On Golden Ages Dark Ages

So I've just arrived on a boat into Athens. It's a beautiful day, it's going to be fantastic and it's just dawned on me that there's no fortifications to get past, there's no defences, there's no castles. Crossed over the sea all the way from Cyprus, no worries whatsoever, no pirates and that in itself is very unique in history. This is one of those ages where everything is okay on the sea. It's one of those rare times in history, like during the Roman age, like during the height of the Mycenaean period, the height of the Minoan period, where piracy is not a thing in the Aegean. So if this isn't a golden age then I don't know what is. Now let's go to Athens. Well then, I've just arrived at the Athens Archaeology Museum. It's a pretty beautiful place, everything's intact, nothing's been looted, which I mean it's pretty rare. It's pretty rare in history that all this stuff is amassed in one place. There's very little in the way of guards to protect it. I mean there's a few guards in there but really in many periods of history a group of armed men could just go in there and take everything and then sell it on. We're in a golden age people, people don't realise this, you know. But why am I banging on about golden ages? Well a couple of years ago I went around Crete and I was lucky enough to go with a very eminent historian and archaeologist and he made the point that there are ages in history where people live higher on citadels, away from the shore to protect themselves from pirates and that's most of history. You look at the Aegean, that's a lot of it and then there are ages which he called golden ages where people live down by the shore. They're not afraid of pirates, there's no worries there and we're in one of those, we're in one of those right now. So basically this is an interesting way of looking at the history of the Aegean and it's been noted for as long as people have looked at the Aegean. In the 1800s when archaeologists first began looking at these things they noted that there were certain periods where everything was linked up, trade was possible, trade was flourishing and we're in one of those right now, for the time being anyway. So more or less what we have, as soon as the Neolithic begins people begin speaking to each other, trading across vast distances, that's when people begin to accumulate things that other people want. So really it ramps up at the start of the Bronze Age, that's the age where metal begins to show up, people begin to acquire things and on the outside on the periphery the first barbarians begin and they want in, they want the things that these more settled proto-urban communities begin to accumulate and in good times the barbarians don't really get a look in besides maybe being swords for hire, things like this, but in bad times that's when things can really go wrong, that's when these outsiders, these peripheral people come in and very often take over the initial society that they were kind of preying on. And it happens all through history, it begins in this kind of age of firsts in the Bronze Age and it goes all the way through. So loads of people have spoken about this throughout history, you've got most famously possibly Toynbee, who's this guy who talks about the rise and fall of civilizations and it's like rise and fall, rise and fall, keeps going on through time, you have an apogee, a golden age followed by a dark age which continues on and you know there's something to that, there really is, over and over again, over and over and over again. The guy in the Islamic world as well, Ibn Khaldun I think he's called, says the same thing, this rise and fall and his idea was kind of in the context of the Almoravids in Spain, who were these guys who basically they were peripheral people, bad times came in and they took charge in Spain, but after only a few generations they themselves became weak and were replaced by more newcomers from North Africa, so that's the kind of like weak man, strong man thing, a cyclical thing that carries on through. So the early Bronze Age happens, people are doing well, they have things, they're making art, they're making big settlements all through the Aegean and then at the end of the early Bronze Age it all begins to fall apart, there's this period called the Kastri phase where hilltop citadels become the norm with fortified walls, these horseshoe bastions which kind of originate in Anatolia and before that they originate in Syria and the Levant, they end up in the Aegean where the people came with them, we don't know, but the architecture certainly did, which means people had to defend themselves, people for the first time were aware of warfare and piracy, they were protecting themselves on these big fastnesses on top of hills, places like Kastri on Syros, Panormos on Naxos and Mount Kithnos on Delos and others too. So this flourishing prosperous trading society comes to an end, people go live up on high on hills and no longer down by the shore. Eventually a few generations pass and we have a new society forming, first the Philokope culture of Melos and later on the Minoans of Crete, some of the most astonishing people of the ancient world, completely incredible stuff coming out of Crete at that time, huge palaces influenced by Egypt, you know the inspiration for the labyrinth of Greek mythology where King Minos is said to have held the Minotaur, it's awesome stuff. And then the Minoans, according to Thucydides, the Greek 5th century BC historian who wrote most famously of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta, also had much to say about the history of the Aegean Sea which, you know, he called home and he speaks of King Minos having cleared the sea specifically of pirates entering into a new age of thalassocracy which is sea empire and that's pretty interesting isn't it? So the pirates in this age where we can actually see what's going on with this history, you know, there's written records that he calls them pirates. Obviously he was talking about an earlier age but there's some memory that survives whereas for that earlier early Bronze Age society memory doesn't even survive, myths don't even survive, so all we have for that is archaeology. But it does seem likely that piracy probably existed at that time too, you know, Kastri for example, there's evidence and Panormos as well, there's evidence of bronze arrowheads, you know, and spear points and also burned layers of ash where the the citadels were destroyed basically at the end of their existence. So we've come to the Minoans, unfortunately the Minoans are then wiped out by something no one could have predicted, natural disaster. The island of Santorini completely explodes essentially wiping out the city of Akrotiri on Thera and launching a tidal wave all the way to Minoan Crete where people suffered immensely, you know, for years they were thought to be a completely peaceful society until victims of cannibalism were found in the archaeological record at Cretan sites. Pretty grim, pretty grim, but needs must I suppose. So the Minoan period comes to an end and who takes over? The Mycenaean Greeks, and you know you could call these guys pirates to begin with, but essentially they form a flourishing civilization which was massively inspired by the Minoans who came before them. So they become the new big dogs, they become the new players on the scene. And what happens then? Well at the end of the Mycenaean age after another flourishing period of trade and outside connections, you know, they were in Egypt and they were in Mesopotamia and all this and they had contacts with all these, you know, the Hittites of Anatolia and they were sending messages across the known world. They were considered one of the great powers for a time in the club of great powers alongside the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians. But old things must end. In the 12th century BC pretty much all of their palatial centers were put to the torch, burned down in an era of chaos known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse. And this is a time where we have direct written evidence. At Medinet Habu in Egypt, the huge mortuary complex of the pharaoh Ramesses III who did battle in the Nile Delta against seaborne invaders. These weren't just pirates anymore, this was an armada of sea marauders. These were pirate empires who founded new states based from the ashes of their defeated foes. And now we enter another period where people had to live up high on top of citadels once more. Finally after hundreds and hundreds of years the Greek polices of the classical age begin to show up. And there were many of these guys but a lot of them were walled. They weren't a united people in the same sense as the Minoans before them for example who didn't need walls. There's very little evidence of them having any walls. The polices had walls, they often warred with each other and piracy existed. Then for a time with the Athenian supremacy over the seas piracy may well have been wiped out. We have evidence of some Skyrian pirates for example being taken out by Themistocles and massacred. You could say the Athenians had a golden age, they were doing pretty well. Then there's another period of chaos, the Romans actually sponsor some pirates, the Greeks too sponsor some pirates. Mithridates sends his pirate lords to destroy the island of Delos in the first century BC, ravaging the place, selling its entire population to slavery, the ones who survived. And then finally who comes in to mop up the rest of the pirates but flipping Julius Caesar himself and Pompey the Great, clearing the Mediterranean of pirates and ushering in possibly the most glorious golden age of all. The Romans of course, they liked walls but they tended to only have walls in their later ages. Londinium for example was walled in the third century AD I believe, same as Rome, when at that point you know the golden age thing had kind of worn off a bit and barbarians were at the gates again. But in the first couple of centuries of Roman rule things were pretty good, people didn't need to live on top of hills, they could live down by the sea, they could have a port city with you know people coming in from afar, trading, diplomats arriving from all over the world, you'd have geographers traveling across the entirety of the known world. You know Ptolemy for example saw vast amounts in his life, much more than anyone you know for a thousand years to come until the days of Ibn Battuta in the medieval era. So that's a golden age right there and then it's a long time after the Romans fall until there's another golden age, you know piracy becomes a thing once more, particularly in the early middle ages. The Arabs come along, they're the new pirates, they even at one point sail up from Ostia along the Tiber river to attack the outskirts of Rome. Nowhere was safe really at that point and piracy then existed for a long time afterwards. You even have you know Icelandic people being taken by Barbary corsairs to North Africa to be sold onto the Middle Eastern slave market and of course before that the Vikings were enslaving everybody. So it took a long time and then finally by say the 1800s piracy is kind of rare now. You've got pirates off the shores of Somalia but not here, not in the Aegean. The Aegean has been cleared of pirates once more but for how long?