IF you’ve got time this weekend, get yourself a copy of The Iliad. The ancient text, recounting the legend of the Trojan War, contains within it memories of events 3000 years ago which bear rather startling similarities to the troubled times we live in today.

Forget ruthless Achilles, beautiful Helen, and crafty Odysseus. They’re myths. Troy, however, was very real. There was a terrible, long-drawn out war waged against the city, at a location on what’s now the west coast of Turkey, around 1200BC. The Trojan War was part of what’s known to historians of the ancient world as ‘the Late Bronze Age Collapse’ – an implosion of advanced civilisations across the eastern Mediterranean three millennia ago. Kingdoms fell like skittles and the causes might seem uncomfortably familiar to us today: climate change, financial chaos, war, technological disruption, migration, and disease.

Ancient people would most likely look at the world we inhabit today and feel a shudder of fatal recognition at life in the 21st century.

We’re in the foothills of climate catastrophe; this is now the era of global pandemic; we face what could turn into a Third World War in Europe – nor can the stink of war in the Pacific between the West and China be ignored; migration caused by conflict, poverty and extreme weather spirals out of control; democracy creaks in the West, particular in America, the torch-bearer, quite literally, of liberty and liberalism; our financial system buckles through trade wars and the crisis in capitalism; new technology threatens to overwhelm us with mass unemployment from AI and robotics, upheaval from social media, and state control via digital surveillance and drones.

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This really isn’t the Roaring Twenties we were hoping for; instead we’re starting to see something like the first indications of a potential ‘general systems collapse’ across the world, and the west in particular. We’ve stretched our civilisation too far. Globalisation has made us dangerously interdependent. There’s too many threats on too many fronts for something not to give, and give dramatically.

So that’s the state of the world right now. Let’s go back and look at what was happening in ancient times around 1200BC. Are there lessons to be learned?

This was a period of rage – just as we live in a period of rage. Homer’s Iliad opens: “Sing, Goddess, of the anger of Achilles.” The song sounds like Twitter.

Until the late 19th century it was thought that Troy and the Trojan War were as mythical as Zeus – just figments of wild, ancient Greek imaginations. Then the pioneering German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann uncovered an ancient city on the north-west coast of Turkey which had been the site of a brutal siege and sacking. It was the real Troy. The site was given UNESCO World Heritage status, and you can now visit the Troy Historical National Park and Museum.

The memory of real history lies within Homer’s myth-making. For instance, Ilium – from which The Iliad gets its title – was the name given to Troy by ancient Mycenaeans, the Greeks who besieged the city. Troy – Ilium – was a city aligned with the Hittite empire, which dominated central Turkey in the Bronze Age. Ancient records show Hittites writing about a city called ‘Wilusa’, which linguists believe was the source of the name ‘Illium’. Hittite records also report a kingdom from the west called ‘Ahhiyawa' attacking Wilusa. Linguists have worked out that ‘Ahhiyawa’ relates to the term ‘Achaean’, the name Homer gives to the Greeks fighting at Troy.

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So a real city, which we call Troy, was really sacked by real Greeks sometime around 1190BC. The Iliad is simply the folk memory of the long conflict between the competing empires of Mycenaean Greece and the Hittites. Troy was a central event in that wider series of catastrophes called the Bronze Age Collapse. From around 1200BC to 1150BC, the civilisations of Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites, the Kassites in Babylonia, the Ugarit and Amorite states in what’s now Syria and Lebanon, all fell to pieces. Egypt only just survived.

The disintegration was so bad for Mycenaeans – the Trojan War’s victors – that it ushered in the ‘Greek Dark Ages’.

These events are known as the ‘late Bronze Age collapse’ for a reason: the Bronze Age was ending, replaced by iron. This new technology lead to devastating conflict, worse than anything seen before. Casting rather than forging weapons industrialised warfare for the first time.

Whole cities and peoples were uprooted. Once such group was called the ‘Sea People’. They travelled the Mediterranean sacking coastal cities. It seems the Sea People were refugees from various collapsed societies who banded together in the pursuit of a home and riches. Imagine if refugees from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan grouped together and armed up to protect themselves, that’s probably the best way to imagine the Sea People.

The environment was also changing. A huge volcanic eruption around 1159BC in Iceland caused a volcanic winter and famine in the near east. Humans had stripped forest away for resources, triggering soil erosion. There was drought. Populations grew large and unsustainable. Trade was shattered by warfare meaning commerce was throttled. All the above events, would have led to disease on a mass scale.

Many scholars see the Bronze Age Collapse as a ‘general systems’ failure: interlinked societies grew so complex that all these many pressures became simply too much to bear and civilisations imploded across the known world. Of course, out of the ruins of Bronze Age collapse, other civilisations grew: the Greek society of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, to name but one, which birthed western literature, democracy and philosophy. Nothing dies, it changes; often, hopefully, for good.

None of this means we’re at the point of civilisational collapse. But perhaps we should all remember the ancient Trojan princess Cassandra, cursed to foresee the future but never to be believed. History seems to be warning us that we’ve gone too far, too fast in this 21st century world. History, like Cassandra, should be heeded. We should look back to the ancient world and realise that unlike our ancestors we need to slow down and think; respect and cherish what we’ve got before we destroy it.

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