The End is Always Near

The subsequent negative effects of that early twentieth-century war involved many of the same factors we’ve targeted in our discussion of the end of the Bronze Age. By 1918, due to the conflict, Europe was experiencing famine and pestilence to go along with its war and death. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were running rampant through some of the most advanced societies in the early twentieth century—an eventuality that was made possible only because the war opened the door to it. It’s not hard to imagine, then, how a multigenerational and eventually losing struggle with another great power may have challenged the Hittite state.

Assyria’s wars of expansion during this era were in the military history foreground and are hard to miss. But in the background were lots of conflicts that didn’t involve the great powers fighting their peers at all (which doesn’t mean they weren’t potentially important, or possibly fatal, should a great power have been defeated). Lots of “barbarian” peoples and tribes, for example, nibbled at the fringes of the great states, always seemingly ready to exploit weakness or take advantage of opportunities. In the case of the Hittites, their local troublesome “barbarians” were people like the Phrygians and a lesser-known people known as the Kaska (or Gasga). The Kaska are portrayed by the Hittite sources as aggressive wild tribesmen who had sacked and burned the Hittite capital in the past. Some historians think that, as the Hittite state got weaker, its ability to resist these peoples declined. If major conflicts with other powerful states like Assyria weakened the Hittites, it may have made them less able to fend off their traditional “barbarian” neighbors. And, just to tie it all together, if those barbarian neighbors were starving due to a famine caused by arid conditions and poor harvests, does that explain why the Hittites might have had to fend them off in the first place?

If one credits the Assyrians with a large amount of responsibility for bringing down the state of Mittani,[49] and then possibly mortally wounding the Hittites, that would amount to a great deal of political and military change occurring around the thirteenth century BCE. And this might have been enough to spark a chain reaction that disrupted a whole system.

Suspects #6 and #7: Systems Collapse, Multiple Causes

We live in a world of complex systems—economic, cultural, social, administrative-bureaucratic. Many things must function together to make an interconnected system work, and a breakdown anywhere can mean a breakdown everywhere. For that reason, most systems have some flexibility and redundancy built into them to deal with stresses, breakdowns, and unforeseen circumstances—in short, they are made to be resilient. But when these backup systems become overwhelmed, the cascading nature of a problem can ripple throughout the entire system like an economic version of a communicable disease. So in a Bronze Age trading network that reached from Spain to Iran and from northern Italy to Nubia, a disruption of something like Mediterranean commerce could affect all those regions.

And while the loss of things like luxury products and the money generated from trading activity would have had an enormous effect, it’s important to remember that food constituted one of the major categories of goods being shipped in the late Bronze Age. The Egyptians were sending food to multiple places (including the Hittite lands) via ship to alleviate starvation. If those ships were unable to reach their destinations, it wasn’t a question of loss of income or a lowering of living standards, it was a potential famine.

When people don’t have food, under certain circumstances all law and order and societal controls can break down. Plagues can cause the same problems if they’re bad enough. Anarchy, revolution, and civil war can sometimes do to a society what outside invaders can’t manage. All it can take is too little food or too much disease.

There are other scenarios that can lead to the same outcome. Mass migration in a short time (for example, the Libyan and sea peoples’ “invasions” of Egypt) can disrupt norms and break down culture and amicable coexistence. Insufficient military defense can leave a population and its food supplies open to predation by other armed groups.

Some experts have suggested that the Bronze Age system was somewhat fragile or brittle. Undergirded by highly centralized, very bureaucratic states, with a small rich elite presiding over large numbers of peons,[50] such a system might have been vulnerable to all sorts of rebellion and social upheaval. Think of an ancient version of the French Revolution, for example. If such destabilization were sparked by a system’s inability to deliver food to a starving population, what’s ultimately to blame: The famine, or the brittle, inequitable social system? If the sea peoples’ piracy helped destroy the maritime trading system, does the damage come from the piracy or the resulting collapse of the trading system? This is where the multiple-causes suspect begins to look like a good bet.

WHILE WE FEEL somewhat safer from those Bronze Age suspects than our ancestors did, we have managed to add new potential threats that previous eras never had to face: nuclear weapons, global environmental damage, potentially catastrophic scientific innovations, and more.[51] And the ongoing threat of certain types of potentially dark age–inducing wild cards seems pretty consistent over the ages. Whether you live in an era when a scary-size asteroid hits the earth or a supervolcano explodes in Yosemite seems merely the luck of the celestial roulette wheel.

When the Soviet Union suffered a political system collapse[52] in the early 1990s, did some of the USSR’s successor states have something we might consider a mini–dark age? That unsettled era saw an extended and difficult transition period. In newly created nation-states like Russia, birth rates and life expectancy dropped drastically. Alcoholism and suicide rates rose; the social safety net was shredded; the nation’s military and infrastructure seemed to atrophy; its political system seemed unsteady, corrupt, and chaotic; and its national resources were seemingly up for grabs to the highest or most corrupt bidder. If the history of the post-USSR era were being written by historians a century ago, would they have called it “The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union”? Would they have identified the period afterward as a “dark age”?

Perhaps how long any societal, economic, or civilizational downturn lasts is a key factor in whether or not we agree that something qualifies as a dark age. Both the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s and the post-Soviet breakup of the 1990s lasted roughly a decade or so. That length hardly seems to meet the minimum standard for a dark age. However, had the direct fallout from either instead lasted a century or two, that might have been enough to turn a statistical civilizational blip into an extended negative trend.

One of the modern theories on societal collapse argues that because of the entire planet’s connected nature in the twenty-first century, individual or localized “dark ages” of the sort that formerly occurred are nowadays absorbed by the rest of the global body and civilization as a whole.[53] Others have suggested that the depth and severity of any potential “dark age” are lessened due to modern interconnectivity. So you might have another Great Depression or the fall of a superpower, but you won’t have a century of global decline and technological backsliding. It’s sort of a global diversification of risk in our modern civilization, a redundancy that allows the system to survive local blackouts.

But perhaps our bias is showing. Maybe such changes are not decline or backsliding at all. It all might depend on the criteria we’ve decided to use. Depending on your point of view, things might not be considered better or worse … just different.

Earlier we brought up the idea of “progress” having an innate bias attached to it. If literacy declines in a later era because reading is less important, is this indicative of living in a “dark(er) age”? Or would it be more a case of people adjusting their skills based on their needs? And who gets to decide this—we moderns looking backward at the past, or the people actually living in the earlier era? Our ideas of what was good for the inhabitants of an earlier time might be different from their own.

This brings up the question of how much the people living in a dark age would even realize it. If you were born in Greece in 1000 BCE,[54] did you know (or care) that there was a greater age before yours? Take a kid born in the United States in 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression. On his tenth birthday, the world was still mired in the effects of the crash. To that child, the privation and lowered sense of expectations felt normal; he had no experience or memory of anything else. His parents, however, likely felt that times had gotten tougher. While it sounds like a bad thing to be living in a society off its technological, cultural, or economic highs, it’s very possible the happiness level of individual human beings adjusted and evened out comparatively quickly. It’s hard to know what you’re missing after it’s been gone for a couple of lifetimes.

Maybe we are looking at this entirely wrong. If we lived in an era when our history books taught us that Ben Franklin’s eighteenth-century Revolutionary War generation had landed a spacecraft on Mars and could completely cure cancer (which of course we can’t do or haven’t done yet), would we care? Of course we would want the things of the past that seemed like improvements, but would we want the rest of the package that came along with it? If, for example, a Native American from five centuries ago had a bad tooth, she might really want our modern dentistry to deal with it. But if in order to get the modern medicine she had to become modern in all the other aspects of her existence, she might not consider the deal worth it.

There are multiple ways that any account or story can be viewed, but it’s helpful to be reminded from time to time. Certain narratives, such as “golden ages” and “rise and falls,” are so ingrained in our thinking that it’s easy to forget there might be other ways to see things. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter said that in some regions the Roman Empire taxed its citizens so highly, and provided so few services in return, that some of those people welcomed the “conquering barbarians” as liberators.

A similar theory exists about the Bronze Age: that perhaps the very bureaucratic and tax-heavy structure of the palace cultures of the Mediterranean states stopped working well for the majority of people, and one way or another they abandoned or stopped actively supporting it. In such a case, if things become too complicated to work well, or too centralized to be in touch with ground-level problems, is reverting to a greater level of simplicity and local control moving in a negative or a positive direction?[55]

As with so many things, it may depend on whom you ask. No doubt at least some of those living back then would think we were romanticizing how wonderful the “good old days” of their lives were. Indeed, the successors of Rome would spend hundreds of years trying to put it back together again (in some form or another), and a certain blind poet named Homer would make a living recalling tales of the good old heroic days of the Bronze Age centuries after it ended.

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