Why did the Bronze age Near Eastern civilizations stagnate and go extinct?

Anawrahta

Banned
These were some of the most spectacular civilization in a time most humans lived in caves, hunted each other as prey, hunted and foraged. Yet despite their emergence around 3100 BC, they simply stagnated having not developed a form of science, tradition of literacy, philosphical tradition, nor explored neither the west, east, north or southern worlds. The Pharoahs, canaanites, Ugarites, Akkadians, Sumerians, Hurrians, Elamites, Urartians, Alashiya, and Dilmun are in museums and personal collections, whose legacy is to only serve as food for thought of what it could have become?
What happened and can it be fixed?
 

Anawrahta

Banned
So, essentially, you want to avert the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

Developing a scenario where this period does not occur would depend on what you believe actually led to this period.
The greeks collapsed, yet reemerged with strong scientific and philsophical traditions, even being prolific writers and explorers. I'm wondering why can't a similar consequence be replicated in the mesopotamian and egyptian societies.
 
Well, as noted, they did not stagnate. They collapsed.
Then, some of them re-emerged, or successor entities did, quite changed, and technologically more advanced, with a lot of creativity.
In terms of literary traditions, a lot is lost, but fo the times and literacy rates available, they produced impressive literatures. Which left a detectable mark on later developments (especially because the Bible). For what they could, Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians has something that could be plausibly called "science". They clearly were credited by Ancient Greeks, albeit perfunctorily, with having a wisdom that compared with philosophy. In their late phases (already Iron Age) they certainly explored. And even before, Sumer had trade links with the Indus valley already in the Early Bronze.
Their legacy has not disappeared at all. I mean, we still read horoscopes. That's someting based on the astrological practices of Late Kassite Babylon IIRC (so, after the end of the Bronze Age).
 
Well, as noted, they did not stagnate. They collapsed.
Then, some of them re-emerged, or successor entities did, quite changed, and technologically more advanced, with a lot of creativity.
In terms of literary traditions, a lot is lost, but fo the times and literacy rates available, they produced impressive literatures. Which left a detectable mark on later developments (especially because the Bible). For what they could, Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians has something that could be plausibly called "science". They clearly were credited by Ancient Greeks, albeit perfunctorily, with having a wisdom that compared with philosophy. In their late phases (already Iron Age) they certainly explored. And even before, Sumer had trade links with the Indus valley already in the Early Bronze.
Their legacy has not disappeared at all. I mean, we still read horoscopes. That's someting based on the astrological practices of Late Kassite Babylon IIRC (so, after the end of the Bronze Age).

Even so, that is a major point, the poster assumes that what Greece produced was a sole isolated production. Rather, it was the continuation and expansion of what preceded them with a new home and place. Most scholars agree that even without fully understand such, the Hellenes were influenced immensely by the Hittites and their approximates and we know well the influence and contribution to the Hellenes via Babylon, Assyria, etc and from Egypt.
 
Just to throw in - we have literally thousands, wait, tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets from the Bronze Age. The larger problem is finding people to translate them. You are dealing with here over a dozen different languages with varying writing styles that also each evolved over time. Unlike Greek, Hittite or Akkadian do not have long histories of study in modern linguistics. They were only determining the basic language family affiliation of Hittite in the early 1900s. All that knowledge and culture is there, we just can't read it.

Also, the Canaanites did not vanish, really their brightest moments are all after the collapse. They became not only the Phoenicians, but then the Carthaginians, and the Jews. Everything from the Alphabet, to Larry David can be attributed to a well-attested Bronze Age culture, and both the Alphabet and Larry David can (allegedly for Mr. David) be traced to after the Bronze Age, so they were clearly up to something after the collapse too.

There was also the Assyrians, present throughout the Bronze Age but reached their largest size after the collapse. Really with the Bronze Age collapse you see whats always happened in history. Large-scale regional disasters cause some societies to collapse, others to expand, but they are always changed. Calling it a stagnation across the board misses a lot of counter-examples.

I sorta see what you are getting it, but I think it is based on a reading of the historical situation that is missing out on a lot of historical continuities through the collapse, just because they are not as prominent in western thought as Leonidas, or Socrates.
 
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