It was a cataclysm of immense proportions: Near the end of the 13th century B.C.E., the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Near East suddenly collapsed.
In the latter part of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1400–1200 B.C.E.), Mycenaean civilization flourished in Greece and Crete. The Hittites controlled most of Anatolia and northern Syria from their capital at Hattusa (modern Bogazköy, about 125 miles east of Ankara). The Egyptian New Kingdom ruled not only in the Nile Valley but also in 018Palestine and southern Syria. Commerce flowed over trade routes that crisscrossed both land and sea. A late-14th-century B.C.E. ship excavated off the Uluburun promontory in southern Turkey, for example, carried cargo from Cyprus, Canaan, Egypt, Anatolia and Mycenaean Greece.a
A century later, all these civilizations had begun to unravel. Cities burned, trade became almost nonexistent, and large groups of people migrated from one place to another.
When calm returned, a new world had dawned. In the wake of the magnificent Late Bronze Age civilizations, new peoples eventually arose, including the classical Greeks and biblical Israelites—two of the most significant precursors of modern Western civilization.
Mycenae and the Mycenaeans
Around 1500 B.C.E., Mycenaeans from the Greek Peloponnesus invaded Crete, destroyed the Minoan palaces, and took control of the island. For the next three centuries, the Mycenaeans were the dominant power in the Aegean. They ruled Crete from Knossos into the 13th century B.C.E.1 and set up settlements on the island of Rhodes and at Miletus in Anatolia.
Signs of the disaster to come first appeared in the 13th century B.C.E. Although Mycenaean products such as perfumed oils and unguents continued to be in great demand throughout the eastern Mediterranean, matters were not so peaceful at home. By the mid-13th century B.C.E., the rulers of Mycenae, Athens, Gla and Tiryns found it necessary to strengthen their fortification walls, and the palace at Thebes in Boeotia was burned. The palace at Knossos in Crete, taken over from the Minoans, may have been destroyed about the same time.
Then came the widespread disasters of the early 12th century B.C.E.2 Around 1200 B.C.E. Pylos was destroyed and Thebes was burned again, along with Gla, Iolkos, Midea, Tiryns and the Menelaion (a site near Sparta associated with the Homeric king Menelaus, the younger brother of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon and the husband of Helen). Portions of Mycenae were burned (possibly twice) in the early 12th century B.C.E., but this great citadel survived the fires. Then, around 1150 B.C.E., Mycenae, Tiryns and the nearby sites of Asine and Iria were razed. Many sites in Greece were simply abandoned, with refugees settling as far off as Cyprus. The population of Greece seems to have declined by about 75 percent. The literate, highly centralized Mycenaean kingdoms with their elaborate bureaucracies disappeared—and small, poor agricultural villages took their place.3
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Similarly, Crete seems to have suffered a major decline in population. People abandoned the coastal areas and built new villages in the hills or in other easily defensible positions.4 Without the palace bureaucracies to maintain it, knowledge of writing was lost both here as well as in Greece.b A “Dark Age” descended over the entire Aegean region.
Hattusa and the Hittites
Texts surviving from the reign of the last Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II (c. 1200–1180), refer to general discontent among the Hittite people. The population’s displeasure may well have been due to food shortages. Not long before the destruction of Canaanite Ugarit around 1185 B.C.E., the city’s king received three letters mentioning famine in the Hittite Empire. One demanded that Ugarit furnish a ship to transport 2,000 measures of grain to Cilicia, in southern Anatolia. It is, the letter says, a matter of life or death!5
With the Hittite Empire severely weakened, Hittite vassals in western Anatolia and 022elsewhere rebelled. Egyptian annals record that the so-called Sea Peoples (see the sidebar to this article) were marauding in Anatolia at this time. The Hittites raised an army and navy from their citizens and their loyal vassals and deployed them to meet these threats. However, this left the Hittites’ loyal allies like Alashiya (Cyprus) and Ugarit defenseless. The king of Alashiya appealed to the last king of Ugarit, Ammurapi, for help in defending the island. Ammurapi regrets that he is unable to help:
My father behold, the enemy’s ships came (here); my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country [Ugarit]. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Hittite country, and all my ships are in the land of Lycia [Lukka]? … Thus, the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.6
Hittite and Ugaritic records then become silent, so we do not know what happened to the Hittite forces to which King Ammurapi had committed troops and ships. It is likely that the Hittite forces were defeated, for a wave of destruction swept over the Hittite Empire. Hattusa was violently sacked and burned—as was Troy, Miletus, Alaca Hüyük, Alisar, Tarsus, Alalakh, Ugarit, Qatna, Qadesh and numerous other cities either ruled by the Hittites or associated with the empire.
The Hittite Empire was gone, but Hittite culture did not disappear. In Syria during the 12th century B.C.E., several small kingdoms 023arose whose rulers bore Hittite royal names and whose religious, artistic and epigraphic traditions derived from the Hittite Empire. The Assyrians called these kingdoms “Hatti,” the old name for the Hittite Empire. However, the language of these “Neo-Hittites” was not the Hittite of the former rulers of Hattusa. It was a dialect of Luwian, a related Indo-European language that had been spoken by groups in western and southern Anatolia during the Bronze Age. Peoples from Cilicia or western Anatolia, it seems, migrated to Syria during the upheavals of the early 12th century B.C.E. and filled in the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the once-great Hittite Empire.
Egypt and the New Kingdom
Although many Egyptian vassal states in Syria and Palestine were destroyed, Egypt itself weathered the 12th-century B.C.E. tumult better than the rest of the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt also prevented groups of Libyans and Sea Peoples from occupying the Nile Delta. But not even Egypt could maintain her former grandeur in the face of widespread calamities.
From the time of Ramesses III (c. 1182–1151 B.C.E.) through that of Ramesses VII (c. 1133–1127 B.C.E.), the price of emmer wheat in Egypt gradually rose to eight (or, for a time, 24) times its earlier price. Not until the reign of Ramesses X (c. 1108–1098 B.C.E.) did the price drop, but even then it remained twice what it had been at the beginning of the 12th century. During this period, the government also sometimes failed to pay grain and other food rations owed to artisans who cut and decorated the 024royal tombs. The craftsmen staged strikes at least six times between about 1154 B.C.E. and 1106 B.C.E. because their grain allotments were months in arrears.
Corruption among public officials was rampant. Royal tombs were robbed, often by the very craftsmen who had worked on them. During the reign of Ramesses IX (c. 1126–1108 B.C.E.), eight tomb robbers were caught and forced to confess. It is interesting that the thieves most often confessed to purchasing food with their loot.
Several times during the latter half of the 12th century B.C.E., marauding groups of Egyptians and Libyan mercenaries terrorized the area around Thebes, looting and killing. On one occasion they destroyed an entire town. Anarchy broke out in Thebes, and looters stripped the gold and copper from the walls, doors and statues of the city’s temples. By the time Ramesses XI died in 1070 B.C.E., Egypt was being ruled by an army commander of Libyan descent. The New Kingdom (1550–1070 B.C.E.), the last of the great Egyptian dynasties, was now defunct.
Assyria and Babylonia
During the late 14th and early 13th centuries B.C.E., Assyria had grown into a major power. Asshur-Uballit I (c. 1353–1313) established Assyria’s independence from Kassite Babylonia, claimed the status of “Great King” and initiated correspondence with Egypt. The kings Adad-Nirari I (c. 1295–1264) and Shalmaneser I (c. 1263–1234) extended Assyrian power into eastern Syria. Shalmaneser’s successor, Tukulti-Ninurta I (c. 1233–1197), wrested territory from the Hittites in the north and then campaigned in the south, conquering Babylon and making it an Assyrian vassal. When he died, Assyria controlled all of Mesopotamia, including the portion of Syria east of the Euphrates River.
Tukulti-Ninurta was then murdered by one of his sons, and the Assyrian Empire went into decline. Babylon reestablished its independence and Assyria seems to have lost much of her Syrian territory. Tiglath-Pileser I (c. 1115–1077 B.C.E.) arrested the decline for a time, but most of his campaigns seem to have been essentially defensive. An Assyrian letter from this time complains about “rains which have been so scanty this year that no harvests were reaped.”7 An Assyrian chronicle records that “a famine (so severe) occurred (that) [peop]le ate one another’s flesh.”8
By the end of the 11th century B.C.E., Assyrian rulers controlled only a small territory in northeastern Mesopotamia. Drought, famine and hunger are mentioned at least 14 times in texts dating between the 11th and the first half of the tenth century B.C.E. At the end of the 11th century, the situation was so bad that food and drink offerings for many of the gods had to be canceled. Considering the importance that ancient Near Eastern peoples placed on maintaining the rites of their gods, especially when divine help was needed, this could only have been prompted by an extreme emergency.
Rival Babylon was unable to take advantage of Assyrian weakness. Elam, the 025kingdom just to the east, began sending her armies into Babylonia, destroying Babylonian towns. In one invasion, the Elamites sacked Babylon and carried Hammurabi’s law stela off to Susa, capital of Elam, where French archaeologists found it in the mid-19th century C.E.
Mesopotamia’s political chaos was accompanied by—and perhaps caused by—severe food shortages. For instance, the normal price of barley in Mesopotamia had been about one silver shekel for 30 seahs (approximately two bushels). An inscription from the mid-tenth century B.C.E., however, records that in Babylon a gold shekel purchased only two seahs of barley.9 Now, one gold shekel was usually worth ten silver ones—meaning that grain was selling for 150 times its price at the earlier time!
The turmoil in Babylonia from the 12th to the tenth centuries B.C.E. is probably reflected in the Epic of Erra, apparently written in the early first millennium B.C.E. to celebrate the return to normalcy. In this poem, the principal Babylonian god, Marduk, abandons Babylon, and Erra, the god of pestilence, war and the underworld, gains control. Erra destroys everyone—just and unjust, strong and weak—through fighting, plague, famine and natural disasters. Pleased with the devastation he has wrought, Erra reflects on how he has eliminated all social bonds and bred a “dog-eat-dog” sense of desperation:
Sea-land [the area at the head of the
Persian Gulf] shall not spare Sea-land … nor Assyrian Assyrian,
Why the sudden, dramatic demise of the Bronze Age?
It used to be popular to cite invasions by outsiders—Dorians in Greece, Sea Peoples in Asia Minor and Syria, and Philistines and Israelites in Canaan. The Dorians, however, didn’t settle in the Peloponnesus and Crete until several generations after the Mycenaean collapse. Moreover, the Bronze Age Mycenaeans, Hittites, Canaanites and Egyptians had long defended themselves against well-trained armies. So why did they now fall so easily to less-organized groups of invaders? No, the invasions and population movements of the early 12th century B.C.E. were probably symptoms of widespread political, economic and cultural collapse—not the cause.
Others argue that the Bronze Age civilizations experienced a “systems collapse.” Late Bronze Age political economies were too narrowly based and their trade networks too dependent on peaceful conditions. The combination of intrinsic social problems—resentments caused by slavery, the alienation of land and the abuse of peasants by the ruling aristocracy—and piracy and military conflicts disrupted trade at the end of the 13th century. The decline in trade led to economic hardship, increasing revolts and a general breakdown of political and social systems.11 This theory helps explain why Bronze Age societies could not recover from the catastrophes of the 12th century B.C.E.
Again, however, we have a confusion of symptoms and causes. Why did piracy increase and trade decline at the end of the Bronze Age? What made the conflicts around 1200 B.C.E. different from those that had frequently occurred earlier? Why did social inequities that had existed throughout the Bronze Age suddenly lead to revolutions?
Still other scholars say that only natural forces can explain the extensive Bronze Age social and political collapse. Some of the destructions (Knossos, Mycenae, Tiryns, Midea, Troy, Hattusa, Alalakh and Ugarit), for example, may have been caused by earthquakes.12 However, since earthquakes are usually localized phenomena and the destructions were widespread in Greece, Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, most scholars have dismissed earthquakes as a general cause of the death of the Bronze Age. Another earthquake scenario, however, is considered in the accompanying article by Amos Nur and Eric H. 026Cline (“What Triggered the Collapse?”): They argue that sequences of earthquakes, or “earthquake storms,” occurred over a 50-year period throughout the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, triggering a “systems collapse.”
Prolonged drought has also been suggested as provoking the crisis.13 Much of the agricultural land in the eastern Mediterranean is marginal at best. A small change in rainfall can have a major impact, even in the volume of water carried by rivers. Soaring prices for grain in Egypt and Mesopotamia and the Hittite appeals for grain have been used to support the theory of climatic change. Also, studies of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates rivers indicate that they were at very low levels during the 12th century B.C.E.14 Moreover, studies of tree-ring sequences reveal a climatic change in the northern hemisphere between 1300 and 1000 B.C.E.; and a series of narrow rings on a log from Gordion, in Anatolia, indicates a period of very dry weather around 1200 B.C.E.15 That was about the time the Hittites appealed to Egypt for grain to alleviate famine.
Obviously, food shortages due to extended drought could have led to discontent, increased piracy, revolts, conflicts and population movements such as those of the 12th century B.C.E. Such conflicts and movements, once begun, would have had a multiplier or “domino” effect on other areas. However, it has been argued that there simply is no evidence of a drought long enough and intense enough to have caused the collapse. The texts at Pylos in Greece produced just before its destruction give no indication of drought, food shortages or famine. The food shortages mentioned in Near Eastern texts and the inflationary prices for grain could have resulted from disorder and social collapse rather than being their cause. Also, some Greek palaces had stores of wheat, barley and other foods still in their storerooms when they were burned. So their attackers do not seem to have been seeking food.16
Here’s our dilemma: All archaeologists agree that around the end of the 13th century B.C.E., the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean collapsed within 50 to 100 years of one another. But, alas, there is no consensus as to what actually brought about this devastation. Whatever the cause, one of the most glittering eras in human history came to an end.
This article is adapted from the author’s forthcoming history of the ancient Near East.
It was a cataclysm of immense proportions: Near the end of the 13th century B.C.E., the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Near East suddenly collapsed. In the latter part of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1400–1200 B.C.E.), Mycenaean civilization flourished in Greece and Crete. The Hittites controlled most of Anatolia and northern Syria from their capital at Hattusa (modern Bogazköy, about 125 miles east of Ankara). The Egyptian New Kingdom ruled not only in the Nile Valley but also in 018Palestine and southern Syria. Commerce flowed over trade routes that crisscrossed both land and sea. […]
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In the first half of the second millennium B.C.E., the Minoans on Crete invented a script, the as-yet undeciphered Linear A, to write their own language. When Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland conquered Crete, they adapted Linear A to record an ancient form of Greek; this script, called Linear B, was deciphered by the English architect Michael Ventris in the 1950s. Tablets inscribed with Linear B have been found on Crete and at Mycenaean sites on the Peloponnesus.
Endnotes
1.
The destruction of the palace at Knossos has been dated c. 1400–1380 B.C.E. by Sir Arthur Evans. A review of the evidence from Knossos, however, makes it likely that the palace continued to exist under Mycenaean rule into the 13th century B.C.E.
2.
For a survey of sites, see R. Hope Simpson and O.T.P.K. Dickinson, A Gazetteer of Aegean Civilization in the Bronze Age, Vol. 1: The Mainland and Islands (Göteborg: Âström, 1979); and Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 21–26.
3.
See V.R. d’A. Desborough, “The End of the Mycenaean Civilization and the Dark Age: (a) The Archaeological Background,” in I.E.S. Edwards et al., eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, 3rd ed., vol. II, part 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 658–671.
4.
R.W. Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962), pp. 320–325; d’A. Desborough, “Mycenaean Civilization,” pp. 675–677; Drews, End of the Bronze Age, pp. 26–29.
5.
Michael C. Astour, “New Evidence on the Last Days of Ugarit,” American Journal of Archaeology 69 (1965), p. 255. For a different interpretation of this letter, see Harry A. Hoffner, “The Last Days of Khattusha” in William A. Ward and Martha S. Joukowsky, eds., The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C.: From the Danube to the Tigris (Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1992), p. 49.
6.
Astour, “New Evidence,” p. 255. Words in brackets were added by the author.
7.
J. Neumann and Simo Parpola, “Climatic Change and the Eleventh-Tenth-Century Eclipse of Assyria and Babylonia,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 46:3 (July 1987), p. 178. See also D.J. Wiseman, “Assyria and Babylonia c. 1200–1000 B.C.,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, p. 465.
8.
Neumann and Parpola, “Climatic Change,” p. 178.
9.
Neumann and Parpola, “Climatic Change,” p. 181.
10.
Amèlie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East (New York: Routledge, 1995), vol. 1, p. 380. For the entire epic see Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 771–801.
11.
See, for example, Philip P. Betancourt, “The End of the Greek Bronze Age,” Antiquity 50 (1976), pp. 40–47; Nancy K. Sandars, The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, rev. ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 47–49, 77–79, 197; Carlo Zaccagnini, “The Transition from Bronze to Iron in the Near East and in the Levant: Marginal Notes,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 110 (1990), pp. 493–502; and Oliver Dickinson, The Aegean Bronze Age (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 307–309.
12.
See the summary in Drews, End of the Bronze Age, pp. 33–37. See also Eberhard Zangger, The Flood from Heaven: Deciphering the Atlantis Legend (New York: William Morrow, 1992), pp. 82–85.
13.
See, for example, Rhys Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966); R.A. Bryson, H.H. Lamb and D.L. Donley, “Drought and the Decline of Mycenae,” Antiquity 48 (1974), pp. 46–50; B. Weiss, “The Decline of Late Bronze Age Civilizations as a Possible Response to Climatic Change,” Climatic Change 4 (1982), pp. 172–198; William H. Stiebing, Jr., “Climate and Collapse—Did the Weather Make Israel’s Emergence Possible?” Bible Review, August 1994.
14.
Karl W. Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 30–33; P.A. Kay and D.L. Johnson, “Estimation of Tigris-Euphrates Streamflow from Regional Paleoenvironmental Proxy Data,” Climatic Change 3 (1981), pp. 251–263.
15.
See, for general tree-ring sequences, H.H. Lamb, “Reconstruction of the Course of Postglacial Climate Over the World,” in A.P. Harding, ed., Climatic Change in Later Prehistory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 147–148; and, for Gordion, P.I. Kuniholm, “Dendrochronology at Gordion and on the Anatolian Plateau,” Summaries of Papers, 76th General Meeting, Archaeological Institute of America (New York, 1974), p. 66.
