This is John Bachelor, conversation with Professor Eric Klein, his new book after 1177 BC,

continuing the story of globalization in the 12th century before the common era and how it collapsed of a sudden six, seven,

eight civilizations working together for trade, military adventures, walls, castles, and then gone. Why, how? And here

Professor Klein speaks of one of the civilizations, Assyrian, measuring how it did compared

to the others in the collapse and the recovery.

Eric Klein on the collapse and surviving the collapse.

More of this tonight and later on.

It's a two-hour conversation.

He's 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 the 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 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 have been happily trading with back in the late Bronze Age, they're having trouble.

They don't have trading partners per se anymore.

So they simply take what they need during these next couple of centuries.

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