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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“for the Israelites are among the groups of peoples who will make up a new world order,”
― 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

“scholars have recently pointed out that many of the city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Ugarit in particular, may have been hard-hit by the collapse of the international trade routes, which would have been vulnerable to depredations by maritime marauders. Itamar Singer, for instance, has suggested that Ugarit’s downfall may have been due to “the sudden collapse of the traditional structures of international trade, which were the lifeblood of Ugarit’s booming economy in the Bronze Age.” Christopher Monroe of Cornell University has put this into a larger context, pointing out that the wealthiest city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean were the hardest-hit by the events taking place during the twelfth century BC, since they were not only the most attractive targets for the invaders but also the most dependent on the international trade network. He suggests that dependence, or perhaps overdependence, on capitalist enterprise, and specifically long-distance trade, may have contributed to the economic instability seen at the end of the Late Bronze Age.17”
― 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

“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

“Moreover, it is especially relevant that the kingdoms, empires, and societies of the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean can each be seen as an individual sociopolitical system. As Dark says, such “complex socio-political systems will exhibit an internal dynamic which leads them to increase in complexity.… [T]he more complex a system is, the more liable it is to collapse.”25”
― 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

“Monroe’s words might serve as something of a warning for us today, for his description of the Late Bronze Age, especially in terms of its economy and interactions, could well apply to our current globalized society, which is also feeling the effects of climate change.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“It is while they were waiting to set sail from Aulis for the second time that a tragic series of events, immortalized by the later Greek playwrights, took place. Because the goddess Artemis, for reasons best known to herself, had sent winds that prevented the fleet from sailing, the increasingly impatient Agamemnon took measures that we would regard as rather extreme. He planned to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia in order to placate the goddess. The Cypria, however, puts a pleasant spin on these events, stating that Artemis snatched Iphigenia away at the last minute, making her immortal, and left a stag on the altar in her place, much as Isaac was replaced by a ram during the intended sacrifice by Abraham, as related in Genesis 22 of the Hebrew Bible. Euripides”
― Eric H. Cline, The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction

“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

“an inscription that dates to 1207”
― 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

“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

“Maxwell Miller and John Hayes [...] have pointed out that if “six hundred thousand fighting men” left Egypt, then altogether there would have been about 2.5 million people who left Egypt at that time, since most of the “fighting men” would have had wives, and most of the couples would have had several children. Add in the assorted others the Bible says were also present, and we have easily 2.5 million people taking part in the Exodus. As Miller and Hayes note, if this were the case, the Israelites would have formed a line 150 miles long, marching ten across, and would have taken “eight or nine days to march by any fixed point.”

A line of escaped slaves 150 miles long certainly makes the crossing of the Red Sea very problematic, for Moses would have had to keep the water parted for nearly nine days for all his people to cross safely. Moreover, as Miller and Hayes note, we can only begin to imagine the logistics involved in keeping 2.5 million people alive in the desert for 40 years, especially if they are reduced to eating manna and quail upon occasion. However, it is unlikely that the Egyptians would have had that many Hebrew slaves in the first place, no matter when the Exodus took place (and if they had, the slaves probably would have revolted even earlier!).”
― Eric H. Cline, From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible