1177 B.C., the Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; ISBN 978-0-691-14089-6 ©2014, $29.95, p. 176, plus Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, and Index
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, Calilfornia — The Late Bronze Age is prominent for its unprecedented financial, political, and social interconnectedness, along with the generation of great wealth and the rise of vast empires: Assyria, Egypt, Kassite Babylon, Hatti (the Hitites of Anatolia/Turkey), Mitanni (southern Syria), and Mycenae (Greece), to name a few. According to Eric Cline, the author of 1177 B.C., the Year Civilization Collapsed, the Late Bronze Age is “the beginning of what would become a ‘Golden Age’ of internationalism and globalization.” Scholars generally assign the year 1500 BCE as the starting date for the Late Bronze Age, which coincides with the approximate date of the foreign-ruling Hyksos people being expelled by native Egyptians.
Cline begins with a description of the internal backdrop and external environment of the countries that will become major world players during the fifteenth century BCE including, Mesopotamia, Minoa, Mitanni, Egypt, and Hatti. He then provides us with the rich details of the developing and thriving commercial intercourse, gift exchanges between the kings, multinational treaties, and marriages among royal families in the Middle East, Near East, and the Aegean during the fourteenth century BCE. He relies heavily on hieroglyphics written on Egyptian statuary, foreign pottery found at archeological sites, and the Amarna letters, a trove of hundreds of royal Cuneiform tablets, correspondence among the ruling elites, mostly written in the Akkadian language, the lingua franca of the time, going as far as the eighteenth century BCE. However, by the end of the Late Bronze Age, by about 1200 BCE, all existing empires and major city-states had either disappeared completely, or were becoming mere shadows of their former selves.
Edward Gibbon and Jared Diamond independently examined causes for the demise of a lone empire or an individual civilization, but Eric Cline, an active archeologist and a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, goes one step further in 1177 B.C., the Year Civilization Collapsed by looking for the causes resulting in the social, political, and economic disintegration of the entire ancient world during the late thirteenth and early twelfth century BCE, and ushering in what academics call the “First Dark Age.”
Historians blame the “Sea People,” an enigmatic and amorphous group of mariners and mercenaries, identified in the archeological record as the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, Weshesh, and Shardana, whose origins are still unconfirmed, as the cause of the ancient world’s collapse. For more than a century they menaced the shore of Israel, the Levant, kingdoms and federations in Anatolia, city-states in Turkey and Syria, and ravaged Hattusa, the capital city of the Hittite empire, among others. Cline singles out 1177 BCE because it is the year in which Pharaoh Ramses III mounts a massive defense of Egypt, defeating the Sea People, the only country to do so, for a second time in thirty years; but to no avail, as Egypt, like the rest of the ancient world, will soon lose its wealth and power. The year 1177 BCE is like the hands of a clock, distinguishing between a time of order and one of anarchy.
Cracks in the ancient world first appear during thirteenth century BCE with increasing warfare among the nations: Egypt fights the Hittites to a draw at the famous Battle of Qadesh, the Mycenaeans obliterate the city of Troy, the Hittites attack the Island of Cyprus, most likely for its supply of copper, and Pharaoh Merneptah defeats an invasion by Libya with the help of the Sea People. Cline places the Exodus from Egypt during this period based on Ex. 1:11-14, which names the cities under construction by the Hebrews and which archeologists say were built during the reign of Pharaoh Seti I, around 1290 BCE. To the extent that the Book of Exodus is historically accurate, the Hebrew Exodus cost the Egyptians its source of free slave labor, perhaps more than a million people. Additionally, by mid century, the Hebrew nation, under the leadership of Joshua, must have created disruption and turmoil as they made war against numerous Canaanite nations. Yet, the record shows that trade continued unabated, alliances strengthened, new ones formed, and massive construction projects under taken—no one as yet recognized that the end was drawing near.
The archeological evidence, however, is clear: international trade among the ancient world countries and city-states— Ugarit, Egypt, Cyprus, Assyria, Tyre, the Hittites, etc., continued until virtually the last moment, which came quickly and violently. The city of Lachish, in what is today modern Israel, is destroyed in a fire about the year 1200 BCE. Around the same time, the Hittite Empire collapsed, Babylon and Syria are threatened by nomads, the Mycenaean city of Pylos is crushed, and the city of Ugarit met a brutal fate, resulting in it being unoccupied for over six hundred years. Additionally, many cities in southern Syria and Canaan are wiped out, with carnage continuing in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Aegeans— Crete, Mycenae, Tiryns, Troad, Cyprus, and so forth. All commercial trade ended and turmoil prevailed in the eastern Mediterranean world by 1171 BCE.
Yet, archeologists have found no signs of extraordinary trouble, except the mentioning of enemy ships and perhaps the Sea People, discovered among a few of the many Amarna Letters. Cline argues that the Sea People might be just as much victims of history as they are believed to be conquerors. Scientific conjecture and finger pointing by historians notwithstanding, he argues that there is no hard evidence that the Sea People are the unique cause of civilization’s collapse.
In the last two chapters, Cline examines various theories about why these civilizations might have fallen. There is evidence of large scale earthquakes in the region between 1225 and 1175 BCE. Severe drought/climate change is well known to have occurred from the late thirteenth into the twelfth centuries BCE. How about internal invaders and home grown terrorists disabling international trade? Perhaps the old centralized Late Bronze Age political and economic systems being replaced by decentralized systems in the Early Iron Age created unmanageable upheaval. What about the Sea People? Who were they? Where did they go? What part did they play? He also notes that it is a well documented fact that all civilizations decay and die. Are there any lessons for us to learn in our highly connected world from the events in the Late Bronze Age?
1177 B.C., the Year Civilization Collapsed is a wonderful example of scholarship written for the non-expert. Cline clearly pulls together the engaging story of the interactions among the major empires of the Late Bronze Age and puts forth a reasonable theory explaining why they seem to have evaporated as quickly as moisture on a hot afternoon. And yes indeed, as Cline shows us, we do have much to learn from the events leading up to the collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.