After 1177 B.C.

And Gandalf said: ‘...The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what may be preserved. For though much has been saved, much must now pass away...’

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

In the imaginary world of Lord of the Rings, the Loremasters of Eruhini divided up their history into Ages.

The ending of one age and the beginning of a new one was typically defined as the point at which some ultra-baddy was defeated. So in the Lord of the Rings the Fourth age starts when the Dark Lord Sauron’s magic ring is accidentally dropped into a volcano and he immediately disintegrates.

In the real world, our own various Ages of man are generally less easy to pinpoint.

However Loremaster and Historian Eric Cline has sought to bring some clarity to one such division - the ending of the Bronze Age with the Bronze Age Collapse, and the start of the Iron Age, in 1177 BCE, with his new book After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations

The difficulty is that no-one is absolutely sure what drove the collapse - what caused the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian civilizations to simultaneously disintegrate? - and with written records falling away after that point the next few hundred years are quite murky too.

In his previous book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (1177 BC review) Cline sought to untangle the causes of the collapse.

In the new book After 1177 B.C. Cline turns his attention to the experience of the different societies in weathering the storm. Who sank, who swam, and why?

What’s in the book?

Cline systematically takes us through the main players of the age in this corner of the world:

• Central Canaanites (Isrealites?)
• Southern Canaanites
• Egyptians
• Assyrians
• Babylonians
• Cyprians
• Phoenicians (Central Canaanites)
• Hittites
• Mycenaeans and Minoans

The last section of the book brings it all together and considers whether there are any lessons to be learned in today's potentially troubled times. (Spoiler alert: other than “plan for the worst”, not really!)

What’s the evidence?

For each civ he pieces together what happened in the few hundred years from 1177 BCE to about 800 BCE - as much as we can based on the available evidence. This is not always straightforward and - historians being historians - there are still arguments to what extent different societies experienced a collapse. The main problem is that as record keeping withers aways, we can’t say with certainty whether everyone was having a great time and just not writing about it. Or having an awful time, with no spare energy to hold a reed stylus.

However the consensus is that things were pretty bad and we are generally arguing about how bad. Was it a 90% population fall? Or just 75%?

Hapless Hittites

For example, the Hittites, who were a major superpower based in modern day Turkey, were basically annihilated.

In more scholarly language: a “drastic decrease in political complexity” took place in and around the capital Hattusa: a return to subsistence farming and “a lack of evidence for any public institutions”. Population decline is estimated to be 90%.

There is a but though because some peripheral Hittite towns on what is now the border between Syria and Turkey did manage to soldier on - and branches of the Hittite royal family appear to have continued to rule there, descended from the Hittite king Suppiluliama I who had sent out some of his sons to rule over the towns before everything kicked off.

There were up to 15 of these mini city-states (described as Neo-Hittite) with the most famous being at Aleppo and Carchemish.

And by late 10th century (i.e. close to 900) Cline tells us that “all the trappings of a complex society were evident - monumental buildings and sculpture; inscriptions; rulers with titles; ... specialised occupations such as that of priest...” and so on. To see for yourself have a look at some of these pictures of Carchemish sculptures on the excellent Hittite Monuments site

So while the Bronze Age Collapse was a disaster for the Hittites, there were survivors who thrived after a couple of hundred years, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Savvy Cypriots and Phenomenal Phoenicians

In contrast , two societies / peoples that seem to have done pretty well for themselves amidst the rubble were the Cypriots and the Phoenicians.

The Phoenicians - the collective term for a group of coastal city states in what is now Israel and Lebanon - became hugely wealthy as maritime traders, setting up outposts all over the Mediterranean including as far away as Spain. (There’s some more info in my review of Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz).

On Cyprus meanwhile the Cypriots seem to have been the earliest people to figure out how to get iron out of iron ore and make useful things with it - the evidence for this is iron bladed knives found in 12 century BCE graves in a bunch of different sites on Greek islands. The metal in the blades can be traced back to Cyprus.¹

It is not clear exactly what prompted the use of iron - was there a shortage of tin to make bronze? did people just think iron looked cool? Whatever the cause it is a good example of technological innovation even while the Mediterranean world at large regressed.

Atrocious Assyrians

So the Hittites did very badly and the Cypriots and Phoenicians quite well. The Assyrians are an example of a state that had both ups and downs.

The Assyrians had morphed from a city of peaceful merchants in the period 2000 to 1700 BCE, to a typical if rather bloodthirsty empire from about 1400 BCE.

In the years immediately after the Collapse in 1177 BCE they seemed to have carried on pretty much as usual, keeping their head when all about them were losing theirs and blaming it on them (often very justifiably).

One Assyiran King of the period was happy to report that:

Like a storm demon I piled up the corpses of their warriors on the battlefield and made their blood flow into the hollows and plains of the mountains. I cut off their heads and stacked them like grain piles around their cities.

Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser I (1115–1076 BC)

But the 150 years after 1076 were a low ebb for Assyria. There seem to have been severe droughts every ten years in the 11th Century BCE and the population fell. Other neighbouring people like the Arrameans menaced their lands, record keeping ceased and the Assyrians were driven back to their heartlands.

Nevertheless they kept their (bloodthirsty) culture intact and the (brutal) line of Assyrian Kings continued. So when climate conditions improved in about 920 BCE, they were able to carry on business as usual:

I conquered the city. I felled 800 of their combat troops with the sword and cut off their heads. I captured many soldiers alive. The rest of them I burnt. I carried off valuable tribute from them. I built a pile of live men and of heads before his gate. I impaled on stakes 700 soldiers before their gate. I razed, destroyed, and turned into ruin hills the city. I burnt their adolescent boys and girls.

Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II (883 to 859 BCE)

Civilisation’s back, baby!

Just like the good old days. Assyrians with prisoners and a severed head at the siege of Lachish. Reliefs from the Palace at Nineveh now in the British Museum, my photo.

What if I like the dark?

One of the difficulties when looking at this period is that we don’t have a lot of evidence for non-elite life. So when the Assyrian kings go back on the rampage in the 920s BCE, for them this is excellent progress. But for those being rampaged, who may have been peacefully tilling their crops up to that point, this would feel like a set-back.

Perhaps ultimately we are trying to measure free time - ie time that doesn’t have to be devoted to simply surviving. You can’t measure free time directly but you can measure what people like to do with their free time which is:

a) Having babies
b) Going plundering
c) (Possibly also doing art)

So a rampaging army is a great sign all round, even if a successful rampaging army is bad news for those on the receiving end.²

Winners and losers

To go back to our list of states Cline assigns each of them a ranking which I have converted into emojis to reduce brain processing time.

• 😎 Phoenicians (Central Canaanites)
• 😎 Cyprians
• 🙂 Assyrians
• 🙂 Babylonians
• 🙂 Central Canaanites (Isrealites?)
• 😢 Egyptians
• 😬 Mycenaeans and Minoans
• 💀 Hittites
• 💀 Southern Canaanites

Interestingly the two highest rankers were small political units (city states) at the time of the Bronze Age Collapse in 1177 BCE .

My initial thought was that maybe being a small city state is helpful for survival in times of stress, but on reflection I’m not sure that is true because there is by definition survivorship bias in the data. There are likely to have been many more small polities in the Late Bronze Age, most of which are unknown to us. Presumably most disappeared and a few - such as the Phoenicians - snuck through.

What I don’t know then is whether the survival rates are better or worse for city states than for larger kingdoms? There’s enough doubt for me to suggest that if you are worried about the modern day apocalypse don’t head for the commune in the hills just yet!

What’s it like to read?

It is a short book with a lot crammed into its 199 pages (excluding notes).

For me the cramming was often too intense and made it difficult to read. For example the first chapter (which unfortunately is the worst example - I recommend skipping to chapter 2 if you are struggling) names 66 different historical figures over 34 pages.³ It definitely was more like reading The Silmarillion than The Hobbit.

Not only that but every discovery or insight is credited to the archeologist or historian who made it, adding another layer of detail / plethora of names that as a reader, I wasn’t really bothered about. Even though I’m sure as an academic it is good form to reference the work of your peers.

I got a huge amount out of this book but I felt that I had to work hard at it.⁴

Structurally sound

I thought the structure was good though, focussing on the evidence first: what do we know of what actually happened in the years following the Bronze Age Collapse? Followed by Cline’s own thoughts and conclusions.

Using an evidence led rather than theory led structure means it is easier for the reader to decide whether or not they agree with Cline’s own interpretation, and draw their own conclusions.

Conclusion

I started this review with some words of wisdom from Gandalf the White. The analogy isn’t perfect though partly because as Cline reveals in his book real life is hugely more complicated than Lord of the Rings, and partly because after the Bronze Age Collapse the bad guys - the Assyrians - won and covered the lands of Middle East in darkness.⁵ This time there was no handy MacGuffin you could toss into a volcano to defeat them.

After 1177 is a welcome attempt to dispel that darkness and make the beginning of the iron age more accessible to everyone. Though the fellowship of the reader and the writer is tested at times with overly complex descriptive passages, ultimately a good read prevails.

The final words are best left to Cline the Grey: “it [was] a time of transition and adjustment, involving transformation as often as regeneration. In Canaan, Syro-Anotolia, Cyprus and elsewhere, for instance, there were new kingdoms, including Israel and Judah, Edom, Moab, and Urartu... more a period of rebirth and renewal than it was of darkness and despair... this period was the start of something new, a set of ideas and cultures that ultimately resulted in the world to which we now belong.”...

...the Second Age of Man.

review

Next post

← Improving the bookshelf - database upgrades

Last post

New history books in July 2024 →