Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle | Hacker News Reader

Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle

sciencemag.org

93 pointscurtis25 comments

This is within a century of the fall of the Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Mycenaeans, Canaanites, Troy, Miletus, and a few others. What I would give for a time machine to know precisely what caused all this turmoil.

http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/1200BC_abstracts.pdf There are quite many theories linking this period with global scale climate changes.

Yep -- would be neat to see it play out, and what exactly happened. That time coincided with a Bond event -- the next one was in 400-500CE (which coincided with the 'Great Migration' of germanic and turkic tribes, the huns, the fall of Western Rome).

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed[1], is a really interesting study of this period. There is a lot of material therein analyzing caches of trading records that have been discovered, which provides a fascinating window on just how interconnected the world was, even that far back.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed-Turnin...

Oriental Institute talk about this book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyry8mgXiTk

Very good book, given the difficulty of knowing exactly what happened so long ago.

One thing this battle shows, people have been killing each other for a long time.

Oh, even our closest ape relatives are killing each other.

One quote from the article I found interesting was this:

> DNA from teeth suggests some warriors are related to modern southern Europeans and others to people living in modern-day Poland and Scandinavia. "This is not a bunch of local idiots,” says University of Mainz geneticist Joachim Burger. “It’s a highly diverse population.”

I'm curious if this analysis takes into account the historical migration patterns of the Germanic tribes that were potentially living in the area at that era. For instance, the Vandals, Goths and Lombards are all believed to have been settled in north-central Europe prior to their late-Roman migrations into Italy, Spain and elsewhere. On the other hand, this might be before those tribes migrated south out of Scandinavia, if, as is believed, they originated in Scandinavia, in which case the inhabitants of this area may have been the proto-Celtic Urnfield culture[1]. And there is always the question of how much displacement versus assimilation occurred in these movements. It all gets pretty hazy, and most of these divisions are based on styles of artifacts and burial practices. As DNA sequencing improves, I'm very interested in seeing how that fills in the blanks around these large-scale migration events.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urnfield_culture

The entire bronze age is fascinating, with little historical data surviving. This was an era where humans stepped into a new age of civilization. So much of what we think of as modern ways of life had their start in the bronze age. You have trade networks that span continents, running from the British Isles all the way across to the Horn of Africa, and possibly beyond. You have merchants who travel around those networks, making trips of hundreds or event thousands of kilometers and connecting vastly different cultures and civilizations. You have people from the Levant and the Aegean spreading out and settling in Morocco, Libya, Spain, Italy, etc. You have a whole host of new technologies being invented, adding to the already impressive list of innovations from the stone age. Advances in tools, boats, clothing, housing and construction, writing, mathematics, the wheel, agriculture, pottery, and so on. Then you have cultures who exist not just in small bands but have grouped together into city states and even empires. You have kings, queens, emperors, etc. Add on to that the enrichment of philosophies, mythologies, stories, etc. that was happening culturally.

So much of our modern culture has roots in that era, with fables like Jason and the Argonauts, epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey, mythological elements like the great flood, supernatural cosmology (deities and their interactions with mankind), and on and on. You can trace the origins of so much of the nature and character of 21st century human civilization back to that era. And yet, so little of what happened was recorded, so little was preserved even with artifacts and ruins. So much happened and we know so little about it.

And on the other side of the world, you've got the half of the world's people living during the longest lasting Chinese dynasty. In 1000BC there were Chinese cities with more people than Ancient Rome, you've got flourishing philosophy schools, the 'ancient wise men' Confucius and Laozi referred to in their works. Truly an amazing time.

Most records were destroyed either in the burning of the Alexandria Library and/or in the Sack of Baghdad.

Both events were a huge loss for humanity.

Most records simply weren't made to start with, period. A lot of those civilizations and cultures weren't literate. And even among those that were, they didn't keep many records. There wasn't a tradition of keeping track of history the way there was in later societies. This is a problem even in places that were very sophisticated and had written language, like China. But it's even more of a problem in areas that were largely pre-literate, such as most of Northern and Western Europe, the areas around the Black Sea, etc.

There are entire cultures and nation-states as important to history as the Greeks who we know very little about simply because they didn't have the habit of recording damned near everything of importance that happened and eventually writing it down. There is so much of the Hittites, the Scythians, the Celts, etc. that we just don't know and may never know because of that.

Interestingly, the date of the battle, 1250 BC, is only a few decades older than some of the biggest events of the Late Bronze Age collapse [1]. Could be that whatever was the cause for the turmoil you're speaking of, this battle could've been one of it's first recorded consequences!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

> About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years

I think they got their math or information wrong, written word not being common for another 2000 years after 3200 years ago would mean that writing didn't become common in Germany until ~800 CE.

Writing not being common in Germany until about 2000 years ago or 1200 years later (than 3200) would be more correct.

"Common" though?

Fro Wikisources:

RUNES, RUNIC LANGUAGE AND INSCRIPTIONS. The art of writing with an alphabet appears to have been introduced into Germanic Europe in the Iron Age. ... The Iron Age is supposed to have existed from circa 200 to circa 650, and it is to the close of this epoch that the beginning of the writing on Scandinavian memorials is attributed.

What we think of as writing is hard without the right technology. You need parchment/vellum/papyrus, and something to make ink, and something to make pens with.

None of this is trivial. And it's not obvious until someone invents it, or is told how to do it by someone else.

So you can have an alphabet - but if it's only ever engraved into rocks, that guarantees that whatever gets written is really, really important to someone, and there won't be a lot of diarising, philosophising, or gossip, or even recording of battles.

The fact that we can buy pens, paper, and digital keyboards so easily we take them for granted is actually kind of amazing.

> [...] but if it's only ever engraved into rocks, [...]

You can engrave into wood much easier. Won't last for as long as rocks, though. That's why we see less of it.

It doesn't seem particularly likely to be incorrect. That area of north-east Germany was kind of a backwater in late antiquity, with the Romans stopped well short of penetrating that far, and many of the tribes that had been living there migrating further west, and replaced with the Wends, a branch of pagan Slavs.

800 CE would be about the time that that area of Germany became part of Charlemagne's empire, and Christian missionaries started making inroads around the Baltic.

Charlemagne himself could read, but not write.

There's a joke about

    chmod u+w Charlemagne

there, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.

chmod 500

Because it's certain he could execute as well....

(In fact, let's make it 510. The group can't read or write but they don't have problem executing either.)

Eldar Futhark [0] would be the earliest Germanic tribe writing, and spanned from 2nd to 8th centuries. However, I don't believe that any literature was found, just inscriptions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark

800CE seems about right for Germany. Prior to that there's very little text being found besides small/simple inscriptions.

Humans were doing really "modern" stuff so much earlier than I realised!

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