“Proliferating global networks, both physical and virtual, inevitably incorporate more … risks into a more interdependent and ‘fragile’ system,” he wrote. “Any negative event along these lines can create a rolling, widening collapse—a true black swan—in the same way that the failure of a single transformer can collapse an electricity grid.”27 They

“a town partly destroyed by fire and deserted in haste.” Here, sometime around or after 1200 BC, “loose objects were left abandoned in the courtyards and valuables were hidden in the ground. Bronze arrowheads—one of them found stuck in the side of a wall of a building—and numerous lead sling bullets scattered all over the place are eloquent proof o

As Bell has noted, when a complex system does collapse, it “decomposes into smaller entities,” which is exactly what we see in the Iron Age that follows the end of these Bronze Age civilizations.

We are no longer certain that all of the sites with evidence of destruction were razed by the Sea Peoples. We can tell from the archaeological evidence that a site was destroyed, but not always by what or by whom. Moreover, the sites were not all destroyed simultaneously, or even necessarily within the same decade. As we shall see, their cumulative

Shutruk-Nahhunte’s own mother was a Kassite princess, as he tells us in a letter that he wrote to the Kassite court, and which the German excavators found at Babylon.64 In that letter, he complains that he had been passed over for the Babylonian throne, despite being fully qualified for the position, including by birth. His indignation is palpable

Johnson also states that the system is typically “alive,” meaning that it evolves in a nontrivial and often complicated way, and that it is also “open,” meaning that it can be influenced by its environment. As he puts it, this means that the complicated stock markets today, about which analysts often talk as if they were living, breathing organisms

the Egyptians, who were in charge of the administration in Canaan at that time, had had the foresight to plan for the drought, increasing the production of grain and breeding more hardy cattle, in order to counter the climatic problems that they saw coming. This may, in part, explain why they were in a position to send shipments of grain to the Hit

Therefore, although there is little question that there were new peoples entering and settling down in Canaan at this time, in this reconstruction the bogeyman specter of the invading Sea Peoples/Philistines has been replaced by a somewhat more peaceful picture of a mixed group of migrants in search of a new start in a new land, who apparently also

What caused whole civilizations to collapse rather than simply to falter and then recover and carry on? Kaniewski and others have suggested that the prolonged drought and the resulting widespread and long-persisting famine exacerbated the other stressors, resulting in what is known as a “multiplier effect.”107 As a consequence, the various societie