The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2016–2020
52:19 · 290K views · Apr 6, 2015
Eric Cline presents the thesis of his book 1177 BC on the collapse of the interconnected Late Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations. The talk covers the Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Canaanites and their trade networks.
HN recommends it as an entertaining intro to the Bronze Age collapse from the book's author.
4 comments from Hacker News
Eric Cline, the author of that book, is also an entertaining speaker. I recommend his 1h youtube talk about the bronze age & genesis of "1177 BC": this video
Nice video intro/discussion about the book for anyone interested. I haven't had a chance to read it yet but it is fascinating. this video
This issue highlights one of my main fears about a pandemic such as COVID-19: if enough people with the necessary amount of knowledge to maintain necessary infrastructure die without sufficiently and timely trained replacements, then civilization as we know it becomes one more step closer towards total irrecoverable collapse. The prevalence of COBOL and other older programming languages in many parts of the world's critical infrastructure (unemployment claims here, finance, government, defense) means that the average age of someone maintaining these systems tends older. Older people tend to have more health issues. From the summaries of reports I read about COVID-19, the majority of the deaths happen among the elderly and those with other health conditions. The idea of civilization collapsing might seem fanciful and farfetched, but the idea struck me after watching a video that was submitted here on HN and the videos it references [0][1][2][3]. [0] Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only) - [LINK] [1] Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video] - [LINK] [2] [LINK] - [LINK] [3] Eric Cline | 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed - this video
I think you mean the somewhat more limited "... used in eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age tools ..." In the video linked to by dpeck, Cline talks about Afghanistan as a tin source at this video . He mentions Cornwall and Turkey as two other sources, with "the vast majority" coming from Afghanistan. Cornwall provided a lot of the tin for Europe. A clue that Cline is talking about a regional supply is that he mentioned Cyprus as the source for copper, when NW Europe had other sources, like Great Orme in Wales.