The Bronze Age Collapse

In Our Time: History

BBC

History

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2016

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Bronze Age Collapse, the name given by many historians to what appears to have been a sudden, uncontrolled destruction of dominant civilizations around 1200 BC in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia. Among other areas, there were great changes in Minoan Crete, Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Mycenaean Greece and Syria. The reasons for the changes, and the extent of those changes, are open to debate and include droughts, rebellions, the breakdown of trade as copper became less desirable, earthquakes, invasions, volcanoes and the mysterious Sea Peoples. With John Bennet Director of the British School at Athens and Professor of Aegean Archaeology at the University of Sheffield Linda Hulin Fellow of Harris Manchester College and Research Officer at the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Oxford And Simon Stoddart Fellow of Magdalene College and Reader in Prehistory at the University of Cambridge Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time for more details about In Our Time
0:04.0	and for our terms of use please go to bbc.co.uk slash radio 4.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:10.8	Hello, in the 12th century BC there was a dramatic change in the kingdoms and empires
0:15.6	of the Mediterranean, a series of events known as the Bronze Age Collapse.
0:20.8	Over the course of perhaps 50 years the great palaces of the Mycenaeans became ruins,
0:25.6	the hit item by a manateuria broken to pieces, the mysterious sea peoples attacked Egypt.
0:31.4	Literacy disappeared from Greece as the Iron Age arrived a web of trade routes across the
0:36.0	region fell apart.
0:37.9	What's new rulers emerge their kingdoms are much smaller.
0:41.0	What exactly happened in the 12th century and perhaps more importantly why that happened
0:45.3	and who won as well as who lost is a matter of debate informed by the texts that remain
0:49.4	a new archaeological discoveries.
0:51.9	With me to discuss the Bronze Age Collapse, John Bennett, director of the British School
0:56.0	at Athens and professor of EGN archaeology at the University of Sheffield, Linda Hewlin,
1:01.5	research officer at the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of
1:05.1	Oxford and Simon Stoddard, reader in prehistory at the University of Cambridge.
1:10.0	John Bennett, what do historians mean by the term the Bronze Age?
1:14.2	Well the Bronze Age is important to remember is our term for this period and it was part
1:19.2	of a sequence of Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age which was essentially developed in
1:25.7	a prehistoric environment and environment without text.
1:28.6	It was developed at the early part of the 19th century by Christian Thompson who was
	...

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