The Bronze Age Collapse was, definitively, the end of the Bronze Age. By the time the ancient civilizations had picked up the pieces and rediscovered how to write and interact with each other again they had an entirely new and exciting discovery to work with: iron. Iron can be made into harder and more durable
For the six centuries between the end of Roman occupation and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, Britain was not a united kingdom. It was, instead, a mishmash of tribal domains, petty kings and infighting. Chief amongst these were the seven Anglo Saxon kingdoms of the Heptarchy. Five of them crowded round the south east
The main problem in understanding the Bronze Age Collapse is that we don’t really know what happened. This may look like an oversimplification but it is not. It is, instead, the simple truth. Of the four great civilizations that faced disaster in this 12th century BC collapse: the Mycenaean Greeks, the Hittites, the Assyrians and
A gruesome discovery in the United Kingdom has thrown a shadow over Bronze Age England. The find, at the ancient site of Charterhouse Warren in Somerset, has been described as “something horrible.” Here archaeologists have found a great pit, dug by our ancestors and at least 15 meters deep. In the pit were the remains
We know a great deal about the lost civilization of Llhuros. You may not have heard of this Iron Age kingdom, but far from being obscure and forgotten it is among the better attested cultures of Asia Minor. Situated in what is now Turkey, Llhuros was a neighbor of the more famous kingdom of Lydia
Homer’s Iliad is one of the oldest stories which has survived. Coming out of the Greek Dark Age and describing events which occurred more than three millennia ago, it is a richly wrought and beautiful poem, but also something of a puzzle. The events that it describes, whereby an alliance of Bronze Age Greek states