Dissecting the mess that is the "Did the Bronze Age Really Collapse?" video by Kings and Generals (Part 2)
The wild ride continues...
This is the second part of my essay dissecting and analyzing the mistakes in the infamous Kings and Generals video on the Late Bronze Age Collapse. If you haven’t read the first part, be sure to do so. As previously, KG is the abbreviation for the channel, and timestamps are provided. Without further ado, let’s continue diving into this mess. Video link is here if you haven’t seen it yet and/or want to follow along.
6:57 - Yes, please, finally we are moving towards something more intelligent. Drought, caused by some degree of climate change, was indeed one of the main causes of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, and it led to famines and starvation, and eventually the collapse itself, as hungry people are also often rebellious people. However, for some reason KG decides to immediately discard this cause. So my first sentence here was false hope actually.
7:46 - Crete did not really become fragmented later on. Crete - the Minoan civilization - just had many cycles, with centralization and decentralization changing one another every few hundred years. But by the end it was basically part of the Mycenaean civilization, so it wasn’t decentralized, it was as centralized as ever, and now ruled by a somewhat foreign power.
7:56 - Late Bronze Age spans from around 1500 BCE to 1100 BCE, so most of it wasn’t all crises and bad stuff. Only the last century or so was the decline and eventually collapse, whereas 1500 - 1200 BCE was the height of the Bronze Age.
8:20 - Words like “change” and “adaptation” are the understatements of the century. The Mycenaean civilization had most of its cities destroyed, one way or another, literacy was lost for centuries, the Mycenaeans themselves basically went extinct and were replaced by Dorians and other new Greek groups, and it would take many centuries for cities with even a fraction of their former power to emerge. So I think it definitely could be called a collapse. Also, Mycenae was the first domino, falling around 1190 BCE, not the other way around. Hatti only fell around 1180 BCE, Egypt started declining in the 1170s BCE. For Mycenae, it definitely was a collapse, as sites/cities, including but not limited to: Mycenae, Pylos, Menelaion, Tiryns, Thebes, and Knossos were destroyed around then, and these were the main cities in the kingdom/confederation.
8:55 - I think my guy is now really confused with the timeline. He is talking about the Mycenaean writings from like 1400 - 1300 BCE, but applying it to the 1100s BCE, in order to, I assume, prove his theory more. But it makes no sense if you know the timeline of the events and when everything was written. It just doesn’t add up.
9:03 - Tyre and Sidon had already been important Phoenician cities during Egyptian rule, though the preferred one was Byblos until the Collapse.
9:37 - Should be called Alashiya, as Cyprus is the Greek name, and there were no Greeks there at the time, but I can forgive this one.
10:08 - “Cyprus’ stable position” I want whatever of what he’s smoking. First of all, Cyprus - Alashiya - was conquered by Hittites around the start of the collapse, as we know from their texts. Could have been due to Hittites needing more copper for their armies to quell the rebellions or deal with barbarians. But in any case, the Hittites lost the island, and it was mostly destroyed during the collapse, with Enkomi and other major cities becoming ruins. The entire Eteocypriot culture vanished in a few decades, and nothing was left of the island, it was anything but stable.
10:19 - Greeks and Phoenicians only started settling Cyprus around 900 BCE or so, centuries after the collapse. Phoenicians had no need to move at first, as they were safe in their cities, which hadn’t been destroyed, and only later started expanding, whereas the “new” Greeks (post-Mycenaean) first had the entire peninsula to rebuild, before venturing to start any colonies.
10:23 - Again, the timeline is distorted. The Sea Peoples may have settled on the island, but that was centuries before the Greeks and Phoenicians, at least on a large scale. It didn’t happen at the same time.
10:38 - There were no more Cypriot elites, because there were no more Cypriot cities. We have evidence of their destruction, and here the Sea Peoples may indeed have played a role, as there would have been plenty of them already after Mycenae and Hatti had fallen.
11:10 - Rural communities would reject royal authority because there was no royal authority anymore. It’s not like the kings were like “oh, you guys don’t like paying taxes and being conscripted? That’s fine, you can not do that, we won’t send in the army to beat you up into submission”. Whenever some cities or whole regions would try becoming independent, they would be utterly crushed by the court - i.e. Canaan and Kush by Egypt, or various peripheries of Hatti. It was never a peaceful divorce in any case, the only cause for the regions becoming free from the kingdom would be that there was no kingdom anymore, or that it was so weakened that it couldn’t do anything. Because of the collapse.
11:16 - The martial culture of Greek never went anywhere, if anything it only intensified. Ever heard of Sparta? Or literally any other city there, those societies were as militarized as they come.
11:19 - I’m sorry, did he say “Geometric Greece”? What in the name of Seth does that mean? No, genuinely, I have no idea.
11:29 - Yes, and there were revolts in Mycenaean Greece, which eventually led to the destruction of many palaces and cities. But this had nothing to do with democracy, which would become a thing in Athens - barely a small town in 1200 BCE - about 700 years later. This connection with the fall of Mycenae and democracy is ludicrous really.
11:37 - Egypt did not, in fact, survive for a few more centuries. Only for like one. New Kingdom Egypt fell in 1069 BCE, though it began fracturing even earlier. It survived, just barely, for a little over one century, as the collapse began around 1200 BCE. After that it was divided between various warlords and local rulers.
11:40 - Mentioning the Libyans and Persians, but not the Kushites or Assyrians, despite those being much more influential than the Libyans.
11:47 - Atrocious map strikes back! Now Lydia is for some reason on the same map as Hatti, despite those two being separated by at least a few hundred years.
11:50 - Assyria began its conquests way earlier than the collapse and while it did use the collapse as an opportunity to expand even more, in the end it lost more than it gained and by 1100 BCE was reduced to a rump state around the capital Ashur.
12:07 - Again, Lydia would come into play only centuries later, deep into Iron Age. It had nothing to do with the Collapse or the period around it.
12:17 - New resources? New populations? My man, most civilizations lost most of their resources and millions died, it’s the complete opposite.
12:30 - New forms of networks were created, but again, only centuries, if not millennia, later. During the Dark Ages, around 1100 - 500 BCE, there was little trade in the region, it was a definite downgrade.
12:38 - The world of early iron age was one of barbarians and illiteracy, not colonies. Colonies would come from 900 BCE at the earliest, much later than the collapse, and even then is quite a small scale.
12:42 - The Persians would not rise “again”, they would rise for the first time, as the Elamites had nothing to do with the Persians, they were completely different groups.
12:56 - These were long term processes, which led to collapse. Collapse doesn’t have to happen in an instant, it doesn’t have to be solely a product of warfare or the Sea Peoples. It can be caused by other factors as well, and over a long period of time.
13:28 - Trade continued on a small scale, but nowhere near the level of the Late Bronze Age. Only with the emergence of the Roman Empire, millennia later, would trade would reach such an intercontinental level.
13:46 - I don’t know if I want more videos of this kind, chief. If anything, I would suggest you use your time instead to read a book or two before spreading such narratives.
One such would be, of course, my beloved, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric H. Cline. A nice simple read which details the state of the Late Bronze Age and how it came to the collapse. It disputes the Sea Peoples hypothesis, while also explaining how they were a cause of the collapse, and how the collapse itself was a product of drought, climate change, internal rebellions, natural disasters, and more. I never want to miss a good opportunity to promote the work of the only god I serve apart from Sobek this great scholar. If you want to read it, get it here. Or if you want actually good videos on the Late Bronze Age Collapse, check out videos by History with Cy or Epimetheus. They have actually seem to specialize in the Bronze Age and so have many videos on the topic, which explain the event much better, though they don’t have nearly as many subscribers, so be sure to check them out. As to the KG, well, what else could I say - what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God Horus have mercy on your soul. Jk, you’re alright, but, really, please put some effort into your video next time, or you’ll have old Sobekhotep here again on a Friday night writing up a 3000 word rum-fuelled essay.
Image Credits
By Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71577590
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jesse-what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about
Screenshot from the KG video