I'm John Batchew with Professor Eric Klein.

His books, there's a sequel now, after 1177 BC.

The world has ended, combination of accident and intervention and invasion and migration.

But we look to who survives, who adapts, who's resilient.

And we start with the Assyrians because they're in the Bible and they're easy to remember.

The professor teaches me, however, that the Assyrians were successful because they were almost always at war.

One particular king of the Assyrians was extremely successful on identifying what you recommend

professor is, if you're going to survive, you need leadership, and the Assyrians had it.

Yes, absolutely. That's one of the things that I do in the final chapter of this new

sequel is try to figure out why some of these societies, the G8,

as I call them, why some of them were more resilient, why they were able to make it through

the collapse better than others. And the Assyrians are one of the best examples.

They've got redundant systems in place, for example.

They still have their military.

They still have writing.

They still have their government.

The king is still in place.

And that's where having a good leader at the right time might come in.

And so we know from their records, which we have for much

of the time, though there's an interesting gap right at the beginning, we know that their

leaders, as you say, are busy conducting war almost every year. And in part it's because

the people that they had been happily trading with back in the late Bronze Age, they're having trouble.

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