How did the Bronze Age End?
Review of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline
This is an academic book that strives to be a popular history that would please a wider audience, but doesn’t quite get there. It is about the Mediterranean political and economic system that collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, an unprecedented network of trade and common (elite) civilization of extraordinarily fertile cultures and prosperity. As the title implies, this is supposed to be relevant to the current age, which may also be in danger of collapse, but instead, it gets bogged down in academic proofs and dry, tedious detail. Only occasionally does it bring that world to life or provoke a sense of wonder.
Beginning some centuries before the 1177 date of near-simultaneous catastrophe, a spectrum of Mediterranean civilizations were flourishing, from various Greek kingdoms to Egypt and several others in the Near East (e.g. Hittites and Babylonians). They traded with each other, had developed a written lingua franca, and had highly developed systems of central administration. Seemingly all at once, and without any satisfactory explanation, they disappeared and ushered in a dark ages that lasted several centuries. Only in the 7th Century BC, when the Iron Age cultures emerged, did dynamism return. Though some survived, like Egypt, they had decisively lost their energy and were set for a slow decline.
According to Cline, there are several possible explanations. First, earthquakes clearly destroyed some cities. Second, warfare destroyed others, though not everyone. It has been argued, for example, that the “sea peoples” destroyed the empires or that chariot warfare became obsolete, but again, not everywhere. Third, there is evidence of climate change, which caused drought and then famine, but again only in some places. Fourth, there may have been internal rebellions, a kind of rise of populism against the elites that lived in citadels and used them as slave labor, though there is almost no evidence - archaeological or written - to prove this. Finally, perhaps the end was a chaotic phenomenon, a systemic collapse that was both a perfect storm of all these factors but also the proverbial unprovable causality of a single factor spinning out of control and causing a cascade of failures throughout the entire system, i.e. a butterfly in Brazil might have beaten its wings at the wrong time. This is the explanation that Cline prefers.
That is about it for the ideas, though there are many interesting asides, such as correlating events in the Bible (the liberation from Egypt of the Jews around that time or the Trojan War). There are also many individuals discussed, like Ramses and Agamemnon. This is very fun and interesting, but they are haphazardly thrown in.
This is a good academic book and worth a serious read, but it is not for lay readers. Its level is high undergraduate, for majors in classics or archaeology, and it is only obliquely relevant to the concerns of today.