Tomorrow Never Dies: Post-Palatial Memories of the Aegean Late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean

Abstract

The oldest words for future in Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Hittite, and ancient Greek can be translated as the back of the day or that, which is behind you. Thus, the future has always been conceived in terms of its relationship to the past. Although the act of remembering the past may lead to remorse and trauma, it can also create a sense of stability through nostalgia, identity maintenance, and belonging. One of us (Hitchcock under submission) has proposed that the Late Bronze Age collapses not from any one catastrophe, but that its social and political structures could not withstand the multiplicity of the changes confronting it. Drought, famine, disease, earthquakes, piracy, and popular ..