1177 B.C. : The Year Civilization Collapsed

Overproduction, vast inequalities, endemic war, exhaustion of resources, climate shifts - what I learned was that the earliest "global civilization" sounds much like the latest. No single cause brings down complex human systems, but when these factors conjoin, at some point, they fall. The process unfolds over decades, and frenzied activity - construction, diplomacy, trade, commerce - continues right up to the last, so that it is only clear in retrospect that some order which may have lasted for centuries is gone for good.

I would have liked to hear more speculation about what happens to common people in these situations - their lives are not recorded, so it's difficult. But when city after city was burned to the ground, what became of show more the people in them? I suppose we could look at contemporary examples like Syria to get some sense.

Humans make pretty things, but our history isn't pretty. It's beyond disturbing - it seems a complete concession to entropy and waste, for our species and for our planetary ecosystem. Now more than ever, works like this make me wonder if what we call civilization is the best we'll ever do. show less

One of the great mysteries of history is the Sea People. They arrived from somewhere in the 12th century BC, sacked the palaces of the literate civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, caused the collapse of the intricate society of the Late Bronze Age, and vanished.

Cline aims to explain what happened, but archeology is as much art as science, and despite ample ruins and inscriptions, including diplomatic correspondence, we simply don't know. There were webs of trade and communication, and then they stopped, cities burned, and people stopped writing anything for centuries. It's frustrating, because along with the mystery of the Sea People, two great epics of Western civilization are set in the Late Bronze Age, and extra-textual show more evidence for both the Iliad and Exodus is scanty at best.

Cline points at a multitude of causes: earthquake, drought, disease, and invasion. He draws labored comparisons to our own integrated and global world. One key factor was that bronze requires tin, which at the time only came from a region that is now Afghanistan. This single tenuous land link was an obvious vulnerability, though not one that is much discussed. It's a long way from Mycenae to Afghanistan. What was traded for tin?

I found Graeber's Debt a much more interesting exploration of the period. show less

On the whole I rather liked this work, however, I do have to agree with those who think that less was delivered than the title seems to suggest, as Cline spends more time on dismantling past arguments for the collapse of Bronze Age culture in the Mediterranean than he does in terms of providing an explanation. In as much as Cline offers an analysis it is to suggest that it was a series of unfortunate events that kicked out the supports of a system that was too interdependent and complicated for its own good, leading to failure.

Two thoughts come to my mind. One, while this system was convoluted, it probably was not very redundant, being more in the nature of a dozen or so single points of failure. Two, the shadowy war between the show more Hittites and the Mycenaean Greeks over predominance in western Anatolia of this period, which provoked the Hittite emperor to impose a trade embargo, may had even more of a systemic impact if this much-touted system was already in a rather ramshackle state. After natural disaster, drought, famine, and the like, maybe it only took bad political decisions by the major players to drive the machine into the ditch. This is particularly if the enigmatic "Sea Peoples," who seem to have had a predominant base of folks from the Aegean islands, really were left out in the cold by this war, and decided to play their own hand. But this is just my stab at offering a hypothesis on the basis of what Cline thinks that we can reasonably say. show less

The Late Bronze Age Collapse is uncomfortable to read about, at least for me. Over the span of a few decades, civilizations around the whole Eastern Mediterranean, one of the most pleasant locations on earth, disintegrated in fire and bloodshed, and no one really knows why. The destruction was so total in many places that even the memories of these disasters are faded, because no one was left alive to write about them, save for in a few places like Egypt which somehow escaped. That's the last time, to the best of our understanding, when a large cluster of civilizations collapsed to leave barely ruins behind, and though I've read competing theories about exactly how the entire eastern Mediterranean transformed into ghosts - most notably, show more Robert Drews' theory of warfare shifts in The End of the Bronze Age - Cline's synthesis of what's known about that time period combines archeology, demography, analysis of trade routes, recent translations, and some good old-fashioned speculation to offer about as good an overview of the mysterious Sea Peoples and their role in what was essentially the end of the world as you're likely to find. show less

I originally gave this three stars, but after a bit more thinking I think I was being unduly harsh. I'd just finished reading Isabel Wilkerson's masterful [b:The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration|8171378|The Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America's Great Migration|Isabel Wilkerson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1433354252s/8171378.jpg|13341052] and Andy Weir's marvelous space-castaway adventure [b:The Martian|18007564|The Martian|Andy Weir|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1413706054s/18007564.jpg|21825181], so what is a solid, well-researched book seemed a bit paler than it would under the light of less luminous peers.

Cline does a great job of sifting though not just the complicated and show more difficult-to-understand archaeological evidence, but its numerous and frequently contradictory interpretations.

Contrary to what at least one other reviewer said, he does not engage in wild speculation. In fact, he does quite the opposite: he debunks a lot of theories. In particular, the simplistic one-cause ones. In his view, and it is presented convincingly to my ear (audiobook), no one cause--the Sea Peoples, earthquakes, famine, climate change--is enough to explain the collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean Near East world.

More likely it was a sort of perfect storm of several of these that brought on the dark ages at the end of the Bronze Age. (You'll have to read/listen to find out which one's he favors.)

In short, an excellent piece of scholarship that is accessibly written and, in the case of the audiobook, well-narrated. If you're into archaeology or ancient history, pick this up! show less

Buena muestra de como una obra puede ser didáctica sin dejar de ser rigurosa. Cline enumera las distintas hipótesis que pudieron llevar al colapso de las civilizaciones de la Edad del Bronce tardía argumentándolas según los últimos hallazgos e investigaciones (textuales, arqueológicos, geológicos, biológicos,…) pero sin aseverar nada que no esté lo suficientemente comprobado. Aún así, arriesga y ofrece posibles nuevas vías de investigación y enfoques novedosos con la honestidad de señalar siempre quienes han sido los primeros en formularlos. El hecho de buscar paralelismos, sea sólo como referencia y sin profundizar en ello pues sería tema de otra obra, con la época actual, lejos de trivializar los hechos anima a la show more reflexión y a ponderar como pudieron sentirlos y valorarlos las personas que los vivieron. Al fin y a la postre “la historia no consiste en pensar en gente que murió hace tiempo sino en gente que vivió hace tiempo”(“Hijos de Homero”. Bernardo Souvirón. Alianza Editorial 2006, pág 246). show less

Recommended by a history professor from Lyon College and did not disappoint in its telling of fairly significant trade and diplomatic relations among the ancient peoples spanning Eurasia to Africa. Book read a bit like a Dan Carlin "Hardcore History" podcast in its focus on connections and what other people were doing at the same time. The book also had my favorite benefit of forcing me to another book to look something up. In this case, The Sea People, who apparently are in need of additional focused research and a few books of their own as they remain a mystery.