The Secrets to Civilization

- Season 1

(2021)

Historians and archaeologists worked long on various theories about the extinction of most Mediterranean states and cultures around the reign of Pharaon Rameses III (+1155 BC), except his own Egypt, from the Myceneans to the Hittites and Babylonians. The few Ancienr records, mainly his, confirm a dark age of famine and invasions form unidentified 'sea people'. Yet none of the advanced disasters and wars accounts for the synchronicity. Then climatic records made it all fit, as drought resulting from temperature drop explain all storms and famine-driven migrations while...

The first millennium BC saw in and around the Mediterranean an unprecedented growth in demography, economy, technology and politics, resulting in the first true superpower. A milder climate and the discovery of iron enabled a revolution in productivity, literally feeding urbanization and the establishment of stronger states. The dispersed Greeks lived in city states near (natural) sea ports and championed maritime trade and colonization, like Phoenicians. Only Athens managed to become the early metropolis, until Alexander the Great's Macedonian dynasty united Greece ...

The Roman empire grew and prospered unprecedented by combining exemplary organization, technological advances and military skills with fortunate climate in its 'Golden Age', virtually unifying the Mediterranean world under its 'Pax Romana'. Then it even coped with a major pandemic, possible small pocks, wiping out several over its about 50 million inhabitants. Having stabilized its expanse towards Rhine and Danube, it suffered the effects of worse climate, causing major Germanic and other migrations from the east and north and weakening it as did the much worse pest ...