When you're Sardinian, and the last time your people were relevant in any meaningful way was when they were part of the sea people coalition which kinda caused a halt in the advancing of human civilizations
What about that time Sardinia sailors sailed with Spain and Venice to stop the Ottomans invasion of the Mediterranean and basically ended the ottomans as a naval power?
In the XIXth century, the major power in Italy was Sardinia, and it's them that pushed for Italy unification, so... not that irrelevant :p Well, of course it was actually Savoy, but still, it counts ^^
We may get to see the collapse of our own age. Just think in 5000 years some archaeologists will find my hause and other than a few silver coins the only thing that will survive that long will be a couple of arrowhead that l have. One I bought and another one that was made for me by a friend. The archaeologists will find that and the stones from the courthouse and determine that we were primitive people who were religious and had a temple
Easily the most shocking part of this video is how much bigger the Bronze Age world was than I thought. I think the regular belief is that it centers mostly around the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. But now you're telling me they were trading from Britain to Afghanistan? That is just mind blowing.
@Alex Gully I mean, we've found evidence of complex civilization dating back to 10,000 b.c. with Göbekli Tepe, so I shouldn't be as surprised as I was. I guess I always thought of the Bronze Age as a few hotspots of cilivization surrounded by untamed wilderness. Looks like that wasn't the case.
@Alex Gully Sounds like the same thing that happened after the fall of the Roman empire. People started loving inside old stadiums fallout style because no one played sports anymore and places needed walls.
@@andrasbeke3012 gobekli tepe is not evidence of complex civilization. its evidence that religion had a much more important role in developing civilization as these megaliths presumed to be places of congregations may have been the seeds of fully fledged settlements.
It's an example of the limitations of history, history by definition is about the times and areas we have written sources from but people settled down and started building complex societies long before writing was invented or spread to them. This has for a lot of the history of history left us in the dark about what life in those areas and times was like but modern archeology is helping to uncover a lot of this and fill in our gaps, still it's not quite the same as written sources and it's just a lot easier to imagine what a place was like when we actually have the words written by those people. But yeah global trade is actually a lot older than you might think and areas outside of what we tend to think of as the "civilized world" were actually a lot more like that world than we imagine. For example a few thousand years after the Bronze Age you might think that beyond the borders of the Roman Empire were just endless forests with small villages and people walking around with helmets that had horns on them but actually it would be more or less impossible to tell these areas apart from the Roman Empire as they looked very similar. The differences between these areas was more like the difference between the the current superpowers like the US and China and their smaller allied states in Europe, Africa and Asia. But if your only source for learning about our world was Hollywood you might think that everywhere outside of the US was backwards and untamed and that's basically the situation we're in when trying to learn about the past.
Good point! Perhaps the "sea peoples" were not invaders: but refugees. The shear amount of extra mouths to feed...was the straw that caused the chariot to collapse!? This would of course result in more migration and more collapse.
Just as a note: The Cyprus was so closely identified with copper that the metal derived its name from it. The Latin for copper is cuprum, shortened from an older word cyprium, meaning of Cyprus.
@@omegacardboard5834; Don't know about Greek, but Latin (Roman) 'V' was the original 'U' before the 'U' letter was introduced in the 16th century. A dead giveaway is that the letter 'W', to this day, is still pronounced "double-u", and not "double-v".
@@pintorpi333 yes that it correct. But the Romans also adopted the Greek y for Greek names/ words they borrowed from Greek. It’s not quite the same V/u sound in Latin, it’s like a u but with tighter lips and you sort of lift them up a bit and it’s a bit more aspirated I believe
@@pintorpi333 Depends on language. In French it's "doobla-veh". Double V. I think the more obvious pointer would be that in Greek Cyprus is Kypros. A hard K sound and not a soft S sound. Although some prominent etymologists say that's just some popular, lazy bs.
@@aaronleverton4221 well you can always look it up. There is no letter C in greek. There is kappa K and there is sigma S Cyprus is spelled Κύπρος and is pronounced Kupros or Kipros.
A severe drought in the Mediterranean may also explain why Egypt was less affected and survived the Bronze Age Collapse as the only major power in the region. Egypt's agriculture is totally dependent on the yearly flooding of the Nile which is caused by heavy rainfalls in distant Ethiopia and therefore unaffected by changes in local climate systems.
@@BenState typically when one area is extremely hot and dry, another area is extremely wet and temperate. We see this especially with just our yearly climate patterns, like with the el niño/la niña events. Most especially significant, is that most the world is unaffected.
@Seaworth Look, it's kind of yes nad no at the same time. Traditions and society are completely different. But we still kind of embrace them, and we are proud of our ancestors.
A lot of people have pointed out that it is unlikely that a composite bow could shoot through 3 inches of metal but I didn't see anyone dig into the sources so I'll comment on what I've found. I'm guessing that particular part of the video was sources from "The end of the Bronze Age : changes in warfare and the catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C." (mentioned in description, I found a copy on Internet archive) pg. 120-121. The exact passage reads as follows: "The pharaohs themselves took pride in their skill as chariot archers. Amenhotep II boasted of the rapidity, range, and accuracy of his shooting, claiming that from a speeding chariot he had hit four targets, set thirty-four feet apart with such force that the arrows went clean through each target's three inches of copper." This passage is apparently from a stele (Ancient Near Eastern Texts (ANET) pg. 244), and the thickness given in this translation is "of one palm in their thickness", which the annotation says is "a litde [little?] less than 3 inches". Regardless, it seems that this is a boast from a specific pharaoh, rather than some sort of historical fact or mixing up units, so probably not an accurate account of a bronze age era's composite bow's potential.
To elaborate, they found one of the bows buried with a prince, which makes it, to me, seem like a closed-case. I see little reason why they wouldn't be able to verify that, or why they didn't cast aspersions on its capabilities, given that they found it and it was verifiable that it was the exact bow Egyptian sources had spoken about. A modern bow, can penetrate sheet-metal steel, and it can do it easily. Composite bows were an absolute gamechanger. They were unrivaled. They were the dreadnought of bows. I don't find it a stretch that it could shoot through some copper ingots. It *certainly* could shoot through armour, and I don't think there were tin-men covered in 3 inches of armour, which is a naval vessel level of armour, during the Bronze Age. So I figure it really doesn't matter if it's a boast, they could do exactly what was needed, and with proficiency.
@@iMajoraGaming Thanks for the info (for anyone looking its McLeod, W. E. (1962). Egyptian Composite Bows in New York. American Journal of Archaeology, 66(1), 13. doi:10.2307/501476, I found it on sci-hub). The estimate they give is that it could penetrate a metal (brass) plate 0.002 to 0.003 m thick from a distance of 30-40 m.
If northern Europe was in such bad shape and they became sea people early scandinavian vikings perhaps? I mean the drive for resources were similar as the later scandinavians wanted to spread out due to resource issues. However this situation seems more serious.
@@orions2908 Yes of course. The Jews themselves were not native to that land either (they had settled it a few hundred years before). In general, Canaan/the Eastern Levant has always been one of those "in-between-empires" areas which get trampled and stomped on every few centuries.
I was listening to a Wendover Productions video the other day (he covers logistics and transport) and suddenly the music transitioned and I thought, "The battle of Munda?"
Clear and concise yet thorough examination of one of history's most troubling ages. Excellent narration and illustrations. Glad I discovered this channel. Well done!
With regard to environmental changes, that could again explain why Egypt survived. Agricultrue in Egypt is driven by the waters of the Nile, and the Nile is fed by far-flung lakes and tributaries in regions that may not have been as effected by an environmental change. Thus, Egypt could maintain enough agricultural output to survive even as it’s neighbors dried up.
yep, exactly Egypt Everything that led to the bronze age demise can be tied to there being a Grand Solar Minimum ... as well as a concurent 2000+/- conjunction of the gas giant planets. The climate changes and seismic up-ticks were relentless the "sea people" were. forced to migrate due to major drought that began in western Europe first ~ desperate people exasperated desperate events
Egypt suffered heavy droughts also during this period. The drought was believed to have been caused by the "Hekla 3 volcanic eruption" causing a "volcanic winter" in Ramesses III's reign. The disruption of sunlight was so bad that worldwide tree growth was stymied for 20 years. On top of all this, Ramesses III had to deal with lots of wars. Constant war; Dealing with the Sea Peoples. Draining of the treasury. Drought -> Famine -> Instability It left Egypt terribly weakened and divided. From what I understand, of the various Bronze Age major powers, 2 survived: Egypt and Assyria. The Assyrians had it real bad and they basically withdrew into only their home territory. However, Assyria recovered and carved a powerful empire in the wake of the Bronze Age collapse while Egypt never really did. It got to the point that the Assyrian Empire subjugated Egypt.
@@billheineman472 There are a lot of things I could correct here but I'll settle for saying you mean "exacerbated." "Exasperated" would only make sense the other way around (desperate events exasperated desperate people).
When the king of Ugarit said that the invaders had 'seven ships' I think it was understood at the time that he meant more than seven. 'Seven and seven' is an idiom (meaning many) seen in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it's possible that its meaning was persisted through time. Just as 'one' to us can mean 'a united people', seven probably isn't literal. Not to mention that I couldn't see seven ships as all that threatening, what with the navies these civilizations had.
@@johnnysasakithethird1209 Use your brain to analyze things that you are told. *Because they didn't have cannons, 7 ships was very little, you needed a lot of ships because fighting was done man to man
Well in this case their only real mistake was an over reliance on chariots in their military. Everything else, assuming this theory is correct, was outside their control.
Same lol I’ve been checking daily for the next video... I mean we are right about to see the history civilis video/videos about Octavius and Antony vs Brutus and Cassius, and then Octavius and Agrippa vs a Pompey son, and then (GOT himself- Gaius Octavius Thurinus) Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus and Agrippa vs Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and then Octavius become Augustus, the first citizen and all his great changes to Rome, and then somehow he outlives everyone he meant to give power to so he could sorta retire in peace, and he loved Livia too much to stop her evil scheme to kill the good people Augustus would have given power to, just so Livia could give power to friggin Tiberius... which set a terrible precedent and so she caused a few evil emperors... which also began the crazy awesome storyline of Roman rulers, some great and some horrible. If Augustus would have stopped her before she got started, then Augustus very well might have left a different system in place with good people and the senate with the power.. but Livia killed all the good people Augustus knew so all the power instead went to Tiberius like she planned and that’s how we got the history we have lol anyway I am so excited for these next few videos of Octavius - my doppelgänger.
Your videos never disappoint... thank you for producing them! Mostly just kicking in a couple thoughts that always bugged me about the Bronze Age Collapse - I always get a little agitated that I rarely get a glimpse into what was going on in the Black Sea region during that time. There’s plenty of archeological evidence that there was plenty of interaction and trade between the Black Sea region and the major powers of the time and they had seafaring technology to be active traders. Given migrations from Northern Europe to the Black Sea region during Roman times, it seems perfectly plausible for people living in that area to have been displaced by Northern Europeans and/or migrating tribes from the steppes who might have had their own environmental pressures due to climate change. I’m not a historian, but I am extremely curious about what was going on there at the time and what issues they might have been facing that would affect their interactions with their more civilized neighbors.
@@jorenvanderark3567 wrong. The city most likely existed and they even have a location for it. But people exaggerated a lot about the city based on Plato's book.
Good factual presentation, well done. Just to explain something, the King of Ugarit referred to the King of Cyprus (Alashiya) as "Father" which means he was considered less than equal and the King of Ugarit had to prostrate himself in front of superior Kings, such as Cyprus and Egypt. In contrast, the Kings of Cyprus referred to the Kings of Egypt as 'brother', which meant they were equals and did not need to prostrate themselves nor pay tribute.
Ancient societies were patriarchal, and in that is the origin of their political and social systems. Clan and family systems were applied to the conception of what states were and how they should operate.
@@vorynrosethorn903 What you suggest is quite correct as well as the socio-economic system, local and foreign resources, language, farming (from the Neolithic onwards), the weather and the environment in general that played a huge part in the cultural development of a society. However, there's no getting away from the fact that kings (and queens) imposed themselves on a culture to varying degrees. There was of course the fear of invasion from outside as well as usurpation from within.
i wonder if that is the original introduction as god in the bible. they call god lord or father alot. is this possible to the king of egypt that allowed the jews to settle in isreal?
@@michaeleldridge5640 "The Jews" were not 'jewish' at that time. According to Manetho, the Hyksos came out of the East with all and sundry and entered the Pharaohs palace and took over. When they were eventually deposed several centuries later, the ones that lived in their capital called Avaris, barricaded themselves in and were eventually led out by an Egyptian priest that believed in monotheism. Many believe that this equates to the exodus in the bible.
I just watched a 2+ hour documentary on this subject, but I think this 20+ minute clip explains it better and more to the point. The lengthy documentary was obsessed with "who dun it?", while this clip was more focused on system-level causes. Good job!
@@mageovoid9145 It was likely the channel History Time and the reason for focusing on whodunit is that we don't actually know and therefore exploring the possibilities of who, exactly, the Sea Peoples were and where they came from is useful for expanding our knowledge of history. That would be "knowing our own story".
But I'm still very interested in the whodunnit because that would shed a lot of light on the expanse, nature and scale, and thereby, a verification of the environmental and socio-political disasters. Are there any genetic evidences of the sea people?
@@ahwabanmukherjee5065 There's a little bit. Testing shows that in the very early Iron Age there was a large but brief influx of European blood in the heritage of the people of Ashkelon, which belonged to Egypt at the time. This would suggest a migration event in between the Bronze Age and Iron Age. But it's hard to be very certain.
@@aaronleverton4221 It's definitely an interesting questions, it seems if they had that many people in Europe already then Western Asia would have already been trading with them, or at least aware of who they were. Yet it seems no one knew who the sea people were, so where the hell did they come from?
It's possible that even at the time, many may have disagreed as to the "true" causes of their crisis. Famine? Droughts? Earthquakes? Sea people? Bad politicians? Punishment from the gods? It might be difficult to see even the cause, let alone solutions, especially through the haze of fear, despair and anger which would likely have been present in discourse. That's a lot of speculation though.
Also because they were kinda similar to us, most people give too much of a credit to these nations. Famines were commonplace in anatolia back then, so a few crises at the same time can absolutely destroy hitites. Once the central authority gone, cities are easy picking for raiders of any kind.
Excellent comprehensive summary of the "Collapse of Bronze Age". You covered many more possible reasons other than just Sea Peoples even though they were probable the main reason. Your summary is the only one I've seen thus far that mentions the 5 decade flurry of earthquakes. Plus you did all of this with a very economical use of time. Thank you for your quality video.
I, Marcus Porcius Cato, being an incorruptible man of impeccable virtue, will now derail this entire discussion by writing an absurdly long, confusingly phrased comment for no reason other than that I derive _eudaimonia_ from the act of filibustering. I swear to the gods that if any of you were to block me, or if the noble Historia Civilis should deem it wise to remove my comment, I would commit glorious suicide (twice) in an unreasonably painful and gruesome manner.
There's an important bit left unsaid: Rulers of the time relied on the favor of the gods. Famine, no rain, earthquakes, even sending an enemy are typical actions of an angry god. People turn against rulers that apparently make the gods angry and thus have lost legitimacy.
ye kinda feel like that aspect of it all would have been quite an important factor tbh, what I found funny though was him showin western and central europe as " northern europe"
well to be fair their countries got hit by famin, no rain, instability and invasion and the earth itself going "nah bruh" and shaking their building until they colapsed all at once, maybe they really did anger the gods lmao
From what we know, what followed this collapse was one of the darkest periods in human history fro centuries, we're limited in what we know because across most of the old world written languages died out almost completely. Almost every major city outside Egypt was gone and every remnant of the old empires eventually collapsed over the centuries, never even being close in scale to the pre-collapse civilizations. Edit: Even China's Shang Dynasty saw apparent decline in this time and a few centuries later (1000BC) were eventually overthrown by the Zhou dynasty.
This was a very clear explanation of a hugely important historical event I did not know about , until I watched a very good and long video on the subject , about two years ago .
It's wild to think that the amount of human history we know is a drop in the bucket compared to the entirety of the unknown, lost history of human civilization.
And the history we have is still mostly written as "great man" history instead of looking at systemic and socioeconomic dynamics. I feel like we are in a very exciting age of scholarly debate over how we view our history and I hope especially now with climate change and the coming collapse of old power dynamics we also focus and learn more about our own history with the environment and how it affected civilizations in the past.
I disagree. we know EVERYTHING humans have done thruout history, because the HUman Being is a very consistent ROBOT. Violence? CHECK! War? CHECK! RACISM or Corruption? CHECK! plus environmental crises? CHECK!
It reminds me of Xenephon's Anabasis, where the Ten Thousand Greeks find ancient ruined Mesopotamian cities that were older to them than Xenephon is to modern people.
@@Jaml321 Why have human societies made stupid decisions? Why has greed been such a strong factor? You seem to radically reduce something so complex and interesting as humanity's development, to such a boring, overly simple conclusion, without even asking some very impirtant questions. If humans were naturally stupid, our cavemen ancestors would've all died from poor decisions. If humans were naturally greedy, our early ancestors wouldn't have shared food or shelter during hard times with those who need it, losing future allies either through their death or worsening relations. They'd be ostracised from their tribes, and have no one to turn to when they were in trouble. Humanity is not the oopsie; nothing is absolutely bad or good, even if they do approach one end or the other; a wrench can be used to build or to sabotage, power by itself is neutral, and humanity is very powerful; the difference, is that a wrench has no mind of its own, but humanity can choose to do bad or good. Please, do yourself a favor, leave this misanthropic pessimism behind, and ask questions, with the end goal of how to make sure humanity can do more good than harm. Giving up on something is sure to bring defeat, whatever the goal may be, and humans are all we got, so give ourselves a shot.
@@katiaquirino6020 Humans kill each other and destroy nature and the planet from the moment they took it over to make a quick buck. Its like we are shitting the bed we are sleeping in. We are a scourge on the planet and there is no doubt it would be better off the moment we die out from whatever stupid war or other contraption we are going to create that speeds up our demise. Humans pose only problems for the earths ecosystem, they are the oopsie of evolution.
@@Jaml321 @Jaml321 Ah yes, I sure am glad my corporate and stately overlords didn't sign an agreement designed to heal what damage we wrought on the planet. God forbid the stockholders lose their money. And don't get me started on the progress of ww3 so far! Look, humanity has its many faults, but the attempts at making the world a better place are not unfelt. Organizations like the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity and the many USA organizations dedicated to preservation of nature would be impossible in the world you just described. And excuse my crassness, but people like you are a part of the collection of problems that plague us. You sound defeated by things you do not even understand. You sound as if you willfully remain ignorant in an attempt to appeal to blind pessimism. If humanity were to listen to people like you who condemn them to shame in spite of their great achievements, then we would lose all motivation to progress. We would be driven to such complete stagnation that we would seek to die in our own shit. You seem to want humanity to fall, to not do everything in its power to try and reverse the damage it sows. You are your own evil.
1. In southern Greece near Thebes, there is the Mycenaean citadel of Glas (= Γλας), dominating the dried-up lake of Kopaida. During the Mycenaean era, they built a 20 km long draining channel for the lake, turning it into arable land. On the acropolis were built a huge commercial and industrial complex of buildings (not housing) (some buildings are two-story, 70 m long) and a double palace on top of the hill. The citadel was fortified with a 2.5 km long walls, 3 meters thick. According to archaeological evidences, it was completely abandoned 50 years after it was erected without any fight, despite some evidence of fire.
@@hotkulen2196 I don't know if it's completely true, but I think during the time after the bronze age collapse there is a lack of any written sources from all the places mentioned in this video except Egypt, which I think is how the theory of the bronze age collapse initially began
it kinda makes sense. trade and abundant agriculture is what lets people specialize. If everyone isn't farming then they can take the time to write down history. Once civilization collapsed there is no one with free time to write things. Not saying writing went away...not that it didn't
Goddamn Civ. You do all those vids on my favourite period in histiry that I know the most about and then to mix up the content then you do the period I know the most about relative to average person. Like i know more about the late republuc but its also so famous every average person knows a little about it but with the Late Bronze Age Collapse they cant name like 3 of the main powers from the end of the month .not a knock against them at all im saying it's a societal thing. I mean when i started grtting into it, 3 of the first 4 books i was recomended to read each had an explict separate section purely for promoting the argument that this was more significant historically than the fall of Rome and likely had more of an impacton modern socitu. Also he's always arguing that this event should simply be called "the dark age" and post Rome should be called "The Roman/Western European dark age" like he's real fucking invested in it. Anyway point is thanks for some reason deciding to pick you video topics based purely on what will make one random Sub in Australia Happiest I should have done it a while ago but you legit have a new patreon when i get next paid
Another explanation for why the sea peoples were so effective against the chariots was maybe because the chariot's main advantage was that it was a morale busting weapon. Fighting someone you can hardly catch, but during the entire chase is needling you to death is very demoralizing. Most disorganized armies and raiders probably went home rather than press on. The sea people might not have done anything significantly different than the other raiders, the only difference might have only been their utter desperation. They pressed on against incredible casualties that would have convinced others in normal circumstances to go home simply because there was no home for these sea peoples to go back to. Where else could they go when the environmental disaster at the time meant that the only place with food was probably behind where ever the chariots were defending. They had chariots after all, they probably had food.
That's a terrifying irony if you're right, it may explain why some cities were spared or avoided the Sea Peoples. They didn't have chariots and thus the Sea People ignored them.
“The peoples made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once, the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms: from Hatti, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya onward, being cut off at once. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, the flame going before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the land as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting, ‘Our plans will succeed!’” -Pharaoh Ramesses III, 12th c. BCE
@@legion999 he actually just ripped off the full quote from the Sea Peoples wikipedia article, I can tell because he included "their confederation was the peleset, tejeker" etc, which is not included in the video. but if you look up "Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh" on google the first result is the Sea Peoples wikipedia page.
We should remember that this inscription is hagiographic propaganda meant to aggrandize Ramesses III after his death. The more fearsome the enemy, the more glorious his victory.
Only tin, the metal essential to all of our crafts, could stop them. But when the world needed it most, it vanished. A generation has passed and my brother and I have discovered the new Pharao, a bronzebender named Ramesses. And altough his chariots are great, he has a lot to learn before he's ready to defeat anyone. But I believe Ramesses can save the world... Pharao, the last bronzebender
Why are people so terrible at spelling words like “cheap” and “tough” now? I see people writing “cheep” and “tuff” now more than I did a few years ago.
This video made me watch the entirety of your chronological order playlist, and now I wish there were more of your videos, now I'm looking forward for any future video you will make whatever the topic it will be
Imagine being alive during this time. Their world literally ended and I'm sure it must have been terrifying. No way to explain any of it beyond the gods are angry.
The normal way of fighting is outdone by a new thing called mobile infantry. No one adapts, everyone is still stubbornly holding on to outdated things.
A lot of people are working on bringing about civilisational collapse today. Just give it time and remember the sea peoples wanted only to migrate for a better life, but faced nativist aggression.
I mean, we are living through a version of it right now. The famine and drought migrations, waterwars and climate catastrophes have already started. Next comes waves of refugees and when they have nowhere to go and no other choice (because humans are greedy and don't plan for catastrophes) they will pick up arms to take what they need.
This must have really seemed like the end of days. Imagine being a major trader on your way to one of these cities only to arrive to it either burning or leveled. Or the farmer waiting for state sponsored seeds to arrive for your harvest, and then realizing no one is coming and you might starve. I wonder if near the end, the Sea Peoples were just a lightly organized paramilitary rabble of former lowclass people from all over who'd watched their parents struggle in these times, were forced to relocate and now see no other way to survive.
same thing happened when the mongols came followed by the plague. Arabian scholars describe the world as if it was in the process of ending, literally using the word apocalypse to describe it. numerous middle eastern cities were gone in a flash, population of the earth reduced to 50% by conflict and disease the middle east and central Asia still suffers the aftermath until now. but also like the bronze age its amazing how Egypt again stopped a foreign destructive invasion, being the last stronghold where everyone took shelter and immigrated to escape the slaughter and disease
@@julesfalcone it feels like it had to have been several waves that were less and less organized. Survivors from the first states to fall collapsing on those still standing, and then vice versa for 50-100 years until most cities were gone. This includes migrations from northern Europe and maybe central Asia, suffering similar geological frustrations.
I really enjoyed this History Lesson and The Narrator was one of the best I have ever heard~! I was glad to be a new subscriber and look forward to watching all the other lessons.
History Channel in the 90s and 2000s: The Collapse of the Bronze Age and their ancient civilizations remains one of human civilizations' greatest mysteries History Channel today: "Aliens"
the aliens invaded northern Europe causing the mass migration and the heat was because the aliens needed a warmer Temperature to survive but then they ehree finally beat back but then time traveling scientists from the year 3031ish used thier time traveling machine to go back and clean up any trace of alien life.
I know I just watched a video explaining that the "sea people" likely came from areas in Italy and around the Mediterranean... But I can't get the image out of my head of Rameses defeating an unstoppable horde of Lovecraftian fish people in hand to hand combat for the glory of Egypt
11:55 "Sire! The enemy can destroy our chariots! We're done for!" "How!? Do they have their own chariots? Elephants? The gods themselves on their side???" "No sire. They know how to R U N." "....Dear gods, we are doomed"
The Zulus, with shields and assegai defeated the British at Isandlwana (with Martini Henry rifles 7 pounder field guns, and bayonets) with their ability to run (to the flanks and rear of the British).
Usually it is mobility versus fire power in the military. Spearmen and chariots are different class of unit, but I believe when armoured, trained spearmen in decent formation could beat the chariots.
That letter always makes me sad, and weirdly nostalgic. I just have this image of him looking out to the horizon watching the ships approach and things burning around him, while he dictates the words to a scribe who is imprinting it on a clay tablet.
Yeah the majority of claims about arrows effectiveness on armor are greatly exaggerated by modern historians. I'm pretty sure they're just using linear equations starting with a very thing material control to accomplish this. Either way these metrics are demonstrably wrong.
I reckon this was supposed to be 3 millimeters or MAYBE 3 eighths of an inch, but even that would be quite a stretch. There is no fecking way, an arrow went through 3 inches of solid metal at room temperature. not even lead.
Thank you so much for making wonderful, easy to understand and entertaining videos. I have been watching lots of them and will continue to do so. Awesome.
Oh boy have you not been keeping up to date with the manga if you think that Rameses was the biggest thing here. Wait until you see in the manga actual giants 50 meters tall, millions of them, marching out of the ocean with a 500 meter tall Eren walking skeleton leading it, stomping out entire cities
It didn't have cities so modern intellectuals are not big on it. Additionally it disproves the noble savage myth which is important to certain utopian ideologies. Beyond that most of these societies were fundamentally patriarchal, and tended to be led by priest-kings, based on the ancestor cults of the tribes (clan might be more accurate) they came from. However much of this was just as true of the bronze age, and much later. The old clan system was broken but the Church in western Europe in the middle ages, and patriarchal based government and civil structures as well as a divine hierarchy continued well into the enlightenment. They are effectively gone now, but will likely come back with a vengeance as they are disproportionate in communities who reproduce.
@@vorynrosethorn903lol. I love how confidently people spew their paranoid delusions. And just wrong ones at that. Tell me? What evidence do you have of “fundamentally patriarchal” tendencies in the Stone Age? If anything we have evidence for the opposite. That women held a lot of power in prehistorical communities as they were the ones who controlled reproduction.
@@s_for_short2400 I believe the material was able to store more energy while being flexed back, making arrows being launched faster/stronger, it also was smaller and less cumbersome, but I haven't read about it in ages so I might be missing details.
Glorious Egyptian bow, sinewed over a thousand times, pierce through three inches of bronze, filthy sea people go home - Original guy who wrote the source for that claim, probably
The interesting thing about the Assyrian collapse was that a lot of modern scholars and a lot of ancient scholars surmise that partially the reason why they collapsed was because they were extraordinary cruel and barbaric even by ancient world standards and they were extraordinarily oppressive to the people around them and the ones that they controlled.
I disagree with that, Assyria was a very powerful state, yes, but it wasn't "exceptionally cruel". Its evictions and movement of peoples were done with care in order to preserve the valuable artisans they needed. In fact, Assyria arguably emerged from the Bronze Age Collapse better than Egypt did.
@Hunter Smith But what forced them off the flat terrain? Why didn't they choose to take a defensive stand in a flat place? And why didn't neighbouring enemies try that in the hundreds of years beforehand?
@@mdilligaf Because flat terrain gave the massed infantry/swarm tactics of the Sea Peoples even more of an advantage, as they had all the room they needed to rush around the flanks of row-ordered spearmen. With enough runners, they might have even been able to ignore the chariots entirely and wipe out their infantry support.
And composite bows. Not as clumsy or random as a regular bow, but an elegant weapon for a more civilized age... before the dark times, before the Sea Peoples.
Thank you for explaining! I never understood the "...far lands of tin land. I don't know, my dealer won't tell me where he gets it" part from Bill Wurtz but now I do.
@@Great_Olaf5 This can be put into perspective with our world today: global warming, income inequality, pandemic, migrations, rogue states. A lot of crisis a once.
9:40 "It could punch through three inches of metal" I really would like to see the source for that claim since that would make a bronze age composite bow one of the most effective anti-tank weapons at the start of WW2.
@@thomasjoyce7910 The primary reason for the rise of iron and steel over bronze was primarily due to cost and ease of access. Either way you aren't punching through three inches of pretty much any solid material with a bow, steel, iron, bronze, copper, aluminium, wood.
Metal from ancient times is not the same as post-industrial revolution metal, the so called damascus steel, wich was the best metal you could find in the ancient world is nothing compared to mass produced spring steel we have today
@@rafaelpascoaliczerniej297 A bow can’t punch through three inches of rubber, plastic, or aluminium. Yes modern metals are superior to ancient metal, but not to that degree. What is wrong with asking for the source to the claim that a bow can punsh through three inches of metal?
It's funny how before this video was released, I had no knowledge of the Bronze Age Collapse, and now it's probably my favorite topic, I may even say that I'm obssesed with it.
@@Darknimbus3 The collapse of the Roman Empire wasn't that much of a collapse as people tend to think. It was for the better if you think of it, one just had to look to romans inventing monetary policy and having some sort of ancient New Deal as evidence of economical and cultural decline.
It's upsetting to see so many historians trying to rewrite history to minimize the sea peoples. My uncle was killed by the sea peoples, but now everyone's trying to carry water for them.
I think he likes variety. It took him several years to complete the Ceaser playlist. He might get burned out if those are the only videos he worked on.
@@qnteban True. I was avoiding the "Can animals commit crimes", video. But after I went through all of his other videos I finally watched it and throughly enjoyed it aswell.
@@rodneylagrone7180 He had also been working on Macedon, Philip and Alexander series, I thought that now all the players he talked about in Ceasar are dead (Cicero, Kato, Ceasar), that his next video would be about Alexander. My best guess is that he is taking a time out from serial videos and making one offs until he finishes a better script for Alexander or Augustus. I think he is even thinking about moving a bit into the English Civil war. But I can see his style, he loves to build up the culture and system of the civilizations before moving on to the main series, if my hopes aren't too high, he could be preparing a post bronze age collapse series in the next two years or so.
I wonder if we were to collapse from this not quite pandemic, combine with instability of the financial system and tension between major economies, would historian call our period the Plastic Age collapse? The Chinese Collapse? The Epidemic Collapse? The 2nd Pax Americana Collapse? The Western Civilisation Collapse? I wouldn't imagine if I were a Hittite or Mycenaean, I would have thought of the destruction of my world to be called "Bronze Age".
"Within the short span of one generation, the majority of Earth's most technologically advanced civilizations faced an existential crisis." I felt that
@@lilben4184 2030 is being pillared to being a new tech age. So yes we will. Obviously, creating another underclass like what hapened when mercantilism became a thing. This time instead it over the guise of freedom.
Mind-boggling to think that 1200BCE predates the time of Caesar by a millennium and some change. In terms of British history, that's as far removed as the Viking invasion is from today.
@@tulsatrash Perhaps only tangentially related but when I was a very young child in the early Nineties, people aged in their 70s and 80s fought or at least lived through the Second World War. It continually throws me when I realise that people of the same age today were the generation after. My dad's nearly 70 himself and he was born '52, long after it ended. _Tempus fugit_ indeed.
@Stephen Jenkins Yeah, the Late Antiquity citizenry was probably feeling the same. Until the elites couldn't maintain the illusion anymore. Then suddenly they found themselves surrounded by barbarian warlords and tax collectors, having to feed on their own production instead of global imports, having to defend themselves instead of relying on professional soldiers coming from afar, and so on. Laugh! ...while you can. Don't take your living conditions of today as granted, for they might change very, very quickly.
@Stephen Jenkins Alright, I'll show you what we're up against. 1. Peak Oil. Eventually we're going to produce less oil - so the oil-producing countries will face a significant shortfall in income and, thus, power. The countries which rely on oil will be forced to either find new sources or kick the habit. I don't know how many methheads you personally know, but I know some tweakers and, let me tell you: America ain't kickin' it's oil addiction in a generation. 2. Climate change. Climate change is such a big issue that it's startling that nobody seems to realize its great threat. Of course, it may seem like some folks are going wacko about how it's going to cause the end of the world (it won't), and others just have their heads in the sand, but the truth is a lot worse. You see, the people that seem to be screaming about the end of the world are just failing to realize that human civilization will go on long after you and I and America are dead. It might even be better in the future. But between now and then, we're going to face a period of unimaginable suffering. We're going to have worldwide famines, and we're facing the leading edge of these famines right now. Look at the Syrian Civil War and the massive refugee crisis caused by it - that war was in part caused by climate change. Imagine that happening all of the countries of the global South, not merely a couple. The famines will cause the price of bread to go up, and the shortage of fuel will also cause the price of bread to go up. The price of bread going up too greatly will result in revolutions which will see the rich get their heads cut off. I'm not complaining or saying we should avert this because I like rich people. I most assuredly don't. We are at the beginning of the collapse of global civilization - the very earliest point. This is why Historia Civilis uploaded this, because we are seeing a microcosm of this collapse. At this very minute, there are people dying in droves because of a virus that our economic system wasn't prepared to fight, that the psyche of the American people is unwilling to come to terms with, that provides the leadership with the perfect scapegoat with which to blame all of its problems upon. This infighting is not how it used to be. It is something new for us, or at least new for living memory. America is undergoing a drastic political polarization, there is going to be an enormous wave of famines and refugees in the not-so-distant future, and we are going to become economically, uh, "worse off" because of our insane dependence upon fossil fuels which we *have the technology* to remove ourselves from. Ironically enough, if we kick the petrofuel habit, we kill one major factor behind climate change! It's almost as if this were all some horrifying dialectical system which exists purely to showcase the contradictions of our present society. So, yeah. This ain't no "it needs to happen big time before I believe it" type nonsense. It's happening right now, right under our noses, and nobody realizes it because it starts out real subtle like.
Fun fact: The word ''copper'' came from the latin ''aes cyprium'' (from Cyprus), corrupted as ''cuprum'' in the writing. In Old England it was called ''coper''(later ''copper''), derived from the latin word. Cyprus was producing so much that the metal's name came from it. Greetings from Cyprus everyone and have a great history session!! :D
Fun Fact: Cyprus was producing 80% of the copper being traded in Bronze age Mediterranean at one point. The local ore was so rich and easy to mined/smelt that they beat out other competitors in the region.
@@iyousef46 The sea peoples went back to Atlantis. Later the Atlanean gods made them romans and they would start their sea people conquest on land. They are now the land peoples. I read this on a wall in a tomb somewhere and people believe me. Buy my book.
Dear Historia Civilis dude and everybody: I'd like to point out a major difference in these bronze age cultures which isn't mentioned in the video but is significant. The fact that the sea peoples attacked the countries in that particular order is important, because the countries weren't equally equipped to deal with the invasion. The greek city states were more like social experiments leading up to democracy centuries later. They weren't ruled by one king above all, but had many kings who didn't agree and most likely didn't all unite against the sea peoples. The Hittites were an unstable people already, in part due to never actually subduing the many tribes living around them in the Anatolian mountains, plus they were marred by intrigues in courts (backstabbing and succession fights) plus parts of their territory regularly breaking away. Cyprus was a small player so I'll skip them here. As Babylonia and Assyria isn't covered in the video I'll skip them too. But, Egypt was a major player, and also the most stabile of them all. The greatest pharaoh of all time, Ramesses II had recently passed on, so Egypt was at near peak strength. Egypt was best equipped to deal with the invasion of all the countries. The sea peoples gained strength, slaves, wealth and new soldiers and weapons with every victory, as we've seen with all the ancient warfare. If Egypt had been the first ones attacked, this all could have gone very differently. Egypt could have taken the brunt of the attack, leaving only smaller portions of the sea peoples to attack the other countries. I'm not saying Egypt would have won completely, but they would most likely have weakened the sea peoples to a fraction.
Mind that Egypt was attacked two times, the first at the time of Pharaon Merneptah (that seems to have won rather easily) and the second a the time of Ramses III. Ramses says to have won, but yet Egypt lost all of its empire, returning back to its fundamental state just around the Nile. It's middle eastern empire was occupied by the very same sea peoples.
True. Ramesses II also claimed to have beaten the Hittites at Karnesh, yet their sphere of influence clearly didn''t include that city after the battle. But being sons of the Gods, who was going to say otherwise?
Most of the "Sea People" werent actually outside invaders. Some of them were rebels. But the most significant portion of them were Runners. The Bronze Empires used other militaristic nations in their armies as runners, and had them settle down on the borders as buffers. But, most of all, these runners were used to protect chariots and to capture enemy chariots as spoils. They knew the weaknesses of chariots intimately. 50 years before the collapse, the biggest bronze age chariot battle occured. It was devastating for both sides. This resulted in the world's first peace treaty. Copies of this peace treaty was found in different nations in their own languages. Peace, on that grand scale, meant that these runners were now out of a job. Those militaristic nations that "buffered" the Empires were now suddenly in poverty. Egypt was only able to avoid the fate of the other empires because they knew what was coming. E.g., the Exodus, in the Bible, happened at exactly this time. The Hebrews were settled on the east side of the Nile delta for the purpose as a buffer and military auxiliaries. In the Bible, the Pharoah gave them pointless work (making bricks... without straw). The Pharoah was trying to keep them employed. Later the Pharoah killed sons that were born, etc and such stories. They were a threat to internal stability...the Pharoah could see it...and tried to address it. Anyway, runners, like the Hebrews became a liability. The Egyptians had enough advanced knowledge to know how that ended for the other empires. So Egypt had time to be able to re-employ or just kick out liabilities like the Hebrews, and were able to mount a preemptive defence. Egypt even reorganized their armies and and abandonned chariot warfare and fought on foot. Egypt also built grain storage cities/depots (Two of which were raided by the hebrews on their way out.) The capital was also moved North near the Delta because they knew, that protecting that region was key to surviving. The Egyptians survived because they knew what was coming. They knew, because they saw the others fall like dominoes.
@@tylerdurden3722 Interesting. Curious to know if you have any sources for reading concerning the Hebrews and similar peoples in their roles as 'runners'.
Honestly makes me curious to know what the direct ancestors of the Roman aristocracy were up to at this point. I imagine most of them would have been lowly backwater farmer or shepherds completely oblivious to how, while their farmer neighbor’s descendents would go on being peasant farmers for thousands of years, theirs would reach unimaginable heights of power
If things were so bad in the Superstars of the Bronze Age countries, why did the Sea People find them so attractive and continue to attack them? A question that should have been answered, I feel.
Something I always found interesting is the idea that the cities that weren't completely destroyed... the ones where only the palaces were burnt, they were destroyed by their own people. Which makes sense when you think about it. War and famine would have pushed social pressure up to the maximum. At some point the people would feel abandoned by gods and rulers, and rise up against them. The theory is they mobbed the palaces and temples, looted them, then abandoned the city.
I am from Spain and in the south-east of the iberian peninsula, aroun the 2nd millennia, there was a culture called by the arqueologist "El Argar"( The Argar). They didn't have rwiting or a large state, but they were a large bronce culture with contact with the diferent cultures in the mediterranean. The people of Argar had a stratified society, with nobility and slaves. And around 1200b.c. they have desapered like the other cultures exposed in this fantastic video. I hope that you find the subject of this commentary interesting. Thanks you HISTORIA CIVILIS for such a good content. Thanks!
They had contact with Mycenaean Greece and possibly adopted their burial customs. I think their collapse predated the Bronze Age collapse by a couple centuries, though. Maybe Argarians were some of the Sea People...
+Isaac Bruner Yeah, they could have been one of the early victims of the wave of migrating people, themselves becoming migrating people and displacing someone else. They say “domino effect,” but the inage that comes to my mind first is a line of spaced pool balls
@Romano Coombs I do think their way of warfare and MO is suspiciously similar to how the Romans and Greeks later describe Germanic and Gaullic peoples, up to and including showing up as a combination of conquerors and migrating tribes with the family in the back cheering on the warriors. I think someone in the comments described some circumstantial historical evidence for whatever the event was also affecting Ireland and some tribal migration happening there, so it's plausible it was affecting Europe as well. Given that Scandinavia/ northern Germany/ the Baltic has put out many many waves of emigree tribes that go on to cause more in their path to move or form coalitions, and bronze age Scandinavia was an interestingly complex society all on its own (but Scandinavia also was typically one of the hardest hit areas by climatic shifts) that had trade ties with the Mycenaean Greeks, that might suggest something similar. _However,_ I don't know that there's any evidence for that claim, and may be much against; perhaps the general warm period of the time even actually helped establish bronze age Scandanavia, and thus between the generally advanced state of the region combined with very good farming (comparatively) would make migration from there much less likely. Continental and Mediterranean Europe outside of the more brittle but self-reinforcing eastern med. bronze age societies looks more and more likely. And these societies (at least places like England and bronze age Scandinavia) also had chariots afaik. So why wouldn't they have brought them? There is evidence of pretty significant trade routes through Europe to the Mediterranean at the time, so presumably from anywhere. Though, I'd presume wherever they come from they could build and use ships relatively well, so perhaps central Europe is more unlikely than western/ southern Europe or the Balkans or say Romania? Perhaps proto-celts, or the Atlantic Bronze age. Hell, what was happening in north/ northwest Africa?
They wielded the ancient art of teleportation to dominate 5 mighty nations at one time, without impunity!! Bow to the mystical Sea peoples, for they shall return!!😱😱😱
I think it would've been worth mentioning that Cyprus, apparently, had so much copper that the word copper itself comes from Cyprus (through Latin "cuprum").
I think it's the other way round and that the island was named (before the existence of the latin language) after the metal so abundant there but don't quote me on that. Certainly both words are related though
When you're Sardinian, and the last time your people were relevant in any meaningful way was when they were part of the sea people coalition which kinda caused a halt in the advancing of human civilizations
They were based af
What about that time Sardinia sailors sailed with Spain and Venice to stop the Ottomans invasion of the Mediterranean and basically ended the ottomans as a naval power?
In the XIXth century, the major power in Italy was Sardinia, and it's them that pushed for Italy unification, so... not that irrelevant :p
Well, of course it was actually Savoy, but still, it counts ^^
Feels bad man
Napoleon Bonaparte notwithstanding, I suppose that you are correct.
"We have a drought, an earthquake and we still have to pay extra! What next? We get invaded?"- Some Bronze Age dude, probably
I thought u were talking about 2020
Oh wait......
We may get to see the collapse of our own age. Just think in 5000 years some archaeologists will find my hause and other than a few silver coins the only thing that will survive that long will be a couple of arrowhead that l have. One I bought and another one that was made for me by a friend. The archaeologists will find that and the stones from the courthouse and determine that we were primitive people who were religious and had a temple
Easily the most shocking part of this video is how much bigger the Bronze Age world was than I thought. I think the regular belief is that it centers mostly around the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. But now you're telling me they were trading from Britain to Afghanistan? That is just mind blowing.
Glass beads from Egypt have been found in Denmark (presumably paid for with amber)
@Alex Gully I mean, we've found evidence of complex civilization dating back to 10,000 b.c. with Göbekli Tepe, so I shouldn't be as surprised as I was. I guess I always thought of the Bronze Age as a few hotspots of cilivization surrounded by untamed wilderness. Looks like that wasn't the case.
@Alex Gully Sounds like the same thing that happened after the fall of the Roman empire. People started loving inside old stadiums fallout style because no one played sports anymore and places needed walls.
@@andrasbeke3012 gobekli tepe is not evidence of complex civilization. its evidence that religion had a much more important role in developing civilization as these megaliths presumed to be places of congregations may have been the seeds of fully fledged settlements.
It's an example of the limitations of history, history by definition is about the times and areas we have written sources from but people settled down and started building complex societies long before writing was invented or spread to them. This has for a lot of the history of history left us in the dark about what life in those areas and times was like but modern archeology is helping to uncover a lot of this and fill in our gaps, still it's not quite the same as written sources and it's just a lot easier to imagine what a place was like when we actually have the words written by those people.
But yeah global trade is actually a lot older than you might think and areas outside of what we tend to think of as the "civilized world" were actually a lot more like that world than we imagine. For example a few thousand years after the Bronze Age you might think that beyond the borders of the Roman Empire were just endless forests with small villages and people walking around with helmets that had horns on them but actually it would be more or less impossible to tell these areas apart from the Roman Empire as they looked very similar. The differences between these areas was more like the difference between the the current superpowers like the US and China and their smaller allied states in Europe, Africa and Asia. But if your only source for learning about our world was Hollywood you might think that everywhere outside of the US was backwards and untamed and that's basically the situation we're in when trying to learn about the past.
>''History is written by the victors''
>be sea peoples
>arrive and cause the fall of the bronze age
>dont write anything down
>leave
Sea peoples: “there are no pictures in these written records!”
Early civilization mad lads smh
History is written by literate people lol
>refuse to elaborate
Good point! Perhaps the "sea peoples" were not invaders: but refugees. The shear amount of extra mouths to feed...was the straw that caused the chariot to collapse!? This would of course result in more migration and more collapse.
Just as a note: The Cyprus was so closely identified with copper that the metal derived its name from it. The Latin for copper is cuprum, shortened from an older word cyprium, meaning of Cyprus.
Yes, I believe also that the y to Greeks and Romans was more like an u sound at the time
@@omegacardboard5834; Don't know about Greek, but Latin (Roman) 'V' was the original 'U' before the 'U' letter was introduced in the 16th century. A dead giveaway is that the letter 'W', to this day, is still pronounced "double-u", and not "double-v".
@@pintorpi333 yes that it correct. But the Romans also adopted the Greek y for Greek names/ words they borrowed from Greek. It’s not quite the same V/u sound in Latin, it’s like a u but with tighter lips and you sort of lift them up a bit and it’s a bit more aspirated I believe
@@pintorpi333 Depends on language. In French it's "doobla-veh". Double V.
I think the more obvious pointer would be that in Greek Cyprus is Kypros. A hard K sound and not a soft S sound. Although some prominent etymologists say that's just some popular, lazy bs.
@@aaronleverton4221 well you can always look it up. There is no letter C in greek. There is kappa K and there is sigma S Cyprus is spelled Κύπρος and is pronounced Kupros or Kipros.
A severe drought in the Mediterranean may also explain why Egypt was less affected and survived the Bronze Age Collapse as the only major power in the region. Egypt's agriculture is totally dependent on the yearly flooding of the Nile which is caused by heavy rainfalls in distant Ethiopia and therefore unaffected by changes in local climate systems.
climate is not local
@@BenState "its raining outside my house so it must be raining in tehran and beijing too"
U wot m8?
@@BenState typically when one area is extremely hot and dry, another area is extremely wet and temperate. We see this especially with just our yearly climate patterns, like with the el niño/la niña events. Most especially significant, is that most the world is unaffected.
@@BenState This planet is divided up into many climatic zones. You have heard of Artic, tundra, boral, temperate and tropical, right?
He is correct. Nile water comes from Ethiopia and the Rift Valley of Africa, thousands of miles from Mediterranean sea.
That final battle in the Nile was probably one of the most epic battles in history.
An apocaliptic clash for survival of their world.
Right... I want a good idea of who these invaders were too
As an Egyptian, I am proud that we have such a glorious and great history
@@yousefshahin2654 Be proud !
Egypt history is amazing.
@@avalle4493 Thank you 😀😊
@Seaworth Look, it's kind of yes nad no at the same time. Traditions and society are completely different. But we still kind of embrace them, and we are proud of our ancestors.
A lot of people have pointed out that it is unlikely that a composite bow could shoot through 3 inches of metal but I didn't see anyone dig into the sources so I'll comment on what I've found. I'm guessing that particular part of the video was sources from "The end of the Bronze Age : changes in warfare and the catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C." (mentioned in description, I found a copy on Internet archive) pg. 120-121. The exact passage reads as follows:
"The pharaohs themselves took pride in their skill as chariot archers. Amenhotep II boasted of the rapidity, range, and accuracy of his shooting, claiming that from a speeding chariot he had hit four targets, set thirty-four feet apart with such force that the arrows went clean through each target's three inches of copper."
This passage is apparently from a stele (Ancient Near Eastern Texts (ANET) pg. 244), and the thickness given in this translation is "of one palm in their thickness", which the annotation says is "a litde [little?] less than 3 inches".
Regardless, it seems that this is a boast from a specific pharaoh, rather than some sort of historical fact or mixing up units, so probably not an accurate account of a bronze age era's composite bow's potential.
Interesting... Thank you!
The real MvP
Wallace MacLeod's Egyptian Bows in New York offers more information.
To elaborate, they found one of the bows buried with a prince, which makes it, to me, seem like a closed-case.
I see little reason why they wouldn't be able to verify that, or why they didn't cast aspersions on its capabilities, given that they found it and it was verifiable that it was the exact bow Egyptian sources had spoken about.
A modern bow, can penetrate sheet-metal steel, and it can do it easily.
Composite bows were an absolute gamechanger. They were unrivaled. They were the dreadnought of bows.
I don't find it a stretch that it could shoot through some copper ingots.
It *certainly* could shoot through armour, and I don't think there were tin-men covered in 3 inches of armour, which is a naval vessel level of armour, during the Bronze Age. So I figure it really doesn't matter if it's a boast, they could do exactly what was needed, and with proficiency.
@@iMajoraGaming Thanks for the info (for anyone looking its McLeod, W. E. (1962). Egyptian Composite Bows in New York. American Journal of Archaeology, 66(1), 13. doi:10.2307/501476, I found it on sci-hub). The estimate they give is that it could penetrate a metal (brass) plate 0.002 to 0.003 m thick from a distance of 30-40 m.
When Bill Wurtz said about tin: "idk, my dealer won't tell me where he gets it..."
I didn't know he was being serious.
Everything he said in his history of the world video was in reference to some aspect if history, there were no throw-away lines.
Volcryn Darkstar i could think of one or two that might be arguable. but it’s generally good.
Volcryn Darkstar how about “this is stupid” and then black screens for 10 seconds
Cornwall apparently I just found out tin was rare but honestly I thought it was common
I read the title and said "now the Phoenicians can get down to business."
“The sea peoples” sounds like such a vague and terrifying name for peoples that don’t even have much history to them.
It's exactly the kind of name you would give to people we know nothing about who came suddenly from the sea
They are also know as Sea Men
If northern Europe was in such bad shape and they became sea people early scandinavian vikings perhaps? I mean the drive for resources were similar as the later scandinavians wanted to spread out due to resource issues. However this situation seems more serious.
@@DudeWatIsThis you're making their case bruh
they might not have been there from the very beginning, but 3000 years is a long ass time
@@orions2908 Yes of course. The Jews themselves were not native to that land either (they had settled it a few hundred years before).
In general, Canaan/the Eastern Levant has always been one of those "in-between-empires" areas which get trampled and stomped on every few centuries.
"we need to talk about bronze age warfare"
* battle music starts *
Age of Mythology battle theme immediately comes to mind
I was listening to a Wendover Productions video the other day (he covers logistics and transport) and suddenly the music transitioned and I thought, "The battle of Munda?"
Clear and concise yet thorough examination of one of history's most troubling ages. Excellent narration and illustrations. Glad I discovered this channel. Well done!
I am now ending all messages with "May you know it." May you know it.
i love you.
Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
start all of them with: "Carthago delenda est"
@@fionafiona1146 Let us all be Cato the Elder.
I may know it
With regard to environmental changes, that could again explain why Egypt survived. Agricultrue in Egypt is driven by the waters of the Nile, and the Nile is fed by far-flung lakes and tributaries in regions that may not have been as effected by an environmental change. Thus, Egypt could maintain enough agricultural output to survive even as it’s neighbors dried up.
yep, exactly Egypt
Everything that led to the bronze age demise can be tied to there being a
Grand Solar Minimum ...
as well as a concurent 2000+/- conjunction of the gas giant planets.
The climate changes and seismic up-ticks were relentless
the "sea people" were. forced to migrate due to major drought that began in
western Europe first ~ desperate people exasperated desperate events
Egypt suffered heavy droughts also during this period. The drought was believed to have been caused by the "Hekla 3 volcanic eruption" causing a "volcanic winter" in Ramesses III's reign. The disruption of sunlight was so bad that worldwide tree growth was stymied for 20 years.
On top of all this, Ramesses III had to deal with lots of wars.
Constant war; Dealing with the Sea Peoples.
Draining of the treasury.
Drought -> Famine -> Instability
It left Egypt terribly weakened and divided.
From what I understand, of the various Bronze Age major powers, 2 survived: Egypt and Assyria. The Assyrians had it real bad and they basically withdrew into only their home territory. However, Assyria recovered and carved a powerful empire in the wake of the Bronze Age collapse while Egypt never really did. It got to the point that the Assyrian Empire subjugated Egypt.
@@billheineman472 There are a lot of things I could correct here but I'll settle for saying you mean "exacerbated." "Exasperated" would only make sense the other way around (desperate events exasperated desperate people).
The aftermath of a volcano that blocks the sun is terifing such as in 536, or that time in 70k bc that humans almost went extinct due to one.
@@Warmaker01 of the various Bronze Age major powers in western asia* fixed that for you
When the king of Ugarit said that the invaders had 'seven ships' I think it was understood at the time that he meant more than seven. 'Seven and seven' is an idiom (meaning many) seen in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it's possible that its meaning was persisted through time. Just as 'one' to us can mean 'a united people', seven probably isn't literal. Not to mention that I couldn't see seven ships as all that threatening, what with the navies these civilizations had.
I feel like 7 ships would've been a lot in 1200bc.
@@johnnysasakithethird1209 Actually 7 warships has been "a lot" since the XIX century forwards, because it can carry so many cannons.
I don't think they had cannons in 1200bc
@@johnnysasakithethird1209 Use your brain to analyze things that you are told. *Because they didn't have cannons, 7 ships was very little, you needed a lot of ships because fighting was done man to man
@@johnnysasakithethird1209 the ships were much smaller, 7 ships couldn't carry anything worth batting an eye at.
"Human civilization did an oopsie" is the perfect summary for a lot of human history, to be honest.
Well in this case their only real mistake was an over reliance on chariots in their military. Everything else, assuming this theory is correct, was outside their control.
IAmFourteenAndThisIsDeep
I wish we would stop doing them.
....and a perfect summary of the dumbing down of history teaching.
It took a dump and the strink caused everyone to leave
I could watch history civilis all day every day and not get enough. this is the most addictive content love it.
Hey man! As a fellow vet I love your content
I personally prefer Invicta slightly over this channel but this is solid as well :)
That's more or less what I did when stumbled upon the channel 18 months ago. 😅
Have you heard of the younger dryus??
@@Maazitung Luckily there is room enough to LOVE both and yet still not have enough content.
Me : *waiting for Augustus story*
HC : ever heard about the bronze age?
Me : well.. No but.. Go on
Cicero is dead, there is nothing more to find there for HC.
@iRue399 he allready named a playlist for octavian and it will be a pretty long one as well. dont worry friend
Same lol I’ve been checking daily for the next video... I mean we are right about to see the history civilis video/videos about Octavius and Antony vs Brutus and Cassius, and then Octavius and Agrippa vs a Pompey son, and then (GOT himself- Gaius Octavius Thurinus) Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus and Agrippa vs Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and then Octavius become Augustus, the first citizen and all his great changes to Rome, and then somehow he outlives everyone he meant to give power to so he could sorta retire in peace, and he loved Livia too much to stop her evil scheme to kill the good people Augustus would have given power to, just so Livia could give power to friggin Tiberius... which set a terrible precedent and so she caused a few evil emperors... which also began the crazy awesome storyline of Roman rulers, some great and some horrible. If Augustus would have stopped her before she got started, then Augustus very well might have left a different system in place with good people and the senate with the power.. but Livia killed all the good people Augustus knew so all the power instead went to Tiberius like she planned and that’s how we got the history we have lol anyway I am so excited for these next few videos of Octavius - my doppelgänger.
Your videos never disappoint... thank you for producing them! Mostly just kicking in a couple thoughts that always bugged me about the Bronze Age Collapse - I always get a little agitated that I rarely get a glimpse into what was going on in the Black Sea region during that time. There’s plenty of archeological evidence that there was plenty of interaction and trade between the Black Sea region and the major powers of the time and they had seafaring technology to be active traders. Given migrations from Northern Europe to the Black Sea region during Roman times, it seems perfectly plausible for people living in that area to have been displaced by Northern Europeans and/or migrating tribes from the steppes who might have had their own environmental pressures due to climate change. I’m not a historian, but I am extremely curious about what was going on there at the time and what issues they might have been facing that would affect their interactions with their more civilized neighbors.
I really want to hear more about how, having destroyed their tyrant, they still failed to save their republic.
No reason, why?
It's sort of terrifying and amazing how we literally have our own "Lost civilization" mystery like you see in fantasy and sci fi games.
We have many, Atlantis being another.
Games are based on history.
In a sense, all tropes come from history, not the other way around :)
@@DLimit
Actually no, Atlantis straight up never existed.
It was little more than a blueprint for Plato to describe his Ideas.
@@jorenvanderark3567 wrong. The city most likely existed and they even have a location for it. But people exaggerated a lot about the city based on Plato's book.
Good factual presentation, well done. Just to explain something, the King of Ugarit referred to the King of Cyprus (Alashiya) as "Father" which means he was considered less than equal and the King of Ugarit had to prostrate himself in front of superior Kings, such as Cyprus and Egypt. In contrast, the Kings of Cyprus referred to the Kings of Egypt as 'brother', which meant they were equals and did not need to prostrate themselves nor pay tribute.
So Kinda like calling a priest father/pater? Edit: Linguisticly not Culturally. Just genuinely curious.
Ancient societies were patriarchal, and in that is the origin of their political and social systems. Clan and family systems were applied to the conception of what states were and how they should operate.
@@vorynrosethorn903 What you suggest is quite correct as well as the socio-economic system, local and foreign resources, language, farming (from the Neolithic onwards), the weather and the environment in general that played a huge part in the cultural development of a society. However, there's no getting away from the fact that kings (and queens) imposed themselves on a culture to varying degrees. There was of course the fear of invasion from outside as well as usurpation from within.
i wonder if that is the original introduction as god in the bible. they call god lord or father alot. is this possible to the king of egypt that allowed the jews to settle in isreal?
@@michaeleldridge5640 "The Jews" were not 'jewish' at that time. According to Manetho, the Hyksos came out of the East with all and sundry and entered the Pharaohs palace and took over. When they were eventually deposed several centuries later, the ones that lived in their capital called Avaris, barricaded themselves in and were eventually led out by an Egyptian priest that believed in monotheism. Many believe that this equates to the exodus in the bible.
The Bronze Age civilizations can't collapse until someone asks if it's okay with Tribune Aquila.
Lmao
Hahahahaha
ROFL
The sea people waited 1200 years to ask the tribune to sack a bunch of cities.
And for that reason, I'm out.
I just watched a 2+ hour documentary on this subject, but I think this 20+ minute clip explains it better and more to the point. The lengthy documentary was obsessed with "who dun it?", while this clip was more focused on system-level causes. Good job!
was it a BBC documentary?
@@mageovoid9145 It was likely the channel History Time and the reason for focusing on whodunit is that we don't actually know and therefore exploring the possibilities of who, exactly, the Sea Peoples were and where they came from is useful for expanding our knowledge of history. That would be "knowing our own story".
But I'm still very interested in the whodunnit because that would shed a lot of light on the expanse, nature and scale, and thereby, a verification of the environmental and socio-political disasters. Are there any genetic evidences of the sea people?
@@ahwabanmukherjee5065 There's a little bit. Testing shows that in the very early Iron Age there was a large but brief influx of European blood in the heritage of the people of Ashkelon, which belonged to Egypt at the time. This would suggest a migration event in between the Bronze Age and Iron Age. But it's hard to be very certain.
@@aaronleverton4221 It's definitely an interesting questions, it seems if they had that many people in Europe already then Western Asia would have already been trading with them, or at least aware of who they were. Yet it seems no one knew who the sea people were, so where the hell did they come from?
It’s amazing to read these ancient letters and see a literal apocalypse be recorded, but still have no answer as to what the hell was causing it.
It's possible that even at the time, many may have disagreed as to the "true" causes of their crisis. Famine? Droughts? Earthquakes? Sea people? Bad politicians? Punishment from the gods?
It might be difficult to see even the cause, let alone solutions, especially through the haze of fear, despair and anger which would likely have been present in discourse.
That's a lot of speculation though.
Also because they were kinda similar to us, most people give too much of a credit to these nations. Famines were commonplace in anatolia back then, so a few crises at the same time can absolutely destroy hitites. Once the central authority gone, cities are easy picking for raiders of any kind.
Sounds like today
cmon guy, you know, your living it.
To be fair information was very limited back then. The average person on the ground was obviously aware of bad things happening, but not exactly why.
Excellent comprehensive summary of the "Collapse of Bronze Age". You covered many more possible reasons other than just Sea Peoples even though they were probable the main reason. Your summary is the only one I've seen thus far that mentions the 5 decade flurry of earthquakes.
Plus you did all of this with a very economical use of time. Thank you for your quality video.
"....what brought them here is a question we'll get into later"
*slams fist on table* Bibilus is involved in this somehow! I know it!
Not being born over 1000 years is no excuse! He must have found a way!
Domitius Ahenobarbus has travelled back in time to eradicate Caesar's ancestors, thousands of years before he was born!
Which leads to a causal loop/butterfly effect, where murdering Caesar’s ancestors only ensues Caesar is born and even more successful!
History memes are best memes.
I, Marcus Porcius Cato, being an incorruptible man of impeccable virtue, will now derail this entire discussion by writing an absurdly long, confusingly phrased comment for no reason other than that I derive _eudaimonia_ from the act of filibustering.
I swear to the gods that if any of you were to block me, or if the noble Historia Civilis should deem it wise to remove my comment, I would commit glorious suicide (twice) in an unreasonably painful and gruesome manner.
There's an important bit left unsaid: Rulers of the time relied on the favor of the gods. Famine, no rain, earthquakes, even sending an enemy are typical actions of an angry god. People turn against rulers that apparently make the gods angry and thus have lost legitimacy.
ye kinda feel like that aspect of it all would have been quite an important factor tbh, what I found funny though was him showin western and central europe as " northern europe"
@@goranpersson7726 well it’s northern in relation to the greeks and the other civilisations that were destroyed lol
well to be fair their countries got hit by famin, no rain, instability and invasion and the earth itself going "nah bruh" and shaking their building until they colapsed all at once, maybe they really did anger the gods lmao
Yes. Like the Mandate of Heaven in China.
That sort of Mandate of Heaven philosophy is not native to the near east or Europe.
300 year long drought? Wow. Can you imagine every generation knowing hunger over and over again? It must have been a very low point in human history
yeah I imagined a Great Depression (I knew it was economic not agricultural) but for 300 years. Sounds like a bad time
imagine africa
Oof
From what we know, what followed this collapse was one of the darkest periods in human history fro centuries, we're limited in what we know because across most of the old world written languages died out almost completely. Almost every major city outside Egypt was gone and every remnant of the old empires eventually collapsed over the centuries, never even being close in scale to the pre-collapse civilizations.
Edit: Even China's Shang Dynasty saw apparent decline in this time and a few centuries later (1000BC) were eventually overthrown by the Zhou dynasty.
Global warming man. Started 3000 years ago
This was a very clear explanation of a hugely important historical event I did not know about , until I watched a very good and long video on the subject , about two years ago .
"Help is on the way."
"jk"
This sums up a lot of alliances in the past.
I mean, if they can't retaliate your backstabbing, why bother?
Poland:Hey Hey I've seen this before. Its a classical one
@@drretard0343 *Czechoslovakia
sums up league soloq
Even when they do send help
Help has drowned in a river along the way
It's wild to think that the amount of human history we know is a drop in the bucket compared to the entirety of the unknown, lost history of human civilization.
And the history we have is still mostly written as "great man" history instead of looking at systemic and socioeconomic dynamics. I feel like we are in a very exciting age of scholarly debate over how we view our history and I hope especially now with climate change and the coming collapse of old power dynamics we also focus and learn more about our own history with the environment and how it affected civilizations in the past.
@Akhand Bharat The bronze age collapse didn't affect human civilizations apparently to this ultranationalist
@Akhand Bharat You misunderstood his comment which meant a part of history was lost in these places Zindabad
I disagree. we know EVERYTHING humans have done thruout history, because the HUman Being is a very consistent ROBOT.
Violence?
CHECK!
War?
CHECK!
RACISM or Corruption?
CHECK!
plus
environmental crises?
CHECK!
It reminds me of Xenephon's Anabasis, where the Ten Thousand Greeks find ancient ruined Mesopotamian cities that were older to them than Xenephon is to modern people.
"Human civilzation did an oopsie". Now, that's worthy of a thesis.
The human civilization is the oopsie. The current state is a result of thousands of years of human stupidity and greed.
@@Jaml321 Why have human societies made stupid decisions? Why has greed been such a strong factor? You seem to radically reduce something so complex and interesting as humanity's development, to such a boring, overly simple conclusion, without even asking some very impirtant questions.
If humans were naturally stupid, our cavemen ancestors would've all died from poor decisions. If humans were naturally greedy, our early ancestors wouldn't have shared food or shelter during hard times with those who need it, losing future allies either through their death or worsening relations. They'd be ostracised from their tribes, and have no one to turn to when they were in trouble.
Humanity is not the oopsie; nothing is absolutely bad or good, even if they do approach one end or the other; a wrench can be used to build or to sabotage, power by itself is neutral, and humanity is very powerful; the difference, is that a wrench has no mind of its own, but humanity can choose to do bad or good.
Please, do yourself a favor, leave this misanthropic pessimism behind, and ask questions, with the end goal of how to make sure humanity can do more good than harm. Giving up on something is sure to bring defeat, whatever the goal may be, and humans are all we got, so give ourselves a shot.
They didn't subscribe to Pewdiepie. Now look what happened
@@katiaquirino6020 Humans kill each other and destroy nature and the planet from the moment they took it over to make a quick buck. Its like we are shitting the bed we are sleeping in. We are a scourge on the planet and there is no doubt it would be better off the moment we die out from whatever stupid war or other contraption we are going to create that speeds up our demise. Humans pose only problems for the earths ecosystem, they are the oopsie of evolution.
@@Jaml321 @Jaml321 Ah yes, I sure am glad my corporate and stately overlords didn't sign an agreement designed to heal what damage we wrought on the planet. God forbid the stockholders lose their money. And don't get me started on the progress of ww3 so far!
Look, humanity has its many faults, but the attempts at making the world a better place are not unfelt. Organizations like the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity and the many USA organizations dedicated to preservation of nature would be impossible in the world you just described. And excuse my crassness, but people like you are a part of the collection of problems that plague us.
You sound defeated by things you do not even understand. You sound as if you willfully remain ignorant in an attempt to appeal to blind pessimism. If humanity were to listen to people like you who condemn them to shame in spite of their great achievements, then we would lose all motivation to progress. We would be driven to such complete stagnation that we would seek to die in our own shit. You seem to want humanity to fall, to not do everything in its power to try and reverse the damage it sows. You are your own evil.
1. In southern Greece near Thebes, there is the Mycenaean citadel of Glas (= Γλας), dominating the dried-up lake of Kopaida. During the Mycenaean era, they built a 20 km long draining channel for the lake, turning it into arable land. On the acropolis were built a huge commercial and industrial complex of buildings (not housing) (some buildings are two-story, 70 m long) and a double palace on top of the hill. The citadel was fortified with a 2.5 km long walls, 3 meters thick. According to archaeological evidences, it was completely abandoned 50 years after it was erected without any fight, despite some evidence of fire.
"Oopsie." I guess that's one way to describe a collapse of civilization so complete that we had to rediscover stuff like writing and so on.
Writing? Is that true?
@@hotkulen2196 I don't know if it's completely true, but I think during the time after the bronze age collapse there is a lack of any written sources from all the places mentioned in this video except Egypt, which I think is how the theory of the bronze age collapse initially began
@@hotkulen2196 During the bronze age collapse literacy went extinct in Greece and had to basically be reinvented over time.
Haha that annoyed me too.
it kinda makes sense. trade and abundant agriculture is what lets people specialize. If everyone isn't farming then they can take the time to write down history. Once civilization collapsed there is no one with free time to write things. Not saying writing went away...not that it didn't
"A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one."
Not as clumsy or random as a blaster...
"this does put a smile on my face"
I see Rainbow H, I click.
Goddamn Civ. You do all those vids on my favourite period in histiry that I know the most about and then to mix up the content then you do the period I know the most about relative to average person. Like i know more about the late republuc but its also so famous every average person knows a little about it but with the Late Bronze Age Collapse they cant name like 3 of the main powers from the end of the month .not a knock against them at all im saying it's a societal thing. I mean when i started grtting into it, 3 of the first 4 books i was recomended to read each had an explict separate section purely for promoting the argument that this was more significant historically than the fall of Rome and likely had more of an impacton modern socitu.
Also he's always arguing that this event should simply be called "the dark age" and post Rome should be called "The Roman/Western European dark age" like he's real fucking invested in it.
Anyway point is thanks for some reason deciding to pick you video topics based purely on what will make one random Sub in Australia Happiest I should have done it a while ago but you legit have a new patreon when i get next paid
Eamon isn’t the average person, he’s a step above.
Another explanation for why the sea peoples were so effective against the chariots was maybe because the chariot's main advantage was that it was a morale busting weapon. Fighting someone you can hardly catch, but during the entire chase is needling you to death is very demoralizing. Most disorganized armies and raiders probably went home rather than press on.
The sea people might not have done anything significantly different than the other raiders, the only difference might have only been their utter desperation. They pressed on against incredible casualties that would have convinced others in normal circumstances to go home simply because there was no home for these sea peoples to go back to. Where else could they go when the environmental disaster at the time meant that the only place with food was probably behind where ever the chariots were defending. They had chariots after all, they probably had food.
That's a terrifying irony if you're right, it may explain why some cities were spared or avoided the Sea Peoples. They didn't have chariots and thus the Sea People ignored them.
@@SudrianTales Or maybe simply those were the cities that had something to share with the tribes that came their way.
If they had chariots they definitely had food. The horses could be eaten by whoever survived the battle.
@@C00kiesAplenty Nothing goes wasted.
@@C00kiesAplenty Sea peoples are the French confirmed?
the range of this channel is awesome.
I got Sea People Return in the December slot of my 2020 Apocalypse bingo card.
Lmaooo
I put all my eggs in the Jesus basket, so he better come first.
@@MagplarImposter
Funny I've got them pegged for October.
I've got Third Impact scheduled for December and Sea People in October
“The peoples made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once, the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms: from Hatti, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya onward, being cut off at once. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, the flame going before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the land as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting, ‘Our plans will succeed!’”
-Pharaoh Ramesses III, 12th c. BCE
you watched the video too?
@@legion999 he actually just ripped off the full quote from the Sea Peoples wikipedia article, I can tell because he included "their confederation was the peleset, tejeker" etc, which is not included in the video. but if you look up "Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh" on google the first result is the Sea Peoples wikipedia page.
"Shekelesh" OK so the sea peoples were Jewish
you can just feel the anger radiating from the full inscription.
We should remember that this inscription is hagiographic propaganda meant to aggrandize Ramesses III after his death. The more fearsome the enemy, the more glorious his victory.
Greece.
Hittites.
Egypt.
Cyprus.
Long ago, the four empires lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Sea Peoples attacked.
Hardly in harmony.
@@12coudak000 I don't think you got the reference pal
Only tin, the metal essential to all of our crafts, could stop them.
But when the world needed it most, it vanished.
A generation has passed and my brother and I have discovered the new Pharao, a bronzebender named Ramesses.
And altough his chariots are great, he has a lot to learn before he's ready to defeat anyone.
But I believe Ramesses can save the world...
Pharao, the last bronzebender
@Lovecraft Nope... It's from the only western animation cartoon that is worth watching: Avatar, the last airbender
Lovecraft Is spongebob anime then?
This is my favourite ever historia civilis video. Lovingly presenting such haunting words from thousands of years ago has always stuck with me
"the chariots were handcrafted..." well they should have ordered up some cheep manufactured chariots from Asia or something
Lol
*cheap
I thought it's sheep manufactured chariots.
Buying isn’t “CHEAP”
Why are people so terrible at spelling words like “cheap” and “tough” now? I see people writing “cheep” and “tuff” now more than I did a few years ago.
“Cyprus in Cyprus”
A history teacher AND a geography teacher
9:24
“Not as clumsy or random as a regular bow”
A more elegant weapon from a more civilized age then?
Before the dark times... before the Sea Peoples.
Hello there
Garrett Fuhrman ah, you beat me to it!!
@@Arashmickey Sea Peoples itself sounds scary af for me but that quote just made them even more terrifying.
This video made me watch the entirety of your chronological order playlist, and now I wish there were more of your videos, now I'm looking forward for any future video you will make whatever the topic it will be
Just be aware that his video on Work is not the best sourced. I dare say every other video is excellent, but that one is not so great.
Imagine being alive during this time. Their world literally ended and I'm sure it must have been terrifying. No way to explain any of it beyond the gods are angry.
at least we don't have the earthquakes and droughts...at least not yet
The normal way of fighting is outdone by a new thing called mobile infantry. No one adapts, everyone is still stubbornly holding on to outdated things.
A lot of people are working on bringing about civilisational collapse today. Just give it time and remember the sea peoples wanted only to migrate for a better life, but faced nativist aggression.
I mean, we are living through a version of it right now. The famine and drought migrations, waterwars and climate catastrophes have already started. Next comes waves of refugees and when they have nowhere to go and no other choice (because humans are greedy and don't plan for catastrophes) they will pick up arms to take what they need.
@@JohnWayne-dh8gl lols, thats litteraly all happening right now.
This must have really seemed like the end of days. Imagine being a major trader on your way to one of these cities only to arrive to it either burning or leveled. Or the farmer waiting for state sponsored seeds to arrive for your harvest, and then realizing no one is coming and you might starve. I wonder if near the end, the Sea Peoples were just a lightly organized paramilitary rabble of former lowclass people from all over who'd watched their parents struggle in these times, were forced to relocate and now see no other way to survive.
same thing happened when the mongols came followed by the plague.
Arabian scholars describe the world as if it was in the process of ending, literally using the word apocalypse to describe it.
numerous middle eastern cities were gone in a flash, population of the earth reduced to 50% by conflict and disease
the middle east and central Asia still suffers the aftermath until now.
but also like the bronze age
its amazing how Egypt again stopped a foreign destructive invasion, being the last stronghold where everyone took shelter and immigrated to escape the slaughter and disease
It basically _was_ an apocalypse.
Geordie: That's what I think the Sea people were.
@@ASWE15 Egypt is truly a monster at making its civilization stand the test of time
@@julesfalcone it feels like it had to have been several waves that were less and less organized. Survivors from the first states to fall collapsing on those still standing, and then vice versa for 50-100 years until most cities were gone. This includes migrations from northern Europe and maybe central Asia, suffering similar geological frustrations.
"They were runners."
I need a Bronze Age zombie movie NOW DAMMIT.
Taking bronze in the 30 year dash
@Violet Mia shut up boy
I really enjoyed this History Lesson and The Narrator was one of the best I have ever heard~! I was glad to be a new subscriber and look forward to watching all the other lessons.
History Channel in the 90s and 2000s: The Collapse of the Bronze Age and their ancient civilizations remains one of human civilizations' greatest mysteries
History Channel today: "Aliens"
Ancient astronaut theorists say, yes.
Aliens ate my homework.
the aliens invaded northern Europe causing the mass migration and the heat was because the aliens needed a warmer Temperature to survive but then they ehree finally beat back but then time traveling scientists from the year 3031ish used thier time traveling machine to go back and clean up any trace of alien life.
What you meant to say was " I'm not saying it was aliens, but........". :)
I'm an Alien and I agree, we really outdid ourselves on this one 💫👽
I know I just watched a video explaining that the "sea people" likely came from areas in Italy and around the Mediterranean...
But I can't get the image out of my head of Rameses defeating an unstoppable horde of Lovecraftian fish people in hand to hand combat for the glory of Egypt
I would love a movie of Rameses defeating a lovecraftian army of fish people!
i would watch the shit out of that movie
@@origami83 be better than 300 that's 4 sure
@@dominickdibart12 It totally would be! i mean, ancient egpyt and fish people! How could anything top that? :D
sort of like doom, but at the bottom of the ocean
11:55
"Sire! The enemy can destroy our chariots! We're done for!"
"How!? Do they have their own chariots? Elephants? The gods themselves on their side???"
"No sire. They know how to R U N."
"....Dear gods, we are doomed"
Back when running wasn't invented
The Zulus, with shields and assegai defeated the British at Isandlwana (with Martini Henry rifles 7 pounder field guns, and bayonets) with their ability to run (to the flanks and rear of the British).
Usually it is mobility versus fire power in the military. Spearmen and chariots are different class of unit, but I believe when armoured, trained spearmen in decent formation could beat the chariots.
@@pavel9652 I mean, you don't hear much about chariots going against a phalanx. So it's safe to say that.
“Not as clumsy or random as a bow”
I see what you did there.
That letter always makes me sad, and weirdly nostalgic. I just have this image of him looking out to the horizon watching the ships approach and things burning around him, while he dictates the words to a scribe who is imprinting it on a clay tablet.
Everything changed when the sea people attacked...
Everything changed *then* the sea people attacked
Damn you SeeMen...
@V R thats not a woosh bruh
@V R buddy he corrected the quote there's no woosh here
Beat me to the punch
"Arrows could penetrate three INCHES of metal"
What the hell were they using to shoot them, RAIL GUNS??
Well, aliens *did* build the Pyramids, after all. :^)
is not steel... not even Iron, is bronze.... and of course not the quality we made bronze nowadays... by today standars was pretty rubbish
Yeah the majority of claims about arrows effectiveness on armor are greatly exaggerated by modern historians. I'm pretty sure they're just using linear equations starting with a very thing material control to accomplish this.
Either way these metrics are demonstrably wrong.
@@Doctor_Mantis what kind of armour would people need to have 76.2mm thick of armour lol.. they are a tank obviously.
I reckon this was supposed to be 3 millimeters or MAYBE 3 eighths of an inch, but even that would be quite a stretch. There is no fecking way, an arrow went through 3 inches of solid metal at room temperature. not even lead.
Thank you so much for making wonderful, easy to understand and entertaining videos. I have been watching lots of them and will continue to do so. Awesome.
Chariots: I'm the result of hundreds of years of technological and military research, I terrify battlefields.
Sea peoples: I'm fast as f*ck boi
Bruh you could switch them with Battleship and plane respectively, and it would still make sense haha
You: I'm not amusing.
LOL well put, thanks fer the laff
3000 years later:
Germans: we have state of the art tank warfare
Finland: *stuffs rag in a bottle of gas and lights it on fire* LIGHT EM UP!
@@HolyKhaaaaan Makes sense to replace Germans with Soviets, seeing as Finland allied with the former and fought the latter.
13:37 - Egypt prevailed because Ramses could transform into a Titan
Oh boy have you not been keeping up to date with the manga if you think that Rameses was the biggest thing here. Wait until you see in the manga actual giants 50 meters tall, millions of them, marching out of the ocean with a 500 meter tall Eren walking skeleton leading it, stomping out entire cities
@@robertjarman3703 ok spoilers man
Egypt is apparently Paradis then LOL
Given other Bronze Age artwork throughout the region this seemed to be a common strategy.
@@MrAaaaazzzzz00009999 out of all the places I hoped to avoid Aot spoilers lol
"On the whole, the picture is fuzzy, but its fair to say that there was chaos in Greece."
When has there ever not been chaos in Greece?
When they weren't Greek but Roman
@@chestersnapdragonmcphistic579 even them there was many minor rebellions
They invented chaos.
@@adamcoyne1315 as everywhere else
Blame philosophers
Describing the Stone Age as “oppressive” raises more questions than it answers, annoyingly. In what ways was it more oppressive than other ages?
This isn't a vid about the stone age.
It didn't have cities so modern intellectuals are not big on it.
Additionally it disproves the noble savage myth which is important to certain utopian ideologies.
Beyond that most of these societies were fundamentally patriarchal, and tended to be led by priest-kings, based on the ancestor cults of the tribes (clan might be more accurate) they came from.
However much of this was just as true of the bronze age, and much later. The old clan system was broken but the Church in western Europe in the middle ages, and patriarchal based government and civil structures as well as a divine hierarchy continued well into the enlightenment. They are effectively gone now, but will likely come back with a vengeance as they are disproportionate in communities who reproduce.
@@vorynrosethorn903lol. I love how confidently people spew their paranoid delusions. And just wrong ones at that. Tell me? What evidence do you have of “fundamentally patriarchal” tendencies in the Stone Age? If anything we have evidence for the opposite. That women held a lot of power in prehistorical communities as they were the ones who controlled reproduction.
“Chariots. Chariots chariots chariots.”
I’m glad to see that you’re the real Historia Civilis and not one from another timeline
But what if this is a an alternate Historia Civilis that just likes saying chariots a lot?
"...a composite bow, not as clumsy and random as a regular bow..."
Ah, an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
Killing hasn't been as stylish and refined in Ages, wink
The Jedi Sea Peoples
Well, times have changed.
Im really curious in what way was a composite bow an improovement over a normal bow during the bronze age?
@@s_for_short2400 I believe the material was able to store more energy while being flexed back, making arrows being launched faster/stronger, it also was smaller and less cumbersome, but I haven't read about it in ages so I might be missing details.
Glorious Egyptian bow, sinewed over a thousand times, pierce through three inches of bronze, filthy sea people go home
- Original guy who wrote the source for that claim, probably
Three inches of bronze is total bullshit.
@@WozWozEre Yeah. It's a tank level armor. Totally useless for a human that needs to actually move.
There must be a mistake, no bow can punch through 3 inches of metal (I guess he means bronze)
Clearly untrue, unless it means that it penetrates 3 inches of flesh upon piercing through Bronze or Copper armor?
Egyptian bow can cut through tank armor. Egyptian officers used their herediary bows in Yom Kippur War with great effect.
The interesting thing about the Assyrian collapse was that a lot of modern scholars and a lot of ancient scholars surmise that partially the reason why they collapsed was because they were extraordinary cruel and barbaric even by ancient world standards and they were extraordinarily oppressive to the people around them and the ones that they controlled.
I disagree with that, Assyria was a very powerful state, yes, but it wasn't "exceptionally cruel". Its evictions and movement of peoples were done with care in order to preserve the valuable artisans they needed. In fact, Assyria arguably emerged from the Bronze Age Collapse better than Egypt did.
I still remember as a kid seeing the inscriptions of rebels being flayed alive in Assyria.
"chariots at full speed could move roughly twice as fast as a human could run"
so how did the sea peoples defeat chariots?
they ran twice as fast
They likely boxed them in giving then no room to move or used their own missiles
@Hunter Smith But what forced them off the flat terrain? Why didn't they choose to take a defensive stand in a flat place? And why didn't neighbouring enemies try that in the hundreds of years beforehand?
@@mdilligaf Because flat terrain gave the massed infantry/swarm tactics of the Sea Peoples even more of an advantage, as they had all the room they needed to rush around the flanks of row-ordered spearmen. With enough runners, they might have even been able to ignore the chariots entirely and wipe out their infantry support.
@@mdilligaf you’ll have to ask them
these barbarians have no idea how fast silver chariot goes ))))))))))))))
We've been in quarantine long enough for this man to have uploaded *thrice.*
That's easily the best measure of time.
I agree, maybe he's getting tired of covering the Roman civil war.
How was the Bronze Age warfare:
-Chariots.
-Chariots.
-Chariots.
-People protecting chariots.
Accurate as hell.
Even vedic traditions are always talking about chariots.
"Chariots Chariots! Cave here...Prime. Look in this next test I need you to go to Cyprus in the bronze age for a chariot...For Science!"
8:35
Even the Art of War by sun tzu mentions chariots
And composite bows. Not as clumsy or random as a regular bow, but an elegant weapon for a more civilized age... before the dark times, before the Sea Peoples.
Thank you for explaining! I never understood the "...far lands of tin land. I don't know, my dealer won't tell me where he gets it" part from Bill Wurtz but now I do.
Me: So what ended the Bronze Age? War? Famine? Cataclysm? Innumerable catastrophes?
Historians: Yes.
No....iron
Too many moderate-to-severe problems hitting all at once.
It was actually war, famine, pestilence, and death
@@CarlosRios1 nope....the iron age....ha
@@Great_Olaf5 This can be put into perspective with our world today: global warming, income inequality, pandemic, migrations, rogue states. A lot of crisis a once.
9:40
"It could punch through three inches of metal"
I really would like to see the source for that claim since that would make a bronze age composite bow one of the most effective anti-tank weapons at the start of WW2.
Yeah. You're right.
Everyone knows that, until shaped charges were developed, 3 inches of bronze was adequate armor for a battle tank.
@@thomasjoyce7910
The primary reason for the rise of iron and steel over bronze was primarily due to cost and ease of access. Either way you aren't punching through three inches of pretty much any solid material with a bow, steel, iron, bronze, copper, aluminium, wood.
Metal from ancient times is not the same as post-industrial revolution metal, the so called damascus steel, wich was the best metal you could find in the ancient world is nothing compared to mass produced spring steel we have today
@@rafaelpascoaliczerniej297 A bow can’t punch through three inches of rubber, plastic, or aluminium. Yes modern metals are superior to ancient metal, but not to that degree. What is wrong with asking for the source to the claim that a bow can punsh through three inches of metal?
Agreed. I was looking for a comment as I heard it in the video. that must be a mistake on their side. 7.62 cm is way to thick.
It's funny how before this video was released, I had no knowledge of the Bronze Age Collapse, and now it's probably my favorite topic, I may even say that I'm obssesed with it.
Because of the mystery?
Le pizzazz
Yes! I'm obsessed with the origins of civilization and bronze age too.
Here’s a fun fact: The dark age that followed was even worse than the dark age that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire!
@@Darknimbus3 The collapse of the Roman Empire wasn't that much of a collapse as people tend to think. It was for the better if you think of it, one just had to look to romans inventing monetary policy and having some sort of ancient New Deal as evidence of economical and cultural decline.
It's upsetting to see so many historians trying to rewrite history to minimize the sea peoples. My uncle was killed by the sea peoples, but now everyone's trying to carry water for them.
😂
Both you and your uncle were born before the year before 1200BC?
I sea what you did there
@@harrietcanary2470 yes
me: alright Ceasar is dead, now we're moving on to the Roman Empire.
HC: this is my time machine
I think he likes variety. It took him several years to complete the Ceaser playlist. He might get burned out if those are the only videos he worked on.
@@rodneylagrone7180 I mean I'm not complaining. All his videos are great
@@qnteban True. I was avoiding the "Can animals commit crimes", video. But after I went through all of his other videos I finally watched it and throughly enjoyed it aswell.
@@rodneylagrone7180 me too. The dude is tip top.
@@rodneylagrone7180 He had also been working on Macedon, Philip and Alexander series, I thought that now all the players he talked about in Ceasar are dead (Cicero, Kato, Ceasar), that his next video would be about Alexander. My best guess is that he is taking a time out from serial videos and making one offs until he finishes a better script for Alexander or Augustus. I think he is even thinking about moving a bit into the English Civil war.
But I can see his style, he loves to build up the culture and system of the civilizations before moving on to the main series, if my hopes aren't too high, he could be preparing a post bronze age collapse series in the next two years or so.
1200BCE: Sea people make me anxious
2020CE: Seeing people makes me anxious
Severely underrated
2050CE: Rising sea making people anxious
Lampedusa, Italy 2020 See people still make me anxious
I wonder if we were to collapse from this not quite pandemic, combine with instability of the financial system and tension between major economies, would historian call our period the Plastic Age collapse? The Chinese Collapse? The Epidemic Collapse? The 2nd Pax Americana Collapse? The Western Civilisation Collapse? I wouldn't imagine if I were a Hittite or Mycenaean, I would have thought of the destruction of my world to be called "Bronze Age".
@@lc9245 nervous laughter intensifies
And Cato and Aquila were still trowing rocks in Caesar's plans, even back then.
when the Eastern Mediterranean creates an inter-empire diplomatic and trade network without Aquila's permission:
*Bronze Age Collapse*
Let's ask tribune Aquila if we can collapse the civilizations in eastern Mediterranean.
@@marcosbravo9645
Well, clearly he gave his permission, for the Bronze age collapse did happen :P
@@Albukhshi everything is okay then.
Ironically, the only time the Dreadnought sank an enemy ship, it rammed it
They always ask, "where did the sea peoples come from?"
I always ask, "Where did the sea peoples go?"
Prob were assimilated like vikings were or the greeks did later on ?
@@Ilikeavocados123 the Greek is still exist
Most scholars think they became the phoecians of the Bible who went on to found Carthage
If it hadn't been for the Sea Peoples, I'd have been married long time ago.
@@happyslapsgiving5421 where did you come from, where did you go? where did you come from sea foam jones?
What is there to be learned from the collapse of all major bronze aged civilizations?
Never skip leg day.
All except China.
@@hedgeandhue What can I say? The sea people weren't exactly known for being long distance runners...
@@hedgeandhue China was killing itself so many times it really doesn't matter
@@hedgeandhue Umm Indian here.
@@kaustubhlunawat7827 Ah. Apologies.
"Within the short span of one generation, the majority of Earth's most technologically advanced civilizations faced an existential crisis."
I felt that
@@BLRSharpLight
2030s?
@@fionafiona1146 bold of you to assume we'll survive the 2020s
@@lilben4184
I as an individual might be as likely as an average Egyptian to survive... Errigation is awesome but all infrastructure has limits.
@@lilben4184 2030 is being pillared to being a new tech age. So yes we will.
Obviously, creating another underclass like what hapened when mercantilism became a thing. This time instead it over the guise of freedom.
A lot of people showin up from across the sea, eh? Definitely not an ominous portent of things to come.
Now the Phoenicians can get down to business!
Mind-boggling to think that 1200BCE predates the time of Caesar by a millennium and some change.
In terms of British history, that's as far removed as the Viking invasion is from today.
What confuses me is nowadays I'm of two minds about how recent/distant that is.
Speaking of Vikings, it’s longer than Sweden has existed and further in time from when the Iron Age ended
@@tulsatrash
Perhaps only tangentially related but when I was a very young child in the early Nineties, people aged in their 70s and 80s fought or at least lived through the Second World War.
It continually throws me when I realise that people of the same age today were the generation after. My dad's nearly 70 himself and he was born '52, long after it ended.
_Tempus fugit_ indeed.
@EmperorJuliusCaesar
Did I... Did I just summon you?
What's even more mind boggling is that the pyramids were already well over a thousand years old even back in 1200 BCE!!.
I think this historian is just not taking into account the will of Zeus and the other gods.
True, the earthquakes indicate ANGERY Poseidon.
@@luxborealis Clearly the wrath of Baal Hadad smh
Or most importantly: Aliens.
Nah, he aint taking into account kratos who brough all this destruction
Worth noting is that Poseidon wax the head god of the pantheon in Mycenean times.
Makes me realise that some of the greatest and most epic stories of all time aren’t even make-believe. History really is cool as hell.
When history is more badass than fiction
@@polygonalfortress cause history always has better world building
All of our storytelling is derived from history.
some science fiction is excellent. philip k dick, joe haldeman, douglas adams, ursula k leguin….
@@SK-le1gm Tolkien. Martin.
What a great video, the bronze age collapse and the sea peoples were always a bit of a mystery for me.. Egyptian here :)
"The bronze age civilizations were dealing with five crises at once."
That sounds unfortunately familiar...
@Stephen Jenkins Yeah, the Late Antiquity citizenry was probably feeling the same. Until the elites couldn't maintain the illusion anymore. Then suddenly they found themselves surrounded by barbarian warlords and tax collectors, having to feed on their own production instead of global imports, having to defend themselves instead of relying on professional soldiers coming from afar, and so on. Laugh! ...while you can. Don't take your living conditions of today as granted, for they might change very, very quickly.
@Stephen Jenkins almost all of those have happened in the past 10 years you moron... maybe look at countries outside your own for once?
Thats all literally happening right now arouns the world. Look outside the us, europe etc
@Stephen Jenkins Somebody's always first.
@Stephen Jenkins Alright, I'll show you what we're up against.
1. Peak Oil. Eventually we're going to produce less oil - so the oil-producing countries will face a significant shortfall in income and, thus, power. The countries which rely on oil will be forced to either find new sources or kick the habit. I don't know how many methheads you personally know, but I know some tweakers and, let me tell you: America ain't kickin' it's oil addiction in a generation.
2. Climate change. Climate change is such a big issue that it's startling that nobody seems to realize its great threat. Of course, it may seem like some folks are going wacko about how it's going to cause the end of the world (it won't), and others just have their heads in the sand, but the truth is a lot worse.
You see, the people that seem to be screaming about the end of the world are just failing to realize that human civilization will go on long after you and I and America are dead. It might even be better in the future. But between now and then, we're going to face a period of unimaginable suffering. We're going to have worldwide famines, and we're facing the leading edge of these famines right now. Look at the Syrian Civil War and the massive refugee crisis caused by it - that war was in part caused by climate change. Imagine that happening all of the countries of the global South, not merely a couple.
The famines will cause the price of bread to go up, and the shortage of fuel will also cause the price of bread to go up. The price of bread going up too greatly will result in revolutions which will see the rich get their heads cut off. I'm not complaining or saying we should avert this because I like rich people. I most assuredly don't.
We are at the beginning of the collapse of global civilization - the very earliest point. This is why Historia Civilis uploaded this, because we are seeing a microcosm of this collapse. At this very minute, there are people dying in droves because of a virus that our economic system wasn't prepared to fight, that the psyche of the American people is unwilling to come to terms with, that provides the leadership with the perfect scapegoat with which to blame all of its problems upon. This infighting is not how it used to be. It is something new for us, or at least new for living memory. America is undergoing a drastic political polarization, there is going to be an enormous wave of famines and refugees in the not-so-distant future, and we are going to become economically, uh, "worse off" because of our insane dependence upon fossil fuels which we *have the technology* to remove ourselves from.
Ironically enough, if we kick the petrofuel habit, we kill one major factor behind climate change! It's almost as if this were all some horrifying dialectical system which exists purely to showcase the contradictions of our present society.
So, yeah. This ain't no "it needs to happen big time before I believe it" type nonsense. It's happening right now, right under our noses, and nobody realizes it because it starts out real subtle like.
Fun fact: The word ''copper'' came from the latin ''aes cyprium'' (from Cyprus), corrupted as ''cuprum'' in the writing. In Old England it was called ''coper''(later ''copper''), derived from the latin word. Cyprus was producing so much that the metal's name came from it. Greetings from Cyprus everyone and have a great history session!! :D
Fun Fact: Cyprus was producing 80% of the copper being traded in Bronze age Mediterranean at one point. The local ore was so rich and easy to mined/smelt that they beat out other competitors in the region.
I’d like to see the Sea Peoples try to cross the Pomerium!!!
Lol
After learning the do's and don'ts
Sea Peoples: This is bullshit. Were going back to the levant.
lol
@@iyousef46 The sea peoples went back to Atlantis. Later the Atlanean gods made them romans and they would start their sea people conquest on land. They are now the land peoples. I read this on a wall in a tomb somewhere and people believe me. Buy my book.
@@ricky-sanchez honestly this is the best response XDDD
Sea peoples:
- barges in
- proceeds to destroy empires causing bronze age collapse
- refuses to elaborate further
- leaves
Dear Historia Civilis dude and everybody: I'd like to point out a major difference in these bronze age cultures which isn't mentioned in the video but is significant. The fact that the sea peoples attacked the countries in that particular order is important, because the countries weren't equally equipped to deal with the invasion. The greek city states were more like social experiments leading up to democracy centuries later. They weren't ruled by one king above all, but had many kings who didn't agree and most likely didn't all unite against the sea peoples. The Hittites were an unstable people already, in part due to never actually subduing the many tribes living around them in the Anatolian mountains, plus they were marred by intrigues in courts (backstabbing and succession fights) plus parts of their territory regularly breaking away. Cyprus was a small player so I'll skip them here. As Babylonia and Assyria isn't covered in the video I'll skip them too. But, Egypt was a major player, and also the most stabile of them all. The greatest pharaoh of all time, Ramesses II had recently passed on, so Egypt was at near peak strength. Egypt was best equipped to deal with the invasion of all the countries. The sea peoples gained strength, slaves, wealth and new soldiers and weapons with every victory, as we've seen with all the ancient warfare. If Egypt had been the first ones attacked, this all could have gone very differently. Egypt could have taken the brunt of the attack, leaving only smaller portions of the sea peoples to attack the other countries. I'm not saying Egypt would have won completely, but they would most likely have weakened the sea peoples to a fraction.
If you've got your shit right, good point
Mind that Egypt was attacked two times, the first at the time of Pharaon Merneptah (that seems to have won rather easily) and the second a the time of Ramses III. Ramses says to have won, but yet Egypt lost all of its empire, returning back to its fundamental state just around the Nile. It's middle eastern empire was occupied by the very same sea peoples.
True. Ramesses II also claimed to have beaten the Hittites at Karnesh, yet their sphere of influence clearly didn''t include that city after the battle. But being sons of the Gods, who was going to say otherwise?
Most of the "Sea People" werent actually outside invaders.
Some of them were rebels.
But the most significant portion of them were Runners. The Bronze Empires used other militaristic nations in their armies as runners, and had them settle down on the borders as buffers. But, most of all, these runners were used to protect chariots and to capture enemy chariots as spoils. They knew the weaknesses of chariots intimately.
50 years before the collapse, the biggest bronze age chariot battle occured. It was devastating for both sides.
This resulted in the world's first peace treaty. Copies of this peace treaty was found in different nations in their own languages.
Peace, on that grand scale, meant that these runners were now out of a job. Those militaristic nations that "buffered" the Empires were now suddenly in poverty.
Egypt was only able to avoid the fate of the other empires because they knew what was coming. E.g., the Exodus, in the Bible, happened at exactly this time. The Hebrews were settled on the east side of the Nile delta for the purpose as a buffer and military auxiliaries.
In the Bible, the Pharoah gave them pointless work (making bricks... without straw). The Pharoah was trying to keep them employed. Later the Pharoah killed sons that were born, etc and such stories. They were a threat to internal stability...the Pharoah could see it...and tried to address it.
Anyway, runners, like the Hebrews became a liability. The Egyptians had enough advanced knowledge to know how that ended for the other empires. So Egypt had time to be able to re-employ or just kick out liabilities like the Hebrews, and were able to mount a preemptive defence.
Egypt even reorganized their armies and and abandonned chariot warfare and fought on foot.
Egypt also built grain storage cities/depots (Two of which were raided by the hebrews on their way out.)
The capital was also moved North near the Delta because they knew, that protecting that region was key to surviving.
The Egyptians survived because they knew what was coming. They knew, because they saw the others fall like dominoes.
@@tylerdurden3722 Interesting. Curious to know if you have any sources for reading concerning the Hebrews and similar peoples in their roles as 'runners'.
Did Tribune Aquila's ancestor approve of this collapse?
He may have even been a part of it.
He probably just sat down when the sea peoples came by
best comment i've ever read
He didn't give his approval to sack Egypt, which is why they survived.
Honestly makes me curious to know what the direct ancestors of the Roman aristocracy were up to at this point. I imagine most of them would have been lowly backwater farmer or shepherds completely oblivious to how, while their farmer neighbor’s descendents would go on being peasant farmers for thousands of years, theirs would reach unimaginable heights of power
Honestly, I just want more Historia Civilis content. I'd literally accept a video of him narrating a traffic intersection.
Tbh the best narrators could narrate anything and it would be interesting
If things were so bad in the Superstars of the Bronze Age countries, why did the Sea People find them so attractive and continue to attack them? A question that should have been answered, I feel.
Excess population leaves to take goods and farms elsewhere.
Something I always found interesting is the idea that the cities that weren't completely destroyed... the ones where only the palaces were burnt, they were destroyed by their own people.
Which makes sense when you think about it. War and famine would have pushed social pressure up to the maximum. At some point the people would feel abandoned by gods and rulers, and rise up against them. The theory is they mobbed the palaces and temples, looted them, then abandoned the city.
Yeah, people have been overthrowing and killing their leaders for thousands of years.
All this crisis was some kind of a chain reaction.
@@heberrodriguez3310maybe... possibly... perchance
The shang dynasty: "what're you guys doing over there?"
they were chilling and relaxing 400 years before and for the next 200 years
after.
the Shang shouldn't be too hasty in celebration-they were brought down by a fox
@@rin_etoware_2989 hahahaha best comment ever
@@rin_etoware_2989 is that why Hot Priest was so freaked out by one in Fleabag???
"Dafuq dey doin over dere"
I am from Spain and in the south-east of the iberian peninsula, aroun the 2nd millennia, there was a culture called by the arqueologist "El Argar"( The Argar). They didn't have rwiting or a large state, but they were a large bronce culture with contact with the diferent cultures in the mediterranean. The people of Argar had a stratified society, with nobility and slaves. And around 1200b.c. they have desapered like the other cultures exposed in this fantastic video. I hope that you find the subject of this commentary interesting. Thanks you HISTORIA CIVILIS for such a good content.
Thanks!
Too much of the bronze age collapse focuses on the near east states, rather than anything out on the 'periphery.' Fascinating
They had contact with Mycenaean Greece and possibly adopted their burial customs. I think their collapse predated the Bronze Age collapse by a couple centuries, though. Maybe Argarians were some of the Sea People...
+Isaac Bruner Yeah, they could have been one of the early victims of the wave of migrating people, themselves becoming migrating people and displacing someone else. They say “domino effect,” but the inage that comes to my mind first is a line of spaced pool balls
@Romano Coombs I do think their way of warfare and MO is suspiciously similar to how the Romans and Greeks later describe Germanic and Gaullic peoples, up to and including showing up as a combination of conquerors and migrating tribes with the family in the back cheering on the warriors. I think someone in the comments described some circumstantial historical evidence for whatever the event was also affecting Ireland and some tribal migration happening there, so it's plausible it was affecting Europe as well.
Given that Scandinavia/ northern Germany/ the Baltic has put out many many waves of emigree tribes that go on to cause more in their path to move or form coalitions, and bronze age Scandinavia was an interestingly complex society all on its own (but Scandinavia also was typically one of the hardest hit areas by climatic shifts) that had trade ties with the Mycenaean Greeks, that might suggest something similar.
_However,_ I don't know that there's any evidence for that claim, and may be much against; perhaps the general warm period of the time even actually helped establish bronze age Scandanavia, and thus between the generally advanced state of the region combined with very good farming (comparatively) would make migration from there much less likely.
Continental and Mediterranean Europe outside of the more brittle but self-reinforcing eastern med. bronze age societies looks more and more likely. And these societies (at least places like England and bronze age Scandinavia) also had chariots afaik. So why wouldn't they have brought them?
There is evidence of pretty significant trade routes through Europe to the Mediterranean at the time, so presumably from anywhere. Though, I'd presume wherever they come from they could build and use ships relatively well, so perhaps central Europe is more unlikely than western/ southern Europe or the Balkans or say Romania? Perhaps proto-celts, or the Atlantic Bronze age. Hell, what was happening in north/ northwest Africa?
This video has inspired me to learn more about it. Keep up the great work!
"you will not see a living soul from your land"
Bruh, this is kind of chilling
It almost makes me cry and I don't knows why
It's the desperation. Whenever I see an ancient letter I stop and think about how that person must have been feeling :/
@@alexmccullough1961 you are right
Ancient people knew how to make threats. Total Chads
But then, everything changed when the Sea People attacked.
They wielded the ancient art of teleportation to dominate 5 mighty nations at one time, without impunity!! Bow to the mystical Sea peoples, for they shall return!!😱😱😱
the Sea Peoples
fear the mighty seaman
So...what did the sea ppl eat as they conquered and travelled through droughf stricken lands ?
And then, when the world needed him most, The Tin vanished
I think it would've been worth mentioning that Cyprus, apparently, had so much copper that the word copper itself comes from Cyprus (through Latin "cuprum").
That's one coppery island...
Like how Argentina was named after silver (Argentum, latin: silver)
I think it's the other way round and that the island was named (before the existence of the latin language) after the metal so abundant there but don't quote me on that. Certainly both words are related though
Very nice! Truly illuminating! Thank you very much!