We live, as we’re often told, in the era of glob­al­iza­tion. In fact, we’ve been told it so often over the past few decades that it now hard­ly seems like an obser­va­tion worth mak­ing. But how­ev­er thor­ough­ly our era is defined by con­nec­tions between far-flung nations, soci­eties, economies, and cul­tures, we should­n’t flat­ter our­selves into think­ing we are pio­neers in a whol­ly new glob­al­ized real­i­ty. As clas­si­cist Eric Cline explains in this recent Big Think inter­view, an inter­con­nect­ed world flour­ished in the late Bronze Age, and espe­cial­ly the four­teenth and thir­teenth cen­turies BC. “Life was pret­ty good” in those days, he says, at least if you lived in one of the lands around the Mediter­ranean and Near East that con­sti­tut­ed what he calls the “ancient G8.” The mem­ber peo­ples of this ret­ro­spec­tive orga­ni­za­tion includ­ed the Myce­naeans and Minoans in Greece, the Hit­tites in mod­ern-day Turkey, the Assyr­i­ans and the Baby­lo­ni­ans in mod­ern-day Iraq, as well as the Cypri­ots, Egyp­tians, and Canaan­ites. Alas, as implied by the title of Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civ­i­liza­tion Col­lapsed, their …