After 1177 BC – The Survival of Civilisations

This is the sequel to the author's 1177 BC that chronicled the collapse of late Bronze Age civilisations in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. It poses a question similar to Jared Diamond in his 2006 book Collapse – what makes for the survival or demise of civilisations? Needless to say, there are lessons for our time of instability and potential collapse. Resilience is central in any event, and survival strategies are on the spectrum from coping, adaptation, transition, and transformation. Moreover, the three central factors of resilience are complexity, flexibility and systemic redundancy. A series of chapters takes the reader through this history, and there is a detailed chart comparing the relative resilience of different societies from that era. Collapse is survivable, provided we have the necessary capacity to cope, adapt, and transform, and in this respect the example of indigenous cultures may prove to be critical. The book could have benefited from the work of many thinkers who have considered cycles of rise and decline of cultures, especially moral and spiritual factors – Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin and Nicholas Hagger among others – however, there are many insights relevant to our own predicament.