As is often said, we live in an era of globalization. In fact, we’ve been told this so often over the past few decades that it hardly seems like a worthwhile observation now. But even though our era is defined entirely by connections between far-flung nations, societies, economies, and cultures, we should not be flattered by thinking that we are the vanguard of an entirely new globalized reality. as a classicist Eric Klein I will explain in Recent Big Think interviewsduring the Late Bronze Age, especially between the 14th and 13th centuries BC, an interconnected world flourished. “Life was pretty good,” he says, at least if you lived in any of the areas around the Mediterranean and Near East that make up what he calls the “ancient G8.”
Members of this retrospective organization included not only Cypriots, Egyptians, and Canaanites, but also the Mycenaean and Minoan peoples of Greece, the Hittites of modern Turkey, and the Assyrians and Babylonians of modern Iraq. Ah, as Klein’s title suggests, 1177 BC: The year civilization collapsed.their good times didn’t last long.
In his book and in lectures on YouTube, he describes the various factors that contributed to the collapse of the once-thriving “small world network.” His surprising popularity as a Bronze Age historian is due in part to his willingness to draw comparisons between that time and our own. Many of his fans must have found him out of curiosity over a certain question. Could it be that our “flat” 21st century world is headed for collapse as well?
If so, we might focus less on why the ancient G8 collapsed and more on what happened to previously interdependent societies when the crisis ended. That’s Klein’s subject. After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizationand the Big Think interview excerpt It’s at the top of the post. Some coped, some adapted, some transformed, and some simply disappeared. For example, the Cypriots and the Phoenicians of Canaan reinvented themselves to thrive in chaos. Egyptians overcame difficulties through a combination of adaptation and coping. The Mycenaeans and Minoans lost more or less everything, including their writing system, and had to rebuild from scratch. But the real cautionary tale seems to be that the destruction of the Hittite civilization was largely self-inflicted. “Don’t be a Hittite,” is one of Klein’s advice. Another thing is to understand that antifragility Sooner or later.
Related content:
Why civilizations collapsed in 1177 BC: Watch classicist Eric Klein’s lecture with 7.6 million views already
Is America in decline like ancient Rome?
Göbekli Tepe: A 12,000-year-old ruin that rewrites the story of civilization
Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
