Sea Peoples in their ships during battle with the Egyptians – relief from the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu (public domain image – Wikipedia “Late Bronze Age Collapse”and “Sea Peoples”)

(7) BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE

Styled as World War Zero by some historians.

The Bronze Age Collapse – or more precisely Late Bronze Age Collapse – was the widespread societal collapse of Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization in the 12th century BC, argued to be worse than the collapse of the western Roman Empire or even the worst case of societal collapse in human history.

Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece – the Greeks of the Trojan War – were among the most famous casualties, ushering in the Greek Dark Ages for a few centuries.

However, they are among about a dozen ancient civilizations that collapsed or declined – foremost among them the Hittite Empire that collapsed in Anatolia, while Egypt’s New Kingdom and the Assyrians clung on by the skin of their teeth, in decline or weakened. “Almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”

I don’t know much about the finer details of the Bronze Age Collapse, but then neither does anyone else ultimately, as it remains the subject of argument and theory.

However, war is often cited as the main culprit, typically at the hands of the mysterious and to some extent still hypothetical “Sea Peoples”, seaborne raiders to rival the more usual horse blitzkrieg of nomadic herding tribes in civilization-crushing effect.

I certainly think war played a major part, hence this special mention, although am less clear whether it was the cause of the collapse or an effect – with the latter involving the Sea Peoples and others effectively moving into the void left by collapsing civilizations.

Interestingly, the Sea Peoples are proposed to include a number of ethnic groups – one of which is identified as the ancestors of the Philistines faced by the Israelites in the Bible. The Israelites themselves rose in the vaccuum left behind by the retreat or collapse of Hittites, Egyptians and Assyrians – so that the Bible itself has origins in the Bronze Age Collapse, as does that other landmark of western culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Apart from Sea Peoples and war, other causes are proposed for the collapse – political fragmentation or rebellion within societies, drought or famine, natural disasters such as earthquakes or volcanic eruption, plagues, and the collapse of trade for manufacture of bronze (or the emergence of iron among adversaries).

Or a combination of all of these – “the civilizations could have endured any one disaster, but not multiple at the same time, especially not when they were feeding into one another”.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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