The Bronze Age, from 3000 BC to 1200 BC, followed the Stone Age and preceded the Iron Age. It began with the Indus Valley Civilization, in what is now India, and spread all the way through Western Asia, Europe, and North Africa, what was thought of as the ancient Near East, and Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq, to the Eastern Mediterranean. The Hittites in Central Anatolia (Turkey) seemed to engage in goddess worship.
I visited a spectacular Anatolian history museum in Ankara that illuminated this history. It is one of the major reasons to include Ankara in a tour of Turkey. The Museum of Anatolian Civilization is full of artifacts going back to the Hittites in the Bronze Age, 10,000 BC, and maybe further back:
Neolithic Mother Goddesses.
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649
Slideshow of Anatolian Museum, Ankara
In this Crash Course lecture, John Green argues that “through a complex network of trade and alliances, there was a loosely confederated and relatively continuous civilization in the region. Why it all fell apart was a mystery. Was it the invasion of the Sea People? An earthquake storm? Or just a general collapse, to which complex systems are prone? We’ll look into a few of these possibilities. As usual with Crash Course, we may not come up with a definitive answer, but it sure is a lot of fun to think about.” Transcript.
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