Historian Eric H. Cline has multiple books citing this time period, specifically 1117 BCE as the inflection point for the bronze age "collapse", defined by a deterioration of international shipping routes that weakened the nation-states of the era. I've learned about it recently because YouTube began recommending videos about it.
For example: https://youtu.be/choxcHXhZhE?is=t5lDwQQpqPsE2k5M
One historical event that Cline focuses on is a severe centuries-long drought. It's something the ACOUP article seems to omit. Cline does not focus as much on destruction of bronze-age sites although there is one port city in particular which is linked to the international trade of the time. Exactly who destroyed it appears to be a mystery but it could be linked to the migration theory that ACOUP dismisses. The migration may have actually come as a result of the previously mentioned drought.
in my personal "immersive learning" period starting 2021, i discovered acoup.blog when Old World came out and extended into reading while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action
EDIT: in the blind i'm guessing the port city of which you speak is Ugarit, which i had never heard of. IIRC everything was weakened by drought and famine, and Ugarit's armies were pulled over to the Hittites who abandoned Ugarit to The Sea Peoples. and the Sea Peoples always came off like a "cosmological constant" fudge factor where constant advances in shipwreck archaeology should provide more clarity in its merry time
history is dope. it never repeats itself but it always rhymes :)
Hope your teeth are doing better now!
LBA -> probably supposed to be LBAC, Late Bronze Age collapse
Civ -> Civilization, a series of historically inspired strategy games, where you play as the historical leader of a civilization through the ages of human development
Hatshepsut -> an Egyptian Pharaoh who is one of the leaders you can play as in Civ VII
Deity -> the name of the highest difficulty level in Civ VII
Firaxis -> the company that develops the Civilization series
Discord -> a chat app/service often used in gaming communities
ooh la la i call a car hole a garage -> a reference to a joke in The Simpsons, where a character complains someone else thinks they're fancy because they use the word "garage", and when challenged on an alternative, he calls it "car hole"
Old World -> a game similar to the Civilization series
CK III -> Crusader Kings III, another game similar to Civilization
Plague -> probably Plague Inc, a game where you play as a pathogen trying to infect and kill the entirety of humanity
Contagion -> a movie about the start of a pandemic
Rest of the references I can't help with. Also no idea why they would mention the playtest of Civ VII version 1.3.2.
Caturday -> Saturday
Hepped -> Novel synonym for “high” likely influenced by the jazz slang word ‘hep’ which means ‘hip’ or ‘cool’
Goofballs -> 5/500 hydrocodone/APAP, aka Vicodin. The gold standard tooth pain prescription drug, an opioid. In this context.
> there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.
One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.
For the rest of HN, while that video is from someone who takes the Bible seriously, you can also view it as an interesting examination of the historical time period, even if with a particular lens and slant. Who doesn't have a particular lens and slant anyhow?
Edit: I should say "almost entirely fictional". The main scholarly agreement is that it may record some stories of some small numbers (hundreds, at most some thousands - nowhere near the 600k in the Bible) real semitic slaves' escape from Egypt and migration to the area of Canaan, mixing with the local Canaanite population that were the precursors of the Jewish populations of later Israel and Judah.
A more reasonable claim would be: "we cannot verify much of what's in Exodus using sources external to the Torah/Pentateuch." It's fair to also say something like "if X happened, it's surprising that we would not see physical evidence of it."
If you're interested in the topic of the Old Testament in general, I highly recommend [Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540960214_anci...).
It starts with a survey of the academic field, an overview of relevant primary documents from surrounding cultures, and in-depth discussions of historical records and archaeological finds. There's meta-discussion about the role of comparative literature that I also found useful. I benefited from the author's perspective that there's a lot to learn from the Old Testament regardless of whether or not existing physical evidence satisfies our personal standard for determining whether something happened verbatim.
I like that it does so in a way that does not try to push an agenda. I interpret the author as trying to provide an entrypoint for anyone interested in the related academic fields, regardless of their background.
I've recommended the book to both religious and non-religious friends who enjoyed it. Take this recommendation as one made in good faith, and an opportunity to look at something from a new perspective. You're free to disregard it as you see fit.
(And of the things I mentioned, the Exodus is less likely to line up with the Bronze Age Collapse's chronology anyways. But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.)
> One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt
I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt.
I didn't mention it, but the events in the Book of Joshua are also very much non-historical - there are no signs whatsoever of a conquest of parts of Canaan by any other group at a time that would be consistent with the Biblical narrative. The historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence is most consistent with the ancient Israelites simply being a specific group of Canaanites that established a kingdom in the area in which they had lived for millennia.
> But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.
The Book of Judges is also regarded as mostly non-historical by modern day scholars.
There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories. For example, the death of a large amount of the population along with the pharaohs son. The destruction of pharaoh's army. Records of ancient hebrew slaves.
Ancient Egyptians left behind a pretty large amount of history and documentation. They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation.
Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them.
>Records of ancient hebrew slaves
Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.
>They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation
Israel being one of them!
That's exactly the sort of stuff they wrote about all the time. We know about the various wars and political conflicts throughout the second intermediate period precisely because that's what the Egyptians liked documenting.
And, in particular, during the supposed time of the exodus the Egyptian kingdom was fairly divided. Even if one kingdom was too proud to write about a defeat, the others would be sure to document it.
> Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.
Read up about the Canaanites. They were on the uprise during this period and they are also believed to be the actual origin of the Hebrews.
> Israel being one of them!
No even according to the bible. Israel didn't exist before the exodus. Definitely not for decades and even centuries afterwards. The oldest records of the exodus are nowhere near the event. The closest record we have is around 900BCE.
There's a lot of distance between having claims in the account not supported by evidence and it being an "entirely fictional account."
I wouldn't be surprised if truth is that it has a factual core with significant embellishment, to the point where the boundary is not discernible by history/archeology.
The Hebrew language came long after the exodus. We have no earlier records of it that aren't written in Hebrew.
So what we have is writings written hundreds of years later documenting an event with no earlier writings verifying that documentation.
It's possible that a small group of slaves escaped egypt and that was the actual origin of the exodus story which just kept growing and growing with retellings.
I have absolutely backed by nothing theory that ancient Armenians and Jews are the same people that got separated. For some tribe living on the shores of east black sea - a myth about massive flood and some saving boat that stopped on Ararat is easy to see how it could be created.
Of course it takes incredible levels of incompetence to be lost in sinay for 40 years. But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth.
The biblical flood has been connected to various possible historical floods, but any such connection is highly speculative and tenuous, because the details simply can't match the original claims.
Similarly, some kernel of the Exodus narrative is quite possibly related to real migration events that actually happened, though they would necessarily be much smaller in scope. They also couldn't be the sole origin of the Ancient Israelites, as there is overwhelming evidence that they are simply a subset of the native people of Canaan, which had continuously inhabited that region for a very long time. We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).
The Exodus narrative explicitly describes the early Israelites flocking to worship idols like that.
> Jeremiah, weeping and sighing: yes I know
(That's a tweet that pops up from time to time when exchanges like this happen.)
> the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time
I mean...yes, this is thoroughly documented throughout all of Judges/Kings/Chronicles/etc. Elijah is the one who stands against 450 prophets of Baal, and when he feels totally alone later on, God tells him that 7,000 haven't bent the knee - big enough to be reassuring, but certainly not a huge percentage of the northern kingdom's population.
I think it's quite extraordinary how little the scholarly and historical consensus on these narratives has penetrated mainstream culture, even among a secular audience, so I like to bring it up whenever it is mentioned.
I thought that was a story from when the Sumerians were driven up to Mesopotamia as the water level in the Persian Gulf rose when the glaciers of the last ice age melted.
Pretty much every ancient religion/group has a "biblical" flood story. Even those from different continents. Haven't you seen Ancient Aliens?
We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.
This is similar to the reason we believe the stories in Genesis are not historical, e.g. the flood, - if they had been historical, we expect that they would have left behind certain marks; those marks haven't been found, so we have a reason to believe that they didn't happen.
As the last Ice Age melted away (20k–8k years ago), there were very likely several major floods in the region.
I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is. IIRC, that stuff is in the actual Bible. Like, a significant chunk of the Old Testament is about "Israelites [not] worship[ing] Yahweh alone as the only God."
I feel like you haven't read Exodus because it describes in detail the early Israelites' predilection for idolatry.
It may be the case that the Exodus tale is a recontexualization of various historical memories of nomadic resettlement combined with political narrative, but the actual story as described in the actual Bible didn't happen.
Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.
This, plus the gigantic amount of agricultural land being used for biofuel production (almost as much as cattle food).
But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.
But yes if people get hungry enough, field corn easily qualifies as actual food.
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).
After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.
Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.
So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.
I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.
The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
The Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan revolutions didn't occur at the same moment out of coincidence…
The whole channel is top quality if you want to ruminate on other civilisations that came and went.
like a closing of a certain straight that was essential for a large percentage of a necessary resource?
Enough of that & hardly any inter-state trading is left.
>All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....
>That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.
It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :)
i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute
just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky.
i'll see myself out
Very possibly a subset of the Sea Peoples were Greek. Egyptians reported the "Ekwesh" (which might be the Egyptian word for Achaeans) and the "Denyen" (which might be the Egyptian word for Danaans) among the Sea Peoples.
Maybe Troy was actually destroyed by the Sea Peoples, but that probably wouldn’t make as much at the box office.
>Late Bronze Age Collapse
It was a little late but it had to happen sooner or later.
For those in power there may not be many other opportunities to set the standard for archaic leadership, so better get it while they can.
As we have seen :\
I was doing geological research trying to show how crustal displacement theory is incorrect, and stumbled upon a paper that elucidated the insight:
There was a localized weakening of the geomagnetic field in the Levant and in the Med (3 actual areas) starting at roughly 1200 and ongoing until about 600! Im pretty sure Im the first person to posit this theory, but the more I steelman against it the more I think I'm onto something, and the implications are huge... because it has more to do with other subjects such as the evolution of religion in the region too. My theories on that are harder to prove but will be the follow up paper, at first Im just trying to focus on the geological proof.
Essentially a localized reduction in geomagnetic shielding allowing increased cosmic ray flux and solar radiation caused destruction, migration, religious interpretations of what was being seen in the sky, and all the war and tumolt that would come along with those...
This is an interesting theory. My question is: What methods are you using to test the change in magnetic fields? Put another way, what is your middle range theory from an archaeological perspective? How are you dating your samples? etc.