What causes cultures to decline and fall?

Summary

History Extra Podcast – "What causes cultures to decline and fall?"

Release Date: November 26, 2025
Host: Matt Elton (Immediate Media)
Guests: Luke Kemp, Caroline Dodds Pennock, Islam Issa

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the complex question of why cultures decline and fall, challenging popular images of sudden collapse and total disappearance. Drawing on the new BBC television series "Rise and Fall," three distinguished historians—Luke Kemp, Caroline Dodds Pennock, and Islam Issa—discuss the nuanced factors behind civilization change, the resilience and continuity of cultures, how narratives are shaped by the victors, and what lessons history may offer for our own era.

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Key Themes and Discussion Points

1. What Do We Mean by "Collapse"?

• Luke Kemp emphasizes that "collapse" is not an ancient apocalypse but refers to the breakdown of power structures (state, economic, population), not the total ending of cultures. It is a process with varied costs, benefits, and outcomes.

  "Collapse is essentially about the breakdown of different types of power structures... When all these different power systems start to fall together, we often refer to it as a societal collapse." (03:53)

• Caroline Dodds Pennock challenges the common view that collapse means disappearance, reminding listeners about survivors and enduring cultural elements.

• Islam Issa notes that even the most powerful societies have felt themselves undefeatable and yet have fallen—often never foreseeing the possibility.

  "They all fall, so to speak, for different reasons, which I think is fascinating. But...there are similarities in the sense that they didn’t think they would fall. And I think there’s a huge lesson in that." (05:55)

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2. Case Studies in Collapse

A. Ancient Egypt and the Ptolemies (06:56)

• Islam Issa outlines the end of the millennia-long Pharaonic period, the rule of the Ptolemies, and the transition to Roman control.
• Discussion of Cleopatra VII, the bias of Roman sources in shaping her legacy, and the limited Egyptian voices due to destruction (e.g., Library of Alexandria).

  "Much of the writing came from Octavian... who ultimately defeated her to become the first Roman emperor." (08:51)

• Longstanding issues noted: economic hardship, Roman interference, social upheaval, sibling rivalry for the throne.

B. Aztec Empire and the Spanish Conquest (12:03)

• Caroline Dodds Pennock describes Tenochtitlan as a vast, sophisticated, gender-relatively-egalitarian city ruling over millions, but not immune to external threats.
• Discusses the immense cultural loss after Spanish conquest, likening destruction to the Library of Alexandria.
• Stresses that indigenous resilience carried through:

  "A million people still speak the Aztec language of Nahuatl in Mexico today... Their society remains vibrant, even in the face of devastating disease, warfare, [and] enslavement." (14:03)

C. Parallels and Common Dynamics

• Luke Kemp synthesizes comparisons:
  • Collapse arises from both internal vulnerabilities (inequality, poor leadership, rigid systems) and external hazards (invasion, climate, disease).
  • Narratives of collapse often come from victors’ and elites’ perspectives—the "1% view of history."

    "While the power structure often collapses... the people and the cultures usually endure." (17:51)

• Rome’s depopulation was more due to supply system breakdown than mass death—"most moved away when the breadbasket of Egypt was lost." (25:04)

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3. Artifacts and Cultural Continuity (20:24)

• Caroline: The "Codex Aubin" (“Book of Days”) as a rare indigenous artifact surviving conquest, demonstrating historical continuity through imagery and record-keeping.
• Islam: Egyptian identity as composite (Pharaonic, Roman, Coptic, etc.)—exemplified by a Horus figurine in Roman military garb, showing cultural amalgamation.

  "The item... Horus is a vital God... looks Roman." (22:41)

• Luke: The Moreau head of Augustus, found in Egypt but buried in Nubia, illustrates both Rome’s outreach and its vulnerability.
• Continuity is visible in symbolism—like Tenochtitlan’s eagle-on-cactus image, now the Mexican flag.

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4. Fragility and Resilience: Which Endures? (26:35)

• Luke Kemp: Empires and ruling dynasties are fragile; languages, identities, and local cultures are more enduring.

• Caroline: Power shifts were common in Mesoamerica; the Spanish acted as just another—albeit more thorough—dominant power. Tribute systems and social hierarchies largely continued, even under new rulers.

  "So the Spanish actually only replicate almost what the Aztecs themselves had done 100 years earlier..." (27:43)

• Islam Issa: Highlights the persistence of culture and Alexandrian/Egyptian identity despite repeated rises and falls.

• Identity and tradition adapt and persist, even as political systems change or disappear.

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5. The Experience of "Collapse" Varies (32:26)

• The impact depends on one's social position and location. For some, life was upended (Roman Britain); for others (rural areas), little changed, apart from tax collectors or language.
• But diseases post-conquest in the Americas caused catastrophic mortality—up to 90% population loss—transforming societies at the deepest level.

  "You're talking about a population decimation of maybe 90%, 100 years after the invasion in central Mexico." (33:18)

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6. Signs and Symptoms of Decline (36:39)

• Inequality is a major, often underdiscussed, precursor.
  • Aztecs prided themselves on equality, but growing disparities enabled internal dissent and facilitated conquest through alliances with discontented subject peoples (e.g., Tlaxcalans).
• External shocks rarely work alone; they exploit existing internal fractures.

"The areas that were more likely to rebel were the ones that were more heavily taxed and extracted from." (39:07)

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7. Who Controls the Narrative? (40:50)

• Victors often rewrite history, erasing records to legitimate their rule (as both the Aztecs and Spanish did).
• The podcast draws attention to the ongoing struggle over who tells the story—critical for understanding both past and present crises.

  "I'm almost more interested in the other end, like who's going to tell that story and how will we remember it, and who is going to control that narrative in the years to come." (40:50)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Islam Issa (On perspective):

  "Cleopatra was closer in time to the invention of the iPhone than the pyramids being built." (40:03)

• Caroline Dodds Pennock (On continuity):

  "Their society remains vibrant, even in the face of devastating disease, warfare, enslavement." (14:03)

• Luke Kemp (On resilience):

  "The church actually grows in power after the fall of Rome. So some institutions...tend to be much more resilient than others." (26:55)

• Luke Kemp (On popular misconceptions):

  "Collapse is not the end to a social order, nor that everyone dies...it's a process with costs and benefits, winners and losers." (03:53)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:53 — Guests introduce themselves
• 03:53 — Defining "collapse" and societal fall
• 06:56 — Ancient Egypt, Cleopatra, and the Ptolemies
• 12:03 — The Aztec Empire’s complexity and fall
• 17:51 — Comparing collapse across cultures
• 20:24 — Objects and artifacts as evidence of continuity
• 26:55 — Fragility vs. resilience: what survives?
• 32:26 — The variable experience of collapse
• 33:18 — Disease and transformative change in the Americas
• 36:39 — Signs and symptoms of decline: the role of inequality
• 40:03 — Lessons, rewritings of history, and the importance of perspective
• 42:49 — The cyclical nature of rise and fall, and warnings for the present/future

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Conclusion & Lessons

• Collapse is best understood as a transformation of political and social structures rather than an apocalypse.
• The common narrative of sudden disappearance erases the persistence of cultures, languages, and people.
• Historical lessons are double-edged: every generation overestimates the permanence of its own epoch, and the victors often shape subsequent narratives.
• Internal fractures (especially inequality) and external shocks together drive societies towards major change.
• The control and rewriting of history is ongoing—who tells our present-day "collapse" story will shape how the future remembers us.

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Episode Host: Matt Elton
Guests:
• Luke Kemp (Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge)
• Caroline Dodds Pennock (University of Sheffield)
• Islam Issa (Birmingham City University)

Based on the new BBC series "Rise and Fall."

Transcript

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[B]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Why do cultures fall? Do the inhabitants of a civilization in decline always know that it's happening? And were disease and invasion not the only factors to blame for the final days of the Aztec Empire? These are some of the questions tackled in the new BBC TV series Rise and Fall, and I was joined by three of its experts, Luke Kemp, Caroline Dodds Pennock, and Islam Issa, to learn more about these stories and why they're more complicated than we might at first expect. I kicked off by asking the three experts to introduce themselves, beginning with Luke.

[A]

I am Luke Kemp. I'm a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. In short, my job is to think about the very worst case scenarios for the future. Not just global societal collapse, but also potentially even things like human extinction. But in the light of my work, I've also tried to look not just to the future, but to the past.

[D]

I'm Islam Esser. I'm a British Egyptian historian. I've written a history of the city of Alexandria and I'm professor of Public Humanities at the Birmingham City University.

[C]

I'm Caroline Dodspennock. I'm professor of International History at the University of Sheffield. I started as a historian of the Aztec Mexica people and then more recently have been working on indigenous American travellers to Europe after 1492.

[B]

Thank you all so much for being here. We are here today to talk about the BBC's new series of civilisations, which is subtitled Rise and Fall. To kick us off, could I go to you, Luke, first? What do we mean when we talk about a culture falling or collapsing?

[A]

It's important to be clear. This doesn't mean an ancient apocalypse, it doesn't mean the complete end to a social order, nor that everyone dies. Collapse is a process with costs and benefits, winners and losers. And to me at least, collapse is essentially about the breakdown of different types of power structures. When the state fails, we call it state failure or state collapse. When the economy breaks down, we refer to it as an economic bust or an economic collapse. And when a population fails, falls dramatically, we call it a population bust. When all these different power systems start to fall together, we often refer to it as a societal collapse. But of course it does vary across each individual case study.

[B]

And to ask a question of all of you, I suppose, why do you think it's revealing to focus on collapse or fall? Why do you think the approach of this series is particularly revealing?

[A]

One of the aims is always to use history to inform both an understanding of where we are now and and also to understand can we take lessons to better navigate the challenges we face today? One thing viewers will see is that many of the challenges faced by these past societies are reflected in our own. Things like competition, warfare, climate change, internal rebellion, inequality, poor leadership. These are all things that have happened throughout history. And different societies have had different ways of dealing with these, for better and for worse. And it's only by looking at the track record, we can have a better understanding of how to think for our own future as well.

[B]

And Caroline, what's your sense of this?

[C]

I guess for me, I would sort of almost take a similar but opposite approach, which is to say that what's so interesting about this is how relatable it is, but it's more in terms of the people who experience this. So as a cultural historian, I come at this in terms of thinking about how these societies, which are often othered they're created as kind of, especially the Aztec Mexica, who I study as these kind of barbarian past civilizations. They actually faced very relatable challenges, very relatable problems, and also lived in incredibly sophisticated, sophisticated, complex ways that are not so very different to our own Islam.

[B]

What's your take on this?

[D]

Well, we have these great civilizations who were all powerful, who'd made huge advances in so many different fields, who thought that they were the ultimate epoch, that they were immovable, undefeatable, and they all fall, so to speak, for different reasons, which I think is fascinating. But there's also a lot of comparative points. Despite them being in different parts of the world and during different eras, there are similarities in the sense that they didn't think they would fall. And I think there's a huge lesson in that. So for me, that's Rise and fall transcends time and space.

[B]

And that comparative approach is really interesting and I wanted to return to it later on in the discussion. Before we do that, I thought it was worth focusing in a little bit on some of the specific areas that the series covers. Islam. Can I come to you first? Can you talk us through the disastrous period that ancient Egypt faced, which the series focuses on, and if you think our view of it and its major place is unfair?

[D]

Yeah, those are big questions. The series focuses on the Ptolemies and it's essentially the move or the end of the Pharaonic period. So in Egypt, we wouldn't call it Ancient Egypt, we'd call it the Pharaonic period, when there was a pharaoh. And it's the end of that period and the move towards Roman rule. When we think that Egypt had a pharaoh since the 4th millennium BC and that the Ptolemies were in power from the 4th century BC and then moving to the 1st century BC, so to the time of the most famous Cleopatra, Cleopatra vii. So her ancestors, the Ptolemies, had been ruling Egypt for about three centuries. And like I said, Egypt has had a pharaoh for about three millennia when it was unified around 3100 BC. So it's the end of a very significant time in Egypt's history, the Pharaonic period, and it's a move towards that Roman. In terms of the second part of that question, the fact that the Romans were victorious against the Ptolemies and against Cleopatra in particular, means that a lot of the sources that we have about that time, and particularly about that figure of Cleopatra, are extremely biased because they tried to show how somebody, a woman and a foreign woman at that Egyptian woman, could have caused such havoc to two of their great warriors, two of their great leaders in Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Plus the fact that the library of Alexandria was destroyed and that ancient or Ptolemaic Alexandria is either underwater or under the ground, means that we have very scarce sources, if any, from Cleopatra herself and her people about that period and about her. And much of the writing came from Octavian, who is the person who ultimately defeated her to become the first Roman emperor.

[B]

So is it the case then, that some of our understanding of this period of history is still being refracted through propaganda from the time?

[D]

I'd say the answer is yes, that much of what we know is from the Roman sources, either from Octavian or from texts that he commissioned. And even later historians like Plutarch, for example, who really made Cleopatra's suicide quite famous through his writing and through whom even writers like Shakespeare used that as a source. We do see that the. The propaganda from the Romans does continue through today in some way. But I think it was coming in a way because the story of the fall of the Pharaonic Egypt, or the Ptolemies, started much before Cleopatra. Her father was Ptolemy xii. They were mostly called Ptolemy and Cleopatra. So she's Cleopatra vii. Her father, Ptolemy xii, had been borrowing money from the Romans and actually using it to bribe Roman politicians. He sought Roman support in today's money. 10,000 tal balance he paid to Rome is probably about 200 million pounds so that they could reinvade Alexandria for him. Her ancestors prior to that, Ptolemy X had borrowed money from the Romans and had put down, really, Egypt as collateral. Interestingly, that if Egypt doesn't have a legitimate heir, that the Romans could capitalise on that. And Julius Caesar knew that. And so Cleopatra faced many challenges and Roman interference had already started when she took power in 51 BC.

[B]

So there are longer term, more significant problems at work here, rather than just simply this being the story of one person and their decisions.

[D]

Yes, it's the story of culture, as this series shows. It's the story of dynasties, social systems, theologies, all of These things come together to create both the rise of a civilization and indeed the fall of a civilization. In the case of Cleopatra vii, we had factors like a reduced harvest, so there were economic factors, hunger, civil unrest, inflation. So all sorts of issues, controllable and uncontrollable natural disasters or economic decisions that began the process or sped up the process of the fall. And then we also have personal things like the sibling rivalry that's very much at the center of the story of the Ptolemies, that she did fight against her siblings, and that she did choose to ally herself with Julius Caesar in the hope that their son, who's this fantastical, hardly believable amalgamation of two huge names, Julius Caesar and Cleopatra Caesarion, little Caesar, that she placed her bets on him becoming heir to Rome, which didn't end up happening when Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, because he was followed by his great nephew Octavian, and her plan was ultimately shattered.

[B]

It's really interesting to get into the history of some of these stories, Caroline, to come to you. What were the 16th century experiences of the Aztec Empire? And I suppose in what ways do you think they're a reminder of how complex these stories can be?

[C]

Well, I suppose to take the second part of your question first, the complexity of these stories is really fascinating because actually our image of this period is filtered almost entirely through post invasion sources after the Spanish invade the Aztecs, because one of the things that they do as soon as they arrive and conquer the city is to instigate a huge destruction of this vast pictographic culture, this incredible legal records, religious records, political records. People have compared it to the conflagration of the Library of Alexandria. You have the destruction of an enormous body of knowledge. So again, we're reading these stories through. Classically, the history is written by the victors, right? And so as a historian of the indigenous world, I'm pushing all the time to try and read the opposite. And so in some ways it's incredibly similar, but in others very different. This is not a society that actually is experiencing particular hunger most of the time or particular civil unrest. It's an enormous city that dominates over a huge empire. So at its largest, which is when the Spanish arrived in 1519, the Aztec Empire stretches across about 80,000 square miles, 200,000 square kilometers, mostly in what's now Mexico. It's maybe 5 to 6 million vassal peoples in over 500 allied and subject cities. So what you have is this vast but not entirely stable empire that is ruled over by a city that even in modern terms is incredibly sophisticated. You have relative gender egalitarianism in some ways, compared to most societies of that period. Rich artistic and poetic cultures, loving families, but also an enormous focus on being a successful, warlike culture. That's how they see themselves, a culture that can dominate this enormous empire.

[B]

And do you think there's any aspects of this story that we should focus on much more than we do?

[C]

I think that is the question that any indigenous historian would want to be asked. Because really, although we're talking about rise and fall here, and very much it is one of the fastest collapses of an enormous empire that exists in history. I think one of the things that gets forgotten is the people that endure after the fall. So when we use words like collapse, it leads us to think that the entire thing simply fell to pieces. And it almost plays into a really dangerous trope, which is the idea that indigenous civilizations disappeared, that they don't exist anymore. A million people still speak the Aztec language of Nahuatl in Mexico today. Their descendants become part of the colonial infrastruct. They intermarry with the Spanish. Much of their culture continues. Their society remains vibrant, even in the face of devastating disease, warfare, enslavement. And so I know it kind of cuts against the point of the series a little bit, which is to look at that moment of rise and fall, but that continuity is what I would want to emphasize as an Aztec historian.

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[B]

Luke, listening to this. Obviously what we're talking about here is a range of complications and some parallels, but also a story that needs careful navigating. What's your sense of the extent to which we can draw draw parallels around the moments at which cultures start to decline?

[A]

I believe we can. When we think about collapse or even resilience, we tend to think about risk. And risk is composed of four factors. The hazard, vulnerability, exposure and response. Your hazard is essentially the thing that causes damage. So this could be a tsunami or it could be an invader. Your vulnerability is the fact that you don't have the infrastructure, for instance, to withstand the tsunami. Tsunami, you're vulnerable to being hit by the damages incurred by the hazard. The exposure, of course, had you actually stand in the path to the tsunami and the response is how you react can make it better or worse. In the case of every single one of these case studies, they have a range of different vulnerabilities and hazards. Rome has both Germanic mercenaries operating inside of it, but it also has Germanic invaders on the outside as well. It faces, yes, things like climatic change, drought, disease, but it also has an incredibly sclerotic set of institutions, a huge amount of wealth inequality and elite competition, particularly during the third century crisis. Likewise, the shogunate has both Commodore perry invade during 1853. And they also have a very rigid class structure. They have inflation, economic hardship happening internally. It's never one thing. It's always a constellation of both internal vulnerability and external hazards coming together. And two things I want to pick up on here, which I think also run across all the case studies Islam mentioned one, which is we often have a somewhat distorted view of many of these case studies. Either they're often told from the victors and the invaders, and quite frequently they're told from the powerful. I describe this as the 1% view of history, that in general, we tend to have access to written documents that only come from essentially scribes working on behalf of kings or the rich. And likewise, most tools, architecture, buildings, et cetera, that we have easy access to, tend to do things like palaces, ziggurats, pyramids, etc, we have far less idea of what the average person is during these collapses. And I think one thing Caroline said here is very important, which is, while the power structure often collapses, or parts of it do, the people and the cultures usually endure. And we see this across every single one of the case studies. Obviously, in the case of the Aztecs, even things like the taxation system are picked up by the invaders, for instance, and much notability go on to basically serve under the new Spanish conquistadors. And similarly with Rome, it's not like the Germans take over and decide to change everything. They adopt Roman language, customs, taxation system, et cetera. So while we think about this as collapse, it's really about the collapse of a power structure, not the entire civilization in terms of its people and culture.

[B]

You mentioned there, the built environment and artifacts. And something I wanted to pick up a little bit is whether there's any objects or artifacts in the series or from these cultures that you'd like to highlight that a particular interesting or I suppose, reflective of these wider themes. Caroline, can I come to you first?

[C]

Fascinatingly, the objects do in fact reflect what Luke was saying, which is that we tend to get an elite point of view through these artefacts, because certainly for the Aztec world, what survives is what's rich and what's beautiful and often what's been passed down to us, because this is a collaboration with the British Museum, the series. So it's some of the great treasures of the museum that are being highlighted in civilizations. I got a preview and it was just wonderful the way that they're being filmed. But it does, again, point us towards often elite peoples and points of view. And there was one that I wanted to mention, because it doesn't, which is what's called the Codex Aubin, which is also a Tonalpo Huali. That's what the indigenous people would call it, a book of days. And this is an incredible, tiny, beautifully inscribed book which uses the indigenous calendar and imagery alongside alphabetic, a Nahuatl text to tell the histories of The Aztec people from before the invasion up until 1604, I think it is that it ends. And it's just wonderful for me because you see the ways in which people in the pre invasion and then in the invasion period and after are recording and rewriting their histories and making them meaningful in the present. Because the indigenous Mesoamerican peoples believed in a cyclical history where things would come round again and would be repeated. And so they highlight not just this happened in this day or this ruler, but particular kind of exemplary moments and events. And the Codex is so wonderful for that. You see the foundation of Tenochtitlan. You see the moments of invasion. You see moments when people see their culture being revived and revitalized and continuing after the invasion. And it's all through these incredible tiny drawings, which we were lucky to see in the museum itself at the launch. I had never seen it up close, and it was. It was really, really wonderful.

[D]

I'm going to offer a slight provocation, actually, which is that from an Egyptian perspective, and it could be seen as slightly different. We believe we have seven columns, we call them of Egyptian identity. And Pharaonic is just one of them. So we are Pharaonic, Greco Roman, Coptic, Muslim, Arab, African and Mediterranean. And why do I say that? Because the rise and fall actually reminds me of the kind of. It's a phrase we use with tragic heroes, for example, rise and fall. A tragic era is neither fully good nor fully bad, but a mixture of both. And in many ways, the rise and fall in the Egyptian context is neither fully good nor fully bad, because Egypt adapts to Roman ideas and ideals, and the Roman becomes one of the Egyptian identities through its fascinating history. And the Roman identity of Egypt gets an Egyptian touch to it. And so on that note, I think cultures can adapt and amalgamate, not just replace one another. And so the item that comes to mind for me is Horus. Horus was such an important God. He's the son of Isis and Osiris. And Cleopatra obviously saw herself as Isis championed herself as Isis. So Horus was also Caesarian, in a way, the son of Caesar and Cleopatra. So Horus is a vital God. And there's an item in the British Museum in which Horus is dressed as a Roman centurion. And so we see that the cultures amalgamate, but we also see that the Egyptian God survives. Horus survives through every stage of Egyptian culture and Egyptian rule, no matter who's there. And I think this item's fascinating because this. This vital Egyptian God looks Roman.

[C]

I was just really interested because actually, although the object I mentioned is completely different to what Islam says, it in many ways reflects the same kind of thing, which is that you have the indigenous culture adapting and yet maintaining itself through time. So one of the iconic images in the codex is of the foundation of Mexico, of the city of Tenochtitlan, which is the eagle on the cactus at the place which is now Mexico City. And of course that's now on the Mexican flag. And so that image that history has evolved and maintained through time in a really similar way.

[A]

And actually what I wanted to briefly mention as well was there is the Moreau head of Augustus in the program as well. And this is a plaster head of Augustus which was actually made in Egypt and then found in Nubia. But in many ways it shows both the stretch of Rome, you know, it is essentially the longest running large scale empire in all of Europe. No one gets even close to that size until Napoleon, who only managed to hold his empire together for roughly a decade. But it also shows how in many ways fragile that was. When you actually dig up the head, it has little bits of sand in it because it was buried eventually during the fall of Rome. And in many ways it just simply shows that people adapted. They basically just got rid of one emperor and adapted to a new form of living under non Romanic rule. And it also, I think, has a much bigger story here as well. Rome, one of the reasons so many people move away from Rome. Rome is often seen as this apocalyptic story of the city goes from a million people to only 30,000 souls. And yet it's not like most of them died. Instead, most of them leave because they get the cure Anoni, which is basically the free provision of grain from Egypt severed. So in many ways it was the loss of the breadbasket of Egypt that really leads to the city of Rome becoming so depopulated. And Rome in many ways is like the Aztec empire that we're referring to. It's this one city dominating a far larger expanse of territory. And the head is indicative of that. It's essentially a piece of propaganda trying to valorise one particular ruler.

[B]

Between us, we've raised there quite a lot of complications, I suppose, and some challenges to the idea of a culture falling in inverted commas. Do you think these stories are revealing of the fact that these cultures are fragile or that they're resilient? Or is there something about both of those themes to be said here? Luke, can I come to you?

[A]

I think it shows that some things are much more resilient Than others. When it came to the Aztec empire, as Carolyn mentioned, the political apparatus falls apart relatively quickly, and the same is true of Rome as well. In both cases, other factors endure for a very long period of time. The language nahuatl exists today. Latin transforms into all the Latin languages we know, Whether it's Spanish, French, or Portuguese. And in the case of Rome, the church actually grows in power after the fall of Rome. So some institutions, and I think in general, both local people and culture, tend to be much more resilient than others. But what's usually more fragile here is the empire itself, the political power unit. And it's very important in most these cases not to conflate too much the idea of civilization with the idea of empire.

[C]

I do agree. I think that it is very much the case that it's the dynasty or the ruling group rather than the culture itself, which perhaps rises and falls. And in the case of Tenochtitlan, one of the differences to some of the other examples is that it is a relatively recently arrived ruling power. So they only arrive in the valley of Mexico around 200 years before the Spanish arrive. They only come to power in the valley of Mexico in the 1430s. So less than 100 years before the Spanish arrival. And actually, for me, there's a sense in which the arrival of the Spanish isn't that much of a transformation, because what you have in that region is a negotiated power pyramid where people are constantly rising and falling, different cities are rising to the top. So the Spanish actually only replicate almost what the Aztecs themselves had done 100 years earlier when they conquered the Tepanecs of the Capotzalco, which is another city in the region, and put themselves into the top spot in that power pyramid. And that's one of the weaknesses, I suppose you could say, of this region is that they're used to people coming in and taking over. So they don't recognize the threat that the Spanish provide to their way of life and to their political structure, because they don't understand the absolutist view that the Spanish have of religion and monarchy. They think this is simply another power player in the region. You might choose to ally with them, you might choose to resist resist them. You might choose to negotiate with them. And that's perhaps the error Moctezuma makes at the start. So in some ways, although you might say that Moctezuma and the dynasty, the Mexica dynasty, fall the pyramid, the structure remains quite similar for a period of time, at least until European invasion becomes so great that it fully establishes those kind of political structures. And even then, as Luke said, tribute structures, taxation structures, labor structures, a lot of those things continue.

[A]

Actually, a really fascinating example of this is if you go to the Real Palacio, the royal palace in Madrid, there's two very interesting figures that flank the front door. They're an entirely different garb compared to all the other statues, and they're actually the figures of Atahuapa, the Sapa Inca, the last emperor of the Inca Empire, and Moctezuma. And interestingly, from the point of view of the Spanish, they never see either the Incan empire or the Aztec empire as having collapsed. They simply inherited both the empires. And whoever takes on the crown of the West Indies also becomes the new emperor, essentially the new king of both the Incan and Aztec empires. So from the point of view of the Spanish, there's actually no collapse here at all. There's no fall per se, it's just simply an exchange of empire. We call in Latin the translatio imperae, the passing on of empire.

[C]

And you might call it a sort of strategic decision on the part of the indigenous rulers to do this, but they actually play on that. They quite quickly realise the way that the Spanish are perceiving this and they start making their own claims as the previous rulers, the previous emperors, to be recognized, to be rewarded within the colonial system. My book On Savage Shores is about, in part, some of those indigenous people who come to Spain and promote themselves as the rightful heirs of the rulers of these lands. And so the descendants of Atualpa, for example, get huge amounts of money from the Spanish crown, pensions in perpetuity. The descendants, Moctezuma, have tried in recent years to reassert their claims in court to millions and millions that they say they're owed. Having been promised a pension in perpetuity, they were not successful. But it's really fascinating, Isam.

[B]

It seems like, as with a lot of this discussion, the ideas of resilience or fragility are a matter of perspective. Do you think that chimes with you as well?

[D]

What chimes with me is fragility being linked to certain systems and identity being a more enduring factor. In the case of Alexandria, you know, my history of Alexandria, I write about a series of rises and falls, rise and fall and rise and fall, and yet something like an Alexandrian identity is maintained, and Egypt is an example of that. Egyptian identity remains very strong through today, the Pharaonic aspect of it, Roman aspect of it, and so on. So I think identity to me is what's Sort of ever present. And then the systems that come in, whether they're social or political systems, do create change. They are fragile, they fluctuate. But the tradition, for example, that identity brings remains at the fore and, as we've said, can adapt and so on.

[A]

One thing to very briefly add, there is what's resilient and fragile also depends upon who you are and where you are. For instance, if you are in the city of Rome during its collapse, it does seem like a place of catastrophe. And likewise, if you're in Roman Britain during the withdrawal of the Roman Empire, your entire life changes within a single generation. You go from living potentially in a small market town where there's a currency, columns of Roman soldiers, bath houses, and people speaking Latin, to suddenly a world where very few people speak Latin. You no longer have a common currency, you don't see any Roman soldiers at all. And the bathhouses and elite structures are all falling into dilapidation. And yet, if you're a Spanish peasant, for instance, you might not really notice anything change, apart from suddenly your tax collector rocks up less frequently and is speaking a Germanic tongue rather than Latin. So it's important to also remember that collapse varies across time and space as well.

[C]

And I wouldn't want to make people think that the same is true, for example, for the people of Tanochtitlan. I've talked a lot about resilience and continuity, but the introduction of unfamiliar diseases to which they have no immunity, something we're all too familiar with now, does produce absolutely devastating consequences in the Americas, generally in central Mexico, particularly, because it's so urbanized, so the close proximity of people means that from the smallpox epidemic, through epidemics of influenza and mumps and just one disease after another, you're talking about a population decimation of maybe 90%, 100 years after the invasion in central Mexico. It's absolutely astonishing levels of death and disease. And anyone who survived presumably was disabled or very likely visually disfigured from the smallpox in some way. So you have a total transformation of society.

[D]

In some ways, there are changes to jobs, everyday life systems. Certainly hierarchy is something that changes. So with the fall of one ruling dynasty, for example, and the rise of another one, a hierarchy develops and changes. One thing that's interesting to me in the Egyptian context is architecture that we see some architecture stay important, most obviously something like the pyramids that never lost their importance and endured. And then we have very obvious and purposeful erasure at other times. A good example of that is places of worship, because they're usually on very sought after land in higher locations and so on. But we do have have Egyptian temples that become Roman temples that become churches that become mosques, or we have a very purposeful erasure of architecture from a previous group. And I think that's a real tangible way of seeing change and seeing how one group can fall in people's eyes.

[A]

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point that often the rise for one is the fall of another. Ptolemaic Egypt is in many ways also about the rise of the Roman Empire. And the fall of the Aztec Empire is in many ways. But the rise of the Spanish Empire, the fall of the Shogunate in many ways is about the rise of, well, both colonial Europe in general, but also the US in particular. In many ways. What's happening across all these stories is about large changes in power structures and the knock on effects these have across people's lives, which of course can be devastating. The case of Toniskillan is indicative of that. In some cases they don't have to necessarily be bad. One thing I like to talk about as a bit of a surprise is after the fall of the West Roman Empire, people seem to grow taller. So when you look at their skeletal records, they're taller. They also have less bone lesions, trauma in their bones and less holes in their teeth, dental cavities. And that's not just simply because so many people died and moved around that they had more resources afterwards. Like was the case of the Black Death, even people on the outside of empire were actually taller. The old trope of the muscle bound genetic barbarian is kind of true. They actually were taller than their Italian counterparts. Often empire just wasn't good for people. And sometimes its fall could have some unexpected benefits. But again, we can't paint any of this with a single brush. It really does depend. But it's important to think about this in a broader context that rise can also be fall. And sometimes fall isn't necessarily an entirely bad thing.

[B]

Before we start to wrap up some of the themes we've talked about today, are there any other identifiable signs or I suppose symptoms of these shifts we've been talking about that we've not mentioned?

[C]

So far we haven't talked very much about something I know Luke is interested in, which is inequality in places. I've heard Luke talk before about income inequalities. And the Aztec Empire is a really interesting case because it models itself as quite an egalitarian place. They go to a lot of effort, especially in Tenochtitlan, to argue that people are all doing their own role, working towards a common goal. And they do have systems of redistribution, for example. But at the same time, as outside of the city itself, you have vast inequalities, and that inequality does get greater as the empire goes along. And you have rulers who put in place greater systems of inequality, where nobles take greater precedence over commoners, for example. Now, Tenochtitlan is difficult because the city doesn't collapse. Those inequalities aren't what suddenly create a fall. There's a huge external force, a pressure on the civilization, but arguably there's a lever there which enables the Spanish to more quickly, more effectively bring down the ruling dynasty because of disgruntlement, because of inequalities, and actually because the empire isn't as dominant as it seems. So we make the comparison of the Rome and the Goths, for example. Within the Aztec Empire, we have groups like the Tlaxcalans, who have never been conquered. And they at first resist the Spanish, but then they decide to ally with them and to use them as a tool against their old enemies, the Aztecs of Tenoctil. In fact, I would argue that you could really say, especially based on how many Tlaxcalan warriors there are, tens of thousands of them, where only hundreds of the Spanish. You could argue that it's actually the Tlaxcalans who defeat the Aztecs and rise to the top of the power pyramid. And of course, in the long term, they become very much subordinate to the Spanish, but they themselves see it as a victory. They successfully assert their influence in the colonial period. And so I think it's not just one person rising to the top often. Luke mentioned the rise and fall, but there are an awful lot of different communities and peoples who are very often involved in these empires, and that's a big factor in how sustainable they are.

[A]

Yeah, this is a wonderful point. When you look at the way we often think about the fall of the Aztec empire, it's often framed in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. It's about a bunch of plucky conquistors who arrive with superior weaponry and overthrow and topless a very large empire very quickly. In reality, many indigenous people would have viewed this more as a popular rebellion, a successful one. And when Cortes arrives at the second siege of Terecialan, he's actually the head of an army of roughly 100,000, potentially more. And almost all of them are indigenous allies. They're not Spanish. And the really telling thing here is that the areas that were more likely to rebel were the ones that were more heavily taxed and extracted from.

[B]

We've obviously talked about some enormous themes today and case studies that we could do an entire episode on in their own right. But to draw things to a close, do you think there are lessons here from either exploring these stories or by knitting together some of these themes? Islam. Can I come to you first on this?

[D]

I think there are always lessons from history. And my most simple and important one here would be that every generation thinks that their moment is the ultimate epoch that we don't see beyond our importance. And when I think of Egypt as a fascinating case study because of its longevity, I often say Cleopatra was closer in time to the invention of the iPhone than the pyramids being built. So we're talking two and a half millennia between the pyramids and the Ptolemies coming to power, and then another two and a half millennia between the Ptolemies and us. And so we'd be wise to think that things might be very different two and a half millennia from now.

[C]

For me, I think the most instructive thing about these stories is something about the stories themselves and who tells those stories. So we discuss the fact that these histories are known largely through post fall records, to put it in the terms of the series. But actually what we see is rewritings and rewritings of this history. So the Aztecs arrive in the Valley of Mexico in 1325, but in the 1430s they destroy all of their records really deliberately and create a new history in which they are destined to rule over the Valley of Mexico, in which they will be a great empire that stretches from sea to sea. And then in the 1520s, the Spanish come and do almost exactly the same thing. They destroy all the records and create a history in which they, the plucky band of conquistadors, are just destined to rule over an empire that stretches across the globe. And actually that was a history that endured a really, really long time. And then it started to be picked apart by indigenous peoples and scholars and activists, knowledge keepers over the centuries. And we were just starting to think about that in new ways. And now we're again having that history rewritten and we're seeing that struggle over who gets to tell history in the public space, who gets to control the media that tell the histories, who control social media networks, news networks, who's going to tell the story of this moment of fragility that we're in right now, this moment when we're on the brink of environmental collapse, when there is war, when there is likely to be migration because of economic collapse, when we really are at a point, aren't we, that feels like a tipping point again. So I'm sure there are things we can learn about what might cause that, but I'm almost more interested in the other end, like who's going to tell that story and how will we remember it, and who is going to control that narrative in the years to come.

[A]

This is a vital point. Collapse is often told as a story of Horizon 4, as we have the series titled. And yet in some ways you can think about this more as a story of of fall and rise. As mentioned, the fall of the Aztec Empire is ultimately about the rise of the Spanish Empire. In many ways, the worst things to happen throughout history are less about the fall of one particular dynasty or power structure, but much more about the expansion of certain empires would be Rome or the Spanish. And similarly, if we're looking at human height, then suddenly Rome looks more like a case study of once again fall and then rise. So I think that these different case studies, and by looking at collapse and how it affects everyday people as well, it can really us question what empire, civilization, et cetera, has meant for people across history and also what it can mean for us today. And I think it'd also be a bit of a warning of when you face so many different threats and rising vulnerabilities, whether it be climatic change and rising wealth inequality, things can often turn very quickly and in a way very unforeseeably. In some of these case studies, it seems like the people of that time didn't really foresee that they were going through any kind of collapse type event. It varies, but once again it does happen.

[B]

That was me, Matt Elton in conversation with Luke Kemp, Caroline Doddspennock and Isamisa Islam is Professor of Public Humanities at Birmingham City University. Caroline is professor of International History at the University of Sheffield and Luke is Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of of Cambridge. All three experts have contributed to the new BBC TV series Rise and Fall, which launched here in the UK on Monday 24th November.

[C]

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