Subscribers can listen to the audio version of today’s post here.
This was more than three millennia ago, so how. The fuck. Do we know that Troy was sacked and burned on June 11, 1184 BCE? Beats the shit out of me, but a thousand years later some math dude who pioneered “scientific chronology” named Eratosthenes said that’s when it happened. Oh, and there was no fucking horse.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 11, 1184 BCE--
Well, there were horses, but the whole giant horse as a gift filled with haha you got pwned secret soldiers is likely an imaginative fable that arose out of the very real practice of covering siege engines with soaking wet horse hides, a tactic that prevented them from being set on fire by defenders.
The ancient city of Troy was rediscovered in Turkey in the early 19th century; the Turks call it Hisarlik. If you want to know the myth, read the Odyssey, or watch that shitty Brad Pitt movie. It’s a fantabulous tale of goddesses and golden apples and loving another man’s wife so let’s make war manifesting in a decade-long siege and okay now we’re sick of this siege send in the Trojan Horse.
But on this day in history, maybe, Troy was destroyed. And like other cities destroyed across the ages, there was killing and raping and looting and burning because humans like doing stuff like that. What makes the tale of the fall of Troy important is what it represents from a larger perspective of what was going on in that part of the world at the time: The Bronze Age Collapse.
Although humans may have been smelting copper as early as 6000 BCE in the Middle East, the Bronze Age began around 3300 BCE, when the ancient world transitioned away from using stone for tools and weapons. A couple thousand years later, right around the time of the fall of Troy, everything went to ancient excrement.
Prior to 1200 BCE, there were functioning governments and trade routes across the Middle East, Mediterranean Europe, and North Africa. Then, people just decided to wreck the shit out of it all. Enough of this civilization bullshit, they said. Let’s have a dark age.
The Bronze Age collapse was sudden, violent, and destructive to numerous cultures in a surprisingly short period of time. Many cities were destroyed, never to be occupied again. Literacy rates plummeted. Trade routes fell into disuse. Anarchy reigned.
Why did this happen? There are guesses. It may have been a combination of privation and external invasion. There were severe droughts leading to famine. Throw in some earthquakes and raiding by nomadic tribes and it possibly created enough chaos that spiraled out of control and they decided to burn it all down. Things were shitty for a few hundred years, and then I guess people said okay this sucks let’s give that civilization thing another go.
Support keeping this daily column free and get access to subscriber only content:
Get the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.
I know this is an obvious question, but is the whole "enough of this civilisation bullshit...let's have a dark age" a recurring theme? I feel like we've recently endured this.