What was the Bronze Age Collapse?
Tides of History
00:00
What if the King Had Nothing to Redistribute?
A mega drought would have had disastrous consequences for political and economic systems built on the extraction and redistribution of agricultural surplus. The palatial societies of the late bronze age were responsible for some significant portion of the redstribution, everywhere from greece to egypt. Famine certainly wasn't a new phenomenon around 12 hundred b c. We even have evidence for earlier episodes in the hittite lands about 50 years before that. It's easy to see how political, economic and social instability might all result from a drought induced famine.
Transcript
Play full episode
