1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (27 page)

W
e are now finally in a position to attempt to solve our mystery, by pulling together all of the different strands of evidence and the clues that are available, so that we may determine why the stable international system of the Late Bronze Age suddenly collapsed after surviving for centuries. However, we must come to this with an open mind and employ “the scientific use of the imagination,” as the immortal Sherlock Holmes once said, for “we must balance probabilities and choose the most likely.”
¹

To begin with, it will be apparent by now that the Sea Peoples and the so-called Collapse or Catastrophe at the end of the Late Bronze Age are both topics that have been much discussed by scholars over the course of the past century, and that they are linked more often than not in such discussions. This was especially true during the 1980s and 1990s, when Nancy Sandars published the revised edition of her book, simply called
The Sea Peoples
, in 1985 and Robert Drews published his book
The End of the Bronze Age
in 1993. There were also at least two academic conferences or seminars specifically devoted to these topics, held in 1992 and 1997, and many other books, theses, and conferences were tangentially related.
²
However, as noted at the beginning of this volume, a wealth of new data has become available in the past few decades, which need to be considered in our evolving understanding of both the Sea Peoples and the complex forces that brought to a close the era of magnificent civilizations that we have been discussing.
³

We need to acknowledge first and foremost, as frequently noted in the preceding pages, that it is not always clear who, or what, caused the destruction of the Late Bronze Age cities, kingdoms, and empires of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. The destruction of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, ca. 1180 BC, is an excellent example, as one scholar has recently acknowledged: “Some have suggested that the agents of this calamity were invaders from outside the kingdom; others that the people
of Pylos themselves revolted against their king. The precise causes remain undetermined.”
⁴

Second, we need to admit that there is currently no scholarly consensus as to the cause or causes of the collapse of these multiple interconnected societies just over three thousand years ago; culprits recently blamed by scholars include “attacks by foreign enemies, social uprising, natural catastrophes, systems collapse, and changes in warfare.”
⁵
It is therefore worth our time to reconsider, as scholars have done for approximately the past eighty years, what the possible causes might be. In so doing, however, we should objectively consider the available evidence that supports or fails to support each of the hypothetical possibilities.

E
ARTHQUAKES

For instance, the idea that earthquakes caused, or might have contributed to, the destruction of some of the Late Bronze Age cities has been around since the days of Claude Schaeffer, the original excavator of Ugarit. He thought that an earthquake caused the final destruction of the city, for he found visible indications that an earthquake had rocked the city in the distant past. Photographs from Schaeffer’s excavations, for example, show long stone walls knocked off kilter, which is one of the hallmarks of earthquake damage.
⁶

However, current thinking on the subject puts the date of this earthquake at Ugarit at 1250 BC or a bit thereafter. Moreover, because there are signs of restoration activities in the decades between the earthquake and the final demise of the city, it is now thought that the quake only damaged the city and did not completely destroy it.
⁷

It is, admittedly, frequently difficult to distinguish between a city destroyed by an earthquake and a city destroyed by humans and warfare. However, there are several markers that characterize a destructive earthquake and which can be noted by archaeologists during excavations. These include collapsed, patched, or reinforced walls; crushed skeletons, or bodies found lying under fallen debris; toppled columns lying parallel to one another; slipped keystones in archways and doorways; and walls leaning at impossible angles or offset from their original position.
⁸
In contrast, a city destroyed during warfare will usually have weapons of
various sorts within the destruction debris. At the site of Aphek, in Israel, for example, which was destroyed toward the end of the thirteenth century BC, the excavators found arrowheads stuck in the walls of the buildings, just as there are in Troy VIIA.
⁹

Thanks to recent research by archaeoseismologists, it is now clear that Greece, as well as much of the rest of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, was struck by a series of earthquakes, beginning about 1225 BC and lasting for as long as fifty years, until about 1175 BC. The earthquake at Ugarit identified and described by Schaeffer was not an isolated event; it was just one of many such quakes that occurred during this time period. Such a series of earthquakes in antiquity is now known as an “earthquake storm,” in which a seismic fault keeps “unzipping” by unleashing a series of earthquakes over years or decades until all the pressure along the fault line has been released.
¹⁰

In the Aegean, earthquakes probably struck during this time period at Mycenae, Tiryns, Midea, Thebes, Pylos, Kynos, Lefkandi, the Menelaion, Kastanas in Thessaly, Korakou, Profitis Elias, and Gla. In the Eastern Mediterranean, earthquake damage dating to this period is also visible at numerous sites, including Troy, Karaoglun, and Hattusa in Anatolia; Ugarit, Megiddo, Ashdod, and Akko in the Levant; and Enkomi on Cyprus.
¹¹

And, just as people are killed during the collapse of buildings and are buried in the rubble when an earthquake hits a populated area today, so too at least nineteen bodies of people killed in these ancient earthquakes have been found during excavations at the devastated Late Bronze Age cities. At Mycenae, for example, the skeletons of three adults and a child were found in the basement of a house two hundred meters north of the citadel, where they had been crushed beneath fallen stones during an earthquake. Similarly, in a house built on the west slope of the ridge north of the Treasury of Atreus, the skeleton of a middle-aged woman whose skull had been crushed by a falling stone was found in the doorway between the main room and the front room. At Tiryns, the skeletons of a woman and a child were found buried by the collapsed walls of Building X inside the Acropolis; two other human skeletons were found near the fortification walls, where they had been killed and then covered by debris falling from the walls. Similarly, at nearby Midea, other skeletons were found, including one of a young girl in a room near the East Gate, whose skull and backbone were smashed under fallen stones.
¹²

However, we must concede that although these earthquakes undoubtedly caused severe damage, it is unlikely that they alone were sufficient to cause a complete collapse of society, especially since some of the sites were clearly reoccupied and at least partially rebuilt afterward. Such was the case at Mycenae and Tiryns, for example, although they never again functioned at the level that they had achieved prior to the destruction.
¹³
Thus, we must look elsewhere for a different, or perhaps complementary, explanation for the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.

C
LIMATE
C
HANGE
, D
ROUGHT
,
AND
F
AMINE

One suggestion favored by scholars, especially those seeking to explain not only the end of the Late Bronze Age but also why the Sea Peoples may have begun their migrations, is climate change, particularly in the form of drought, resulting in famine. Although theories formulated by archaeologists frequently reflect the era, decade, or even the year in which they are publishing, such hypotheses regarding the effects of possible climate change at the end of the second millennium BC predate by several decades our current preoccupation with climate change.

For example, drought was long the favored explanation of earlier scholars for the movement of the Sea Peoples out of the regions of the Western Mediterranean and into the lands to the east. They postulated that a drought in northern Europe had pressured the population to migrate down into the Mediterranean region, where they displaced the inhabitants of Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy, and perhaps those in the Aegean as well. If this occurred, it might have initiated a chain reaction that culminated in the movement of peoples far away in the Eastern Mediterranean. For examples of droughts initiating large-scale human migrations, one need only look back to the United States of the 1930s and the drought that caused the infamous “Dust Bowl,” which led to a huge migration of families from Oklahoma and Texas to California.

This type of migration is frequently referred to as “push-pull,” with negative conditions in the home area pushing the inhabitants out and positive conditions in the area of destination beckoning or pulling the new migrants in that direction. To these, as the British archaeologist
Guy Middleton has pointed out, may be added the categories of “stay” and “ability”: the factors contributing to the desire to stay at home after all, and the factors regarding the ability to actually migrate, including knowledge of sailing, passable routes, and so on.
¹⁴

Perhaps the most famous of the arguments in favor of a drought as an influential factor in the demise of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean was put forth fully fifty years ago, in the mid-1960s, by Rhys Carpenter, a professor of archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. He published a very short but extremely influential book in which he argued that the Mycenaean civilization had been brought down by a prolonged drought that had severely affected the Mediterranean and Aegean regions. He based his arguments on what appeared to be a rather dramatic drop in population on mainland Greece following the end of the Bronze Age.
¹⁵

However, subsequent archaeological surveys and excavations have shown that the population decrease was not nearly as dramatic as Carpenter had thought. Instead, there was a shift in population to other areas of Greece during the Iron Age, which may have had little to do with a possible drought. And so Carpenter’s ingenious theory has now fallen by the wayside, although perhaps it should be resurrected in light of new data (see below).
¹⁶

Leaving drought aside for the moment, and turning to famine, we may note that scholars have long pointed to the written texts that speak plainly of famines and the need for grain in the Hittite Empire and elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age.
¹⁷
They have also correctly noted that the occurrence of famine in this region was not unique to the final years of the Late Bronze Age.

For example, decades earlier, during the mid-thirteenth century BC, a Hittite queen wrote to the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, stating, “I have no grain in my lands.” Soon thereafter, probably in a related move, the Hittites sent a trade embassy to Egypt in order to procure barley and wheat for shipment back to Anatolia.
¹⁸
An inscription of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, in which he states that he had “caused grain to be taken in ships, to keep alive this land of Hatti,” further confirms famine in the land of the Hittites toward the end of the thirteenth century BC.
¹⁹
Additional correspondence sent from the Hittite capital city attests to the ongoing crisis during the following decades, including one letter in
which the writer rhetorically asks, “Do you not know that there was a famine in the midst of my lands?”
²⁰

Some of the letters found at Ugarit are concerned with the immediate shipment of large quantities of grain to the Hittites. One missive sent from the Hittite king to the king of Ugarit is concerned specifically with a shipment of two thousand units of barley (or simply grain). The Hittite king ends his letter dramatically, stating, “It is a matter of life or death!”
²¹
Another letter is similarly concerned with the shipment of grain, but it also requests that many boats be sent as well. This led the original excavators to hypothesize that it was a reaction to the incursions of the Sea Peoples, which it may or may not be.
²²
Even the last king of Ugarit, Ammurapi, received several letters from the Hittite king Suppiluliuma II in the early twelfth century BC, including one chastising him for being late in sending a much-needed shipment of food to the Hittite homeland sometime in the years just before the final destructions.
²³

Itamar Singer of Tel Aviv University was convinced that the extent of famine during the last years of the thirteenth and the early decades of the twelfth century BC was unprecedented, and that it affected far more areas than simply Anatolia. In his estimation, the evidence, both textual and archaeological, indicates that “climatological cataclysms affected the entire eastern Mediterranean region towards the end of the second millennium BCE.”
²⁴
He may well have been correct, for one of the letters found in the House of Urtenu at Ugarit in northern Syria refers to a famine ravaging the city of Emar in inland Syria at the time that it was destroyed in 1185 BC. The relevant lines in this letter, apparently sent by someone from Urtenu’s commercial firm stationed in that city, read: “There is famine in your [i.e., our] house; we will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land.”
²⁵

Even Ugarit itself seems not to have been immune, for a letter from Merneptah found in the House of Urtenu specifically mentions “consignments of grain sent from Egypt to relieve the famine in Ugarit,”
²⁶
and one king of Ugarit wrote to an unidentified, but probably royal and senior, correspondent, saying, “(Here) with me, plenty (has become) famine.”
²⁷
There is also a text from the king of Tyre, located in the coastal area of what is now Lebanon, to the king of Ugarit. It informs the Ugaritic king that his ship, which was returning from Egypt loaded with
grain, had been caught in a storm: “Your ship that you sent to Egypt, died [was wrecked] in a mighty storm close to Tyre. It was recovered and the salvage master [or captain] took all the grain from their jars. But I have taken all their grain, all their people, and all their belongings from the salvage master [or captain], and I have returned (it all) to them. And (now) your ship is being taken care of in Akko, stripped.” In other words, the ship had either sought refuge or been successfully salvaged. Either way, the crew and the grain it carried were safe and awaiting the command of the Ugaritic king.
²⁸
The ship itself, it seems, was berthed in the port city of Akko, where today one can sit in a pleasant seaside restaurant and imagine the bustle of activities that took place there more than three thousand years ago.