What I Am Reading: "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" by Eric H. Cline

In my school curriculum, history was taught chronologically. Thus, you learn your ancient history when you are too young (around 6th grade or so) to receive a very complicated version of it. For me, this means that my forays into ancient history are, if not quite remedial, then at a more basic level than other history.

This history/archaeology book is by a professor at George Washington University. I didn't take any of his classes (fun trivia: I was admitted as a prospective archaeology major, all those years ago), but a friend had him as an advisor. I don't know much about him, or how he interacts with the rest of the campus, but this book on ancient history/archaeology had a lot of very GW touches.

This book is about the Bronze Age Collapse, dated around the beginning of the 12th century BC (made memorable by the title, obviously). There are many examples and therefore many studies of the collapses of individual regimes and civilizations across history, but here is a rare opportunity to investigate the collapse of an entire stable international order. Most of the book is spent elaborating on the existence of this international order, which was present in the Aegean and Western Mediterranean for about three to four centuries prior to the collapse.

One of the major players in this international system, and the only civilizational survivor, is Egypt. Cline roughly dates the beginning of the international system to the 15th Century BC: about 70 or 80 years after Egypt overthrew the Hyksos, a foreign peoples who ruled over them for a couple of centuries. During the reigns of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, encompassing the middle half of the 15th century BC, Egypt engaged in trade with the Minoans, a Cretan civilization, as evidenced by artifacts, records, and artwork found in sites in both polities. Through the record and artworks on their tombs and temples, the Egyptians had contact also with the Mycenaeans (Greece), the Hittites (Anatolia), Punt (unknown), the Mitanni (Northern Syria), the Nubians, the Babylonians, and others. Many of these civilizations traded with each other in a network, perhaps under the plausibly-deniable guise of "tribute," as revealed through artifacts such as Minoan frescoes were created for Egyptian palaces. Internationalization came from both trade and war, and sometimes kingdoms had cordial relationships with and embassies to other kingdoms that they had marched on only a few decades earlier. This was not confined to the Egyptian sphere of influence; another prominent example is given in the form of Mycenaean swords found at the sites of the Assuwa rebellion, a revolt by city-states in northwest Anatolia against Hittite rule. This suggests that Hellenic adventurers were involved in this uprising.

The book continues into the time of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, ruling from the 1390s to the 1350s BC, who had a list known as the Aegean List on his tomb: a list of Greek city-states that it is possible he traded with, or sent an expedition to, alongside other lists of lands that ostensibly paid him tribute. This evidence for contact is corroborated by remains of royal seals of Amenhotep found at palace sites in Mycenae, one of the cities so listed. The Mycenaeans, from mainland Greece, took over from the Minoans around the middle of the 14th Century BC, and trade shifted from the Egyptians over largely to Canaan and Cyprus. In Egypt, Amenhotep III was succeeded by his son Akhenaten, famous for instilling an anomalous form of monotheism. In this case, though, he is also the source of a large cache of diplomatic correspondence uncovered by archaeologists, communicating with the newly-arisen Alashiya civilization of Cyprus, the Hittites, the Canaanites, the Kassite Babylonians, and the similarly new Assyrians, who were in the course of displacing the Mitanni. Again, trade was probably undertaken under the auspices of official tribute, with many letters from other rulers begging Akhenaten for the gold that was allegedly plentiful in his country. Rulers often presumed to refer to each other as “brothers” to imply equality in hierarchy, assertions that sometimes received pushback. Thanks to this cache, we also know of specific events of international diplomacy, such as the Zannanza Affair, whereby an Egyptian queen (unspecified, but believed to be the widow of Akhenaten's son Tutankhamen) asked the Hittite king, Suppililiuma I, for a son to marry, in the absence of a Pharaoh. Eventually, the King was won over, but unknown parties killed his fourth son en route to Egypt. The Hittites responded by attacking northern Egyptian territories, but fell victim to a plague brought back with enslaved prisoners. The Hittites were a rising power at this point, though interestingly, among all the intermingled trade artifacts, there is an apparent absence of trade between the Hittites and the Greeks, with some evidence implying an embargo in place.

This situation continued through the 13th Century BC, trade and warfare. Trade goods are cataloged by ancient shipwrecks uncovered in the region. Again, internationalism wasn't only manifested through trade: the Egyptians and the Hittites fought each other at Qadesh in 1274 BC, then signed a peace treaty 15 years later. Both then dispersed to deal with their own events of dubious historicity but established mythology: the Hittites fought in what may have later been interpreted as the Trojan War (the aforementioned Assuwa rebellion), and the Egyptians would have been dealing with the Exodus at this time. By the end of the century, the situation was beginning to disintegrate a bit - the Hittites started to collapse, possibly in the face of Assyrian aggression.

This brings us, chronologically, up to the overall collapse itself. From the 12th Century BC, we have the records of Ugarit, a city in Syria with an extensive mercantile trade. The enormous volume of records found there prove that bronze age trade wasn't confined to the recorded gifts of luxury goods exchanged between rulers, but (as can be predicted) vast quantities of perishable goods that do not survive in the archaeological records. Ugarit collapsed rapidly, roughly around 1192, as their city was sacked and burned. They were sending requests for help right up to the end. This is a dramatic but mysterious situation. Most of the major empires fell within a few decades of the turn of the 12th Century BC: the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Macedonians, and others. For many years, historians and archaeologists put the blame on the enigmatic Sea People, alleged attackers whom the Egyptians fought off, but whom many others succumbed to around this time frame. It is believed that these peoples may have been migrants from Sicily and the Aegean; their alleged attacks are spread out across a few decades in different areas, proceeding from Greece south along the coast to, eventually, Egypt. They do seem to be the origins of the Philistines, who had signs of rapid cultural transition that may have resulted from a sudden influx of migrants. The Sea People are referred to directly by the Egyptians, but other “sightings,” such as in the records of Ugarit, are conjectural and sometimes contested. They were probably less of an organized group than they were a wave, or successive waves, of migrants.

As can be inferred from this framing, Cline posits many other possible reasons for the collapse of the Bronze Age's major civilizations than a Sea People apocalypse. Archaeological excavations show earthquake damage in many areas, and there is believed to have been considerably heightened seismic activity from about 1225 to 1175 BC. However, some cities affected did rebuild afterwords, so this cannot be the only source of their downfall. Climate change may have led to drought and/or famine in some areas, leading to a population shift (starting from Northern Europe down into Italy, and to sea and the east from there). Records indicated a famine in the Eastern Mediterranean, and this has subsequently been confirmed by pollen analysis. More violent political activity is harder to identify from the evidence: some urban sites do have arrowheads and spearheads in the same layer as a destruction by fire, but others show no weaponry and evidence of immediate rebuilding. Similarly, the evidence of alleged Sea People activity in a city after a fall doesn't necessarily indicate that they were the city's destroyers, they may have moved opportunistically into a vacuum (many ruined cities showed a layer of inferior Mycenaean pottery subsequent to their destruction, perhaps brought by the Sea People, though perhaps post-Mycenae bootlegs from Cyprus). There is also ample archaeological evidence that Sea People coexisted with preexisting populations.

Civilizations have survived all of these threats before: famine, refugees, natural disasters. To get to the central question of the book, what was different? Why didn’t the international order survive these crises? Cline talks about a "systems collapse," whereby individual failures and disasters had both a domino and a multiplier effect across the entire international order; as civilizations lost their central administrative organization, traditional elites, and centralized economy, and saw a shift in settlement patterns and a population decline. Some theories on these system collapses are that there was too much power concentrated in the network of elite palaces, so as these elites fell as the result of various catastrophes, the entire civilization fell with them instead of reorganizing to replace them. Another theory is that too much economic reliance on traded prestige goods instead of homegrown staples may have led to a decline as international trade routes were disrupted and economies fell apart.

Cline discusses the perspective gained by using mathematical "complexities theory," investigating the properties of complex systems. These systems, such as the international order at the end of the Bronze Age, are alive, open, and process feedback, and thus result in organic outcomes that are impossible to predict in a way that allows for policy to be crafted. Their constituent parts are also highly interdependent, and thus a failure in one area can cause cascading failures across the entire system. In other words, the system was too complex and therefore delicate to survive earthquakes, famine, climate change, population migrations, internal strife, and the whole host of issues that arose at the time. We do not have enough evidence to know for sure; and Cline notes that complexities theory may not necessarily seem more useful than just saying "shit happens" (my paraphrase), but it does provide us with a way of looking at the problem other than in a linear "A caused B, leading to C" way.

So there is the history, such as it is. The book was largely written for a layman audience, with references to things like Steve Martin's "King Tut" song; but occasionally digressed into the complexities of archaeology, and things like foreign loan words in Linear B script. It did well to introduce the relevant civilizations and their recent history, though jumping back and forth this way was on occasion slightly confusing; a timeline for reference would have been welcome. As I noted at the beginning, a lot of IR words and analyses snuck in through, I think, the GW osmosis. Cline refers to things such as the Hyksos use of chariots and composite bows as providing a "first-strike capability;" or how much like oil is today a strategically valuable resource, tin from Afghanistan was similarly critical to obtain in order to produce "weapons-grade" bronze. Items traveling between Mycenae and Mesopotamia obtain "distance value," the city-state that may have been Troy was on the "contested periphery" of the empires, or rather the "great powers." I always appreciate filtering pre-modern politics through a modern lens in this way (to combat myth-making). Cline, though, makes frequent note of how similar some of our modern institutions are to the Bronze Age infrastructure, with embassies and trade missions and embargoes and even, perhaps, summits between international leaders. If anything, the comparison to the modern day is even more apt now than it was when the book was published in 2014, as the world seems to collapse around us.