ping
This might be of interest: http://gizmodo.com/all-hail-histomap-4-000-years-of-history-in-a-single-p-1109857517
It shows only the last 4000 years of what we think we know of civilization. But it is interesting.
Read any Robert Temple?
Also dating Egyptian Old Kingdom is an extremely unreliable base to infer a cycle of some periodicity.
WB Yeats’ Vision as well as Giambattista Vico would be of interest, perhaps....
Civilizations take centuries to build, and only a generation to destroy.
Round about 3000 BC the bronze age ended and the iron age began accompanied by the disappearance of several major areas of civilization and a large reduction in population.
I have looked around can’t find any thing about this in the non nut job world...
And you are looking for answers here?
This place is swarming with nut jobs driven insane
by political campaigning.
Hardly recognize the place.
There is some recent research tying the rise and fall of civilizations with climate cycles. The global warming thing isn’t new, and it actually leads to civilization flourishing. It’s the onset of the colder times when civilizations crash.
I believe that the traditional Chinese dynastic cycle is ~300 years, and there are similar cycles in Europe, India, and Mesopotamia. There are both social and climatic reasons for this cycle, and it is often weather events that are the trigger for the dynastic collapse.
An important note to any studies of cycles is that classical civilizations were frequently shattered by “hill tribes” who would replace the prior ruling classes. This would change in areas under European influence after the fifteenth century. The forces in Europe that pushed this change were technologies that made infantry dominant to cavalry (most of the “hill tribes” were actually steppe nomads), and the European habit of converting and making those tribes men from marginal lands part of the civilization.
I tend to go with weather myself. Three years of crop failure will leave civilization weakened, five will destroy most and seven is flat out not survivable.
Volcanoes are a possibility that somewhat combine both theories.
Eric Cline's book 1177 BC is not a bad read.