The lecturer begins with a provocative claim: the global-industrial civilization we inhabit is not humanity’s first experience of “modernity.” It is, depending on how strictly one defines the term, either our third fully realized modernity or our fourth serious attempt at it. This reframing forces us to abandon the Whiggish assumption that technological and organizational progress is a single, unbroken arc culminating in the present day. Instead, history reveals a recurring pattern: societies periodically achieve breakthroughs that feel strikingly “modern,” sustain them for centuries, and then collapse—not primarily from external invasion (though that often delivers the final blow), but from internal structural failures.

First Modernity: Ancient Egypt (c. 3100–1070 BCE, especially the New Kingdom)

Ancient Egypt, particularly from the Old Kingdom through the New Kingdom, exhibited traits we instinctively recognize as modern:

1. Large-scale bureaucratic state with specialized administration
2. Formal medical schools and sophisticated surgical practice
3. Advanced mathematics (required for pyramid construction and land surveying after Nile floods)
4. Monumental stone architecture and the invention of the true arch
5. An explosive musical tradition—Egyptians developed nearly every string, wind, and percussion instrument still in use today (with rare exceptions such as the piano and the santur)

Yet this civilization lacked electricity, steam power, or widespread mechanization. Its collapse around the end of the 20th Dynasty (c. 1100 BCE) appears to have resulted from elite complacency: resources were increasingly diverted to lavish tombs, temples, and lifestyles for the pharaoh and priesthood rather than reinvested into adaptive infrastructure or innovation. In the lecturer’s blunt phrasing, “they got rich, they got happy, and they stopped being productive.”

Second Modernity: The Hellenistic World (c. 323–31 BCE)

After Alexander’s conquests, a hybrid Greco-Egyptian-Persian civilization emerged that pushed even further:

1. The Persians had already pioneered the world’s first documented bill of rights (Cyrus Cylinder, c. 539 BCE) and a multi-ethnic imperial administration with limited governmental power.
2. Greek philosophy and democratic experiments were grafted onto this base.
3. At Alexandria, Hero of Alexandria built functional steam engines (the aeolipile), automated theatres, and programmable mechanical devices centuries before the Industrial Revolution.
4. Euclidean geometry, early heliocentric hypotheses, and systematic dissection marked an explosion of formalized knowledge.

This second modernity ended through a two-stage process: first military conquest by Rome (which lacked the same intellectual dynamism), then the deliberate destruction of knowledge infrastructure after Rome’s Christianization—most famously the repeated burnings of the Library of Alexandria and associated institutions.

Third Modernity: The Abbasid Caliphate and the Islamic Golden Age (c. 750–1258 CE)

After the Abbasid revolution overthrew the Umayyads, the Arab-Islamic world constructed what was arguably the most advanced civilization on Earth:

1. Invention or systematization of algebra, algorithms, trigonometry, and early calculus
2. The zero as a mathematical concept
3. Discovery that light travels at a finite speed and that all bodies attract one another gravitationally
4. Systematic optics and the invention of the lens
5. The empirical-experimental method (codified by Ibn al-Haytham)
6. Modern-style hospitals, agricultural revolutions (new crops, irrigation, crop rotation), and urban infrastructure (piped water, sewage systems, street lighting, fast-food stalls) in cities like Baghdad

This golden age received three catastrophic blows in rapid succession:

1. The Crusades (1095–1291) drained resources and fractured cohesion.
2. The Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258—perhaps the single most destructive event in pre-modern history—killed up to 800,000 people in weeks and ended the Abbasid caliphate.
3. The Black Death (c. 1340s–1350s) killed 40–50 % of the remaining population across the Islamic world.

In the vacuum, European powers—having absorbed translated Arab texts brought back by Crusaders and via Sicily and Toledo—launched the Renaissance.

The Contemporary (Fourth) Modernity: 1492–Present

What ties these episodes together is not merely high technology or complex organization, but a cluster of traits: urbanization, specialization of labor, rationalized administration, explosive knowledge production, and the belief that human ingenuity can deliberately reshape the future. Our current modernity, usually dated from Columbus or the fall of Constantinople, inherited translated knowledge from the Arab world, survived its own near-death experience in the 20th century (World Wars, Depression), and now exhibits the same warning signs observed in earlier cases:

1. Extreme concentration of resources among a small elite
2. Environmental and resource strain pushed to breaking points
3. Complacency born of material abundance
4. A cultural nihilism that senses the unsustainability but refuses structural change

The lecturer’s core thesis is grim but historically grounded: civilizations do not collapse because they fail to invent; they collapse when they succeed too well at consumption and forget to reinvest surplus into resilience and adaptation. Egypt built pyramids instead of adaptable irrigation; the Hellenistic world scattered its knowledge rather than institutionalizing it against political risk; the Abbasid world was physically annihilated after reaching a peak its enemies could not tolerate.

We are not the first society to live in a world of medical schools, advanced mathematics, global trade, and urban plumbing. We are merely the latest—and the historical record suggests that “latest” is not the same as “last.” The question is no longer whether the pattern repeats, but how much time remains before the familiar mechanisms of decline assert themselves once again.