332. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Before The Collapse (Ep 1)

We've seen many empires rise and fall, but in the next six episodes, we're going to look at the most dramatic imperial collapse in history, empire after empire, disappearing in a wave of violence, droughts and catastrophes. This is the Bronze Age collapse, 2000 BC. Hello and welcome to Empire. I'm William DeRimple. And I'm Anita Arnim.

Now, um, William and I, since we began this podcast, we've been looking at the rise and fall of empires, why it happens, when it happens, who is involved. But over the next series, what we're going to be doing is we're going to be exploring which Something that really has to be one of the most dramatic imperial collapses of all time in human history. And it's a period that is much earlier than, you know, the things that we normally look at here. We are leaving the world of the East India Company.

We are leaving the Mughals. We're leaving the mutiny far, far behind us. And instead, we are heading 3,000 years into the past to a world which in many ways actually looks surprisingly like the one we're in today. I hope it's not too similar because this is a period when empires collapse in a range of connected crises. There are raiders, brigands, droughts, a whole variety of different crises that bring down first Mycenae, then Troy, then a whole range of city-states on the Mediterranean.

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