The collapse

I've mentioned before that I have an absolute fascination with historical mysteries, which is why if I had the opportunity to visit one place and period, it would be somewhere in western Europe during the "Dark Ages" -- the time between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (usually placed at 476 C.E., when the puppet emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the Scirian leader Odoacer) and the founding of the Carolingian dynasty and re-consolidation of power by Charlemagne 325 years later.  During that interval, damn little is known for sure -- we have some names, like Clovis and Charles Martel and Arthur Pendragon -- but how many of the accounts from that period are true and how many later inventions and add-ons, we'll probably never be certain.

There's another time period, though, that is (if anything) more mysterious still -- partly because it's much further in the past.  This is the Late Bronze Age Collapse, that happened in the twelfth century B.C.E., in which two of the most powerful civilizations in ancient Eurasia, the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites, suddenly disintegrated, and others in the region, including the Egyptian New Kingdom and the Assyrian Empire, were seriously weakened (although ultimately survived and rebuilt).

Whatever happened, it happened fast.  Two of the main cities of the Hittite Empire, Hattusa and Karaoğlan, both burned right around the same time, and from the archaeological evidence, so many people died their bodies were never buried.  Greece was equally hard-hit, with just about every Mycenaean palace and citadel burned or demolished; the period afterward has been nicknamed the "Greek Dark Ages," a period of about four hundred years from which we have almost no records.  Whatever caused it, the Greek peninsula seems to have been left largely depopulated.  One estimate is that ninety percent of pre-collapse settlements in the Peloponnese, the southernmost region of Greece, were abandoned during that one event.

The Mycenaean "Mask of Agamemnon," ca. 1550 B.C.E. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Xuan Che, MaskOfAgamemnon, CC BY 2.0]

So what caused the collapse?

The simple answer is that we don't know.  It may well have been a confluence of bad stuff; earthquakes, plagues, and famines are all possibilities, although it's hard to imagine why any of the three would then lead people across an entire region to destroy just about every last city.  Another possibility is severe and prolonged drought caused by a climatic shift, followed by open rebellion by people desperate for food and water.  (Recall that back then, the kings were considered to be intercessors to the gods on the behalf of the people; when the rain stopped falling and the crops all died, it's entirely possible the people overthrew their own rulers for not intercessing hard enough.)

It's also possible that both the Mycenaeans and the Hittites were overcome and destroyed by a mysterious group called the "Sea Peoples," who are mentioned in records of the Egyptian New Kingdom (the Egyptians were also attacked, but successfully repelled them and managed to survive).  Who these Sea Peoples were isn't known for sure, but they may have been an alliance between the Lukka of coastal southwestern Anatolia, the Peleset of what are now Israel and Lebanon (the name is probably a cognate to the biblical name "Philistine"),  and the Weshesh, who may have been from Sicily or southern Italy.  But the truth is, we're not sure of that, either.  The Sea Peoples left no records of their own and seem to have moved around a lot, so any artifacts they left behind haven't told us much.

And of course, it could be a combination of all of these.  Changes in climate and natural disasters are known to have been responsible for famines and epidemics, and when those happen, people often up stakes and try to move to a more congenial venue -- which is inconvenient for the people who already live there.  The attacks by the Sea Peoples may have been a result, not the root cause, of the collapse.

But there's no doubt that the effects were devastating.  The eastern Mediterranean would take four centuries to recover completely, leaving behind a historical whodunnit that still puzzles us today.  But it does highlight how tenuous survival was back then.  The people of the ancient world were one bad harvest between relative comfort and famine.  Epidemics were regular visitors, sometimes wiping out settlements entirely.  When things get desperate, the veneer of civility disintegrates pretty rapidly.

It's to be hoped our modern civilization would be resilient enough to weather such calamities, should they strike, but the reality is, we're not really that different from our distant ancestors.  It's nice to think that in severe trials, we'd help each other -- that we might remember Benjamin Franklin's words, "We must hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."  Like us, the Bronze Age empires probably thought they'd be around forever, but when catastrophe struck, they seem to have promptly self-destructed.

Let's hope we can learn some lessons from their failure.

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Under the ancient skies

I find it fascinating how long humans have been curious about the nature of the universe.  Our drive to understand the world and its workings certainly goes back a very long way.  Some of it can be explained purely pragmatically -- a commonly-cited example is the development of accurate sidereal calendars by the ancient Egyptians to get the timing right for the annual Nile floods, critical not only from a safety standpoint but because figuring out a way to manage all that water was essential for agriculture in what was then a rapidly-growing population.  But it goes far beyond that.  It seems like as far back as we have any kind of records at all, we've wanted to know what makes the cosmos tick.

A particularly fascinating example of this came my way via my friend, the brilliant writer Gil Miller, who seems to have an uncanny knack for finding stuff that (1) I will find really interesting, and (2) I haven't heard about before.  Yesterday he sent me a link from the site New Scientist about an archaeological find in Turkey that -- if the researchers' conclusions are borne out, will provide another example of how early we developed our compulsion to understand what was going on up there in the night skies.

The site is called Yazılıkaya, and it was built by the Hittites 3,200 years ago near their capital city of Ḫattuša.  (The nearest modern town is Boğazkale, in central Turkey.)  It has hundreds of images carved into the rock surfaces, and according to this new study, they represent not only solar, lunar, and sidereal calendars, they are a representation of their concept of the structure of the universe.

The shrine at Yazılıkaya

The current study was the product of a tremendous amount of work.  "There are many connotations with the names of the deities and the arrangements and groups, and so in retrospect it’s pretty easy to figure it out," said Eberhard Zangger, one of the researchers who investigated the site.  "But we worked on it for seven years...  [The Hittites] had a certain image of how creation happened.  They imagined that the world began in chaos, which became organized into three levels: the underworld, and then the earth on which we walk, and then the sky.  The second aspect of Hittite cosmology was a recurrent renewal of life – for instance, day following night, the dark moon turning into a full moon and winter becoming summer.  The calendar-like carvings reflect this cyclical view of nature."

Of course, back then, there was no particularly accurate way to measure stellar and planetary positions, and anything like a telescope was still two millennia in the future.  But even so, they did pretty damn well with what they had access to, especially given how long ago this was.  The Hittites controlled most of what is now modern Turkey from 1,700 to 1,100 B.C.E., at which point attacks from the Phrygians and Assyrians pretty much smashed the power structure and subsumed the culture.

From our modern knowledge of cosmology, the Big Bang and stellar evolution and astrophysics, their conclusions seem pretty rudimentary.  They, like most of the contemporaneous societies, put the whole thing in the hands of gods and sub-gods and so on, giving the whole thing a religious rather than scientific veneer.  "Obviously that makes sense, because that’s exactly what religion does," said archaeologist Efrosyni Boutsikas, of the University of Kent, who was not involved in the current research.  "It addresses universal concerns and the place of the people in the world."  She added that she's not 100% sold on the conclusions of Zangger and his colleagues, but that the site and others near it are deserving of further study.

I'm certainly not qualified to judge the quality of the research nor the legitimacy of the team's conclusions, but I am fascinated with how long we've been trying to figure out how everything works.  As Boutsikas said, religion is a common first-order approximation, and although in many cases it became solidified into a compulsory belief system that then became a hindrance to scientific advancement, it does represent our drive to reach beyond our day-to-day concerns and glimpse the mechanisms controlling not only the movements of things here on Earth, but of those unreachably distant points of light we see gliding through the night skies.  Awe-inspiring, isn't it, to think that our ancestors 3,200 years ago were looking at those ancient skies, and trying to make sense of it all -- just as we're still doing today.

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In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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