[evanjrowley]

Seems to be a popular topic.

Historian Eric H. Cline has multiple books citing this time period, specifically 1117 BCE as the inflection point for the bronze age "collapse", defined by a deterioration of international shipping routes that weakened the nation-states of the era. I've learned about it recently because YouTube began recommending videos about it.

For example: https://youtu.be/choxcHXhZhE?is=t5lDwQQpqPsE2k5M

One historical event that Cline focuses on is a severe centuries-long drought. It's something the ACOUP article seems to omit. Cline does not focus as much on destruction of bronze-age sites although there is one port city in particular which is linked to the international trade of the time. Exactly who destroyed it appears to be a mystery but it could be linked to the migration theory that ACOUP dismisses. The migration may have actually come as a result of the previously mentioned drought.

[The_Blade]

Eric Cline is great - when i had a tooth removed in a somewhat nasty procedure i spent a Caturday hepped up on goofballs watching his videos on LBA while playing Hatshepsut on Diety in Civ VII 1.4 (i got to play test 1.3.2 via Firaxis via discord, ooh la la i call a car hole a garage)

in my personal "immersive learning" period starting 2021, i discovered acoup.blog when Old World came out and extended into reading while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action

EDIT: in the blind i'm guessing the port city of which you speak is Ugarit, which i had never heard of. IIRC everything was weakened by drought and famine, and Ugarit's armies were pulled over to the Hittites who abandoned Ugarit to The Sea Peoples. and the Sea Peoples always came off like a "cosmological constant" fudge factor where constant advances in shipwreck archaeology should provide more clarity in its merry time

history is dope. it never repeats itself but it always rhymes :)

[nchmy]

its been a while since ive read a comment somewhere that I am so completely bewildered by. I understand about half the words, and none of the references, that you wrote.

Hope your teeth are doing better now!

[tsimionescu]

Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat

LBA -> probably supposed to be LBAC, Late Bronze Age collapse

Civ -> Civilization, a series of historically inspired strategy games, where you play as the historical leader of a civilization through the ages of human development

Hatshepsut -> an Egyptian Pharaoh who is one of the leaders you can play as in Civ VII

Deity -> the name of the highest difficulty level in Civ VII

Firaxis -> the company that develops the Civilization series

Discord -> a chat app/service often used in gaming communities

ooh la la i call a car hole a garage -> a reference to a joke in The Simpsons, where a character complains someone else thinks they're fancy because they use the word "garage", and when challenged on an alternative, he calls it "car hole"

Old World -> a game similar to the Civilization series

CK III -> Crusader Kings III, another game similar to Civilization

Plague -> probably Plague Inc, a game where you play as a pathogen trying to infect and kill the entirety of humanity

Contagion -> a movie about the start of a pandemic

Rest of the references I can't help with. Also no idea why they would mention the playtest of Civ VII version 1.3.2.

[mrDmrTmrJ]

I think the funniest part is the username. The_Blade, which I can only assume is a reference to this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5cll43/while_you_wer...

[The_Blade]

That is actually a reference to the underrated Mark Belanger, who has the second highest dWAR ever behind Ozzie Smith, and a few percentage points ahead of teammate Brooks Robinson: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/belanma01.shtml

that he has a .228 lifetime batting average makes him more endearing, although shortstops couldn't really hit then

also i thought there was an LBA before an LBAC, but the more important thing is literacy regarding the entire concept

[quickthrowman]

“Caturday hepped up on goofballs [after dental work] -> I was high on opiates on Saturday

Caturday -> Saturday

Hepped -> Novel synonym for “high” likely influenced by the jazz slang word ‘hep’ which means ‘hip’ or ‘cool’

Goofballs -> 5/500 hydrocodone/APAP, aka Vicodin. The gold standard tooth pain prescription drug, an opioid. In this context.

[order-matters]

hepped could also just be "hopped" as in "hopped up on X" which is a relatively common phrase for being on some drugs or medication, but using kawaii speak which often softens vowel sounds, turning the open "ah" sound of the 'o' in hopped into a pronunciation of 'eh'. They couldve taken it further and said "hipped up" for no change in meaning. this may not have all been consciously decided, as many chronically online social circles use forms of this speech routinely and linguistics is a funny thing like that where the brain can adopt and make up things to fit it. May also be more of a 'fedora' speech pattern that younger online generation uses ironically in a nerdy voice (general ex. "m'lady"), hence the addition of trivial details like the version number and having early access to a new build of the game

always hard to tell exactly whats influencing the speech of the chronically online folk, but the mention of discord and well everything else about the post seem to strongly indicate it. all this to say, i doubt they were looking to be understood as much as they were just talking to talk and sending some in-group signaling

[mr_toad]

> hepped could also just be "hopped" as in "hopped up on X"

Another Simpsons reference.

[marssaxman]

> Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat

There's a well-known underground nightclub in Seattle which has a monthly event called "Caturday" - I had no idea there was another meaning for the portmanteau! Makes sense, though.

[fc417fc802]

I don't think that's "another meaning" but rather assume their name is a reference. Caturday is a widespread and long standing online meme event (20+ years) to post pictures of cats on saturdays. I have no idea what community it originated in or even when.

[raffraffraff]

And "hepped up on goofballs" is a Police Chief Wiggum quote, about Ned Flanders.

[ludicrousdispla]

merry time -> maritime

[simtel20]

Do you find yourself more lost in the history parts or the gaming parts?

[The_Blade]

the point is sort of both (i've been nerdy and signalling enough in these general and personal trying times, so why stop there)

- Chris Crawford created Balance of Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)) and had some writings saying games are more important to / have a greater capacity to aid learning than the modern education system at large, citing the little games mother cats play with kittens to teach them how to survive (or something to that effect). that stuck with me but either way, without BoP and WarGames you don't have, say, Twilight Struggle

- Another thing later on that stuck with me are media theorist Marshall McLuhan's concept of hot versus cool media (perhaps more famous for the medium is the message / massage). I am not going to consult AI for this, but I contextualized it as how much work the "recipient" has to do. I.e. baseball or War of the Worlds on the radio is "cooler" than red-hot NFL football or Independence Day on the screen

So then Contagion is hot media, passages from David Quammen's Spillover are cool(er) media, and Plague Inc.'s porridge is just right. or play Augustus while I, Claudius is one while getting ripshit on Ovid and wine

if i had more time i would make it shorter

[yubblegum]

Reminds of Burgess' Nadsat (which deserves its own hn post):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat

[pseudohadamard]

> its been a while since ive read a comment somewhere that I am so completely bewildered by.

I think you need to be on goofballs yourself to understand it.

[The_Blade]

my mother is a fish

[UltraSane]

Is this how you normally write because it is very hard to understand.

[cs702]

The OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting:

> there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.

[pfdietz]

One possibility I've wondered about is the emergence of a new crop pathogen. This might be addressed by looking at DNA of modern crop pathogens, and possibly looking if there was a change in the crops being grown before/after the LBAC.

[Brendinooo]

It injects some really interesting color into the Tanakh/Old Testament - I'm not sure anyone has definitively lined up the Bronze Age Collapse with Biblical events, but it sure seems to have happened somewhere between the Exodus and King David.

One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt, and the period in Joshua and Judges describes a power vacuum: no centralized king over the area, lots of back-and-forth struggles for control; as the Philistines, sometimes referred to by historians as an actual group of the Sea Peoples, often impose their will with instruments of iron.

[simiones]

The Exodus is an entirely fictional account though, it's not based on any real historical events. Even King David seems to be mostly mythical, though there is some vague evidence of a "House of David" being something some real kings claimed descent from.

Edit: I should say "almost entirely fictional". The main scholarly agreement is that it may record some stories of some small numbers (hundreds, at most some thousands - nowhere near the 600k in the Bible) real semitic slaves' escape from Egypt and migration to the area of Canaan, mixing with the local Canaanite population that were the precursors of the Jewish populations of later Israel and Judah.

[Brendinooo]

I tried to word my original comment in a way that allows a broad range of opinions to make a narrow point; I don't think anything you've said here refutes anything I said. I'm not really here to kick off a serious apologetics fight, though if you want me to engage on your thoughts I could.

(And of the things I mentioned, the Exodus is less likely to line up with the Bronze Age Collapse's chronology anyways. But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.)

[simiones]

You wrote:

> One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt

I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt.

I didn't mention it, but the events in the Book of Joshua are also very much non-historical - there are no signs whatsoever of a conquest of parts of Canaan by any other group at a time that would be consistent with the Biblical narrative. The historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence is most consistent with the ancient Israelites simply being a specific group of Canaanites that established a kingdom in the area in which they had lived for millennia.

> But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.

The Book of Judges is also regarded as mostly non-historical by modern day scholars.

[Brendinooo]

> modern day scholars

Everyone, including you, me, and the most expert of scholars, brings their own biases, assumptions, evidentiary standards that will allow us to accept something as truth.

I actually got more dialed into this while listening to Bart Ehrman on a NYT podcast recently. I was interested in him: an atheist who ascribes historicity to certain bits of the Bible, Jesus in particular. But ultimately I wasn't really impressed: If a detail is wrong, that's proof that everything is suspect; if a detail is right, sometimes that means "if I wanted to invent a credible story, of course I'd say that" and sometimes that means "I think it's obviously credible", and there didn't seem to be any meaningful heuristic to distinguish.

And, when he talked about his journey away from faith, all of that had nothing to do with it - it was him getting hung up on the problem of evil. In other words, the underlying value changed, then his interpretation of historical claims changed as a result.

I can live with the idea that one might look at the body of evidence and draw a different conclusion than I do; I just don't like the conceit that one conclusion is somehow objectively correct, especially because of some broad appeal to authority. I can live with "Troy may have existed but we haven't found any archaeological evidence", but I greatly dislike "we haven't found any archaeological evidence, therefore Troy didn't exist", which is what a lot of the replies under my first comment seem to be speaking. (There's be a lot of "we would expect to find..." as well: even if that's true, sometimes we just haven't found it yet! And surely we'll never find everything!)

That's not to say that scholars can't know more or contribute more work: in a case like Jericho, scholarly work seems to have settled the question of whether or not a city named Jericho exists, having walls that were destroyed suddenly. Now, we dispute when exactly that might have happened and how that compares to Biblical chronology, but just because one person gives a date that aligns with my priors or your priors doesn't mean the matter is settled.

I've sat on this tab for too long haha, just gonna send it and step out for a bit.

[tsimionescu]

Absolutely, of course we all have our biases and evidentiary standards.

But there is much we know about who and when wrote the various books of the Bible, and we have lots of archaeological evidence about what was happening in the area of north Egypt and Canaan for that entire duration. And for example we know with high confidence that the Book of Exodus, the Book of Joshua, and the Book of Judges were written hundreds of years after the events that they purport to describe - so they aren't very trustworthy sources to begin with, for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship.

Note also that atheists, whether scholars or not, have no particular bias against the historicity of the non-miraculous elements of the Bible. The general narrative of the story of the Book of Exodus could be explained in naturalistic terms, so it isn't dismissed outright by atheists the way, say, the Book of Genesis is. Moses could well have been some historical semitic leader that led a group of semitic slaves from captivity in Egypt up into freedom in Canaan, perhaps in the midst of a series of calamities hitting Egypt that allowed for their escape in the first place. That's why many serious scholars have looked for signs of these events, in many forms of historical sources - they simply didn't find any.

Contrast this to the story from the Book of Kings. Again, atheists will generally dismiss the story of the fire from the sky and the other miracles out of hand - but when they went and looked for evidence of a King Ahab and a religious leader Elijah, they did actually find it, and so they have no problem in attesting that these were real people who really lived.

In relation to the Book of Joshua - while it's true that Jericho exists as a city, and seems to have indeed existed at the right times to match the accounts, other parts of the narrative do not fit. In particular, the city of Ai was abandoned much earlier than any possible time for the narrative of the conquest (it was abandoned in 2400 BCE) and it wasn't re-settled until much later when a village was founded there during the Iron Age. So Jericho - maybe; Ai - no. Beyond this, there is simply no evidence to suggest that early Jewish settlements were conquered from "the Philistines" - the evidence suggests much more so that they were simply peacefully founded by Jewish people (that is, people who spoke Hebrew, followed Jewish dietary practices, and worshiped Yahweh).

[ButlerianJihad]

I personally think that the conquest of Jericho depicts, allegorically, a conquest of the Moon itself. That there is more than one OT story that describes journeys to outer space (the highest heavens, of course). That the Promised Land really was an unfathomable location in outer space that was only reached by the most faithful and holiest of warriors.

But I like to start with Jericho because there's a lot of evidence that the actual city-state of Jericho was dedicated to a Moon god, and the Moon god was worshipped there. But if you think about how Jericho and its conquest is described...

[bazoom42]

As far as I know we have no Persian sources for the batte of Thermopylæ. Historians also agree that Xerxes couldnt possibly have had a million man strong army.

Does this mean the war is entirely fictional? Ancient sources tend to be strongly mythologized, but “entirely fictional” is a very strong claim.

[vintermann]

One thing the author mentions in passing is the settlement which is "almost certainly the historical Troy". The "serious" opinion used to be that the city was fictional. The same with Ur. I think the Babylonian captivity used to be considered as fictional too. Of course ancient written sources embellish things, but they don't generally make things up out of whole cloth. Especially not things which are kind of embarrassing (e.g. "we used to be enslaved by those guys over there").

[Tuna-Fish]

The problem is, we don't just have an absence of evidence, we have evidence of absence. The area has been widely excavated, and there is a clear continuity of settlement with the same pottery, culture, and religion. There is simply no trace of any large-scale population movement. As far as we can tell, the same people continued living in the area in the same way, worshipping the same gods (still plural for way longer) with the only large change being the yoke of the nearby great powers going away with the collapse.

This of course doesn't mean that there cannot be a trace of truth in the story! It just has to have been morphed substantially over time. For example, it was common in the time to kidnap and move foreign nobility and artisans, while no-one much cared about the identity of the average farmer or goatsherd. It could well be that "the people of Israel" who were kidnapped meant the people who actually mattered, ie, a fairly small upper class group, who could move from the Nile valley to the levant without leaving much trace in either society.

I'm still personally partial to the observation that the story seems to originate during the Babylonian captivity, and the situation of the story greatly mirrors the conditions they were living under, but while complaining about their Babylonian overlords was probably not allowed, writing stories about the plucky underdogs outwitting the horrible Egyptian overlords with divine assistance was fine, even if it contained themes of returning home and of liberation from foreign rule. (Note that Egypt was the main rival of Babylon in this period, and the Kingdom of Judah was on-again off-again vassal of the Egyptians. The captivity was party imposed to prevent this relationship from continuing.)

[pqtyw]

Interestingly we have surviving Hittite letters complaining about the Achaeans causing some trouble in the vicinity of Troy along with a guy whose name sounds very similar to Priam (although he actually seems to have been on the Greek side). And we somewhat confidently know that Troy had a king named Alexander (Alakasandu) which happens to be the Greek name of Paris (of course there were probably many Trojan kings carrying that name over the years).

Of course that doesn't mean much, the Iliad is a mishmash of different historical events from different periods (based on the descriptions of weapons, armour, political systems, cities etc.). There is probably a massive accuracy gap between oral history like the Iliad and written one (including the Hebrew bible).

[pfdietz]

I'll add that it would make a lot of sense for these kinds of stories to be fictional, because they come through a religious infrastructure whose legitimacy is boosted by the stories. They are just the kind of propaganda one would create to cement a power structure.

[zoobaloo]

Respectfully, this is a stronger claim than I think anyone can make.

A more reasonable claim would be: "we cannot verify much of what's in Exodus using sources external to the Torah/Pentateuch." It's fair to also say something like "if X happened, it's surprising that we would not see physical evidence of it."

If you're interested in the topic of the Old Testament in general, I highly recommend [Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540960214_anci...).

It starts with a survey of the academic field, an overview of relevant primary documents from surrounding cultures, and in-depth discussions of historical records and archaeological finds. There's meta-discussion about the role of comparative literature that I also found useful. I benefited from the author's perspective that there's a lot to learn from the Old Testament regardless of whether or not existing physical evidence satisfies our personal standard for determining whether something happened verbatim.

I like that it does so in a way that does not try to push an agenda. I interpret the author as trying to provide an entrypoint for anyone interested in the related academic fields, regardless of their background.

I've recommended the book to both religious and non-religious friends who enjoyed it. Take this recommendation as one made in good faith, and an opportunity to look at something from a new perspective. You're free to disregard it as you see fit.

[cogman10]

> Respectfully, this is a stronger claim than I think anyone can make.

The only reason to treat this with kid gloves is because a large portion of the population believes in it.

Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events."

The stronger claim is a valid one to make because the primary source doesn't have any corroboration.

[zoobaloo]

I'd encourage you to re-read my comment and consider that you may have jumped to conclusions about what I'm trying to say.

> Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events."

I wouldn't go so far as to say this. We have artifacts and historical texts talking about them, so we at least know that Romulus and Remus are figures that ancient humans talked about.

If we had a time machine, could we go back in time and meet them? If there were two guys named that who generally did the things the Romans thought, were they actually raised by wolves? No idea with the former. The latter sounds unusual.

My point is that there are more interesting questions to ask than these. The book I recommended does a good job of this. It's a good read if you're interested in the cultural backdrop of the ancient near east.

[tshaddox]

> We have artifacts and historical texts talking about them, so we at least know that Romulus and Remus are figures that ancient humans talked about.

Well, yeah, but you seem to be confusing the authenticity of the writings as ancient artifacts with the historical accuracy of the contents of the writings. I don’t think anyone disputes that the Torah contains stories that had been widely spread and believed among the writers, compilers, and intended audience at the time.

[Amezarak]

Denying the possible, even likely, historicity of Romulus and Remus is silly, yes.

[Telemakhos]

Recognizing that the exposure myth of Romulus and Remus is an analogue of the exposure myth of Moses, of Cyrus, and of a host of other famous figures gets one thinking that early Roman history and early Jewish history, among others, map common Eurasian stories onto particular agendas.

[cogman10]

Likely? That's wild.

What's the corroborating evidence from ~750BC documenting their existence? Heck, where's that evidence from 650BC?

[bazoom42]

We dont know that.

[cogman10]

We actually do.

There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories. For example, the death of a large amount of the population along with the pharaohs son. The destruction of pharaoh's army. Records of ancient hebrew slaves.

Ancient Egyptians left behind a pretty large amount of history and documentation. They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation.

[Brendinooo]

>The destruction of pharaoh's army

Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them.

>Records of ancient hebrew slaves

Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.

>They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation

Israel being one of them!

[cogman10]

> Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them.

That's exactly the sort of stuff they wrote about all the time. We know about the various wars and political conflicts throughout the second intermediate period precisely because that's what the Egyptians liked documenting.

And, in particular, during the supposed time of the exodus the Egyptian kingdom was fairly divided. Even if one kingdom was too proud to write about a defeat, the others would be sure to document it.

> Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.

Read up about the Canaanites. They were on the uprise during this period and they are also believed to be the actual origin of the Hebrews.

> Israel being one of them!

No even according to the bible. Israel didn't exist before the exodus. Definitely not for decades and even centuries afterwards. The oldest records of the exodus are nowhere near the event. The closest record we have is around 900BCE.

[IAmBroom]

Some Jewish slaves in no way corroborates "all of Israel was enslaved". The latter is demonstrably false. Jewish immigrants were hired, paid, and in some cases promoted to positions of wealth and authority.

[palmotea]

> There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories.

There's a lot of distance between having claims in the account not supported by evidence and it being an "entirely fictional account."

I wouldn't be surprised if truth is that it has a factual core with significant embellishment, to the point where the boundary is not discernible by history/archeology.

[cogman10]

People wandering in the desert for 40 years, or even 1 year, leave traces. Especially when it's thousands of people (at a minimum).

The Hebrew language came long after the exodus. We have no earlier records of it that aren't written in Hebrew.

So what we have is writings written hundreds of years later documenting an event with no earlier writings verifying that documentation.

It's possible that a small group of slaves escaped egypt and that was the actual origin of the exodus story which just kept growing and growing with retellings.

[bazoom42]

Try applying the same criteria to say the battle of Thermopylae. What does the Persian sources say?

[cogman10]

Ktesias wrote of the battle using Persian sources. Though he's considered pretty unreliable.

While the sources are all from greek authors, we have 6 different sources about the battle with Herodotos, Diodoros, and Ktesias all writing within 100 years of the battle happening.

What we can deduce from these many sources and most of them in living memory of the battle is that the battle likely happened and was a real historic event.

We've got nothing like that with the exodus story. There's not a second author detailing the exodus or making even a vague reference to it.

[BurningFrog]

Are you saying we have no evidence that Exodus happened, or that we have real evidence that it did NOT happen?

[simiones]

If there had been a massive migration of hundreds of thousands of people, and even more so hundreds of thousands of slaves, from late bronze age Egypt (a powerful, old, highly literate kingdom), we would expect to find significant evidence of this (inscriptions, local stories, migration sites, etc). The absence of any such evidence, while not conclusive proof of course, constitutes evidence against this event happening.

We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.

This is similar to the reason we believe the stories in Genesis are not historical, e.g. the flood, - if they had been historical, we expect that they would have left behind certain marks; those marks haven't been found, so we have a reason to believe that they didn't happen.

[logicchains]

>We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.

I feel like you haven't read Exodus because it describes in detail the early Israelites' predilection for idolatry.

[jcranmer]

The book of Joshua details the supposed conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, which archaeological evidence rather disfavors--there's no discontinuous horizon in cultural adaptation between the supposed Philistines and the Hebrews following Jewish dietary laws, for example, and the settlement sites just are not inhabited during the time period that they were supposedly conquested.

[amanaplanacanal]

Calling it idolatry is ahistorical though. Worshipping yhwh alone came much later.

[gamblor956]

The absence of any such evidence, while not conclusive proof of course, constitutes evidence against this event happening.

There is documentation in Egypt of slaves around this time, and of the subsequent departure of some unstated number of slaves. There is evidence of pig bones disappearing from trash sites on the path of the migration, and there is evidence of a shift in religious practices along the migration path. So there is some evidence of an event similar to the Exodus occurring.

We're talking about something that occurred over 3000 years ago. Most events back then weren't recorded, and even then it was still so difficult and time consuming that Egypt and Ancient Greece generally left out the embarrassing parts, most of which we only know about because their contemporaries wrote about it to disgrace them (and most historians now suspect that the vast majority of negative accounts of other civilizations were wholly made up, especially those written by the Ancient Greeks).

Very few nomadic migrations left evidence on the way. There is more evidence of the some sort of exodus having occurred than of the human migration from Asia into South America (note: an increasing number of historians claim the first migration was by sea from Africa, not over land from Asia).

[IAmBroom]

> There is documentation in Egypt of slaves around this time, and of the subsequent departure of some unstated number of slaves

No one claimed the Egyptians didn't own slaves.

> There is evidence of pig bones disappearing from trash sites on the path of the migration

There are also many Jewish sites that had pig bones in their trash. That mandate had not yet solidified.

[palmotea]

> We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened

I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is. IIRC, that stuff is in the actual Bible. Like, a significant chunk of the Old Testament is about "Israelites [not] worship[ing] Yahweh alone as the only God."

[simiones]

This was not idolatry, as depicted in Exodus - this was full blown state religion, held in the same esteem as Yahweh, and co-existing with worship of him. So much so that El later became identified with Yahweh, and now most people reading the Bible (including Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims) believe El is just another one of Yahweh's names, or maybe the name of one of his angels.

[BurningFrog]

Flood legends are very common among ancient Eurasian cultures.

As the last Ice Age melted away (20k–8k years ago), there were very likely several major floods in the region.

[ButlerianJihad]

But all of these are indeed historical. Y’all moderns have simply redefined the term to not include these types of history. That’s extremely problematic.

[krapp]

We know the Exodus didn't happen because the supernatural elements described cannot have happened, and there is no evidence of any such mass migration in the archeological record, nor any non-Biblical references to such an event taking place.

It may be the case that the Exodus tale is a recontexualization of various historical memories of nomadic resettlement combined with political narrative, but the actual story as described in the actual Bible didn't happen.

[coffeecat]

> We know the Exodus didn't happen because the supernatural elements described cannot have happened, ...

Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:

- matter exists (i.e., physicalism or dualism is the correct metaphysical worldview)

- the universe is strictly a physics simulation

- there's no God who's capable of fiddling with human affairs (or interested in doing so)

[Brendinooo]

Yeah.

> witness something that defies all natural explanation

> write about it

> people say it cannot have happened because it was a supernatural element

You see this too with stuff like "anything that predicted the destruction of the temple must have been written after because no one can predict the future."

Like, the whole point of huge chunks of the Bible is that world-altering supernatural events actually happened, and the authors want people to know about them.

I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to stake out a position of "supernatural elements cannot happen" and there are absolutely cogent responses to what I just did rhetorically, I just don't like that people who think that way try to assume the center; it's worth pointing out that it's the tail that wags the dog in big chunks of historicity debates.

[krapp]

>Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:

Yes, I am certain of these things because I am an adult with an education, and an awareness of the difference between mythology and reality.

If you believe in magic, and that the Bible describes reality more correctly than the entirety of science, and that archaeology and Biblical scholarship are all wrong, and that somehow out of all of the religions that humans have concocted only the Abrahamic God is the correct one, then the onus is on you to prove that.

[tshaddox]

If you’re not a realist, just say so. Then we’ll know that there’s no point in engaging with your epistemology, because your epistemology also admits claims like “the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday,” or “I am the only entity that exists,” or “Jupiter doesn’t actually exists, it merely appears to exist.”

[dylan604]

Doesn't the English monarchy claim lineage back to David?

[simiones]

No, they don't. But they do claim lineage to Alfred the Great, whose lineage is traced by legendary sources to Woden/Odin, and from there to Noah and Adam. In some versions, Beowulf is also part of that lineage.

[dylan604]

Okay, so maybe the family doesn't but others do. There's the Davidic throne concept people believe that does claim that lineage exists. These are usually religious types though.

[tsimionescu]

If you're trying to say that this constitutes evidence of a historical king David, I point you back to the lineage that the real king Alfred (or some of his descendants, I didn't check the dates that clearly) claimed from Odin - who I presume few people today consider to be a historical character. Not to mention Odin's lineage being traced back to Adam.

[Ar-Curunir]

The link from Odin to Noah and Adam is only made by explicitly Christian writers. From what we know, the Germanic gods far predate Christianity and even Judaism.

[tsimionescu]

Oh, absolutely. I was merely pointing out that at least some early English kings claimed descent from Odin and from Noah - but this doesn't lend any special credence to the existence of Odin or Noah as real people/gods.

[ReptileMan]

Iliad is fictional yet Troy existed. The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean and probably was not entirely unpeaceful.

I have absolutely backed by nothing theory that ancient Armenians and Jews are the same people that got separated. For some tribe living on the shores of east black sea - a myth about massive flood and some saving boat that stopped on Ararat is easy to see how it could be created.

Of course it takes incredible levels of incompetence to be lost in sinay for 40 years. But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth.

[simiones]

Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it. If we found evidence of a mass migration of slaves from Egypt to Canaan, we'd also know that certain aspects of the Exodus narrative are true - but no such evidence has ever been found.

The biblical flood has been connected to various possible historical floods, but any such connection is highly speculative and tenuous, because the details simply can't match the original claims.

Similarly, some kernel of the Exodus narrative is quite possibly related to real migration events that actually happened, though they would necessarily be much smaller in scope. They also couldn't be the sole origin of the Ancient Israelites, as there is overwhelming evidence that they are simply a subset of the native people of Canaan, which had continuously inhabited that region for a very long time. We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).

[bjourne]

Noah's Ark may well be derived from the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In both stories the God(s) assert that the flood is a one-time event and promise to never repeat it. Many of the stories are probably amalgamations of different myths and legends of the near east.

[Ar-Curunir]

There are flood myths across the entire world.

[logicchains]

>We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).

The Exodus narrative explicitly describes the early Israelites flocking to worship idols like that.

[simiones]

It describes it as a sectary offshoot relatively quickly corrected - while the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time. Note also that, while Baal became an adversary of Yahweh and/or a false god in later narratives, Asherah and El were ultimately identified with Yahweh - to the point that mentions of El in the Bible became identified as referring to the same being as Yahweh.

[Pay08]

FYI, "Baal" is a much later invention. In ancient Hebrew, the word "Ba'al" means lord/master/husband and is often used as a honorific.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it.

We knew Troy existed long before that because it remained as a city at least into the 3rd century CE. We just didn't know which ruins it was.

[IAmBroom]

It was widely believed to be fictional. The discoverer of Troy's ruins astounded the world because it showed a fable had a serious basis in fact.

But until we dig up a boat in "the Holy Land" with biological samples from South America, Australia, and Siberia...

[dylan604]

> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago

Pretty much every ancient religion/group has a "biblical" flood story. Even those from different continents. Haven't you seen Ancient Aliens?

[ivell]

It could be just that almost all ancient civilizations were near water bodies that could flood. Any big flood would seem apocalyptic for the population size of the time.

[dylan604]

The how/why of the flood is irrelevant. The fact that they all have them makes it not special/unique in the way that religion makes it out to be.

[pantalaimon]

> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean and probably was not entirely unpeaceful.

I thought that was a story from when the Sumerians were driven up to Mesopotamia as the water level in the Persian Gulf rose when the glaciers of the last ice age melted.

[bell-cot]

> ... it takes incredible levels of incompetence to be lost in sinay for 40 years.

That 40 years wandering in the wilderness was "lost" only in a poetic or opportunity cost sense. More literally, it was divinely-assigned Punishment Detail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Spies

Also note that the story is in Numbers and Deuteronomy, not in Exodus.

[IAmBroom]

> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean

8,000 years ago.

> But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth.

Unfalsifiable claims are not truth.

[Brendinooo]

> Unfalsifiable claims are not truth

My favorite color is orange.

[codesnik]

even if black sea deluge happened sufficiently rapidly, you're several thousands years off. Current theories date it to about 8 thousand years ago.

[senderista]

Uh, we know who the ancient Armenians were, from both linguistic and genetic evidence. They were Indo-European, not Semitic (unless you actually mean the Urartians or something).

[jerf]

You'd probably find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy2Ic_j0SnA interesting.

For the rest of HN, while that video is from someone who takes the Bible seriously, you can also view it as an interesting examination of the historical time period, even if with a particular lens and slant. Who doesn't have a particular lens and slant anyhow?

[detourdog]

I heard that the story of the Exodus and Moses was to unite the northern and southern kingdoms of Judea behind a single figure.

[cratermoon]

It's worth noting that historically, Israel and Judah are iron age settlements. This makes references to the authors of the tanakh "bronze age sheepherders" wildly inaccurate at best and mostly offensively reductionist.

[ux266478]

Taken as an intentional insult though, it could be very historically literate. The south of Canaan seems to have peaked in prestige in the Neolithic and early bronze age. Afterwards, other than a handful of Canaanite sentinel cities, it was kind of an irrelevant rural backwater, and those cities fell off drastically in the iron age. The kingdom of Israel was a regional player with a lot of manpower, but compared to its neighbors of Aram-Damascus and the Sidonians, it didn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Judah may as well have not even existed. When Israel was turned into Samaria, it was right back to being a footnote.

Painting the kingdoms as LARPing pastoralists who belonged to an older time is basically exactly what it would have looked like to the Tzorim, who had apparently bad relations with Israel from the mid-iron age onwards. Reinvoking that imagery is basically stoking a 2500 year old brotherly inferiority complex, if a highly esoteric one.

[Brendinooo]

> The kingdom of Israel was a regional player with a lot of manpower, but compared to its neighbors of Aram-Damascus and the Sidonians, it didn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

Not sure if you mean it this way but: I don't think the Tanakh itself claims otherwise. Its portrayal is basically an ~80-year run of David and Solomon accumulating a ton of land, wealth, and prestige; then the kingdom splits, and it's a directionally downward spiral from there, with near-constant pressure and incursion from greater powers.

[ux266478]

No, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'm contextualizing for why that framing of the book is eyebrow raising.

[beloch]

One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. It was a systems collapse. The societies of the time were likely resilient enough to deal with "just a drought", "just a war", "just a big earthquake", or just some "international trade hiccups". What happened during the collapse was all of these things at once. It was the combination that proved so difficult to handle.

To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline.

Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.

[pfdietz]

> One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing.

I don't think he establishes that. It could be one root cause, and complexity in how things then fell apart.

[pfdietz]

The drought explanation seems particularly plausible for the Hittites, IMO. They had grain storage, but ~3 years of drought would exhaust that. So if the climate becomes just a bit drier the chance of such a three year run increases enough to likely crash their society.

Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.

[stymaar]

> Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals.

This, plus the gigantic amount of agricultural land being used for biofuel production (almost as much as cattle food).

[bryanlarsen]

The standard counter-argument is that the corn grown for animal feed and for ethanol production is not suited for human consumption.

But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.

[reactordev]

The corn grown that’s not for human consumption is only because it’s earmarked for feed or biofuels. Corn is corn. Where I live, 1 in 4 fields is “for human consumption”

[Retric]

Filed corn is harvested at a different time resulting in a dryer product.

But yes if people get hungry enough, field corn easily qualifies as actual food.

[reactordev]

There are 4 types of corn. Dimple/dent corn, pop corn, sweet corn, and flint corn. Each variety can be eaten. Prepared differently of course as they have different starches and flavors but the vast majority of corn fields in the United States grow dent corn for feed and biofuels.

[inigyou]

Aren't there different varieties of corn?

[reactordev]

Yes, and they are all edible. But not all are palatable.

[brazzy]

Yeah, we're pretty good at making pretty damn anything "fit for human consumption", including quite a few things that are outright poisonous if consumed unprocessed.

[stymaar]

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).

[throwaway27448]

Who ever thought the idea of biofuel was a good one? Is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?

[mrguyorama]

While Bush Jr was definitely doing it to give yet another handout to corn growers, it solved a real problem.

After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.

Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.

So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?

It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.

[akiselev]

> So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?

I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains

[stymaar]

It's wasteful in the sense that we are exploiting lots of land for the limited value it brings.

[pfdietz]

It's the result of politics, and that's not always pretty.

[throwaway27448]

What isn't the result of politics? This is a bad explanation—how is there so little will to act in rational self interest?

[pfdietz]

Everyone, or at least almost everyone, acts according to personal interests. There's a whole branch of political science, Public Choice Theory, that deals with this. Where did you get this idea that altruism was common?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

[stymaar]

> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?

It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).

[idiotsecant]

It's unlikely that rich countries would experience famine as severely as poor ones and consequently they would probably still demand meat. Grain that could feed people would still feed livestock.

[bryanlarsen]

A draw down of animal stocks increases meat supply in the short term. As grain gets more expensive, farmers sell animals for meat rather than keeping them to reproduce.

[stymaar]

But “As grain gets more expensive” middle eastern countries (that rely almost entirely on import for their grain source) would start facing grain shortage (due to balance of payment issues) or at least severe deprivation of the poorer part of their population.

The Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan revolutions didn't occur at the same moment out of coincidence…

[darkfloo]

Shameless plug for my favourite YouTuber of all time https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=GviYcvEtOAJ1mln7

[moffkalast]

The man who singlehandedly got me to think about Rome on a weekly basis.

[CountHackulus]

Historia Civilis somehow distills subjects down to squares in a great way. Entertaining and informative. Fantastic channel.

[DicIfTEx]

The fantastic Fall of Civilizations podcast also had an episode about it: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/01/21/episode-2-...

[antondd]

Here is a youtube video he did on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B965f8AcNbw

The whole channel is top quality if you want to ruminate on other civilisations that came and went.

[pixl97]

Ha, beat me too it. FoC is a great channel.

[bloak]

I'm being pedantic here, of course, but "nation-states" is perhaps not the right expression to use for that era. Nation states are primarily a thing of the nineteenth century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state). The article seems to talk about "imperial states" and "palace states", and I'm not sure I've ever seen the expression "palace state" before.

[icegreentea2]

I don't think Bret (the author of ACOUP) omits drought - he leads his section on plausible theories with "period of drying and consistent crop failures". While Bret dismisses the out to in migration/invasion theory, he does support the idea of intra-region migration/warfare (perhaps induced by drought/crop failures).

[atombender]

He's also recently been on Empire [1], the Goalhanger podcast — and sister show to the great The Rest is History (which I hope will cover this period someday, though they tend not to go back that far in time) — in a series of episodes on the late Bronze Age collapse, which had Stephen Fry as a guest as well.

Cline does cover the evidence of destruction, which is also talked about in the other episodes. But the thing about drought is that we have written communications between different rules documenting that they were struggling with food supply.

An aside: For some reason I find Cline super annoying to listen to — his voice, drawl, and odd cadence triggers something visceral in me. But I admit he knows his stuff.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire-world-history/i...

[the-smug-one]

Eric Cline has an interview on "Tides of History" podcast.

[flir]

I'm really annoyed that Patrick gave up on that. I mean, I know he's been doing it a decade, and I can't chain him to a desk, and I'm being entitled, but...

[the-smug-one]

It was cancelled by Amazon when they purchased Wondery, IIUC. He's got "Past Lives" podcast now!

[flir]

Well that sucks. Thanks for the update.

I listened to a couple. The first (current?) run on Past Lives was about slavery, and was a bit too "misery porn" for me. The historical fiction component of the show was always my least favourite bit.

[ape4]

I think it's a popular topic because so many people are wondering when our civilization will fall.

[forlorn_mammoth]

> deterioration of international shipping routes

like a closing of a certain straight that was essential for a large percentage of a necessary resource?

[RetroTechie]

Probably more in general, as in: fighting between states disrupts trade between them.

Enough of that & hardly any inter-state trading is left.