Episode
The Silence Of Empires
- Podcast
- Disturbing History
- Published
- Aug 9, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4478
- Processing state
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Summary
Around 1200 BC, a king named Ammurapi dictated a letter from the port city of Ugarit describing seven enemy ships, burned towns, and an army that was somewhere else. That tablet was still sitting in the ruins more than 3,000 years later when a French archaeologist pulled it out of the ash. It's the only case in this entire episode where somebody put the emergency on the record while it was still happening. Everywhere else, the silence is the story. In this episode we work through the civilizations that flourished for 30 generations and then simply stopped, and we look at what the evidence actually shows rather than the version most of us got in school.We cover the Late Bronze Age collapse and the Sea Peoples, including the 3 consecutive drought years that Cornell researchers dated to roughly 1198 through 1196 BC using juniper tree rings, and the discovery that the Hittite capital at Hattusa was emptied of its archives and valuables before anyone set fire to it. We go to Minoan Crete, to the town at Akrotiri that was buried in ash with no bodies and no valuables left in it, and to the disputed sanctuary at Anemospilia, destroyed around 1700 BC, where 4 skeletons were found and no full excavation report was ever published. We take apart Mortimer Wheeler's massacre at Mohenjo-daro, which never happened, and look at what the weakening monsoon and the shifting rivers actually did to the Indus cities between about 2600 and 1900 BC.We spend real time on Rome. The denarius falling from roughly 98 percent silver under Augustus to a coin under 5 percent silver by the 260s AD, copper with a wash thin enough to rub off in your pocket. Something like 26 claimants to the throne in the 50 years between 235 and 284. The pottery, roof tiles, and coffins that vanish from the archaeologi…