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

The historian writing about the Aegean Bronze Age faces an uncomfortable choice. They can take a point of view and make a compelling narrative but only at the cost of simplifying or ignoring the scanty and contradictory evidence. Or they can delve into the complexities and the current arguments in the field at the cost of providing a confused turmoil into which the reader is lost. Eric Cline does very, very well at charting a course between those extremes; he makes it possible to follow the story while exposing and exploring the counter-evidence and competing theories. The late bronze age in the Aegean, as he describes so eloquently in the opening chapter, is a frighteningly familiar world; wide-spread nets of trade and economic interdependence, a complex weave of diplomatic relationships, the pressures of environmental change and a growing undercurrent of violence. In what seems like a blink over half the great players were seemingly wiped from the map (although all may not be as it seems there). One can't help thinking of the phrase "Too big to fail" and wondering if there is a warning here for us. It is also a fascinating, vibrant time. And a time in which foundational legends were being laid; set in this time, though not neccessarily happening in it, are the Greek myths, the Homeric epics that shape so much of the self-perception of the Western world, the events of Exodus...and this is also the height of Egypt's power, the New Kingdom, from where also comes so many of the stories and myths which would be recorded and elaborated in the Ptolemiac. The book is long, but still too short for the subject. Fortunately it is packed with citations. And dense, too; I am on my fourth or fifth reading and I'm still finding new things to explore. As with all history, but particularly history of the Ancient World, archaeology and the associated fields have seen incredible advances over the past years. Even Egyptology, buttressed by the volume of texts (and the historical accidents that made them translatable rather early on) is changing paradigms almost daily. In my humble, amateur opinion, it isn't worth reading a history written more than twenty years ago unless you are interested in the history of history. Fortunately, then, this is a recent book by someone who is active in the field. He honestly explores outmoded concepts such as the Dorian Invasions and manages to give both a historical perspective and ways in which the concept is still useful in a more modern conception. Oh, right. And it is incredibly readable for the amateur and the non-specialist. This is a serious history, make no doubt about it (the pages and pages of citations should tell you that). But it is fully accessible to any reader.

"1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed," by Eric H. Cline, is a short and engaging book of archeological evidence and theory that kept me so glued to the pages that I finished it in one day. Unfortunately, I found the book as disappointing as it was fascinating. It wasn't what I thought it would be. Nevertheless, I was pleased with what it did contain and that's why it is getting four stars. Let me explain. This book does an excellent job of setting forth the raw summarized archeological evidence supporting the concept that virtually all Late Bronze Age civilizations in the Aegean, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Near East collapsed beginning in 1197 BC (with the Sea Peoples' successful invasion of Egypt) and continuing like a wave of disintegration across the basin over the many decades. What followed was a mini-dark ages lasting many centuries before civilization once again rebounded in the Iron Age. Cline's book summarizes the primary source evidence demonstrating how these Late Bronze Age civilizations were dependent on a highly complex system of regional trade in luxury items, foodstuffs, essential raw materials, ideas, and specialized high-technology experts. He also presents evidence showing how this system broke down and collapsed as the result of a "a concatenation of events, both human and natural--including climate change and drought, seismic disasters known as earthquake storms, internal rebellions, and `systems collapse' that brought this age to an end." As to an overall theory for this process, the author believes that the answer can be found by applying "complexity theory" to the evidence. I whole-heartedly agree! But this is exactly the point at which the author completely failed me. In my estimation, Cline did a very poor job of showing the evidence in support of that idea. I certainly don't pretend to be an expert in the science of complex adaptive systems, but it soon became clear to me that I may have actually read more on this new science than he has. The author did a very fuzzy job of describing how the evidence might support the application of complexity theory to this particular situation. In particular, the author could have presented evidence from related sciences in support of this idea. I wanted to see evidence from archaeobotany (the study of plant remains), zooarchaeology (the study of faunal remains), archaeopedology (the study of soil and uses of the soil), and paleoclimatology (the study of ancient climates). In my estimation, we won't fully understand these events until their evidence is given equal weight. Two years ago, I did a college-level independent study and report on the collapse of the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization. So, I am well-acquainted with the evidence pointing toward complexity theory as the root cause. At that time, I read evidence concerning deforestation, erosion, drought, soil fertility depletion, and other environmental causes that may have been significant causal factors behind the rebellions and the emergence of the "Sea Peoples." I don't see this evidence in Cline's book...just brief mention that some of this may be involved. Perhaps this quote might help. It comes from one of the major scholars studying and applying complexity theory to a wide number of issues. The scholar is Yaneer Bar-Yam. He is head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He says: "A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism; random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep. Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear--and may not even be predictable --which chunks of our densely networked civilization are critical, until it's too late. When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it. Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable." The actual text of Cline's book is only 177 pages in length, so it is a fairly small book that can be read in a brief amount of time. The rest of the book consists of detailed notes, a glossary of important ancient people in the book, and a bibliography. I enjoyed it. I learned a great deal. I would definitely recommend it together with the caveats I've noted above.

This book is very strong as a non-technical summary of the Hittite and Ugarit power centres and their correspondence. The main weaknesses are the attempts to determine causes of events. The author often explains causes as maybe this, or maybe that, or maybe something else. In other words, he rarely succeeds in pinning down the causes of things. The author describes very effectively, and in some fascinating detail, how the ruling classes of the numerous power centres of the eastern Mediterranean region communicated with each other about their administrations, armies and personal issues. However, most of the archaeology tells us predominantly only about the ruling classes and their collapse. Presumably the societies continued after the collapse of ruling élites, but without the central control, taxation and oppression. Thus 1177 BC should not be thought of as the date of collapse of civilisation, but rather the collapse of the ruling élites. There's an interesting early case of game theory on pages 29-30, where a king decided to take the most difficult path to attack a town, rather than the two easier paths, because the enemy would place all of their defences at the easy approaches. This is similar to the Calais-versus-Normandy decision in WW2. But this early game-theory-like thinking was in 1479 BC. Two small sections of this book could have been more useful at the beginning. The two-page map on pages 110-111 is a very useful overview of all of the individual towns which collapsed, and the 4-page "dramatis personae" on pages 181-184 gives useful perspective for all of the personalities which appear in the narrative. They would have been more useful just before page 1. I wondered about the name Ahhiyawa for Mycenaean Greece. It looks pretty clearly like an early form of Achaea. So I'm not sure why this was not discussed. There's a little error on page 37, where the activities of Schliemann in the "mid- to late eighteenth century" are discussed. Wrong century, I think. Pages 139-179 are concerned principally with speculation as to the causes of the apparent "collapse of civilization". These are the weakest pages in the book. The most meaningless and implausible explanation given by the author is that the international order became too complex. He invokes some kind of "complexity theory", which he himself admits on pages 169-170 is "possibly pseudoscientific" and "does not really make all that much sense". I would omit the word "possibly". The main problem which I see in the idea that "civilization" collapsed is that it was really only the palaces and a few towns which collapsed and were not re-built. Also, the written correspondence would naturally disappear if local power centres collapsed. The fact that the ruling 1% lost their ability to rule the 99% does not imply that the 99% just disappeared into thin air. (Remember that only the ruling class had access to reading and writing.) It seems that the rulers at that time had over-leveraged their power, in the same way that the Roman Empire over-leveraged its power, finally depending on foreign mercenaries which it could no longer pay. (Too much outsourcing!) And of course, if the 99% get no benefit from supporting the lavish life-style of the 1%, they might not consent to be ruled by them. And then, for example, they might burn down the palaces and loot the towns and cities. Despite its failings, this book deserves a strong 5 out of 5 for all of the fascinating correspondence of the Hittite and Ugaritic kingdoms which I didn't know much about before. If there is a lesson for the present, it might be that excessive concentration of power and wealth in the ruling classes might not be good for long-term stability.

A fine book to plod through the late Bronze Age history. Quite interesting and informative, and, thanks to clay tablets, sometimes very human stories emerge from a time removed from us by 100 generations. Amazing detail can sometimes be found, and shows why I respect archeology so much: So much has been learned by careful investigations by studious men and women. They examine things lesser mortals would dismiss as trash, and reveal ancient worlds to our astounded eyes. The book only covers societies in today's Greece, Crete, Cyprus, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Iraq and Egypt. I may have left out Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and who knows what else, but it is about the Eastern Mediterranean societies 3500 years ago. They all showed extensive political and economic centralization in the "palace" culture. What was happening outside of the palace culture is not well known. Mark Twain noted that science is a great occupation. A tiny investment in facts can result in huge profits in speculation. This speculation occupies much of the book in the various theories to account for the downfall of the Bronze age put forward say more about the authors of the theories and the times in (I will not misuse "within", unlike the author of this book) which they lived. Invasion, climate change, civil disorder, capitalism, etc., have all been given attention and blame from time to time. One item NOT mentioned as a cause of the downfall of the Bronze Age is iron. This seems so obvious. The Iron Age followed the Bronze age. Dud. I read about this years ago. The palace culture maintained its hold on power by force, of course. Bronze weapons were expensive. According to this book, I think Iran was the only source for tin for all these Eastern Mediterranean Bronze age civilizations. Wikipedia doesn't think so. "The earliest sources of tin in the Early Bronze Age in the Near East are still unknown and the subject of much debate in archaeology (Dayton 1971; Dayton 2003; Maddin 1998; Muhly 1973; Penhallurick 1986; Stech & Pigott 1986; Kalyanaraman 2010). Possibilities include minor now-depleted sources in the Near East, trade from Central Asia (Muhly 1979), Sub-Saharan Africa (Dayton 2003), Europe, or elsewhere. It is possible that as early as 2500 BC, the Erzgebirge had begun exporting tin, using the well established Baltic amber trade route to supply Scandinavia as well as the Mediterranean with tin (Penhallurick 1986, pp. 75–77). By 2000 BC, the extraction of tin in Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal had begun and tin was traded to the Mediterranean sporadically from all these sources. Evidence of tin trade in the Mediterranean can be seen in a number of Bronze Age shipwrecks containing tin ingots such as the Uluburun off the coast of Turkey dated 1300 BC which carried over 300 copper bars weighing 10 tons, and approximately 40 tin bars weighing 1 ton (Pulak 2001). While Sardinia does not appear to have much in terms of significant sources of tin, it does have rich copper and other mineral wealth and served as a centre for metals trade during the Bronze Age and likely actively imported tin from the Iberian Peninsula for export to the rest of the Mediterranean (Lo Schiavo 2003)." Iron weapons, much cheaper, undermined the monopoly of the palace on power, and led to the downfall of that culture. Seems simple. The same sort of simple explanation escaped for many decades the explanation for the extinction of the Ice age megafauna in North America. Anybody who read American comic books in the 1950's read a lot about the "Happy Hunting Ground", the heaven for Indians. It was obvious to any reader that the happy hunting ground referred to North America soon after the arrival of humans, who found abundant and easily killed prey. So, good book. Not great. Worth the read.

As a history buff, I have bookcases full of tomes covering pre-history to today. Most of them I enjoyed, a few I struggled through and some I just put in the "donate to the library" box after a few chapters. But this book is going on the must-recommend-to-everyone list and will be only cautiously…very cautiously…loaned to a few like-minded friends. They can, and should, buy their own copies. Covering the first historical Dark Ages, this is a fascinating history of the nations and people who lived there before a combination of factors caused the eastern Mediterranean to implode. Frankly, I knew very little about this period, largely because the information was scattered through many books and generally scholastic. Then came Eric Cline and what a story he is telling! He brings the entire area to life, tells stories about real people, albeit mostly rulers,.and has a writing style that is accessible to those of us without PH.Ds. One line that indicates his sense of humor is when, discussing an army that marched 1,000 miles, sacked a city, then turned around and went home, he calls it "the longest drive-by shooting in history." I highly recommend this book for its information, writing style and plain enjoyment. This is the first in a series, "Turning Points in History," and I certainly anticipate them all being good books. But Cline's is going to be a very difficult one to equal.

I'm a big reader of apocalyptical fiction, but sometimes it's good to return to non-fiction and think about the real world. So I picked up this book to learn about "the year civilization collapsed" in 1177 BC. I've also always been interested in ancient civilizations like the Egyptians, Babylonians, Hittites, etc. but I am no expert in this field and am certainly not an archeologist. So I approach this book from the perspective of an interested but not particularly well-informed layperson. The book first sets the scene of what countries had diplomatic, trade, martial, or cultural relationships with each other in the Late Bronze Age. A few interesting and sometimes even amusing anecdotes are sprinkled in here, so reading it in short chunks is a good way to pass the time. The author describes this network of countries as "international" or "globalized"--I would hesitate to call this state of affairs "globalization" but I take the author's point that the countries were interconnected and in some ways interdependent. The book then walks you through major developments in research in this area, from archeological digs (and reinterpretations of the findings there), a little linguistic analysis, climate research, etc. Although perhaps a little dry, this part gives you plenty of names and footnotes for further exploration if there is a particular researcher or research point you'd like to follow up on later. Those looking for a grand conclusion about how and why various major civilizations in the Mediterranean collapsed may be disappointed. The author challenges the view that the legendary "Sea Peoples" launched invasions and singlehandedly took down all these countries. Rather, the author indicates that there may have been a "perfect storm" of natural disasters, climate change, political and economic instability, social unrest, and other factors that may have brought the international network to its knees and pushed the "elites" of the palace-centered societies back into the ranks of the ordinary folk, who then fell into a "dark age" of sorts that later gave rise to the advances of the Iron Age. (As a result, the title is a little misleading, as 1177 BC ends up being of relatively little relevance, since the author concludes that the collapse took place over a longer period, and readily admits that the selection of that year for the end of an era is more or less symbolic, like the dates some use to declare the end of the Roman Empire.) Overall, I appreciated the author's skeptical approach, as he points out inconsistencies and possible alternative explanations, and challenges existing research where he finds it lacking. I'm left with the impression that a lot of amazing research has been done in this area, and that more work is needed to better understand the Late Bronze Age and what came after. Also, a word of caution: the book isn't quite as long as you might think. The footnotes, bibliography, and index make up about 45% of the book (based on Kindle percentages). The rest of the writing is not overly wordy, but could have been made a little more concise and clear in places, too. As for the Kindle edition of this book: On a Kindle Paperwhite, I found that the few tables and maps in this book were far too small to read, even when I double-touched to zoom. So the map was essentially worthless. The footnotes worked well, popping up the notes and citations whenever I wanted to check them. The table of "dramatis personae" at the end was of little use since it's harder to just "flip" to the back of the book and back in a Kindle, but x-ray seems to work if you want to check on other references to a particular name or place.

[ I have edited this review to correct some flaws pointed out in comments. ] The other reviewers have already pointed out the book's many fine points; I agree with them that this is a book well worth reading. I had long thought that the Late Bronze Age Collapse was primarily due to the depredations of the Sea Peoples, and this book scotches that idea. Yes, the Sea Peoples played a part in it, but they may well have been just as much Effect as Cause. That is, their rampage may well have been induced by the same factors that brought down other cities. The real contribution of this book lies in the application of recent archaeological findings to the problem. Over the last few decades archaeologists have built up a steady compilation of data on the cities of the Late Bronze Age, and they have demonstrated that not all those cities were destroyed in wars. Some show evidence of having been wrecked by earthquakes; in others, the destruction is confined to the central palace and government facilities, suggesting that a popular revolt, not a foreign invasion, lay behind the destruction. Other sites, however, do show the kind of general destruction we'd expect from a victorious enemy. Especially important is the evidence they bring to bear showing that some sort of regional climate change was responsible for the at least some part of the collapse. The evidence indicates a cooler, dryer climate which would have been devastating to the cereal crops on which civilizations are dependent. The cooler climate would have led to repeated famines that would have led to revolts, migrations, and wars - all of which appear in the record of this period. However, there are two points on which I disagree with the author. The first is the author's decision not to organize the causal factors into some sort of logical pattern. Instead, he declares that all of the factors (climate change, poor harvests, migration, civil disturbance, and war) converged to create a "perfect storm" that destroyed Late Bronze Age civilization in the Near East. That struck me as overly conservative. My second objection falls on the assumption that a collapse of international trade caused by the piratical depredations of the Sea Peoples added to the collapse. The author several times refers to an 'international system' of trade, likening it to modern globalization. He even goes so far as to suggest that the societies of that time had developed such intricate trade relationships that the disruption of those relationships helped undermine the societies. The problem arises when you think in terms of economic output. In all early societies, agricultural output constituted the vast majority of economic output. Sure, the historical records teem with stories of gems, spices, precious woods, and metals, but they attracted so much attention only because they were so rare. In terms of economic output, grain was far and away the most important component of all ancient societies. Indeed, in 1790, 90% of all laborers in the USA worked on farms. So let's keep our eyes on the ball here: grain. Trade in grain was rare and limited to emergency situations, because the transport systems of the Late Bronze Age were incapable of moving grain in bulk. The ocean-going ships of the day had cargo capacities of a few tens of tons. Grain was carried in heavy ceramic jars; a single ship could carry enough food to provide for at most a hundred people for a year. Land transportation was even worse: the inefficient wagons and poor roads of the day did not permit the carriage of large amounts of grain very far. After a few tens of miles, so much of the grain would have to go to feed the dray animals that there just wouldn't be much left at the destination. Thus, the disruption of trade would have denied rulers their luxuries, but would not have made much of a dent on the economy as a whole. A postscript to this review: the author of the book, Eric Cline, has graciously responded to my criticisms and finally gotten through my thick head a point that, while not mentioned in this review, came up in the exchange of comments. He has taken a lot of his time to straighten me out, and I deeply appreciate his patience with my errors.

There was a good chance, I thought, that this book would be very dry. But about halfway through, I realized that I was enjoying the style along with the story, and that it was both a fun and informative read. I had other engaging books going, but suspended them while I finished this. This book describes a mystery of the ancient world. The mystery is modern day because archaeologists can't piece the whole story together, but you get the sense that the ancients may not have known what was causing the collapse, either. Suspense is maintained by the author, as he doles out information across his chapters. He has an interesting style where he's telling a story in human terms from thousands of years ago, and then he breaks it with "and we know/suspect this because," whereupon he goes into what archaeologists have found over the years and how they have interpreted it. Then back to the story. Reading this, you'll learn a lot about what has been found, what is known, unknown, disputed, and/or suspected. It renders the ancients as real people, as we peer into their letters and messages. Surprisingly, the book ends in a discussion of complexity theory. I had been thinking in those terms as I read the book, and was pleased when the author arrived there. He acknowledges that complexity is not highly explanatory. Rather, it provides a framework for thinking about how collapse occurs, and how many events or trajectories contribute to it. For me, we are always on complex interacting trajectories that we cannot comprehend in the present, and that may not be comprehensible in retrospect. This book seems to describe that very idea about the late Bronze Age.