Sublime

a megadrought that impacted much of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean beginning ca. 1200 BC and lasting between 150 and 300 years.

In our current view, as we shall see below, the Sea Peoples may well have been responsible for some of the destruction that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but it is much more likely that a concatenation of events, both human and natural—including climate change leading to drought and famine, seismic disasters known as earthquake

Nations or people in a true alliance treat each other as equals. They work together to meet a common goal—defeating or deterring an enemy, for example.

A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization.

Will Durant is credited with the adage that “civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” Major earthquakes are gray swan events, and so are volcanic eruptions. Mount Rainier, whose majestic cone is easily visible from Seattle, is an active volcano. Any such event is likely to have a huge impact on the region.

In fact, combining textual observations with the fact that Ugarit was clearly destroyed by fire, and that there are weapons in the debris, we may safely reiterate that although there may have been the seeds of decentralization at Ugarit, warfare and fighting almost certainly caused the final destruction, with external invaders as the likely

foundations were laid in Victorian times. Now it is changing radically. Standard economics is suddenly being challenged by a number of new approaches: behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, new institutional economics. One of the new approaches came to life at the Santa Fe Institute: complexity economics.

I would still maintain, however, that it was not simply a linear progression from drought to famine to upheaval that ended the Bronze Age. Moreover, in my opinion, none of the individual factors that we have discussed above—drought, famine, earthquakes, or invaders—would have been sufficiently cataclysmic on their own to bring down even one of the