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Grand_Cookie t1_ix6jlp5 wrote

When I first saw the card I thought it was about the Bronze Age collapse and got excited and then once I actually clicked it to see that it was graham “it’s entirely possible” Hancock I subjected my wife to a 25 minute rambling rant about how he’s a quack and it’s just ancient aliens.

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Bentresh t1_ix6ui52 wrote

It'd be very difficult to do a proper, well-researched documentary on the collapses at the end of the Late Bronze Age, I think. Most lectures and documentaries on the topic are far less nuanced than they ought to be.

There was not a singular collapse that affected all regions to the same degree; the end of the Late Bronze Age affected different regions in different ways over slightly different periods of time. Some cities and kingdoms were destroyed and never regained their prominence (e.g. Ugarit and Emar), some simply moved locations (e.g. Enkomi to Salamis, Alalakh to Tell Tayinat), and others were scarcely affected by the end of the Bronze Age at all (e.g. Carchemish, Byblos, Paphos). It has become increasingly clear that we must look not at the overall picture – the entirety of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East did not experience collapse – but rather specific places at specific times to understand how each of the great powers (and especially each of the regions within them) collapsed, survived, or even thrived from 1150-950 BCE. Unfortunately, this sort of nuanced analysis does not lend itself well to a documentary format.

To take the Hittite empire as an example, some of the southern parts of the empire like Tarḫuntašša and Malatya (Išuwa in the Bronze Age) essentially split off and became de facto independent states toward the end of the Bronze Age. These kingdoms preserved aspects of Hittite culture until the Neo-Assyrian conquests of the 8th/7th centuries BCE – religious beliefs and practices, Luwian and the Anatolian hieroglyphic writing system, architectural and artistic styles, administrative titles, Hittite royal names like Šuppiluliuma and Ḫattušili, etc.

The collapse of the Hittite heartland in central Anatolia was due partly to the loss of these outlying regions (the Hittite imperial core was always short on manpower and grain), but also from pressures unique to the Hittite empire, such as raids from the Kaška who lived in northern Anatolia. I discussed this more in How did the civilizations fall in the end of the Bronze Age? and When and how did we learn that the bronze age had really collapsed and was a thing and not just an imaginary folk idea like Atlantis?

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Rocketlucco t1_ix6w1b5 wrote

As someone who loves ancient history and is slowing making my way through textbook level books on all the ancient Levant civs, your links to your other comments were amazing reads. I’d don’t even realize we knew that much about the Hittites. If I want to get the best overview I can on their civilization, Can you recommend 1-2 books to read about them?

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Bentresh t1_ix73eaf wrote

Yeah, we know quite a bit about the Hittites; they’re by far the best attested of the Late Bronze Age powers after Egypt, though the distribution of sources is decidedly uneven in terms of location, date, and contents. I discussed Hittite archives in this post.

I recommend starting with Warriors of Anatolia: A Concise History of the Hittites by Trevor Bryce, essentially a greatly condensed combination of his earlier books (The Kingdom of the Hittites and Life and Society in the Hittite World). The Hittites and Their World by Billie Jean Collins is also a pretty good introductory overview, especially the chapter on Hittite religion.

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