The Long Way Back to Ourselves

3.5

The First Networks: Bronze, Incense, Silk

The episode centers on the Uluburun shipwreck, a fourteenth-century-BCE vessel off the Turkish coast carrying roughly ten tons of copper and a ton of tin, the ratio needed to cast bronze, alongside Baltic amber and Egyptian gold. It corrects the image of a continuous Silk Road, noting the name was coined only in the 1870s and goods moved through relay legs between traders who never saw both ends of the chain. You learn the Bronze Age collapse, in which the Hittite kingdom fell and Ugarit was destroyed within two or three generations around 1200 BCE, still resists a single explanation. It closes on iron needing no long-distance network, so the tin trade's collapse broke a monopoly only palaces had held.