Three of six · The Bronze Age
Three thousand years ago the eastern Mediterranean was a connected world of kingdoms,
ports and long trade routes. Within about fifty years most of it was destroyed or
abandoned.
The people who came afterwards lived among the ruins, could see them perfectly well, and
had lost the ability to read a single word of the writing left on them.
The Bronze Age takes its name from a metal, and the metal is the reason for everything else. Bronze is copper mixed with tin. Copper is common enough in the ancient world. Tin is rare, and the places that had it were nowhere near the places that needed it.
So a technology that every state depended on, for tools and for weapons alike, could only exist if goods moved reliably across enormous distances. That requirement built something: a network of kingdoms, ports and agreements running from Greece to Mesopotamia and out towards Afghanistan and the Baltic.
Two objects show what that looked like from the inside.
Each exhibit has two steps. Read the first, then press the button to move to the second.
A sponge diver spotted metal slabs on an underwater slope off the coast of Turkey in 1982. Eleven diving seasons later, the wreck had produced the most complete cargo anybody has from the entire Bronze Age. The list above is a fair summary of what was in it.
Around three hundred and fifty clay tablets turned up at the site of an abandoned Egyptian capital. They are the diplomatic correspondence of the Egyptian court with the other great powers of the day: Babylonia, Assyria, the Hittites, Cyprus, and a long list of smaller rulers in between.
Kings address one another as brother, arrange marriages, ask for gold, and complain at length when a gift arrives late or turns out to be of lower quality than promised.
Before the exhibits, a question, because the answer you give is what this section is actually about.
Imagine archaeologists working on a Bronze Age city. Several hundred hectares. Tens of thousands of people. Standardised weights, planned streets, brick made to consistent proportions. They have been digging for a hundred years.
Which of these would you expect them to have found by now?
Writing, authorship and astronomy all feel like fixed features of human life. The sort of thing that was always going to happen, and always going to take roughly the shape it took.
This period is early enough that you can catch several of them before they settled, while the decisions were still being made and could have gone otherwise. The last of the four is here for a different reason, and it will matter shortly.
The oldest substantial writing anybody has is not literature, law or scripture. It is stock control. The earliest tablets record quantities of grain, beer, textiles and livestock, and who was answerable for them.
It grew out of an older habit of sealing small clay tokens inside clay envelopes and marking the outside to show what was inside, until somebody noticed the tokens had become redundant.
Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad and high priestess of the moon god at Ur. A body of hymns comes down attached to her name, and by long convention she is the earliest author in history who can be called by one.
She writes about herself in trouble: driven from her office, appealing to the goddess Inanna, describing what the loss of position felt like from the inside.
A bronze disc about the size of a dinner plate, inlaid with gold: a sun or full moon, a crescent, a scatter of stars, and a tight cluster usually read as the Pleiades. It is the oldest concrete depiction of the night sky anybody has found.
Diviners of the Shang dynasty applied heat to ox shoulder blades and turtle shells until they cracked, read the cracks as answers, and inscribed the question alongside. Will the harvest hold. Will the king's toothache pass. Is a particular ancestor responsible for the trouble.
These are the oldest Chinese writings anybody has, and they are somebody's actual anxieties rather than an official account of anything.
Between roughly 1200 and 1150 BC, city after city in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East was destroyed or abandoned. Some were burned. Some were simply walked away from. The trade routes emptied, the correspondence stopped, and the palace administrations that had run the whole system ceased to exist.
Historians still argue about the cause, and the honest answer is that there probably is not one. Drought, earthquake, migration, warfare and the fragility of a system in which every state depended on every other are all somewhere in the mix.
What matters here is not why it happened but what it did to the record. Below is a list of things that were running in 1200 BC. Some of them stop. Some of them do not, and noticing which is which is the whole point of the exercise.
Press the button underneath the list to run the collapse. You can put it all back afterwards.
Everything in the first three sections could be opened and read. The ship's cargo has been catalogued, the letters have been translated, and the oracle bones can be studied by anybody who learns the script.
The material below is the same sort of thing. Objects, inscriptions, poems. The difference is what happened to the chain carrying them, and that chain is worth picturing properly, because it is not a metaphor.
Writing is not a property of a place. It is a line of people, in which every single person who can read learned it from a person who could. There has never been any other way of acquiring it. Break that line for one generation and the marks are all still there, on the same walls and tablets, and there is nobody alive who can turn them back into words.
The Shang line has never once been broken, which is why a reader today can be walked back to the oracle bones. The line in Greece was cut, and stayed cut for four centuries.
Minoan Crete wrote in a script called Linear A. A later script, Linear B, borrowed a great many of its signs in order to write early Greek, and Linear B was successfully cracked in the 1950s.
Because the signs are shared, we can make a decent guess at how a Linear A tablet sounded. You could read one aloud in a room and be broadly right about the noises.
Egyptian inscriptions describe a coalition arriving by land and sea, overwhelming everything in its path, and being fought off. The inscriptions name them: Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, Weshesh.
That is very nearly the whole file. Modern writing calls them the Sea Peoples, which is a scholarly convenience rather than anything they would have recognised.
Greece came out of the break without writing and stayed that way for roughly four hundred years. When literacy returned it had to be borrowed: the Greek alphabet is an adaptation of a Phoenician one.
Homer is composed at around that point, about a war set in the world that fell.
This is the part worth taking away. A collapse of this kind is not buildings falling over. Buildings can be rebuilt, and generally were.
What broke was transmission. The people who came afterwards were living among the ruins of something they could see perfectly well and could no longer read, in a landscape full of writing that had become decoration. Everything they said about it was reconstruction, and they had no way of knowing which parts they had got right.
Neither, for a good deal of it, do we.