Furthur lesson from antiquity

The Mycenaean Civilization came to a sudden and abrupt end around 1200 BC. The age of Heros, the age brought down to us through the poet Homer, the age of the Trojan war was over, and for the next 300 year... nothing. A “dark age” followed the fall of the Mycenaean civilization, population decline and a loss of literacy and cultural ties (art, politics, religion) were systemic. The decline is generally blamed on the successive invasion of the Dorian and Ionian Greeks brandishing their weapons forged of iron against the Bronze age Mycenaeans, but could have been caused by a number of different causes including natural disaster, disease, or famine. The Mycenaean Greeks were highly insular, led by a warrior class, they lived in close proximity and their cities were walled and in close confines. Disease or privation could easily have threatened their basic existence.

However the Mycenaean people were also well traveled and the influences on their culture came from far and wide. Minoan Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian art motifs are all found in archeological digs of the Mycenaean ruins, suggesting that their sphere of influence was also great.

America was once widely known as the “great melting pot” and in many ways our country still reflects this philosophy. Influences from a myriad of cultures can be found in our restaurants, our literature, our movies theaters and coffee bars. In fact the “global economy” means that I can pick up a plate at a local retail store, flip it over and discover that it was just as likely to have been crafted halfway around the world as in our own back yard. Some might argue that this imbalance between what we ourselves produce, and what we import mean that eventually we will become a nation, completely dependent on the imports of others. Already, labor disputes and oil disputes threaten the very nature of our existence. Jobs are exported abroad while we become ever more dependent on the raw materials of other countries. One wonders, what are the things that ultimately threaten great nations? What are the factors that ultimately threaten our nation, modern, great and strong? Dependence on others for jobs and raw materials? Political infighting and corruption? Sometimes the answers seem so impossibly vast in incomprehensible, and other times it might be as simple as the invention of some simple new technology; the wheel, the bow, the atom bomb. When looking back at the past I wonder, what were the powers that threatened the Mycenaean Greeks and overturned their civilization? Perhaps the demise of the Mycenaean people came from the mining of a single ore: iron. Will our dependence on oil help us to fair any better?