Unsupported Speculation

The Bible contains famous stories about the cities which collapsed during the Bronze Age. What led to these collapses? I believe it was an insufficient level of advancement of technology at the time.

You see, before the Bronze Age, people could only maintain fields of crops of a smaller size because they had no way to make a plow which was of a material with enough tensile strength to allow it to be dragged through the earth by a beast of burden. The best they had was copper, and you could only use a plow, or more precisely an ‘Ard’, once out of copper before it was too deformed to use preparing the field.

How much of a field could be prepared with a copper ard before it was too deformed? I don’t know, but it wasn’t enough for them to do this too often back then, and instead the size of a field was limited to the physical labor ability of actual human beings to prepare it for crops. THUS, this limited the amount of food that could be grown, which in turn limited the size of the human community’s population.

But the way to create the alloy Bronze was found, and they began making ards for cutting furrows into the fields with them. Animals dragged them, and the possible size of the fields grew to a comparatively enormous size to what they were before. This is because people just seeded the furrows as they were cut by the beasts pulling the ards, which wasn’t hard, and by making these fields directly next to the water of rivers or oceans, they were pretty much self watering. Then, the crows grew, and were harvested, and people had more food than they ever had before, and the population increased, and cities became huge.

But having enough food is only one problem of the multiple problems of maintaining the smooth functioning of a large city. The problem is in human psychology, and in the amplified effects of large numbers of people who are subject to laziness, whims, jealousy, anger, irrationality, greed, and ext. ext.

You see, our level of technology today enables us to have a production that completely compensates for the innate unreliability of the population. Not only that, we are not isolated cities anymore, but networks between other cities and resources that span not only the state, but the country, and even potentially the world.

This allows modern cities to completely overcome an upper limit to the size of a city which before would sometimes caused all the random life circumstances and varying psychological states of its inhabitants to reach some threshold, and the unmanageability of much of the tasks required of the city caused it to no longer be organized or governed, and it collapsed.

Whenever this happened, like the fall of Rome, if they survived the chaos, most people trudged off to some other place that hadn’t collapsed, and much less people lived in the slowly decaying remnants of these cities, keeping a few animals, and maintaining their own personal plots of food, foraging from the area, and things returned to a state from well before the once thriving city was built, albeit they could occupy a now vacant building that once was a bank or hair salon.