Last time I read about the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations the Sea People, in a cue the barbarians moment, wreaked havoc on more settled empires and plunged the eastern Mediterranean into a dark age. Highly literate cultures like Mycenaean were overrun by less civilized Dorian Greeks; illiteracy and poverty spread, fortress cities emerged like medieval castles, and bards like Homer kept the culture of Mycenaean alive orally through tales of the Trojan War.
Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, shows how these older notions are too simplified, based on theories rather than fact, conjecture rather than consensus; as in the study of all ancient culture, there are far more questions generated than settled answers about the last years of the Bronze Age.
Cline brings us up to date. Rather than a single answer, the global culture of the late Bronze Age went down from invasions of the Sea Peoples (whoever they were), internal revolts, climate change, drought, earthquakes, and demographic shifts. Cline also, rightly, reminds us that such a thing as a dark age is too gloomy a moniker. The collapse of the Bronze Age ushered in the Iron Age, where a small group of confederated tribes called Israel filled the power vacuum in Canaan. We still live with the impact of their stories today; without the destruction of the Bronze Age behemoths, this would not have happened. The Homeric tales ushered in the great age of the Greeks. These stories became their foundation texts, and until recently, along with the bible, the anchors of so-called western civilization. For the new to grow the old must often die.
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