ERIC H. CLINE, THE CRISIS AND THAT OF 3,000 YEARS AGO

“Every society ends up sinking”

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The thing was already very badly more than three thousand years ago when the Mediterranean civilizations of the Bronze Age collapsed, one after another “and forever changed the future of the Western world.” The historian Eric H. Cline, director of the Capitol Archeological Institute, at George Washington University, explains that the area hosted an international world of complex connections and political and commercial links similar to those of our days. Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mauritanians, Canaanites, Cypriots and Egyptians, all were related and all disappeared in the first rut of civilizations, which the expert dates back to 1177 BC. “It was a globalized and cosmopolitan world system that has only rarely been seen before our present,” he says.

The American anthropologist and archaeologist analyze the possible causes of the collapse of these civilizations when the empires and kingdoms of the second millennium disappeared. “Maybe that international character contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that put an end to the Bronze Age.” Surely it sounds to them: peoples so interrelated and dependent among them, that a rumor in one part of the world unleashes an economic storm in the other.