I would like to discuss about the dark age and how it is this period of history related to our energy problem. The Greek Dark Ages is the period of Greek history from the end of the Mycenaean palatial civilization around 1100 BC to the beginning of Archaic age around 750 BC. (Martin, 2019)
Everything was prosperous during the twelfth century BC and the Dark Age took place unexpectedly. People now days believe that the main cause of the destruction is the evasion from the “Sea People”. but this was only part of the reasons. The ancient Greek also suffered from drought and lack of resources during that time.
Bronze Age was given that name for a reason. Bronze were used to build agriculture equipment, weapons, daily necessities and decorations. One of the main resources to make bronze, tin was a relatively rare element in the Earth’s crust. (about 25000 times less than iron and 35 times less than copper) However, tin was even rarer in Europe. The largest mining zones were the Ore Mountains and apart from there, there are only a few smaller sources in the Balkans. By classical Greek times, the tin sources were well established. Greece and the Western Mediterranean appear to have traded their tin from European sources, while the Middle East acquired their tin from Central Asian sources through the Silk Road (Muhly 1979, p. 45).
According to Dayton, who wrote the “The problem of tin in the ancient world”, The earliest sources of tin in the Early Bronze Age in the Near East are still unknown and the subject of much debate in archaeology Possibilities include minor now-depleted sources in the Near East, trade from Central Asia (Muhly 1979), Sub-Saharan Africa (Dayton 2003), Europe, or elsewhere.” Evidence of tin trade in the Mediterranean can be seen in a number of Bronze Age shipwrecks containing tin ingots such as the Uluburun off the coast of Turkey dated 1300 BC which carried over 300 copper bars weighing 10 tons, and approximately 40 tin bars weighing 1 ton. (Pulak 2001) All the trading places mentioned above were far away during that time and the considered the ship wrecks founded and piracy (Piracy in the ancient Mediterranean has a long documented history, from the Late Bronze Age. "The eastern Mediterranean has been plagued by piracy since the first dawn of history.”(Gabbert,1986)), shipping routes could be really dangerous.
A civilization which developed basing on a single resource could be fragile, not to speak that the resource itself is rare during that time.
2. How is the Dark Ages related to our modern life
Today, environmental scarcity is one of the biggest problems in the world. Environmental degradation decreases the overall amount of a limited natural resource, decreasing the amount available to each individual.
One of the most significant problems is the mineral depletion. Large-scale exploitation of minerals began in the Industrial Revolution around 1760 in England and has grown rapidly ever since. Technological improvements have allowed humans to dig deeper and access lower grades and different types of ore over that time. Virtually all basic industrial metals (copper, iron, bauxite, etc.), as well as rare earth minerals, face production output limitations from time to time, because supply involves large up-front investments and is therefore slow to respond to rapid increases in demand. According to statistics, numerous natural resources will enter production decline during the future: gasoline in 2023, copper in 2024, aluminum in 2057, coal in 2060 and iron in 2068. It is just a matter of time before the mines run out.
In western China, overgrazing in portions of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has combined with drought to degrade precious topsoil over the past several years. Especially from the 50s to the 70s last century, the government encouraged farmers to raise as many sheep as possible in the name of increasing production. Thousands of sheep were sent to the grassland and wolves were hunted down. Herders used to migrate every season to let the grass grow back, now they had so many sheep in the region that there were no longer spare grasslands to immigrate to. Within years, grass turned to dessert and Chinese scientists estimate that 900 square miles of land in the region degrade into desert each year. As a result, herders and farmers have found it increasingly difficult to earn a living in the area. In the late 1990s, the impacts of grassland degradation drew increasing attention from Chinese scientists and policymakers, when drought in the Yellow River basin brought more frequent dust storms and sandstorms from western China and Yangtze River floods adversely affected the health and economic well-being of eastern China’s population. (Harris, 2010) As the time passed by, the grassland degradation was no longer the problem of a single region, but effected the whole country. By the time people realized this, it was already too late. They depended on the natural resources too much and they finally did things irreversible to the environment.
In China, there is a definition called the Resource-exhausted city, which described cities depend on single natural resources to develop and are suffering from severe environmental and economic problems. There are 118 resource-based cities in the country and by the time of 2012, 69 of them were defined as Resource-exhausted city, which raised over 154 million people. That was nearly 10 percent of China’s total population. Millions of them were forced to leave their homelands and make a living elsewhere. Some cities were even abandoned and became so-called ghost city.
As the demand of human grows bigger, the environmental scarcity problem grows with it. Is there anything we can do to avoid the disaster?
3. Conclusion
It was nearly impossible for the ancient Greek to avoid entering the Dark Ages. They did not have the knowledge about environmental scarcity, and they could not foresee the incoming drought nor the invasion of the “Sea People”. When the catastrophe arrived, all they could do was watching helplessly when their homes were burnt to the ground and their lands be taken by the invaders. However, we do not need to follow their footsteps.
The Ruhr in Germany was one of the greatest industrial landscape since the 19th century. In the 1950s, due to the decreasing demand for coal and iron, and the increasing environmental problem, the economy in Ruhr started to decline. The area went through phases of structural crisis and industrial diversification, first developing traditional heavy industry, then moving into service industries and high technology. The air and water pollution of the area are largely a thing of the past although some issues take a long time to solve.( De Ridder,2008)
As for the resource-exhausted cities, the government has already found ways replace these unrenewable industries. Today, we are no longer helpless against the environmental scarcity problem.
In China, Taizong, the Empire of the Tang Dynasty once said: “take history as a mirror, I will know how the things rise and fall.” In the past, the ancient Greek depended on bronze to develop and because of the lack of resources and intrusion, the civilization of the Bronze Age disappeared. Studying this period of history can remind us of protecting the natural resources and encourage us to find multiple ways to develop the economy. By remembering the Dark Ages, combining it with our own experience and the help of modern technology, we can certainly do better than the ancient Greek did.
Sources
Martin, Thomas R., (October 3, 2019). "The Dark Ages of Ancient Greece": "...The Near East recovered its strength much sooner than did Greece, ending its Dark Age by around 900 B.C...The end of the Greek Dark Age is traditionally placed some 150 years after that, at about 750 B.C..." Retrieved October 24, 2020
Dayton, J.E. (1971), "The problem of tin in the ancient world", World Archaeology, 3 (1), pp. 49–70, doi:10.1080/00438243.1971.9979491
Dayton, J.E. (2003), "The problem of tin in the ancient world (part 2)", in Giumlia-Mair, A.; Lo Schiavo, F. (eds.), The Problem of Early Tin, Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 165–170, ISBN 1-84171-564-6
Pulak, C. (2001), "The cargo of the Uluburun ship and evidence for trade with the Aegean and beyond", in Bonfante, L.; Karageogrhis, V. (eds.), Italy and Cyprus in Antiquity: 1500–450 BC, Nicosia: The Costakis and Leto Severis Foundation, pp. 12–61, ISBN 9963-8102-3-3
Drielsma, Johannes A; Russell-Vaccari, Andrea J; Drnek, Thomas; Brady, Tom; Weihed, Pär; Mistry, Mark; Perez Simbor, Laia (2016). "Mineral resources in life cycle impact assessment—defining the path forward". Int J Life Cycle Assess. 21 (1): 85–105. doi:10.1007/s11367-015-0991-7.
De Ridder K. et al., 2008. Simulating the impact of urban sprawl on air quality and population exposure in the German Ruhr area. Part I: Reproducing the base state. Atmospheric Environment 42,7059–7069
Gabbert, Janice J. "Piracy in the Early Hellenistic Period: A Career Open to Talents", Greece & Rome 33 (2) (October 1986): 156-63. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S001738350003031X