Love, War, and Diplomacy in the Late Bronze Age: Interview with Professor Eric Cline

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Professor Eric Cline, author of the outstanding book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, returns to the show to discuss his new book: Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed. We talk about the dynamics of Bronze Age states, how such an extraordinary treasure trove of texts was discovered and translated, and what we can know about a long-past world.

Patrick's new book - Lost Worlds: The Rise and Fall of Human Societies from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age - is now available for preorder, and will be released on May 5th! Preorder in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWLostWorlds. And don't forget, you can still Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge.

Also Patrick is launching a brand-new history show on December 3rd! It’s called Past Lives, and every episode explores the life of a real person who lived in the past. He'll have a lot more to say about it very soon, so keep your eyes and ears peeled.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad-free right now.
0:04.6	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:13.1	Hi, everybody.
0:18.1	From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.
0:21.7	I'm Patrick Wyman.
0:22.9	Thanks so much for joining me.
0:31.9	Of all the many times and places in human prehistory and early history, the late Bronze Age of the Eastern Mediterranean stands out as one of the most fascinating.
0:37.6	Long-distance trade bound together the entire region from Mesopotamia to Greece to Nubia.
0:42.4	Powerful kings with armies and administrative systems ruled over that vast space.
0:47.4	Even more than just the kings, though, this is one of the first occasions when we can see not just a state or two, but a whole state system of interacting polities spread over a huge
0:52.9	area.
0:54.0	The reason we know about that state
0:55.8	system comes from a dusty archaeological site in Egypt called Amarna, a place that was almost
1:00.8	completely forgotten for more than 3,000 years. There, in one building, hundreds of clay tablets
1:07.2	were discovered, tablets that bore not Egyptian writing, but cuneiform, the standard
1:11.9	writing system of the Semitic speaking near east. Unbeknownst to anyone, those clay tablets were
1:17.5	part of a royal archive dating to the 14th century BC. We call them the Amarna letters. Today's guest
1:25.1	has written a fascinating new book on this singular discovery and what it tells
1:28.6	us about that world.
1:30.7	Eric Klein is Professor of Classics and Anthropology at George Washington University.
1:34.9	He's the author of one of my favorite books, and probably many of yours, 1177 BC, the
1:40.3	year's civilization collapsed, as well as a recent follow-up after 1177 BC, the survival of civilizations.
	...

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