Wow, vulcano erupting, a famine, an earthquake, a pandemic, civil wars and rioting sea people, that’s quite a task. Really interesting read, thanks for writing it! And the graph ended up really nicely.
But this climatic approach does not explain everything. The civilizations in this part of earth already survived similar events in the past. For example the destruction of the Minoan civilization on Crete (which is in the middle of the eastern Mediterranean) was caused by another major volcanic eruption (Marinatos, 1939). However, all other civilizations survived mostly unharmed. This indicates that also the societal structure comes into play.
This argument didn’t seem super watertight to me. There seems to be a lot of randomness involved, and causal factors at play that are unrelated to societal structure, no? For example maybe the other eruption was a little bit weaker, or the year before yielded enough food to store? Or maybe the wind was stronger in that year or something? Would be interesting to hear why the mono- and/or some of the duo-causal historians disagree with societal structure mattering.
However, we also have more resources and more knowledge than the people in the Bronze Age.
I wondered how much this is an understatement. I have no idea of how people thought back then, only the vague idea that the people that spend the most time trying to make sense of things like this were religious leaders and highly confused about bascially everything?
Lastly, your warnings of tipping points and the problems around the breakdown of trade reminded me of these arguments from Tyler Cowen, warning that the current trade war between China and the US and the strains from the current pandemic could lead to a sudden breakdown of international trade, too.
Thank you. Yeah when I wrote this down I was a bit shocked myself on how many bad things can happen at the same time.
You’re are right that the argument about the comparison with the other eruption is a bit flaky. The problem is that this is so long ago and most written sources were destroyed. So, we have to rely on climatic reconstructions and those are hard. Therefore, I found accounts that both eruptions were of similar strength, but also some which argued that one of them was stronger than the other. However, the earlier eruption happened smack in the middle of the Bronze Age empires, while the one during the collapse happened in Iceland. So, I would also be very interested in the opinion of someone about this who spend a career on it.
To your second argument: I agree that we have vastly more ressources and knowledge now. The problem is that it seems to me that our power to destroy ourselves increased as well and the society seems much more unlikely to recover when a really bad disaster would strike. So, my feeling is that stabilizing and destabilizing factors increased in a similar magnitude.
Thank you for the article from Cowen. I see this danger as well. Such topics always remind of this article. It is mainly a rant about programmers, but it also touches on the problem that much of our infrastructure will be very difficult to restart once its stopped, because so much of it are just improvised stopgap solutions.
Wow, vulcano erupting, a famine, an earthquake, a pandemic, civil wars and rioting sea people, that’s quite a task. Really interesting read, thanks for writing it! And the graph ended up really nicely.
This argument didn’t seem super watertight to me. There seems to be a lot of randomness involved, and causal factors at play that are unrelated to societal structure, no? For example maybe the other eruption was a little bit weaker, or the year before yielded enough food to store? Or maybe the wind was stronger in that year or something? Would be interesting to hear why the mono- and/or some of the duo-causal historians disagree with societal structure mattering.
I wondered how much this is an understatement. I have no idea of how people thought back then, only the vague idea that the people that spend the most time trying to make sense of things like this were religious leaders and highly confused about bascially everything?
Lastly, your warnings of tipping points and the problems around the breakdown of trade reminded me of these arguments from Tyler Cowen, warning that the current trade war between China and the US and the strains from the current pandemic could lead to a sudden breakdown of international trade, too.
Thank you. Yeah when I wrote this down I was a bit shocked myself on how many bad things can happen at the same time.
You’re are right that the argument about the comparison with the other eruption is a bit flaky. The problem is that this is so long ago and most written sources were destroyed. So, we have to rely on climatic reconstructions and those are hard. Therefore, I found accounts that both eruptions were of similar strength, but also some which argued that one of them was stronger than the other. However, the earlier eruption happened smack in the middle of the Bronze Age empires, while the one during the collapse happened in Iceland. So, I would also be very interested in the opinion of someone about this who spend a career on it.
To your second argument: I agree that we have vastly more ressources and knowledge now. The problem is that it seems to me that our power to destroy ourselves increased as well and the society seems much more unlikely to recover when a really bad disaster would strike. So, my feeling is that stabilizing and destabilizing factors increased in a similar magnitude.
Thank you for the article from Cowen. I see this danger as well. Such topics always remind of this article. It is mainly a rant about programmers, but it also touches on the problem that much of our infrastructure will be very difficult to restart once its stopped, because so much of it are just improvised stopgap solutions.