Bronze Age

Newspapers, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, the scars of the First World War, the modern world.

And on the other side, the Bronze Age, separated by a few inches of ancient plaster.

The chamber Carter was looking into would become known as the antechamber.

And it wasn't neat.

See rules at ialottery.com.

Woo-hoo! I'm John Batchelor, continuing with Professor Eric Klein, Love, War, and Diplomacy, the Discovery of the Amarna Letters in the Bronze Age World They Revealed, just published.

This is a treasure trove from the late 19th century, translated all during the 20th, and now in the 21st.

Archaeology continues, but at the same time, this is a region of the world, the Fertile Crescent, that's much in conflict.

Therefore, we're identifying that the original conflict can date from the Bronze Age.

You can actually look at this and say they've always been at war.

Well, in this case, it's the Canaanite kings fighting.

We have it in the Hittite archives.

By the time of King Tut, it's all over.

We've found the treasure of what's in it, love, war, and diplomacy, the discovery of the Amarna letters, and the Bronze Age world they revealed.

Eric H. Klein is the author.

When we come back, the translations.

In fact, in The Race to Translate, Budge, the disliked scholar, was far more accurate than Sace, the respected scholar, at least in terms of the two British scholars that were working on these.

The early translations are out, and we're going to turn to the machine itself, the Germans.

The book is Love, War, and Diplomacy, the Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed.

Eric Klein is the author.

Attitudes that were almost universally held across the ancient Mediterranean, and which would have been ancient even to Jesus himself.

Bronze Age notions about ghosts, spirits, and demons survived for thousands of years in the Mediterranean and beyond.

And many of these convictions still haunt our culture today.

According to a 2025 Gallup poll, a full 39% of Americans believe that ghosts are real, and less than half would confidently say that the spirits of the dead do not interact with the living.

With that out of the way, let us now pass through the veil from our plane into that of the spirits, where ghosts and demons dwell.

The

earliest references to spirits of the dead come from the late Bronze Age Mesopotamian tablets, which typically offer instructions about how to rid ghosts from one's home.

In 2018, scholars determined one particular tablet showed a male figure with bound wrists led by a woman by a rope or chain.

That would be the dream, obviously.

But I have found Bronze Age objects.

I've got something actually with me, which is this little bead.

which is, I don't know if you can see it.

Yeah.

Which I really love.

I love finding Bronze Age things.

They just feel extra super special to me.

The Egyptians recorded their wars, their kings, their gods, their enemies, the tribute brought by foreign peoples.

the invasions of mysterious sea peoples who swept across the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age.

Nowhere in all of it is there a reference to a great island in the Western Ocean, or to an empire that invaded from beyond the strait, or to an ancient Athens that stood alone and won.

Sayers itself has not been kind to archaeologists.

The idea that it was the mother civilization, the source, the original from which everything else descended.

None of these ideas are in the Timaeus or the Critias.

Plato described a wealthy Bronze Age maritime power.

Its people fought with chariots and javelins and slings, sailed in triremes, worked bronze and tin, built temples and canals and harbours.

And I think we have to think about this story more universally that connects Carthage, but it connects Rome, it connects with Syracuse, it connects with other cities in the Western Mediterranean.

where the facts around their origins and the epic stories that were told about the age from before the Trojan Wars, the Bronze Age, all these things get sort of woven together into myth and into historical legends and into foundation myths.

So we have to kind of construct that.

But realistically, going back to what we were talking about with the DNA and radiocarbon evidence and things like that, Carthage's radiocarbon dates and the names on the Tyrian king lists actually correspond to the 9th century BC being a really important part for Tyre, Tyre's expansion, and they're sending out colonial foundations or founding outposts anyway all across the Mediterranean.

Archaeologists recovered a remarkably well-preserved bronze sword from Lake Masano, north of Rome.

The blade dates to the Late Bronze Age, and it's one of several comparable weapons recovered from that body of water over decades.

Investigators have also found traces of settlement and other metal objects nearby.

It's tempting to imagine the sword lost in a battle or dropped from a boat.