The End of the Bronze Age
Posted on 05/13/2016 7:38:33 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Trojan War was a grander event than even Homer would have us believe. The famous conflict may have been one of the final acts in what one archaeologist has controversially dubbed "World War Zero" -- an event he claims brought the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age world crashing down 3200 years ago.
And the catalyst for the war? A mysterious and arguably powerful civilisation almost entirely overlooked by archaeologists: the Luwians.
By the second millennium BC, civilisation had taken hold throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptian New Kingdom coexisted with the Hittites of central Anatolia and the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece, among others.
In little more than a single generation, they had all collapsed. Was the culprit climate change? Some sort of earthquake storm? Social unrest? Archaeologists can't seem to agree.
Eberhard Zangger, head of international non-profit, Luwian Studies, based in Zurich, Switzerland, says that's because one crucial piece of the puzzle is missing. Another powerful civilisation in western Anatolia played a crucial role in the downfall (see video below)...
So what do other archaeologists make of this idea of a lost Luwian civilisation? Many stopped trying to impose this sort of monolithic cultural identity on ancient peoples decades ago, says Christoph Bachhuber at the University of Oxford.
"Archaeologists will need to discover similar examples of monumental art and architecture across western Anatolia and ideally texts from the same sites to support Zangger's claim of a civilisation," he says.
The textual evidence available is mainly from post-Bronze age and it paints a slightly confusing picture, which could be seen as both supporting and undermining Zangger's theory, says Ilya Yakubovich, a historical linguist at the Philipp University of Marburg, Germany.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
The End of the Bronze Age
I saw a video that said the downfall of almost all civilizations is the savagery that is found in the Arabs or Turks.
"Coexisted"? More like were unable to defeat.
I’m a Zangger fan, but this appears to be a giant smoking crock.
related topic:
Ancient Group Believed Departed Souls Lived in Stone Monuments
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2134429/posts
Yes, that's right, it's another one of *those* topics. Luwian is related (or ancestral) to Lycian, and both appear to be cousins to Lydian.
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McQueen found that "Hittite appears to be Lydian", an anomaly that he tried to resolve in a later edition by changing "Lydian" to "Arzawan". He was right the first time.
What would we do without the ‘climate change’ bugaboo?
Serious archaeologists positing a climate change that, in the space of a generation, takes down a civilization? I don’t think so.
I saw that, too. It is now obligatory to make “climate change” #1 in any list of possible causes of anything, no matter how implausible or silly.
Mysterious civilization of Sea Peoples were wiped out by world war zero 3,000 years ago
“The textual evidence available is mainly from post-Bronze age and it paints a slightly confusing picture, which could be seen as both supporting and undermining Zangger’s theory, says Ilya Yakubovich, a historical linguist at the Philipp University of Marburg, Germany.”
So maybe they did and maybe they didn’t
what about the Dorians?
Only the Egyptians survived - in a weakened state.
Interesting theory
Wouldn’t those be Phoenicians?
Some authorities extend the map of the Hittite Empire all the way to the Aegean/Med shores of what we describe as southern Anatolia. It’s a convenient device to fill in areas which have no apparent separate identity.
Regarding the Sea Peoples, the question has always been their place of origin. We are pretty sure that the Mycenaeans would not have been identified by this appellation. Other theories have placed them as far away as the extreme Western Med or around Italy/Sicily.
This theory of a coordinated bunch of city states in that Anatolian region could finally place and make sense of the origins of the Sea People. Being a coastal people, they would have the requisite sea-faring knowledge to be rated as “Sea People.”
If the Hittites recognized them as a ‘people’ and not just one city, then I think the idea has some merit. You don’t have to have huge cities of stone to become sea raiders as the Vikings proved centuries later.
And in range of all the other civilizations they attacked, which is why the only graphical evidence we have of them is Egyptian murals.
If this theory is right, the Sea People may have been pushed to raiding other shores as the Hittites expanded into their area OR simply started raiding for goodies, realized it was profitable, and brought on the first world wide coalition to take out a terrorist state.
Immanuel Velikovsky wrote a book appropriately titled “Peoples of the Sea” in which he discussed the effect these marauders had on ancient civilizations.
I’m gonna tell you one thing, kid...Felice Vinci’s “The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales”
Trade when you can; pillage when you can’t. Probably the story of seaborne commerce until the 1800 A.D. or so.
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