imagine being a marauding pirate in the bronze age ...........and people are still talking about you 3,200 years later

I think the real question is whether or not Matt Damon caused the Bronze Age Collapse.

"oddysseus causing the bronze age collapse" makes me think of some mr. magoo slapstick comedy where he leans against a column and it falls over and starts a domino effect that knocks over subsequent columns, the whole city, and then every city in the eastern meditterranian basin and oddysseus is just like "oh god! oh no! dammit! dammit! sorry! dammit!"

Well according to the stories, Odysseus got lost in the west, but Menelaus got lost in the east.  Those two are the only characters that returned home and survived or didn't get exiled.  So if you're looking for a semi mythological character to have sacked and destroyed many of the Easter Mediterranean locations during the bronze age collapse, I would say Menelaus is the guy you should look at.  But it definitely wasn't just one or two guys.  The whole system collapsed.  It does appear that people from the Aegean and possibly some of the Italian islands are the so called sea people.

I like the idea of the oddesy occurring after the collapse or at the tail end of the collapse. It would explain him running into multiple cannibal groups as nations were starving. I also like the idea of the Trojan horse being an earthquake finally weakening the walls of Troy for invasion.

I can't believe that Odysseus has been dead for 3000 years and people are still pinning stuff on him

I'd think having several thousand Greeks ravaging the countryside on their way home and just deciding to do a little more looting; combined with survivors from Troy and deserters from both armies there would be enough to do serious damage to anywhere.

The collapse took place over a hundred years, so this one war could only be a portion. We also have Hittite records pointing to the war, and they describe it more like a local event that involved some of their vassals.

Fun fact: tin was essential for the bronze age period . No tin = no bronze age tools & Britain, unlike a lot of places, had tin in it's abundance. It also sat upstream of the bronze age atlantic trade networks.

I had no idea that the Achaeans only stayed around Troy for the beginning and the end of the war. This makes the scene where King Priam is asked to know who his enemies are more logical. If they had been fighting for a whole decade, him not knowing his enemies seems strange, but it makes more sense if he hadn't seen them in, what, 8-9 years, so he obviously had to be reminded of who is who

The Sea Peoples were various populations who roamed around the Eastern Mediterranean trying to find a new home, and there were many Greeks among them, but also many others, of other ethnic origins.
For example, some theories posit that the names Shardan and Shekelesh prove that amongst the Sea Peoples there were populations from Sardinia and Sicily. On the other hand, there are others who theorise that those populations were of Anatolian origin, and they became marauders, contributed to the Bronze Age collapse etc in the process of trying to find a new homeland, and eventually some of them moved west to Italy, and the two big islands were named after the groups that settled them at that time, while the older names for the islands were forgotten.

From all the evidence we have, it looks like the Sea Peoples weren't one unified group, they were a generalised phenomenon, of some people who were forced out of their homes by various disasters, natural of man made, as well as some people who left their homes by choice, to go seek loot elsewhere, and they formed groups that attacked any region where central state authority was weak, trying to take over those regions in order to settle permanently there and carve out a new homeland for themselves.


The Odyssey can, therefore, be interpreted as the Bronze Age Collapse being retold from the perspective of the Sea Peoples.
I'm not saying that's the correct or the only interpretation, as I believe each new interpretation can add a layer of nuance and depth to the text, and explain some parts of it, without preventing other interpretations from being valid, but I think it sure is interesting to think about.

“ Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. “
‘Mark Twain’
- Life on the Mississippi

What IF (lots of ifs to follow):
- The Mycenaean leaders put together an enormous alliance to attack Troy including a lot of Mercenaries/Pirates (Sea Peoples) from around the Mediterranean
- Whilst this force was attacking Troy the Hittites struck back at the.relatively undefended Mycenaean heartland.
- When Troy was finally destroyed and the Mycenaean leadership headed for home a significant proportion of this alliance decided to just keep going
- A lot of Mycenaeans and other Greek allies decided to stay on with them for the ride
- It went well and so they called up more allies from all over the Med and the thing just snowballed

Essentially the Mycenaeans would have created a Frankensteinian monster to attack Troy/The Hittites and then lost control of it...

Sea peoples are wildly overblown. There's what, 3 references to invading armies total in a 200 year period, and only one of the loosely mentions something about 'people of the sea', I believe it's the Egyptian one that also names a confederation of peoples we can't quite place. The other one only says 'Ships are arriving' or something to that effect, and I believe that ones from Cyprus.

There was likely some kind of large conflict at the end of the last bronze age. It probably lasted a fairly long time. A lot of people probably died. If I had to guess what led to this conflict, it would be that the palace systems of the period had reached their maximum capacity, and were starting to get unstable. If I had to place a real catalyst on the collapse, it would be the fall of the Hittite empire which seems to be caused by a succession crisis. I suspect the Hittites, with their writing system, were the main people keeping the whole thing in tact, and when they collapsed the whole trade network collapsed. Interestingly, the peoples don't go anywhere, DNA groups continue to remain where they were through the dark period. It only seems to have been the palace system that fell.

So when we hypothesize if Odysseus caused the bronze age collapse, I'd point the finger much more at him killing 100+ of the ruling elite, then their families, over blaming the Trojan war, lol. The entire system rests on the shoulders of a few people who know what to do, losing even 20-30% would be catastrophic.

One other lynch pin I rarely hear discussed, is once the bronze trade networks collapse, people seem to immediately turn to iron. Figuring out iron democratizes the war machine, you find iron all over the place. You can equip an army without having to engage in and negotiate the trade that is necessary to facilitate bronze, making it an option for MANY more people. Elites dead at the top + petty elites trying to maintain a dying system = lots of little fighting kingdoms that take centuries to recover.

One of Odysseus’ “Cretan Lies” is a tale of a man returning to Crete after the Trojan war, and swiftly leading a fleet of 9 ships to Egypt and raiding Egypt’s River. His men attack Egypt and are defeated and captured, where the person Odysseus is pretending to be stays for 7 years and then leaves for Ithaca where he’s now telling this story. There’s a lot of detail to that story and one must wonder if the bards incorporated this story they heard into the larger story. It does sound similar to the battle of the Nile delta under Ramses III. But also sounds very similar to earlier raids along the Nile by Sherden/Shardana under Ramses II’s time. Although Sherden probably had no correlation with Cretans.

"our age of bronze is collapsing" - Odysseus

There was a lot of value in the approach of talking about how even initially good intentioned people in The Pursuit Of Glory and with hubris can be the source of their own destruction and and that of those around them

And thus allmost all of civilisation perished because of a beauty contest among the godesses.

A dog walks into a cinema and says "I can't see anything. This isn't IMAX, " the bronze age collapses

ABSOLUTELY love your videos, found the one about modern day Ithaca just now and decided to check out your channel and wow! Please keep going ::))