Eric Cline: Love, War and Diplomacy, international relations in the Bronze Age

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib again talks to George Washington University archaeologist Eric Cline. The author of 1177 B.C. - The Year Civilization Collapsed and After 1177 B.C. - The Survival of Civilizations, Cline has a new book out, Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed. While 1177 B.C. closed with the end of the first global civilization, that of the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age, and After 1177 B.C. tells the story of those who picked up the pieces, Love, War, and Diplomacy puts the spotlight on the Late Bronze Age at its peak.

Razib and Cline discuss the two major threads in Love, War, and Diplomacy: the decipherment of cuneiform and the emergence of the field of Assyriology, and the diplomatic world of Bronze Age Great Powers. Cline addresses the reality that 19th-century archaeology was not an idealized enterprise, and scholars had to compete with treasure hunters, and negotiate difficult nationalist sensitivities. He also explains how they deciphered cuneiform decades after hieroglyphs, providing an alternative view of the earliest antiquity. The discussion then focuses on the intricate and tense relationship between Egypt, Assyria, the Hittites, and the Mitanni. Cline also highlights the reality that the Amarna Letters also shed light on the bickering between the petty states of the Levant and their relationship to their hegemon, Egypt.