The Explorers Club — New York City
Public Lecture Series featuring Eric Cline
Event open to: Public — Date: November 03, 2014
Time: 6:00 pm Reception, 7:00 pm Lecture
Location: NYC Headquarters, 46 E 70th Street, New York, NY, 10021
1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed
This event will be streamed live. Please visit our Live Stream page here at 7pm on the evening of the event to view the lecture for free.
Here is a brief summary of the lecture provided by The Explorers Club.
For more than three hundred years during the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 BC to 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, and Canaanites all interacted, creating a cosmopolitan and globalized world-system such as has only rarely been seen before the current day. It may have been this very internationalism that contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that ended the Bronze Age. When the end came, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from Greece and Italy in the west to Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia in the east. Large empires and small kingdoms, that had taken centuries to evolve, collapsed rapidly. With their end came the world’s first recorded Dark Ages.
It was not until centuries later that a new cultural renaissance emerged in Greece and the other affected areas, setting the stage for the evolution of Western society as we know it today. Blame for the end of the Late Bronze Age is usually laid squarely at the feet of the so-called Sea Peoples, known to us from the records of the Egyptian pharaohs Merneptah and Ramses III. However, as was the case with the fall of the Roman Empire, the end of the Bronze Age empires in this region was not the result of a single invasion, but of multiple causes. The Sea Peoples may well have been responsible for some of the destruction that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but it is much more likely that a concatenation of events, both human and natural — including earthquake storms, droughts, rebellions, and systems collapse — coalesced to create a “perfect storm” that brought the age to an end.
For more information about Dr. Cline, see here.
HT: Joseph I. Lauer
, is available in Kindle format today for $2.99. The retail price of the hardback is $28.
by Neil Lightfoot. This is not the only book you need on this subject, but it is a good beginning source.
Ferrell's Travel Blog 
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