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.

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1177 B.C. (Revised and Updated): The Year Civilization Collapsed