Bronze Age

And so the, the large kind of battles of the empires to the north and the south of this trading route through the lowlands of Israel, well, that's still going on, but it's not really affecting the nation of Israel at this time, as the rest of the world is just kind of entering into this new time of the Iron Age.

They've just exited the Bronze Age, and so the world is shifting.

And you, you heard them talking yesterday about having those chariots of iron.

You know, that was cutting-edge technology.

The project manager initially dismissed concerns over a fictitious character and said the company was flooded with calls after a BBC segment highlighted the issue.

We went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains, but we avoided Dobby's grave, they said.

I mean, nerd alert.

Sound the alarm.

Not because underwater archeology is somehow off limits.

There are Neolithic settlements, Bronze Age harbors, entire Roman districts sitting under the Mediterranean right now.

The unease came from something else.

The gap between the claims and the chain of evidence needed to support them start with the most brutal critique, the one that sits at the top of almost every technical response.

Thousands of inhabitants, specialized neighborhoods, clear evidence of social stratification, often defensive works, public spaces, maybe monumentality, a degree of permanent density where most people are no longer directly producing their own food.

At nine thousand years ago, that kind of urbanism is extremely rare and highly localized.

We see large complex settlements in a few parts of the world, and even those don't look like later Bronze Age or classical cities.

They're big villages on steroids, transitional forms.

The early examples of bearer checks and advanced means of financial transactions like that.

So it's a very complex society, kind of Singapore of the Middle Bronze Age, as some have called it.

And this is what we learned from these very early texts.

And then, unfortunately, so following the mid-18th century, we have a hiatus of some 200, 300 years, during which we have very few sources.

And therefore, because they are now a serious player, they also make an appearance in the famous Amarna correspondence, which, of course, biblical scholars are very interested in because it includes the first mentioning of Jerusalem and things like that.

where the Assyrians, well, very self-confidently articulate their right to be part of this club of great powers and request gold from the Egyptians and defy attempts by the Babylonians to keep them down.

And if I, since I am already in this process of outlining the basics of the Syrian history, I don't want to talk for too long, but very briefly, what then happens around 1200 is that as everywhere in the region, this collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, the Syrians are eventually affected by that.

So, the famous Sea Peoples, whatever their role exactly was, there may be earthquakes, there's climate change, migrations, the new players that come into play, including, of course, the Israelites, but also the Philistines, the Arameans, the Arameans in particular, represent a big problem for the Assyrians.

Romance on the Rocks in Santorini is where that bottle gets opened and turns out to be mostly exposed utility lines, a rental car held together by optimism, and a ferryless day solved by a start-up helicopter.

It turns out the island that swallowed an entire Bronze Age civilization has a real talent for inconvenience.

And this week on The Rise the Limit, the caldera isn't the only thing with a gaping hole in the middle of it.

The 4am alarm opened onto a pitch black void, kicking off the next leg of our transcontinental migration.

Navigating a subterranean water disaster from a different continent is an exceptionally cursed endeavour, trying to forget about structural integrity entirely.

We focused our gaze on the deep blue waters of the caldera, This breathtaking horseshoe-shaped bay is actually the rim of a drowned volcano, and its sweeping landscape is the result of one of the most violent events in human history.

To truly comprehend the gravity of Santorini, one must rewind to the Bronze Age, when the island was known as Thera.

During this era it hosted Akrotiri, an exceptionally sophisticated maritime city deeply tethered to the Minoan civilisation on nearby Crete.

Alessia Brucato slash Lucy Farr slash Mode Roddy slash ABAP Archive.

They place its original construction at a time equivalent to the Bronze Age of the remaining Western Mediterranean.

This makes it the earliest confirmed defensive construction in North Africa outside Egypt.

What was this construction for? This structure raises important questions about the society that built it.

I don't know if you know the thing about the Kundalini experience, do you know about the whole kind of rising thing? the serpent yeah so i was actually saying to the other day i said to him when i imagine the kundalini experience in myself i see it as a dragon because for me it's a fire breathing dragon that's the dragon that's the that's the energy and he said yeah actually that makes a lot more sense so uh yeah 100 i think the dragon well the chinese

used to believe that one of dragon and shed its skin it shed its bones as well the bones turned to stone and felt worth and it grew new bones and the bones of dinosaurs and other extinct animals were thought to be dragon bones and they were used in chinese pharmacy they grind them up and use them as medicine so that's and also that they believed in different types of dragon they were the great celestial dragons and then there were more earthly ones could be more dangerous and there was one that they called the flood dragon possibly because it came near to human habitations after tons of blood but in the bronze age there's lots of documents from the bronze age of these things killing people that were out in rice paddies and attacking boats and stuff and a local official read out a proclamation at the time from the ruler saying that the dragons must um leave the area and stop harassing people.

And then they poisoned the water with quicklime.

Now, it was thought that this was all mythology until they found the remains of this species of crocodilian called the Indian Gario hyanusuchus.

And it was a really big crocodilian, similar size to the saltwater crocodile.

And unlike the Indian Gharial, which feeds almost exclusively on fish, this was more like the Sundar Gharial, which also fed on large animals as well.

And it's reckoned that this animal was the original flood dragon that they were writing about back in the Bronze Age that was attacking people in the rivers and rice fields of China in the Bronze Age.

So that's one type of dragon that was an actual animal.

you can't work if you're dead.

right uh so you don't have a job if you're just killed um is that true i don't know i think um and that's part of this segue to our discussion today how much of that is hype how much of that is true and does it matter does the difference matter between hype and truth and how we approach those type of news i think um Yes, I think with every revolution, like during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age and the discovery of fire, maybe people lost their jobs in hunting.

I don't know.

I think there's always readaptation.