← Empire: World History
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- [00:01]
A
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
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B
Hello and welcome to Empire with me.
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A
Anita Anand, and me, William Dalrymple.
- [00:36]
B
Now, over the next three episodes, what we're going to do is we're going to take you to the place we've been promising for quite some time, because for the last three episodes, we've been talking about the Bronze Age collapse. And here it is. We've seen those sophisticated, interconnected fingers that stretch in between these different kingdoms, making this tapestry world. And it's been a chance for us to explore Mycenae. It's been a chance to explore Troy and to examine how Homer perhaps preserved the memories of a lost world, if not the actual facts of what happened, which was a shock to me. So that's what we're going to do. That's why we're here. To understand what really happened today and.
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A
To guide us through this territory, we have the wonderful Eric Klein, Professor Eric Klein, whose books have kept me very happy over Christmas. I read both of them in Kerala and just finished the last chapter, the last one today, and they are absolutely wonderful. 1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed. There's been a massive international bestseller, and after 1177 BC comes with an even rarer thing, which is a nice quote from my friend Nassim Nicholas Tlib, who's not known for his happy adjectives. Anyone who follows him on Twitter will know he's the irascible fellow when he wants to be, but here he is and he loved this book. I've had a long chat with him about it after 1177 BC. And, Eric, you have a third volume planned, you just let slip.
- [01:57]
C
I do. Thank you. Wonderful to be here and it's wonderful to talk about my favorite period in history. But, yes, I do have a third book in the unintended trilogy, as I'm calling it, that I'm working on now. So stay tuned for after. After 1177.
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A
Is that actually the title is Me?
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C
No, I suggested that. No, it's going to be called 776B.C. The clashing of Civilizations.
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A
Persians and Greeks.
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C
Persians and Greeks and Athenians and Spartans and everybody fighting everybody. Ye.
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B
Well, I'm delighted. I'm delighted. I like your title. I mean, it could have been, you know, the rest is 1177. It's a theme on this podcast world. So well done for picking something very unique. Now, your book argues that the collapse wasn't caused by a single factor. You call it a perfect storm of catastrophes. But before we get into the causes, I've always wanted to know what it would feel like to live in that kind of collapse. What did it look like for the people living in. In these places? What was happening around them?
- [03:01]
C
It's a good question, I think, in terms of whether some of them would have even realized what was happening. I think for some it was. In hindsight, they went, oh, what just happened? But it's a pretty dramatic story. It happened, I think, with pretty shocking speed. I mean, 500 years, they had been doing quite well. And then within 20, 30, 40, 50 years at most, everything is basically gone. The network that connected them all has broken. We're talking like between 1200 and 1150 B.C. somewhere in there. And. Well, I mean, what happened? The Hittites fell. The Mycenaean palaces were all destroyed. Lots of cities in the Levant and elsewhere are burnt. Egypt makes it through, but barely. It's weakened Cyprus, temporarily devastated. What there was, it was a complete systems collapse, a complete failure of the system. And it took them a while, I mean, a while. It took them up to 400 years to recover and get the network back up there. So we're looking at a huge population decline. Used to be thought that up to 90% of the people in Greece had died. Now it's been ratcheted back. So only 40 to 60% died.
- [04:19]
B
Only.
- [04:20]
C
Exactly. Same with Mesopotamia. At one point, there was an estimate that about 75% of the population died there. Again, that's been ratcheted back. But the other thing is literacy that disappears in Greece. It's got to come back, courtesy of the Phoenicians. All the trade networks that they had so carefully built up, those are broken. That collapses. And we've got all the centralized economies and such, they take a hit, some of them collapse completely. And a lot of places, including, like Greece, they revert to lower social, political, economic conditions. They basically have to rebuild from the ground up. Others come through a bit better, but we'll talk about that. But this was a catastrophe. I do call it a perfect storm. In the book, I also call it a series of Unfortunate events.
- [05:10]
B
Very Lemony Snicket of you.
- [05:12]
C
Exactly. For Lemony Snicket, Yes, I. I have a game I play with the editors and publishers to see if I can slip, like, pop culture references past them. So, yeah, I have A Series of Unfortunate Events. I also, at one Point. I say resistance was futile.
- [05:30]
B
Oh, my goodness. Look at you, Trekkie. So, Willy, did you even get that? We are Borg and I got it.
- [05:35]
A
I got it. I was impressed by that. But there's another one. You also have House of Cards.
- [05:39]
C
Yes. So. And then after 1177, I worked in three or four references to Hamilton.
- [05:47]
B
You're so cool.
- [05:48]
C
I just. I have fun with it. I'm like, well, we decided during the pandemic, when we were watching Hamilton every night, that there was a quote from Hamilton for every situation. So, yeah, I mean, after 1177, empires rise, oceans fall, or something like that. Yeah. Anyway, Anyway, so this was a catastrophe.
- [06:08]
A
I mean, is this you in rebellion against sort of university presses and finally being allowed to write as you want to?
- [06:16]
C
You could say that. Or it could just be me having fun.
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A
These are both Princeton University Press. So you're still within the fold.
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B
I mean, I'm genuinely thinking here, Eric, that we ought to turn reading your books into some kind of drinking game. I'm so thrilled with this. The Dark Ages. Let's cheer it up with a drinking game.
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C
It would be very easy. I'd be happy to work with you on that.
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B
Yes.
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A
This could be a source of fortune, Anita. You could have put your finger on it.
- [06:43]
C
My students on the excavations did that. At one point, I was lecturing, and every time I mentioned an Egyptian pharaoh's name, they would drink. And I realized this about halfway through. And so I just. At one point, I went, so, you know, we're here in the New Kingdom. So that's Hatshepsut, Thutmose iii, King Tut rams.
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B
And they're, you know, why did I never have professors like you? I am miserable.
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A
Now, let's go through these different causes of the collapse. Eric, you call it a. I wouldn't say a cluster.
- [07:11]
B
A cluster fudge.
- [07:12]
A
A Cl. Cluster fudge was the very word I was looking for. But let's go through them one by one, because each one of them has been raised before by different scholars. And different decades have gone by. Different things have become more fashionable. I mean, I think drought and climate change is the one that's getting all the grants from the university departments 10 years ago, maybe less so in the current climate. But let's go through them. Drought.
- [07:40]
C
Yes. Yes.
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B
So.
- [07:41]
C
Excellent question. And when I was in college, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I was told that the sea peoples had caused it, and they were the. They were the sole cause. That was it. But then, over the years, as you say, other people have suggested in fact, they were suggesting things over the past decades. They were just not in favor as much. So one of the things that I did in the book was to look at each of the suggestions and look at the pros and cons. So people. Yes, so people suggested invaders like the Sea Peoples. Scholars suggested an earthquake or an earthquake, storm had done it. And in fact, Amos Nor and I contributed some of that information. Drought and famine. Yeah, that's kind of the flavor of the moment, but it's not necessarily hopping on the climate change bandwagon, if you will. There is very good evidence that there was drought back then. Internal rebellion frequently comes hand in glove with all of that. So when I looked at these, I was trying to figure out which one of them caused it. And I ultimately concluded, yes, to all of them. They all did. All of them. All of them, yes. And in fact, I think it works because any one of them was survivable. I mean, if you get hit with an earthquake, there are going to be thousands of people that die, but it's not going to bring down your society. Same thing with drought or famine. A lot of people are going to suffer, but your civilization is not going to come to an end, and so on. And then I was thinking, okay, but what if they all happen in rapid succession or if almost simultaneously, so that you can't recover from one before you got the next? So let's say hypothetically, you've got a drought that is causing famine, that causes people to start migrating for a better world, and then toss in disease, which frequently accompanies all of this, and then all of a sudden you're hit with an earthquake as well. So you can survive one of those, maybe even two of them, maybe even three if you're pushing the luck. But what if you have four of them all in, you know, within a decade or so, at some point you're going to throw up your hands and just say, okay, enough, and you go ahead and collapse. And I actually think this may be getting ahead of ourselves. But, you know, the financial crisis that hit Wall street and the world back in 2008, all right, what if that had happened a dozen years later? What if it had coincided with the beginning of the pandemic? I think we wouldn't be here talking right now. I think that would have been enough to put us all down. So, same thing back then. I think the individual catastrophes were survivable, but you put them all together, that's that.
- [10:28]
B
So, I mean, when you talk about drought, I mean, describing it that way, it's more of a mega drought than a drought. Is there actual evidence? You know, can you, can you sift through, you know, piles of ash and rubble and find evidence that says, actually, you know what there really was this, this systemic failure in multiple different areas?
- [10:49]
C
The answer is yes. But you don't have to sift through the ash and all of that. What you actually have to do is go down into lakes and pull up the sediment that has accumulated at the bottom of the lake. You need to take a look at wood, like structures that were built of wood, and look at the tree rings. In fact, very recently there was a study published that showed that wood from the site of Gordian in Turkey, ancient Anatolia.
- [11:19]
A
As in Gordian knot.
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C
As in the Gordian Knot. As in our friend Alexander the Great. Exactly. That there was a drought that hit there from, I think, 1188 to 1186. Something that specific. If you go into a cave and look at the stalagmites, there's one particular one that's been studied.
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A
Brilliant.
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C
Yeah. The stalagmite stopped growing because there wasn't enough water.
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A
And you can date a stalagmite like you can date a tree ring?
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C
Yes, absolutely. Yes. We are advanced enough that we can do that.
- [11:52]
A
Yep.
- [11:53]
C
We can now show. There's a map that David Kanievsky from France published in 2019. Lots of little red dots all over the map, and it goes from northern Italy all the way over to Iran in modern terms, and from Turkey down to Egypt again in modern terms. And there are dozens of red dots, each of them marking a place that a scientific report has shown there was a drought. And like you said, it's not just a drought, it's a mega drought. 150 to 300 years in some places that it lasted from 1200 down to 900 or 1250 to 950. Somewhere in there, we've got a huge drought that goes on. They've tested underneath Lake Tiberias, Sea of Galilee, the shores of the Dead Sea. I mean, the evidence is coming from everywhere. So, you know, I referred earlier to jumping in the bandwagon of climate change. This is not. This is scientific studies. This is also using pollen analysis to see that the plants are adapting to a more arid condition. And then we can see it all change back by about 85800 BC. And that is what allows them to get back up on their feet everywhere. So this is really impressive data that we've got, and it's from multiple sources and many different places. So it's Extremely believable. And this is something. I mean, the idea of suggesting drought is not new. It was already suggested by Reece Carpenter, who was a professor at Bryn mawr in the 1960s. He said the Mycenaeans had come to an end because of a drought, but he didn't have the full data. He had some migration ideas, things like that. We now have the data that he wanted. So he was right. Drought did contribute to the end of the Mycenaeans and pretty much to everybody else. So we now have the hard science, which is really interesting.
- [14:02]
A
And documentary evidence. Do we have letters and cuneiform tablets talking about food shortages? Inscriptions, wow.
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C
Demanding. You want textual evidence, too?
- [14:11]
B
I mean, I know. I know you've been generous, but.
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C
But, yes, well, you are in luck, because, yes, we have that too. We do. We have the text written on the clay tablets and different people, different societies. We have Hittite kings and Hittite queens mentioning food shortages. Send grain. It's a matter of life and death. We now have relatively. Well, they're not new tablets, they're old tablets, but they have been newly translated and deciphered. They were just found at the site of Ugarit a couple of decades ago on the coast of what is now northern Syria. The French have been excavating at ugarit since the 1920s or so.
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A
I'm proud to have spent a night in a sleeping bag in a trench at Ugarret in my twenties.
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C
I am dutifully envious of you, his.
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B
Host of sleeping bag stories. I mean, it's a family show, so we might do a compilation near Christmas, but there are.
- [15:10]
C
Okay, well, you will be happy to know that in 2016, they published a new set of letters. And one of them, the King of Ugarit, says that there is a famine in their city and is asking the Egyptian pharaoh for grain. And the Egyptian pharaoh, we know, actually he sends. Not. Well, he sends some grain, but he sends 7,000 dried fish. And textiles. The dried fish, I can see that would help the famine. I'm not sure where the textiles come in, but maybe their sleeping bags were not warm enough.
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B
Yeah. I don't know. Or let them eat coats kind of thing. So, I mean, look, if everybody is short of food and they depend on each other, then, I mean, it's as you said, with the banking crisis, you know, if you. If you depend on your neighbors to export food to you, to make up any shortfalls, but nobody's got anything, that's a desperate, desperate situation to be in.
- [16:06]
C
Yeah. If you can't turn to your neighbor for help because they don't have anything. In fact, in terms of knowing whether they were collapsing, I actually think that that would have given them some idea that things were not going well. But the Egyptians also seem to have had some idea because there is a study that was published a couple years ago showing that the Egyptians were cross breeding their cattle at that time. Really? And they were taking their usual cattle and cross breeding with Zebu or Zebu cattle.
- [16:39]
A
That's what we get in India, the humped couple.
- [16:41]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And they are able to survive in much more arid conditions. So the Egyptians are doing this and it looks like they were over planting, if I can use that term, some of the areas that they were in control of in Canaan at the time, which means that they were trying to get enough grain for themselves and for the other people. What's interesting is they are shipping grain not only to their friends, but also to some of their erstwhile enemies. So everybody in a time of need, okay, fine, we'll help you out here. We'll go to war later. But for now, here's some grain.
- [17:22]
A
Who do they ship them to? Which enemies?
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C
Well, like the Hittites, I mean they're on and off again. And at this time, as we see for example in the Amarna letters from the 14th century B.C. there are a bunch of little proxy wars that are being fought in Canaan basically on behalf of the Egyptians and the Hittites. And that's going to break out of course in the full scale war by the time of the Battle of Kadesh 1279, 1274. But for right now we've got proxy wars going on.
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A
The Battle of Kadesh is one of the great set pieces in your book. It's an ambush, isn't it?
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C
The Egyptians get ambushed, they get ambushed and it's disinformation. It's one of the first examples where, yeah, where the, the Hittites send out two spies knowing they're going to be captured and have told them, by the way, we're leaving. And so when the Egyptians capture the spies, they say, yeah, the Hittites have gone back, gone back up to Anatolia when in fact they were still right there behind Kadesh. And yeah, anyway, so we've got people that are, you know, sometimes erstwhile enemies but also helping them themselves out.
- [18:28]
B
But are they, are they hungry? I mean, are you getting the sense that, you know, things are so desperate that people are, you know, sort of skin and bone on the streets and you know, the civil Unrest that goes with that. Do you get all of that?
- [18:39]
C
We don't get that per se. Like that. And you wonder how much is exaggeration. I mean, we did have previously in the previous publications, we had a letter, one of the firms in Ugarit had a branch office further inland in Syria, in the site of Emaar. And the representative in Emar says, there's a famine here. If you don't send food, everyone's going to starve. So we had known about that already, but, you know, you chalk that up. Is that just some guy, you know, embellishing and exaggerating? But now we have this newly published letter in Ugarit itself saying, yeah, we've got famine here as well. And there's a couple other letters again in Ugarit, because we have at least three different archives there from private merchants that were also working with the palace. And they're saying, your citizens are going to die if you don't feed us.
- [19:35]
A
And then we come to the original cause in the sense the one that you were. That was still being touted when you were at college, the Sea Peoples, which is a modern construction. The Egyptians don't talk about the Sea Peoples as such. They give individual names, don't they, to various groups, some of whom seem to come by sea. Is that right?
- [19:54]
C
Yes, absolutely. It's our name for them, the Sea Peoples. Actually, it was some of the early French Egyptologists that made it up. The Egyptians themselves tell us the exact names for the nine different groups that come in two waves. First wave comes in 1207 BC during the reign of Merneptah. And then the second wave comes in.
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A
I feel I should now down a shot of vodka at this point.
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C
Go. Right, well, get that ready because the second wave comes in the time of Ramses iii. So there you go. There you go. Right. And that is 1177. So you can now know where the.
- [20:39]
A
The title comes from. That's Medinet Habu, this wonderful inscription, which has a sort of massive picture of the pharaoh. Even the macro picture, there's little ones too, aren't there? But there's one massive picture of him sort of taking people by the scruff of their necks and sort of dashing them somewhere.
- [20:58]
C
Always, always. But we also have a nice picture of the naval battle that is fought because in that second invasion in 1177, the pharaoh. And again, this is if we can believe what he says, but I think it's pretty believable. They come by land and by sea. Right? It's kind of like Paul Revere, you know, one if I land, two if I see. But they come by both. There's a land battle and a naval battle which is probably fought in the Nile Delta. But anyway, Ramesses and Merneptah both tell us the names. So we've got, like, the Peleset, the Tajekar, the Shekelis, the Denyen, the Weshash. And we've been playing linguistic games for a hundred years trying to figure out who these people are.
- [21:42]
A
I've read various articles of yours, Eric, where you go into some detail about these people, even more than you do in the book. Do you want to give us a quick summary of where you think these guys come from? Because it's a good game. This. This is another good, tricky game.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Yes. All right. And it is just a game. It's a guessing game. But, for instance, the Shekelesh. What I usually tell my audience when I'm lecturing is, can you name me another place in the Mediterranean? And I'll give you a hint. Western Mediterranean. That sounds a lot like Shekelesh. Like, who has the same consonants that might be in there?
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A
I know the answer. Anita says you're the contestant of this one.
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C
Okay, let me add in another because this will help you. There's another group called the Chardonna or the Sherden. Where is a place near. That sounds like Shardana.
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B
Just tell the class, Eric.
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C
Okay.
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B
Okay.
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C
Oh, man. Okay, go on. Shardana. Sardinia.
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B
Sardinia, right. He said she Sardinia. Okay.
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C
Shekelesh or Sickles. Sicily.
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A
Oh, and Philistines. Palestine.
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B
Palestine. Well, they came up with our Joe Quinn episode.
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A
We did a Gaza series, Eric, where we had a big Peleset presence with Joe.
- [22:57]
C
Okay, good. But the question is, did they come from there or did they go there after they lost? So which way did they go? The early French Egyptologists thought that the sea peoples went to the Western Mediterranean and settled there after they were beaten by the Egyptians and then gave their names there. Nowadays, many, including myself, reverse that and say, no, they came from the Western Mediterranean and came to Egypt. But then there are two more, which I'll just mention, the Denyen and the Equesh. And the Denyen. Could they be Homer's Danaans?
- [23:32]
B
Oh, that'd be fun.
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C
The Equesh. Could they be Homer's Achaeans? And they don't come at the same time. One comes in the first wave and one comes in the second wave. So do we have groups of Mycenaeans in both waves with two names, just like Homer has two names. For them. So we may have them as well.
- [23:53]
A
In that inscription that we talked about at Medinet Habu. And this picture on the side of the picture, there's a crucial clue, isn't there? You've got, as well as all this sea battle y stuff going on, perhaps in the Nile Delta, you've got pictures of wagons filled with men, women and children. You compare that to the Okies and Grapes of Wrath, these guys leaving a drought and sort of heading off looking for peaches to pick in California. This is the kind of world we're talking.
- [24:20]
C
Yes, exactly. They're migrating. These are not warriors just coming in and conducting a raid and then going back home with loot. These are people. And as you say, we can see it in Ramses III on the wall of Medinet Habu. We've got the women, we have the children, we have the oxcarts, we have the Samsonite luggage. They are moving. And yes, say it's probably comparable to the Dust Bowl. 1930s United States moving out of Oklahoma, heading for California. And I think that's. That's the case here. They're. They're fleeing the drought. They're trying to move to a better place.
- [25:02]
B
Okay, so, but fleeing, I mean, that. That sort of sounds very, very passive. But sometimes these, you know, migrations through necessity, as you're describing them, they lead to a great deal of. Of destruction. You yourself have excavated at Megiddo. Anyone who has watched the Omen, since you like a popular reference, will know Megiddo is quite important, the site of Armageddon, if you read a Bible and care about that more than popular culture. So, I mean, what does archaeology actually show about, you know, the transitions of people and the destruction that they bring in their wake?
- [25:35]
C
Yeah. So migration versus invasion. This is an interesting question. And in fact, it pops up at the beginning of the sequel of after 1177, where I take on the Dorian invasion and I say, look, it's not an invasion. At best, it's a migration.
- [25:51]
A
We should explain that little reference quickly. These are the guys who passed through Greece and may be responsible for extinguishing Mycenae or part of that whole jigsaw.
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C
Yes, that's what the later historians, like Herodotus, Thucydides, they claim the Dorians brought an end to the Mycenaeans. But archaeologically, there's no evidence for that. So it's an invasion. That doesn't look like an invasion. And I say, look, it's a migration. And, you know, that may be splitting hairs, but invasions Are usually, you know, quick, dirty, fast. And migrations can take quite a long time. So I think here with the sea peoples and everything, it's more of a migration. But you're right, they are not always passive. Sometimes they're aggressive. And we can see this at some of the cities. And again, let me use Ugarit, where we have the archives. That's one of the reasons they're preserved, is because that city is burned to the ground. There are arrowheads in the walls, there are bodies in the streets. When the French excavated, there was a meter of destruction of ash and wood and everything else. And Ugarit was then abandoned for 400 to 600 years. And we actually. One of the new tablets that was just published says the enemy has overrun our port city and they are advancing on Ugarit. Send me help, Send me reinforcements. Well, they obviously didn't get there because Ugarit is burnt to the ground. And there are other cities like that as well.
- [27:23]
B
Okay. And let's just remind people, Ugarit in today's money is northern Syria is what we're talking about.
- [27:28]
A
And there's this sort of capitalized paradise. It's a sort of Switzerland where full of bankers and merchants sending out expeditions. And maybe not Switzerland. What would be a better analogy? Where's the big sort of mercantile hub today? Guanzhou. It's like the Chinese, these sort of megacities and richer than anywhere else. And sending out sort of mobile department stores. That may be the Uluberun shipwreck that Joe told us about.
- [27:57]
C
It turns out that Ugarit was so important that when it and the Hittites went down at about the same time, our computer simulations have showed that that's what brought the whole network down, was Ugarit and the Hittites coming down at the same time. Which is interesting. But you mentioned Megiddo, Armageddon, Biblical Armageddon.
- [28:15]
A
You've actually dug there. You've held the trowel in your hand.
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C
And I was. I was there for 20 years. My kids have shirts that say I survived Armageddon. Yes.
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B
So.
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C
But yes, there is one of the levels. I mean, Megiddo has 20 levels, one on top of another.
- [28:32]
A
It's like Troy, isn't it? It's one of these archaeological sites, just goes on and on and on.
- [28:36]
C
Exactly. Troy's got nine levels, Megiddo's got 20.
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B
Wow.
- [28:40]
C
And level number seven at Megiddo is destroyed at exactly this time. We don't know what caused it or who caused it, but it is one of the cities that is destroyed right now. Yeah.
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B
Can I. Can I just ask, what is it like standing in a place like Megiddo? Like, when you have, you know, you're standing on top of layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of human history? Do you even think about it? Or are you just sort of so focused on this tiny square of where I'm actually, you know, with my trowel trying to find something.
- [29:07]
C
You feel it with every step you take. Absolutely right. Every step you take, every breath you make, you know, drink.
- [29:15]
B
You've done it again. Okay.
- [29:18]
C
Yes. I actually, a couple years ago, I published a book on University of Chicago's excavations at Megiddo in the 20s and 30s. But I wrote it also from the point of view of having dug there. I was there 1994 to 2014, and I said, as you're walking up the mound, which is now 70ft tall, it had been 110ft tall, but now it's 70 because archeologists have taken off the layers. I said, every step you take, you can feel what's underneath you. And you're wondering, what am I stepping on? Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. There's no feeling like it. And same thing like with Troy. When I go to Troy and I'm wandering around, I'm like, what am I stepping on? What is underneath my feet? If I stopped and dug right where I'm standing, what would I find? And for me, that's the magic of archeology. That's why I keep going into the field every year when I can, and excavating. It's this mystery of what is there that's left to be discovered. And there's a lot left. I mean. Oh, boy. Yeah. I mean, don't even get me started. We've probably found maybe 10% of what there is to be found.
- [30:29]
B
Wow.
- [30:30]
C
People ask me, is there anything left to find? I'm like, we haven't even started. Yeah.
- [30:35]
A
Eric, let's go back to Ugarit again from Megiddo, because one of the only moments I felt you were spoiling. One of my favorite stories in your book is that Jo has in her book and the older books, you get this. The story of the cuneiform tablet that was still being baked when the raiders come. And it's in the oven. And the reason we have it is it's in the oven, but you say it wasn't in the oven. It just fell from the ceiling above or something.
- [31:01]
C
I know, I know. That was such a lovely story. And then we punctured the balloon. Yes. Okay. So that goes back to when I was being taught about the Sea Peoples and all that. One of the critical texts is this letter written on a clay tablet that was found at Ugarit and translated and published very early on. I mean, 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And it says something like, we have seen the. Or the ships of the enemy have come. They. They are burning all of the cities. My troops are away up in Anatolia. My ships are away. I am undefended. Please send help before it's too late. And the story went that the tablet was found by the French excavators in the kiln, ready to be baked, because frequently you would bake these before you sent them, because first of all, it helped preserve it so that it wouldn't shatter, but also so that nobody could change the text. Right. If you've just written it on regular clay, you can smear water on and rewrite it. So the idea was it was being baked in the kiln and the invaders came and burnt the city before it could be sent. And they're like, ooh. And it was incredibly dramatic. Well, when later archaeologists went back and restudied the notes and everything turns out it's not quite as dramatic that it's not in a kiln. It was probably in a basket, a wicker basket.
- [32:31]
A
I love that you can tell this. It's fantastic.
- [32:34]
C
Yeah. And when the palace was destroyed, that basket fell from the second floor down into the courtyard, turning upside down with all the clay tablets still in it. The basket itself disintegrated, but it left the tablets in a pile that looked like they had been in a kiln, even though they hadn't been. So. So if that means that it wasn't in a kiln or anything, that means all sorts of things or implies all sorts of things. One, it might be a copy of a letter that had been sent, or it may be the real letter. But which destruction was it? And which raid? Was it 1207? Or was it 1177? And, you know, did it get sent? Did it not get sent? Anyway, the story kind of collapses a bit. It was wonderful.
- [33:28]
B
Well, you love a collapse.
- [33:29]
D
You.
- [33:31]
B
You're all about the collapse.
- [33:33]
C
I know, I know. But we also have a saying in archaeology. If it's too good to be true, it's probably not true. And that story turned out to be too good to be true. But we now have these other ones where we have the new tablet, newly translated tablet, that does actually say, the enemy has overrun Rasib and Hani. The port city.
- [33:53]
A
They're coming towards us. Six boats have landed.
- [33:55]
C
That's right, exactly. So now we, you know, replaces it. And this is a good story, but I could happily throttle the ancient scribe because instead of saying, the Peleset are here, the Shekelesh are here, the Equis are here, he simply says, the enemy. I'm like, could you tell us who the enemy is, please? Nope. The enemy. But I suspect that he didn't know who they were either. Like, he didn't run down and say, excuse me, excuse me, before you kill everyone, who are you? Oh. And they're like, oh, yeah, we're the Shek Lash. We're going to leave a calling card. So we don't know who it was, but we do know that it happened.
- [34:34]
A
One thing I thought when I heard that was that six boats seems rather little to destroy a major trading city, isn't it?
- [34:40]
C
Yes and no. Yes and no. No. If you look, for example, at the story of the Trojan War, and, yes, we have a huge armada that goes over to rescue Helen. Right. The Face that launched a thousand ships.
- [34:53]
B
Exactly.
- [34:54]
A
And six seems a bit of a swizz.
- [34:56]
C
It does, it does. But if I may input right here, it wasn't a thousand. I actually counted in the catalog of ships. I was very bored. I was taking the train from London down to Penzance.
- [35:09]
A
That's a long trip.
- [35:11]
C
Yeah, it's a long trip with the Buffy car and everything else. But I had, at that time, what was the new translation by Fagl's of the Iliad. And so I. 1,067 ships. So I've been trying to get the, you know, Helen, the face that launched 1067 ships. It hasn't caught on, but I'm trying. But if you look at the earlier. There is an earlier expedition to Troy by Heracles in the time of Laomedon. Right. Like Priam's father, if I remember correctly, could be the grandfather. And he has six ships, and that's it. And he sacks Troy.
- [35:48]
A
But he's Heracles. He's Hercules. I mean, he's lied to you.
- [35:50]
C
Exactly. But that's only six ships.
- [35:52]
A
He's a marvel superhero.
- [35:55]
C
We. I mean, we're told there are, what, 50 people per ship? So even six ships is not that small. It's like 300 people. So saying that six or seven ships have been spied was a goodly number. But we even have gaslighting back then, because one of the texts from. I think it's the governor of Cyprus to The King of Ugari, it says. Actually, are you sure they're not your own people rebelling against you? Have you checked who's on?
- [36:23]
B
I'm like, are you sure your people don't hate you?
- [36:26]
C
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
- [36:28]
A
The Cypriots. We better take a break, Eric. But we could go on like this with our drinking games all afternoon. But take a break. We'll be back to take this forward.
- [36:42]
E
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Book Club, a new podcast from Goal Hanger, hosted by me, Dominic Sambrook, and me, Tabitha Syrett.
- [36:50]
D
As some of you may know, I have been Dominic's producer on the Rest Is History, and we even did a miniseries last year about all things books.
- [36:58]
E
And since we enjoyed that so much, we have decided to roll it out as its own show. So it'll be coming out every Tuesday. Tuesday we'll be doing a different book each time and digging into all the stories behind them.
- [37:10]
D
And we are going to be talking about the historical contexts behind some of the greatest and most famous books of all time. We're going to be digging into the remarkable people behind them, the unexpected stories behind the stories, and also unraveling the plot of each book a bit and delving into the depths of the story.
- [37:28]
E
Now, you don't have to have read.
- [37:29]
A
The books to listen to the show.
- [37:30]
E
But we hope that by the end of each episode, you will be able to pretend to people that you've read them. That is the key thing. And either way, whether you read them or not, we hope that you'll learn lots of fascinating facts, you'll do lots of great stories, and maybe Tabby the odd laugh.
- [37:45]
D
We will be looking at thrilling gothic bodice rippers like Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, as well as iconic stories like the Great Gatsby or Little Women and then also some more modern stuff. So Game of Thrones, Normal people, the Hunger Games, Hamnet, all manner of exciting stories.
- [38:04]
E
So please join us on our journey into all things books. Wherever you get your podcasts, just search for the Book Club every Tuesday and hopefully we will see you there.
- [38:25]
F
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- [38:55]
C
We heard you nine years of bring.
- [38:57]
A
Back the snack wrap and you've won.
- [38:59]
C
But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the hot honey snack wrap. Now you've really won.
- [39:07]
A
Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.
- [39:14]
B
Welcome back. So before the break, Eric was happily taking some of our most cherished stories about the Bronze Age and smashing them to pieces. Like the clay tablets that didn't come from where we thought they'd come. Can I. I mean, at the risk of you ruining this as well. Talk about some of the. Some of the sculptures that have been found in ancient Egypt. Now, these seem to be sculptures of battles with the pen set and. And at the edge of them, there are really interesting things in these, in these sculptures because you have women and children in carts, which is exactly what, you know, you were talking about before, which is the migration of people with everything that they loved and everything that they had. I mean, is that real? Am I reading that wrong or am I completely wrong about that as well?
- [39:55]
C
You're not wrong, but I will correct one thing.
- [39:57]
B
Good. You wouldn't be, Eric, if you did. That's fine. Go on then, Eric.
- [40:02]
C
Let's change the word. They're not sculptures because they're not like freestanding. What they are, it's a drawing. I mean, it's a picture that is inscribed into the wall. I mean, they have put the picture on the wall. So you're looking at a drawing, basically. And not only do we see the naval battle, which is so detailed that people have written books about what the ships look like and all of that.
- [40:28]
A
You'Ve got into some fair detail yourself about the horned helmets and the feathered helmets and the different. Are they different? Are they the Shakalesh and the Peleset?
- [40:36]
C
Yes, but there I'm leaning on my colleagues who have published on that, and I'm trusting what they've said, but we've also got these women and children that we talked about with the oxcarts and the luggage and all of that. And so we've got what's called the push pull effect. Something is pushing them out of their own homeland and something else is pulling them to the new area. And I think in this case, it's drought for both of them. And what they didn't realize, let's say for, you know, for argument's sake, that they are coming from Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, which is where I think they started. And there's a drought there. We now have evidence definitely for a drought in that region. What they did realizes that there was also drought in the area that they were heading to so out of the frying pan into the fire, I think, is the saying. At any rate, they're looking for a new place to live, and they are pretty desperate when they lose to the Egyptians, when especially Ramses III beats them. He says, I settled them in strongholds bound in my name, meaning that he settled them in Egypt, which was his country, but also in Canaan, because the Egyptians controlled that region. And so especially, we know, like Tel Dor is known as a tajeker or sickle city, which is one of the sea peoples. We've also got further north, like up in Byblos, and that area we've got, for example, down south in Canaan. That's where it looks like the Peleset end up, because the Peleset are the Philistines. Right. It's the one that we're pretty sure we know about. And the Philistines, of course, are eventually going to give their name to all of that region when the Romans come in and it becomes Syria, Palestina.
- [42:22]
A
Oh, Herodotus. Yeah, before that.
- [42:24]
C
Yes, exactly. So that is where. And of course, the Philistines, we get the Philistine Pentapolis, the five cities. Right. Ashkelon and Ekron and Gaza and all of that. That is when they get there and the. The Peleset settle down. They actually seem to be, I would say, less aggressive. They seem to have assimilated and actually intermarried. Yeah, and intermarried because there's a couple of grandkids that were excavated a decade ago in Ashkelon, and the DNA shows that they are part Canaanite and part Other. And the computer simulation models say other is most likely Crete or Sicily or Spain. So we do know that that's where the Philistines come from. And in fact, if you look at their pottery, it's long been thought that it was degenerate Mycenaean, if I can put it that way, and degenerate, not in a bad way. Meaning this looks like Mycenaean vessels, you know, the stirrup jars and all that. But it's made with local clay from Cypress or Rhodes or even in what is the Levant today. So I think a lot. I mean, we all think that the Philistines may actually be Mycenaeans who have migrated to the eastern Mediterranean. So we're learning a lot, but we're not there yet. There's a lot more for us to.
- [43:49]
A
Go for in preparation for this. Eric, I went to the Philistine Gallery at the British Museum last week. I was slightly disappointed Because I've had Joe talk about how the Philistines are a lot less philistine than they are made to be in the Bible. That Gath and various of these cities seem to be very sophisticated. But the stuff at the British Museum was pretty cruddy. There were these sort of. These sort of rather nasty sort of clay versions of Egyptian sarcophagi with sort of rather ghoulish face masks on. They weren't great. I mean, they weren't those nice things you get in Mycenae with nice ducks and sort of buffaloes.
- [44:26]
C
Yes, that might be a bit harsh. Some of it's nice. But yes, we're definitely in an era where they're having trouble, I would say.
- [44:36]
B
On sort of, you know, just taking this idea of systems collapse even further. Can we talk about some of the specific areas that we've been talking about? Because, I mean, we've been talking about Troy and that's sort of 1200 B.C. and we were talking about Homer. How much can he be trusted? Is he even a person? You know, everything. Mind blown. So what do we know actually as fact about that?
- [45:00]
C
What do we know and what we don't know? What we know is that we don't know a lot more than we know that it's all a mystery. It's all like you just said, is Homer even a real person? Right, exactly.
- [45:12]
B
Do we know what do we know about anything that appears in Homer being true? I mean, do we know how big Troy was? Do we know? Because Simon Golda was suggesting you were.
- [45:22]
A
Very upset yesterday that he was destroying your Troy.
- [45:25]
B
He painted it like some sort of bargain basement kind of small shack. You know, I was like, hang on a minute, that's not what I read. You know, we could even get into the horse business. But, you know, he just completely traduced what my ideas of what Troy was. What have you found?
- [45:41]
C
Oh, my word. All right, well, we have. We could have like another five episodes just on this, but. Okay, let's see if we can unpack some of that. Okay, so, you know, there are, as you may have already discussed, there are nine levels at Troy. So which one is Homer's Troy? It's probably either Troy, six of which there were many phases.
- [46:01]
A
7A. Some people think that.
- [46:03]
C
So it's either 6H or 7A. Exactly. And in fact, 6H is destroyed 90%, I would say by an earthquake. I mean, 90% chance that it's an earthquake. And I think that's the case. And that's about 1300 BC somewhere. In there. But then the next Troy, 7A is destroyed by humans. That's another example where we have unburied bodies in the streets. We've got arrowheads in the walls, and the arrowheads are Aegean type. I mean, Korfman, the German excavator, recently back 2000, 2003, found those.
- [46:41]
A
And specifically Aegean. That's very nice.
- [46:43]
C
And specifically Aegean. So I think that 6H is an earthquake and 7A is the destruction. But who does the destruction? Is it the Mycenaeans? Is it the Sea peoples? Which is conceivable. And it was also, if you go back in the archaeological records, you know, 6H and 7A. 7A is a rebuilding of 6H. And in fact, one of the earlier excavators, Dortfeld Karl Blaggen from Cincinnati, said to him, you know, we shouldn't have called it 7A. It should be 6I. And Dorfeld said, yeah, it should be the next level of 6. But they said, by this point, it's too late. We got to call it 7A. And that dates to somewhere 1200, you know, 1175, for the destruction of 7A. So I do think that that one of the two is. Is Homer's Troy. But two things. One, I think Homer might have conflated the two of them because 6H is a lovely, wonderful, huge city. The one that you wanted, right, with the big wealthy. Yes. But 7A is that same city now destroyed and inhabited either by people under siege or by people rebuilding from an earthquake. So I tell my students when we study this, and I have an entire seminar that goes a whole semester just on Troy and the Trojan War, I say, what if it's both of them? What if it's 6 and 7? And Homer, who is compiling all this 400 years later, conflates the two he telescopes. And I mean, after all, it's an epic. And that's where the horse comes in. Because there was a German scholar, schackermayer in the 50s, that said that the horse is a metaphor for an earthquake. Because if you think about it, you've got Poseidon as the God of earthquakes. And Poseidon's animal, like Athena had the owl, Poseidon has the horse. So earthquake equals Poseidon equals a horse. Bingo. There's the Trojan horse.
- [48:48]
B
I don't know why I'm wasting time with you, Willie. I want to do his course. Just something rethinking all my life choices.
- [48:56]
C
There you go. Before you do that, you know, as they say. But wait, there's more. You wanted text we have text. What we have is not just Homer. Homer's on the. On the Greek side.
- [49:09]
A
You've got some Hittite stuff, haven't you?
- [49:10]
C
Exactly. From the Hittite, we've got mentions of not just one war at Troy, which they called Wilusa, and not just two and not just three. We have four different conflicts that are fought in this same time period. And so my question, as I always say, is not, was there a Trojan War? I was like, yes, there was.
- [49:32]
A
Which one?
- [49:33]
C
Which one was Homer talking about?
- [49:36]
A
And just to clarify for those who haven't got the geography here, so the Hittites are sitting in sort of close to modern Ankara, in the middle of modern Turkey, just sort of to the northeast of Ankara, is that right?
- [49:47]
C
Yeah, yeah, mostly to the east, but slightly northeast. But they controlled all of Anatolia at this point, all the way to the western coast.
- [49:54]
A
And Troy, which is near the Dardanelles, near Gallipoli, near. All that sort of stuff is on the edge of that world and not completely conquered, but sort of on the satellite city.
- [50:04]
C
Yes. They would be at various points, probably a vassal owned, you know. A vassal to the Hittites. Yes. And so that's why they were interested and they called it Wilusa. And in fact, one of them says that the king of Wilhassa had been deposed by an unknown enemy and the Hittites put him back on the throne. There's another one where they actually sign a mutual defense treaty with a guy named Alexandu of Wilusa. And I mean, you tell me, doesn't that sound like Alexander of Ilios, AKA Paris? So people have been again debating this since about, oh, about 1911. Right. More than 100 years.
- [50:46]
A
This is post Sliman or. Yeah, after Sleeman.
- [50:48]
C
After Sleeman. But just as the Hittite texts were being deciphered first Hittite texts were founded about 1906 at Hattusas. By 1916, we could read Hittite. And so already things start up where they're actually looking to see if they're mentioning the Greeks and such in the Hittite texts.
- [51:09]
A
Eric, let me take you away from Troy now back to Egypt, because you mentioned these two waves of attacks. And let's just go into that a little bit further. The first wave of attack is interesting, isn't it? Because Merneptah's Stella, the tablet that he puts up, is the first mention out of the Bible anywhere of Israel. And this is obviously a crucial marker in the sand in Middle Eastern history. So take us through Merneptah's stela. Am I pronouncing it right?
- [51:40]
C
Yes, yes, yes. And this is. It's absolutely fascinating. Yes. In Merneptah's reign in what I would call 1207 BC. I mean, the actual year depends on what chronology you're following, but Merneptah mentions the Sea Peoples coming for the first time. But in that same year he has an inscription that mentions Israel. And it's the first time that word is used outside the Bible. What we would call an extra biblical reference.
- [52:10]
A
And then in 1187, the Medina Habu for the second inscription, which is the one that records the battle coming down into the delta over land from Israel, Palestine. That is where you first get the peleset, which is the root of Palestinian. Yeah, Philistines and then Palestinians. So these two people who've been rubbing against each other and who are in the headlines every single day today appear within about 13 years of each other.
- [52:36]
C
Yeah. Things go back 3,000 years. Yep.
- [52:39]
A
Extraordinary.
- [52:40]
C
Right, so this inscription, which is like in his fifth year or so, 1207. I'm fascinated by the fact that the Sea Peoples and Israel are mentioned in the exact same year. And in fact, Merneptah seems to be to some degree much more concerned about the Sea Peoples than about Israel. But he has a campaign up to Canaan and he mentions Israel. Israel is laid waste. His seed is not. What's interesting about that mention is it's got a determinative before there's a sign before the name, and that sign indicates what comes next is a people rather than a place. And then he has Israel. So the people of Israel are up there.
- [53:26]
A
But he also implying they're nomadic or what's the implication?
- [53:30]
C
Yes, something like that. Which is where it's kind of interesting, especially if you think about the Exodus. You know, people have argued, when did the Exodus take place? Did the Exodus take place? I mean, if you look at the Bible and add up the years, it should be 1450 BC. But that's the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. There's no. But 1250 BC fits into the general collapse that we're talking about. And so I personally think that if the Trojan War and if the Exodus did take place, and they're not just stories that both of them fit into this period of the collapse, in which case you do have a migration of people coming out of Egypt and going to Canaan.
- [54:15]
B
So just to get this straight in my head, so then you're saying that these people that he refers to with the determinant before it.
- [54:23]
A
The people of Israel.
- [54:24]
B
The people of Israel. But where were they running from, do you think?
- [54:28]
C
He doesn't say. But if they were running from anywhere and if you believe the biblical account, they're running from Egypt. But that's not necessarily so. I mean, this has been a debate.
- [54:38]
A
This is much debated over for centuries, isn't it?
- [54:41]
C
Yeah, decades for sure. But yeah. And there are some people like Israel Finkelstein, who say, no, they were already in Canaan, the Israelites were up in the highlands. In which case, what about the Hyksos?
- [54:54]
A
That's another theory, isn't it? These are Canaanites that invaded and took over Egypt. Some scholars think that, that they retreating.
- [55:02]
C
Back into Canaan is the Exodus, but that's much earlier. Yes, the Hyksos take over Egypt, 1720 to 1550 BC.
- [55:11]
A
600 years before this.
- [55:15]
C
400, 500. Yeah, and the Egyptians expel them. So there are some people that say the story of the Exodus is a folk memory of the expulsion of the Hyksos, which happened much, much, much earlier. But yes, the Hyksos do come down from Canaan.
- [55:32]
A
And in general you're getting throughout history at this early period, a lot of people coming down from what is now Israel, Palestine, Canaan then, which is much poorer, to Egypt, which is the New York, the Bay Area, where all the money's made, it's the rich.
- [55:49]
C
But there again, we're hard pressed to find Canaanites in Egypt itself. So we gotta figure out what the archaeology is telling us versus the story. So it may well be. But I think even if the Israelites are already in Canaan, which I think is quite likely, what they do then is take advantage of the chaos. They are, you know, again, they're taking advantage, they're anti fragile and they come down. I don't think the Israelites could have taken on the Canaanites by themselves. But what if the Canaanite cities like Megiddo, like Hazor, like you know, even Jerusalem had already been destroyed because of earthquakes? The Sea peoples. Then the Israelites come on down. Thank you very much. We'll take it from here.
- [56:38]
A
We're going to be coming back to this in much more detail in our last episode with you, Eric. But in the meantime, this is just, this is such a rich picture. What's so attractive about your theory is that you bring all these different elements together, you have all the different causes and you have all the different stories, you have Troy, you have the Exodus, everything that we know from this period and it all sort of fits Together with a very neat click.
- [57:02]
B
Right?
- [57:02]
C
We dumped it all in. It's everything but the kitchen sink. And then we try to make it fit. Right.
- [57:06]
A
So we're gonna come back to this. Cause this is obviously such incredibly interesting stuff. And as I say, this is the perfect end. You get all the different causes that drought, the collapse of urban civilization. Plus you get every movie you've ever seen about the Middle east, the fall of Troy, the Exodus, the whole thing. And Eric's wonderful book, 1177, the year that civilization collapsed shuts click with a perfect click. Anyway, we are coming back for more with Eric in the next episode. We're gonna take this story forward, but you do not have to wait a week. You can join our club. This is normally Anita's pitch, but I'm.
- [57:44]
B
Going to do it today because you just want me. No, this is so. Can I just say unacceptable.
- [57:50]
A
She normally does the sales pitch, but I will do it today.
- [57:53]
B
And now over to William to tell you why you should join our club.
- [57:57]
A
You can hear Eric immediately go on and tell you about the next exciting chapter of the Bronze Age collapse and how this whole house of cards for falls down. That's all from me, William Dalrymple and me, Anita Arnand.
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C
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
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B
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That I wouldn't get my new contacts.
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In time for this class.
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B
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order.
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D
Oh, sorry.
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B
Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
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C
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- [59:07]
B
I'm so relieved. No problem.
- [59:09]
C
I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [59:10]
F
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