC in parts of the Near East,
01:04it's an era defined by the widespread use of bronze, created through a mixture of copper and tin.
01:11Well, the new technology of bronze, we don't really know what prompted it.
01:16If you've got what we call native copper, it's copper with arsenic in it.
01:21And if you heat it up, it actually does make bronze.
01:24The problem is, if you heat up something with arsenic in it, you're not going to live very long.
01:29So they quickly figured out that if you replace the arsenic with tin,
01:33in a ratio of 90% copper to 10% tin, that you will get bronze and you won't die
01:39while making it.
01:41Bronze was more durable than any other metal, and more useful than gold or silver.
01:46The ancients could use it to make agricultural tools, hunting spears, and daggers.
01:54They also created ornamental grave goods, drinking vessels, jewelry, and weapons for war.
02:01So prior to the Bronze Age and the Neolithic period, people's wealth was in agricultural produce, textiles, pottery, that kind
02:11of thing.
02:12And those can be transferred and hoarded to an extent, but they kind of go bad after a while.
02:17Clothes rip, cattle die.
02:20Metal is a new kind of wealth that was not seen before.
02:23Metal is a wealth that can be displayed, it can be used, but its value doesn't go down when it
02:29is worn.
02:30It can be melted again and made into something else.
02:34The Bronze Age is a moment where people are starting to use this combination of tin and copper on a
02:41more regular basis,
02:42and that's what sort of historically has given us the name of the Bronze Age.
02:47But it is, more specifically and more importantly, a moment where connections are being made between societies on a much
02:57broader scale,
02:58reaching across the sea, reaching across land.
03:01Diplomacy, as we think of it now, really has its roots in the Bronze Age.
03:07In the region that includes the Mediterranean, the Aegean, Mesopotamia and Egypt,
03:13the Bronze Age arrived around 3000 BC and lasted nearly 2000 years.
03:20Bronze and other metals helped to fuel the rise of the first true cities.
03:26These centers of power were ruled by a group of elites, royal families, wealthy landowners, merchants and temple managers.
03:40In the early Bronze Age, settlements weren't much larger than about two and a half acres in today's measurement.
03:47Probably groups of around 150, 200 people.
03:51Then towards the Middle Bronze Age, you get what some archaeologists have called big men.
03:58People controlling the surplus, storing it, extracting taxation from people.
04:03And then in the Late Bronze Age, you get people moving into much larger cities.
04:07Like Nosos and Mycenae, at their height, probably had around 12,000, 17,000 people, which is around a mid
04:14-sized city today.
04:17So by the time we get to the Late Bronze Age, we're in relatively sophisticated civilizations.
04:23I mean, not on the level of today, of course, with the technology.
04:27But at places like Knossos and Crete, where you've got the Minoans, they've got a sewer system.
04:32They've got running water.
04:35And they've got international trade around the Mediterranean.
04:39So they're actually quite sophisticated, considering it's 3,000 years ago.
04:45During the Bronze Age, the population of Egypt's ancient capital, Thebes, swelled to 80,000 people.
04:52And in Mesopotamia, a region that developed along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
04:59the city of Uruk had an equal number of inhabitants at the height of its power.
05:03Perhaps it would be more apt to call it something like the urban age,
05:08the period when urban societies first emerged anywhere in the world, as far as we know.
05:15You have economic specialization, where people are not just all food producers,
05:21but actually have different specialized professions or jobs and so forth.
05:26That's part of this phenomenon.
05:29When human societies become not just people of relatively equal social status,
05:34but rather you have an elite and you have a middle class and you have a lower class and you
05:39have slaves,
05:40all that, that's also part of this phenomenon.
05:44To keep these highly stratified societies running efficiently, new systems were developed.
05:49Large-scale farming and manufacturing, organized religion, government administration, law and taxation.
05:59They've got laws, they've got jurisprudence, they've got all sorts of things that we would, you know, associate with today.
06:05So, for example, around 1800 BC, we've got Hammurabi, King of Babylon.
06:10In things like Hammurabi's Law Code, we've got regulations that really hit home today.
06:19Divorce, marriage, runaway slaves upon occasion, what to do in the case of debt, for example.
06:27So, we've got society as we know it.
06:31During the Bronze Age, many new technologies and inventions were created to meet the needs of these increasingly complex societies,
06:38including the earliest writing systems.
06:42Writing developed first probably in the Sumerian cities of southern Iraq, southern Mesopotamia.
06:50Although in Egypt, writing developed about the same time independently,
06:57but there was interaction between the Sumerians and the Egyptians.
07:03Basically, all of these civilizations that developed these urban-based complex societies developed writing for the elites to control
07:14and to administer the complex transactions that were taking place.
07:20So, initially, a lot of writing had to do with products that are coming into the palace or the temple,
07:29products going out, keeping track of the tax revenue coming in, keeping track of the produce going out.
07:38So, this is an initial sort of purpose for writing.
07:43Mesopotamian writing started actually as what you might call a logographic system,
07:49where each character stood for a word.
07:53So, if you wanted to represent the word water, you'd have a symbol that stood for water.
08:00Now, very often these symbols were also pictographic, meaning it was a picture of the actual object being represented.
08:07But not every character was pictographic.
08:10The character for sheep is a circle with a cross in the middle, and it's not a picture of a
08:16sheep.
08:16So, they just somehow, they came up with this symbol.
08:19But the point was that the word sheep got its own character.
08:23This logographic system worked in the early Bronze Age.
08:27But with nearly a thousand characters, memorizing all of them proved too inefficient.
08:33Over time, a new system developed into what's known as cuneiform.
08:40Cuneiform, it comes from the Latin. It means wedge-shaped.
08:43But think about a bird stepping in ink and walking across the page.
08:47That's kind of what you've got.
08:48Except that it's made with reeds being pushed into wet clay.
08:53And the tablets are small, kind of pillow-shaped.
08:56So, instead of a curvy line for the sign for water, you would just have two wedges making a straight
09:04line.
09:05There's a sign for fish, but it gets turned into a set of wedges, and you'd never have known that
09:11originally it was making the shape of a fish.
09:14In Egypt, one of the pictographic writing systems survived, and eventually developed into Egyptian hieroglyphics.
09:23When we look at cuneiform versus Egyptian hieroglyphic, we see a real difference.
09:29And that is that with cuneiform, it began as administrative use.
09:32So, it was really meant for writing on tablets, so very small sort of media.
09:39Whereas, with Egyptian hieroglyphic, a very different purpose from the very beginning.
09:44That kind of writing was meant for monumental sculpture, monumental paintings.
09:51So, the actual writing had to be large, and because it accompanied these artworks, it had to be artful.
09:58So, what we see in Egypt is a long development of hieroglyphic writing as an art form.
10:08In Egypt and Mesopotamia, large central institutions, such as the palace and temple, evolved into highly sophisticated administrative centers.
10:19The Bronze Age elites who ruled these institutions were acquiring a surplus of food and other goods from the rest
10:26of the population,
10:27while employing huge numbers of people to help run their cities.
10:32Raw materials were also coming into city centers through extensive trade networks.
10:38Writing allowed civilizations to prosper with better record keeping, stronger taxation, and greater communication over long distances.
10:48Letters, contracts, and other important texts were written with the help of an elite class of professional scribes.
10:54To be trained as a scribe, you had to go through rather rigorous years of schooling.
11:01And there are texts, both from Mesopotamia and Egypt, that talk about what it was like to go to school
11:06to learn how to read and write.
11:08And it wasn't fun.
11:09It was usually reserved for boys.
11:12Occasionally, you know of girls, women, who could read and write.
11:15It wasn't that common.
11:16And in general, it does seem to have been limited to a small number of people.
11:20And I suppose they had a pretty good lifestyle compared to most people.
11:26In the Egyptian texts, they talk about, it's a kind of, these texts that are advertisements for a scribal way
11:32of life.
11:33And they talk about how horrible it is to be a farmer, how dangerous it is to be a soldier.
11:38Be a scribe, you'll do really well.
11:40You know, it's like, I guess the equivalent of like telling your kid to be a doctor.
11:44There's job security and you'll get paid pretty well.
11:48So there would have been resident scribes at these palaces.
11:51And they are responsible for very, very important diplomatic relationships.
12:00And in the same way that you can imagine a translator at the UN today has an incredible load.
12:05These scribes also had incredible weight on them to be able to kind of handle the finesses of correspondence between
12:14very important people in the world at that time.
12:17The scribes recorded the yearly histories for the kings and rulers.
12:22They recounted celebrations, campaigns, and conquests.
12:26They also drafted letters from one ruler to another.
12:30Well, a lot of the letters start out with, say to Amenhotep, king of Egypt.
12:37Thus says to Shraddha, king of.
12:40And what is happening is the scribe, one scribe is telling the other scribe to read this out loud because
12:46the king can't read.
12:48Sometimes on a couple of them we have a handwritten ink inscription from one scribe to another.
12:55Hey Joe, it's Phil. How's the wife and kids?
12:58By the way, when you read this out loud, please emphasize the third line down.
13:02You know, look forward to hearing from you again.
13:04And so we've got these private messages that the kings never knew.
13:09Now, it doesn't happen that often, but just enough to instill the humanity in these dry and dusty documents.
13:16In the Aegean, where the Minoans flourished during the Middle Bronze Age,
13:20a large number of scribes and bureaucrats helped run the day-to-day operations of the palace.
13:27Writing also played an important role in Minoans' ritual life and their extensive system of trade.
13:33Cretan Hieroglyphic develops on Crete and then, probably just a little bit later, we have Linear A developing.
13:41A very exciting name for what it seems to be essentially a cursive version of Cretan Hieroglyphic.
13:46And these are active in different parts of the island.
13:50Now, neither of these scripts have been deciphered.
13:54To the north of Crete, the Mycenaean culture rose on the mainland of Greece toward the end of the Middle
14:00Bronze Age and into the Late Bronze Age.
14:03The Mycenaeans adapted the Minoan Linear A system to create Linear B, which is now known to record an early
14:12form of Greek.
14:13Unlike Linear A, Linear B has been deciphered.
14:18We now can read Linear B documents.
14:20So we have the wages that are being given to different workers within the palace.
14:25We have record of dedications that are being made at different shrines, etc.
14:30So they are not very exciting just by themselves.
14:35But they can be opened up to really help us understand how the Mycenaean palace system, how it worked.
14:42And that has been incredibly useful.
14:45One of the most interesting accounts in the Linear B archives is this account of a priestess who is arguing
14:53with the Damos, the city.
14:55And the city says, you owe us the produce of your agricultural land.
15:01You need to give that to the palace.
15:04And Eritah says, no, that land belongs to the god.
15:08You have absolutely no right to tax me. I'm not paying.
15:11So we have in the Linear B records evidence of a conflict between the religious sphere and the political sphere.
15:19And an evidence of a woman kind of stepping up and asserting her power.
15:25Linear B was used by the Mycenaeans for just 200 years, mainly for administration.
15:31Other forms of writing, such as poetry or literature, never developed.
15:37That's because Mycenae, along with many of the Mediterranean and Near East palace societies,
15:43largely disappeared after a violent and mysterious collapse that began around 1190 B.C.
15:50There are mentions in Egyptian texts of the sea people.
15:54We don't know who these people are.
15:56There is mention in the Linear B texts of sending men to the coast to kind of keep an eye.
16:02But we don't know if this was standard practice or if they were in a state of alarm.
16:06The fires that destroyed the palaces baked the Linear B tablets, which were on wet clay,
16:11and which otherwise would probably have been discarded after the necessary record keeping had happened.
16:15So they give us this snapshot of life right at the very end.
16:18And we don't really see a state of alarm.
16:23What appeared to be once thriving palaces and city-states were completely destroyed.
16:28And with the collapse, the need for writing and record keeping disappeared as well.
16:34And this brings in what we call, from hindsight, the Dark Ages.
16:41This is a moment where we do not have written texts to refer to.
16:44Now there was a great deal going on during the Dark Ages.
16:47It's just that the lights are turned out on one of our principal ways of accessing these past societies,
16:54which is decipherable texts.
16:57In the Aegean, writing wasn't seen for another 400 years until the Greeks made contact with the Phoenicians.
17:05From the Phoenician alphabet, they developed the Greek alphabet.
17:09Eventually, alphabetic writing spread to all of Europe and beyond.
17:14What was once the domain of scribes and other elites during the Bronze Age
17:18finally became accessible to the common man.
17:26The Bronze Age produced the world's first consumer societies.
17:31Ancient civilizations with a thoroughly modern obsession.
17:35The pursuit of luxury goods.
17:38We have gold, we have ebony, we have ostrich eggs that are moving between the elite of the different societies
17:47of this period throughout the Eastern Mediterranean,
17:49between the palaces, between the kings.
17:52To meet the demand, merchants and middlemen traveled by land and sea, creating a highly connected ancient world.
18:01One where distant cultures made contact and international trade first began, generating extraordinary wealth at a whole new level.
18:21Throughout the early Bronze Age, most people lived in small settlements scattered around the Mediterranean and Near East.
18:28But as the Middle Bronze Age advanced and populations increased, connections began to form between royal houses and urban centers.
18:37We start to see the development of communities that are at a whole different scale, at a regional scale, at
18:45what we can call an international scale.
18:47In fertile capitals like Thebes in Egypt and Uruk in Mesopotamia, an abundance of food created a rich class of
18:56landowning elites,
18:57who were eager to trade their surplus for stones, metals and raw materials from other lands.
19:03With the growth of cities and the growth of hierarchical society, there came to be an elite that wanted to
19:11advertise its status and also wanted to decorate the palaces and the temples.
19:17And to do that, you needed things like copper and precious stones and precious woods and things like that.
19:24So Mesopotamia was the great market for raw materials.
19:29And indeed, when Mesopotamia became urbanized, they seemed to have sent out expeditions far into Iran and Anatolia,
19:37specifically looking for the raw materials and setting up little trading posts in order to acquire these raw materials.
19:44And from there, that's where it all took off and these networks became all the more robust through the centuries.
19:54To the west of Mesopotamia, where the cultures of the Aegean and Mediterranean rim developed,
19:59the terrain made it more difficult to move goods by land.
20:03So the ancients took to the sea for long-distance travel.
20:09Revolutionary innovations marked a booming era of maritime trade.
20:13One of the most important was the sail.
20:19The sail was probably first used in the fourth millennium, perhaps in southern Mesopotamia.
20:24By about 2000 BC, it's found its way to Crete, probably via Egypt,
20:31where we know that there were sailing ships by about 3200 BC because we have representations of them in Egypt.
20:39So innovations in maritime travel really brought these areas together.
20:44And this is also the time when we see the emergence of the first superpowers in the world, Egypt and
20:50Mesopotamia.
20:50So they are traveling on the seas and they are engaged in trade.
20:55The people in the Aegean, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, are plugging into these networks.
21:01And that's facilitated by the sail.
21:05Now they can actually travel to these places and they get plugged in.
21:11As civilizations became increasingly sophisticated during the middle to late Bronze Age,
21:17their need for raw materials drove a thriving trade in metals
21:21and developed interconnected relationships never seen before in the ancient world.
21:27We know that during the Bronze Age, Cyprus, the name itself actually comes from the word for copper.
21:34We know that Cyprus was one of the largest sources of copper in the Eastern Mediterranean.
21:39So in the mountain ranges, in the foothills of the mountain ranges, that's where we find copper sources.
21:45In other places in the Aegean, there's some copper farther to the east in Mesopotamia, also in Anatolia.
21:53So copper could be found.
21:54The real problem was tin.
21:56Tin is very rare and the sources of tin are nowhere near the Mediterranean.
22:01There are a few disputed sources in Anatolia, but it seems that the tin was coming mainly from well to
22:07the east, near Afghanistan, Central Asia.
22:10In the west, it could come from Spain and even farther from Britain.
22:15And whether they were exploiting those sources in the Bronze Age, we're not sure.
22:22As these regional trade networks flourished, they fueled an even wider exchange of goods from foreign lands.
22:30Everything from women and wine to ivory, precious gems, and artwork.
22:38Copper and tin were traded as pillow-shaped ingots and may have been used as a form of currency.
22:44This expansion in trade created a ripple effect of economic and cultural influences across the region.
22:52Some of these ideas about writing, about religion, are moving around or being passed by, you can imagine, merchants who
22:59are telling stories as they're landing at a harbor.
23:03The figures that are behind the scenes, not necessarily the king sitting on his throne, but the people who actually
23:09make up the activities of social life.
23:12The craftspeople, the peasants, the merchants, the traders, they're interacting and they're creating this kind of social network and interaction
23:20that really sees the changes at the Bronze Age.
23:25The Minoan civilization arose on the Greek island of Crete during the Middle Bronze Age and flourished for over a
23:32thousand years.
23:34Named after the mythic king Minus, the Minoans are considered Europe's first advanced civilization.
23:41By 2000 BC, they began building a string of palaces on the island.
23:47Their capital, at Knossus, was a hub of commercial and cultural activity.
23:53The Minoans, during the Middle Minoan period to the early Late Minoan period, kind of monopolized trade in the area.
24:02They had the biggest ships. They controlled the flow of people and goods from several centers.
24:08And they were trading with the Syro-Palestinians. They were trading with the Hittites, the Cycladic Islanders, the Egyptians.
24:15They were even trading as far west as southern Italy and north to the Balkans.
24:19So there was quite a large network.
24:22There is this idea that there was a Minoan thalastocracy, a kind of rule of the sea, that the Minoans
24:28as incredible sea persons were able to rule the entire eastern Mediterranean.
24:34I think more and more we've worked away from that idea.
24:37What we do know is that, culturally, Minoan Crete had a very big impact on areas beyond its shores.
24:45We see this, for example, in the spread of wall paintings throughout the Cycladic Islands and again into the northern
24:51Aegean, even to coastal Anatolia.
24:53So a very distinctive style of Minoan wall painting is showing up in these places.
24:58We also find it throughout the Levant and also in northern Egypt.
25:03In exchange for copper, tin, gold, ivory, silver and precious stones, the Minoans traded olive oil, wine, food and textiles.
25:17They may have also been the first to develop the so-called purple trade, centuries before the Phoenicians.
25:26People in the Aegean became aware of the fact that certain types of sea molluscs, the murex, has a gland
25:34that creates an incredible purple dye.
25:37Early excavations on Crete and in the Aegean would turn up shells and people did not exactly know what to
25:44make of this.
25:45We now can kind of go back to these early excavation reports and understand them very likely as being processing
25:52sites for this purple dye made from the murex.
25:56And there have been some very interesting recent finds of this dye actually being used, essentially creating a color in
26:03paint.
26:04The world was being colored by this purple in various different places, not only in cloth but also in the
26:09walls and doubtlessly in other places too.
26:13The Minoans enjoyed relative peace and prosperity through much of their reign as grand masters of trade.
26:20But by the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, Minoan society began to decline.
26:28A major volcanic eruption on nearby Thera or some other natural disaster may have contributed to their fall.
26:38Over time, the Mycenaeans, a group of early Greeks from the mainland, moved in and took over trade in the
26:45region.
26:47The Mycenaeans, once they supersede the Minoans, circa 1450 BC or so, they don't seem to have as strong a
26:59connection with Egypt.
27:00And so they are oriented into the east, more to the Hittites and the Cypriots.
27:06But the Mycenaeans also have a strong interest in southern Italy and Sicily, more so than the Minoans.
27:13So they're developing contacts with places on the southern Italian coast and Sicily looking for different kinds of products.
27:22We know that the Mycenaeans were trading with southern Italy, with the Balkans.
27:27We have Balkan amber in Mycenae.
27:29We know that they continued to trade with Cyprus.
27:31They continued to get copper ore from the places that the Minoans did.
27:34We can actually trace the source of copper by lead isotope analysis
27:39because veins of metal in the earth typically possess the same sort of signature.
27:44And the sources of copper continue into the Mycenaean area.
27:48They continue to kind of extract at a high level and higher and higher.
27:53As the demand for copper grew, so too did the quest for more luxury goods.
27:59This, in turn, fueled the demand for stronger ships capable of carrying heavier cargo.
28:05Initially, most shipbuilders used twine to join the planks of wood together.
28:10But these craft were too fragile for the open sea.
28:14Eventually, a new technique was developed in the Late Bronze Age,
28:18using mortise and tenon joints to connect planks,
28:21creating stronger boats that helped expand trade beyond rivers into the open sea.
28:27The earliest evidence of this major advance in ship construction
28:31was discovered off the southwest coast of Turkey in 1982 in an area called Uluberun.
28:40The ship was nearly 50 feet long and carried more than 20 tons of cargo from at least seven different
28:47cultures.
28:49The Uluberun shipwreck is unique in so many ways.
28:53We have only a few actual wrecks from the Bronze Age.
28:57And this is so unique because, first of all, the preservation.
29:01We have a kind of moment frozen in time.
29:06Everything went down with the ship was meant to be with the ship.
29:09And so we can study that particular moment and we can study the range of objects,
29:14the range of products that are being shipped around the Mediterranean at about 1300 BC.
29:21And this is really extraordinary.
29:25We have these large ingots of copper, for example.
29:29We have beautiful ingots of glass.
29:32Glass would have been used and then would have been sent throughout the Eastern Mediterranean
29:36and then turned into different types of objects by craftspeople in the different societies.
29:43Among the more than 18,000 artifacts was a cache of exotic objects.
29:50Ebony from Egypt.
29:52Elephant tusks and hippopotamus teeth.
29:56Ostrich eggshells and Baltic amber beads from Northern Europe.
30:00The ship was likely a mixed enterprise.
30:03A trade ship that sold raw material and goods from port to port while transporting a special cargo of elite
30:10goods.
30:13During the late Bronze Age, royal gift-giving was a vital part of international trade and critical to ancient diplomacy.
30:22To maintain good relations, the ruling elite of the day traded what they had for what they coveted most.
30:31They really treasured gold just like we do.
30:34And indeed there are texts from the late Bronze Age where the kings are writing to each other and saying,
30:41the king of Babylonia writes to the king of Egypt,
30:43I know that gold is like dust in your country, why aren't you sending me more gold?
30:47The inherent shiny beauty, sun-like beauty of gold was just as impressive to them as it is to us.
30:56By the late Bronze Age, the trade networks that brought great wealth to the ruling elites were being disrupted.
31:04Scholars believe that climate change in the Aegean may have been a factor.
31:08A series of intense droughts could have dramatically affected agriculture and led to great social unrest and upheaval.
31:16So ultimately what we end up seeing is the destruction of palace after palace very widely throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
31:23And I think the scope of that suggests two things.
31:27One, that the climate very possibly is playing a role.
31:30That this is, you know, the climate is something that can cause such a widespread synchronous event.
31:35But also these are societies that are very interconnected.
31:39And so we can see that the livelihood of one is going to affect the livelihood of another.
31:46Much like the global financial meltdown in 2008, the disruption caused a ripple effect across the region.
31:54The flow of luxury goods and raw materials for the ruling elites eventually ceased altogether.
32:01The vibrant trading networks forged in the ancient world would not be seen again for centuries.
32:08But they set the stage for a remarkable expansion of international trade, diplomacy and cultural exchange that continues to this
32:18day.
32:24During the Bronze Age, metal making fueled specialized industries and ignited the demand for new innovations.
32:33Tools for farming and hunting.
32:35Objects for religious rituals and elite burials.
32:40Weapons for war.
32:42Weapons show up in the archaeological record and proliferate pretty much all at once.
32:47So they learned the technique for making weapons and everyone wanted to get in on the fun.
32:52Competition and conquest ushered in a new age of organized warfare.
32:58With professional armies that sought to expand empires, defend territory and defeat their enemies.
33:17It's not known exactly where or when bronze making first began.
33:22But it revolutionized the way tools and weapons were made.
33:26And the new technology spread quickly throughout the ancient world.
33:31Bronze is so important because it's such a versatile material.
33:35So when it was discovered that one could alloy copper with tin to make bronze, it was a great improvement.
33:42Because copper is really soft and it doesn't make a good working edge for a tool or a weapon.
33:49But when allied with tin, it becomes harder and more durable and it keeps a sharper edge.
33:54Therefore, the tools are better. The weapons are better.
33:57Bronze Age tools and weapons were often interchangeable and consisted of axes, swords, daggers and spears.
34:11In the early Bronze Age, warfare was localized.
34:15Small groups of men attacked nearby settlements for land, resources and women.
34:22But as the wealth and size of settlements grew and societies became more urbanized, warfare spread.
34:31By the middle of the third millennium BC, the earliest professional standing armies were organized to defend communities in southern
34:38Mesopotamia.
34:41The normal political situation in southern Mesopotamia was that of the city-state.
34:45And each important city had its own political area that it controlled.
34:51And they were very competitive. They fought with one another. Sometimes they conquered one another.
34:55And there would be these ambitious rulers like Sargon around 2300 who tried to unify all of them.
35:01And for a while that worked and then it would fall apart again and they'd go back to their city
35:04-states again.
35:06The Sumerians were the first to use body armor and helmets in battle.
35:11They're credited with the invention of the sickle sword and the earliest known chariots.
35:16The Sumerians executed well-disciplined formations in battle and launched the first missile troops using men armed with javelins.
35:27Their military techniques and weapons were quickly adopted around the region, giving other ancient adversaries a greater advantage.
35:37New innovations and new technology usually do give you an edge, whether it's in war or society or elsewhere.
35:44And so we do see these new adoptions.
35:48For instance, there's a group called the Hyksos that come in and they invade Egypt in about 1720 BC.
35:55Don't quite know where they come from, but it's probably the region that today we would call Israel, Lebanon, Syria.
36:01And they come in and they take over Egypt because they have a new type of chariot and they have
36:07a new type of bow, the composite bow.
36:09This particular bow, made out of composite materials, could shoot probably twice as far as a regular bow.
36:15So with these new types of chariots and the new type of bow, the Hyksos overrun and take over Egypt.
36:21And they rule it until about 1550 BC.
36:23By that point, the Egyptians have adopted that chariot and the composite bow in return and they're able then to
36:31kick the people back out again.
36:33By the late Bronze Age, Egypt was a military powerhouse.
36:38It turned from a relatively peaceful kingdom protected by the natural boundaries of the Nile River and Mediterranean Sea to
36:46a leading Bronze Age Empire.
36:49A rich warrior class joined the military as charioteers.
36:53Army divisions numbered 5,000 strong, launching fierce battles to conquer their enemies.
37:01We have from Egypt, from the town of Amarna, a cache of over 300 letters written in Akkadian in cuneiform.
37:12And these letters detail the relationships between not only a pharaoh in Egypt, but the different rulers of small city
37:21kingdoms and large powerhouses like Babylon and Assyria and Mesopotamia.
37:25In the letters, the openings will begin by saying, Brother, how are you? How is your wife? How are your
37:32chariots?
37:32The chariots are very, very important.
37:34And if you look at the art from this time, coming from various different societies, you see the chariot very
37:41heavily stressed.
37:43And these chariots seem to have been a sort of international symbol of power and prestige at the time.
37:51As Bronze Age empires grew, so too did their need to control land and resources.
37:58There are the great powers like Egypt and Assyria and Babylon and especially the Hittites.
38:04So you've got the Egyptians fight the Hittites, Hittites fight the Assyrians, and so on.
38:12And there are winners and losers in the battles and the wars.
38:15In the Aegean, the Mycenaeans emerged as a powerful warrior-based society.
38:21Their militaristic culture produced great wealth for their elites.
38:26The Mycenaeans are best known for their famous attack on the ancient city of Troy.
38:32According to legend, after a fierce ten-year battle, the great Mycenaean king Agamemnon finally conquered Troy.
38:41The Trojan War became the basis for Homer's Iliad, written some 400 years after the end of the Mycenaean era.
38:50We don't know if the Mycenaeans saw themselves as an independent nation in the way we would think of a
38:56nation.
38:56They might have saw themselves as inhabitants of a particular city, for instance, or the speakers of a certain language,
39:01or the worshipper of a certain god, rather than someone in a nation.
39:05But having said that, they were kind of teetering between fighting with each other and kind of getting along.
39:14It probably was a kind of uneasy alliance, and they probably came together to fight off external invaders,
39:20but when there was no one invading them, they probably were at each other's throats.
39:26The Mycenaeans celebrated their victories in their artwork,
39:30and buried their prized weapons in tombs along with their dead.
39:35They had spears, they had short swords, they had these figure eight shields made of wood draped with cowhide.
39:42They had boar's tusk helmets.
39:45Hunting of boar was a very potent symbol of Mycenaean male power.
39:49We know that they possessed horses.
39:50There are horses and chariots in fresco paintings, and illustrated on weapons themselves.
39:57The chariot is certainly part of the picture, but because of the terrain in Greece being so rugged,
40:04it's not very hospitable for chariots.
40:07And therefore, we don't really think that chariots were a major part of warfare in a practical sense.
40:15Chariots were, however, a very strong symbolic element of the elite.
40:22So elites depicted themselves in chariots.
40:25And of course, this is something that they extracted from the East,
40:28from places like Egypt, where chariots were actually practical tools of warfare.
40:36The elites of the Late Bronze Age may have possessed powerful weapons and controlled large armies,
40:43but it wasn't enough to save their empires.
40:47In the end, their greatest enemy was an unexpected one that led to the collapse of the ancient world.
40:55I would argue that the collapse of the Late Bronze Age was so calamitous and so catastrophic
41:02that its similarity would not be seen again until Rome collapsed, which is 1,500 years later.
41:10In the Late Bronze Age, you have these large kingdoms that dominated the whole region.
41:15It wasn't an era of city-states so much anymore like the Early Bronze Age was.
41:20In the Late Bronze Age already, you have large regional states, even nation-states, you could call them.
41:25These nation-states were highly sophisticated and urbanized, bolstered by a thriving international trade network and the spoils of war.
41:35Yet they were vulnerable to numerous threats.
41:39None of these societies were really built to last a long time.
41:44They had kind of inherent fragilities and weaknesses that would sooner or later come to tell on them.
41:52No one knows exactly why Bronze Age civilizations collapsed the way they did.
41:57But their highly stratified societies may have been a factor.
42:02One theory points to a growing inequality between the ruling elites and their dependents.
42:09Over taxation, poverty and oppression sparked internal dissent.
42:15People began to flee their kingdoms, seeking refuge in other lands and causing unrest throughout the region.
42:22They were clearly posing a problem to the rulers, to the settled society, the elites of the Late Bronze Age.
42:30Sometimes there's treaties between the different kings of the Late Bronze Age, and the treaties include clauses about fugitives.
42:37How, if a fugitive from your kingdom comes into mine, then I am liable to send them back to you.
42:44So clearly there's a problem that these rulers are dealing with people that are running away all the time.
42:51Another theory adds climate change to the mix.
42:55During the end of the Late Bronze Age, there is increasing evidence that the climate was much drier, and drought
43:02became a persistent issue.
43:05Agriculture in Greece is something which is always a struggle in terms of rainfall, and would have been potentially precarious.
43:13And one of the suggestions that scholars are kind of working with now is that if they were to have
43:19several bad seasons in a row during one of these dry spells,
43:23I mean, think of a moment like the Dust Bowl here in the States, what you end up having is
43:29the basis of these societies.
43:31You know, what we all cannot do without food starts to become a scarce resource.
43:40If you didn't have the same supplies of water that you were used to, you couldn't produce the same amount
43:45of crops and sustain the same numbers of people,
43:48particularly all those people that weren't food producers themselves, all these elites and the specialists that are working for the
43:55elites.
43:55And if the agriculture is failing, then that whole system of all these parasitical people that are living off of
44:04the actual farmers and herders and so forth,
44:07that's all going to fall apart if they can't be fed.
44:11While drought and famine may have helped topple these Bronze Age societies, it's possible the land itself created even more
44:19instability.
44:20There's evidence that powerful earthquakes once rocked the region.
44:26Mainland Greece and the islands are a site of high seismic activity.
44:30They're right on a fault line. And so there are frequent earthquakes.
44:34The palaces were producing large quantities of olive oil and large quantities of wine and storing them in these giant
44:41pithos jars as tall as you or I, full of oil.
44:45And you combine that with lamps that would have been inside, like candles burning, earthquake and these large drums of
44:52oil and you get this recipe for disaster.
44:55By the end of the 13th century BC, it was clear that many of the ruling elites were hitting a
45:01crisis point.
45:03We see in text that people are writing letters back and forth to one another.
45:07So for example, we hear evidence that there are groups that are attacking Cyprus.
45:12We also hear this from various different places along the Levantine coast and from Egypt itself.
45:18So this is the so-called Sea Peoples.
45:21No one knows exactly where the Sea People came from or why they were attacking cities and settlements along the
45:29coasts.
45:31Some believe they may have been refugees or disaffected people fleeing from hardship in their own homelands.
45:39We have examples of letters going back and forth.
45:43Letters from the Hittite king to the king of Ugarit saying,
45:47you've got to let that shipment of grain get through. The people need it. They are starving.
45:52A letter from the king of Ugarit to the king of Alashia.
45:56I can't help you. All of my troops are in the Hittite realm and I'm being attacked. So I'm left
46:04here vulnerable.
46:05So it's very clear that there were disruptions, there were people moving around, perhaps the so-called Sea Peoples of
46:14disaffected people moving around and attacking the coastal areas.
46:19Little is known about the mysterious Sea Peoples, a name given to groups of invaders who raided coastal towns and
46:27cities throughout the Mediterranean for nearly a hundred years.
46:31They're mentioned in ancient Egyptian texts, attacking in two separate waves about 30 years apart.
46:39They talk about these people coming from the north. They talk about them coming from overseas.
46:44And they actually give us the names of the groups.
46:46They talk about the Shardana and the Shekilesh and the Weshesh and the Esh, the wonderful names, the Denyan and
46:54the Peleset.
46:55Who are these people? The Shardana sounds a lot like Sardinia, doesn't it?
47:00But we don't know for sure if it is. Same with the Shekilesh. It sounds a lot like Sicily.
47:05So people have suggested that's where they came from.
47:07It's really only the Peleset that we think we know. They're probably the Philistines.
47:11And the Philistines are mentioned in the Bible as coming from Crete. So that might actually work.
47:15But, you know, again, we don't know that much about them.
47:20External invasions, internal unrest, climate change, and natural disasters.
47:27Scholars now believe it was a perfect storm of conditions that rocked the ancient world at the end of the
47:33Bronze Age.
47:36Geographically, the collapse goes all the way from Italy in the west to Iraq and Afghanistan in the east.
47:44And it goes from Turkey in the north to Egypt in the south.
47:48From the western to the eastern Mediterranean, all that collapses.
47:52It would be Italy, Greece, and the Middle East as we look at it today.
47:57All that went down. It went down hard.
48:00In less than 200 years, many of the great civilizations of the Bronze Age were in ruins.
48:07Their central economies collapsed.
48:09The elites died off. The art of writing was lost.
48:13And the great architecture disappeared.
48:16And with it all came the end of the vibrant international trade network that had long sustained the region.
48:24Think about America's dependence on oil from the Middle East.
48:28The equivalent back then would have been this dependence on tin.
48:32Tin's only coming from Afghanistan.
48:33You cut the supply roots to the tin, and everybody's in big trouble.
48:38And I think that's probably what happens at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
48:42But in the end, these trade routes were cut.
48:44Suddenly you don't have tin, which means you don't have bronze, which means you either collapse or you adapt.
48:50Some collapsed, some adapted.
48:53For the next 300 years, the region plunged into what's known as the world's first Dark Ages,
49:00where fragmented, localized cultures lived more simply and freely,
49:05without the structure of a complex, organized, interconnected society.
49:12For decades, we have treated the time after the collapse as the Dark Ages.
49:19This mainly suggests that we, archaeologically, have kind of a moment of darkness.
49:25Because some of the means that we have of getting at these societies, text being a major one, disappear.
49:32That doesn't mean that life ceased.
49:34Because what we lose is kind of the grandeur that archaeologists and that all of us love.
49:40You know, palaces with wall paintings covering their walls, gold and ivory being imported.
49:45The industries that might have been connected to the palaces and to kind of the jockeying for social status linked
49:53to palace life.
49:54That is what seems to diminish.
49:56But that does not mean that culture and society somehow, you know, just disappeared.
50:03I've argued that actually the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age, while it was horrific for them,
50:09was not the end of the world for us, because out of that the beginnings of Western civilization were born.
50:17The rise and fall of empires and ages.
50:21It's an ancient, yet familiar story.
50:24And a cautionary tale for our own age.
50:28Can we take any lessons from the failures of the Bronze Age?
50:33We could, if the powers that be paid attention to the archaeologists and the historians of the Bronze Age.
50:39I mean, we like to think, those of us who study those societies, that we're actually learning something that we
50:45can profit from.
50:46As we look at life in the Bronze Age, as it became more and more complex,
50:52the kind of technological innovations brought in their terrain problems.
50:59As they developed the ability to create metal for better implements, better tools,
51:05they were also made into tools of destruction.
51:08So as we become more complex, and as we develop technologies,
51:13we can see that every technology that has a good purpose also has a kind of evil use.
51:21And so this is something that they began to learn already in the Bronze Age,
51:26and of course, we know this today very well.
51:30As our societies become more advanced, and we develop more complex technologies,
51:36we face similar vulnerabilities and potential upheavals.
51:42The lessons of the Bronze Age may be well worth paying closer attention to,
51:48with an even greater urgency.