Extra History
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2017–2022
7:46 · 3.9M views · Jun 24, 2017
The first part of Extra History's series on the Bronze Age Collapse, introducing the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Mycenaeans and their interlinked system of trade, agriculture, and war before the Sea Peoples arrive.
HN points to it as an entertaining, approachable docu-series on how interconnected civilizations can collapse, often in discussions of societal fragility.
3 comments from Hacker News
> First, there are way more examples of complex societies collapsing than I was aware of. To add to the discussion, I submit this entertaining docu-series[0] describing the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean. The authors proffer that one possible cause for their near-total collapse could have been a breakdown within Bronze Age society's well-structured and complex systems from which recovery was simply not possible. Apologies to the history purists for the inevitable inaccuracies to be found herein but this was an approachable series for me as a codemonkey. [0] this video
It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but still own two cars, never take public transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy buy buy. Given the evidence of all of recorded history and archaeological evidence, how is the denial of economics any better than climate change denial? We have many, many examples of environmental changes combined with misaligned incentives bringing about the end of many civilizations. (Just one example, for which new media exists: this video ) As another HN commenter on this post noted, you can't overturn people's incentives through moralizing about some abstract fear. Even when pursuing an obvious course of justice, Gandhi knew that you must align with people's day to day incentives. It does no one good to rail against the stupidity of the masses and the greed of corporations. We need to figure out how to align everyone's incentives.
If I remember correctly, currently it is thought that the collapse was caused by many negative events happening almost at the same time. One of those are so-called Sea Peoples (seriously [0]). A single impact could explain a collapse of a city or a country, but not the fall of the whole region. Extra Credits once did a series of videos describing various weak points that could lead to the Late Bronze Age collapse: this video [0]: [LINK]