After 1177 B.C.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Bronze Age in the Near East and Aegean region began around 3000 B.C. It peaked in the 1500s B.C. and ended gradually, then suddenly, in the Late Bronze Age collapse of the late 1200s and early 1100s B.C. The Egyptian empire went into terminal decline. The Hittite empire fell, and the Assyrian and Babylonian empires faltered. The Mycenaeans, Minoans and Canaanites disappeared from the record. Mainland Greece’s population halved and its palaces collapsed, along with literacy and even the concept of a supreme ruler. Welcome to the age of ignorance, war and poverty that Hesiod called a “race of iron.”

Modern historians attributed the collapse to the Dorian Greek invaders whom the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples; a horde of them sailed into Egypt in 1177 B.C. These categories now seem to be a retrospective mirage. Various peoples came to the Eastern Mediterranean over a period of centuries, some by land, some in peace, and many driven by drought, but none understood themselves as Sea Peoples or Greeks. The crisis at Egypt’s southern border, the wave of tomb robberies attributed to “foreigners” and the partisan paralysis of Egypt’s administrators were consequences as much as causes of Egypt’s demise.

In his 2014 book, “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed,” Eric H. Cline attributed the Late Bronze Age collapse to a “systemic failure with both a domino and a multiplier effect.” Mr. Cline, a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, applied complexity theory and systems analysis to the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. He detected a cascade effect of unpredictable interactions and nonlinear outcomes, often amplified by the sophistication and interdependence of imperial economies throughout the Mediterranean world. The Sea Peoples’ invasion of Egypt in 1177 B.C. remains a pivotal event, a proof of decline akin to the barbarian sack of Rome in A.D. 476. But the shift from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age was a “rolling” process. The mighty Bronze Age kingdoms and empires took decades to crumble, and the city-states of the early Iron Age took decades to cohere.

History is one sequel after another, and in “After 1177 B.C.,” Mr. Cline describes what happened next. These were, Hesiod wrote, times of “sore trouble,” but “even these shall have some good mingled with their evils.” Late Bronze Age societies adapted and transformed, or they faced eclipse and extinction. What did the dawning Iron Age do for us? Monotheism, coinage, innovations in iron-working, the Greek alphabet, the polis (city-state), the origins of democracy in Athens and the nation-state in Jerusalem, and, as Mr. Cline’s expert, ingenious and endlessly fascinating book shows, an ancient lesson in the lately rediscovered virtue of “resilience.”

Ramses III of Egypt saw off the Sea Peoples in 1177 B.C., but two decades later he was murdered, his throat cut in a “harem conspiracy” led by one of his wives and her son. His predecessor Ramses II became the “Ozymandias” of Percy Shelley’s poem, a “colossal Wreck” in the sand. Egypt went the same way through food shortages, palace intrigues, political schisms and pressure on the southern border. Neither adapting nor transforming, the Bronze Age superpower suffered a “rapid decline” in its standing and stability.

Around the same time the Hittite empire in Anatolia (modern Turkey) shattered. Attacked from the west by Sea Peoples and from the east by Assyria, the empire broke into as many as 15 small “Neo-Hittite” states populated by a “host of political entities and various ethnicities.” Hittite culture survived—the Israelite king David falls in love with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite—but the Hittite capital of Hattusa was leveled and the Hittites’ cuneiform language, a Bronze Age lingua franca, fell into disuse.

The Babylonian and Assyrian empires survived drought, famine and plague, and eventually revived in a new form. Babylonia’s population collapsed and Assyria’s record-keeping seems to have stopped in the mid-1100s B.C., but their “Neo-Babylonian” and “Neo-Assyrian” successor empires retained cultural continuity, governmental capacity and military strength. Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylonia defeated his Elamite neighbors so severely, Mr. Cline writes, that they left “no written records and little archaeological evidence” for centuries. When writing resumed at Nineveh in Assyria, it recorded victories over the Aramaeans, a nomadic people who, displaced by drought, were raiding Assyrian cities. Their language, Aramaic, would become the lingua franca of the Near East in the Iron Age.

The Mycenaean and Minoan societies of mainland Greece and Crete ended by the late 1100s B.C. Contact with the Near East dwindled, writing stopped and only “survivors or squatters,” Mr. Cline writes, lived amid the mainland’s ruined palaces. The Bronze Age was remembered in Homer’s oral legend, and Greek civilization took centuries to rebound. As everywhere, the collapse of large sociopolitical units gave space to city-states. The polis, which the Greeks would export across the region, was born from this power vacuum. The cities of Bronze Age Canaan were reborn as a mishmash of Phoenician cities, an Israelite state in the southern hill country, and, after a Sea People called the Peleset had annexed Canaan’s coastal strip, a league of Philistine cities.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)