ARCHAEOLOGY DESK

IT APPEARS it’s a tale as old as civilization itself: an elite class of drug abusers leading a society down the toilet.

Take you mind back several thousand years, past Mohammed, past Rome, past Jesus, Past Socrates, past Homer (the poet, not the Simpson), to an age when no one used iron. You’re in the Bronze Age, the time of Troy and Helen and all that.

Somewhere between 1200 BC and 1150 BC, it all vanished. No one really knew why, until now.

It appears that the Mediterranean was awash with drugs, and a leadership which thought that it should have exclusive control of society and used drugs to do it.

“I can see it all now,” says Archaeologist Illinois Smith, who is leading the dig that found the evidence. “You went from the heroic to the pathetic in a generation or two. One minute you have Hector and Achilles and Agamemnon, names for the ages; the next you have a society of doped out junkies, full of entitlement and their own importance. And bada bing, it’s all over in an instant.

“And we found the evidence in a toilet, would you believe. Shaman shit, we call it. These boys were out of their minds, hallucinating. And they were in leadership positions. You think you might have heard something like that before?”