The Silence Of Empires

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...