← Empire: World History
Empire: World History
337. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Philistines, Israelites, & Rebuilding The Ruins (Ep 6)
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- [00:01]
William Drymple
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.
- [00:20]
Professor Eric Klein
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- [00:55]
William Drymple
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- [01:17]
Professor Eric Klein
Nine years of bring back the snack
- [01:19]
William Drymple
wrap and you've won.
- [01:20]
Professor Eric Klein
But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the hot honey snack wrap.
- [01:27]
William Drymple
Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Welcome back to Empire. I'm William Drymple, but I'm afraid there is no Anita this week as she is got her back trouble back again and she can't sit down in front of a microphone, poor woman. But we have the great compensation of the company of Professor Eric Klein, who's been taking us through his extraordinary trilogy of books, books on the Bronze Age collapse. We've followed him through the collapse, through the aftermath, and we're now going to talk in this final episode of our series about the recovery, the very different world that emerges after the collapse. Particularly, we're going to look at the Eastern Mediterranean, what happens in Israel, Palestine, what happens in Lebanon, Phoenicia, the early Israelite kingdoms, and the Philistines. Eric, welcome back and thank you for joining us.
- [02:34]
Professor Eric Klein
Thank you. It's a real pleasure to explore this period with you and I'm glad that we can actually end all of this with how people rebuilt after the catastrophe. So there is light at the end of the tunnel, if you will.
- [02:48]
William Drymple
And it is a very different world. It feels completely different, with different names and a very different looking World to the world we had when we opened with this.
- [03:00]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, it's a new world order. It's fundamentally a very different world from what had existed before the collapse. What had existed in the late Bronze Age. Now in the Iron Age, all of the great palace centers are gone. The international diplomatic networks have broken down. The long distance trade was cut. There were supply chain shortages. Literacy disappeared in many areas, especially Greece. What else? Population. Population levels declined significantly. Many fewer occupied sites in the early Iron Age as compared to the late
- [03:39]
William Drymple
Bronze Age population collapse across the region. I mean, equally or.
- [03:45]
Professor Eric Klein
It looks like. It can be sometimes difficult to determine this archeologically, but yes, I give you one example that we've mentioned previously. It used to be thought that the population in Greece had declined 90% through either death or migration. Now that's been ratcheted back. It's not quite as catastrophic. It's only 40 to 60% had died or migrated.
- [04:12]
William Drymple
That's still a.
- [04:13]
Professor Eric Klein
That's still. It's a hefty chunk of change.
- [04:16]
William Drymple
Yes, we'd notice that if it happened today.
- [04:19]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, yeah. So I think the latest estimate I've seen is that there might have been about 600,000 people in Bronze Age Greece in like the 13th century. 600,000. By the 11th century it's down to 330,000. So, you know, that's not quite 50%, but it does give you some numbers. And Mesopotamia, similar things. So there are significant declines in population levels. And everything that we had had, all the beautiful pottery, the monumental architecture, all the sophisticated bronze and gold work, all gives way to much simpler forms. Basically they've gone back, back, they've stepped backwards. It's a lower level of political organization, lower social, lower economic. And now we've got small kingdoms, small city states, tribal groups, villages, rather than huge kingdoms like the Hittites or the Egyptians. So everything is decreased markedly pretty much around the entire area.
- [05:23]
William Drymple
Eric. I mean, the most obvious example of something that I was certainly brought up with and was very familiar to me in my education was obviously the collapse of Rome. Where in a place like Britain you have wonderful Roman villas with floor mosaics and hypercour systems and nice bath houses for people to recover from the fogs of Cirencester or whatever you are. And then some of these places are burnt, some of them are deserted. Some of them become little sort of farmsteads with sort of grotty forges in the middle of lovely mosaics. Is it similar to that or is it fundamentally different?
- [05:59]
Professor Eric Klein
No, no, it's absolutely similar. When you look at A collapse. Whether it's the collapse of Rome or the Maya or Harappan civilization, or in our case, late Bronze Age, if you look very closely, you will notice it's not uniform. Different places go down at different times. And the flip side, the recovery, it didn't happen at the same pace. It didn't happen in the same way in all the regions. Some areas, recovery pretty much right away, relatively quickly. Others, it took, you know, 400 years to recover. So I frequently say it's like a foot race. Everyone's starting at the same starting line, namely the collapse. But everyone finishes at different times and some don't finish at all. So both the collapse is not uniform and the recovery is not uniform.
- [06:58]
William Drymple
I'd like to start in the Eastern Mediterranean, and particularly in this fascinating world where we talked last time, how within a few years of each other, we get the very first reference to Israel. His seed is not in the Merneptah stele. And then a few years later, the Philistines, or the Peleset as the Egyptians call them, turn up. Who are the ancestors, or certainly etymologically, of the modern Palestinians. So this world, which had previously been Canaanite and been in an Egyptian province and run very much from Egypt with the nice wine from Gaza being sent off in special sealed vessels down to be drunk by Ramesses II in Thebes or whatever, this world is changed completely. Suddenly we get two new players who were very minor players, if at all before this, and are now suddenly dominating. So let's talk first of all about the Philistines. Cause they obviously get a very bad rap in the Bible and are made to be eternal enemy of the Israelites that they are still to this day. To be a Philistine is to be someone without culture. Is that biblical picture fair, or do archaeologists have a very different view of the Philistines?
- [08:17]
Professor Eric Klein
It's not fair. We have a very different view. They're the bad boys of the Bible, if you will. And there are other small kingdoms that appear too. These two are not alone. You've also got the Edomites, the Moabites, the Ammonites, Jebusites. Yeah, all the Ites, as I tell my students, all the ites. So, but what has happened is, as you said, it's replaced the Canaanite society that was there in the Bronze Age. And now we have these new groups.
- [08:47]
William Drymple
Let's quickly talk about the Canaanites. For those who are not familiar with them. This is a group that stretches right up to Ugarit, which is now in Modern Syria. So it's not just modern Israel, Palestine and modern Lebanon, but it's actually as far north as the Turkish border almost. And some of the best Canaanite sources we have are again from Ugarit, where you have figures like BAAL and all those Canaanite gods being discussed.
- [09:15]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes, it stretches all the way from what is now the Sinai all the way up, as you say, to the border between Turkey and Syria. Right. So we have northern Canaan, we have central Canaan, we have southern Canaan. Right. And we do have all kinds of information, including like the amarna letters, the 14th century Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, Beirut, Byblos. They're all Canaanite cities that are interacting and were all vassal to the Egyptians at that point back in the Bronze Age. That is now all ended. The cities keep going. You know, we still obviously have Jerusalem and Beirut and Damascus. Even today. We've also got them in the Iron Age, but the Egyptians are no longer in control. And now what we get are these smaller kingdoms like Israelites, like Philistines and like Phoenicians, whom we will talk about. But the Philistines show up. They are the Peleset, as near as we can figure. They are one of these groups of the sea peoples that Ramses III specifically fights. They're one of the groups that he names. And then when he beat them, he settled them, as he says, in strongholds bound in my name, meaning in Egypt and in Canaan, because they're still barely in control up there. I mean, this is 1177. The Egyptians will be gone by 1140. So, you know, 30, 40 years, they're
- [10:50]
William Drymple
gone later, overseeing these newcomers and then leaving them to their own devices.
- [10:55]
Professor Eric Klein
Exactly. And so the Philistines take advantage of this and they settle along the coast
- [11:02]
William Drymple
in southern Canaan, places like Gaza, Ashkelon, modern Gaza Strip, modern Israel, coastal Israel, and inland, sort of halfway to Jerusalem. Is that right?
- [11:15]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes, you are correct. They have five major cities, what we call the Pentapolis, literally five cities. And this becomes Philistia. Philistia. Let's see, the five are, as you mentioned, there is Gaza, there's Ashkelon, there's Ashdod, there's Ekron, and there's Gath. And most of these four, at least four of them have been excavated. So Gaza has been touched.
- [11:42]
William Drymple
And ongoing excavations, this is stuff we're learning about still.
- [11:44]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, ongoing excavations. In fact, discoveries for the Philistines at Ashkelon. Just in the last, say, decade or two, Ekron was excavated in the especially the 80s and the 90s, Gath is still being excavated. And so, yeah, we're still learning all about these. So the Philistines take over the coast and we've also got the Israelites a bit more inland.
- [12:10]
William Drymple
Now, in the Hebrew Bible, you very much have the impression of, you know, the poet king, like David sitting with his harp and this highly civilized figure in a kind of wonderful Jerusalem, not quite the Temple of Solomon yet, but something approaching that. And the Philistines are depicted in the biblical narrative as these sort of barely civilized savages and sort of Chippendale style bodybuilders on the coast. The reality dug up by archaeologists is almost the reverse, isn't it? The big cities are the Philistines and in fact, the slightly sort of shaggy looking shepherds and sort of rural landlords are the Israelites.
- [12:54]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes, again, I think the Philistines have gotten a bad rap. They were identified as early as about 1899, and we started being able to identify Philistine pottery, Philistine Canaanite culture, shall we say. And Philistine pottery, as we've mentioned, looks distinctly Mycenaean.
- [13:17]
William Drymple
It's quite pretty nice. Ducks, Lots of sort of seabirds.
- [13:22]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, yeah, yeah. With their own unique motifs, you know, birds, ducks, fish. You can always. When you're excavating and, you know, when you find philosophers.
- [13:35]
William Drymple
You've done this yourself.
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Professor Eric Klein
Exactly, yes. Right. And I have friends who have been excavating at a number of these Philistine sites, so. But it definitely looks Mycenaean derived, but it's with local clay and Cypriot derived too.
- [13:49]
William Drymple
That's quite a borrowing of Cyprus.
- [13:51]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, to some degree. To some degree, yeah. We've got Cypriot influence as well.
- [13:58]
William Drymple
Now, Eric, there's a controversy I'd love to discuss with you because I've been reading around this and I came across a long article in Harry, the Israeli Newspaper, by Shirley Bendor Evian of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and she slightly argues against what you consistently argue in your books that the Philistines are Incomers. She says that they're not Aegean pirates after all. And she has quite an elaborate and complicated argument about why they're actually just the local peoples who've been on the move and like Yoroki's the hardscrabble, and they're looking for new pastures, looking for new lands. Do you not agree with her? This is an argument you've come across and reject.
- [14:45]
Professor Eric Klein
I'm going to agree to disagree with Shirley. Yes. Shirley, a good friend of mine, we dug together at Megiddo really interesting ideas, really interesting research that she does. But this one, yeah, I'm going to push back. They are others, I would say they are from outside. They're not local, at least not to begin with. I do think they come from the Aegean or somewhere else like that. That makes sense. You know, if you want to use the Bible, it says that they come from Crete. I don't think we need to use that. But the pottery, as I mentioned, looks very much like degenerate Mycenaean, as if you've got people from the Aegean now living in the region of Canaan. But I also think that the newest DNA evidence that has been found in Ashkelon. In Ashkelon, exactly where they excavated a Philistine cemetery. Okay, that's fine. We know it's Philistine from the pottery and everything else there. But they also excavated the settlement, shall we say, not the cemetery, but the settlement next to it. And in some of those houses, they have what we call intramural burials that is under the floor. This is what you frequently do, especially with little kids.
- [16:06]
William Drymple
It sounds unhygienic. You don't want a dead body under your living room.
- [16:11]
Professor Eric Klein
Well, if it's the dead body of your child, you want them to be close to you. So, you know, hygiene is one thing. Having your dead kid near you is quite another. So sure. Anyway, they excavated, and from four of those infant burials, because they really were young, that were underneath the floors, they were able to get DNA out of them. And the DNA, when they looked at it, and I know this isn't how genetics works, but these kids were basically about 40% local Canaanite and 60% other. And then when you ran the computer models, the other. The most likely came up as Crete. And then after that, the other possibilities were Sicily, Sardinia and Spain. So what I would argue, and what they suggested in that article that was put out about the DNA, is that we have the Peleset, if you will, coming in, settling down, but peacefully, one looks like, because they assimilate and they have children.
- [17:25]
William Drymple
They're intermarrying.
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Professor Eric Klein
They're intermarrying. Now, that might have been forcible or it might have been, you know, do we know if.
- [17:31]
William Drymple
If the. If the locals, the Canaanites are. Are women and the. You can tell male and female DNA, can't you? In these test?
- [17:40]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes, but I'm not actually sure. I'd have to go back and look at the actual study.
- [17:46]
William Drymple
The impression in the study was that it was a peaceful coming together of two different peoples and a mixed population emerging.
- [17:54]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes. Well, the archeology of what we're seeing at these five sites and more is suggesting. I mean, Asafiosor Landau from University of Haifa, in his book that came out in 2010, suggests that it was a much more peaceful infiltration and assimilation than one might expect. And this DNA, I think, kind of corroborates that, because however it happened, there are kids that were the result of unions of local Canaanites and incoming others. These infants that were found are not the Sea Peoples themselves or even the children they're from almost a century later. So I would say they're like the grandkids or the great grandkids of the Sea Peoples. But to my mind, that means that what Shirley Ben Dora Evian is suggesting is that Philistines are basically Canaanites or Levantians, that maybe half of them, of each person, they were half.
- [18:55]
William Drymple
That that makes sense.
- [18:56]
Professor Eric Klein
But the other half is somebody else. Yeah.
- [18:59]
William Drymple
So you can come across a compromise here. You and Shirley can find a way to.
- [19:04]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes. So Shirley and I can continue to be friends. Yes. So, yes, that's where I think it's coming from. So you do have external people that come in. The very interesting thing, though, is that same study showed that within, like, another century or so, that genetic material had basically dissolved and you could no longer see the outside influence. So it was kind of temporary. And then everybody became local again. And you're back to being, you know, Philistine Israelites, whatever.
- [19:36]
William Drymple
Or maybe they were just a small minority who got sort of bred out of. Yeah, maybe. Now, the other thing which has been turning up in some recent articles is a second Philistine state.
- [19:46]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes.
- [19:47]
William Drymple
Which is further north around Aleppo. And we get the same word of Peleset or Palashtu being used far to the north of what is now Palestine or Philistia.
- [20:01]
Professor Eric Klein
Right. So this is from the Neo Hittite city states, such as Carchemish and Aleppo and others.
- [20:09]
William Drymple
This is on the border of modern Turkey and Syria, the sort of area that was hit by the earthquake four or five years ago. Yes.
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Professor Eric Klein
And these are the remnants of the Hittites that have survived. Right. These are the Neo Hittite states. And there's one site, Tell Tayana, that Tim Harrison, University of Chicago, is excavating and so on. So some of the texts up there, which are written in hieroglyphic Luvian, which again, is a remnant of the Hittite empire. There is a mention that had been deciphered as Wallace with a W. Wallacein, and then a Number of years ago that was re read with a P instead of a W. And instead of Wollastin it was Palestine. Palestine.
- [21:00]
William Drymple
But it's not where Palestine is. It's far to the north.
- [21:03]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, it's far to the north. And so there's been a whole debate now, was there a second or secondary state up there, or was that where the Peleset first landed and then came south? And then came south. And it is in the region of Ugarit and Omuru. I mean, it does fit with what Ramses III has said.
- [21:26]
William Drymple
So these Cretans or whatever, they land at Ugarit, then they work their way south and they end up in Ashkelon and Gaza.
- [21:35]
Professor Eric Klein
Exactly. And interesting too, even before that text had been reinterpreted, the pottery that was found at sites like Teltayanate and elsewhere in that region, it's Aegean. It's originally Aegean. There's Mycenaean and then it's this Mycenaean local or Mycenaean light, if you will. So to say that that the Pelesant and all that are from the Aegean actually makes sense. But do you then have an earlier or simultaneous kingdom up north called Palestine or Palestine up there, or Walestine? That debate is still ongoing. We are still debating that right now. But it's absolutely fascinating that we might have had originally the Philistines up north and that they migrated south, but. But that would fit with the general picture.
- [22:29]
William Drymple
Now the even more contested story, of course, is the origins of the Israelites. And this runs into the whole question of the historicity of the Bible. And there's a whole range of different positions from those who think the Bible is the word of God and every word of it is true, through to the bunch of guys in Denmark, the Copenhagen school, who think it's all just kind of story like the Iliad or they all just. It's basically literature with gods and that we shouldn't treat it as history. You kind of pivot in the middle of this, don't you? Sort of halfway between the two schools. Is that right?
- [23:05]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes. I would be like Israel Finkelstein, with whom I dug at Megiddo for 20 years. He calls himself usually a centrist. And I would say, yes, I'm a centrist, yes, I am in the middle between the minimalists and the maximalist. Right. You just referred to some of them, the so called Copenhagen school, which said that history is at a minimum in the Bible. I'm in the middle.
- [23:30]
William Drymple
You believe that the Bible is a useful tool that can Be used, but with care and selectively and just using what you can.
- [23:38]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes.
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William Drymple
And realizing it's written many, many centuries later. Like Homer.
- [23:42]
Professor Eric Klein
Like Homer. You took the words out of my mouth. Absolutely. Looking at what the Bible says and using it. Yes, there are nuggets of history in there. I mean, the Bible is not written as a history book and it's not. It was never meant to be used that way. But that doesn't mean that there aren't nuggets of history.
- [24:03]
William Drymple
It doesn't contain folk memories and so on.
- [24:05]
Professor Eric Klein
Folk memories and even actual facts. When you get down into the first millennium, there's a lot of things that are absolutely sure they're correct. The kings and the battles and all that. And so I use the, the Bible with a grain of salt. I mean, to be heretical, I use it as I do any other ancient source. So the Ugaritic archives, the Hittite archives, New Kingdom records, Neo Assyrian records, Hebrew Bible, I treat them all pretty much the same way. Can I believe this? What can I use? What can I not use? And yes, Homer, same way. I do think that there are parts of the Iliad that can be used, especially the obvious things like the catalog of ships in book two. Right. There are memories that are definitely Boris Tusk helmets. Right. They're not using them in Homer's day.
- [24:58]
William Drymple
And yet there they are in the text.
- [25:00]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, and there they are. Exactly. But, you know, four spoke wheels versus six spoke. So Israel and the history and the Bible, same type of thing.
- [25:10]
William Drymple
So in the Bible, we obviously have the story of the people of Israel who arrive with Abraham, then go off to Egypt, and you have the Exodus and they come back and then you have this sort of picture of total destruction during the age of Joshua, when they smash through Jericho, knock down walls, then assault all the Canaanites there, violently wipe them out. There's a sort of prehistoric Nakba when everyone is expelled. You do not find that archaeologically, I understand.
- [25:43]
Professor Eric Klein
No, we do not find that archaeologically. And in fact, what's interesting is if you look at the Bible itself, you actually have two different stories and two different versions. If you look at the Book of Joshua, it's exactly as you just described. It's a genocide. They come in and they kill everybody and take over. But if you look at the Book of Judges, it's a completely different story.
- [26:08]
William Drymple
What does it say there?
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Professor Eric Klein
Well, they come in, it's much more peaceful. They assimilate. They live side by side in the same towns, it says. And it's much more civilized if you will. So the Bible itself has two different versions.
- [26:24]
William Drymple
How interesting. Yeah, I. So often with the Bible, you've got two different creations, you've got two different arrivals of the Israelites.
- [26:30]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, always. So, you know, people believe what they want to believe. I. From the archeology and from what people, my colleagues have said, I would go with the more peaceful, the assimilation. But there we get into. I mean. And again, this is a huge debate within archeology, which is very, very fun to teach. And in fact, we could have six series, you know, six part series just on that.
- [26:56]
William Drymple
Come back, Eric, come back.
- [26:58]
Professor Eric Klein
So we have, like Albright, William F. Albright, the dean of American biblical archeology. He held to the biblical narrative. He said conquest narrative. Yes. Just like, you know, like we had in Joshua.
- [27:10]
William Drymple
And he was in the 50s and. Or 40s.
- [27:13]
Professor Eric Klein
From the. The 30s. 40s, 50s, yeah, exactly.
- [27:17]
William Drymple
And then he is displaced by a Brit, Kathleen Kenyon, who excavates Jericho and doesn't find what is in the Bible.
- [27:25]
Professor Eric Klein
Exactly. She doesn't find it. This has been actually another Brit, Garstang, John Garstang, who excavated a lot up in Anatolia, the Hittites and all that. He actually had excavated at Jericho and said he had found evidence of the destruction by Joshua and everybody. But the pottery didn't look right. And people called his findings into question. And so they brought in Kathleen Kenyon.
- [27:51]
William Drymple
Dame Kathleen Kenyon.
- [27:53]
Professor Eric Klein
Dame Kathleen Kenyon, exactly. Daughter of the director of the British Museum, wonderful archeologist, dug at Samaria and Jerusalem, and she came in specifically to look at the pottery.
- [28:07]
William Drymple
This is now early 60s, late 50s.
- [28:10]
Professor Eric Klein
50s, 50s, 60s. Somewhere in there. Yep. And she promptly said what every archaeologist ever born has always said. We need to do more digging, we need to excavate more. Yeah. And she then said, this is not Joshua's destruction, this is a thousand years earlier. This is not 1200. It's more like 2200 or 2300, 2400 BC.
- [28:36]
William Drymple
So are we now in a world where the early Israelites are just Canaanites that have taken on a new religion and they're doing different things, like not eating pork or so on, or are we talking about. There's another theory that they're brigands, Apiru, which might be the same word as Hebrews, or not. Take us through that.
- [28:58]
Professor Eric Klein
It depends to whom you speak. And in fact, in which decade you were speaking to them, because, yes, we had Albrecht saying it was an invasion. We then had a couple German scholars saying it was peaceful infiltration. We then had scholars saying no, no, they were always there. They were proto Israelites, meaning they were already Canaanites. So we're still arguing about it.
- [29:27]
William Drymple
And we do get these sort of interesting things whereby, for example, the Canaanite lunar deities, Lucifer, ends up becoming a demon in the New Testament or indeed baal, Beelzebub. And Beelzebub. So you get the demonization of Canaanite deities. So implying that it's a religious change.
- [29:48]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah. As I've mentioned in various lectures, again here in Israel, like in Greece, it's a porous membrane. So most of Canaanite society and culture goes away, overtaken by the, the small kingdoms we're talking about now. But especially in religion, it sticks around. And you still get these gods and goddesses continuing on in here.
- [30:11]
William Drymple
And El, as in Samuel and Bethel, Bethlehem. Yeah. Who is another version of Yahweh.
- [30:21]
Professor Eric Klein
Exactly right. And El and baal, they're all Canaanite gods that then can continue on.
- [30:27]
William Drymple
And Yahweh has a wife in some inscriptions.
- [30:30]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes.
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William Drymple
Asra, this will be a surprise to many people here. Just before we go to the break, let's quickly deal with God's wife.
- [30:37]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah. Did God have a wife? There's actually a book with that title by Bill Deaver. Exactly. There's all kinds of things. And none of these are settled. We're all still arguing about them in archaeology and biblical studies and all of that. And even some of the things, things that we thought we knew. Like for example, if you find a site where they're eating pork, that's obviously not an Israelite site. It would be a Philistine site, for example. And that still seems to hold true. But there are, you know, always some exceptions.
- [31:09]
William Drymple
Gath is one of these places where we have. I think you do have pork boats. That's right. Because it's on the Philistine.
- [31:14]
Professor Eric Klein
You do. Gath is one of the Philistines. Exactly right. But where you have a. What's called a four roomed house. A four room house. They always said that was Israelite. Well, maybe not. And there was a type of pottery, the collared rimmed jar. Oh, if you find that type of pottery, you're in an Israelite settlement. No, not so much. So this is a problem. But you know, it's a problem in all of archeology when you get too close to something for which there's been a grandiose law. Law made. Right. If it's four room house, if it's iron. Yeah. There are always exceptions. So the upshot is we don't know where the Israelites are from, we don't know where they lived, we don't know what they are.
- [31:59]
William Drymple
A lot of questions for something of which a modern nation state depends in a sense.
- [32:04]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, always. Always. This is the problem with doing something like that. But I'm going to go with their mostly local Canaanites and that they took advantage of of this. But if you do want to hold on to the Exodus narrative, I would say that the time of the chaos is the best time for such an exodus to have happened. But as I tell my students, you don't have to have a huge exodus all at once. It could have been a much smaller series of migrations over time. And much like Homer, I think telescopes things into the Trojan War. So I think the biblical writers telescope things into what we know as the Exodus and it may have taken over a much longer period of time.
- [32:51]
William Drymple
Eric, we are just gripped by this. But after the break we are going to discuss the top of the class from your post claps scenario which are the Phoenicians. After the break,
- [33:13]
Professor Eric Klein
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry
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William Drymple
that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class.
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Professor Eric Klein
I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry.
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William Drymple
I almost couldn't breathe when I saw
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Professor Eric Klein
the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts lifelock. How can I help?
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William Drymple
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Professor Eric Klein
What do I do? My refund though.
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William Drymple
I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this. Lifelock fixes identity theft guaranteed and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage. I'm so relieved.
- [34:02]
Professor Eric Klein
No problem.
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William Drymple
Problem.
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Professor Eric Klein
I'll be with you every step of the way.
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William Drymple
One in four was a fraud. Paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
- [34:13]
Professor Eric Klein
Your planet is now marked for death.
- [34:17]
William Drymple
Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four First Steps is now streaming on Disney plus.
- [34:21]
Professor Eric Klein
We will protect you as a family.
- [34:23]
William Drymple
Light them up, Johnny. Marvel's first family is certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
- [34:28]
Professor Eric Klein
That is fantastic.
- [34:30]
William Drymple
And critics say it's one of the best superhero movies of all time. Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four first steps now streaming on Disney. Rated PG 13. What time is it, Ben? It's clobber time. Welcome back. Well, Eric Klein is still with us for the final half episode of our amazing series on the Bronzer's Age collapse. Very much inspired by Eric's books 1177, the year civilization collapsed, and after 1177 BC, the survival of civilizations. Now, at the end of the second volume, after 1177, you kind of rank the different civilizations and how they cope with this sort of terrible crisis that takes place at this time. And the people that come top of the class are the people who by the recovery period are known as the Phoenicians, but who are actually just the people that have been living. The Canaanites that have been living in the middle, middle of Canaan all along and who are the kind of most commercially minded. The big seafarers. Take us through the Phoenicians and where they come from and where they go.
- [35:37]
Professor Eric Klein
Absolutely. So the Phoenicians are basically the Canaanites in central Canaan, what today we would consider to be Lebanon.
- [35:46]
William Drymple
Your book is blurbed by our friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is himself a Phoenician stroke Lebanese superstar.
- [35:54]
Professor Eric Klein
Absolutely. And in fact, I borrowed from him in, I think it was 2014, he had a book that he put out called Antifragile. And to my mind, that is how one describes the Phoenicians. They are Antifragile, meaning that they flourished in a time of chaos. They took advantage of it. So, yes, I'm quite indebted to him for that idea. So the Phoenicians, they are the Canaanites that survive the collapse in central Canaan again today, Lebanon. But, you know, as you know, they would not have called themselves Phoenicians. That's the later name. That's what Herodotus calls them.
- [36:33]
William Drymple
It's the Greek name for these guys.
- [36:35]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, they would have said Phoenician. What's that? I'm from Tyre, I'm from Sidon, I am from Byblos, I'm from Beirut. They would have identified with that.
- [36:45]
William Drymple
This is actually something you see very much at this period, isn't it? People identify with their cities very strongly in many, many places and that we're trying to impose sort of nations on people who were often just city states.
- [36:59]
Professor Eric Klein
I'm actually wondering if the fact that they were decentralized, if you will, that it was a series of city states rather than a big kingdom or empire, if that is what allowed them. Did that allow them to survive? Were they more resilient because of that, that they're. You know, one of the things we talk about with the systems collapse is that the central economy, Coll. Well, if you don't have a central economy, there's nothing to collapse. If you don't have a centralized government, there's nothing to collapse. So maybe they were able to survive precisely because they were decentralized.
- [37:36]
William Drymple
Take us through these guys. So at the beginning of this series five episodes ago, Joe told us about how the Ugarit people were these great merchants with ships running out of this port full of all the goodies from Afghanistan, from Cornwall, you know, stopping off, selling things, making a huge profit. Ugarit goes down. But that same spirit survives in towns like Byblos, Tyre and Sidon.
- [38:02]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes. In fact, this is where they are antifragile down in the Phoenician cities. They take advantage of the chaos and in particular, they take advantage of the destruction of Ugarit. When Ugarit is destroyed, it's not rebuilt and reinhabited for another 400 to 600 years. The Phoenicians say, ah, excuse us, and they step into the, you know, into the breach. And so, as some of my colleagues have said, the Mediterranean becomes a Phoenician lake. Right. They take over.
- [38:38]
William Drymple
What allows these people to be so successful? Just, it's that they've got a mercantile mindset, they've got better boats. What, what is it? What's their USP then?
- [38:47]
Professor Eric Klein
It's an excellent question. What, what I would argue, like, just off the top of my head, out of all the people, the Bronze Age ships, seafaring and navies, the Phoenicians are the ones that survive. I mean, the Hittites had a navy. They don't survive. Mycenaeans and Minoans, they more than likely had their own boats. They're not in shape to do anything.
- [39:09]
William Drymple
They had to go to the Trojan War. Yeah, they had to get there somehow.
- [39:12]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, exactly. There's their thousand ships all gone, right? Egypt, they had a navy. They are now not in a position. It would only be people like Cyprus and the Phoenicians that have ships, navy, and are still in a position to do something about it. Lo and behold, those are the two groups that take over the Mediterranean in the Iron Age.
- [39:35]
William Drymple
You hinted in the last episode that the Cypriots and the Phoenicians may actually be sort of working together or even regard themselves as one people, that they have this mercantile, naval based sort of merchant navy that's now taking over the Mediterranean. And just so we establish this, they're going out to North Africa, they're going to Spain, they're even going down the African coast. Is that right?
- [40:02]
Professor Eric Klein
They're going all over the place. Yeah. And in fact, if you want to really intertwine them, we know the Phoenicians were on Cyprus at this time, so we do know that. So the Phoenicians and the Cypriots, I say in my book, I'm not sure if they're competitors or colleagues. I would go more with that. Their colleagues, at this point, they don't seem to be fighting. And definitely in most of the places, like on Crete and on mainland Greece, where we find Phoenician stuff, we also find Cypriot stuff, but on Cyprus itself, and this is a bit of a problem in the Iron Age, we don't have that many inscriptions on Cyprus, but it does look like the Phoenicians have a toehold, a foothold on Cyprus. So I do think that they're kind of acting in tandem rather than in competition. But, you know, for some of these cities, like Tyre and Sidon and Byblos, we do have inscriptions at the cities. We know the names of the kings. Right. Not just Hiram of Tyre from the Bible, but we know, you know, the predecessors. So we can actually reconstruct the names of the kings in the Phoenician cities during this time period, which means we're getting a pretty detailed history of what's going on. But we don't have the economic records per se from there. But we do know what the Neo Assyrians wanted of them and those goods.
- [41:27]
William Drymple
Now, we've managed in this miniseries to encompass the fall of Troy, the Exodus, great chunks of the Bible. One story we haven't included yet is Dido and Aeneas. So Dido, Queen of Carthage, the founding of Carthage take us there from the Phoenician heartland.
- [41:46]
Professor Eric Klein
So the Phoenicians become the Carthaginians. Right. When Rome fights the Punic wars, they are fighting against the descendants of the
- [41:55]
William Drymple
Phoenicians who worship versions of the Canaanite God still. But in the middle of what's now Tunisia.
- [42:01]
Professor Eric Klein
Right, exactly right. And you've got new city, you've got Carthage and all that. So, yeah. And it does look like the story of Dido fleeing from one of the Phoenician cities and going over to that region. The earliest. The archeology shows that the earliest pottery, architecture, all that does come from, like the 8th century. It does fit the story or the time, the context of the story of Dido. Now, again, how much faith can you put In a story like that, hard to tell. But the archaeology does not, you know, disown it. You know, it's possible.
- [42:41]
William Drymple
And take us beyond Carthage. They found Cadiz, Is that right?
- [42:45]
Professor Eric Klein
In Spain? Yeah, yeah. They're all the way over there.
- [42:47]
William Drymple
What are they doing there? That's a long way from home.
- [42:49]
Professor Eric Klein
Well, and this is where the newest archeology is getting more and more interesting. We are now finding, and by we, I mean all my colleagues are finding, that the Phoenicians were going over to Spain, to Iberia, definitely by the 8th and 9th centuries, possibly by the 10th, maybe even the 11th centuries, which means right after the collapse. And they appear to be going after silver, at least that's what it looks like. They're bringing silver back that you could mine in Iberia, in Cadiz and various areas. And the earliest Phoenician pottery and settlements definitely go back 9th century, maybe even 10th and 11th. So this is where the newest finds in archeology. It's very exciting time to be doing this. And we're finding more and more connections that we've got. And when they're analyzing silver in hordes that have been found in what is today modern day Israel and elsewhere, they're finding that among other places, it is silver from Spain.
- [43:54]
William Drymple
So at the beginning of this series, we were in a very globalized world where Lapis from Afghanistan was kind of meeting in a ship with tin from Cornwall. And we're kind of back there again. By what period? How long has it taken for us to get back to this?
- [44:11]
Professor Eric Klein
Good question. And I don't have a definitive answer, but in my mind we are back to that globalized network. We're back to a small world network. By the early 8th century BC, we had had this network back in The
- [44:25]
William Drymple
Bronze Age, 200 year sort of interregnum,
- [44:29]
Professor Eric Klein
I would say 400 at the most.
- [44:30]
William Drymple
400, yeah.
- [44:31]
Professor Eric Klein
And I put it down that late because of Greece. Greece is the last one back of the ones that made it back, leaving out the Hittites and all that. Of the groups that are trying to make it back, Greece is the. And they're back by the early 8th century. Some of the early parts of the network are already up and running, which
- [44:52]
William Drymple
is the period when Homer's writing. Just to quickly put that in there,
- [44:56]
Professor Eric Klein
Homer's going to be 750, 700 at the latest, but early 8th century, 776 BC, first Olympics. And that's why you mentioned you made
- [45:08]
William Drymple
a reference your next book is going to be.
- [45:10]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, right. You referenced the trilogy and I'm working on the third book in the unintended trilogy, because I never meant to do this. It was the one book and then the sequel. And this trilogy will go from the. The third one will go from the early 8th century down through the death of Alexander the Great. And it's going to be the 776 BC, the clashing of civilizations.
- [45:35]
William Drymple
Brilliant. In this case, this is Persia versus Sparta and Athens.
- [45:41]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes, Persia versus Greeks, but it's also Athens versus Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. And it's, of course, Alexander the Great versus the rest of the world, if you will. But what has happened is by the early 8th century, we've got this network back, but there are bits and pieces that are already up and running, as I say, by at least the 10th century and maybe even the 11th. And that is where Phoenicians and Cypriots come. Come in. And that's why they're at the top of my list.
- [46:12]
William Drymple
They're your star performers.
- [46:14]
Professor Eric Klein
They're my star performers, exactly. If your society collapses, you should emulate the Phoenicians.
- [46:22]
William Drymple
Before we go to that, I'm going to ask you to close the series with your reasons why these guys, you think, succeed while others fail. But before we go there, we started this series with Joseph Joquin, and her big thesis in her last book is how far the west learns from the East. The ideas that we thought are central to Western civilization are coming in, in her view, a lot of them from the Levant beyond. Now, one of these things is the idea of the Alphabet. How does that get to Greece? Tell us that story.
- [46:56]
Professor Eric Klein
So the Phoenicians, they do not invent the Alphabet. Alphabet, but they standardized it. The Alphabet had been around already for a couple hundred years. Even Ugarit had already had a version of the Alphabet before it collapsed. But what the Phoenicians do is standardize it and then spread it. So they bring their standardized Alphabet to Greece, where the Greeks add in vowels.
- [47:20]
William Drymple
That's a Greek innovation, is it?
- [47:22]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes, they take some of the letters and make them into vowels. Right.
- [47:25]
William Drymple
And in some Semitic. Semitic languages, still, we don't have vowels. I mean, Arabic doesn't have vowels.
- [47:30]
Professor Eric Klein
Yes, yeah, Right. Exactly. Right. So, yeah, So I kind of. I see it as the Greek saying, thank you, we'll take the Alphabet. And look, we've improved it. It's right. But they also. The Phoenicians also bring the Alphabet to Italy and it becomes the Latin Alphabet. And of course, we are still using the Latin Alphabet today to write English, French, French, German, Italian, Spanish. I mean, we're using the Latin Alphabet. So if you want, we're still using the Phoenician Alphabet. So we are. I mean, that's one of the, you know, we are the successors.
- [48:07]
William Drymple
That's very nice. Can you.
- [48:08]
Professor Eric Klein
Can you say that we are using a version of the finishing Alphabet? Absolutely, yes.
- [48:12]
William Drymple
That's a very nice thing. So take us back then to the lessons. We've. We've had six episodes, we've had six hours of extraordinary and absolutely fascinating textual stuff with people like Stephen Fry and Simon Goldhill. We've had archaeology from you and archeology and text from Joe Quinn. What are the lessons to be taken from this? Who are the survivors? Why are they doing better than other peoples? What. As we approach this era of climate change, of. Of possible upheavals ahead, I mean, it feels a very fragile moment. What are the lessons of the Bronze Age collapse for us today?
- [48:56]
Professor Eric Klein
This is a question. Yes. So I wanted to give readers some hope towards the end of the book and some takeaways.
- [49:02]
William Drymple
We need it. We need it at this particular moment.
- [49:04]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, we definitely do. So I created a table of, like, seven takeaways, seven common sense things that you should know. But I would also say, you know, in the spirit of ending on a good high note, that it is amazing how resilient people are that they can bounce back. So, like, when we study collapse, it's very easy to focus in on the destruction, the loss and all of that, but. And certainly, you know, people suffered. There was a very real loss. Like I say, the collapse of the late Bronze Age is only really comparable to the collapse of the Roman Empire. I mean, it was catastrophic. In some ways, it was even worse.
- [49:47]
William Drymple
Why would you say that?
- [49:48]
Professor Eric Klein
Well, because we lost so much. We absolutely lost so much. I mean, even with the fall of Rome, you still got the Eastern Roman Empire. That keeps going for another thousand years, Right? You know, Byzantium, Constantinople. Right. So, you know, and even Rome, you know, we teach our kids over here in the United States. Rome fell in 476 or something like that? No, no, it took the fifth century, it took 100 years. So anyway. But it also took 100 years for the late Bronze Age to collapse. So my 1177 is just a benchmark there. But the thing is, in the aftermath of the late Bronze Age collapse, they didn't just give up, they rebuilt. They adapted. Some just coped, some adapted, some transformed. Cypriots and Phoenicians, they transformed, created whole new societies, cities to some degree, like in Greece, they were more simple than they had been, but then they gradually grew and we get great things after that. I mean, look at the Greeks. They went on to create small things like, you know, oh, democracy and small buildings like the Parthenon, you know, little things like that. So they flourished. And basically what happens is, and I argue this in the book in the aftermath, it's not a dark age, it's the Iron Age. It's the period of invention, it's the period of innovation. And so in my takeaways, I focused in on that. The lessons that we can get from the Bronze Age collapse. And one of the things I would say is be careful about being interconnected. It will bring you up to the greatest heights, but it will also bring you down to the lowest level. Clothes.
- [51:35]
William Drymple
Grow your own vegetables.
- [51:37]
Professor Eric Klein
Exactly. Grow your own vegetables.
- [51:39]
William Drymple
Right.
- [51:39]
Professor Eric Klein
When it's working well, it's great. When it's not working well, you know, you can't get toilet paper or computer chips or cars or anything like that. But I do say, don't be isolationist.
- [51:50]
William Drymple
We're not off to Montana with a, with a, with a shotgun.
- [51:53]
Professor Eric Klein
And no, yeah, I wouldn't do that. I would not run out to Montana and hide out with a shotgun. No. You need to keep your friends. Friends. You need to be self sufficient, but depend on your neighbors. Help them out, they help you out, all of that. Because when you're working together, you're much more likely to survive. But along those lines, you need to be inventive, you need to be innovative.
- [52:16]
William Drymple
Adaptable.
- [52:17]
Professor Eric Klein
Adaptable, absolutely. And this is where things got me worried. It used to be that people said, like Carol Bell, wonderful archeologist, she's say tin in the ancient world was like, is like petroleum today. Well, yeah, it was and it still is. I think it's more like rare earths like lithium that are used now to make chips.
- [52:41]
William Drymple
It was a rare earth. Of course it was.
- [52:43]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah. That's where we need to find other alternatives and not depend on those. And again, look at the pandemic. When there was a shortage, suddenly we couldn't get cars, we couldn't get computers because you couldn't get the chips. So innovation, inventiveness, that's incredibly important. The other things I would say, and not everybody will like me to hear the say this, but we need to prepare for extreme weather conditions. We really do. They're happening more and more frequently. I think there's no denying that you're looking at climate change, whether it's heating and cooling, whatever. We're definitely we're getting more extreme weather conditions. Let's just put it that way.
- [53:23]
William Drymple
That way, every single summer, the Mediterranean is on fire. Yeah, we see it.
- [53:28]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah. Wildfires in California and Greece. My personal feeling is, what is the harm in preparing for extreme weather? Because if it comes, you're ready. And if it doesn't come, what have you lost? So I would prepare for extreme weather conditions.
- [53:45]
William Drymple
I live on a farm where I grow my own vegetables on the edge of Delhi. But the water, water, which we depend on has disappeared now beyond all the boreholes.
- [53:54]
Professor Eric Klein
There you go.
- [53:56]
William Drymple
When it gets hot in summer, we have to have it brought in. And if there was a. If that water did not come, we would have to move out of this farm.
- [54:04]
Professor Eric Klein
Exactly. So two things to work off of that. One, I was fortunate enough when I was a kid to watch John Wooden coach the last couple of years of UCLA Bruins basketball, back when they won 88 games in a row. And he used to tell his teams that if you are failing to prepare, then you're preparing to fail. So we need to prepare just in case. But water, you're absolutely right. Water is essential. And that's one of the points that I make.
- [54:37]
William Drymple
It did for the Heptites.
- [54:38]
Professor Eric Klein
Yeah, exactly. The Hittites were the odd man out in terms of. Of not being on a river system, and they're the ones that fail. And I've been told on pretty good authority, and it's happening already, that the wars in the next century, many of them will be fought over over water. Control of water. Absolutely. So that is also a takeaway. Be very careful about your water resources.
- [55:02]
William Drymple
I am from Scotland. One thing we do not lack is rain. Anyway.
- [55:07]
Professor Eric Klein
Well, good. Well, good. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I think my last point was, and I think most historians would agree, you got to keep your working class happy. Right? Keep your, you know, the lower class. You got to keep them happy or they're going to be bad repercussions. So. And I think we see that with the internal rebellions and such back then. Yeah.
- [55:27]
William Drymple
Eric Klein, this has been a complete pleasure. I have. You were with me all my Christmas holiday reading your wonderful books. I've still got. Got the Tell Elimana letters to come and it sounds like I've got a third volume of the trilogy to go when it comes out.
- [55:42]
Professor Eric Klein
Eventually. Eventually.
- [55:44]
William Drymple
Thank you so, so much for being with us. We'd love to get you back on the show another time, but for the moment, Eric, thank you. It's goodbye from me. Anita will be back in the next episode where we will be starting a spectacular new series and I have so enjoyed the reading for this on the extraordinary life of Chairman Mao, who is one of the most important and controversial figures in history and someone who I certainly knew almost nothing about and didn't realize how little I knew until I dived into this series. So strongly recommend the next six episodes. Goodbye from me. William Drimple and Anita will be back in the next episode.