Word: mycenaean
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...environmental challenges. Many past societies collapsed partly from their failure to solve problems similar to those we face today--especially problems of deforestation, water management, topsoil loss and climate change. The long list of victims includes the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest, the Maya, Easter Islanders, the Greenland Norse, Mycenaean Greeks and inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, Great Zimbabwe and Angkor Wat. The outcomes ranged from "just" a collapse of society, to the deaths of most people, to (in some cases) everyone's ending up dead. What can we learn from these events? I see four main...
...optimism is the big advantage we enjoy over the Anasazi and other past societies: the power of the media. When the Anasazi were collapsing in the U.S. Southwest, they had no idea that Easter Island was also on a downward spiral thousands of miles away, or that Mycenaean Greece had collapsed 2,400 years earlier. But we know from the media what is happening all around the world, and we know from archaeologists what happened in the past. We can learn from that understanding of remote places and times; the Anasazi didn't have that option. Knowing history...
...Russian rivers. They reached Rome, Baghdad, the Caspian Sea, probably Africa too. Buddhist artifacts from northern India have been found in a Swedish Viking grave, as has a charcoal brazier from the Middle East." The Hagia Sophia basilica in Istanbul has a Viking inscription in its floor. A Mycenaean lion in Venice is covered with runes of the Norse alphabet...
...lose sight of the long centuries -- there were eight of them -- that separate the heroes of the Trojan War from the age of Socrates and Aeschylus, which paid homage to them. Much of what lay between was not an unbroken line of glory but a dim interregnum. The Mycenaean Greece that leveled Troy around 1200 B.C. was itself in ruins a hundred years later, smashed by Dorian invaders from the north. There followed a dark age that lasted three centuries, when even the alphabet was lost, and then a long, slow crawl back up to the light...
...about 7 in. in diameter, is the earliest ever found, and may prove that raw glass, later to be transformed into jewelry or goblets, was being shipped from Syria as early as the 15th century B.C. The unusual mixture of objects appears to be from three different ancient cultures, Mycenaean, Cypriot and Canaanite. "A mix of goods," says Bass, "that puzzles...