The Bronze Age Collapse - Before the Storm - Extra History - Part 1

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📜 History of the Bronze Age Collapse, Part 1
Egyptians. Hittites. Assyrians. Myceneans. Long ago, these four Bronze Age civilizations lived together in a healthy system of trade, agriculture, and sometimes warfare. But then, everything changed when the Sea People attacked.

*Miss an episode in our Bronze Age Collapse Series?*

#ExtraHistory #History #BronzeAge

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The four Bronze Age civilizations lived together in (relative) harmony... until the Sea People attacked.

extrahistory

You know this had me wondering. Why not brass? It's as strong as bronze, and is made with the much more common element zinc. As someone who enjoys learning about metallurgy I had to look it up. Apparently the ancients were well aware of zinc, but it was a huge hassle to refine from ore. The problem being that just smelting it with charcoal, zinc boils and evaporates at a lower temperature than it would reduce from zinc oxide. Brass had to be produced in small amounts in a crucible by allowing copper to absorb zinc vapor. As such brass was really only used for decoration, as it was too much work for bronze age technology to produce in useful quantities. Refining pure zinc didn't become possible until the 18th century. So there's why we didn't have a brass age.

AntiBunnyStudio

*Now the Phoenicians can get down to business!*

GiffyMcgee

In case anybody's been living under a rock, this is the series that almost all of the EH following has been waiting for since it was introduced to the schedule a half a year ago.
* bows down at the feet of whoever suggested the topic in the first place

DragoniteSpam

So you mean to say that we live in a post-apocalyptic world, and that the cause and details of the disaster are conveniently unknown?

I will now no longer criticize authors that lazily evade the nature of their apocalypse.

RamdomView

More than just these cultures were affected by a collapse around this same time. This was also the end of the Harappa civilization in Pakistan, China was invaded by barbarians, north and central American building cultures suffered during this period. Something big was going on. It could very well have been climate related, something that made it difficult for non-agricultural people to maintain their livelihoods and compelled them to move in and attack wealthier agricultural civilizations. The Odyssey took place during this time (just after the Trojan war which was just before the collapse), and it's a story of a man making an enemy of Poseidon, and fighting his way through treacherous seas and winds (and weird islands) for twenty years.

It could very well have been a climatic event, like a volcanic eruption that changed global temperatures and weather patterns for a while (at least in the northern hemisphere). There was at least one in the world somewhere around that time, the Hekla eruption in Iceland, which has been considered as a candidate for a cause or contributing factor to this collapse.

Personally, what I find most interesting about this whole period is how much Greece changed, from the Achaean/Mycenaean civilization to the "Classical" Greek civilization after the intervening "Greek Dark Ages". Their art style completely changed, especially the depiction of people which were originally a bit cartoonish in a Sumerian/Babylonian way, their writing changed from the Linear B Minoan system of writing to their version of the Phoenician alphabet. They just became such a fundamentally different people... while still maintaining some language and cultural elements from the past. There's a major hypothesis about the later Greeks being northern invaders who then settled among the previous Greeks, something that also happened to some of the other places (the Harappa civilization was displaced by the arrival of the Vedic peoples, for example).

It makes me wonder who they were before. As far as I know the only surviving stories of their culture are the Iliad and the Odyssey, both written centuries later, in the Archaic period and most of the other parts of it were lost. Even from the Archaic period, only some of Homer's works and a few of Sappho's poems survived - considered the father and mother of literature (to the Greeks, and later to the Romans).

jessicalee

All i can think about the Assyrians is how they appear in the fight with the most overpowered tool in the late bronze age.

Iron.

logoncal

Fun fact: the name of copper and it's chemical symbol both come from Cyprus. In ancient times, copper was called Cyprium, which was bastardized by the Romans to Cuprum, (which is why copper is CU), which eventually became Copper

dartwada

5:53 - It would appear that you folks have made an error in your placement of the Assyrian Empire, putting it WAAAAY east of its position along the northern Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It's a minor error, I know, but I'm aware that you all want to be kept updated on any mistakes made.

nicholasrowe

holy crap, finally something on youtube about ancient history that isn't just conspiracy theories, it's frustratingly difficult to find actual facts on anything from before the classical period that isn't just straight up academic (that is, things that aren't just straight up journal articles published by universities)

ares

As a french history teacher I found this very instructive as we barely never talk about what was before Archaïc greece. Thanks!

knight

Egyptians. Hittites. Assyrians. Myceneans. Long ago, these four Bronze Age civilizations lived together in a healthy system of trade, agriculture, and sometimes warfare. But then, everything changed when the Sea People attacked.

knightshade