1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (5 page)

In 1177 BC, as previously in 1207 BC, the Egyptians were victorious. The Sea Peoples would not return to Egypt a third time. Ramses boasted that the enemy were “capsized and overwhelmed in their places.” “Their hearts,” he wrote, “are taken away; their soul is flown away. Their weapons are scattered in the sea.”
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However, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Although Egypt under Ramses III was the only major power to successfully resist the onslaught of the Sea Peoples, New Kingdom Egypt was never the same again afterward, most likely because of the other problems faced by the entire Mediterranean region during this period, as we shall see below. The succeeding pharaohs, for the rest of the second millennium BC, were content to rule over a country much diminished in influence and power. Egypt became a second-rate empire; a mere shadow of what it had once been. It was not until the days of Pharaoh Shoshenq, a Libyan who founded the Twenty-Second Dynasty ca. 945 BC—and who is probably to be identified as Pharaoh Shishak of the Hebrew Bible
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—that Egypt rose to a semblance of prominence again.

Beyond Egypt, almost all of the other countries and powers of the second millennium BC in the Aegean and Near East—those that had been present during the golden years of what we now call the Late Bronze Age—withered and disappeared, either immediately or within less than a century. In the end, it was as if civilization itself had been wiped away in much of this region. Many, if not all, of the advances of the previous centuries vanished across great swaths of territory, from Greece to Mesopotamia. A new transitional era began: an age that was to last for at least one century and perhaps as many as three in some areas.

There seems little doubt that terror must have prevailed throughout the lands in the final days of these kingdoms. A specific example can be seen on a clay tablet, inscribed with a letter from the king of Ugarit in northern Syria, addressed to the higher-ranking king on the island of Cyprus:

My father, now the ships of the enemy have come. They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land. Doesn’t my father know that all of my infantry and [chariotry] are stationed in Khatte, and that all of my ships are stationed in the land of Lukka? They have not arrived back yet, so the land is thus prostrate. May my father be aware of
this matter. Now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us. Now if other ships of the enemy turn up, send me a report somehow, so that I will know.
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There is some dispute about whether the tablet ever reached the intended recipient on Cyprus. The original excavators who found the tablet thought the letter might never have been sent. It was originally reported to have been found in a kiln, along with more than seventy other tablets, where it had apparently been placed for baking—the better to survive the rough journey to Cyprus.
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These excavators and other scholars initially surmised that the enemy ships had returned and sacked the city before the urgent request for assistance could be dispatched. This is the story that has since been repeated in textbooks for a generation of students, but scholars have now shown that the tablet was not found in a kiln and, as we shall see, was probably a copy of a letter that had been dispatched to Cyprus after all.

There was a tendency on the part of earlier scholars to attribute any destruction from this period to the Sea Peoples.
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However, it may be presumptuous to lay the blame for the end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean entirely at their feet. It probably gives them too much credit, for we have no clear evidence, apart from the Egyptian texts and inscriptions, which give conflicting impressions. Did the Sea Peoples approach the Eastern Mediterranean as a relatively organized army, like one of the more disciplined Crusades intent on capturing the Holy Land during the Middle Ages? Were they a loosely or poorly organized group of marauders, like the Vikings of a later age? Or were they refugees fleeing a disaster and seeking new lands? For all we know, the truth could involve a combination of all or none of the above.

A wealth of new data available in the past few decades now needs to be considered within the equation.
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We are no longer certain that all of the sites with evidence of destruction were razed by the Sea Peoples. We can tell from the archaeological evidence that a site was destroyed, but not always by what or by whom. Moreover, the sites were not all destroyed simultaneously, or even necessarily within the same decade. As we shall see, their cumulative demise spans several decades and perhaps as much as a century.

Moreover, while we do not know for certain the cause, or all the causes, of the collapse of the Bronze Age world in Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, the weight of contemporary evidence suggests that it was probably not the Sea Peoples alone who were to blame. It now seems likely that they were as much the victims as they were the aggressors in the collapse of civilizations.
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One hypothesis suggests that they were forced out of their homes by a series of unfortunate events and migrated eastward where they encountered kingdoms and empires already in decline. It is also quite possible that they were able to attack and ultimately vanquish many of the kingdoms of the region precisely because those monarchies were already in decline and in a weakened state. In this context, the Sea Peoples might perhaps be considered simply opportunistic, as one scholar has called them, and might have settled down in the Eastern Mediterranean much more peacefully than has previously been assumed. We shall consider these possibilities in greater detail below.

Nevertheless, for decades of scholarly research the Sea Peoples were a convenient scapegoat, taking the fall for a situation that may have been far more complex and not of their own making. The tide is now turning, for several scholars have recently pointed out that the “story” of the Sea Peoples’ catastrophic wave of wanton destruction and/or migration had been created by scholars such as Gaston Maspero, the famous French Egyptologist, as early as the 1860s and 1870s, and was solidified by 1901. However, it was a theory based solely upon the epigraphic evidence of the inscriptions, long before any of the destroyed sites had actually been excavated. In fact, even those scholars who followed Maspero’s lead were divided as to the direction followed by the Sea Peoples, for some thought that they ended up in the Western Mediterranean after being defeated by the Egyptians, rather than starting there.
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In our current view, as we shall see below, the Sea Peoples may well have been responsible for some of the destruction that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but it is much more likely that a concatenation of events, both human and natural—including climate change and drought, seismic disasters known as earthquake storms, internal rebellions, and “systems collapse”—coalesced to create a “perfect storm” that brought this age to an end. However, in order to understand the enormity of the events that took place around 1177 BC, we have to begin three centuries earlier.

Table 1.
Late Bronze Age Egyptian and Near Eastern kings mentioned in the text, listed by country/kingdom and chronology

Table 2.
Modern areas and their probable Late Bronze Age names

CHAPTER ONE

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