Events
Dr. Eric Cline: Throne Games -- The Trojan War and the Collapse of Late Bronze Age Civilizations
Date and Time
Tuesday, October 10, 2017 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Description
For more than three hundred years during the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 BC to 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, and Canaanites all interacted, creating a cosmopolitan and globalized world-system such as has only rarely been seen before the current day. It may have been this very internationalism that contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that ended the Bronze Age. When the end came, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from Greece and Italy in the west to Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia in the east. Large empires and small kingdoms, that had taken centuries to evolve, collapsed rapidly. With their end came the world’s first recorded Dark Ages. It was not until centuries later that a new cultural renaissance emerged in Greece and the other affected areas, setting the stage for the evolution of Western society as we know it today.
In this illustrated lecture, based on his work that was considered for a 2015 Pulitzer Prize and awarded the American School of Oriental Research’s 2014 prize for “Best Popular Book on Archaeology,” Professor Eric H. Cline of The George Washington University will explore why the Bronze Age came to an end and whether the collapse of those ancient civilizations might hold some warnings for our current society.
Information
For more information, please visit: http://gvsu.edu/classics
Contact
Melissa Morison