TecC 20 - Systems Scaling, Systems Shattered

From Command to Collapse: Tracing innovation’s hidden vulnerabilities and points of failure

Jun 13, 2025

In this series of the study of human innovation and progress, we have started right from the beginning - the very first tools and the very first systems used by humans - what in this technocentric view is referred to as the ‘artefactual’ and ‘institutional’ technologies. While things have seemed hunky-dory so far - with (seemingly) steady progress going beyond Stone Age, where it was somewhat slow-going but still consequential, to the relatively more rapid Bronze Age, with the emergence of large civilizations built on the top of great artefactual and institutional progress such as bronze, horses and large trading networks spanning continents, in reality things are never that straightforward. Today, as part of this series, we’ll look at just the opposite: collapse and contraction.

In fact, and I hope I’ve done a tiny bit to redress this, the developments of the Bronze Age were far more sophisticated and far-reaching than we know or we give credit for. But we are not to blame, part of the reason we are unaware or unappreciative of the sheer scale of achievement in the Bronze Age is that it all came crashing down - a good part of the greatest achievements of the age was lost, suddenly and inexplicably sometimes irrecoverably, or at least diminished severely, only to leave behind, in many areas, what historians tend to call a dark age, with comparable elements of progress, e.g., writing, disappearing and independently reemerging only centuries later.

Furthermore, as you’d’ve gathered reading articles in this series, this is not a study of history per se,1 but an attempt to explore how human progress, by way of the artefacts and institutions we developed over the millennia, came about, and we cannot get a full picture of it without looking at cases where things failed miserably, or even went into reversal. And that will have a lot to teach us not just of the past but also the present.

Building Bedrock, Bucking the Odds

Many of the achievements of the Bronze Age become all the more astonishing when we recognize that they were against the backdrop of a bunch of seemingly2 adversarial or downright inhospitable circumstances.

We saw for example in the previous episode how the people of the Indus Valley Civilization built an elaborate, sophisticated system of water management including covered drains from every single dwelling for hygienic waste disposal, elements of which in many parts of the globe have been replicated only some 4500 years later. Or not even then! But this was a civilization built upon the somewhat challenging nature of the river system - that of the Indus and its tributaries, that was the foundation, almost literally the bedrock, of the entire civilizational undertaking that lasted 7 centuries at its peak.

There were similar related constraints in other parts of this world, such as in the Aegean, with poor, rock soil, with mountains and limited arable lands; Cyprus, the epicenter of copper extraction, with limited freshwater resources and periodic drought conditions; the mighty Hittite empire we saw as one of the tricontinental trading trendsetters in TecC 18 was based on the Central Anatolian plateau, which can be described as a harsh, semi-arid region with little rainfall prone to seismic activity.

There were other resource constraints such as wood shortages as deforestation progressed, which would strain production in areas such as ship-building. But perhaps the most consequential one was what made the Bronze Age the bronze age in the first place.

Rare Earth, Rarer Worlds

We saw in An Alloyed Good, TecC 14 that bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper was generally available, especially as in just-mentioned Cyprus – in fact we get our word ‘copper’ from the name of the island. But tin, a tenth of what goes into the making of bronze, was another story altogether. Tin was rare. It had to be sourced from what is today Afghanistan, which we know is a very difficult terrain, or from Cornwall, Great Britain, which was somewhat remote for people of the Ancient Near East.3

As I’ve touched upon previously, bronze production was thus founded on the refinement of the institutional technology of trade networks, which were quite elaborate and sprawling all across the Ancient Near East and the wider Bronze-Age world from the Indus Valley in the east to the lands hugging the Mediterranean in the west. But this was their biggest strength, and as we’ll see, likely their biggest weakness.

Beaming Brilliance and Brewing Trouble

Let’s now quickly recap the achievements of the Bronze Age civilizations, in essence a summary of artefactual and institutional progress I covered in the last 8 episodes (the direct achievements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans are slightly tangential here in the sense that they were not an urban ‘civilization’ and did not undergo the ‘calamitous end’ of the type we are discussing here - the Proto-Indo-Europeans or their legacy in a (different) way still lives on).

An advanced writing system and institution maintained by a dedicated class of scribes overseeing its use in the affairs of the state (bureaucracy, law, taxes), commerce and international treaties
Advanced maritime technology including sophisticated shipbuilding techniques and navigational knowledge
Palace centers acting as hubs of artistic innovation, specialized craftsmanship and production, in addition to advanced and centralized administration.
A sprawling system of trade networks with a large number of materials and specialized goods traded via sea and land routes spanning continents
Extensive diplomatic networks with elaborate gift exchange systems, royal correspondences and even treaties and international relationships buttressed by royal marital alliances
Advanced metallurgical knowledge and practice making for the production of sophisticated bronze tools and weapons
Monumental architecture and complex religious and ritual systems reflecting sophisticated social organization

Despite all this, in the 1200s BCE, within a period of decades, many of the mighty empires that flourished for several centuries disappeared or were reduced to a frail shadow of their former selves.

What happened? We don’t know enough to be sure in all the fine details. The conventional explanation has been the marauding invasions of the so-called Sea Peoples, as described by the Egyptians in their account of having defeated the invasion, a feat that the Mycenaeans and the Hittites could not boast off. I’m inclined to think that that so-called invasion was a symptom of an on-going degradation rather than its cause, perhaps the last straw.

There have been environmental factors identified, including a prolonged period of drought as deduced from geological evidence from the period. And there is the connection of a large volcanic eruption in Iceland, the Hekla 3 Eruption which, with some ongoing dispute, has been dated to 1159 BCE or at least at some point ± in that century, which in an incidence of local or Global Cooling blocked out the sun for several years, even decades, devastating crops and leading to famine. There is also speculation around disease and warfare, and there is still much more research to be done in all these areas to obtain more conclusive answers.

In any case, it’s very likely that this was a combination of factors acting together to wreak such havoc on an unprecedented scale. But large enough to bring down such mighty civilizations?

Points of Failure

I also think it’s more than just the external factors such as the ones mentioned, whether in isolation or combination: there was a combination of internal (or systemic) vulnerabilities, even in an edifice so grand and sophisticated as the agglomeration of these interconnected, interdependent Bronze-Age empires, that conspired to bring many of them down. The external factors might have been triggers – droughts and invasions and other problems were not new, they always existed, but it was something more severe and fundamental than that. I propose it was ultimately a ‘systems collapse’.

A chief culprit here is likely centralization. Writing as we’ve seen, the key enabling technology of much of all this, was the preserve of a small elite (the hiero- in ‘hieroglyph’ means ‘holy, sacred’ and you can see the connotation of writing being a preserve of the priestly class). The centralized ‘palace economies’ alluded to would go hand in hand with such exclusivity: the ruling class, including the top dog, micromanaged the economic affairs (having a tight grip on the flow of information given control of writing and thus record-keeping). Thus a Mycenaean ruler was in some sense a CEO overseeing day-to-day commercial affairs.

The interdependence I have mentioned, which generally widens the pool from which talents can be drawn and thus can be described as a strength, at some point ended up becoming a weakness too. In particular, when all of what we may call the Bronze Age was based on the sourcing of the scarce material of tin via trade routes to far-away lands, any breakdown in the trading pattern, which in itself might have been because of some of the external factors, meant that these large empires that built their might on bronze couldn’t make that material any more.4

This is not about some remote civilizations far removed from us in time space that came and went: within our lifetime, we have had two systemic events - in 2008 and 2020, with huge repercussions and ramifications. So what can we learn from all this?

Things go wrong. It could be for different reasons and factors.

There are sometimes acts of destruction effected at whim, such as Ming China in the 1400s somewhat mysteriously instituting a ‘sea ban’ (Haijin) after at least 6 consequential voyages,5 just shortly before Western Europe was getting ready to set sail across the oceans and ended up reshaping the whole planet over the next five centuries.

Then there are cases of sudden isolation, such as the Tasmanians cut off from the mainland about 12,000 years ago, when rising sea levels split the era from the mainland making it an island, leading to them losing their fishing skills and probably even fire-making.

But surely in a complex and sophisticated internetwork of civilizations such as if not in the bronze age that of ourselves today, such an overarching collapse is unthinkable?

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Vīta Brevis, Wit Artefāctōrum Ætērna

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