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| Economic collapse: The real message of the fall of Troy |
| 2018-02-08 |
| [BBC] The fall and sack of the city of Troy at the hands of an avenging Greek army is one that has been told for some 3,000 years, but contained within it are clues to a much wider global collapse - with lessons for our own 21st Century. In 1300BC, at the height of the Bronze Age, the great powers of Egypt, the Hittites in central Turkey, the Greeks, Babylonians and Middle Eastern city states would have seemed secure to any merchant sailing around the Mediterranean. None more so than the walled city of Troy, on Turkey's north west coast at the mouth of the Dardanelles. Ships were often forced to wait in its harbours for suitable winds to sail into the Sea of Marmara and Black Sea, so it was ideally placed to grow rich by taxing this trade. Yet just over 100 years later, by about 1170BC, almost all these civilisations had collapsed. In the dark age that followed even the art of writing was lost. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #4 Consider the Dark Ages in Western Europe as a further example. A central authority needs a steady income stream to enforce its will on its subjects. No money, no influence, then no central authority. One advantage the Eastern Roman Empire had in its stranglehold on the East-West (Silk Road) and the Black Sea-Mediterranean (Grain and Troy's old revenue stream) was enough 'cash flow' to avoid devolving into a squabbling collection of petty states. With modern civilization it is the flow of cheap energy that keeps us out of barbarism. |
| Posted by: magpie 2018-02-08 19:51 |
| #3 The Greeks too... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece "Mycenaean Greece perished with the collapse of Bronze Age culture in the eastern Mediterranean, to be followed by the so-called Greek Dark Ages, a recordless transitional period leading to Archaic Greece where significant shifts occurred from palace-centralized to de-centralized forms of socio-economic organization" |
| Posted by: james 2018-02-08 18:16 |
| #2 There was also an abrupt 'Global Cooling' in the region from the Minoan Warm Period (look at Fig.1). The Minoans who depended on long distance trade for prosperity went into decline first (Thera was the garnish on their apocalypse sandwich). Cool and dry hurts agriculture... |
| Posted by: magpie 2018-02-08 12:10 |
| #1 I read the article and couldn't help read between the line what the author doesn't state. All of the 'failed' economies (hitties, Babylonians, even Egypt eventually) only the Greeks survived. The only culture that was attempting alternatives to dictatorship in most of the city-states. Centrally planned economies have always led to failure and even trade is not enough to sustain them. Of course the BBC wouldn't/couldn't say that. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2018-02-08 09:46 |