1177 BC

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H Cline, 178 pages

During the waning of the Bronze Age, the eastern Mediterranean and Near East was the site of a cosmopolitan network of cultures and societies, intermarrying, trading, and occasionally warring with one another.  It was a time when the seeds of future cultures were planted - the age of the Trojan War and the Hebrew Exodus.  It all came to a catastrophic end in the twelfth century, when a wave of invaders known to historians as the Sea Peoples washed over the lands of Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant before breaking against Egypt.  That is, at least, the conventional account, but as Eric Cline points out in 1177 BC, it is also at best a massive oversimplification, ignoring contributing causes such as a series of particularly strong earthquakes, years of drought, and the disruption of trade in an increasingly complex, and therefore correspondingly increasingly fragile, international network.

Cline's persistent attempts to draw direct parallels between the Late Bronze Age and late modernity occasionally give rise to silliness - the Bronze Age world was in no way "global", and "while we might call" the ancient empires "nation-states in modern parlance", it would be an absurd anachronism.  This is aggravated by Cline's conclusion that we do not yet understand the causes of the 12th century collapse, which leaves any utilitarian relevance to our own times pointless.  The story of the Late Bronze Age and the modern efforts to uncover its history is fascinating on its own terms.