The End of the Bronze Age
by Robert Drews · first published 1995
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2016–2024first – last mentioned
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…the field where "one kicks up a lot of dust then complains one can't see anything." It ended up being so complex that it's not falsifiable. I was much happier with the narrative in another book, "The End of the Bronze Age", by Robert Drews. Drews presents the military-technological explanation. It's simpler and it just seems to fit better. It also explains why social organization in the Iron Age was so different from…
on “Are we running out of resources?” ↗These swords were central to Robert Drews' theory in his 1993 book "The End of the Bronze Age". Unlike the "systems collapse" theory popularized by Eric Cline in "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed", Drews explains the late Bronze Age collapse as due to changes in military organization…
on “How to grip Bronze Age swords” ↗Alarmingly, one of the biggest breakdowns in ancient times, at the end of the Bronze age, now seems to have given rise to the 'sea people', a band of refugees that roamed and pillaged. There was a chain reaction of famine, revolution, refugees spilling over to neighbors who also had a poor…
on “How the Apocalypse Will Bring Out the Best in People” ↗The Catastrophe, defined as the simultaneous destruction of almost all the Mediterranean cities around 1190 BCE, is taken as the end of the Bronze Age. It appears to have been the result of a military innovation. Widespread collapse of civilization seems sufficient to cause trading networks to lapse. If trade was falling off before that, it could be…
on “The enigma of bronze age tin” ↗…large collapse could happen, but as far as I can reason it out, it won’t be anything close to the scale of collapse that the Bronze Age collapse was. There are multiple reasons for this. First, at the end of the Bronze Age, writing existed but it wasn’t everywhere all the time. Writing is now everywhere all the time, and most humans can read and write. This means that, in a collapse, most people can carry on knowledge.…
on “Jonathan Blow on Societal Collapse (2019)” ↗…distances as early as 25,000 BC. Either one tribe was moving back and forth from Italy to Spain, on a regular basis, or there was a trade network. So to learn that there was an extensive trade network at the end of the Bronze Age is not nearly so exciting, even if the scale of distance is a bit greater. I mean, we already knew there was extensive trade at the end of the Bronze Age, I was taught that when I was in school.
on “Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal complex trade network” ↗Do you think that's a response to what I said? From Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: > "Shearing" is actually a misnomer. The Akkadian term was "plucking." Before the end of the Bronze Age, domestic sheep did not continuously grow wool, and the wool could be combed or plucked when their coats shed in the spring. Why would you think modern sheep make a relevant comparison point after I…
on “Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system” ↗