1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (31 page)

In writing about the situation at the end of the Late Bronze Age in his book
Scales of Fate
, Monroe describes the interactions of the various powers in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean as an “intersocietal network,” which agrees with the picture presented here. He points out, as I have, that this period is “exceptional in the treaties, laws, diplomacy, and exchange that created the first great international era in world history.”
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However, most interestingly, Monroe further notes that such networks have ways of postponing the inevitable collapse, which comes to all societies eventually. As he says, “revolts are quelled, raw materials are found, new markets are opened, price controls are put into effect, merchants’ properties are confiscated, embargoes [are] placed, and war is waged.”
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He also says, though, that “generally the rulers of the core power or powers treat the symptoms rather than the causes of instability,” and concludes that the “violent destruction of the Late Bronze palatial civilization, as attested in the textual and archaeological record, was, like many collapses, the inevitable result of limited foresight.”
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I am in agreement with Monroe up until this last point, for I do not think that we are justified in blaming the collapse simply on “limited foresight,” given the multiple probable factors explored above, which the ancient leaders could not possibly have completely predicted. An unanticipated systems collapse—quite possibly triggered by climate change, as hypothesized recently by Brandon Drake and the team led by David Kaniewski,
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or precipitated by earthquakes or invasion—seems much more likely, but Monroe’s words might serve as something of a warning for us today, for his description of the Late Bronze Age, especially in terms of its economy and interactions, could well apply to our current globalized society, which is also feeling the effects of climate change.

A R
EVIEW OF
P
OSSIBILITIES AND
C
OMPLEXITY
T
HEORY

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the so-called Collapse or Catastrophe at the end of the Late Bronze Age has been much discussed by scholars. Robert Drews tried to attack this problem systematically, devoting each chapter in his 1993 book to a discussion of a different potential cause. However, he may have misjudged and underestimated some of these; for instance, he dismissed out of hand the idea of a systems collapse, in favor of his own theory that changes in warfare were actually responsible—a hypothesis upon which not all scholars agree.
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Now, twenty years after the publication of Drews’s book, and even after all of the continuous debate and constant stream of academic publications on the topic, there is still no general consensus as to who, or what, caused the destruction or abandonment of each of the major sites within the civilizations that came to an end in the twilight of the Bronze Age. The problem can be concisely summarized as follows:

Major Observations

1. We have a number of separate civilizations that were flourishing during the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries BC in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, from the Mycenaeans and the Minoans to the Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites, and Cypriots. These were independent but consistently interacted with each other, especially through international trade routes.

2. It is clear that many cities were destroyed and that the Late Bronze Age civilizations and life as the inhabitants knew it in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and the Near East came to an end ca. 1177 BC or soon thereafter.

3. No unequivocal proof has been offered as to who or what caused this disaster, which resulted in the collapse of these civilizations and the end of the Late Bronze Age.

Discussion of Possibilities

There are a number of possible causes that may have led, or contributed, to the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but none seems capable of having caused the calamity on its own.

A. Clearly there were earthquakes during this period, but usually societies can recover from these.

B. There is textual evidence for famine, and now scientific evidence for droughts and climate change, in both the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean, but again societies have recovered from these time and time again.

C. There may be circumstantial evidence for internal rebellions in Greece and elsewhere, including the Levant, although this is not certain. Again, societies frequently survive such revolts. Moreover, it would be unusual (notwithstanding recent experience in the Middle East to the contrary) for rebellions to occur over such a wide area and for such a prolonged period of time.

D. There is archaeological evidence for invaders, or at least newcomers probably from the Aegean region, western Anatolia, Cyprus, or all of the above, found in the Levant from Ugarit in the north to Lachish in the south. Some of the cities were destroyed and then abandoned; others were reoccupied; and still others were unaffected.

E. It is clear that the international trade routes were affected, if not completely cut, for a period of time, but the extent to which this would have impacted the various individual civilizations is not altogether clear—even if some were overly dependent upon foreign goods for their survival, as has been suggested in the case of the Mycenaeans.

It is true that sometimes a civilization cannot recover from invaders or an earthquake, or survive a drought or a rebellion, but at the moment, for lack of a better explanation, it looks as though the best solution is to suggest that all of these factors together contributed to the collapse of what had been the dominant Late Bronze Age kingdoms and societies in these regions. Based on the evidence presently available, therefore, we may be seeing the result of a systems collapse that was caused by a series of events linked together via a “multiplier effect,” in which one factor affected the others, thereby magnifying the effects of each. Perhaps the inhabitants could have survived one disaster, such as an earthquake or a drought, but they could not survive the combined effects of earthquake, drought, and invaders all occurring in rapid succession. A “domino effect” then ensued, in which the disintegration of one civilization led to the fall of the others. Given the globalized nature of their world, the
effect upon the international trade routes and economies of even one society’s collapse would have been sufficiently devastating that it could have led to the demise of the others. If such were the case, they were not too big to fail.

However, despite my comments above, systems collapse might be just too simplistic an explanation to accept as the entire reason for the ending of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, and Near East.
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It is possible that we need to turn to what is called complexity science, or, perhaps more accurately, complexity theory, in order to get a grasp of what may have led to the collapse of these civilizations.

Complexity science or theory is the study of a complex system or systems, with the goal of explaining “the phenomena which emerge from a collection of interacting objects.” It has been used in attempts to explain, and sometimes solve, problems as diverse as traffic jams, stock market crashes, illnesses such as cancer, environmental change, and even wars, as Neil Johnson of Oxford University has recently written.
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While it has made its way from the realm of mathematics and computational science to international relations, business, and other fields over the past several decades, it has only rarely been applied in the field of archaeology. Intriguingly, and perhaps presciently, Carol Bell explored the topic briefly in her 2006 book on the evolution of, and changes in, long-distance trading relationships in the Levant from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age. She noted that it was a promising theoretical approach that might be of use as an explanatory model for the cause of the collapse and for the restructuring that followed.
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For a problem to be a potential candidate for a complexity theory approach, Johnson states that it has to involve a system that “contains a collection of many interacting objects or ‘agents’.”
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In our case, those would be the various civilizations active during the Late Bronze Age: the Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Egyptians, Canaanites, Cypriots, and so on. In one aspect of complexity theory, behavior of those objects is affected by their memories and “feedback” from what has happened in the past. They are able to adapt their strategies, partly on the basis of their knowledge of previous history. Automobile drivers, for example, are generally familiar with the traffic patterns in their home area and are able to predict the fastest route to take to work or back home again. If a traffic jam arises, they are able to take alternative routes to avoid
the problem.
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Similarly, toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, seafaring merchants from Ugarit or elsewhere might have taken steps to avoid enemy ships or areas in which such ships and marauders were frequently based, including the coastal portions of the Lukka lands (i.e., the region later known as Lycia, in southwestern Anatolia).

Johnson also states that the system is typically “alive,” meaning that it evolves in a nontrivial and often complicated way, and that it is also “open,” meaning that it can be influenced by its environment. As he puts it, this means that the complicated stock markets today, about which analysts often talk as if they were living, breathing organisms, can be influenced or driven by outside news about the earnings of a particular company or an event on the other side of the world. Just so, Sherratt—in her analogy published a decade ago, and quoted above in the preface—described the similarities between the Late Bronze Age world and our own “increasingly homogenous yet uncontrollable global economy and culture, in which … political uncertainties on one side of the world can drastically affect the economies of regions thousands of miles away.”
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Such influences or stressors on the “system” in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age might well be the probable, possible, and conceivable earthquakes, famine, drought, climate change, internal rebellion, external invasion, and cutting of the trade routes discussed above.

The most important premise, we might argue, is that Johnson asserts that such a system exhibits phenomena that “are generally surprising, and may be extreme.” As he says, this “basically means that anything can happen—and if you wait long enough, it generally will.” For example, as he notes, all stock markets will eventually have some sort of crash, and all traffic systems will eventually have some kind of jam. These are generally unexpected when they arise, and could not have been specifically predicted in advance, even though one knew full well that they could and would occur.
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In our case, since there has never been a civilization in the history of the world that hasn’t collapsed eventually, and since the reasons are frequently the same, as Jared Diamond and a host of others have pointed out, the eventual collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations was predictable, but it is unlikely that we would have been able to predict when it would happen, or that they would all collapse at the same time, even
with a full working knowledge of each civilization. As Johnson writes, “even a detailed knowledge of the specifications of a car’s engine, colour and shape, is useless when trying to predict where and when traffic jams will arise in a new road system. Likewise, understanding individuals’ personalities in a crowded bar would give little indication as to what large-scale brawls might develop.”
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So what use might complexity theory be in the effort to explain the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age, if it cannot help us predict when it would happen or why? Carol Bell pointed out that the trading networks of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean are examples of complex systems. She therefore cited the work of Ken Dark, of the University of Reading, who noted that “as such systems become more complex, and the degree of interdependence between their constituent parts grows, keeping the overall system stable becomes more difficult.”
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Known as “hyper-coherence,” this occurs, as Dark says, “when each part of the system becomes so dependent upon each other that change in any part produces instability in the system as a whole.”
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Thus, if the Late Bronze Age civilizations were truly globalized and dependent upon each other for goods and services, even just to a certain extent, then change to any one of the relevant kingdoms, such as the Mycenaeans or the Hittites, would potentially affect and destabilize them all.

Moreover, it is especially relevant that the kingdoms, empires, and societies of the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean can each be seen as an individual sociopolitical system. As Dark says, such “complex socio-political systems will exhibit an internal dynamic which leads them to increase in complexity…. [T]he more complex a system is, the more liable it is to collapse.”
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Thus, in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, we have individual sociopolitical systems, the various civilizations, that were growing more complex and thus apparently more liable to collapse. At the same time, we have complex systems, the trading networks, that were both interdependent and complicated in their relationships, and thus were open to instability the minute there was a change in one of the integral parts. Here is where one malfunctioning cog in an otherwise well-oiled machine might turn the entire apparatus into a pile of junk, just as a single thrown rod can wreck the engine of a car today.

Therefore, rather than envisioning an apocalyptic ending overall—although perhaps certain cities and kingdoms like Ugarit met a dramatic, blazing end—we might better imagine that the end of the Late Bronze Age was more a matter of a chaotic although gradual disintegration of areas and places that had once been major and in contact with each other, but were now diminished and isolated, like Mycenae, because of internal and/or external changes that affected one or more of the integral parts of the complex system. It is clear that such damage would have led to a disruption of the network. We might picture a modern power grid that has been disrupted, perhaps by a storm or an earthquake, wherein the electric company can still produce power but cannot get it out to the individual consumers; we see such events on an annual basis in the United States, caused by anything and everything from tornadoes in Oklahoma to snowstorms in Massachusetts. If the disruption is permanent, as might be the case in a major catastrophe, such as a nuclear explosion today, eventually even the production of the electricity will halt. The analogy may hold for the Late Bronze Age, albeit at a lower technological level.