1177 BC

By -
1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Cline

Over 3000 years ago, the Bronze Age peoples around and near the Mediterranean had developed a network of wealthy and civilized nations that were connected by trade and royal kinship ties.  But somewhere around 1177 BC, it all went downhill.  Egypt declined, trade routes were ruptured, and a domino effect seems to have toppled one kingdom after another.  The Mycenaeans, the Hittites, the Babylonians and Minoans and others fell into a 'dark age' as technologies and writing systems were lost.  What happened?

We know that one thing that happened was invasions from the Sea Peoples--several groups of murky origin that came in, mauraded, and settled down to intermarry.  (The Philistines in the Bible were part of the Sea Peoples.)  But that's not really enough to explain the collapse.  Some scholars have proposed a massive earthquake for one civilization, or drought for others, but usually they've focused on one civilization at a time.

Cline proposes to examine the Late Bronze Age peoples as an interdependent network rather than as several independent states.   This was a strong and resilient system that could rally after a drought, or from an invasion--but perhaps it couldn't recover from several disasters, coming one after another, weakening the whole network until a systems collapse occurred.  Cline thinks that earthquakes, drought, famines, rebellions, and invasions all combined to break down the trade routes and culminate in the domino effect.

It's a very interesting book, and I think fairly convincing.  We have been able to learn a lot about international trade in the Bronze Age in the last few decades that shows that these kingdoms were far more closely connected than we realized.  Cline gives a nice picture, and as an added bonus, his book isn't an 800 page-long tome that seeks to exhaustively explain everything about each nation.  It's a reasonable size.  Pretty good.

This is part of the "Turning Points in Ancient History" series published by Princeton.  The book cover advertises that quite a bit, but what it doesn't tell you is that this is also the first book in the series and there aren't any more just yet.  I'm going to keep an eye out, though; I'd like to read the next one when it arrives.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 13, 2015 at 9:19 PM

    Ahhh, This looks VERY promising!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJanuary 14, 2015 at 5:45 PM

    Interesting! I always forget about the Sea Peoples -- I keep vaguely learning about them, being fascinated, and then forgetting them again. Bet if I read this they'd stick in my head!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more