1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated (Turning Points in Ancient History)

I’ve been obsessed with the Bronze Age Collapse for a good fifteen years. I only bought Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed because I’d run out of other books to buy. Would I learn anything new from Cline after I’d studied the primary literature and other more approachable works like Drews’s and Yasur-Landau’s? Also, I was certain that Cline would get things wrong. In fact, I learned some things that were new to me. In fact, Cline gets nearly everything correct. In 1177 B.C., Cline provides an enjoyable, easy-to-read overview of one of history’s greatest mysteries: what caused the collapse of eastern Mediterranean civilizations in the beginning of the 12th century B.C.? (Use of B.C.E. accomplishes nothing since year one is still based on an alleged year of Christ’s birth.) Cline provides a comprehensive and evenhanded presentation. Cline’s prose is lively, engaging, and conversational. There is occasional humor and a “revolting” inside joke on p. 138 that Bill Devers should enjoy. 1177 B.C. is thoroughly researched. Cline knows the literature. The book is rich with specifics to back up its assertions. But to understand the enormity of what was lost, we have to understand the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. Cline spends quite a few words explaining the Bronze Age before we get to the collapse. This is necessary. The Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean was a high point in Western Civilization. It was a time of trade, international correspondence, and generally peace. Here the newbie may suffer. There are a lot of names of places and people. Reread. Rereread. The places and people will start to come together. Cline does a great job summarizing the hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the Bronze Age Collapse. In the end, he opts for some combination of factors, and he may be right. However, a “perfect storm of circumstances”, some combination of “drought, famine, earthquakes”, and invading Dorians lusting for the taste of human flesh need not be invoked to explain the Bronze Age Collapse. As a scientist, I can tell you that the simplest explanation is not always the correct one, but here is my simple explanation. The Hittite Empire and a united Mycenaean kingdom, which the Hittites called Ahhiyawa, both fell apart. As such, they could no longer exercise their police function in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean (Hittites policed through their vassals). Groups already prone to piracy took advantage and went on a series of plundering expeditions. The result was mass destruction. Mycenaeans fled to the relative safety of the east, taking their pottery with them, except for the Mycenaeans in Tyrins, who thrived. The Sea Peoples have to have home bases somewhere (here I agree with Elizabeth French). Hatti’s demise is easily explained. Hatti was surrounded by enemies and had hardly any natural defenses (read Trevor Bryce). Whenever the Hittites went to war in one direction they were necessarily weakened on other frontiers. The capital, Hattusa, had already been abandoned once to the Kaskans (pronounced Kashkans) attacking from the north. We know that the capital was abandoned again at the end of the Bronze Age. Presumably it was the Kaskans once more. We also know the last Hittite king had to campaign along the south to recover lost vassal kingdoms. The Hittites may have lacked the military strength to fight both in the north and the south, and so the Hittite ship sank. The end of Ahhiyawa is trickier. In Hittite annals, Ahhiyawa is a united kingdom. In the Mycenaean records, we see only isolated city-states. But those records were only preserved because they consisted of clay tablets that were fired when the palaces that stored them were burned during the Collapse. Older tablets had been erased and reused. A united Ahhiyawa must have existed earlier, but then broke up. It’s fun to speculate as to the cause of the break up. We have a letter from a Hittite king to an unnamed king of Ahhiyawa whose brother, who also seems to be a king, was named Tawagalawa. It may not look like it, but Tawagalawa is equivalent to Eteocles. We see Eteocles and his brother, both kings, in the much later tradition of Seven Against Thebes, in which there is civil war. The attempted creation of a wall across the Isthmus of Corinth points to just that—civil war. Pirate attacks followed naturally. All it takes is the collapse of those two polities, Hatti and Mycenaean Greece, to account for the disastrous rise in piracy and city sacking that made up the Bronze Age Collapse. What to read next? Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War is a fun history of archeology in general and the search for the Trojan War more specifically. “In Search of” is a little out of date, and Wood goes off the deep end when he imagines conversations with Agamemnon. But that’s towards the end of the book. Most of the “In Search of” is great. You can watch the TV version on YouTube. (Warning: at one point I was reminded of Robert Plant’s trousers in The Song Remains the Same.) Yasur-Landau’s The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Bronze Age is more focused on one topic, technical, and scholarly than Wood’s book. Drews’s The End of the Bronze Age is also more technical and scholarly. Drews provides a good overview of the destruction, demolishes all previous explanations for it, but then offers his own hypothesis which is highly speculative. Redford ridiculed Drews’s minimalism in an endnote to Egypt and Western Asia in the Late New Kingdom: An Overview. That endnote is key. “Islands in the midst of the sea” must refer to the Aegean. Throughout all of your reading, keep in mind an idea that Cline attributes to Annie Caubet: “One cannot always be sure that the people who resettled a site after its destruction are necessarily the same ones who destroyed it in the first place.” Caubet’s idea should be obvious, but it is neglected in much of the literature. I do not attribute the LH or LC IIIC pottery scattered from Cilicia south to what became the Philistine pentapolis to the Sea Peoples but rather to the peaceful migration of Mycenaean refugees mentioned above, in spite of the linguistic equivalence of Peleset to Pelishtim.

This is a very detailed and historically descriptive book. Well written and based on the existing written records from ancient history. Primarily the Egyptian records but including Hittite and Assyrian tablets. It is not a book for the general public. It is much too detailed and I think most people would call it a "Tome" in the sense of British school children. When you are done with it you will know quite a bit about ancient civilizations and will have to decide on a speculation of a dramatic collapse of Bronze Age Civilization or devolution of an interconnected group of trading partners who were overcome by internal conflicts.

Eric Kline’s 2nd Edition of the book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed is an epiphany for those who stood before the mute stones of Mycenae, Troy, Egyptian Pyramids, and Armageddon trying to decipher events a thousand years hence. Professor Kline’s book presents hard facts, dates, and direct Bronze age reports of mythological events recorded centuries later in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Hebrew Bible. We know the stories but what is the reality reflected in the folk memory of such cataclysmically important events. Decades of science and scholarship slowly reveal a sometimes-frightening story of vibrant lives snuffed out by uncontrollably violent, tragic events. The most direct reports come from cuneiform letters on clay tablets between kings, merchants, and high official recording treaties, marriages, gift exchanges, requests for foreign aid, and so many other events of the day sounding as if they were yesterday’s CNN news reports. These tablets from sites in present day Egypt, Israel, Syria, Cyprus, Crete, and Iraq summarize the results of over 100 years of archeological excavations, documentation, and scholastic study of clay document records. A historical literature describing a highly sophisticated cooperative societies existing over thousands of years. The intensity of trade and interchange of Bronze age civilization is most poignantly portrayed in careful reports of underwater excavations of trading ships off the coast of Greece, Egypt, and Turkey. George Bass from Texas A&M created a new field of study by documenting the 1300 BC shipwreck at Uluburun, Turkey with goods from sources in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Afghanistan, Cyprus, Mycenae, Minos, and many other ports of call around the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. Most important were the discovery of tin ingots from Afghanistan and copper ingots from Cyprus, used for smelting of Bronze. Enough to create swords and armor for 300 soldiers of the king’s army. This lively trade, interchange and prosperity over centuries came to a crashing close for multiple collaborating empires – Hittite Empire, Kingdom of Minoa, Kingdom of Mycenae, and Babylonia. Only the weakened Egyptian Empire survived following their triumph over the invading sea people in 1177 B.C. It was the end. What caused the rapid decline and collapse of such a vibrant civilization. For almost a century scholars attributed downfall to invasion by the “sea people” mentioned in multiple Egyptian documents. This convenient explanation could not be corroborated with archeological evidence to show who they were, where they came from and why they so suddenly appeared with forces sufficient to topple established empires with powerful armies. Using instrumentation developed in physics laboratories, experts dated events of destruction using Carbon-14. Electron microscopy of pollen deposition in cores from lakes, rivers, and seas show a clear century-long picture of mega-climate change relating to written historical events. The global summary is a chilling picture of one possible future for present-day civilizations. A mega-drought lasting centuries caused famine, political unrest, revolution by the lower classes and organized emigrations of forces – raiding armies – to find better living conditions. Trade collapsed due to roaming bands of bandits and pirates. The final chapter of Kline’s book ponders the constant rise and fall of empires, kingdoms and entire collaborative groups forming a coherent civilization. He concludes “we should not think our current world is invincible, for we are in fact more susceptible than we might wish to believe.” 1172 B.C. is a worthwhile read especially when considering the ever-crazier people behavior in response to stresses. Many wish to ignore the risks of increasing carbon dioxide gas content in the atmosphere caused by human activities. Science competes with magic for the attention of the masses. Science appears to be losing.

muito bem referenciado

Love it, well written

Cline is probably the top archeological expert on the late Bronze Age. If you're fascinated with history and of the world that existed hundreds of years before the Bible was even written, buy this book. Very deep, detailed, explains why archeologists know what they know. Cline has an easy style, not a difficut read.

This book gave me a lot to think about, about how we transitioned from the Bronze Age to The Iron Age in the Mediterranean. The book is filled with citations of supporting works and expands upon the first edition. I hope learn from our past.

The world's vibrant first global village of ancient Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Cypriots, Canaanites, Babylonians, Hittites and Assyrians disappeared almost without trace, within a few hundred years around the end of the 12thC BC. Cultures, buildings, writings and manufactures vanished with the collapse of the Bronze Age. This book provides the latest chilling findings on why such a catastrophe happened. It was not, as previously thought, solely due to the savage invasions of "Sea Peoples", but a lethal combination these invasions, decadence due to increasing wealth, failure of the "palace kings" style of administration, and finally, climate change. The temperature in the eastern Mediterranean dropped by 2 - 3C in a dozen years, triggering a 300 year mega-drought (see the "3ka" event). The only positive was the eventual emergence of the Ancient Greeks, Iron and the first glimmerings of science.