Reddit reviews 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History)

Unfortunately, a lot of the readings on the topic are not widely available to the public, since they are in Archaeology and History journal articles. I read a lot of this stuff in university.

However, if you want to get into the Late Bronze Age in general, there are a few really good resources available to the general public.

1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed is a great survey of the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations in the Near East. It's great for understanding just how complex and interconnected the world of the 12th century B.C. and earlier was.

A History of the Ancient Near East by van de Mieroop, and

The Ancient Near East by James Pritcherd both present an overview of the Ancient Near East, though both go into what is considered 'Classical' Near East as well.

Also, anything by Trevor Bryce, is worth a read, especially his work on the Hittites.

There's a pretty popular book about the Late Bronze Age Collapse called 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

Seems like it might be a good read to get a grasp on what might be coming up for us.

Like Truman said, "The only thing new in this world is the history you don't know."

Eric Cline's "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" is a pretty solid introduction for the lay-reader. Bonus also that he has done an AMA with us before!

> High-skilled 2nd-gen immigrants are indistinguishable from native blue tribers.

Sure... if you know New Haven and you see that comment about "sketchy crowds" you might guess she's prejudiced against more than "white trash."

>Okay, but at this point, what's the difference between your position and plain racism? Like, you're not demonstrating any evidence for this position (like the HBD folks do), you're not admitting other races are superior to whites (East Asians), you're just saying other ethnicities are probably evil when they aren't dumb. Or at least, that's what it sounds like to me.

I'm OK with being called racist. At this point it's clear to me that blue-tribers consider that to be the worst non-violent crime, worse than lying or cheating. Not so for me. A little prejudice is adaptive. That's why it's so common.

Of course they don't have (incontrovertible) evidence for their position, nobody's gonna get funding for that kind of thing these days (GWAS results will bring this whole argument crashing down in less than a decade). BTW I don't really read any of them besides Cochran-Harpending as those two are the only people of this time who actually know what they're talking about and are willing to write about it. Stephen Hsu too though he only writes esoterically and rarely gets into technical details on any topic. Emil Kirkegaard is decent too though not nearly as sharp or credentialed as Cochran. The co-authors of this essay are competent as well (from the GxE research I've seen by some of them) and clearly have some balls to throw out even the more haphazard hypotheses in public.

There are plenty of studies showing correlations between Euro ancestry (in Latin America, African-Americans, other places) and various life outcomes. There are studies showing it's not mediated by skin color so it's not because of colorism (independent assortment is a thing).

Not saying anything about superiority in any sense. I'm basically certain this is gonna be the Chinese century at this point (and am reading up to prepare for it). US upper middle-class may be too far gone. Economists tend to point toward the individualism-collectivism axis (1, 2) as a reason for the "Great Divergence," and these days Americans are all a bunch of conformist cowards while the Chinese are hungry as shit. I don't think of whites as the "master race." In fact, I think we've gone through 200 years straight of moderate dysgenics; not enough to explain the Asian-Euro IQ gap (and the Japanese went through their demographic transition a while ago but still score higher) so maybe we have an edge on some other factors, but it's going to be tough to stay competitive.

The idea that we should have a prior in favor of no difference is ridiculous. Only possible if you're heavily invested in social justice over truth normatively. It's been long enough with low gene flow and the differences in social structure all over the world (gene-culture coevolution) are manifest if you know any history.

For phenotypic evidence, see this behavioral econ study. The methodology is a little spare and the results not totally consistent but the fact that all the East Asian countries top one measure of dishonesty, including Japan, suggests to me it's not just a matter of comparative development. Or read this on the guilt-shame distinction. I don't know if that distinction carves reality at its joints and I don't know how you could end up selecting for honesty or "guilt," but it might be a thing. Or look at this on tax cheating. Self-reported ancestry is wonky (the type of person to identity with their English side and the type to identify with their Irish side are probably gonna be different), but maybe the Know Nothings had a point or two?

Also if you click through on that link next to "Big 5" in one of my earlier comments you'll find Nisbett notes that 2nd-generation immigrants converge some with NW Europeans on his novel personality measures but still differ noticeably. He still thinks the difference is environmental (I guess mediated by family), although I think he basically admitted the Ashkenazi-Euro gap was genetic at some point even though everything else is environmental which is kinda funny.

Or I can look at my own experience. The professors at my top 10 uni think the honor code is a joke. Don't think that was true back in the 50s. The math team at my high school got rocked by a massive cheating scandal too (why the hell would you cheat in an extracurricular of all things?). I know somebody who plagiarized an entire final project from alumni for a class in their major and is now going to a top 4 grad school in their discipline. I don't think they even know entirely why they're doing a PhD. Just "paid education."

In general my suspicion is that, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma that is life, NW Europeans tend toward playing C, while other groups tend to play D to varying degrees (more integrated immigrants are better but the gap will get smaller not disappear). You can fix that by just letting go of some freedoms (like honor codes), but it's a cost regardless.

As someone who tries to be an upstanding citizen and wants to raise my kids that way I would prefer for things to not shift toward a defect-heavy equilibrium. It might be hard to herd large masses of people with different preferences into one polity and still make things work.

I would think it would be smarter in the long run to stop pushing for the policies that are pissing people off than to try to suppress the response with moral haranguing. Tyler Cowen is a dilettante but it still might be worth it for you to read "The Complacent Class." The final passage is interesting and mostly references this book on the late Bronze Age collapse.

Pangloss wasn't right. All is not well with the world and Trump is not the worst of it. He is an epiphenomenon not a cause. The past half-century may have built the US and Europe into powder-kegs and the next 50 years are going to be far more interesting than the last. I don't have enough data yet but I have a bad feeling and I see rot.

Somewhat related. https://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed-Turning/dp/0691168385

Great post OP..I plan on reading that book next. It will be my 35th collapse book..And its only six dollars on kindle.

https://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed-Turning/dp/0691168385

In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh's army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations.

This book.

https://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed-Turning/dp/0691168385

This is probably the best, as in most accessible and most up-to-date book on the subject out right now. One of the exciting things about this collapse period is that archeology is still finding new evidence. For example: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-luwian-hieroglyphic-inscription-bronze-age.html This is new evidence about the composition of the Sea Peoples from late 2017! And not uncontroversial, since the idea that the Sea Peoples were a west Anatolian confederation is far from universally accepted. After all, these inscriptions speak of this confederation attacking to the east, but the destruction also came for the Mycenaeans to the west. In twenty years we may have an entirely different understanding of what happened.

Though what we know for certain is very striking, and that is that nearly every city on the Mediterranean from Greece to Sinai was destroyed within a few decades, wiping out several societies and crippling those that survived. I just can't imagine a more compelling historical mystery.

It’s heavy on the ancient; before the Greeks & Romans, though at the peak of Egypt. But, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is a really cool book about the really ancient world, & how the different civilizations interconnected & dealt with each other & how the whole thing came crashing down during the Bronze Age collapse.

The author has also done a video giving the short hand account of things if you want a kind of preview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4

Eric Carle wrote 1177 BC; The Year Civilization Collapsed. He covers a lot of history leading into and resulting from the collapse. In those discussions, he relates a very interesting theory on the sacking of Priam's Troy and why.

This is a great idea. Please definitely post your list when you've got it compiled.

In addition to some of the other books that have been recommended, I suggest the slightly more unconventional 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed for a rather interesting look at a period in ancient history that I think is generally poorly covered. ("There were some civilizations like Egypt and Sumer, and they rose and fell, and look, it's Aristotle!") It really helps contextualize a lot of the ancient Mideast - who coexisted and what their relationships were, not just who was the Big Dog one after another.

It will also help break up the monotony of all the other books reading the same, because it's not organized like a traditional history book: instead it's organized almost like a play, with a cast of characters, a "prologue" and "epilogue," and several "Acts" describing key sequences of events! Despite that, the author is a pretty well regarded archaeologist at GWU, and it was published by Princeton University Press.

After the collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the Med basin, there was an interregnum that lasted until about 900BC. Athens and other Greek communities were part of an area-wide renaissance and though Athens proper was small it eventually had an outsized impact as it became an economic powerhouse that ruled over a wide area. As the economies of the area recovered, Athens succeeded more than most and money is what pays for a wide range of elevated arts and sciences such as those you listed.

Eventually, War and Pestilence came for mighty Athens but by then the histories had been written.

Hey, I'd really strongly recommend the Yale OT MOOC. I'm a lifelong atheist and history nut doing it just for fun, and it is awesome. The Prof is a respected scholar, it's not some anti-theist spouting BS.


She basically analyzes the OT as a piece of historic literature a la Shakespeare. You learn about the cultures in that region, where/how a lot of the bible stories got incorporated in the Jewish tradition, etc.


Bonus, if your parents are Christians this would probably make them happy while supporting your exploration. I ordered the main book she recommends and just watch the videos/wiki and feel like I'm getting LOTS out of it.


But yeah, the period you're asking about is the neolithic. I also strongly recommend 1177 BC to get a sense of how archaeology works, how we reconstruct the record, etc. It's absolutely fascinating!

Heres an excellent book specifically about that.

So, from what I have read recently that Sea Peoples exploited a lot of situations. But, more recent evidence has shown this is really only substantiated in Palestine and a couple of other places. A lot of the other cities that fell had no evidence of Sea Peoples before or after in those regions.

For more information:
https://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed-Turning/dp/0691168385/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1481215852&sr=8-3&keywords=bronze+age

This is a really fascinating era. There's a book I've been meaning to read about this time period: 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed

I can relate to that to be honest, I like the incidental details of history like what normal people ate, how they lived, etc more than what king ruled when and who he conquered, although admittedly that might be because the latter just gets way more coverage.

The most interesting parts of that book in my opinion are where they quote a farmer telling his son how to farm, or the hilarious dialogue of pessimism.

Also for the heck of it I might as well link that dry book I mentioned. I didn't like it because it spends most of its time trying to conclusively decide why something happened and then comes to no conclusion, but it did win a lot of rewards and it has decent amounts of info on the bronze age collapse so maybe you'll like it more than I did.

Oh my god me too man. I recommend reading through the https://www.ancient.eu/ site if you haven't already. There is also this book about the Late Bronze Age collapse I enjoyed some time ago, maybe you would like it. It's great that we share this passion!