[retrac]

> Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures

There were people in England in Anglo-Saxon times. who had been as far away as Alexandria, or Constantinople.

Icelandic sagas in the late 1000s, wrote about William the Conqueror in England, and noted that many of the surviving Anglo-Saxon nobles fled to Byzantium. So, even in Iceland they knew about Constantinople, and probably ostriches too, and that these were real things and places, which you might travel and see, even if they were basically at the other end of the known world. At the other end of the world, Byzantine records mention Anglo-Saxon warriors being recruited at that time.

People got around even back then.

[kemotep]

The Bronze Age Collapse may have been precipitated in part by disruption to trade from North Europe and the British Isles to the Levant, Greece, and Egypt. They had the tin necessary to make bronze.