I read that Carthage book about 8 years ago and sadly I wasn't a fan. It felt like the author didn't have enough material to work with (understandable) and so he badly padded things out by adding a bunch of material on the pan-Mediterranean cult of Heracles throughout the book. That was kind of interesting but it also felt really off-topic.
What's Cline's take on what drove Egypt's long-term (permanent, it turns out) funk? The nature of their entire civilization seems like it should be able to survive a collapse like that of the Late Bronze Age, and they did, but then just...never really got it back together after that, even though Egypt was consistently a very rich part of whatever foreign conqueror managed to take it over.
I'm not that far into the Carthage book yet (my attention span for nonfiction is highly dependent on how well the baby slept the night before), but yes, I see what you mean. The opening was really good, though!
Cline doesn't really answer the question about Egypt. From his description, it seems like the issue is mostly poor leadership and mismanagement: there's lots of smaller regional administrators or landholders who think they can seize power (and it turns out they can!) with a few episodes of successful pharaohs who can't make it stick after their own deaths. So maybe I should expand my culture / civilization dichotomy to culture / civilization / state -- Egypt kept on Egypt-ing for a very, very long time without ever doing anything particularly impressive again. I might look at Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" again one of these days, I think I got through about two dynasties before I got bored.
Egypt is the most extreme case I know of where a country is extremely fun to learn about as a culture/society but extremely dull to read a narrative history of. Egypt just...doesn't change a lot!
So I finished the book and I disagree with you about the Hercules stuff, I thought it was a really interesting look at the uses of propaganda in an era before political ideology. I don’t know the source material well enough to know if it was AS big a deal as the author portrays it as being, but the multi-civilizational arguments about who’s most thoroughly embodying Heracles (as a way of discussing western Mediterranean colonization) was really interesting.
Perfectly fair! It has been a long time and maybe I'd appreciate it more today. But certainly at the time, I was hoping for a little more meat about Carthage and was annoyed that this book kept talking about Hercules.
Thanks for this delightful essay, and especially for setting out the timeline of Kline's books! I had often wondered why right about 2016, conservative commenters all over the internet started talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse... It's not as if we're lacking for examples of collapses, but nobody talks about the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdown, the breakup of the Han, the downfall of the Tang or the end of the Classical Maya cities!
I do find it hard to grasp the meaning of "... America: a relative backwater, dwarfed by the Great Powers of its day, that suddenly leaps to global prominence when the opportunity arises". How is America in (or after) 2024 AD a relative backwater? The USA dominated the 20th century, they were the sole superpower from 1991 to ca. 2008... By definition, if you're the top dog, the best you can hope for is to maintain your status (or regain it, as Egypt and China did, several times).
Thanks for your answer! Yes, I had wondered if that was what you meant.
To me it looks as if the wave of American strength seems to have crested and been receding since at least 2001, so little need to worry about the negative aspects of future success..
"“Mayor” might become so deeply engrained as the highest title that two thousand years later they would still use it to refer to their emperor."
Fiction use of this idea: In "Canticle for Liebowitz", ~1200 years after a nuclear war, a major regional power in central North America is called the Mayorate of Texarkana
Just how far did those Phoenician explorers travel? There is some rather fun (if historically dubious) speculation about their relationship with the British Celts. At one time or another, various Cornish, Welsh, and Irish have argued that they are, in fact, the descendants of Phoenician explorers.
AFAIK there's no actual evidence for this. There are a lot of claims that they were involved in the Cornish tin trade, but I think they got most of it from Spain instead and played out those mines -- British tin was only a huge deal in the Roman era. Then again, it's totally plausible. The Phoenicians did sail down the Atlantic coast of Africa (see the Periplus of Hanno) and could absolutely have made it up to Britain like Pytheas. John McWhorter thinks the weirdness of the Germanic languages is due to their exposure to Phoenician!
The book I'm reading about Carthage points out that identification with the Phoenicians (and thereby implicitly the Carthaginians) was a way to register opposition to the people who were presently identifying themselves with Rome, namely the British Empire, which sounds about right.
TL;DR: (1) No, there's no evidence that the Phoenicians sailed to the British Isles, but (2) Cornish tin definitely did end up in the Ancient Near East. So there may be a grain of truth in the speculation.
Wonderful review.
Fun topic and a fun review.
I read that Carthage book about 8 years ago and sadly I wasn't a fan. It felt like the author didn't have enough material to work with (understandable) and so he badly padded things out by adding a bunch of material on the pan-Mediterranean cult of Heracles throughout the book. That was kind of interesting but it also felt really off-topic.
What's Cline's take on what drove Egypt's long-term (permanent, it turns out) funk? The nature of their entire civilization seems like it should be able to survive a collapse like that of the Late Bronze Age, and they did, but then just...never really got it back together after that, even though Egypt was consistently a very rich part of whatever foreign conqueror managed to take it over.
I'm not that far into the Carthage book yet (my attention span for nonfiction is highly dependent on how well the baby slept the night before), but yes, I see what you mean. The opening was really good, though!
Cline doesn't really answer the question about Egypt. From his description, it seems like the issue is mostly poor leadership and mismanagement: there's lots of smaller regional administrators or landholders who think they can seize power (and it turns out they can!) with a few episodes of successful pharaohs who can't make it stick after their own deaths. So maybe I should expand my culture / civilization dichotomy to culture / civilization / state -- Egypt kept on Egypt-ing for a very, very long time without ever doing anything particularly impressive again. I might look at Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" again one of these days, I think I got through about two dynasties before I got bored.
Egypt is the most extreme case I know of where a country is extremely fun to learn about as a culture/society but extremely dull to read a narrative history of. Egypt just...doesn't change a lot!
So I finished the book and I disagree with you about the Hercules stuff, I thought it was a really interesting look at the uses of propaganda in an era before political ideology. I don’t know the source material well enough to know if it was AS big a deal as the author portrays it as being, but the multi-civilizational arguments about who’s most thoroughly embodying Heracles (as a way of discussing western Mediterranean colonization) was really interesting.
Perfectly fair! It has been a long time and maybe I'd appreciate it more today. But certainly at the time, I was hoping for a little more meat about Carthage and was annoyed that this book kept talking about Hercules.
Thanks for this delightful essay, and especially for setting out the timeline of Kline's books! I had often wondered why right about 2016, conservative commenters all over the internet started talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse... It's not as if we're lacking for examples of collapses, but nobody talks about the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdown, the breakup of the Han, the downfall of the Tang or the end of the Classical Maya cities!
I do find it hard to grasp the meaning of "... America: a relative backwater, dwarfed by the Great Powers of its day, that suddenly leaps to global prominence when the opportunity arises". How is America in (or after) 2024 AD a relative backwater? The USA dominated the 20th century, they were the sole superpower from 1991 to ca. 2008... By definition, if you're the top dog, the best you can hope for is to maintain your status (or regain it, as Egypt and China did, several times).
I meant America of the early 20th century! And especially after the world wars.
Thanks for your answer! Yes, I had wondered if that was what you meant.
To me it looks as if the wave of American strength seems to have crested and been receding since at least 2001, so little need to worry about the negative aspects of future success..
"“Mayor” might become so deeply engrained as the highest title that two thousand years later they would still use it to refer to their emperor."
Fiction use of this idea: In "Canticle for Liebowitz", ~1200 years after a nuclear war, a major regional power in central North America is called the Mayorate of Texarkana
Ha, I had totally forgotten that! Great minds (me and Miller)…
Just how far did those Phoenician explorers travel? There is some rather fun (if historically dubious) speculation about their relationship with the British Celts. At one time or another, various Cornish, Welsh, and Irish have argued that they are, in fact, the descendants of Phoenician explorers.
AFAIK there's no actual evidence for this. There are a lot of claims that they were involved in the Cornish tin trade, but I think they got most of it from Spain instead and played out those mines -- British tin was only a huge deal in the Roman era. Then again, it's totally plausible. The Phoenicians did sail down the Atlantic coast of Africa (see the Periplus of Hanno) and could absolutely have made it up to Britain like Pytheas. John McWhorter thinks the weirdness of the Germanic languages is due to their exposure to Phoenician!
The book I'm reading about Carthage points out that identification with the Phoenicians (and thereby implicitly the Carthaginians) was a way to register opposition to the people who were presently identifying themselves with Rome, namely the British Empire, which sounds about right.
https://biblicalhistoricalcontext.com/trips/from-cornwall-to-canaan-locating-the-southern-levants-late-bronze-age-source-of-tin/
TL;DR: (1) No, there's no evidence that the Phoenicians sailed to the British Isles, but (2) Cornish tin definitely did end up in the Ancient Near East. So there may be a grain of truth in the speculation.