1177 B.C The Year Civilization Collapsed
by Eric H. Cline
Dr. Eric Cline was born September 1, 1960, in the United States. He received his BA in Classical Archaeology at Dartmouth College in 1982. In 1984 he received his MA in Near Eastern Languages and Literature from Yale, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania on a Fulbright scholarship in 1991. He was also awarded the NEH Public Scholar grant the very first year they were offered. Dr. Cline is an experienced archaeologist with over 30 seasons out in the field mostly, in the eastern Mediterranean, with 10 of those seasons working on the ancient city of Megiddo, which is also known as Armageddon (This is the reason Christian fundamentalists tend to be hard-core pro-Israel and support their more bellicose policies. They require the Jews to be back there, and to be attacked at Megiddo by all their neighbors to trigger the End Times. {Not quite, Armageddon is where the last Christians take refuge and are attacked by the Anti-Christ, ending the Tribulation, modern versions add in the Israelis. Getting attacked by their neighbors happens before that} Fair. Either way, there’s the whole “we need a second Shoah” bit.). Recently he helped discover the oldest well cellar in the near east, which is something to respect as drinking booze is one of the oldest human activities on record, and for my own part, I've delighted in grossing people out by sharing the recipe for the oldest booze on record (Can Confirm.) He is currently a Professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and of Anthropology at George Washington University in Washington D.C. As you might imagine, he is an accomplished author or editor of over 20 books and his works have been translated into 18 languages. Today, as my clever readers have no doubt figured out, we are reviewing 1177 B.C The Year Civilization Collapsed. Published in 2014 the book covers the Late Bronze Age world and the Bronze Age Collapse, attempting to see if we can figure out just what happened and why. The book was well-received and was awarded the 2014 Award for the best popular book by the American schools of oriental research, New York Post's best book of 2014, The Federalist's notable books of 2015 (We won’t hold that against it.), the Australian best books of the Year. Let's take a look, shall we?
The book gives us a tour of the Bronze age world centered on the eastern Mediterranean. This was a world dominated by powerful multinational empires like Egypt and the Hittites, along with smaller but wealthy and culturally influential powers like the Minoans, Cypriots, and others. The Mycenaeans of Greece sailed and traded among them as did Babylonians, Assyrians, and Canaanites. It was a deeply interconnected world of trade and diplomacy with treaties and agreements binding states into multi-layered relationships. These great nations were at the center of a web of trade that stretched from the tin mines of Great Britain to Afghanistan. We know this because we have found and can read the treaties, one set was even etched into tablets of solid silver! (There is also, as I recall, direct evidence of trade links by way of pottery and other identifiable cultural artifacts.) We have found the shipwrecks carrying tons of goods and letters of merchants attesting to their travels and trade. It was a world of cities, massive palaces and temples; monuments that stretched into the sky where legions of scribes, priests, and tradesmen labored fed by the unending toil of the untold farmers who grew crops alongside rivers whose very names conjure images, like the Nile, Tigris, and the Euphrates. It was a doomed world, wherein over a span of between 40 to 50 years, just about every one of the mighty cities would be abandoned ruins, the nations burning wrecks, and only the Egyptians and Assyrians - greatly reduced and huddled in their easily defensible core territories - would survive to see the new age coming. The destruction was so total that we would doubt the very existence of some of those nations and empires until only recently finding physical traces of their existence within the last few decades. To this very day, we're still not entirely sure just what the hell happened (Which is so cool. Highly interconnected systems like this are normally pretty easy to change, but hard to collapse entirely because of internal redundancies. Start hammering on multiple linkages though… and they enter death-spirals.)
Dr. Cline spends the majority of this book giving us a tour of the Bronze Age world so we could see exactly what was lost and how far the fall was. He does this by giving us a brief overview of each power but focusing more on their relationships with each other, which were fairly complex and multi-layered. At this point, international trade had developed into an interesting form that was conducted as part gift-giving between royal houses, tribute, and the flat out trade of goods and services for other goods and services. Much of this is centered on Egypt in the book, which makes sense as much of what we have from the period is due to Egyptian records (Which were extensive, obsessively kept, and in redundant forms. The Egyptians had a state bureaucracy that was a thing to behold, and as I recall, they planned their economy, which means lots of very mundane records. {Same with the Hittites who kept vast troves of documents}). However, Dr. Cline warns us that we can't take the Egyptians too literally. The goal of an Egyptian scholar writing at the time to present a record that flatters and bolsters the power of the ruling Pharaoh not to present an objective record of events after all (This is because the Pharaoh was basically a god-king.). We also look at things from the view of the Hittites, and Dr. Cline takes some time to discuss the Trojan war here. This may have been a conflict between the Hittite Empire and an alliance of Mycenaean kings for control of the Ionian coast (Turkish coast today) and the Aegean sea. Which tells us that some conflicts simply never stop (Because this one recurs a few times like a bad dream through history.). Much like how this conflict drove relations between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire or how it reoccurs between Greece and Turkey today, this conflict seems to color every aspect of Hittite/Mycenaean relations. To the point where we have records of exasperated Hittite Emperors attempting to embargo the Mycenaeans from trade to try and bring them to heel. Dr. Cline bases these discussions on archaeological evidence and the eternal quest of archaeologists in the Eastern Mediterranean to figure out just how much of the myths and legends we grew up with actually happened (Many legends and myths have some historical basis, even if they grow in the telling. It’s actually really impressive, given that literacy almost died during the Collapse, and cultures went with them. For the Trojan War to have survived really is impressive.). That said I've made my peace with the fact that if there was an Achilles-like figure, he never actually fought a river into submission. This is sad but let's be honest that was never likely (Or possible.{Still awesome}). That said, it's clear that there were plenty of battles over a city between contingents of Hittite and Mycenaean troops that the poet - or more likely poets - we know as Homer were drawing their inspiration from something that actually happened. Of course, the most likely battle is dated to just before the destruction descended on the Bronze Age World in earnest. So it's possible to think of this war as the last hurrah of the Mycenaeans because before the century was out, all of their cities and palaces would be empty ruins and the destruction of their culture so complete that they would regress to a pre-literate state from which a very different Greek culture would emerge (Which is one reason the story got so fantastical. It survived as an oral tradition until civilization rebuilt itself.).
Now, this isn't an exhaustive look at the culture or government of the nations of the Bronze Age but it does make for a decent introduction. Although Dr. Cline doesn't really discuss the Mesopotamian states or stray too far from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. Additionally, Dr. Cline is careful to stick to what he can back up, so he avoids taking any real position on a number of the academic fights that he outlines in this book. Most of these fights are over just what brought about the Bronze Age Collapse in the first place. For most of the debate, the accepted answer has been outside invasion by a group of people, or more accurately peoples, known collectively as the Sea Peoples. Of course, we don't know much about them, like where did they come from, how did they get to the heart of the Bronze Age World with no one seeing them coming, why isn’t it until the Egyptians stopped one of their invasions no one was able to stand up to them, just who were these people? It's possible that they may have come from Sicily or Italy, or even parts farther west. Others have suggested they came from the Aegean tribes, or Central Europe others that they were simply soldiers and others driven to banditry by the collapse itself. I admit I find that last one intriguing as many ruined cities show heavy damage to the elite parts of the city (where the palaces and temples would be) but not much damage elsewhere. In the case of an enemy sacking your city, they tend to do as much damage to the parts of the city holding the poor and middle class as they do the wealthy. A popular uprising on the other hand... Now increasingly academics don't like putting the collapse all on the shoulders of the Sea Peoples, for one thing, there are plenty of cities that show being abandoned without any evidence of warfare and there's little evidence of the Sea Peoples being as omnipresent as imagination likes to suggest. Others have blamed a high period of earthquakes as some cities seem flattened by natural disasters but the Bronze Age had dealt with natural disasters before. Dr. Cline does point to recent evidence that the Bronze Age collapse happens at the high point of a century-long drought and the famines that long droughts invariably bring. Although interestingly enough there is no archaeological evidence of widespread plague, no mass graves or written prayers for the gods to send healing, only some localized outbreaks that burnt out fairly quickly (It is worth noting that a volcanic eruption - and I seem to recall one happening around this time - could conceivably alter weather patterns or negatively affect crop production in huge swaths of the eastern med. Without a food surplus, these cities with specialized divisions of labor simply cannot exist.{Without a food surplus it’s hard for anything to exist, our lives are based on the idea that we don’t all have to spend most of our time raising food to eat}).
It's here that Dr. Cline stakes out a position, arguing that it was a combination of the above that broke apart the system of diplomacy and trade and isolated each of the Bronze Age powers. With the international system so thoroughly broken apart the Bronze Age powers did not have the resources to deal with a wave of earthquakes, drought, and famine, and external invasion happening either all at once or close enough together that no one could really focus their resources on fixing any single problem before all the problems starting pulling them down. To be honest, I kind of favor this myself, I can see a power clearly weakened by disasters, with enemies hammering their strongholds, while drought and famine sap the strength of their people until the marginal peoples on the edge of the empire, or the downtrodden people within the empire find a crack and... Just. Start. Pulling. I mean think about last year, it wasn't any single event that made us feel like we were going off the rails, it was the constant hit of one thing after another (And even COVID is the result of systemic causes that we have yet to address. We ain’t done, folks.). They all fed into each other as well, which I could see happening in an event like the Bronze Age Collapse, a sort of negative feedback loop if you will. After the year we've had I think we can appreciate just how quickly things can pile up. If this is a subject you're not very familiar with and would like to learn more about, I think this book is a good start. The back of the book even has a list of names so you can keep track of people and notes for each chapter. Of course, if you're not interested in archaeology or the Bronze Age, I think you might find this a bit dry. Dr. Cline spends a lot of time reviewing different archaeological sites and what we learned from them. I'm giving 1177 B.C The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline an A- for that.
This work was chosen by our ever-wise patrons for review and I hoped you enjoyed it. If you would like a vote on upcoming books and themes consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads for as little as a dollar a month. Next month assuming no last minute upsets in the voting (polls are open until the end of the month) we’ll be looking at Adjustment Team, followed by Adjustment Bureau, Twilight Zone’s Gabe’s Story and ending with the film Dark City. All part of our February tradition looking at the work and influence of Philip K Dick. Until then, stay safe and as always Keep Reading.
Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders
