Is the World Close to Collapse? Ask the Bronze Age People
Scholars hear worrying historical echoes in the stresses building up in the US, and the global shocks of war, migration, climate, disease and famine.
Past is prologue.
Photographer: Charlie Phillips via Wikimedia Commons
Did people in the late Bronze Age know their civilization was collapsing? There’s another half to that thought. If we — in the United States and the world — were ourselves in the early stages of collapse, would we even be aware of it? And what would we do about it?
The collapse of societies has fascinated historians, archeologists and anthropologists from Polybius in ancient times to Edward Gibbon in the 18th century and a growing interdisciplinary field of scholars today (besides spawning an entire genre of “Mad Max”-style apocalyptic dystopia in Hollywood).