Late Bronze Age Collapse • Hacker News Board

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#191

Post by beloch » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:55 PM UTC

evanjrowley wrote: post #2

Seems to be a popular topic. Historian Eric H. Cline has multiple books citing this time period, specifically 1117 BCE as the inflection point for the bronze age "collapse", defined by a deterioration of international shipping routes that weakened the nation-states of the era. I've learned about it recently because YouTube began recommending videos about it. For example: https://youtu.be/choxcHXhZhE?is=t5lDwQQpqPsE2k…

One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. It was a systems collapse. The societies of the time were likely resilient enough to deal with "just a drought", "just a war", "just a big earthquake", or just some "international trade hiccups". What happened during the collapse was all of these things at once. It was the combination that proved so difficult to handle.

To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline.

Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#192

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

Brendinooo wrote: post #181

simiones wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wrote: > One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt. I d…

> modern day scholars Everyone, including you, me, and the most expert of scholars, brings their own biases, assumptions, evidentiary standards that will allow us to accept something as truth. I actually got more dialed into this while listening to Bart Ehrman on a NYT podcast recently. I was interested in him: an atheist who ascribes historicity to certain bits of the Bible, Jesus in particular. But ultimately I was…

Absolutely, of course we all have our biases and evidentiary standards.

But there is much we know about who and when wrote the various books of the Bible, and we have lots of archaeological evidence about what was happening in the area of north Egypt and Canaan for that entire duration. And for example we know with high confidence that the Book of Exodus, the Book of Joshua, and the Book of Judges were written hundreds of years after the events that they purport to describe - so they aren't very trustworthy sources to begin with, for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship.

Note also that atheists, whether scholars or not, have no particular bias against the historicity of the non-miraculous elements of the Bible. The general narrative of the story of the Book of Exodus could be explained in naturalistic terms, so it isn't dismissed outright by atheists the way, say, the Book of Genesis is. Moses could well have been some historical semitic leader that led a group of semitic slaves from captivity in Egypt up into freedom in Canaan, perhaps in the midst of a series of calamities hitting Egypt that allowed for their escape in the first place. That's why many serious scholars have looked for signs of these events, in many forms of historical sources - they simply didn't find any.

Contrast this to the story from the Book of Kings. Again, atheists will generally dismiss the story of the fire from the sky and the other miracles out of hand - but when they went and looked for evidence of a King Ahab and a religious leader Elijah, they did actually find it, and so they have no problem in attesting that these were real people who really lived.

In relation to the Book of Joshua - while it's true that Jericho exists as a city, and seems to have indeed existed at the right times to match the accounts, other parts of the narrative do not fit. In particular, the city of Ai was abandoned much earlier than any possible time for the narrative of the conquest (it was abandoned in 2400 BCE) and it wasn't re-settled until much later when a village was founded there during the Iron Age. So Jericho - maybe; Ai - no. Beyond this, there is simply no evidence to suggest that early Jewish settlements were conquered from "the Philistines" - the evidence suggests much more so that they were simply peacefully founded by Jewish people (that is, people who spoke Hebrew, followed Jewish dietary practices, and worshiped Yahweh).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#193

Post by dllu » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

> in Spanish, there wasn’t an English version, but it will do

I've just uploaded an English translation to: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moyen_Orient_13e_si%...

If someone can proofread my translations that would be great.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#194

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #187

tsimionescu wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're trying to say that this constitutes evidence of a historical king David, I point you back to the lineage that the real king Alfred (or some of his descendants, I didn't check the dates that clearly) claimed from Odin - who I presume few people today consider to be a historical character. Not to mention Odin's lineage being traced back to Adam.

To be willing to claim lineage back to any historical figure means you stipulate that historical figure existed. If you are claiming you can trace back to David back to Adam means you accept the validity of the Old Testament (or however your belief calls it). Personally, this is the first time I've ever heard Norse mythology being tied into the ancient Hebrew text. I've heard a lot but clearly not everything, and I h…

The writers of those genealogies indeed claimed that the god Odin did exist as a real historical person. But that doesn't mean that we have to accept their claim.

Similarly, anyone claiming descent from King David is indeed claiming that the he was a real historical figure, but we don't need to accept their claim.

As for tracing Odin's lineage back to the Hebrew patriarchs, that is of course a form of syncretism, where people who believe in multiple religions create a mix of them for various purposes.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#195

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

palmotea wrote: post #153

simiones wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was not idolatry, as depicted in Exodus - this was full blown state religion, held in the same esteem as Yahweh, and co-existing with worship of him. So much so that El later became identified with Yahweh, and now most people reading the Bible (including Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims) believe El is just another one of Yahweh's names, or maybe the name of one of his angels.

> this was full blown state religion, held in the same esteem as Yahweh, and co-existing with worship of him. IIRC, I'm pretty sure there's also a lot about that in the Bible too (e.g Israelites worshiping other gods like Baal, people up to and including kings).

Not in the Book of Exodus that I was talking about, no (if for no other reasons that there are no Hebrew kings in it).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#196

Post by krapp » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

coffeecat wrote: post #190

krapp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that: Yes, I am certain of these things because I am an adult with an education, and an awareness of the difference between mythology and reality. If you believe in magic, and that the Bible describes reality more correctly than the entirety of science, and that archaeology and Biblical scholarship are all wrong, and that somehow out of all…

During Albright's time, the archaeological evidence was generally interpreted as being in support of Old Testament narratives. Later generations of archaeologists mostly took the opposite view. The bottom line is, there's very little to go by, and the little archaeological evidence that exists can be interpreted either way, depending on one's preferred conclusion.

Could it be that later generations of archeologists took the opposite view because the preponderance of evidence uncovered in that time pointed in that direction (and because the cultural and political stigma against contradicting the Bible diminished over time,) or are you implying that the interpretation of archaeological evidence either way is simply a matter of arbitrary personal preference?

And notwithstanding that, there is absolutely no credible evidence of the supernatural at all.

On what basis do you believe the Bible and its supernatural claims could have happened?

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#197

Post by pu_pe » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

A very pleasant and informative read. The hypothesis that climate change was the primary cause of what came after seems plausible.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#198

Post by stymaar » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #179

stymaar wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture. I have no idea about the US, but in Europe it's absolutely not the case. We've replaced huge quantities of land that was twenty/thirty years ago dedicated to other crops. Also, we could actually convert them to pastures, that have a much better ecosystemic value (or even let them grow into unexploited forests, for even better environmental effect). >…

That's my fault, I should have prefaced that I'm just talking about the US. I have no idea what the situation is like in Europe (for some reason I assumed biofuels weren't big there). Due to US density and geography, most marginal land here wouldn't be returned to little more than pasture. It depends on the state but most of that land was never forest to begin with. > Most crops in the modern world run an engineered…

> What do you mean by engineered?

In a pasture for instance, grass can grow because the plant incorporate enough organic matter in the soil to be consumed by microorganisms that will in return fixate the nitrogen from the air into nitrates that can be consumed by the plant. Then you have some equilibrium-ish (it depends on the seasons and the precipitation so it's not an actual equilibrium) amount of nitrogen and organic compounds in your soil.

When you plow the soil, you accelerate decomposition of organic matter that was previously sitting there (because you bring excess oxygen). In the short term, it favors the fixation of nitrogen by the microorganism of the soil (which is why fallow works) but the following years you have less nitrogen fixation than you'd have had otherwise (because there's less organic mater to provide energy to the microorganisms).

Enters the nitrogen fertilizer: with them you don't need microorganisms to provide the nitrogen for your plants, and as such you don't care about the organic matter load of your soil. That's what I call “engineered soil” in opposition to the soils that are driven by the microorganisms who balance the carbon/nitrogen content of the soil.

Of course that doesn't mean that the whole content of the soil is man-made, but coupled with other fertilization methods (which bring nutrients that were naturally almost absent from the soil before), it helped transformed regions which used to be margins with very low yields, into agricultural powerhouses (For instance, Brittany, the region I'm from in France, went from being one of the poorest due to low soil fertility, to the agricultural leader of the country).

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#199

Post by tsoukase » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

As a Greek I feel proud that we passed through all history tides during our high times: multiple cycles of thriving and decline, the last one being the Classical century of 5th BC, then the Hellenistic period of Alexander until we passed the baton of civilization to the Romans.

This lasted for a full thousand years until a little before Jesus birth and it continued in Europe and the rest of the world in the same way for two more until today.

It seems the reasons of decline were most often the boring ones: variable scale fightings and climate change. Any resemblance to modern times is not coincidental.

Re: Late Bronze Age Collapse

#200

Post by Telemakhos » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

Amezarak wrote: post #157

cogman10 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Respectfully, this is a stronger claim than I think anyone can make. The only reason to treat this with kid gloves is because a large portion of the population believes in it. Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events." The stronger claim is a valid one to make because the primary source doesn't have any corroboration.

Denying the possible, even likely, historicity of Romulus and Remus is silly, yes.

Recognizing that the exposure myth of Romulus and Remus is an analogue of the exposure myth of Moses, of Cyrus, and of a host of other famous figures gets one thinking that early Roman history and early Jewish history, among others, map common Eurasian stories onto particular agendas.