Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced, spanning Egypt, Greece, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and beyond, came apart within a single generation.
Historian Eric Cline argues this collapse wasn’t the work of one invading force or one bad harvest, but something far harder to stop: An overly interdependent system that had no way to absorb multiple shocks at once.
0:I’m Eric Cline. I’m an archaeologist and an ancient historian. I’m also the author of 1177 BC, and its sequel, After 1177 BC. In part one, we’re going to take a look at the civilizations as they existed, and what occurred, to make them all collapse one after another in one set of decades. In the second part, we’ll take a look at whether or not that could have been avoided, what led up to it, what do you do after you’ve collapsed, how resilient are you, and whether it has any implications, for us today?
Part 1: Before the fall: The conditions that led to civilization collapse
Chapter 1: The interconnected world
Most of the people that I talk to about this period, and I will go on and on and on about it at dinner parties and such, they say, I’ve never heard of this period, and I say, actually, you have. This is the New Kingdom period of Egypt.
So I will ask them, have you heard of Hatshepsut, the famous female pharaoh? And they’ll frequently say, yes. I’ll say, have you heard of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh, who might have started monotheism? And they might say, yes. And then I’ll go out in the limb and say, well, I bet you haven’t heard of King Tut. And they’re like, “Of course, I’ve heard of King Tut.” I’m like, fine, that’s the exact period that we’re talking about here.
So you see, you already do know this period. It’s the second half of the second millennium BC. It’s the New Kingdom period of Egypt. It’s the time of King Tut and Akhenaten and all those other pharaohs. So this is a period that is actually more familiar to people. They just don’t realize that they know it.
The late Bronze Age covers about 500 years, 1700 to 1200 BC. And for most of that, life was pretty good, especially in the 14th and 13th centuries BC, that is in the time before the collapse. Now, in those centuries, it was very globalized. It was internationalized across the Mediterranean and into the ancient Near East. So everyone was in contact with everybody else. This is the period when I say the ancient G8 was in place.
And by the G8, in that case, I mean over in Greece, you had the Mycenaeans and the Minoans, right? Think Trojan War. In what is now Türkiye, ancient Anatolia, you had the Hittites. Over in Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers, modern day Iraq, basically, you had Assyria and Babylonia. Then elsewhere, you had Cypriotsensai-Prus Egyptians and Egypt Canaanites in Canaan. So overall, these people are in direct or indirect contact with each other on almost daily basis.
The thing is, if they’re not in direct contact with somebody, like Mycenaeans and Assyrians, who are quite far apart, they will be in contact with a common person. So indirect is not even that indirect. In fact, in what they had, which we call the small world network, if you are only three hops from anybody else at the most, or maybe less than three hops, like two hops for the Mycenaeans to the Hittites to the Assyrians, that’s a small world network.
 |
And in the time period that we’re talking about, that’s what we’ve got. A colleague of mine, Susan Sherratt at University of Sheffield, has talked about this being a globalized Mediterranean. Now, why do we care about that? Because there aren’t that many periods in human history where we’ve had such a small world network in place anywhere. Us today, obviously, yes, we’ve got a small world network all around the globe. Then back then, they had a small world network across the Mediterranean and into the Near East as well.
And that’s why I would argue that what happened to them might be a little bit more relevant to us today than one might think, because they are actually closer to us than one might think. In terms of commercial contacts, diplomatic contacts, and so on, they’re more like us than one might expect, just walking around outside.
Scope of the study
In my book, what I was focusing on is the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. In part, because that’s my specialty. That’s what I know the best. It’s also because they were not necessarily in contact with areas of the world that were further away. So for example, there may have been some contacts with India, with the Indus Valley, but they weren’t that frequent. And as far as we can tell, they’re not in contact with places like China.
There are some indications, and I would give a caveat here, the wonderful thing about archeology is that what people find tomorrow could completely change our understanding. So now, for instance, we think that there were maybe more contacts with Southeast Asia in the Iron Age after the collapse than we had thought before. So this is always changing. However, I limited myself to this area, basically from Italy on the West to Iran and Iraq on the East, if you want to put it that way, and from modern day Türkiye down to Egypt. Again, that’s my focus of specialty, but that is also the area in which this little globalized small world network functioned.
Economic interdependence of civilizations
None of the great civilizations, none of the G8, were self-sufficient at that time, and it’s important to realize that. They each needed each other. So for instance, Egypt was the only place really that could supply gold to everybody else, because it was in control of the mines, Dana Nubia and Sudan. Greece, on the other hand, was one of the areas that could provide the silver. Copper came from Cyprus.
The tin - the tin’s a bit of a problem - it comes from a variety of places, including maybe Cornwall, up in England, but the vast majority came over from Afghanistan, the Badakshan region in particular. It’s the same area where Lapis Lazuli comes from. And so these raw metals would travel hundreds of miles along the trade networks, and each of the different civilizations needed them. So they are trading with each other.
Yes, it’s commercial, but it’s also the lifeblood, because we’re in the Bronze Age here to make bronze. You need 90% copper and 10% tin. I mean, you can use arsenic if you want to, but you’re not gonna live very long. Much better to use tin.
What happens if the trade routes are cut and you can’t get the tin anymore, which means you can’t make your bronze, which means you’re in real trouble. They are trading for the raw materials. They’re also trading for, I would say, commercial goods, but ones that you can eat and drink. So they’re trading olive oil. They’re trading wine. They’re trading grain. And they’re sending it around to each other. It might be a bit like Coles Tourneux Castle, but it’s more like different wines from around the world, each have their own flavor. Same thing back then.
Now, they’re also trading and buying and selling and all of that actual objects. We have a couple of the written texts, for example, that talk about leather shoes being sent from Crete all the way to Babylon, to King Hammurabi, the famous King Hammurabi who wrote his law code, which has an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth in it. And those leather shoes made it all the way to him, but we’re told he returned them. We’re not told why he returned them, and I often wonder if they were too small or too last millennium or something like that, but we know that the actual objects are coming, along with the raw materials and the raw supplies.
We know they’re trading things like solid gold daggers inlaid with Lapis lazuli. These are obviously things that the kings are giving each other. So we have what we call gift giving at the highest elite levels. And then we’ve got commercial mercantile stuff at slightly lower levels. So we’ve got all kinds of things going on, but the end result is that they needed each other. They really did, they could not survive without each other. And so this globalized network is what rose them up to the highest levels, but it is then also what brought them crashing down at the end when all of that was cut.
Now, along with all the commercial activities, and there is diplomatic, but diplomatic also involves marital connections because when the great kings, the G8, when they sign treaties with each other, when they made diplomatic advances, frequently they would marry each other’s daughters to cement the treaties. So we know that Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, the two pharaohs of Egypt in the 14th century BC, they each had multiple wives in their harems who were the daughters of the other kings. We know that there are three Mitannian princesses that are in Egypt in the harems. We know that there are Babylonian princesses in the Egyptian harem.
The one thing that’s interesting is it was not reciprocal. The Egyptians did not send their princesses to the others. No, no, no. Those were sent to them, but it was not the other way around. But even so, exchanging one princess one way was enough to cement a new diplomatic treaty. And we know because of the tablets, especially including one set at the site of Amarna, which in Egypt was Akhenaten’s capital city. We’ve got the archive there of his records and his father, Amenhotep III, writing to these kings.
We can see whenever there’s a new king over in Mitanni, which is in Syria or a new king in Babylonia, they had to renegotiate the treaties with the Egyptian pharaohs and with those renegotiations came the new marriages. So we’re talking diplomatic, commercial, marital, you know, it’s not so different from today.
What “collapse” means
We also need to give a definition basically of what we mean when we say everything collapsed. And I would argue that the world as they knew it back then did collapse after just after the year 1200, like 1177 BC. What collapsed was the network that was linking them all, this globalized small world network where they had commercial contacts and diplomatic contacts and all of that. That breaks apart, that collapses. It’s gonna take up to 400 years to get it back again. Now each of the individual societies that were part of that network, they were each influenced and some collapsed completely, others dealt with it. That’s where we get into a gray area because some of my colleagues say, “Look, you’re over exaggerating, this is clickbait. It’s not collapse, it’s transformation.”
A define transformation for me. So we go round and round and round about this, but basically the way I look at it is the world that they had had in place in the 14th century and the 13th century BC, that world goes away. And it goes away within just a couple of decades in the early 12th century BC. Life as they knew it basically changed. Now that doesn’t mean the farmer out in the Hinterland of Anatolia knew that on Monday he was part of this and on Tuesday he wasn’t, it’s nothing like that, but it does mean that the international contacts, the dynastic marriages, they come basically to a screeching halt.
I frequently say that the comparison is to something like the fall of the Roman Empire. It was catastrophic for its day. Now there was about 1500 years between the collapse of the late Bronze Age and the fall of the Roman Empire. And it’s been about another 1500 years since the Roman Empire fell, at least the Western half. And so I’m not saying that we’re necessarily due for another collapse, but history does rhyme even if it doesn’t repeat.
I’m a little wary that it might be, we might be due for it anyway. So it’s all a matter of academic jargon to a certain degree. What do you mean by collapse? What do you mean by transformation? And I concluded after writing both books that it is, yes, it’s both a collapse and a transformation. It depends where you are and when you are and at whom you are looking.
The thing that’s changed over the last couple of decades is that the old explanation that people put forward for the collapse was too simple. It was what we would now call monocausal. They were looking at one thing. Was it invaders? Was it this? Was it that? But they focused on one thing and one thing only depending on which scholar you talk to.
Nowadays, we think it’s a combination. It would be what I would call polycausal that it takes more than one thing to bring down this whole system. You need two of the explanations, three, four, something like that happening either all at once or in rapid succession. So you don’t have time to recover from one catastrophe before the next one hits. I think that makes a lot more sense than just saying, oh, the Sea Peoples did it or oh, there was a drought. How about if there were migrations? Because of a drought and so on.
That’s what has changed over the last couple of decades. In part, it’s because we have a lot more information now. We have a lot more data from a lot more sources and they’re all pointing in various different directions which if you look at it at a whole, you go, okay, that’s what’s happening. It’s a multitude of causes and that caused a domino effect for one thing and it also caused an exaggeration, where one thing was made much worse because of the next. Our thinking has changed in part because of the new data that we’re getting.
Chapter 2: Who were the Sea Peoples?
When I was first learning about all this, when I was in college and then in graduate school, I was basically taught that the collapse was caused by the Sea Peoples, this group that the Egyptians had mentioned that came not once but twice in the years 1207 and 1177 BC. The Egyptians, Merneptha and Ramesses III were the two pharaohs 30 years apart. They both said that Egypt had been attacked by a coalition of invaders and they give us their names. It’s us that calls them the Sea Peoples.
It comes from a French Egyptologist that was studying these originally. But the Egyptians actually give us the names and we know that there are nine different separate groups that come sweeping across the Mediterranean and wind up attacking Egypt. So I was always told that these groups which are the Shardana, the Shekelesh, the Weshesh, the Ekwesh, the Peleset, you know, these names that most people have never heard of, that they were the ones that were responsible for attacking all the G8 and bringing them down one by one, if you will.
Out of all those Sea Peoples, there’s really only one group that we could identify. We’ve played around with the other ones. I mean, Shardan or Shardana sounds a lot like Sardinia. So it may be that that’s where they came from. The Shekelesh, that sounds a lot like Sicily. Maybe they came from there.
But the earliest Egyptologists actually thought that that’s where they went after they were defeated by the Egyptians and that they then gave their names to those islands. So we’ve flip flopped over the years. Personally, I think the Sea Peoples come from the Western Mediterranean and sweep across the Aegean and wind up attacking Egypt. But we still have the problem of, you know, who are they?
Out of all the groups, the only one that we think we’ve really identified is the group called the Peleset. And the Peleset are the Philistines. Now the Philistines are mentioned in the Bible. We already know them archeologically. It really looks like they are Mycenaeans from Greece who have fled Greece and come over to the Eastern Mediterranean because Philistine pottery looks like degenerate Mycenaean. Meaning not that it’s terrible, but it’s Mycenaean pottery as if it were made in Greece, but it’s made with clay that’s local to Cyprus, Rhodes, the Levant. It looks like the Mycenaeans come across.
Now Ramesses and Mernaptha both say that they defeated the Sea Peoples. And in fact, Ramesses III says, “I settled them in strongholds bound in my name.” Meaning he settled the defeated Sea Peoples in Egypt and in the region of southern Canaan, which the Egyptians controlled at that time. So I think we know where they went, even if we don’t quite know where they came from.
If I had a million dollars, I would go looking for the origins of the Sea Peoples and try and settle that once and for all. But the one thing that we’re quite sure, or at least I’m quite sure of now, is they were not single-handedly responsible for the collapse.
In fact, I agree with my colleagues who have suggested that they were as much victims as they were oppressors, and that they’re more like a symptom of what’s happening than they were the cause of it. I think there were a lot of other things involved, and I think the picture was a lot more complicated than I was first taught when I was an undergraduate in college.
In some ways, the Sea Peoples are one of history’s great scapegoats. I mean, I think they’re blamed for something they didn’t really do. Indeed, I used to use the Sea Peoples to scare my kids at night to make them go to bed. Time for bed, and if you don’t go to bed, the Sea Peoples are gonna get you. I think they’re the bogeyman of antiquity and unfairly blamed.
I think some of the other explanations that people have now put forward, like drought and famine and all that, might have contributed to why the Sea Peoples were migrating in the first place. And I actually think a good parallel would be something like the dust ball in the 1930s in the United States, where the people were leaving Oklahoma and going to Texas and California to get a better life.
Same thing, you could look at some of the migrants and the refugees today, the people fleeing from the Syrian civil war, for example, the people leaving and trying to get up into Europe for a new and better life. I mean, we’re seeing some of the same things today. So I think that’s really what the Sea Peoples were. They were migrants in search of a better life.
Chapter 3: The perfect storm
If the Sea Peoples are not to blame for the collapse, then what is or what was? There have been a number of other suggestions that scholars have made over the years. And in my first book in 1177 BC, I went through the various suggestions, looking at the pros and cons for each. And in the end, I thought the answer was “yes, it’s all of the above.” It’s a perfect storm. It is everything, you name it — everything, everywhere, all at once, and it would have been hard to avoid.
I looked at what my predecessors had suggested and thought that there was merit to almost every one of them, but not on their own. You had to bring them all together into this series of unfortunate events, as Lemony Snicket once said. One of the possibilities is that there was a drought back then.
This is not a new suggestion. It was actually made back in the 1960s by Rhys Carpenter, who was a professor at Bryn Mawr College. He suggested that the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, that their civilization had come to an end because of a drought. But he didn’t have any hard data to back his suggestion up. It remained a hypothesis. We now have the data that he didn’t have. And we have it not just for mainland Greece, but we have it for an entire area stretching from Italy over to Iran today.
The evidence that we’ve got for drought - and by the way, it’s not just a drought, it’s a mega drought, it’s 150 years at the minimum and 300 years at the maximum. So say from 1200 BC or 1250 BC down to 900 or 850 BC, I mean, it’s a long, long, long time. Now, we find evidence for it all over the place. We find it in caves where the stalagmites stopped growing because they ran out of water. We find it in dried up lakes, dried up lagoons, dried up riverbeds, where when you take samples and you look at the pollen under a microscope, you can see that we get more arid plants, that it becomes a much harsher environment.
If you look at the sediments at the bottom of lakes that still exist in Türkiye, for example, you can see this as well. So it’s not like we have data from one place and one type of source. We have it from a multitude of places. If you look at a map where we have scientific evidence of this mega drought at the end of the late Bronze Age, you’ve just got, it’s peppered with red dots where we’ve got all of this information.
I would say it’s beyond a doubt now, you cannot call it into question. There was a drought back then. It lasted for at least 150 and maybe 300 years. And that would have impacted pretty much anybody back then because, well, frankly, society, you can’t survive. A drought that lasts that long. I mean, we have trouble surviving a drought today that lasts 10 years. So imagine one that’s 10 times that or so. Anyway, so I think drought makes sense that that was one of the big factors at that time. And it may have actually driven some of the other factors as well.
Drought, famine, and migration
If you’ve got drought, you’ve probably also got famine coming right on its heels because if you have a lack of rain, if you have a lack of all your major resources and all that, people are gonna start starving. And it looks like that’s what happened during the late Bronze Age collapse as well.
It can be actually pretty hard to find evidence of famine, unless like you find a mass grave, which we haven’t found by the way. But if they write about it, if they write about it in their text, then you can be pretty sure that there was famine. And we have that now, especially in recent years. There have been some texts that were found at the site of Ugarit, which is up on the north coast of what is now Syria. And the site of Ugarit were very important, entrepôt, very important international port at that time.
There have been tablets that have been published fairly recently, like in 2016 in French (and then a couple of years later in English) in which they say there is famine in our city, please send us help. I mean, they come right out and say it. Now, we had others before that as well. We know up in Anatolia, for example, where the Hittites were. There are also tablets that talk about famine, starting as early as about 1250 BC. So a little bit earlier than we might have suspected.
They are writing and saying things like “Famine is here in my lands. It’s a matter of life and death. Please send grain.” And they’re asking people like the Egyptians to send relief. And in fact, we know from other texts that the Egyptians did send grain and dried fish and other things like that to help out the people in Ugarit and Anatolia and so on. So we definitely know that there is famine at that time. And it obviously comes hard on the heels of the drought.
Now, if we pull the Sea Peoples back in again, I think this then explains why they might have started migrating in the first place. If they do come from the Western Mediterranean, like I think Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, there is now evidence that there is a drought in Northern Italy as well, where the Terramare culture was. And there’s evidence for people leaving at that time in mass numbers.
It may be that that’s where we should be looking for the Sea Peoples coming from and that they started their migrations because they were starving and there was a drought in their lands. In which case though, I mean, as the old saying goes out of the frying pan and into the fire, because the Eastern Mediterranean had a drought as well. I mean, it stretched all across the Mediterranean, but they couldn’t have known that, at least not easily at that time.
They start migrating and they get to a place where it’s just as bad, but there are also people already living there. They are attacking at the same time as assimilating, they’re just trying to get a new life for themselves. And I think that’s what we see when they attack Egypt. But we also know from other tablets that they attack elsewhere. So we have to add other things in here as well. But for right now, I would say we’ve got drought equals famine, and then maybe that’s gonna lead into migration and other things as well.
Evidence for Invaders Beyond Egypt
Now it used to be that the only evidence we had for migrations or invasions, if you will, which is probably a better way to put it, is the evidence from the Egyptians, the inscriptions that Merneptah and Ramesses, the third left us from 1207 and 1177. But now we’ve got other evidence as well, the same archives at Ugarit on the north coast of Syria that gave us the tablets talking about famine. They also mentioned invaders.
Some of them have been known for quite a while. There’s a fairly famous tablet that talks about enemies and ships having been sighted. And are they gonna come here or not? And their messages between the king or the governor on Cyprus over to the king of Ugarit. And you can see Cyprus on a good day from Ugarit, basically. So we knew about these enemy ships, but we didn’t know whose they were. Like it doesn’t say the Sea Peoples or anything like that. It just says ships of the enemy. Well, the new tablets that have just been published from Ugarit also mention ships of the enemy, but they also mention that they’ve made landfall.
In fact, one particular text, which is written by the king of Ugarit, basically asking for reinforcements to be sent. He says, “The enemy has landed. “They have overrun one of my port cities and they are now advancing on Ugarit itself. Please send help.” Well, we know that even if the help was sent, it wasn’t enough or it was too late because the French archeologist, when they excavated Ugarit, starting back in the 1920s and even continuing until fairly recently, they found that Ugarit at that time period had been destroyed and had been destroyed by humans.
There are bodies in the streets, there are arrowheads embedded in the walls. There is a meter of destruction, like three feet deep of destruction in that city. And it was then abandoned. It was abandoned for between 400 and 600 years. People buried hordes of precious metals and never came back for them. So that enemy, whoever they might have been, not only advanced on Ugarit, but destroyed Ugarit.
The problem, once again, the scribe just says, the enemy, it doesn’t say the Shardan, or the Shardana, or the Palest, or the Weshesh, and I, oh, I would love to take that scribe and take him out back and say, “Come on, why didn’t you tell us who they were? Why did you just say the enemy?” But that scribe might not have known who they were. Give them a break. But we can now say that there were invaders. There were invaders from outside. Whether they were Sea Peoples or something else, we can’t know for sure, but we definitely have invaders at that time.
Destructions and possible internal rebellions
There are a lot of destructions around the ancient Near East and the Aegean at this time of cities, both major and minor. There are discussions as to whether there are actually city-wide destructions and whether maybe just a cow kicked over a lantern like Mrs. O’Leary in Chicago. We’re still debating exactly how many destructions and how destructive they were, if I could use the same word again. But the basic feeling is yes, there were invaders, there were destructions, but some of the destructions might not have been by outsiders.
They might have been internal. It might have been an internal rebellion by the locals rising up, precisely because they’re starving, because there’s no water, there’s no food, anything like that. And there are a couple of instances where we can see that. The site of Mycenae on Mainland Greece where the famous Lion Gate is, it has been suggested that its ultimate demise at this time was because of internal rebellion. We can’t be sure of that, but it is a definite hypothesis.
Another example might be the site of Hathor in ancient Canaan, which is today in modern Israel. And at Hathor, where we had two co-directors that were excavating and couldn’t agree on what caused the destruction of the site. One said it was Joshua and pointed to the book in the Hebrew Bible that talks about Joshua conquering Hathor. The other co-director said, now wait a minute, at the site, the palaces burnt and the temples were burnt, but not the houses of the local people.
That looks like an internal rebellion. Palaces burnt, temples burnt, but not the people’s houses. You have an invader from outside, they’re gonna burn absolutely everything. But if you have the people’s houses still there, doesn’t that look like an internal rebellion? Well, it might. Now again, hard to decide, my point would be if the two co-directors can’t decide who might have destroyed their site, pretty hard for the rest of us to decide that as well. But I would put this up as an example of maybe internal rebellion. So yes, we have destructions, not everywhere, but a lot of them. But we can’t be sure if it’s external or internal. We just know the city is destroyed.
If we see a destruction at a site though, it might not be by humans. It could be by Mother Nature. I’m talking about earthquakes. Some of the sites that we see destroyed at the end of the late Bronze Age really seem to be destroyed by earthquakes. Now it can be difficult to determine if a destruction’s by humans or by Mother Nature. Sometimes it’s obvious. I mean, if you find bodies in the streets with arrowheads sticking out of them, it’s probably humans and not an earthquake.
But when you find bodies simply buried like under walls of collapsed houses, it could actually be either one. But if there are some symptoms, and we can usually tell when the city is hit by an earthquake because we’ll have walls that are off-kilter, that shouldn’t be, we’ll have keystones slipped in an arch, things like that. And in some of the cases, we could say, yeah, this is most likely an earthquake rather than by humans.
If we take a look at those type of sites at the end of the late Bronze Age, it really looks like we have what’s known as an earthquake storm. Now that’s the name for it in antiquity. If it happens today, it’s known as an earthquake sequence by seismologists. And the general idea is frequently that if you have a fault line, like the North Anatolian fault line that runs across Türkiye, that if you have an earthquake and it doesn’t release all of the pressure, you will have another earthquake sometime later nearby. It could be a week later, it could be a month later, it could be a year later, that will release more of the pressure. And if that still doesn’t release all of the built-up pressure, you will have another earthquake and another and another.
Basically, the fault line will unzip until all the pressure is gone. That can take up to 60 years, 6-0, 60 years. We see that today. It’s been happening across Türkiye since like the 1930s. But it also happened in antiquity. And it looks like it took place in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean from about 1225 to 1175 BC, in other words, spanning the late Bronze Age collapse. And so we can see bodies in a number of cities.
There’s a young teenage girl at Mycenae, for example, who tried to shelter in the doorway of her house. Normally, that’s one of the safest places to try and shelter from an earthquake. But in this case, the whole house collapsed, and one of the stones fell and hit her in the head, probably killed her instantly. She was found with that stone still embedded in her skull. At other places, there are other bodies as well.
To give you one more example, at the site of Troy, where the Trojan War took place, according to Homer, and we have nine cities, one on top of another, city number six is destroyed by an earthquake, not by humans. There’s no bodies there, there’s no arrowheads, anything like that. But the city is destroyed with giant rocks thrown around, and everything fallen with walls undulating. Pretty obvious, Troy six was destroyed by an earthquake. And so we can put that into the category as well. Now, if we’re trying to make a logical succession where we have drought, famine, migration, that works for all those, but we’re do earthquakes fit into that.
Well, you don’t really fit earthquakes into that, they just happen, but it turns out that this is a very active seismic zone in this entire region. There are fault lines off the coast of Greece. There’s a fault line coming straight up the Rift Valley, where you’ve got the Dead Sea and Lake Tiberias. There are fault lines across ancient Anatolia.
In fact, if you lay a map that shows all the earthquakes that have happened in modern Türkiye since say the year 1900, and you’ve got all the earthquakes plotted, and you lay that on top of a map showing the cities that were either partially or totally destroyed at the end of the late Bronze Age, there’s almost a one-to-one correlation. And so I think we have to add in earthquakes as one of the other possible stressors, drivers, factors that led to the late Bronze Age collapse.
The other factor we should bring into the equation is that of disease. We haven’t mentioned this up until now, but in terms of like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, where you’ve got drought and famine and earthquakes and all that, even today, you frequently have disease following on the footsteps. And I think we might have had that same situation back at the end of the late Bronze Age.
Certainly we know this from some of the stories that have been handed down. For example, Homer in “The Iliad” in the first book talks about a plague sweeping through the Mycenaean troops that are besieging Troy. In the story of the Exodus from the Hebrew Bible, we’ve got the 10 plagues. These might be memories, vague memories of what actually happened back then, but we do know, for example, that there was a plague that hit the Hittites earlier, about 150 years before the collapse, back in the time of my favorite Hittite king, Šuppiluliuma I, who ruled about 1350 BC, and we are told by one of his successors that he and most of his immediate family died as the result of a plague that was brought to Anatolia, courtesy of Egyptian prisoners of war, and it absolutely decimated the Hittites.
Now, that’s a century and a half before the collapse. So we really can’t say that that’s part and parcel of it, but there is an Egyptian pharaoh, Ramesses V, if I remember correctly, who ruled about 1140 BC, and we’ve got his mummy. And if you look at the mummy along the jawline and on the cheek, there are pustules. He had smallpox and he probably died from it, and we’re able to say this because we actually have a papyrus, the Turin papyrus - it’s in a museum in Italy today in Turin - and it talks about the fact that Ramesses and other members of his family died of the plague, which we would say is smallpox, and that they were buried in the Valley of the Kings.
But most unusually, it took something like 16 months to bury them, they dug brand new tombs for them, and after they put the king and his dead relatives in, they dismissed the workmen who had dug the tombs, they gave him a month off at full pay, and then they closed the Valley of the Kings to everyone. It was like maybe the world’s first quarantine at that time. So we do have evidence for plague a little bit after the collapse, but the collapse is gonna take most of the 12th century BC to fully form, and so somebody that dies of smallpox in 1140 is in fact part and parcel of the whole collapse. So I think we do have to add in disease in addition to everything else, earthquakes, migration, famine, drought, you name it. I think we’ve got enough there to justify the fact that we’ve got a polycrisis going on.
Multiplier effects, domino effects, and network collapse
One of the things that we’ve got in looking at all these multiple causes that might have led to the collapse is the fact that we’ve got, first of all, a multiplier effect going on, that is each one has got a bigger effect than it might have because of the others, but we’ve also got a domino effect going on, that is when one of these goes down or is dreadfully impacted, it would have affected the others much as today we can set up dominoes to all fall in a row.
If you’ve got a supply chain shortage to put it in today’s terms, if the tin is cut off and you can’t make copper anymore, that’s gonna affect pretty much all the civilizations, but if you’ve got something that affects Cyprus and the Cypriots, which is giving everybody the copper, then that is gonna have a domino effect on everybody else. So even just the news of one of them being affected might have had a domino effect on one or more of the others.
Now, one of the questions that we wanted to ask is what would it have taken to have brought down this network? And so actually after I published 1177 BC, I was approached and got together with colleagues from the US Army Corps of Engineers and we ran scenarios through a computer trying to figure out which of the G8, or others, in which order would it have taken for them to fall to collapse the whole network?
For instance, if the Mycenaeans had gone down, would that have collapsed the whole globalized network? If the Minoans had gone down, would that have shattered the small world network? What did it take? And we know by looking back at it that it did collapse, it was shattered, but in what order and how important was the collapse itself? Can we actually figure out who went down first and who went down last? Well, it turns out we can try and approximate that.
We ran a couple of thousand scenarios through a computer and came up with two basic scenarios that would have resulted in the collapse. One is if the Hittites and the Egyptians both essentially collapsed at the same time, that would have brought down the rest of the network or if that city of Ugarit, the international port on the coast of North Syria, if that had collapsed at the same time as the Hittites, that would have been enough to disrupt the entire network and bring it down also.
Those were the only two scenarios that actually resulted in what we could see. But over the two, one was preferable because the scenario with the Egyptians and the Hittites going down, we know that’s not what happened. We know the Egyptians survived. The Hittites do not. Their society basically ends for all intents and purposes. The Egyptians, while they don’t do well, they do muddle through, they coped and they adapted, but they do survive the collapse. So we knew that scenario in which both went down at once didn’t work. We know historically that’s not what happened. That has left us with the scenario of Ugarit and the Hittites going down virtually simultaneously.
That would have been enough to bring down the whole thing. But interestingly, the rest of them, the Assyrians going down, the Babylonians going down, whatever, none of that would have been enough to take out the entire network. So it does show that it’s not easy to collapse a network and that I would say you’re much more likely to be able to be resilient and overcome a catastrophe than you are to be taken down by it, but it really depends on how effectively you react to it. And if you are actually trying to survive the collapse, instead of ignoring it and denying it is happening, but that brings us to another question of whether they even knew they were collapsing while they were collapsing, did they?
Systems collapse and the Dark Age debate
So what we’re talking about at the end of this late run stage with the collapse is what is known as a systems collapse. This was a term that was invented by Colin Renfrew at the University of Cambridge in the late 1970s, but it basically describes what happens when you have one of these complex systems collapse. You’ve got your central economy collapses, your upper elite, the 1% go away. You’ve got the government, the centralized government collapses. You have all these hallmarks of what had made your society so vibrant and thriving, they now all go away. And along with that, you’ve got a huge decrease in population, both death and migration. And that’s what we see at this end of the late run stage. So I think we’re looking at a systems collapse.
It’s not unique here. There are systems collapses that have happened elsewhere and else when. The Maya collapse, follow the Roman Empire, the Harappan civilization in India, it happens. And in most cases, when you have one of these systems collapse, you have then a dark age that happens immediately afterward where you revert back to a lower level of socio-political economic functioning. You go a whole step backwards into what historians call a dark age. And you basically have to start all over again.
The thing is a systems collapse doesn’t happen overnight. It can take up to a century to take place. So like life was very different in 1200 BC from 1100 BC and completely different in 1000 BC. So we’re looking at a systems collapse and then we’re looking at a dark age afterward. And in the dark age, that’s when you try and regroup basically. And one thing that Colin Renfrew said is one of the hallmarks of a dark age is that they look back at the age that has just disappeared and consider it a golden age and they frequently tell stories about it.
That’s exactly what we’ve got with Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey and the story of the Trojan War and so on. So I do think we’ve got a systems collapse and I do think it segues right into what historians have called a dark age because some of the same things that we lose because of a systems collapse are the very same things that define a dark age. They lose, for example, the knowledge of how to put up big buildings. They lose writing, linear B in my Sydney and Greece is not used again after the collapse of the Mycenaeans.
What we’ve got then is in the years, in the centuries, after the collapse, say for 400 years, say from 1200 BC down to about 800 BC, four centuries. This is what historians have called the world’s first dark age and they point to everything that I’ve just said. Now, that’s not fair, I would say, in a way because each of the different societies is affected to a different degree. Some actually did okay in the collapse.
Others, like the Hittites, completely disappeared. And it’s also an era of invention and innovation, in part because they had to, right? What’s the saying, necessity is the mother of invention? If you’re having trouble getting tin, for example, and you can’t make copper, you might turn to another metal that you already knew about, but that you hadn’t been exploiting yet because it was too difficult, too hard, didn’t have enough, whatever - iron. Iron does not really come into use until during and after the collapse and it becomes a replacement for bronze.
That doesn’t mean bronze completely goes away, but it does mean that iron takes its place. We also get the standardization of the alphabet at this time, which the Phoenicians bring across the Mediterranean. Now, the Phoenicians who come from central Canaan, what we would call today Lebanon, they’re actually survivors of the collapse. They actually are among the people that do the best in the aftermath of the collapse in terms of resilience and transformation.
The Phoenicians standardize the alphabet. They don’t invent it, it’s already been around, but they standardize it, they bring it over to Greece and they bring it over to Italy, and it becomes the Greek alphabet and it becomes the Latin alphabet, which we’re still using today.
The Phoenicians and the Cypriots, alphabet and iron, because the Cypriots, who had been the source for all the copper, now seem to be the first people to be using iron. We get the first bi-metallic weapons and tools where we’ve got like an iron blade and a knife, but bronze rivets in the handle and the Cypriots send them out to Greece on one hand and the Levant on the other.
They seem to have been very nice about it because they sent the technology as well, oh, you like this? Well, here’s how you make it. And every country had iron ore, it wasn’t like the copper in the tin. And we can see the development of iron working spread across the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. So I would say Cypriots with their iron Phoenicians with the alphabet and don’t forget purple dye as well, they’re doing the best. But that also means that our dark age might not be a dark age.
One of my colleagues has said that any age that sees the invention of iron and the standardization of the alphabet cannot be considered to be a dark age. It’s an age of invention. And so what we archaeologists are trying to argue now is stop calling it a dark age, just like the medieval people don’t want theirs to be a dark age anymore either. And now it’s like late antique or the early Middle Ages.
Same thing with us. We don’t want a dark age now. What we wanna do is simply call it what it is. It’s the iron age. It’s when they start using iron. And that’s got no pejorative sense or anything like that. It’s just a fact. You had the Bronze Age, now you have the iron age. And so I think that actually is a better way to describe this.
Uneven survival and the problem of labels
Now, I will admit that many of the societies do go back down to a lower level of socioeconomic political circumstances, like the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, on the Minoans on Crete. Others disappear entirely like the Hittites. But, Cypriots do okay, Phoenicians do okay, Assyrians and Babylonians do okay. So we actually, we need to be specific here and differentiate between the different societies as to how well they did or didn’t do. And then see if there are any lessons that we can learn from that.
One of the other things to keep in mind, and which is at the basis of the debate between archaeologists and ancient historians as to whether we’re looking at a collapse or a transformation at the end of the late Bronze Age, has to do with the idea of how much survived and how much didn’t, in terms of the people themselves versus the societies that they make up. So, for instance, and this is a part of a problem too - all right, you take something like ancient Anatolia and we talked about the Hittite Empire.
There’s actually a whole mess of different ethnicities that are living in Anatolia at that time. The Hittites, per se, might have been the overlords. They might have had the Empire, but the Luwians that are there would have said, “I’m not a Hittite,” right? The Trojans up in Troy, “I’m not a Hittite,” right? But we talk about this, you know, big entity. So when we get to the collapse and then the survival afterward, when I talk about a collapse, I don’t mean that everybody dies. I mean, a lot of people do.
The estimates in Greece, for example, or maybe as much as 40% of the population died or migrated between, say, the 13th and the 11th centuries BC. So, you know, a lot of people do die. It wasn’t a wonderful time, but not everybody does. Same thing with Anatolia, with the Hittites, same thing with Mesopotamia and the Assyrians. So what we have to realize is there is some level of continuum that life does continue, but what changes is the political entities, if you will, the societal entities.
So we no longer have the Hittites, per se, in Anatolia, but we do have some of the survivors, and we call them the Neo-Hittites down in North Syria. Others, though like the Urartian, you do have new peoples moving into some areas, and we know this from the records, like the Phrygians coming in, we know about their invasion, but you’ve got other people who are still farming in Anatolia that are basically looking over their shoulders saying, “Okay, who am I paying taxes to tomorrow?” Right, “I’m still here. My Hittite government isn’t here.” So we do have to keep this in mind.
Even in Greece, for example, nobody called themselves a Mycenaean after about 1050, but that doesn’t mean that Greece was empty. It means that the survivors were just dealing with life and figuring out what to do after that. So this is where we still have our arguments in academia. What is a collapse? What is a transformation? Right, and where do the two meet? Where’s the gray area?
That’s why I took, I wouldn’t call it the easy way out, but I wanted my cake and to eat it too. And so in the sequel, I said, what collapsed was the network that connected them all? What transformed are the various societies? And they didn’t always transform, some just coped, some adapted, but that’s where you get the nuances.
But you also have to realize too, that you’re really talking about the whole group. And if you get down to the individuals, that’s where it’s, first of all, I’m gonna get very, very interesting. I mean, what I wouldn’t give to have a time machine and go back and yeah, it’d be great to talk to the kings and the pharaohs. I’d also like to talk to the farmer in Messenia, living near Pylos and saying, so how did your life change after the palace went down? And that is nearly impossible to answer, unless you get lucky doing some archeology. But I do think we have to keep this in mind, the ethnicities versus the societies, the people versus the government, and just realize that we’re frequently talking about the forest and not the individual trees. Because in part, that’s all we can do.
Part 2: After the Fall: Resilience, Recovery, and the Road Back
Chapter 1: The Riser of the New World Order
One of the questions that I think is extremely relevant today comes in the sequel that I wrote, After 1177 BC, which simply asks the question, what do you do if your society collapses? If the globalized network that you’re a part of collapses, what do you do? How resilient are you? Now, resilience is a word that’s bandied about today by lots of people, and that’s part of the problem. It has different meanings for different people and in different situations. For me, resilience is how well you do in the face of adversity.
How do you bounce back when something has gone wrong, sometimes very wrong? And I think there are basically three ways you can deal with it. And I get these from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They won the Nobel Prize back in 2007. They are the ones that put out reports on climate change every year or every couple of years. And they put out something back in 2012 that was dealing with resilience and mitigation that what do you do after disasters? They’re more looking at things like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
But in that publication, they had some definitions that I thought fit very well with the late Bronze Age collapse a