The Tom Veitch Files

33. By 1220 B.C., mighty and rich civiliza- tions had held sway in Greece and the Near East for many centuries. But beginning around that time, many of these powers met violent fates. Scholars have offered various causes for this concatenation of disasters known as the end of the region’s Bronze Age (the period before iron came into common use). Now Robert Drews, a scholar known for bold hypotheses, presents a military expla- nation of stunning simplicity and clarity. Like Thucydides, Drews argues in The End of the Bronze Age that his subject is sig- nificant because its violence was so fear- some. He even tops the Athenian historian’s claim that the Peloponnesian War was the worst in Greek history by ranking the collapse of the Bronze Age civ- ilizations as “arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the western Roman Empire.” To emphasize the magnitude of the destruction of cities and palaces around the Mediterranean in this period, he labels it the “Catastrophe,” a fair assess- ment of the ruin of the great centers of the eastern Mediterranean world (excepting Egypt and the interior of the southern Lev- ant). The cause of the conflagration, says Drews, was a radical innovation in warfare that “suddenly gave to ‘barbarians’ the military advantage over the long estab- lished and civilized kingdoms of the east- ern Mediterranean.” Simply put, the change was not in technology but in awareness. The foreign mercenaries employed by kings as support for their chariot forces—the basis of the kingdoms’ military strength for centuries—realized that they, the infantry, could defeat the chariot squadrons of their employers. Power shift The mercenary infantrymen of the late 13th century B.C. were armed with the same kind of weapons as always—long swords and javelins—but now they learned how to use them to defeat chariots. Thus, “power suddenly shifted from the Great Kingdoms to motley collections of infantry warriors. These warriors hailed from barbarous, mountainous, or other- wise less desirable lands, some next door to the kingdoms and some far away.” At this turning point in history, the barbarians “awoke to a truth that had been with them for a long time: the chariot-based forces on which the Great Kingdoms relied could be overwhelmed by swarming infantries....” Applying this knowledge, the foot soldiers turned on their erstwhile commanders and plundered their riches. * Space gypsies * JBM (Jedi Battle Meditation) -- a whole “[uncertain: physics?] book” could exist, based on centuries of experience. * [uncertain: Aleema’s?] tarot deck * Luke Skywalker appears in TOJ > Time Gate or > Time Anomaly [margin: [illegible]] [margin: [illegible]]