The First Time the World Ended

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 90
Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

The Late Bronze Age dominated the eastern Mediterranean for over three centuries. Extensive trade routes criss-crossed from Babylon to Greece, from Afghanistan to Egypt. It was a time of globalized trade, of epic warfare and timeless art. Then, in the early 13th Century BCE, it ended abruptly in violence, destruction, and dirt. Empires collapsed, and cities were vacated. Technology, government, and culture skidded backward. What, exactly, happened?

According to GWU classicist Eric Cline, a scholarly consensus existed not long ago. Archaeologists blamed the Sea Peoples, a consortium of migratory refugee groups who attacked Egypt in 1177 BCE. Though Pharaoh Ramses III beat these invaders back, his victory came at massive cost. Egypt didn't regain its regional dominance for three centuries. Classicists assumed the Sea Peoples sacked the entire region, particularly since many archaeological sites were found riddled with bronze arrowheads.

New evidence since the 1990s, however,questions this assumption.  The collapse apparently proceeded over several decades, and not every site shows signs of sacking. Cline writes that current evidence suggests a perfect confluence of climate change, refugee crisis, resource scarcity, and international anarchy, among other influences, created a “perfect storm of calamities” that shattered the foundation of globalized civilization. Cline doesn't comment on today's parallels. He doesn't need to.

Cline starts by reconstructing what we know about Late Bronze Age (LBA) civilization. Given that this era saw the first keeping of widespread records, we know an astonishingly detailed amount about this period. New rising powers like Mycenaean Greece offset dwindling influences of once-magnificent empires like Mittani. States once regarded as almost mythological, like the Hittite Empire, not only really existed, they left copious records… once we knew where to look.

Professor Eric H. Cline

There are limitations to this history. Most record-keepers were state officials and court scribes; some were prosperous merchants. Thus we know the “great doings of great men,” as Thucydides put it. And, after over three millennia, large quantities of important artifacts just rotted away, like food, textiles, and other perishable goods. We must reconstruct how ordinary people lived from court records and metal artifacts, a limitation Cline openly acknowledges.

But that leaves extensive documentation nevertheless. Cline quotes most extensively from Egyptian stelae and temple inscriptions, as Egypt clearly left the most detailed literary record. Yet other sources also exist. Under a century ago, for instance, Ugaritic records were completely unknown; Ugarit was a forgotten minor city-state, its location lost. But now its rediscovered written records provide Cline’s most specific sources on the LBA’s final decades.

The world Cline reconstructs (he admits making occasional leaps of logic where facts are scanty) is both fantastically complex, and hauntingly familiar. Extensive trade routes made LBA society possible, moving uncountable quantities of goods from where they naturally existed, to where humans lived. Civilization in Egypt, Greece, and Anatolia was only possible using bronze, made from Cyprus copper and Afghanistan tin, so peaceful trade was absolutely necessary.

Mercantile culture survives for readers because LBA record-keepers described their trade in extensive bills and receipts. We know as much about certain prosperous merchants as about some kings. Besides land-based archaeological sites, Cline dedicates probably his longest description to an underwater dig, the Uluburun Shipwreck, with has yielded science’s most extensive trove of information about the interconnected, downright globalized, nature of LBA society.

Cline spends almost as much time describing the scientists of the last two centuries who have reconstructed LBA history, as on the history. Since Near Eastern civilization just stopped, leaving huge gaps in historical records, Cline considers how we know that history equally important to what we know. LBA history is modern history, because the rediscovery says as much about ourselves as about the civilization which scientists have painstakingly reconstructed.

Then, after three centuries of almost uninterrupted prosperity, LBA civilization stopped. Historians once simply assumed barbarian invasions destroyed civilization, because Egyptian records mentioned barbarians, and hey, similar invasions destroyed Rome, so why not? But as Cline reconstructs the final, poorly documented decades, it becomes increasingly clear that no single explanation suffices. The end of LBA civilization was as complex, and as fraught with possibilities, as its beginning.

Places and cultures Cline describes are as familiar as today’s post-Arab Spring headlines: Egypt, Syria, Megiddo, Anatolia. Aleppo. And possible causes of collapse, including climate change, refugee crisis, and war, should make thoughtful readers pause. Like all great literature, Cline’s history isn’t only about its subjects, it’s also about us, its readers. It challenges us to consider how we resemble, or don’t, LBA history. The parallels are chilling.