Eric H. Cline > Quotes

“Unfortunately, identifying Ramses II as the pharaoh of the Exodus, which is the identification most frequently found in both scholarly and popular books, does not work if one also wishes to follow the chronology presented in the Bible.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“In a complex system such as our world today, this is all it might take for the overall system to become destabilized, leading to a collapse.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“We must now turn to the idea of a systems collapse, a systemic failure with both a domino and multiplier effect, from which even such a globalized international, vibrant, intersocietal network as was present during the Late Bronze Age could not recover.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“But what factor, or combination of factors, may have caused the famine(s) in the Eastern Mediterranean during these decades remains uncertain. Elements that might be considered include war and plagues of insects, but climate change accompanied by drought is more likely to have turned a once-verdant land into an arid semidesert.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“the question of whether the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt was an actual event or merely part of myth and legend also remains unanswered at the moment .. alternative explanations of the Exodus story might be correct. They include the possibility that the Israelites took advantage of the havoc caused by the Sea Peoples in Canaan to move in and take control of the region; that the Israelites were actually part of the larger group of Canaanites already living in the land; or that the Israelites had migrated peacefully into the region over the course of centuries .. the Exodus story was probably made up centuries later, as several scholars have suggested. In the meantime, it will be best to remain aware of the potential for fraud, for many disreputable claims have already been made about events, peoples, places, and things connected with the Exodus. Undoubtedly more misinformation, whether intentional or not, will be forthcoming in the future.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“One tablet, for instance, is concerned with the ice that Zimri-Lim was using in his summer drinks, which included wine, beer, and fermented barley-based drinks flavored with either pomegranate juice or licorice-like aniseed.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“As Jamie Shreeve of National Geographic describes it, this required going through a passageway known as Superman’s Crawl, which is less than ten inches high and can be traversed only if you hold one arm tight against your body and extend the other above your head, like Superman when he is flying; then climbing up a vertical wall of jagged rock called the Dragon’s Back; and then, after a number of other twists and turns, finally squeezing through a passage that at one point narrows to only seven and a half inches wide, before reaching the Dinaledi Chamber in which the bones lie.”
― Eric H Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology

“Sometimes it takes a large-scale wildfire to help renew the ecosystem of an old-growth forest and allow it to thrive afresh.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Joseph Maran, of the University of Heidelberg, has further noted that, although we don’t know how contemporaneous the final destructions actually were in Greece, it is clear that after the catastrophes were over, “there were no palaces, the use of writing as well as all administrative structures came to an end, and the concept of a supreme ruler, the wanax, disappeared from the range of political institutions of Ancient Greece.”4”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Such is the nature of archaeology - an ongoing mystery tale whose plot slowly unfolds.”
― Eric H. Cline

“According to Ramses’s inscriptions, no country was able to oppose this invading mass of humanity. Resistance was futile. The great powers of the day—the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the Cypriots, and others—fell one by one. Some”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“seismic disasters known as earthquake storms,”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“There is also an unrelated inscription at the site of Gezer”
― Eric H. Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations

“For instance”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“a bacterium named H. pylori that can cause ulcers. The bacterium may provide a clue to human migration patterns, for it is an Asian strain, and not the more usual Asian-African hybrids present in today’s European population. This discovery suggests that the additional migrations that brought African strains to Europe had not yet taken place by Ötzi’s time.”
― Eric H Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology

“The well-known bust of Nefertiti was found by Ludwig Borchardt”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“A major battle between the Hittites and the Egyptians was fought at the site of Qadesh in the year 1274 BC,”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“There can be problems with measuring rehydroxylation”
― Eric H Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology

“we are, in fact, more susceptible than we might wish to think. At”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“In the survey released in February 2020 cited at the beginning of this book, one respondent noted the interrelatedness of the factors involved in our own current world situation, writing: “While extreme climate events are weakening the societal governance and infrastructure, food and water security will become more and more serious, causing large-scale immigration and further inequity. If several geopolitical crises occur in parallel, many states cannot handle the situation properly, due to lack of resources and with the internal conflict, it would cause catastrophic outcomes all over the world.”13 The parallels between events in our modern world and what happened during the Bronze Age Collapse in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean were already readily apparent, but now we need also to take into consideration the catastrophic direct effects of the COVID-19 virus and the ripple effects of the contagion on financial and economic systems that went global at about the same time as the release of the survey.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“the pankration, a no-holds-barred martial art event akin to today’s kickboxing or perhaps a combination of karate and judo, in which everything was allowed, except for biting, eye-gouging, and scratching”
― Eric H Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology

“One tablet”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“There is also a new and very important DNA study”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“an inscription that dates to 1207”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“none of these individual factors would have been cataclysmic enough on their own to bring down even one of these civilizations, let alone all of them. However, they could have combined to produce a scenario in which the repercussions of each factor were magnified, in what some scholars have called a “multiplier effect.”95 The failure of one part of the system might also have had a domino effect, leading to failures elsewhere. The ensuing “systems collapse” could have led to the disintegration of one society after another, in part because of the fragmentation of the global economy and the breakdown of the interconnections upon which each civilization was dependent. In 1987, Mario Liverani, of the University of Rome, laid the blame upon the concentration of power and control in the palaces, so that when they collapsed, the extent of the disaster was magnified. As he wrote, “the particular concentration in the Palace of all the elements of organization, transformation, exchange, etc.—a concentration which seems to reach its maximum in the Late Bronze Age—has the effect of transforming the physical collapse of the Palace into a general disaster for the entire kingdom.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Carol Bell, a British academician, has recently observed that “the strategic importance of tin in the LBA [Late Bronze Age] … was probably not far different from that of crude oil today.”3 At that time, tin was available in quantity only from specific mines in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan and had to be brought overland all the way to sites in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and north Syria, from where it was distributed to points farther north, south, or west, including onward across the sea to the Aegean. Bell continues, “The availability of enough tin to produce … weapons grade bronze must have exercised the minds of the Great King in Hattusa and the Pharaoh in Thebes in the same way that supplying gasoline to the American SUV driver at reasonable cost preoccupies an American President today!”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“more than the drought and climate change that may have been ravaging these areas during this period, what we see are the results of a systems collapse that brought down the flourishing cultures and peoples of the Bronze Age.6”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“In an interesting, and unexplained, related piece of trivia, the actor Brad Pitt now reportedly has a tattoo of Ötzi on his left forearm—Hollywood meets archaeology?”
― Eric H Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology

“Renfrew noted the general features of systems collapse, itemizing them as follows: (1) the collapse of the central administrative organization; (2) the disappearance of the traditional elite class; (3) a collapse of the centralized economy; and (4) a settlement shift and population decline. It might take as much as a century for all aspects of the collapse to be completed, he said, and noted that there is no single, obvious cause for the collapse.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“According to Joseph Tainter, who literally wrote the book on the collapse of complex societies, “collapse is fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed