We dwell, as we’re typically advised, within the period of globalization. In actual fact, we’ve been advised it so typically over the previous few many years that it now laboriously looks like an observation price making. However however thoroughly our period is outlined by connections between far-flung nations, societies, economies, and cultures, we must alwaysn’t flatter ourselves into assumeing we’re pioneers in a wholly new globalized actuality. As classicist Eric Cline explains in this recent Big Think interview, an interconnected world flourished within the late Bronze Age, and especially the 4teenth and thirteenth centuries BC. “Life was pretty good” in these days, he says, a minimum of when you lived in one of many lands across the Mediterranean and Close to East that constituted what he calls the “historical G8.”
The member peoples of this retrospective organization included the Mycenaeans and Minoans in Greece, the Hittites in modern-day Turkey, the Assyrians and the Childlonians in modern-day Iraq, in addition to the Cypriots, Egyptians, and Canaanites. Alas, as implied by the title of Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, their good instances together didn’t final.
In that e-book, and in lectures on YouTube, he’s defined the variety of factors that contributed to the dissolution of that after execsperous “small-world internetwork.” His surprising popularity for a historian of the Bronze Age owes partly to his willingness to attract comparisons with that point and our personal. Lots of his followers certainly discovered him out of curiosity over one question: is our “flat” twenty-first-century world similarly headed for a collapse?
In that case, we’d pay much less attention to why the traditional G8 collapsed, and extra to what grew to become of its formerly interdependent societies when the crisis had run its course. Such is the subject of Cline’s After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, and of the Big Think interview extract on the prime of the publish. Some coped, some adapted, some transfashioned, and others simply vanished. Cypriots and the Phoenicians of Canaan, for examinationple, remade themselves to thrive within the chaos; the Egyptians muddled by way of with a mixtureture of adaptation and coping; the Mycenaeans and the Minoans misplaced roughly eachfactor, including their writing system, and needed to rebuild from sq. one. However the truly cautionary story is that of the Hittites, whose civilizational annihellolation seems to have been largely self-inflicted. “Don’t be a Hittite,” is certainly one of Cline’s items of recommendation; another is to achieve an belowstanding of antifragility quicklyer fairly than later.
Related content:
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the creator of the newsletter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
