1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed

(audience applauds)

– Thank you, Sarah, and many thanks to the Center for the Humanities, and to Emily Clark especially for working with us to present this lecture tonight. Eric Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology at George Washington University and is the Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute. An archaeologist and ancient historian by training, Doctor Cline’s primary fields of study are biblical archaeology, the military history of the Mediterranean world from antiquity to the present, and the international connections between Greece, Egypt, and the Near East during the Late Bronze Age. He is an experienced and active field archaeologist with more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey to his credit in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, and in the United States. Doctor Cline is currently co-director of the archaeological excavations at the site of Tel Kabri in Israel, which began in 2006.

He was also a member of the Megiddo Expedition in Israel, excavating at biblical Armageddon for 10 seasons, from 1994 to 2014, and eventually serving as co-director of that project. He is also a prolific researcher and author. He is perhaps best known for writing books such as Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: International Trade in the Late Bronze Age Aegean, Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel. He’s also contributed books to the Very Short Introduction series, published by Oxford, on the Trojan War and on the biblical archaeology. And that’s just to name a few titles from among his 16 books and over 100 articles and reviews.

In July 2015, Professor Cline was named a member of the inaugural class of the NEH Public Scholars. He is also a National Geographic Explorer and a Fulbright Scholar. He has won numerous awards for his teaching, including the National Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award from the Archaeological Institute of America in 2005. His most recent book, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, the subject of this evening’s lecture, received the Best Popular Book Award in 2014 from the American Schools of Oriental Research. This book explains how human and natural events coalesced to create a perfect storm that brought Bronze Age civilization to an end in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the ancient Near East. And so, without further ado, I’m happy to welcome Professor Eric Cline to speak on the subject.

(audience applauds)

– Thank you so much. It is a pleasure to be here and a bit daunting to see all of you here. No pressure, no pressure.

(audience laughs)

It’s wonderful to be here. I haven’t been in Madison since, I think, 1994. So it’s changed a bit, but it’s wonderful to be here. And I’d like to thank everyone who was involved in bringing me here: The Center for the Humanities, Isthmus, and especially CANES. And I welcome the new departments. So wonderful, we have a similar department at GW where I teach, but our name is not quite as nice. We’re the Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, which comes out to be CENEL. So everybody refers to us as senile.

(audience laughs)

I think CANES is probably better. Anyway, and it’s nice to be here and see so many old friends and meet some new ones, in particular, for example, Professor Nick Cahill. I was my very first dig him way back when. Longer than both of us want to say. And other people here as well. But it’s nice to see old people and meet new people, especially all of you. So without further ado, what I would like to do is introduce to you the Late Bronze Age of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, which will not be new to some of you, might be new to all of you, or others of you. What I propose to do is to build it up and then bring it crashing down. And that is one of the mysteries, is exactly why it came crashing down.

So this is the area that we’re going to be looking at. This is the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. And in the years of the Late Bronze Age, which is 1700 to 1200 BC, a number of different cultures or civilizations flourished back then. But we have to remember that this is just the last part of the Bronze Age, which really starts back in about 3000 BC, when you’ve got the invention of bronze, copper, plus tin. We’re going to focus in on the last part of it, and at this time we’ve got what I call the G8 of the Late Bronze Age world. It’s actually cheating a little bit because in order to get eight, I have to combine the Mycenaeans and Minoans of Greece into one, which they would protest at, but we’ve got Minoans and Mycenaeans up here. We have the Hittites in purple up in Turkey. Here, we’ve got the Egyptians, of course, coming up all this way, Mitanni in red, then we’ve got the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Plus we’ve got the Cypriots and the Canaanites. And I think that comes out to eight or nine people. All of these are interacting.

It is a very international and globalized world for its time, which I will get to. And I dare say that more of you know this period than might expect. If you’re sitting here going, “I’ve never heard of the Late Bronze Age. I don’t even know what’s going on back then,” actually I do think you know more people back then. For example, how many people have heard of Hatshepsut? Right, female pharaoh, right, okay. Good, so she’s in our time period. How about Thutmose III, anybody for that? My boy Amenhotep III, my favorite guy in antiquity?

(audience laughs)

We’ll come back to him. His son Akhenaten, the Heretic Pharaoh? Right, okay. So all these people are in this period. I dare say a couple of you have heard of King Tut, yes? Right, are you all waiting to see what’s in the new rooms? Yeah, I’m predicting they’re going to be full. I don’t know if it’s Nefertiti back there, but I think there’s going to be stuff in there, so we’re waiting. Ramses II, perhaps the Pharaoh of the Exodus and then the guy that we’re going to be looking at tonight over there, Ramses III. So this is the period. These were most of the Egyptians, of course. Everybody else is around. But this is my absolute favorite time in history. If I could be, I guess I don’t even know what the word would be, if I could be resurrected backwards and live in any time period, it would be this period. I don’t think I would survive for more than about 48 hours, (audience laughs) but it would be a very fun 48 hours.

(audience laughs)

I’d love to have a chat with both Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. “Akenaten, what are you thinking of? What on Earth were you doing?” Anyway, so this is the period that we will be in tonight. And, of course, we’ve got the Battle of Qadesh as well. If you’ve heard of that. The Trojan War, I dare say some of you have heard of that. How many of you saw the movie with Brad Pitt?

(audience laughs)

How many wish they hadn’t seen it?

(audience laughs)

And then if it took place, the Exodus will have taken place here. That’s not our topic tonight however. So what I want to stress tonight as I’m building it up, before I bring it all crashing down, is the fact that this is a globalized world system. Now it’s not global, of course, as we would consider it, but for their time period and their area, from, say, Italy on the west to about Afghanistan or Iran on the east, this whole area is interconnected. Nobody is more than just a couple of hops away from everybody else. And everybody is interacting, everybody is dependent upon everyone else to a certain extent.

And, in fact, there are only a couple of times in history where we’ve got such a globalized, interconnected system. One is us today, and one is them back then. So I actually think that there are more parallels than you might expect. Back then they had wonderful royal marriages, they had really bitter divorces, they had embargoes, they had embassies, pretty much, you know, the same sort of thing that we’ve got today.

And this particular diagram, a socio-gram, is made by my wife, Diane Cline, who is now doing social network analysis, looking at all the interactions between the people. And she made this up. It’s demonstrating that is, what we would call a small world, where everybody is interconnected. And we actually had an article that just came out two days ago where we tried to do this to the Amarna Letters and we put together everybody that’s mentioned in the Amarna Letters and their relationships with each other and came out with a small world at about 1350 BC. So put it another way here, you’ve got the King of Egypt in the middle and then everybody that is writing to everybody. And you can see how interconnected they are at that time period.

So this is just to demonstrate the types of things that we can do now in digital humanities, where we’re looking basically at old data in new ways. And so she, in fact, is applying this to Alexander the Great and Socrates. And so at one point, I brightly said at dinner, “Hey, wait, we could do this for the Amarna Letters.” And she’s like, “Yeah, no problem, do you want to do it?” I’m like, “Yeah, sure.” So we actually co-authored the article, which is the first that we’ve ever done that. So, very interesting. At any rate, you can see just how connected people are back then.

Now, one of the things that’s connecting them, of course, is the need for both tin and copper because you can’t make bronze unless you’ve got both tin and copper. Well, actually, you could. If you’ve got arsenic instead of tin you can use that, but between you and me, you’re not going to live very long if you’re using arsenic plus copper, right. Tin is much better. So 90% copper, 10% tin. Now, most of the copper, in fact almost of all of it, is coming from Cyprus, right, Cipros, that’s where the name comes from. And at that time, you could get a little bit of tin from southern Turkey. You might be able to venture up to Cornwall, though I don’t think they did that that often.

But most of the tin is coming from off this map in what is now Afghanistan, the Badakhshan region specifically. And in fact, not only tin comes from there, but does anybody have any lapis lazuli jewelry? Lapis comes from there as well. So lapis and tin is coming all the way from Afghanistan. And if you can imagine the trade route being cut at any point, then you could be in real trouble. So in fact, we’ve got written records about this. This is one of the tablets we’ve got from Mari, which is on the Euphrates over here in Syria. I think it’s busy being looted by ISIS even as we speak. But in the Mari tablets, which date back to about 1800 BC, before our time period, we’re already seeing that they’re talking about tin coming.

And the tin is going to come to Mari, and then it’s going to go to Ugarit. And then from Ugarit, it’s going to go to Crete. And in fact, the text talks about the Caphtorians, which is the name for Crete in Akkadian. And they’re talking, in fact, about an interpreter as well. So we’ve got somebody that’s speaking multiple languages back then. And so you can see the route of the tin. Now, in fact, my colleague Carol Bell from England has actually said that for them, the importance of tin, well, it’s like our dependence on oil. And that she thinks that the king in Egypt and the king up in Turkey, the Hittites, were as concerned about their supplies of tin as, say, Obama or a US President would be concerned about the source of oil.

So, again, there is a parallel there. Now, in these Mari Letters, we not only have the text about tin, but we’ve got some interesting things as well. It seems that they’re importing stuff from Crete already, including finished objects.
So we have here a Caphtorian weapon, so a Minoan weapon from Crete. The top and the base are covered with gold. Its top is encrusted with lapis lazuli. So it would have looked something like this. Now this isn’t it, this is a dagger from the Death Pits of Ur back in about 2500 BC. But I think it would have looked something like this, and I don’t know about you, but I want one of these.

(audience laughs)

Alright, I’d happily have a concealed weapon permit if I could carry one of these. And I think they’re fairly unusual. But there’s another one. There’s another text that is actually my absolute favorite in which it says, “One pair of leather shoes in the Caphtorian style,” so Minoan. So it’s going to be sandals, I think. It could be boots from Khania but I bet it’s sandals. “Which to the palace of Hammurabi,” and, yes, that’s the Hammurabi, as in, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” “King of Babylon, and official name Bahdi-Lim, carried but which were returned.” Now, I’ve always wondered about this. You’re going to get sandals from Crete and then you return them? I mean, are they too small?

(audience laughs)

Are they too last-millennium?

(audience laughs)

And in fact, I had my students go through the Law code, and there’s, what, 272 or 282 laws in there, and they came back to me and they said, “You know, there’s no law, there’s no penalty for returning shoes.” I said, “Exactly!”

(audience laughs)

But I am surprised he didn’t re-gift them. I mean, “These are too small for me but they’re perfect for you and they’re all the way from Crete.” Anyways, so this is one of my favorites. It just shows that nothing has changed, all right. Now, at this time, just to show you some of the interconnections that we’ve got, where everybody is trading with everybody for raw materials as well as finished goods, right, you’ve got things like sandals and daggers, but bear in mind that gold at that time is going to come from Egypt, Nubian Sudan. The copper, like I said, is from Cyprus. You’re going to get silver from various places. So they’re really trading for pretty much everything.

So for example, we’ve got Hatshepsut sending an embassy down to Punt. She’s not the first person and she won’t be the last. But she tells us where it is, in fact, she gives us pictures of what they bring down. And she even shows us in this picture of the Queen of Punt, Ati. The problem is we’re not quite sure of where Punt is, or rather we weren’t sure until relatively recently. They did a test on some baboons in the British Museum, and they determined that, in fact, the land of Punt is probably Eritrea or Ethiopia, which was probably the prime contender anyway. So now we think we know where Punt is, fairly recently.

We’ve also got wall paintings in the tombs. This is the tomb of Rekhmire, 18th Dynasty, New Kingdom. This is going to be the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. And in here as well as in another, another couple of tombs, we’ve got what look like Minoans and Mycenaeans here. In fact, one of the kilts is over-painted, so people have suggested we are seeing Minoans being overtaken by Mycenaeans. Either way, they’re coming from Greece. They’re coming from the Aegean region and they’re bringing goods that we would normally see in mainland Greece and Crete. So in another tomb, for example, where the guy over here is carrying a bull’s head, that’s pretty much, obviously, coming from Crete. And in fact, we’ve got inscriptions next to us that tell us this, right, so for the Egyptians it’s Keftiu, is the name of Crete.

So this is where my boy comes in, Amenhotep III. This is his mortuary temple. I know you’re thinking there’s not an awful lot there and you’re correct, in fact, there’s just the two big colossi at the entrance. Right, The Colossi of Memnon. Who’s been there? Who’s seen these in person? Yeah, okay, big, 60-foot-tall, right, one of them used to cry every morning.

The god would speak and then when an earthquake hit, the god stopped talking. So it was probably just expanding and contracting with the desert air. These stood at the front of Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple, but it’s all gone because the later pharaohs mined it away for their own temples. Why go make your own stuff when you can just rip off this guy who’s dead and build your own temple out of his stuff? So most of it’s gone except for these.

There is an excavation ongoing right now, and in fact, they’re uncovering more statues there. The statues I am interested in, though, are about to about two thirds of the way towards the back. And you see them here. These are much smaller. The original statues were probably only about 10 feet tall, so a little over life-sized. And originally they found five of them. The new excavations now have uncovered almost 40 of these. And the thing about these is that around the statue base, they have the names of places that were known to Egypt at that time. Now this is going to be somewhere about 1391 to 1353 BC, so the 14th-century. That’s when Amenhotep is ruling. And one names places in Babylonia, one names places in Assyria, one names Hittite places. This particular one names places in the Aegean. It has names of places that have never appeared in Egypt before and will never again.

Now you can see there’s two on this side, and that’s all there are. And then there’s about 14 going around this side. They are all bound up, they’re like prisoners. And then there’s what looks like a cartouche almost in there. It’s actually a fortified oval that depicts a fortified city. And people said, “Oh, this means the Egyptians actually conquered them.” It’s like, “No, this is an iconographic convention to show a foreign place.” And so in those ovals, we’ve got on the right side those two that were by themselves, Keftiu and Tanaja. So Keftiu is Crete. Tanaja is probably mainland Greece. It’s been argued, as some people wanted it to be Rhodes, some people wanted it elsewhere.

I think now the only possible place it can be is the mainland of Greece. And in part I say that because of the other names, Amnisos, Phaistos, Kydonia, Mycenae, Dikte. And then it keeps going, including Nauplion, Knossos, Amnisos again. And in fact, when this was first found, it was published in 1965. And the original translator, Kenneth Kitchen, a very eminent British Egyptologist said, “I hardly dare suggest but these look uncomfortably like
Mycenae and Knossos.” And, yes, that’s my British accent. That’s the best I can do.

(audience laughs)

Well, he was quite right, it is Mycenae and it is Knossos, and it’s others as well. The question is, what’s this doing in Egypt at this time? Well, it turns out, if you go to the Aegean at many of the sites that are mentioned on this statue base, you actually have objects with Amenhotep’s name on them or his wife. Now, you can read this as easily as I can, so you know that this says, you can, right? Yeah, Neb-Ma’at-Re, the good god, and then Nebma-Ra, that’s the name of Amenhotep III. And we’ve got pieces from maybe as many as 10, 10 or 11 of these Faience Plaques, which are not found anywhere else outside of Egypt except at Mycenae. So I think that these are the remnants of what may have been a royal embassy or royal gift, something like that. These are not your run-of-the-mill bric-a-brac.

At other places, like at Knossos, we’ve got one of his scarabs. And then also as I say, his wife, Queen Tiyi, we’ve got them as well. What I am wondering, what I think happened is that what is recorded on the statue base is actually kind of a geographical itinerary, that if you follow them in the order that they’re listed, you go from Egypt to Crete and then you go around and up into mainland Greece, and then you come back to Crete and go off to Egypt again. And I actually think that’s why Amnisos is on there twice. You go in from Crete, from Egypt up to Crete, and it’s just like taking a long car ride. You get there, you say, “Okay, first stop Amnisos, who needs the bathroom? Who needs coffee?” And they’re like, “You’ve been driving for hours.” And then you go around and up and come back through Kydonia and you hit Amnisos again. And you’re like, “Last stop on the turnpike, it’s 23 miles unbtil we get to the next one.”

So I can’t think of any other explanation why Amnisos would be on there twice. If you have one let me know. So I’m proposing, and I am not the first. Vronwy Hankey came up with this before me, but I think the evidence is supporting this. So again, I show that as evidence of interconnections in this case between Egypt and Greece in the 14th-century. And this type of thing is supported by some of the archaeological finds, including the Uluburun shipwreck, which went down at about 1300 BC. We see up top an Egyptian wall painting and then down the bottom the National Geographic reconstruction of what this ship would have looked like.

So here is the remains. It’s between 140 and 170 feet deep, off the coast of Turkey. Anybody dive here? Anybody certified? Anybody ever gone down that deep? It’s off the diving charts. George Bass who was excavating along with Cemal Pulak, they said it’s as if you’ve two martinis and then you tried to go work at 140 feet down. So they would only go down for 20 minutes at a time. But they did it for a dozen years or so. So you can see what we’ve got here, including these right down the hole. You see those big blocks with a hole in them. Anybody guess what those are?

– [Audience] Stone anchors.

– Yeah, stone anchors, absolutely. As you got one stuck and you had to cut it off, you would just go down, so they’re being used as ballast until they’re needed. And then over here, all these guys are the copper oxhide ingots. This was 99% pure copper. It’s coming from Cyprus. Each of these looks like an ox hide, as if you’ve killed a cow, cut off its head, and either hung it up on the wall or put it on the floor. So it is in the shape of an ox hide. Some of you who know or may recognize Nicolle Hirschfeld, she’s the only one who never wears a jacket at 140 feet down. She is carrying a Canaanite jar there. Notice she’s got no flippers on because that would have accidentally excavated in the sand. So they would take them off when they got down there.

(coughs)

There are as many as 300 of these ingots on there and George Bass at one point said that it was enough to outfit an army of 300 soldiers, the amount of copper and of tin on board. So think swords, shields, greaves, everything. Somebody lost a fortune. I hope they were insured.

(audience laughs)

Seriously, they actually did have insurers back then over in the Near East, so I hope they were insured. So there’s about 10 tons of raw copper on board. There’s also about a ton of raw tin. You see a bun ingot here, and then a quarter of one of those oxhide ingots, and then a couple of objects made out of tin. We’ve also got terebinth resin from the pistachio tree. Among other things, it was used to color wax, get the yellow color, but also used in perfume, like at Mycenaen Pylos. We’ve got ivory, both elephant and hippopotamus. And in fact, once this came to light, they went back and tested all the ivory in places like the British Museum and the Louvre. And to their surprise, most of it is hippo, it’s not elephant, which was quite interesting.

Up top, my absolute favorite objects on here, also raw material, also on little bun ingots, this is raw glass. In this case it’s colored with cobalt, so it’s blue, but they’ve also got pink ones, and brown ones, and yellow ones. And in fact, when they were analyzed at the Corning Museum of Glass, they match the glass both in Mycenaen Greece and in New Kingdom Egypt. So they’re all getting their glass from the same source, which is a nice, unified part of the world. And here, unused, unused pottery from Cyprus and from Canaan, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. So somebody is sending this stuff around. And in fact, the original excavators from National Geographic back in 1987 thought that the ship was going around and round and round and round.

I’m not so sure about that. I think it actually matches some of the descriptions that we’ve got of royal gifts. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is actually a gift from king to another, which is the type of thing that we see in these Amarna Letters. So in this case it may be a gift that’s going to somebody on Crete or in mainland Greece, but we’ll never know because it sank right off here at the coast of Turkey. It is also possible, I suggested with my colleague Assaf Yasur-Landau, that it may have been the other way, that it might have been a ship coming from Greece on a shopping trip because everything that they would have needed back home, they’re getting from over here.

So it’s like, “Go get some raw glass, and some copper, and some tin, and don’t forget the milk while you’re out.” But in that case, the ship never came back. So the upshot is that we know that there are seven different cultures on board. It looks like it’s heading to the Aegean, but we don’t actually know who sent it. And in fact, there seem to be a number of different nationalities that’s on board. So for me the Uluburun ship is actually a microcosm of the kind of globalized nature of the world in the Late Bronze Age. And we’ve got textual evidence for this as well. We’ve got written evidence here, the Sinaranu Text from 1260 BC.

“From the present day Ammistamru, son of Niqmepa, King of Ugarit,” that’s on the north coast of Syria, “exempts Sinaranu, Son of Siginu, his grain, his beer, his olive-oil, to the palace he shall not deliver. His ship is exempt when it arrives from Crete.” So we’ve got written evidence that a merchant in northern Syria is sending a ship to Crete and bringing back grain, beer, and olive oil, and he’s not going to pay taxes on it. So I actually think we’ve got the first corporate tax exemption here in history.

(audience laughs)

Now, that’s what we’ve got then. I’ve showed you what we’ve got. It’s a nice globalized society for its time and place. Everybody is merrily reciprocating with everybody else, they’re trading, they’ve got diplomacy. You’ve got, again, the Assyrians, the Canaanites, the Mitanni, and so on. It’s working like clockwork, but into this we toss a little bit of chaos, and one by one everything just winks out, until we’re only left with Egypt. And even Egypt is so hurt, basically, ’round about the 1177 BC that it’s never the same again. It was a Pyrrhic victory for it when it won. So, this is the collapse, just after 1200 BC and pretty much everything that you see on this map collapses. Everything I’ve just been describing for the last half-hour or so is now going to go away. So I’ve built it up and now I’m going to collapse it for you.

When this hit, this catastrophe was so enormous that I think the only thing to compare it to is the fall of the Roman Empire, which took place 1500 years later. And I actually think this might be bigger in its own way. The problem is we don’t know what caused it. Now, that’s where this book came in. When I met with Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press, and some of you know him, he came down to DC and took me out to dinner. That’s the best way to get me to write a book, take me to dinner. And he said, “I want you to writ a book on the collapse.” And I said, “Well, sure, but it’s already been done. I mean Robert Drews did it for you and, in fact, Princeton published it back in 1993.” And he said, “Yeah, but, you know, things have advanced in 20 years.” I said, “Yeah, sure.” I said, “But I’ll tell you what, what I want to do is also write about what collapsed.” And he said, “Okay, agreed.”

So in this book, the first and then the last two chapters are about the collapse, but the whole middle part is what I just described to you. We go 15th century, 14th century, 13th century because to me, what collapsed is just as interesting and just as important and how or why it collapsed. Now this is not the first time that somebody talked about collapse, of course. There was a guy named Edward Gibbon who did something similar

(audience laughs)

when he wrote about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Joseph Tainter in 1988 wrote a book on the collapse of complex societies. Very interesting book. And then I’m presuming, how many of you have read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse? Right, okay. So I’m in good company here. The difference is that in each of these cases those authors are talking about the collapse of one civilization: Rome. And then in the other books, they’re doing civilization by civilization by chapter. So here, we’ve got a bunch of different civilizations all linked together that all go down at the same time.

So I show you this picture again, where it’s going to be this globalized world system that goes down all at the same time. And I think that’s unique. Now what caused it? Well, the original hypothesis was that it was the Sea Peoples, and we know these Sea Peoples from the Egyptian texts. In fact, we know that they come twice. They come in 1207 and 1177, 30 years apart. The first time they’re during the reign of Merneptah in his fifth year, and the second time, they’re in Ramses III’s time in his eighth year. Now of course the Egyptologists keep changing the years, so actually a better title for the book would have been Eighth Year of Ramses III but it didn’t quite have the cachet.

(audience laughs)

And, in fact, when the book came out, I got a nice e-mail from a colleague in New York that all it said was, “Congratulations. The title should have been 1186.”

(audience laughs)

I sent him back a two-word email.

(audience laughs)

And, no, it’s not what you’re thinking.

(audience laughs)

My email simply said, “It was.”

(audience laughs).

And, indeed, I can show you the original contract that I signed back in 2007 was for a book called 1186 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, but in the years that it took me to research and write it, the Egyptologists changed the chronology on me again. So I changed it to 1177. And guess what? At the ASOR meetings in Atlanta last week, they told me they’ve changed it back again.

(audience laughs)

So look for a revised edition with a different number. At any rate what we’ve got then, we’re just going to concentrate on the second one, the eighth year of Ramses III, but you can see where the title comes from now. At Medinet Habu, which is his mortuary temple, on the wall there, he has a picture and then inscriptions talking about these Sea Peoples. And in fact, Gaston Maspero, a rather famous French Egyptologist, already by the 1860s had read this text and said, “Ah, the Sea Peoples, they are responsible for the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age.” Never mind that none of the sites had been excavated yet.

Still, the theory was solidified by 1901. And thereafter whenever they found the destruction for one of this sites at about the right time period, they simply attributed it to the Sea Peoples. And I think that this is maybe a bit much. But here’s what the inscription says. You can judge for yourself. I won’t read you the whole thing but, “The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Carchemish.” Now we know where these are, right? Khatte are the Hittites up in Turkey. Qode is down where Turkey meets Syria, and Carchemish is near there. Arzawa, that’s on the western coast of Turkey. Alashiya, that’s ancient Cypress.

All of these, “Cut off at one time! A camp was set up at in one place in Amor.” That’s Amurro on the north coast of Syria. “They desolated its people, its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them.” And then he tells us who they are. “Their confederation was the Peleset, the Tjekker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, and the Weshesh, lands united.” You notice he doesn’t call them the Sea Peoples. He actually gives them their names. Some of these are the same ones that had come 30 years earlier. Others are new. There’s about nine groups all told if you merge the two invasions.

“They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting, ‘Our plans will succeed!'” Well, their plans did not succeed, courtesy of the Egyptians. And in fact, we’re told on the Papyrus Harris, “I overthrew those who invaded them from their lands. I slew the Denyen who are in their isles, the Tjekker and the Peleset were made ashes. The Shardana and the Weshesh of the sea, they were made as those that exist not.” So you can actually see where Maspero got the Sea Peoples or Peoples of the Sea because they are describing some of these as coming from islands or seas, but that’s our name for them. Okay, and we actually see them.

So here are some of the Sea Peoples, in fact, it’s a little late for Halloween, but if you want to dress up as one all you have to do is take a look at these. There’s actually a cheaper way to do it, though. When I was in graduate school, the two people the year behind me came to a Halloween party with about 150 of these cardboard letters, pinned. They were all the letter C. We said, “Who are you, what are you?” They said, “We’re Sea Peoples ”

(audience laughs)

They won first place for a costume that cost about $1.50. So if you’re looking for a costume for next year, you can steal that idea. Now, the problem is that we don’t know where these people come from and we don’t know where they go to. It’s one of history’s mysteries. So Shardana, Shekelesh, Tjekker, the game we’ve been playing for decades now is trying to match up a place in the Mediterranean somewhere that sounds like this. I mean, you can play the game too, Shardana. Name me a place that has the same sort of consonants. Sardinia. Shardana/Sardinia, right. So that’s one. Shekelesh, somewhere near Sardinia? People have suggested Sicily, for example. And so on.

Tjekker may be from the Troad. Denyen, these could be the Donaans, some people have suggested. The Weshsesh, we’re not quite sure. Some people like to say Wilusa, which could be Troy. It’s only the Peleset that we’re fairly confident about, namely the Philistines. And, in fact, Champollion, the guy that deciphered hieroglyphics, already suggested that the Peleset where the Philistines. And the Bible says they come from Crete. So, take it as you will.

But even that, this is all still just a guessing game. The only one that we really know much about are the Philistines because we’re finding their archaeology in what is now Israel and Lebanon and Syria and it looks a lot like what we would call degenerate Mycenaean. It’s as if a Mycenaean Greek from mainland Greece came over and is now making their usual shapes but using clay that is found in Cypress or Rhodes or in Canaan. So what we’ve got, though, these aren’t Vikings. These aren’t raiders. These are people moving with all of their families because in that inscription at Medinet Habu, we actually see, it’s kind of hard to see on the left here.

There’s a drawing of of it up top at the right. They’re coming with their families. They are migrating in carts with the wives and the children and all the household. So rather than Vikings, think 1930s Dust Bowl. Think moving from Oklahoma to Texas and California. And think of all the Syrian refugees coming into Europe today. This is actually a perfect parallel. So it may be that their Sea Peoples and our refugees from Syria are kind of parallel, though that might be pushing it a bit. At any rate, what I think is that these guys are as much victims as they are oppressors. I think they are suffering as well.

And yet, still, people are saying kind of a simplified, logical progression, that maybe there was a drought. From that you had famine. From that, you got the movement of the sea peoples. From that, you got havoc, cutting of trade routes. And then you’ve got collapse. Very linear, right? I think that’s too simple. It’s simple, it’s simplistic. I think it’s much, much messier. Things always are messier, that’s just too easy. So what really happened? Well, if it’s not just the Sea peoples, and I do think they are kind of the bogeyman, right? That’s actually how I scare my kids to go to, both to school and to sleep, right? Either get to bed or go to school or the Sea Peoples are going to get you.

But what else could have happened? Well you know, the possibilities that have been suggested, maybe there’s a drought, maybe there’s famine, maybe there’s invaders, maybe there are earthquakes. And to that my answer is yes. I think it’s all of the above. I think the answer is, you know, five, all of the above. And in fact if we take a quick look, and I don’t want to spend all that long on it, though, I don’t know, I don’t have anything else to do tonight. You guys want to stay?

– Yeah.

– Yeah, okay. Well, what about drought? This is not actually a new suggestion. Rhys Carpenter from Bryn Mawr was already suggesting in the 1960s that the Mycenaean world had come to an end because of drought. But he didn’t have the evidence for it. It was just a hypothesis. So over the decades, it just kind of got forgotten.

Well, guess what? We’ve got the data now. In the last four or five years, there have been a number of different studies that have all come up with evidence for drought. Kaniewski, a French scholar, in 2011, he and his team were at Tell Tweini over here in north Syria. And they did coring in some of the dried-up lakes and lagoons and looked at the pollen there. And they said there is what they called a 300-year dry event, in other words a drought, that went from the late 13th, early 12th centuries, all the way down to the 9th century. So that’s exactly our time when we’re collapsing and the dark ages that followed.

So north Syria. They came up with that. They then went over to Cyprus to Hala Sultan Tekke and did it there as well. You can see coring in the lagoon here. Published this in 2013. Same thing, a dry event from 1200 to about 850 BC. So looking at the pollen, they’ve got the evidence for the drought that Rhys Carpenter was unable to come up with in the 1960s. And then Lee Drake, Brandon Drake, in 2012 put together a couple of other studies and looked at things ranging from Greece to Israel to Cyprus and put together three additional lines of evidence, including one where there was a drop in the temperature of the surface of the sea, which means you’re going to get less rain on land. He said this all starts somewhere between 1250 and 1197 BC.

This article came out in the Journal of Archaeological Science, and I liked it so much I did something I rarely do. I wanted to send him an email just to say how much I like this article, which I don’t usually do. But I had no idea where he was so I Googled him, and the very first thing that came up said, “You are friends on Facebook.”

(audience laughs)

And I’m like, “I am?” And I got his email address and I wrote to him and I said, “Great article! Why do I know you?” And he said, “Eric, we dug at Megiddo in 2006.”

(audience laughs)

Like, “Oh, Lee!” I said, “Wait, Lee, why did you publish under Brandon?” He said, “Brandon’s my scholarly name. My friends call me Lee.” So I emailed him and said, “Next time let me know.” So, be careful, you may know people on Facebook that you don’t actually know you know.

(audience laughs)

Anyway, the most recent has been done by Dafna Langgut, who you see right down here, and Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Litt from Germany. And they took the same sort of thing. They did coring in the Dead Sea and by the Sea of Galilee, and they were able to say that there was a drought here as well, from 1250. But it only went to about 1100 BC. It’s only about 150 years. So we’ve got evidence now for a drought in northern Syria, Israel, Cyprus, and Greece all at about the same time. So I think we now can say that there was drought back then and, yes, climate change, though I understand that most of your people that do climate change here are over in Paris at the Summit there. So tell them what we’re saying here. But, yes, it looks like there was climate change back then.

But when this was all released, as each came out, the media got ahold of it, right? So The New York Times, Pollen Study Points to Drought as Culprit in Bronze Age Mystery. And the LA Times, Climate change may have caused demise of Late Bronze Age civilizations. National Geographic got into it. Archaeology magazine got into it. New York Post added in globalization for good measure.

(audience laughs)

And then, remember the NASA-funded study which turned out not to be funded by NASA? But that said that we were going to all disintegrate in just a couple of decades? At that point I got fed up, and so I put an op-ed in the Huffington Post and just again, from Facebook I said, “The Collapse of Civilizations: “It’s Complicated,” and it is. But the question, alright, so you’ve got drought but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got famine. And in fact, famine’s very hard to find in the archaeological record unless you’ve got dead bodies strewing the landscape. The one way you can figure out that you’ve got famine is if they write about it. And, indeed, they do.

Here we are at Ugarit, and actually that circle should be up there. Never mind, there’s Ugarit on the north Syrian coast. Remember that’s where the tin was being exchanged earlier. So Ras Shamra, Ugarit, and here we’ve got a number of archives from private merchants. Here is the House of Urtenu, and he talks about a famine that’s ravaging the city of Emar in inland, where he has the branch office over in Emar. He’s based Ugarit, but there’s a branch office. “There is famine in our house, we will all die of hunger. If you don’t quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land.”

And then in Ugarit itself, the king is writing to somebody else. He says, “Here with me, plenty has become famine.” And even up in Turkey, the Hittite king, “Do you not know that there was a famine in the midst of my lands? It’s a matter of life and death.” I think you’ll agree there’s some famine going on here. They’re all writing about it. Yeah, but whatever, okay.

Invaders? Yes. We’ve got evidence for that too. In fact, from Ugarit we have a rather famous letter, “My son, now the ships of the enemy have come. They’ve been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land. Doesn’t my father know that all of my infantry and chariotry are stationed in Khatte?” So they’re up in Turkey, “And that all of my ships are stationed in the land of Lukka?” That will be Lycia, also later Lycia in Turkey. “They’ve not arrived back yet. Now, be aware, the seven ships of the enemy have been coming, have done harm to us. If any other ships are coming, please tell me.” When I was both an undergraduate and in graduate school, this was always held up to me as, “Ooh, this is it, this is the Sea Peoples.” And it was being baked in a kiln before it was sent to the King of Cyprus. But that the Sea Peoples had come back and had burnt the city. And so it was still in the kiln before it could be sent. Very dramatic picture, right?

Well, as always, it’s too good to be true. The re-analysis of the whole thing has shown now that was not in a kiln, it was actually in a basket up on the second floor. The whole basket fell with about 70 tablets in it, landed upside down, and then the basket disintegrated, leaving this dome shape, and the tablet is in there. So it’s not in a kiln it’s in a basket, and it’s probably actually a copy of a letter that was sent. And so we don’t actually know if this is from the 1177 destruction or the 1207. It could actually be from either one, so it’s not quite the nice landmark that we’ve got. But it is an example that we’ve got invaders.

And we’ve got another one too. This is one of the last letters from Ugarit. “When your messenger arrived, the army was already humiliated, the city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floors was burnt and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked, may you know it, may you know it.” So we know there are invaders as well. Maybe they’re the Sea Peoples, maybe not. And that’s actually kind of a problem. When you see a destruction, you don’t always know who did it.

So Kaniewski, when he was doing that coring at Tell Tweini and published in 2011, he actually labeled things Sea Peoples Destruction Layer. Well there’s not actually anything there that tells him it’s Sea Peoples. There is later stuff perhaps that indicates says maybe somebody settled down, but the destroyers and the people who settle down aren’t always the same people. So, I think this is a little hasty to say it’s Sea Peoples destruction.

And I give you Hazor in Israel, in Canaan as just one example. We know this city is destroyed in the 13th or early 12th centuries. We can see it, this is the Late Bronze Age palace that’s burnt to a crisp. All the mud bricks are now burnt black and red. The problem is that we don’t actually know who did it. Now there’s two co-directors, Amnon Ben-Tor and Sharon Zuckerman, who actually just recently passed away, and they couldn’t agree on who destroyed their site. Amnon Ben-Tor said, “Well it’s not Egyptians because there are Egyptian statues in the destruction and they’re defaced, so no Egyptians would deface Egyptian statues, so it can’t be them. And it can’t be the Canaanites because there are also Canaanites statues that are defaced and they wouldn’t have done it.”

So he’s left with Israelites and Sea Peoples. And he says Hazor’s too far inland so it can’t be Sea Peoples. Which, by the way I disagree with. Sea Peoples get very far inland. But for him that left only Joshua and the Israelites so he says, “Look, Joshua conquered Hazor just like the Bible said.” But Sharon said, “Now wait a minute. Hold on, hold on. If you actually look at the destruction of Hazor, it’s the temples, a couple of the temples, and the palace that are destroyed but the domestic areas are untouched.” She said, “This to me looks like an internal rebellion from the lower classes. When the grain got cut off or whatever,” she said, “This is your rising up against the 1%.” So she says it’s an internal rebellion.

So the point here is if the two co-directors of the site can’t figure out who destroyed their site, how are we going to decide? So we know it’s destroyed but we don’t know who did it. And in fact, it might not be of who, it might be a what, because we’ve got evidence for earthquakes back then. And in fact, if you take a look, this is Robert Drews’s map from 1993 showing most of the sites that were destroyed in our period. But if you overlay it with a map of earthquakes that have taken place just in the last century since about 1900, you can see that most of the destroyed sites are in active seismic fault zones.

In fact, you’ve got the North Anatolian zone coming right across here. You’ve got others coming down here. Of course you got the great Rift Valley up here. There are earthquakes all the time even now, right? The National Museum in Athens got hit a while ago. The thing is here if you look at the one in Anatolia, you know, there is something that modern seismologists call an earthquake sequence, which is when you have an earthquake and it doesn’t release all of the pressure, you will then have another earthquake right next to it or nearby sometime soon thereafter. It could be days, it could be weeks. It could be a year or two, but you will have another one. And if that doesn’t release all the pressure, you’re then going to have another and another. And these sequences usually last about 50 or 60 years until all the pressure is released, and then builds up for about another 400 years. So they’ve seen this around today.

And some like Amos Nor of Stanford have applied it to antiquity where they’ve got a much sexier name of earthquake storms and it does look like we have one of these storms from about 1225 to 1175 BC where we’ve got earthquakes at most of these sites. So for example, at Mycenae, you recognize the Lion Gate here and you can see the Cyclopean masonry. And then you see this rock face, the bedrock. Well, when some of the seismologists visited Mycenae in about 1995 or 96, they started laughing. And the archaeologists said, “What are you laughing at?” And they said, “Well this, this, this is one half of an earthquake slip zone, that’s one side of it. That’s what an earthquake zone looks like.” And they said, “Wait, you mean the Mycenaeans built their city right on top of an active fault line?” They’re like, “Yeah.” And they’re like, “Well, who would be that stupid to do that?”

(audience laughs)

And Amos said, “Well, I live in San Francisco.”

(audience laughs)

So Mycenae has seen lots and lots of earthquakes and in fact, here is one earthquake victim. This is the same victim here. And this is actually Ione Mylonas is a very young lady excavating. And that stone that’s right next to it was actually embedded in the skull. This young lady is in the basement of the house, sheltering in a doorway, which is normally the safest place to shelter. But in this case the whole thing came collapsing down and she was killed by a falling rock. This dates to just about our time period.

Also at Tiryns, we’ve got a woman and a child that are killed, buried by the fallen walls. And over at Troy, we’ve got here in Troy VI that tilting wall. You can see it slightly better. This is when I was there last August. That wall is not supposed to tilt like that. That’s what happens when you have an earthquake. Same thing Ugarit. Again, this wall is not supposed to look like that. That’s what it looks like after an earthquake. So the point is very simply, we’ve got a series of earthquakes at about this same time. And then those trade routes that I was talking about are also going to be cut.

And remember what I said about their tin being the equivalent of our oil today. If that tin is cut at any point, then you really can’t make bronze anymore and then you’re in trouble. It may be that that’s where they started using iron more than they had been. Bear in mind, iron’s already been around. I mean, King Tut’s got an iron dagger in his tomb. But it was bronze that was being used back then. Even in the Iron Age, you’ve still got bronze, you just have more iron. So one of the suggestions perhaps is that the cutting of these routes is what led to that and helped contribute to the collapse.

So in terms of summing up, let me give you three points that I think you will all agree on and have no argument with. First of all, we’ve got a number of separate civilizations that are flourishing between the 15th and the 13th centuries in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. And these include Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites, and Cypriots. These are independent, but they are interacting with each other, especially through trade. Are we all agreed on that point? Pretty standard, okay.

Point number two. It’s clear that many cities were destroyed under the Late Bronze Age civilizations, and life as they knew it came to an end about 1177 or soon thereafter. We’re agreed on that, yes?

And third, there is no unequivocal proof as to who or what caused it, but it did result in the collapse. Are we agreed on that as well? Yeah, okay, so where does that leave us? Well, the scholarly publications out there are still doing the linear stuff. One leads to another, leads to another. And again I say it was much, much messier. So if you were to say to me, “Well, which one was it? Was it a drought?” I would say, “Yes it was a drought.” “Well, was it famine?” Yeah, it was famine. Earthquakes? Yes. Invaders? Yes. Rebellion? Yes. I think it’s all of them. And in fact, I think it’s a perfect storm, because I think you could survive one of these. You might even survive two. But three or more? I think you’re going to be in real trouble. And so I think that’s what’s going to be happening.

When you’ve got drought and famine and then you’re trying to recover from that but then an earthquake hits, you’re like, “Oh, my god!” And you throw up your hands, “What am I going to do?” Well, that also results in what we call a multiplier effect, where the, you know, the damage and all that gets worse because you’re still recovering from something else. And this is also a fairly complicated system, so that if something happened, to say, to the Hittites, or the Myceneans, or the Cypriots, it’s going to affect everybody at some point in some way. It’s as if today
something happens, like a typhoon in Japan, and it affects the stock market in New York. It’s the same sort of thing.

So what we’re actually looking at, to give it a name, is this is a systems collapse, if we want to describe it that way. This is not a new idea, I mean Colin Renfrew was already talking about this back in about 1979. A systems collapse is when your central administration collapses. It’s when the traditional elite disappear. Your centralized economy goes away. And you’ve got lots of settlement shifts and population decline. So giving this a name, it works with a systems collapse. The thing about a systems collapse is it can take up to a century to take place. So in fact, the title 1177 is misleading. It did not fall in that year, it took up to a century to fall. So the way I actually phrase it in the book is that life in 1200 BC was quite different from the life in 1100, and completely different from life in 1000 BC. But Rob told me that wouldn’t fit on the cover of the book, so he went for 1177. But it is, it takes 100 years or so. I’m saying not everything falls at the same time, but there is a bit of a domino effect.

The thing is when you do get a systems collapse like this, and we’ve got it elsewhere too, the Maya in the Indus Valley at different points and different times, you almost always get a lower level of socio-political integration afterward. You’ve got a development of myths about things that had taken place in the golden age. Think Homer and the Trojan War, for example, and you’ve got a dark age that follows. So we fit the classic definition of a systems collapse. So what’s to take away? What lessons can we learn from all of this? Well, I would have a question of you, do you think we’re facing a similar situation today that they were facing back in 1177?

Without pushing it too much, do we have somewhat of a parallel situation? Well, do we have climate change? We could argue all night about that, but I would say many people would say yes. Famines and droughts going on in the world these days? Yes. Any earthquakes around? Yeah. Rebellions? Sure. I think the only thing missing are the Sea Peoples.

(audience laughs)

But actually somebody did suggest way back when that it might be that ISIS are actually the Sea Peoples. They’re busy destroying most of the Near East, right? So I actually now have a dilemma. Are the Sea Peoples ISIS, the people who are destroying everything? Or are the Sea Peoples the refugees running away from them? It depends on how you see the Sea Peoples, if they’re the victims or the oppressors. But I think either way, I would actually add the Sea Peoples in to this equation.

So, in fact, in the headlines of the last couple of years that have been coming out from the Mediterranean and the Middle East, I took the liberty of ripping them out, so Greece’s economy has tanked, in the last couple of years. Internal rebellions have engulfed Libya, Egypt, and Syria, with outsiders and foreign warriors fanning the flames.
Sound familiar? This is from the local newspaper the last couple of years. Turkey fears it will become involved, as does Israel. Jordan is crowded with refugees. Iran is bellicose and threatening. Iraq is in turmoil. Sound familiar?
If we were to rip the headlines from the Mediterranean and Middle East about 1200 BC, what would they read? Pretty much the same.

(audience laughs)

So one thing about history is we can learn a lot from it if we want to. And the point that I would simply make is that there was a fairly globalized civilization that did collapse after 1200 BC, which has perhaps more parallels to us today then you might have expected. Now, they collapsed and in fact, if you study your history, you will know there is no civilization in the history of the world that hasn’t collapsed. So why we should be immune, I don’t know. I don’t think we will be. The question is: What’s it going to take and when is it going to happen?

There is a difference, however, of course. We are more technologically advanced, of course. We’re aware of what’s happening. I don’t think the Hittites were aware of what was going on. Somebody on the Internet once said, “Wait, there was climate change back then? What, the Hittites had SUVs?” No, the Hittites did not have SUVs. Mother Nature can do climate change. But the Hittites didn’t know how to deal with it. We on the other hand do, so we’ve got a choice if we want to face what’s happening and try and make a difference or ignore it. And from my point of view is what’s the harm if you try and to do something about it. If nothing’s happening, you haven’t done anything, but if it is happening then you’re, you know, saving the planet. So I would look at the collapse of 1177 BC and say it may hold some lessons for us, more than we might suspect. And with that I thank you.

(audience applauds)