What the Odyssey is hiding

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: Unexplainable (Vox)
Episode: What the Odyssey is hiding
Date: July 22, 2026
Host: Noam Hassenfeld
Guest: Eric Klein, Archaeologist and Ancient Historian, George Washington University

In this episode, Unexplainable dives into the mysterious collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations—the surprisingly advanced societies that set the backdrop for Homer’s Odyssey. Host Noam Hassenfeld and guest Eric Klein explore the interconnectedness of ancient Mediterranean societies, the multifaceted causes behind their sudden downfall, and the modern parallels we should heed today.

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Key Themes and Insights

The Bronze Age World Was Shockingly Modern

• The societies of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500–1200 BCE) were advanced and interconnected, contrary to the primitive images often depicted in film and popular culture.
• Noam (01:16): "The world of the late Bronze Age... was way more advanced than you might think."
• Key players included: Mycenaeans (early Greeks), Egyptians, Hittites, Babylonians, and others across the Mediterranean and Near East.
• Eric Klein (02:34): “Everyone is shocked by how modern those ancient societies seem.”
• Technologies and social structures included supply chains stretching to Britain and Afghanistan for metals, diplomatic treaties, dynastic marriages, embargoes, embassies, and even flushable toilets.
  • Klein (03:36): “It’s like us today, but they were doing it 3,500 years ago.”

Catastrophic Collapse Circa 1200 BCE

• Around 1200 BCE, nearly all these societies suffered massive destruction and some collapsed entirely—all within decades.
  • Noam (03:55): “Almost all of these societies took a massive hit... all within a few decades of each other.”
• Writing systems disappeared, palaces were not rebuilt, and even basic technologies (like flush toilets) weren’t seen again for centuries.

Notable Quote:

• Noam (04:21): “This wasn’t the fall of the Romans or the Mayans or the Indus Valley civilization. This was the entire known world for most of these people.”

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Theories of Collapse: From Sea Peoples to Polycrisis

1. The Sea Peoples Theory

• For decades, the destruction was attributed to the mysterious Sea Peoples, invasors known mainly from Egyptian inscriptions.
  • Klein (06:02): “The big one was the Sea Peoples... we know it from an inscription in the mortuary temple of Ramses III.”
• However, Klein notes these groups may have included refugees and migrants fleeing disaster—not just marauders.
  • Klein (07:40): “Absolutely, they’re migrants... more recent example would be the refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria.”

2. Earthquake Storms

• Archaeological evidence shows telltale signs of earthquake damage at numerous sites.
  • Klein (08:42): “If you have bodies buried... and the person has a stone embedded in their head, like at Mycenae, that is probably an earthquake.”
• Modern seismology: “Earthquake storms” along fault lines can trigger a cascade of quakes over decades.
  • Klein (09:15): "[A] fault line can unzip over about 60 years."

3. Drought and Climate Change

• Palynology (ancient pollen studies) and cave formations point to a mega-drought lasting up to 300 years, with dire consequences for agriculture.
  • Klein (11:40): “I think some of the most compelling evidence actually comes from inside caves... there wasn’t enough water for [the stalagmite] to keep going.”

4. Systems Collapse (Polycrisis)

• Klein advocates for a multifactor causal model: these disasters exacerbated each other, leading to a “polycrisis.”
  • Klein (12:40): “The word today... is poly crisis. So I think that is what happened, it’s everything all at once.”
• Drought led to famine, famine to migration, migration to conflict, and all these factors disrupted trade routes, crucial for bronze production—exposing the fragility of this interconnected system.
  • Klein (12:54): “You originally had drought, that drought then leads to famine, famine leads to migration, migration leads to invasions... and then on top of that, you’re hit with an earthquake.”

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What Collapse Looked Like: The Case of Ugarit

Ugarit, a wealthy city-state in modern Syria, offers a vivid microcosm of the collapse:

• Hit by famine (documented pleas for Egyptian grain), repeated earthquakes, invasions/raiders, and ultimately destroyed by fire.
  • Klein (14:07–15:58): “Imagine you’re in Ugarit... Everything that could go wrong was going wrong... by the end, you dig a hole, put your wealth in it, and flee, thinking you’ll come back someday—but you never do.”

Notable Quote:

• Klein (15:58): “Your precious belongings are still sitting there for a French archaeologist to uncover 3,200 years later. And Ugarit is just one of the many cities that was destroyed at that same time.”

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Why Was This Complexity Missed for So Long?

Academic Silos and Methodological Blindspots

• Different specialists focused on their own regions (Greece, Near East, Egypt), missing broader interconnected patterns.
  • Klein (17:56): “People are in their own little cubicles... The Near Eastern people are not talking to the Greek people...”
• Interdisciplinary research was rare, and critical evidence (e.g., from Earth sciences) was scattered.
  • Klein (18:48): “It was really different disciplines... as an archeologist and an ancient historian, I had never even looked at the journals dealing with Earth science.”

Underestimation of Interconnectedness

• The full extent of economic and cultural links—and their vulnerability—was understood only recently.
  • Klein (19:37): “People didn’t really think that the Late Bronze Age was as interconnected as we now know it was.”

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Modern Parallels and Warning Signs

Are We on a Similar Path?

• The Late Bronze Age’s “globalization,” climate stresses, refugee movements, and disrupted supply chains sound eerily familiar.
  • Co-host (20:29): “We're having massive amounts of migration and refugees... We're having supply chain disruption.”
• Klein (20:53): “Yeah, I’m afraid I do, yeah. Many of the symptoms, many of the drivers and stressors that they had that led to that collapse, we’ve got it around today.”

Notable Exchange:

• Noam (21:15): “That’s a pretty pessimistic—”

• Klein (21:17): “Pessimistic view, totally. But we’re aware of what’s happening. I’m not sure they were aware back then. So it's up to us to choose to do something about it.”

• Klein notes that while historical collapse is almost universal, our knowledge gives us a chance to respond better:

  • Klein (21:43): “In this particular case with the Late Bronze Age, we’re able to see what happened before, what happened during, and what happened after... Let’s try to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

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Reflection: Myths, Oversimplification, and the Value of Acknowledging Complexity

• Early scholarship blamed the Sea Peoples, turning multifaceted collapse into a neat invasion story—much as the Odyssey mythologized the loss of a surprisingly modern world.

• Noam (22:12): “We just blamed the Sea Peoples. We took this complicated interconnected crisis and we turned it into an almost mythical invasion story. We flattened it. Kind of like how Homer took the surprisingly modern Late Bronze Age and turned it into gods and monsters in the Odyssey.”

• The challenge now, and for the future, is to resist oversimplifying the past—and, by extension, our own story.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Noam Hassenfeld:

  • “This wasn’t the fall of the Romans... This was the entire known world for most of these people.” (04:21)

• Eric Klein:

  • “It’s like us today, but they were doing it 3,500 years ago.” (03:38)
  • “[The Sea Peoples] are migrants... the analogy I make is to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.” (07:40)
  • “The word today... is ‘poly crisis’. So I think that is what happened, it’s everything all at once.” (12:40)
  • “Many of the symptoms, many of the drivers and stressors that they had... we’ve got it around today.” (20:53)
  • “It's up to us to choose to do something about it.” (21:17)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 01:16 — Introduction: Bronze Age “modernity”
• 03:36 — Technological and social advances
• 04:21 — The scale and uniqueness of the collapse
• 06:02–07:58 — Sea Peoples and their (often misunderstood) role
• 08:24–09:15 — Earthquake Storms as a cause
• 10:29–11:40 — Evidence of severe, long-lasting drought
• 12:40 — Introduction of “polycrisis” as a framework
• 14:07–15:58 — The collapse as lived in Ugarit
• 17:56–19:37 — Academic silos and recent interdisciplinary advances
• 20:29–21:43 — Parallels to today and the challenge of resilience
• 22:12 — The dangers of flattening history into myth

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Final Thoughts

The episode closes with a call to value the complexity of both the past and present. The collapse chronicled in the Odyssey’s world wasn’t the result of a single fault or villain, but of a whole system’s vulnerabilities compounding. The real warning: resilience requires understanding not just what went wrong, but how seemingly modern, interconnected worlds can suddenly break.

Transcript

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[Noam Hassenfeld]

I got a real soft spot for Greek mythology. As a kid I read Dallaire's Book of Greek Myths over and over until the COVID came off. And even now I've got this weird thing where I name every gadget I have after someone from Greek mythology. So my AirPods are Hermes, you know, messenger God. My TV is Dionysus. I think that one's kind of self explanatory. And my favorite one is my Roomba. Unfortunately, he's Sisyphus because no matter how hard he tries, the little guy's never finished. But this summer it might not just be me. We might start seeing a lot more garbage disposals named Charybdis. No one could stand between me and because the biggest movie in the world is the Odyssey.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Now these are the gods.

[Eric Klein]

I'm both excited and dreading it.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Eric Klein is an archaeologist and an ancient historian at George Washington University.

[Eric Klein]

I am hoping I love it. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna hate parts

[Noam Hassenfeld]

of it, because most of the time when you see movies that take place in the ancient past, the world they depict is primitive. But the world of the late Bronze Age, when the Trojan War and the Odyssey supposedly took place, if they did take place, was way more advanced than you might think.

[Eric Klein]

Everyone is shocked by how modern those ancient societies seem.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

So here's what it's like back then. You've got nine powerful, technologically advanced societies all over the Mediterranean and the Middle

[Eric Klein]

east, from Italy on one side to Iran and Afghanistan, and from Turkey down to Egypt.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

There's the Mycenaeans, AKA the early Greeks, the Egyptians, the Hittites the Babylonians. And they're all kind of shockingly interconnected.

[Eric Klein]

They're trading gold, silver, wine, olive oil, sandals, textiles.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And their supply chains are wild to make all their bronze. They get copper from Cyprus and then they mix it with tin from as far away as Britain and Afghanistan.

[Eric Klein]

They are signing diplomatic treaties. They're marrying each other's daughters in dynastic marriages. They are doing economic embargoes, they're doing economic embassies.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

They even have flushable toilets.

[Eric Klein]

It's like us today, but they were doing it for 3,500 years ago.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Toilets. They're just like us.

[Eric Klein]

And then suddenly, around 1200 BC, it all started to unravel.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Almost all of these societies took a massive hit, some just fully collapsed, all within a few decades of each other.

[Eric Klein]

That globalized network was shattered and it was not reconstituted for about 400 years.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Most of the palaces were never rebuilt. In some places, the basic idea of writing disappeared for hundreds of years. We didn't get flushable toilets again till the Romans came around like a thousand years later. And this wasn't just one empire. This wasn't the fall of the Romans or the Mayans or the Indus Valley civilization. This was the entire known world for most of these people. And a lot of it went from a technologically advanced globalized network to a backwater a few hundred years later in this post collapse world. That's when Homer composed the Odyssey. It was almost this myth of the before times, which again were actually pretty modern. So if they were so advanced, what happened to them?

[Eric Klein]

The big question that we've got is what caused it all to shatter? What caused the collapse? We don't have an answer yet.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I'm Noam Hassenfeld and today on Unexplainable, what was behind arguably the the biggest societal collapse in the history of the world? And can we stop it from happening again? When Eric was in school back in the 70s and 80s, there was one pretty standard explanation for what caused the collapse of the late Bronze Age.

[Eric Klein]

The big one was the Sea Peoples. The Sea Peoples, the Sea Peoples, they invade and attack Egypt twice. And we know it from an inscription in the mortuary temple of Ramses iii. He has a picture of the naval battle that he fought against the Sea Peoples and an inscription that says northerners coming from all lands, they invaded from their islands, hence the name Sea Peoples.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Got it.

[Eric Klein]

And he names places that they seem to have invaded. It looks like they are sweeping across what we would call Greece and then Turkey and then northern Syria and Cyprus. And then the French have found archives where the king of Ugarita, which is on the coast of what is now north Syria, is writing, the enemy has overrun my port city, and they're now advancing police and reinforcements. And so whenever a city was excavated and found to have been destroyed from about that time period, people said, oh, it's the Sea Peoples.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

So then what makes this collapse more complicated than just blame the Sea Peoples?

[Eric Klein]

Well, okay, so in Ramses inscriptions, although he does talk about invasions from lands to the north, he also depicts families, oxcarts, where you've got the women and the children looking for a better life.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

You're saying basically they're like migrants.

[Eric Klein]

Absolutely, they're migrants. The analogy I make is to the Dust bowl in the 1930s, where you're moving from Oklahoma to California because of a drought. I also think a more recent example would be the refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah, right.

[Eric Klein]

I think that's the modern equivalent of the Sea People. So they used to be the bogeyman of the late Bronze Age, and I think we need a little more sympathy for them. They may well have caused lots of destruction and upheaval and all that, but it was only because they were uprooted from wherever they came from.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

So even though the Sea Peoples probably played a role in the collapse, Erik thought there must have been something deeper that got them moving in the first place. And when he and his colleagues started looking at a whole bunch of late Bronze Age sites, they started seeing evidence of earthquake damage.

[Eric Klein]

If you've got walls knocked off kilter, if you've got an arched doorway, frequently the keystone in the arch will slip. If you have bodies buried in the remnants of a house, and there's no arrowheads or swords or hacked off arms, and the person is a stone embedded in their head, like at Mycenae, that is probably an earthquake. And we were able to pull together quite a few examples of cities that we thought manifested destruction debris. And then it turns out that in seismology there is something called an earthquake storm. If you have an earthquake on a fault line and it doesn't relieve all of the built up pressure, you'll have another earthquake fairly soon thereafter, a couple of days, couple weeks, couple months at most. If that one then doesn't relieve the rest of the pressure, you'll have another one and another one. And it turns out that a fault line can unzip over about 60 years. And so we see this in modern terms. In fact, the North Anatolian fault line in Turkey has been unzipping for the last 60 years or so.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

So the idea might be that one earthquake happened and then other earthquakes happened and kind of took out a whole bunch of cities.

[Eric Klein]

Yes, the period is about 1225-1175 BC. It's about a 50 year period. And most of the destructions that we looked at fell into that. And so we suggested not that the earthquake storm caused the collapse, but that it contributed to it, that it was one of the factors.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yeah. So sea people's earthquake, storm, what are the other potential factors here?

[Eric Klein]

Well, drought was one of the big ones because in the 1960s, a professor at Bryn Mawr, Reese Carpenter, had suggested that's what ended the Mycenaeans was a prolonged drought. But he didn't have the evidence for it. And so it kind of dropped out of the mainstream in terms of hypotheses. But Starting in about 2010, a couple of groups started taking cores, drilling into dried up lagoons and dried up lakes and looking at pollen samples. It's actually, it's called palenology, the study of ancient pollens. They were able to see that there was a change in trees and shrubs and everything round about 1250 BC where the type of plants that started growing were better adapted to an arid environment without water. And they said, we've got evidence for a drought lasting about 300 years.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

300 years?

[Eric Klein]

Yeah. I think some of the most compelling evidence actually comes from inside caves. There's one stalagmite in a cave in Greece that stopped growing because there wasn't enough water for it to keep going. Yeah. So we've got multiple sources of evidence from multiple sites. It's uncontestable, it's everywhere. And so at some point I basically said, wait a minute, what if it's all of the above? You know, okay, let's say for argument's sake that you've got an earthquake. It may kill a lot of people in your town, city, village society, but it won't end your society. Same thing with drought or famine. But what if you have more than one? The word today, which didn't exist at least a decade ago to my knowledge, is poly crisis. So I think that is what happened, is that it's everything all at once.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

And what does that mean exactly? Like, how does a drought and an earthquake and the sea peoples bring down a whole bunch of interconnected societies at the same time?

[Eric Klein]

The way I see it is that you originally had drought, that drought then leads to famine, famine leads to migration, migration leads to invasions, if you will, and fighting and battles and Then on top of that, you're hit with an earthquake. And one thing that we've left out, but we touched upon it, is the trade in raw metals. So this is the Bronze Age. To make bronze, you need copper and tin. Copper is easy. That comes from Cyprus.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah, it's where Cyprus gets its name, Right?

[Eric Klein]

Exactly right. But the tin, the vast majority is coming from Central Asia, in particular Afghanistan. If the trade routes were cut, you had what we would call today supply chain issues. If you suddenly can't get tin, you then can't make bronze, and then you're in real trouble.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Huh. So that's the big picture version of the collapse. Right?

[Eric Klein]

Right.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I wonder what this might have looked like in one place. Like, if you were there in 1177 BCE, what would the collapse of the entire known world have looked like?

[Eric Klein]

So, actually, Ugarit is probably one of the best case studies that we've got. It's its own city state, it's very close to Anatolia. And Ugarit gets hit with pretty much everything you can imag. They write to the Egyptians, they ask for grain. The texts say, we're all starving here. We're going to be dead if you don't do something about it. They also talk about the invaders. Ugarit is hit by at least one earthquake, and then the city itself is burnt to the ground. So imagine you're in Ugarit and it's the final days. It's somewhere between probably 1190 and 1185 BC. We know there's a famine in the city, so you're probably hungry. You're wondering where your next meal is coming from. We know the city is hit by earthquakes, so is it even safe to sleep in your house or are you going to sleep outside? We know that there are enemy ships that have been sighted. Everything that could go wrong was going wrong in those final days. And so by the end, what you're going to do, because you can't carry all of your belongings with you, you're going to dig a hole, like in the courtyard of your house or even underneath your bedroom. You're going to put your gold and your silver and all your wealth in there, covered up nicely, and then flee the city, thinking you'll come back someday to get it, but you never do. The city itself is destroyed. Maybe you are killed one way or the other, you never come back. And your precious belongings are still sitting there for a French archaeologist to uncover 3,200 years later. And Ugarid is just one of the many cities that was destroyed at that same time.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

In a minute what we can learn from the end of the world.

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$45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12 month plan. Required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms. But you're the great tactician Odysseus.

[Eric Klein]

Lady Athena and others favored me, it's true. But your uncle Poseidon, well, I got on his bad side, I believe.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Why did researchers miss all this for so long? Like, why was it so hard to see how all of these causes could be interconnected?

[Eric Klein]

In part because people are in their own little cubicles, shall we say?

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Okay, what do you mean?

[Eric Klein]

The Near Eastern people are not talking to the Greek people, and the people who study the Hittites are not talking to the Neo Assyrian people and they're not talking to the people who work on Cyprus? So you really have to bridge a couple of academic disciplines and eventually people start looking at the larger picture.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Are you basically saying in Greece there might be more evidence for a drought, and in Ugarit there might be more evidence for an earthquake or an invasion? But if you're just studying that one place, you're just going to focus on that one cause. And the best evidence you have, you're not going to be looking at the bigger picture.

[Eric Klein]

Yeah, you're siloed, basically. And this actually happened to me when I gave a lecture in Belgium and there were a bunch of Earth scientists there, and I realized they were working on the exact same thing I was, but from a different point of view. And that was when I said, send me everything you've published there. It was really different disciplines because I, as an archeologist and an ancient historian, had never even looked at the journals dealing with Earth science and only belatedly realized that there was a whole slew of data that I had missed, as had everybody else, because I didn't know that it was there.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

It's almost like a lot of scholars

[Co-host or Interviewer]

might not have been appreciating just how interconnected the ancient world was.

[Eric Klein]

Yes, exactly. People didn't really think that the late Bronze Age was as interconnected as we now know it was. I mean, I still remember one of my dissertation advisors saying, you're collecting all the Egyptian and Near Eastern objects found in Greece. What use is that? But I pulled together about 1200 objects and I'm like, okay, this is hard evidence that they were in contact. Now if we know they're in contact, we can now say what kinds of influence came with all of that. But the thing is, people like me who do such interdisciplinary work, I am dependent on the individual scholars, the specialists.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right, right.

[Eric Klein]

I could not do this if it were not for the work of all of them.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

You know, the late Bronze Age kind

[Co-host or Interviewer]

of reminds me of our society in

[Noam Hassenfeld]

a lot of ways.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

We clearly are having a climate crisis. We're having massive amounts of migration and refugees. It's causing a lot of anti immigrant rhetoric. It's causing a lot of societal division. We're having supply chain disruption.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

But do you see parallels between, you know, 3200 years ago and today?

[Eric Klein]

Yeah, I'm afraid I do, yeah. Many of the symptoms, many of the drivers and stressors that they had that led to that collapse, we've got it around today. And so I don't think it's a question of are we going to collapse? Is our globalized network going to collapse? It is. The question is, when is it going to collapse?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

That's a pretty pessimistic.

[Eric Klein]

Pessimistic view, totally. But we're aware of what's happening. I'm not sure they were aware back then. So it's up to us to choose to do something about it. Because pretty much every society in human history has collapsed or has transformed so much that it's almost unrecognizable in its new iteration. And in this particular case with the late Bronze Age, we're able to see what happened before, what happened during, and what happened after, and so we can see the ramifications of it. So we can actually say, oh, if we don't respond to the problems we've got here, here's what happened in one situation 3200 years ago. Let's try to make sure that doesn't happen again.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

It's true that understanding how this collapse happened might be the best way to avoid repeating it, but Eric's basically saying that until recently, we haven't been doing too well at the whole understanding part. We just blamed the sea peoples. We took this complicated interconnected crisis and we turned it into an almost mythical invasion story. We flattened it. Kind of like how Homer took the surprisingly modern late Bronze Age and turned it into gods and monsters in the Odyssey. The thing is, the ancient past is always going to be full of gaps, but we don't have to just fill them in. We can accept that the past was complicated and hopefully hundreds of years from now, when some future Homer is telling our story, they won't flatten us either. This episode was produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Meredith Hodnot, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music

[Co-host or Interviewer]

from me, and fact checking from Kim Slatterback.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Joanna Solotarov is our editorial director and

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Valerie Shenkman, Alex Coles and Karim Correia

[Noam Hassenfeld]

are the fact that there are three sports teams in the big four men's sports leagues that are named after works of art. Possibly four depending on whose story you believe. But music, literature, art, all of that counts. And yes, I know lots of sports facts, but if you think you have a guess, let me know. And Bird Pinkerton still didn't understand. You're birds. Why are you helping me? So Flapton explained there wasn't always a war, but when those beak freaks took over, everything changed. We knew we needed to do something, so we came here and I built that guitar. Thanks as always to Brian Resnik for co creating the show with Bird and me. Also, a quick reminder that we are on Netflix now, so if you want to watch video versions of our Monday episodes, you can can check us out over there. And if you have thoughts about the show, as always, we would love to hear from you. Email us@ unexplainableox.com, and if you'd like to support the show, join Vox. Become a member. Just go to vox.com members and if you signed up because of us, let us know. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network and we'll see you right back here next time.

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