What Happens When a Globalized World Collapses: Archaeologist Eric Cline Explains How Bronze Age Civilizations Adapted, Survived or Vanished

We live, as we’re often told, in the era of globalization. In fact, we’ve been told it so often over the past few decades that it now hardly seems like an observation worth making. But however thoroughly our era is defined by connections between far-flung nations, societies, economies, and cultures, we shouldn’t flatter ourselves into thinking we are pioneers in a wholly new globalized reality. As classicist Eric Cline explains in this recent Big Think interview, an interconnected world flourished in the late Bronze Age, and especially the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. “Life was pretty good” in those days, he says, at least if you lived in one of the lands around the Mediterranean and Near East that constituted what he calls the “ancient G8.”

The member peoples of this retrospective organization included the Mycenaeans and Minoans in Greece, the Hittites in modern-day Turkey, the Assyrians and the Babylonians in modern-day Iraq, as well as the Cypriots, Egyptians, and Canaanites. Alas, as implied by the title of Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, their good times together didn’t last.

In that book, and in lectures on YouTube, he’s explained the variety of factors that contributed to the dissolution of that once prosperous “small-world network.” His surprising popularity for a historian of the Bronze Age owes in part to his willingness to draw comparisons with that time and our own. Many of his fans surely found him out of curiosity over one question: is our “flat” twenty-first-century world similarly headed for a collapse?

If so, we might pay less attention to why the ancient G8 collapsed, and more to what became of its formerly interdependent societies when the crisis had run its course. Such is the subject of Cline’s After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, and of the Big Think interview extract at the top of the post. Some coped, some adapted, some transformed, and others simply vanished. Cypriots and the Phoenicians of Canaan, for example, remade themselves to thrive in the chaos; the Egyptians muddled through with a mixture of adaptation and coping; the Mycenaeans and the Minoans lost more or less everything, including their writing system, and had to rebuild from square one. But the truly cautionary tale is that of the Hittites, whose civilizational annihilation appears to have been in large part self-inflicted. “Don’t be a Hittite,” is one of Cline’s pieces of advice; another is to gain an understanding of antifragility sooner rather than later.

Related content:

Why Civilization Collapsed in 1177 BC: Watch Classicist Eric Cline’s Lecture That Has Already Garnered 7.6 Million Views

Is America Declining Like Ancient Rome?

Göbekli Tepe: The 12,000-Year-Old Ruins That Rewrite the Story of Civilization

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.