>>18705541
I understand that the trade network wasn't exactly robust around the edges and a number of other events beyond humanity's control happened, so them trying to get a cut of the fortune circulating through the international system didn't just stall but completely tanked it.

So some of them settled in Egypt for a while, got pushed out and eventually allied with Levant goat herders to become Jews.

>>18705548
Yeah I know if I wanted a cut of the fortune of a fragile trade network, I'd definitely try for decades to disrupt it and starve and incinerate its constituents and render their cities uninhabitable, and let my own cities get themselves incinerated while I'm away so I have no home to return to.

>>18705541
They were bored.

>>18705541
Probably people at the peripheries facing the worst consequences of natural disaster, invading more hospitable land since it's fight or starve which in turn pushes those people off the land till someone ends up in the center of civilization.
Like how germanic tribes kept kicking each other further and further into the Roman empire when global weather took a shitter.

>>18705541
Raiding is fun and profitable.

>>18705608
it's an interesting theory, except that there was no natural disaster. There was nothing "natural" at all about the bronze age collapse, it had no correlation to the weather.

There was no competition for the most hospitable land or whatever either. Look at what happened to the Hittites, their capital city Hattusa is famously in the worst shittiest most arid part of Anatolia, a country with plenty of fertile land, and yet they were starved out for literal decades, culminating in a forced evacuation because their enemies were en route to burn it all down, which they did.

None of that has anything to do with competition for fertile land. If that's what you wanted, it would be such an insane waste of time to besiege this stupid enormously fortified city on arid land for decades, you'd only do that if you hated them.

But most importantly, the Sea People's (Greeks) own cities were destroyed before AND during the course of the collapse. They could not have been seeking wealth or food.

Your own cities, Thebes and Gla, get burned down by some enemies, and instead of rebuilding them or securing your homeland, you set off to fight some other nations on the other side of the Aegean who are crucial for your trade networks, and in the process even more of your cities, Pylos and Mycenae, collapse.

There's no way to align the timeline of the collapse with the notion of competition for resources, except in the sense of a total suicidal world war where everyone hoped that the last man standing might have the whole world to himself.

>>18705648
>None of that has anything to do with competition for fertile land. If that's what you wanted, it would be such an insane waste of time to besiege this stupid enormously fortified city on arid land for decades, you'd only do that if you hated them.
>But most importantly, the Sea People's (Greeks) own cities were destroyed before AND during the course of the collapse. They could not have been seeking wealth or food.

At the risk of inventing stuff adhoc, that kinda works with the world hitting the shitter and people fleeing for new land.
Greeks got their cities burned by other refugees and rather than standing and dying they go to fight wealthier and hopefully weaker people elsewhere.

Sacking a rich capital makes sense both as a source of wealth and to weaken anyone hindering you even if you're just looking for a new home. Allaric wanted to find a new home for his goths in Sicily but still took the time to besiege and sack Rome en-route .

>>18705653
Yeah I had the feeling you were using goths as an analogy. Actually Theodoric and Ostrogoths are probably even better model for what you're talking about. They're desperate for a safe homeland due to Hunnic encroachment, so they make a huge trek to Italy, where they almost manage to secure themselves a home but Justinian destroys them.

I just get the feeling from the facts of the Bronze Age Collapse that it was so much more vindictive and intentionally destructive.
Look at how long it took, Gla and Thebes collapse in 1250, then forty years later the first Sea Peoples raids are attempted and fail, then 20 years later, they succeed in destroying the Hittites and Syrians at the cost of their final remaining city Pylos getting destroyed, and then another 5 or so years later, after they've successfully sacked Hattusa, they go for a last suicidal attempt at Egypt and fail there.

It just doesn't look like a folk migration looking for a homeland. There were so many easier ways to do that, and it wouldn't have continued past Hattusa, and it wouldn't have been so widespread. I know the Greeks who invaded Egypt were obviously not the same people who sacked Hattusa, who may not have even been Greek, but then that gives even less credence to the folk migration idea.

It really feels like some people were hellbent on eradicating each other and that's what caused it.

>>18705596
Apparently the port in Atlantic Spain in charge of the transfer of British tin got wiped by natural disasters twice during the period. Meanwhile, the Hyskos were seemingly busy raiding from Southern France to the Strait of Gibraltar.

The Empires in charge then were tied down with trying to deal with raids and invasions on their central holdings, while the same raids also upset their access to lumber from the Levant, which they required for naval construction.

>>18705670
I was speaking purely from a Greek perspective, it would make no sense for them to lead the Sea Peoples confederation on such violent destruction if their goal was to enrich themselves, since they would have been intimately aware that any disruption to these trade routes would probably spell the end of all wealth and prosperity in the world, and because their own homeland was so clearly in dire need of defense.

It would be insane to be off trying to blockade Wilusa and Hattusa while your own cities are under siege, or lie already in rubble, by someone other than the Hittites or Luwians. Unless you were just abandoning your homeland to move somewhere else, in which case it makes no sense to challenge the Hittites, just settle somewhere else where you don't have to get yourself killed.

>>18705541
It was probably a chain reaction starting with some illiterate steppe nigger tribe becoming a regional power, bullying their neighbors, and then being lost to history.

>>18705670
There was certainly a general atmosphere of chaos and piracy at the time of the collapse.

But when trying to explain what actually precipitated that atmosphere, I don't think the weather or just random increases in piracy are good explanations. They could handle weather and they could handle pirates. In fact, the Hittites and Egypt were doing marvelously handling both problems less than a century before the collapse, they were at the height of their powers in 1250 and had just signed at treaty.

I think the only explanation is that something about the 1250BC destructions in Greece induced a cultural shift, where the Greeks for some reason became committed to basically ending the world and struggling for as long as necessary, be it decades, and at the cost of their own cities, to deal mortal blows to the Luwians, Syrians, Hittites, and Egyptians.

>>18705679
four of the main civilizations involved - Greeks Luwians Hittites and Mittani - already had steppenigger ruling dynasties at the time, although the blood had been diluted quite a bit.
>lost to history
I mean, if hundreds of years after the collapse, the people hanging around on the invaded lands are Thracians, Phrygians, and Dorians, and all three have Indo-European names, it sort of had to be them.

>>18705682
>>18705675
you're using an outdated model of the collapse that over-ascribes its events to the Greeks. The Greeks were the main actors of the collapse but they didn't do everything. Their lands were invaded by the Dorians, then there was probably some sort of split where some Greeks tried to bunker down and fortify the cities and resist the Dorians, while others joined them to snowball into a bigger pirate confederation with the Sardinians and Sicilians to continue the raids into Egypt. The collapse of the Hittites probably had nothing to do directly with the Greeks, that was some other more landworthy tribes, since Hattusa was way too deep into Anatolia for seafaring Greeks to bother with, and there are no signs of Greek occupation at Hattusa.

>>18705675
>in which case it makes no sense to challenge the Hittites
They were fucking around all over the Mediterranean, but they had been raiding the Hittites and Egyptians for a long time already and they were in the neighborhood while the Spanish Atlantic was a long way beyond Sicily, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. They apparently also weren't involved in the tin trade materially, as in none of their crews or ships took part in it and the most important transfer port on the Atlantic got wiped.

So hitting the two Empires within their hood absolutely does make sense.

>>18705541
They didn't. Tons of things caused the collapse of bronze age societies to collapse, and they were inevitable, as they were brittle, highly centralized societies offering no real benefit to most people, with small, fragile militaries relying on long and vulnerable trade routes to make ANY metal tools.

Add in that these were primitive people who couldn't understand things like "you need to stop the irrigation system from gradually filling up with salt over generations" and total collapse was always going to happen.

>>18705696
>So hitting the two Empires within their hood absolutely does make sense
You're talking about them like they were still functioning as a nation: strategizing over how to most weaken their enemies and secure foreign territory.
I don't think that makes sense given their situation at the time.

I think everything becomes far clearer when you just introduce the Dorians and Phrygians to the story. The Dorians invade Greece with partial success, they destroy Thebes and Gla. Mycenae and Pylos are fortified with unprecedentedly huge walls. The Greeks outside those cities just give up and join the Dorians.

Now everything makes sense: you have a new confederation led by Dorians, who don't mind if Mycenae and Pylos fall and just want to pillage as much as they can, they were recently uncivilized so they don't care about trade routes, and are happy to recruit Sardinians, Sicilians and Libyans, and launch an all out attack on Egypt and besiege Wilusa.

Then separately the Phrygians or Thracians run roughshod over the Hittites, with similar lack of care if the cities are burnt to a crisp because they don't need cities or trade routes, they're barbarians.

There needs to be a change in the mentality of the Greeks or else their actions don't make sense.

To be clear I know there's zero genetic evidence for the Dorian invasion, it just seems necessary for the behavior of the Greeks to be rationalized.

Something needed to happen to the Greeks that made them lose interest in defending their homeland, which was in a fragile state of halfway-collapse, and willing to wantonly disrupt trade routes, whose disruption they should have known meant the end of civilization.

>>18705716
>You're talking about them like they were still functioning as a nation: strategizing over how to most weaken their enemies and secure foreign territory.
Nah, it's like how the Cartels can get drugs into the US without relying on diplomats as carriers.

>>18705735
I don't get how the cartel analogy is relevant

The Greeks had their homeland partially invaded. Their response was to become a pirate confederation that raided for a while but eventually ended up committing suicide trying to conquer Egypt.

It's just a nonsensical series of events, unless the invaders took over and lead the pirate confederation, which would explain why they didn't bother fighting to re-secure their homeland and rebuild Thebes and Gla, and it would explain why they eventually launched a suicidal attack on Egypt (barbarian invaders dgaf)

Maybe you already knew all this and are just thinking about more intricate things like the effect of the tin trade, but I'm basically just realizing why the Dorian invasion makes so much sense and is not just aryan kanging

>>18705691
>the people hanging around on the invaded lands
I'm talking further up the chain. If someone was stirring up shit up in the steppe that caused their neighbors to migrate away into eastern Europe, who then caused migrations into southern Europe, there would be no record that they existed. And probably insufficient archeological evidence to ever know about it, either.

>>18705753
I'm pretty sure the chain of migration pressure ends with the people I'm talking about, Urnfield Culture, who split off into thracian phrygian and dorian. They were expanding pretty rapidly in all directions, their expansion also moved east in the direction of the steppe, obviously not all the way, but there was no direction in which Urnfield was receding.

At the time of the BAC the steppe was kind of a vacuum. Everyone had split off in their different directions too recently, there was no big confederation there waiting to explode, that had already happened.

>>18705752
My point with the cartels is that you don't need state actors to invade somebody - sub-state actors and private persons are perfectly capable of amassing that knowledge.

In the case of the Greek, they probably don't even need the Dorians, they're intimately familiar with raiding their neighbors and their agriculture is probably not very efficient, so a phase of climatic instability would probably be enough to domino a large number of them into those Empires.

>>18705753
I recall that the Steppes were part of the international exchange system already, to the point where we found highly specialized production sites which would very quickly feel the heat of any instability in the supply situation.