Status Updates From After 1177 B.C.: The Surviv...

Really cool, archeologists can posit that post-collapse Knossos remained the largest settlement in the Aegean, measuring the city’s extent by determining where graves were dug as the limits of the city boundaries.

Neat, there were up to 33 different variations of the Phoenician alphabet circulating in the Aegean region before the adoption of a standard Greek lettering, pushing our date of arrival of alphabet back from the 8th to as early as the 11th century BCE (replacing Linear B).

The temporary disappearance of writing in Greece at the end of the Bronze Age is because it was connected to the palatial system (as a means of maintaining inventory, accounts in the palaces). With its collapse and the radical simplification/disintegration of political/state organization, there was simply no position for scribes.

The Assyrian imperial apparatus is responsible for spreading Aramaic into a regional diplomatic language, as they adopted it to manage the conquest and governance of the Arameans.

In fact, the Israel/Levant region is the only one in the Mediterranean/Neat East that saw population rises vs. catastrophic collapses at the start of the Iron Age.

The ancient Israelite settlement in the Levant region was enabled by a respite in climatic conditions that supported olive production and the “recovery of settlement activity” in the wake of broader regional droughts (which had eviscerated local Egyptian influence).