Ancient World discussion

This thread is for the group read of 1177 BC, The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric H. Cline.

Here are a few ground rules to keep the discussion on track.
1. We'll discuss this book chapter by chapter in this thread.
2. Anybody can start a new chapter discussion, but please don't do so before all the main participants have had a chance to comment on the previous chapter.
3. Anybody can participate or comment, even casual passers by, but since we only have one thread to discuss the whole book, please try to keep your comments germane to the discussion of the book and the subject covered within. For major digressions, please start a new thread.
4. There are other books that cover the Bronze Age Collapse, and if anyone would like to speak at length on those, by way of comparison, I would ask that you save it for the end, after we've discussed this book. However, minor interjections to share something in-line are ok.

Thanks, and good reading!

Note about editions:

I our organizing thread, Ray pointed out that there are several editions. Ray said:

"There are three editions of this book already. A first edition from 2014. The paperback, which was a little different. And then a revised version which changes up the preface and reorganizes some material later in the book."

"I was listening to the first chapter while reading the older edition. So far it has just been an additional line here and there. I made notes on them and will share as the discussion gets going. I would say he partially felt like he needed to work in COVID and other world events as reference points and it doesn't always really serve his narrative. At one point, for instance, he is comparing the Sea People's migration, potentially caused by other pressures, to refugees leaving Syria. He also, I think, nods to a few theories that people have nudged him with since writing the first edition. For instance, he corrects the notion that the Sea Peoples might have had iron weapons - they didn't, according to Cline."

"The author's preface to the revised edition started different, but eventually dovetailed into the older edition language. And he added a few paragraphs on "what has changed" -- mentioning some reorganized material at the end."

Thanks for recycling the comments. I'll try to keep an eye (well ... an eye and an ear, as it happens) on differences as we go.

"Anybody can start a new chapter discussion, but please don't do so before all the main participants have had a chance to comment on the previous chapter."

Im sorry, what do you mean? And how does it help discussion?

This is a great book -- some chapters are better than others. I would love to comment and dicuss but I guess I should have been here when you started?

Hi Tom, you’re more than welcome to join. We haven’t started discussing anything yet, so your timing is perfect.

By the above, we mean to keep discussion largely focussed on one chapter at a time, rather than have some people rushing ahead to discuss chapter 4 while others are still taking about chapter 2. Since some people read much faster than others, this helps avoid a situation where two fast readers discuss the whole book together before the slower readers are even half way through.

For an example of how this looks, see the thread on Finkel’s First Ghosts.

thanks, Chris,
I now understand what you are trying to do. you want to build a reader group who will all move in lockstep. I think it is a very worthy idea.
Being a fast reader myself (in fact, I read 1777 in one day), I do not qualify to participate in your group. it makes me sad to think that I cannot participate in your group as a result, but I accept your rules! I send you all my best regards!

Hi Tom. We’re just trying to pace the discussion so nobody is left behind. You can read the book as fast as you like. I, myself, will probably be done -reading- long before the slowest person. I usually make notes as I go and them I post them to the discussion when everyone else has caught up. Since you’ve already read the book, nothing is preventing you from following the conversation and jumping in at the right moments. And, of course, when we get to the end, you don't need to hold back at all! So please join in as the mood takes you.

So, to get us started with this book, we have some introductory material.

SERIES EDITOR'S FORWARD by Barry Strauss.
So this book is part of a series on turning points in ancient history. Looking this series up, I see it has... a whopping two books. This one, and one on Nero.

In introducing this book, Stauss says: "Throughout there is a fingertip feel for the evidence. The scale of the detail is as grand as the sack of the Syrian port city of Ugarit around 1190 BC, and as intimate as a CT scan of King Tut's skeleton and the infection after a broken leg that probably killed him."

I mean, it sounds good. Strauss writes well. Part of the genesis behind nominating this book was my surprise at finding in on my friend Ray's list of books to read. He said he picked it, hoping for some immersive reading about ancient history. So, I'll be reading this book with an eye to it's 'immersive' quality, and thinking about how history books can be immersive in general - and which ones are.

PREFACE
Here, in three and a half pages, Cline compares the Late Bronze Age to the modern world, in terms of its systems, and speculates on whether we can see something of it's potential to fall. This was written in 2013, I suppose, before Russia's invasion of Crimea. Before The Big Lie. Even the environment looked more optimistic, then. What I wonder right now is whether this book will return to the comparison again by the end - or was this just penned as a late sales pitch to make the book seem more relevant to the lay reader.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Consider this section acknowledged.

PROLOGUE
And a last we start to get into it. This section presents the puzzle of 'the sea peoples' as we have commonly come to understand it. Who were they? Where did they come from? Cline lays out the prevailing thought, and warns us that change in this thought is on the horizon. "Like water under straw" an ancient might say, meaning "All is not what is seems." So this piques my curiosity.

"We know what they look like." Cline claims. He goes on to say that the images of the sea people have been much studied. But I wonder - do we know what they look like? Sure, we know how some Egyptian artists portrayed them, but is that the same thing? In her book Red Land Black Land, Barbara Mertz discusses Egyptian art as not trying to be naturalistic, but trying to portray the 'ideal'. This gives me hope that we actually DO know what the Sea People looked like. Also - Red Land, Black Land? That's an immersive history book!

Ramses said "They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting." (p3) That's a curious phrase, circuit of the earth. I suppose it means 'the whole world' but aren't we a bit early for 'circuits'? The Mesopotamians were thinking in terms of squares - "The Four Corners of the Earth". What is meant by 'circuit' here? Or is it just an odd translation from 1936?

More from Ramses: "I made the lands turn back from (even) mentioning Egypt: for when they pronounce my name in their land, they are burned up." (p6) I guess this references a curse laid upon the invaders by Ramses.

The prologue rounds out with a couple of tables. Table 1 contains the names of kings and their countries mentioned in the text. Table 2 has ancient placenames. Most of these I know. Pa-ka-na-na isn't one, but it does sound like Kinahnu, which was the Assyrian name for Canaan. Also, 'Misraim' for Egypt - a Hebrew name? Kemet is not mentioned as a name for Egypt.

I haven't actually started yet but here's a clarification that might help on one issue. The Pa in Pa-ka-na-na is the Egyptian definite article. So this would be read as "the Canaan". Some Egyptian inscriptions for this toponym use the article and some do not, and there has been a lot of debate as to whether this is a significant change or simply some stylistic variation.

I just looked up my old notes about this and back in 1982 it was suggested that p3 kn'n (with the article) indicated the town of Gaza, as the chief town of the region (and Egyptian administrative capital during the period of Egyptian occupation). However, subsequent studies have not supported this conclusion for several reasons, not least that other Egyptian writers varied as to whether or not they included the article p3 when describing small territories, and examples can be given of both.
Interestingly (to me, at least, and with particular reference to the "Israel Stele") is that Egyptians appeared to use the terms Canaan and Kharu interchangeably for the same area (hence, Canaanites and Hurrians as regards the people concerned). There has been debate as to whether one refers to geographical boundaries, and the other to administrative ones, or whether they should just be thought of as poetic synonyms. My own view (from a few years back when I was well up on all this) was that a) the definite article p3 had no real substantial difference, and b) Canaan and Kharu are synonyms for the same entity.

OK I've read those sections now are here are some thoughts.
The pedant in me wanted to protest at his insistence about the specific year 1177! I get that it's a great tagline for the book, and for the intended audience, but actually ancient world chronology of this period is simply not so precise. The reign of Ramesses II (and by deduction other New Kingdom pharaohs) is pegged by various astronomical events (lunar and sothic calendars) but there are three contending sets of regnal dates with a span of maybe 25 years - and the sothic aspects of this are regularly challenged and incapable of proof. But I do get that Cline is making a rhetorical point rather than a chronological one, and he does recognise that things are not that tied down. In short, what one might call scientific forms of dating such as radiocarbon and tree-ring do not exactly agree with historical ones based on inscriptions and counts of regnal years.
That said I like his writing style and am very much enjoying the scope of his intentions.
Tin - there is evidence that tin was also brought to Phoenicia from the British Isles, specifically Cornwall, so there was a second trade route for this commodity either overland across France or oversea around the coasts of Spain and France. The quantities may well have been smaller than the sources Cline mentions, but such was the demand for tin that it was potentially important.
The Philistines (or at least some parts of the Sea Peoples) not only migrated down the coast - they also established small but significant settlements in the Jordan Valley, and (interestingly for proposed reconstructions of the history behind the Hebrew Bible) these settlements seem to have lived harmoniously with the (probably Israelite) settlements in the highlands between the Jordan and the coast, unlike the constant conflict we see with what we usually recognise as Philistia. So the simple hostility painted in Judges and Samuel is only one half of the whole story.
But it's a good prologue and has definitely whetted my appetite for his more detailed reconstructions later in the book.

I've read those sections too now.

If I've understood, the "collapse" of the title is an umbrella term for many events, not just invasions, which "stormed" the world over some decades.

The homelands of the groups that made up the Sea Peoples is an interesting mystery. Accepting Sicily and Sardinia as two places, those would seem to me points of departure before arriving in the Eastern Mediterranean to plunder and whatnot. But wouldn't they first have come to those islands from elsewhere ? Could they be ethnic North Africans ? Europeans/Etruscans ? No doubt both ?

The pictures of the prisoners in kilts and feathered headdress make me think of North Africa, but I'm wary of making an unjustified association between the prisoners depicted by Ramses III and dress customs of a much later era. (In fact, I thought spontaneously of Ethiopia....)

Looking forward to reading about the ensemble of events that would result in the "collapse" or dark age that ensued.

Richard wrote: "... So the simple hostility painted in Judges and Samuel is only one half of the whole story ..."

Fergus Millar's books on the Romans, Greeks and Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean opened my eyes to the cultural hodgepodge the area was in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Syro-Phoenician, Canaanite, Sidonite, Samaritan, Syrian Greek -- all wonderfully confusing but corresponding to reality. His sources are inscriptions more than literature, which I appreciate. Thus : inscriptions in excellent Greek from people with Phoenician names, people with Greek or Latin names holding priesthoods of Syrian deities. Not to mention "Hellenised" Jews. Situations like that.

His conclusion was that one should temper the image of an Hellenised East that literary sources tend to portray, or that earlier scholars have imagined that they portray.

Similarly, an "Israelised" Palestine, or a "Romanised" city. Expressions that obscure more than they reveal.

I'm learning as much from all of you as from the book. I am very much reading this as a bystander rather than a historian. I have heard of the Sea Peoples and Shepherd Kings, etc. And it helps (and hurts) that I grew up in a King-James-Bible-beating culture. But some of these details are entirely new to me. I had never before linked the Philistines to the Sea Peoples for instance. That's cool to put together. It's also cool to kind of keep an eye on the "when was Joseph" debate, assuming that's history and not just myth. But overall I have one response to the first chapter and it's lead ups (preface, forward, etc.)...

The thesis is pretty weak. I am assuming the book title is a thesis, and so far the evidence presented only supports it in a very vague way, and in some cases undermines it (the lack of pin-pointing of 1177 as an important year, for instance).

That is hard to deal with, as a reader. It breaks faith. I know we have all had the modern experience of reading a news headline and then digging into the story only to find that the headline was total clickbait. At that point one thinks - do I just stop reading now and forget I ever saw this headline, or do I keep reading so I can help inform others who never read past the headline? That's how this book is affecting me, in a way. I want to keep reading to see how it turns out, but I'm kind of nonplussed that it isn't really delivering on its promise, yet.

I’m not sure we’ve seen the thesis, yet. The book is definitely about the events that lead up to the tumultuous times we call ‘the bronze age collapse’, but he hasn’t so far given us the why. He has argued that the late Bronze Age was characterized by an international order of some kind. He’ll start to lay that out in chapter one. The fact that it seems to have collapsed is an archaeological mystery that needs explaining. I think we’ll get to that near the end.

Now, if you mean ‘1177 as the year the world collapsed’, then yeah, that’s definitely hyperbole and click-baity. Even if you consider the book might be purely from the perspective of the Egyptians, it’s a bit disingenuous since the world didn’t really collapse for them in this year. The collapse was mainly in the north, in the land of the Hittites, and in Crete and the Aegean. In Egypt, the New Kingdom ends about 100 years after this event.

Also, this book doesn’t give a hard look at the world in a specific year, which you might expect from the title.

I agree that citing any specific year is doomed to failure - we're talking about a big social structure to collapse, and that doesn't happen in just 365 days! (Shades of Asimov's Foundation and the collapse of the Galactic Empire, anyone?)

I'm also wary of taking written ancient records at face value, when they frequently served a rhetorical purpose and not simply a bookkeeping one. For example, taking just Egypt, although the main Sea Peoples' incursions were in the reigns of Rameses 3 (c. 1186-1155BCE) and Merenptah (c. 1213-1203), we do have records of Sherden in the reign of Rameses 2 (c. 1279-1213), and Sherden and Danuna in the Amarna period (c. 1340). So they weren't weird folk that appeared out of nowhere, but people-groups that had been on the edge of the Egyptian orbit for nearly two centuries before 1177! They only came to literary prominence when they became a nuisance on a large scale.
Likewise the rhetoric about the Sea Peoples being utterly annihilated by Egyptian forces on land and at sea - clearly they weren't, as Rameses 3 refers not only to annihilating them but also to settling them along the coastal plain of the Levant.

To be clear, I totally accept that the settled relationships and structures of the Bronze Age really did suffer large-scale collapse, and were replaced by new ways of organising territory and new ways of waging war... I'm not yet sold on the idea of highlighting one specific year as a kind of token of the whole.

I agree with all of you : "1177" is simply an eye-catching (=click-baity) easy-to-remember number for the sake of book marketing. It's clear from the Introduction that the author will be talking about a few generations' worth of events (not 365 days) all contributing to a changed state of the world that we might call a collapse, but that the people who lived through it didn't.

Ah, Asimov's Foundation...

Moving on to Chapter 1 (Act I) we start to get into the history of the late bronze age. This chapter deals with the 15th C. BC, and rather specifically with an eye to demonstrating how there was interconnectivity between cultures, mainly in the form of trade, but also warfare and conquest.

First, we go even further back in time a little, to Avaris in the Hyksos period, which deals with a time that (northern) Egypt was ruled by a dynasty of Asians, who presumably introduced chariots into Egypt. Cline uses the word 'conquest' to talk about how the Hyksos came to power, and I'm not entirely sure that's a universal view. Richard will confirm, I'm sure.

Then we learn about trade connections between Babylonia and Crete in the 18th C., which leads into an introduction to the Minoans and their discovery.

Then it's back to Egypt again, and the reigns of Hatshepsut and her son Thutmose III, and the battle of Megiddo against the Hittites. This leads to a brief discussion on the Mitanni kingdom of North Mesopotamia before taking a deeper dive into the discovery of the Hittites and who they are.

The Hittites had connections to, possibly, the Mycenaeans, and may have faced them in battle (or seen their influence) around the city of Troy, some 200 years before Homer's Trojan War, and the author speculates on whether this was the actual battle that inspired Homer. And finally we conclude with a who-what-where of the Myceneans and have come full circle around the eastern Mediterranean basin.

Bit of an aside, but each time I read about Avaris, I think of David Rohl's book: Lords of Avaris, which is the third in a triology dealing with his reorganizing of accepted chronology of the eastern Mediterranean. I've never read the works, but they're very highly rated here on GR: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

I don't have the book, but I'm familiar enough with semi-modern biblical scholarship to know that people like van Seters question a fair amount of the received narrative about a Hyksos invasion, about them coming from somewhere further north/east than Palestine, and other things. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

Yeah, I thought migration was the more common model these days. Maybe Cline means ‘conquest’ loosely. Anyway, I did not know of this van Seeters book, so thanks for the share.

Hi all, a couple of points raised from Chris's comments, then I'll add some more of my own later. First, yes I agree with Socraticgadfly that more recent thinking is that the Hyksos did not necessarily arrive by way of conquest. The conquest idea arose (I think) from two sources, first the tendency in days gone by in Europe to assume that every change of rulership anywhere in the world was because of conquest, and the tendency nowadays to think in terms of trade / assimilation / replacement of elite class etc. Other examples of this change of habit would be the interplay between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans, or the arrival of the Beaker People here in England, The second strand would be the ancient world tendency to write in a rhetorical rather than strict historical manner, and it's clearly more dramatic to talk in terms of conquest and liberation rather than trade changes and quiet assimilation.
Re Rohl's chronological revision - at one stage I was enthusiastic about this but the more I learned about both his approach and the standard one, the less I was persuaded by his revision. Most of the revisionist models rely on assuming considerable parallel rulers in Egypt (and/or Assyria) in order to reduce an overall timescale. The original Centuries of Darkness model trimmed off about 400 years (if I remember correctly): Rohl's does at most about 250, others a bit less, and so on. The heart of Rohl's revision has the effect of moving the Late Bronze - Iron transition later in time, and realigning the chronology of the Hebrew Bible against that of Egypt.
Most folk that I am still in vague contact with into revisionist models tend to focus on uncertainties in so-called scientific methods of dating, eg C14, tree-ring, astronomy etc, and (IMHO) they neglect social and linguistic signals that challenge the models - it can all get quite heated and I have kept out of that debate for quite a few years now!

Other comments: his sloppy approach to ancient names and languages annoy me (and yes, this is probably the pedant in me talking). For example we read "[The Hyksos] fled back to Retenu... the same general area also known to the Egyptians as Pa-ka-na-na, or Canaan". Now, Retenu is a transliteration of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, but Pa-ka-na-na is a transliteration of the Akkadian cuneiform. The Egyptians called it p3 kn'n where 3 is aleph and ' is ayin, neither of which guttural sounds were written in Akkadian (and as I rambled on about before p3 is the definite article in Egyptian, so sometimes they just called it kn'n). So this kind of seems to me sloppy and unhelpful.

"Much of the tribute (inw) depicted... is actually traded goods" - now this is much more sensible and careful, recognising that ancient texts need to be understood in context and not taken as literal fact.

Hittites and the Hebrew Bible - yes, this is a real problem if one assumes that the Biblical Hittites were the same as the Anatolian ones. Even accepting that Hittites might be found in Syria, that is still nowhere near where the Bible locates them. Folk have gone a few directions with this 1) the Hebrew Bible writers simply got it wrong, 2) they were writing rather later, were aware that the HIttites had had a large empire, and surmised that it included what later became Israel, or 3) the Hebrew name simply refers to a different set of people who really did live in the hill country, but were nothing to do with Anatolia.

Michael Ventris - curiously enough a few years back when I was living in London, there was one of our famous blue plaques on a house nearby https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/v... - he died, sadly, in a car crash at the young age of 34 so was unable to get as far with his studies as he (undoubtedly) would have done otherwise.

Act/Chapter One does read like a collection of anecdotes. The sections headings do help to keep track of the changes in era and civilisation.

The point he seems to want to make is that all these cultural spheres, if I may, were not only aware of each other, but interacted in day-to-day life, not only in periodical conflict/war. One must conclude that they were able to (mis)understand each other, live together to the point of intermarriage (keeping in mind that arranged marriages were the norm), that there was MUCH sea travel going on in addition to land travel.

Favourite passage: the citation of Helene Kantor. "The evidence preserved to us by the passage of time constitutes but a small fraction of that which must have once existed."

The cynic in me adds what Cline hasn't said: that in addition to all the interactions, there were undoubtedly masses of people who looked at the ubiquity of foreigners as an intolerable "invasion" with accompanying acts of vandalism against their shops, beatings, riots. The sort of thing one reads about in newspapers today.

I'm not sure sure about the question of 'intolerance' of foreigners. Most of what I've read does suggest there was a degree of looking down upon the other if the other was a nomad or basically had a very different lifestyle. But if one had the same lifestyle (yet was descended from nomads) the scholarly consensus I've seen is that there was no discrimination. I'm not sure there's enough evidence to support the latter, but even so, I have a hard time believing that xenophobia in 1177 = xenophobia today, in how it looks.

Anyway, Ray PMed me to let me know that he has no additional comments on the 1st act, so I think it's safe to move on to ACT II - An (Aegean) Affair to Remember.

To summarize this chapter-
Cline presents evidence of Egyptian contact with Greece - what appears to be a trade itinerary from Egypt to Crete to Mycenae and back again.

He then discusses the Amarna letters and what they reveal about the relations between kings, and the pecking order of those kings, and the 'gifts' they exchanged with one another. He argues that this trade would have been mirrored among the commoners as well. Both goods and craftsmen would have travelled between Egypt, Greece, and the Near East from as early as the 17th C. BC. And I don't see why not, since Mesopotamia had direct trade links to the Indus and indirect ones to Afghanistan before that, and it's about the same distance. One presumes that all of these locations would have had trade links on the other directions for a similar distance as well, but they're not recorded unless by archaeology.

Alashiya (Cypress) and Assyria appear among the LBA 'league of nations' in the 14th C.

We get an aside on the discovery of King Tut (which mentions that Carter waited for Carnarvon before officially opening the tomb, but doesn't mention an anecdote I read in another book recently about how Carter secretly broke into the tomb before the official unsealing and did who-knows-what inside, then hid the fact.

Then we get to King Suppiliuma I of the hittites, and the story of how he received a letter from 'A Queen of Egypt' asking for a husband to marry. He was skeptical and did some due diligence, then ended up sending his son Zannanza - only to have him die en-route! Good story, incidentally turned into a decent piece of historical fiction about the life of Suppiliuma I called I, The Sun, written by Janet Morris, who has quite a remarkable bio in her own right well worth googling.

Cline speculates on the possibility of an 'anti-Hittite' pact between Egypt and the Aegean - a notion I find rather spurious, myself. I mean, the Aegean was hardly a polity on it's own, but likely several competing polities. Perhaps such an agreement would have been made with one or two principle kings, but I somehow doubt it, as it would have perhaps cut off their supply of silver and tin.

I enjoyed this chapter and thought Cline gave a good summary of the various issues of the era, especially the links between Egypt and the Aegean (both islands and mainland).

King Tut - today's Grasmere connection is that a large house on the edge of the village, now called Wishing Gate House but formerly Dry Close, used to belong to a Colonel Danson who was part of Carter's expedition. The house is still reputed to be haunted as an aftermath of the curse and there are occasional reports of mysterious noises in the library, and sightings of supernatural enormous black cats in the garden.

Anti-Hittite pact - this seems plausible to me, as the main Egyptian strategy in the Levant was to secure buffer states as far north as possible (ideally as far as Ugarit) and simultaneously prevent the Hittites from doing the same southwards. Hence Ramesses II's battle at Qadesh (a little later than we have reached so far in the book). So a pact with other interested parties makes sense to me. So far Cline has not (I think) talked about one of what I think of as the major features of Late Bronze politics, viz the building of territory by means of allegiances of lesser kings to one or other of the Great Kings - lesser kings were allowed to keep their titles and all so long as they remained loyal. Rather different from later empires where conquered territories were ruled by governors or whatever appointed by the emperor.

In parallel, I pulled Robert Drews's book The End of the Bronze Age (Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 BC) off my shelves - Drews is very much of the opinion that changes in warfare were the primary cause of the downfall, with other factors (migration, disease, systems collapse etc) secondary. He links this specifically to the abrupt failure of chariot-based warfare, itself linked to an elite warrior group (he makes obvious parallels to the similar sudden collapse of warfare between armoured knights in late Medieval times). I was very taken by Drews's arguments a few years ago when reading around for The Flame before Us, so it'll be interesting to compare and contrast!

Love the Grasmere connections! speaking of parallels, I also pulled my copy of Drew off the shelf this week, so I’m glad you commented on it.

This chapter did another good Eastern Mediterranean tour. Egyptians, Hittites, Cypriots, Mycaeneans, Assyrians and so on... I would have liked a lot more about each of these !

As with many other studies, Cline focuses on trade and war, the "money makes the world go round" approach. He mentions only in passing literary themes such as Gilgamesh, giving more space to hypothetical tall tales spread by sailors than cosmogony myths, for example, which is frustrating for me.

Zannanza affair : most interesting anecdote.

Curse of Tutankhamun : the sudden deaths of many of the first people into Tut's tomb will forever fascinate historians, I'm positive !

An aside : client kingdoms in the East only ended in Vespasian's time : Emesa and Commagene were annexed in the 70's. Can't remember when Lesser Armenia disappeared, but Nero had given that kingdom a ruler in the 50's. Before that, a number of Greek kingdoms had wanted direct Roman rule. It made for less fighting. Mithradates VI was an exception, and Pontus-Bithynia was outright conquered, as was Egypt. Syria simply imploded. Herod Agrippa II was still minting his own coins in the 90's, but the territory of which he was still king until his death is a mystery to me.

Moving on to Chapter 3 - Fighting for Gods and Country, this chapter opens with a description of the rather famous (to us ANE junkies, anyway) Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of Turkey, which has all those nice fleece-shaped ingots. It's presented as an example of west-west trade on the Mediterranean. This is followed by a little anecdote about a merchant names Sinaranu of Ugarit, who lost some cargo.

Next, the author turns to some rather famous battles - the Battle of Qadesh, between Muwattalli II of the hittites, and Ramses II of Egypt, a rather famous chariot battle. Cline cites this as one of the first uses of misinformation, which I suppose is true in the grand scheme of things, though there are certainly earlier incidents recorded in Babylonia.

Then we turn to the (possibly legendary) Trojan war, which seems unlikely to have unfolded as Homer relates - at least at this time (but possibly it's true inspiration is 200 years earlier?). I found the section on the suggestive names from Linear B tablets from Pylos to be quite interesting.

Heading further south, Cline then looks next at the Exodus and Israelite conquest in what I thought was a most interesting section. There's some speculation on the dates - did it take place c.1450 in the reign of Thutmose III, or c.1250 in the reign of Ramses II? This 200 year gap leads us back to the work of Rohl, I think? In any case, the destruction of Canaanite cities seems to correspond to the rise of Iraelites, Philistines, and Phoenicians. Cline mentions waiting for new updated radio-carbon dates from Hazor, and I wonder if this is covered in the updated edition. Anyone?

Next up, we meet the Assyrian at their rise at the expense of the Mitanians, and some changes in the land of Hatti and North Mesopotamia/Syria are discussed. A king of Amurru is mentioned - Shaushgamuwa, which is interesting. Amurru is the region of Northern Syria around Aleppo and Charchemish, originally associated mainly with the Amorites, Western Semitic people, though the name simply means 'West' in the Akkadian language. But the name Shaushgamuwa is surely Hurrian, and the Hurrians (a language isolate, or nearly so) had spread all though this land since the early Bronze Age. Mitannia was a Hurrian kingdom, though ruled by a non-Hurrian dynasty.

Also interesting here is the strike-through in the text of the King of Ahhiyawa (i.e. Aegean) as if he was no longer on the scene. Or perhaps he had become persona-non-grata? Perhaps too much is being read into this, but its tantalizing.

Then comes our last conquest of this section, the invasion of Alashiya (Cyprus) by the Hittites.

And, to round things out, we come again to shipwrecks - one at Point Iria and another at Cape Gelidonia - the chapter has come full circle.

Thoughts?

My interest has varied a lot in the reading so far. I just finished chapter 3. Some things of note.

The Revised edition certainly contains "more" and a number of light corrections throughout. For instance there is further discussion (maybe two pages' worth) of the Trojan War just before the chapter 3 section titled The Hittite Invasion of Cyprus. And at the end of the chapter he adds a note about a shipwreck discovered in 2018: https://nauticalarch.org/projects/kum...

I don't know where this falls on the spectrum of hardcore history books. I presume that it is somewhat short of a "heavily scholarly" work, but to my eyes and ears it's also short of a layman's or popular history. The stream of facts, dates, names (and alternate names) is pretty hard for me to follow. The times I feel most grounded are when he talks about things I can remember/visualize from art history or biblical studies. So I presume this is a work written for "insiders," to some degree.

"Tours" is a funny and accurate word, Chris. I feel like I can see his focus bouncing back and forth (or rather clockwise and counter-clockwise) around the Aegean from Egypt to Mycenae. A picture is emerging for me a bit, but ...

So far the author's vision of "pre-collapse" civilization is one primarily of trade and war, with a bit of migration thrown in. Ok. Is that "civilization" And will it significantly differ from the post 1177 (or thereabouts) collapse? I figured it was more a cultural downfall - loss of artistry, records, etc. If it's just a collapse of nations, that's hardly a collapse of civilization - it's just a replacement by a different civilization. So I'm waiting for that shoe to drop.

I'm trying to have faith that it will all come together into some kind of fruitful understanding, if not a "picture" of some sort.

You kind of have to be insane to study this period seriously, BTW. (LOL) Everything is so imprecise and specious that it's like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are 'chipped' and some from an entirely different box have been thrown in.

At one point I started doing word-search counts on words like likely, possible, may have, could have, might have, it is thought that, perhaps, and so on. Hardly a paragraph goes by without a heavy does of these qualifiers making me wonder what I'm actually learning. There's not much firm ground to stand on. And yet when there is, it's pretty tantalizing.

Side note. I have never taken stories like The Trojan War or The Exodus too seriously. They are stories written from a particular viewpoint and structured to teach/reinforce ideas. It's interesting to try to make them fit somehow into the real events upon which they were supposedly based. I always knew that the Pharaoh of Jacob and the Pharaoh of Moses, both, were pretty uncertain. What I didn't know about was the lack of evidence of the stuff that comes later - the occupation of Canaan and Hebrew conquests. For instance, I knew that archaeologists had found Jericho. I didn't know there was no evidence it had ever been sacked/razed/tumbled as described in the Bible. I always knew the history I got from the pulpit was BS, but I always figured it had a bit more of a touchpoint in history than maybe it actually does.

Not yet finished Chp 3, but I thought I'd share the following.

The first links to an article about the tin from that Uluburun shipwreck. It's Late Bronze Age, so right up our alley. Analysis of the tin shows what Cline is talking about : a network of exchange stretching from Bactria to the Aegean.

The second links to Early Bronze Age gold artefacts. Analysis is pointing at possible exchange between Troy and Ur.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...

Ray wrote: "Side note. I have never taken stories like The Trojan War or The Exodus too seriously. They are stories written from a particular viewpoint and structured to teach/reinforce ideas. It's interesting..."

Not just Jericho; per earlier comments here, too, there's simply no evidence of an "Israelite invasion" anywhere in Canaan at this time point.

I too came across a potentially interesting link to do with ancient trade and transfer of raw materials...

https://www.heritagedaily.com/2022/11...

(Edit: which I've just discovered is essentially the same as the second one Daphne posted!)

Socraticgadfly wrote: "Ray wrote: "Side note. I have never taken stories like The Trojan War or The Exodus too seriously. They are stories written from a particular viewpoint and structured to teach/reinforce ideas. It's..."

Yeah, I got that. I was trying to say that was the part that surprised me/was new to me. But it goes to show you -- if any of that really happened -- how self-centered everyone's view of the world is. I've argued with people for ages that a "worldwide flood" story could refer to just the Tigris-Euphrates river valley(s). It didn't have to cover the globe to affect "everyone in the world" from the perspective of one culture. Anyway, things always get bigger in the telling, right? :)

Lots to catch up on, but for now:
@Ray - This book is definitely more for insiders, and is getting quite heavily into names and dates type history at this point, which is not easy on lay readers. But I'm not sure it's hardcore history either - somewhere in-between, I'd say.

I don't think you'll get much of the 'trappings of civilization' in this book. For one thing, it covers too large an area, and really each of these places (Assyria, Hatti, Egypt, Aegean, Cyprus, Ugarit, Canaan) would warrant their own culture book. But to complicate things further, the Bronze Age collapse inaugurates a dark age from which little information appears afterward. So most of what we know about it is based on archaeology, and in some areas even that is quite scant. We know, for example, that Aegean culture changes a lot, and (it is speculated) that the Greeks forgot how to write, because inscriptions stop for a time, and when they start again, the Greeks are no longer using Linear B, but an alphabetic script they learned from the Phoenicians.

You are right about it being a crazy period to try and study - there's so little information available, but what there is is very tantalizing. Like trying to make a picture from a nearly empty puzzle box. The same is true for the British dark age, and enormous amounts of ink has been devoted to trying to pin down a 'historic' Arthur, all using basically the same sources but drawing wildly different conclusions. There must be at least 20 books about 'the real arthur' each by different authors, placing him in Scotland, North Wales, South Wales, Cornwall, or Shropshire. It's quite fascinating.

Cline has written some other books that might be more accessible or interesting to you:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... deals specifically with the Bible, and is pretty accessible. I read this years ago.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...
As the title says - a very short introduction to Biblical archaeology.

The very lack of certainty and confidence in dates is what makes it so exciting, both for academic study and fiction (and as @apocryphal says, the same is true of Arthur). I can't imagine writing historical fiction in an era where people diaries constrain almost everything you'd like to write about! I know a fair few people who do attempt such a monumental challenge, but personally I'll stick to times when there's no overall consensus!

On biblical stuff, setting an Israelite arrival in the hill country in late New Kingdom times is certainly not limited to chronological revisionists like Rohl - indeed it's only really those committed to biblical inerrancy that take a single isolated date from Kings and deduce that the arrival was in the mid 1400s. (I'm certainly not such a person)

The social and cultural organisation of the hill country in the Late New Kingdom matches it pretty well, and likewise moving on to the united kingdom in the Third Intermediate Period. I'm not sure whether Cline gets to those late times - no especial reason why he would - but if he does I'm sure there will be a lot to talk about.

Rohl has the Judges era lining up with Amarna, and David/Solomon with the late New Kingdom, which he can achieve alongside keeping inerratists happy by substantially down-dating Egyptian history (of course, this makes Egyptologists unhappy, but Rohl isn't especially bothered about that :) )

With Chp 3 we get the picture, the very big picture, as Chris points out, of interconnectedness over distances that earlier modern historians had not believed possible. Homo sapiens is definitely a homo migrans kind of creature.

Cline does seem to refer often to records of conflict situations, but one has to admit that much of the surviving written word is from royal archives, and those earlier modern historians did love their histories of kings and warriors.

The large section about Exodus seems to be aimed at an audience who consider that book to be historical narrative. I suppose that audience does exist somewhere out there. One can always hope that the milieu of researchers in ancient history, on the other hand, has learned to differentiate between historical narrative and theological narrative. Or is that too much to hope for?

And differentiate between historical narrative and oratorio. I refer here to the section on Troy. Cline writes: "...the question we should be asking is not whether the Trojan War took place, but which of these four [conflicts] could be the one later commemorated by Homer and his fellow epic poets."

The one later commemorated by Homer ?? Aaarrgh! There is no one commemorated by Homer or anyone else. The Iliad is an oratorio (pardon the anachronism) about Hellas being bigger and better than their famous rival.

Twenty points from Cline.

Twenty points?!! Geez, that’s a lot LOL. Personally, I doubt Homer made up his stories whole cloth, but that doesn’t mean they’re history either. Tim Severin, and English sailor and adventurer, wrote several travelogues through the 70s and 80s. His book, The Ulysses Voyage, goes is search of Odysseus and rather convincingly finds several locations where the local geography and folklore might have inspired Homer to write certain episodes of The Odyssey. I quite liked that book, and on the strength of it bought several more.

Having now read the chapter to its end I found the Exodus bit to be extremely superficial and naive (or, as Daphne suggests, aimed at a very specific audience). One of the great difficulties for people trying to reconstruct a chronology solely fro the Hebrew Bible is that it is very hard to reconcile the different snippets of evidence - the summary 480 years of 1 Kings is, for example, difficult to square with the various year notes in Judges, and impossible to square with the numerous genealogies listed, requiring some kind of special pleading to reconcile the data items that don't align with 480 years.

Hence most folk who want to build an overall historical framework of the ANE take the biblical descriptions as useful but not binding - again as Daphne has said, theological narrative rather than historical annal. Now I do think that the various snippets of social and cultural detail in said books matches surprisingly well with a late New Kingdom setting, but I don't believe it is possible to get a year-perfect outcome.

I agree with Ray about being a bit muddled by Cline's approach. This clearly isn't intended to be a contribution to ANE scholarship - there is far too little recognition of diversity of viewpoint, for one thing. It is more of a popularly-focused account, but with detail-heavy passages that sit oddly with the pace and swing of other sections. So I keep getting tripped up by how I ought to approach the book, and what sort of reader I ought to be to get the most out of it. On the one hand there are some great and highly informative passages (eg the descriptions of the shipwrecks and their finding) but on the other, sweeping generalisations which don't survive too close an inspection.

Richard wrote: "This clearly isn't intended to be a contribution to ANE scholarship (...) It is more of a popularly-focused account, but with detail-heavy passages that sit oddly with the pace and swing of other sections..."

Very well put, Richard. Let us read on, and see where he goes next.

For now, I'm wondering if by "CIvilization" in the book title he does actually mean that commercial interconnectivity over distances which his predecessors wouldn't have believed possible and between certain (the Big Five) kingdoms ; and consequently, if by "Collapse" he means the replacement of some or all of those Big Five kingdoms by other "lesser" ones, who just didn't have the strength or science to interact commercially and on a scale that the first Big Five had achieved.

@Chris : there's always room to gain those 20 points back ;-)

I have a feeling Cline is just making a contrast between "civilisation" and "dark ages", but if so it's a risky route to travel! The more we learn about the dark ages in Britain the more we find out it was a complex and intricate society that happened not to value writing as much as those before and after.

Moving on, then, to Act IV - THE END OF AN ERA: THE TWELFTH CENTURY BC

Cline opens this chapter with a rather dramatic statement: "This is the moment for which we have been waiting: the climax of the play and the dramatic beginning of of the end to three hundred and more years of the globalized economy that had been the hallmark of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. The Twelfth Century BC, as we will see in this final act, is marked more by tales of woe and destruction than by stories and international relations, although we can begin on the high note of the latter."

And this Cline does, opening right away with a bit on the discovery of Ugarit, a north Canaanite city state whose ruin is today located on the west coast of Syria. We've encountered Urgarit already in this book, but I think the 'introduction to it's discovery' is well placed here to highlight something quite interesting - that among all the excavated documents illuminating ancient trade, there are a few that seem to be harbingers of what is about to happen - namely, the archaeologically documented fall of many cities in the Levant, Aegean, and Anatolia.

After setting up his last argument for 'global' trade, Cline spends the rest of the chapter documenting what we know about it's collapse, region by region.

Here are the rough dates of destruction, compiled chronologically:
1225-1190 - Greece (Mycenae, Tiryns, Katsingri, Korakou, Iria, Menelaion, Pylos, Teikhos Dymaion, Thebes, Orchomenos, Krisa, and another 10 places listed as abandoned without destruction).
1125-1190 Cyprus perhaps caused by Hittites or marauders from Ugarit, but for the most part the island continues to thrive past this time to 1050.
1207 - Egypt (Merenptah)
1200 - Ras Bassit (North Canaan Coast)
1192-1190 - Gibala (North Canaan Coast)
1190-1185 - Ugarit (North Canaan Coast)
1185 or later - Akko (South Canaan Coast)
c.1190 - Hattusa (central Anatolia, at hands of Kaskans?)
1190-1180 - Troy (Aegean)
1190-1130 - Greece (Mycenae, Tiryns, Lefkandi, and Kynos again) but perhaps gradual decline for Mycenae & Tiryns
1185 - Emar (Upper Euphrates)
1180 - Pylos (Aegean) again
1177 - Egypt (Ramses III)
1158 - Babylon (at the hands of Elam)
1130 - Megido and Lachish (Canaan Interior)

From all this, Cline points out, there is little to conclude as to who the Sea People were, where they came from, or if they were somehow responsible for some of this (certainly they weren't for all of it). So who (or what) caused all of this destruction in a relatively short time? To be discussed in Ch. 5.

Thoughts? Certainly there's little here to fit the specific year 1177 as any kind of 'point in time' in this process, though I always thought he picked that year simply based on it's symmetry.

Act IV, or the Chapter of Destruction.
Almost.

Thank you very much for composing that summary, Chris. As we all will have noticed, some of the places seem to have abandoned rather than attacked and raided. It is still a dramatic event. Cities weren't built in a day, and to abandon them is a sign of desperate times.

Where there is destruction (fire, bodies in streets, etc.), they do seem to happen within a generation. (I don't count Babylon and Megiddo-Lachish.) Wars going on simultaneously between the Aegean and the Levant.

Yes, a decline in the volume of trade occurring. Decline is the word I would prefer to "collapse" when it comes to the "globalised economy" mentioned at the opening of the chapter. Collapse more aptly fits the constitution of some of the "empires". Not Cyprus, not Egypt: they kept going. The territory between southern Syria and Ascalon was hardly an empire.

Words like collapse, empire, king, even city: caveat lector! We're talking about realities that are much smaller than we're used to today. At the same time, though some of these "kings" might have had palaces smaller than the house I currently live in, they certainly wore a lot more gold and precious stones than I could ever afford, lol.

I suspect his whole focus on 1177 is specifically because that is the date of the Rameses III text (his year 8 inscription) describing the combined land + sea battles against the Sea Peoples - assuming that one takes the standard accession year, about which, inevitably, there is dispute amongst Egyptologists before ever you get to chronological revisionists! But his year 5 inscription, which deals primarily with his first defence against the Libyans (Rebu), also touches on a defeat of the Sea Peoples, Stylistically the year 5 inscription is a more complex and rhetorically structured piece of work - as so often with Egyptian monumental accounts, you have to factor in the literary conventions and not just directly infer historical stuff.

That aside, it seems clear to me that 1177 is a handy date with an actual document describing an actual battle - albeit one which the Sea Peoples came out with mixed fortunes - whereas most of the other dates are more loosely attached to archaeological factors and (IMHO) are not so precise.

A couple of other thoughts that struck me.

1) He says "[Ugarit] used one of the earliest alphabetic scripts yet known" - well, yes and no. There is a convincing argument that the alphabetic script was only developed late on in Ugarit's history, maybe in the last 50-100 years or so before the city's destruction. And it was a dead end - so far as I know no other alphabetic script developed from cuneiform wedges. The main line of alphabetic development came from Egypt around 1800 BCE or so, via Canaan through Phoenicia to the classical world.

"An eclipse of the sun... January 21, 1192 BC" - hm, well, eclipses in the ancient world cannot be identified with this accuracy. The actual eclipse track over the Earth's surface, and hence the visibility, time of occurrence etc, varies with an unknown parameter conventionally called Delta-T. Now, Delta-T can only be measured once you get to the telescope age, and before that it can only be extrapolated according to one or other hypothesised rate of variation. Different authorities use different formulae for the estimate, and this inevitably results in differences for which eclipse might be one referred to in an ancient text (to clarify, the actual time of any eclipse is known with very high accuracy, but what is speculative is the actual path over the Earth, and hence the degree of visibility at a specific location - hence _even if_ a text is agreed to be describing an eclipse, it really is not so clear-cut which year it is pointing to). See https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhelp/... for a short and reasonably accessible discussion

Ready to move on to Chapter 5 "A Perfect Storm of Calamities" and the Epilogue "Aftermath"....?

This is really where Cline presents his thesis. It's presented in Chapter 5 and discussed in more detail in the curiously named 'epilogue' (which is really the conclusion, not an epilogue, I thought.)

CHAPTER 5: PERFECT STORM

The chapter opens with an admission that we don't know much about this period, and it discusses some of the scholarship leading up to the writing of this book. In particular, he mentions The Sea Peoples by Nancy Sandars and The End of the Bronze Age by Robert Drews, which book we've already discussed above to some degree. Also mentioned are a couple of conferences organized around the topic.

Cline acknowledges that, while it's generally agreed a collapse occurred, there's no consensus as to why or how, or what role the Sea People's might have played.

So now we turn to some of the theories that people have proposed, each of which gets a section:
Earthquakes
Climate Change/Drought/Famine
Internal Rebellion (some kind of Canaanite Spring?)
Invaders from Abroad causing collapse of international trade
Decentralization of trade causing the collapse of palace economies

None of the above can explain the situation by themselves.

Next, Cline looks again at the Sea Peoples, asking who they are and where they went. The conclusion is that they were more likely settlers than conquerors, and that they, in themselves, were just a symptom and not a cause of the collapse.

So, finally, we turn to Cline's big idea, first summarized in the chapter subtitle 'perfect storm', but here now given a name: Systems Collapse, which I guess is a way of saying that a bunch of things went wrong all at once, creating a domino effect.

Cline cites another scholar, Colin Renfrew, who lists some of the general features:
1. Collapse of the central administration
2. Disappearance of traditional elite class
3. Collapse of the centralized economy
4. Settlement shift and population decline
Also, the book Collapse by Jared Diamond is also mentioned.
Cline brings up Drews again as a detractor.

Finally, Cline revisits the various theories, offering his opinion that civilization should have survived any one of these on its own. He argues that only the 'multiplier effect' of several things all at once can really explain things, and discusses 'Complexity Theory'.

But then, just when you think this is the answer Cline is offering, he steps back from it, asking: "It sounds nice, but does it really advance our understanding? Is it more than just a fancy way to state a fairly obvious fact, namely, that complicated things can break down in a variety of ways?"

And this is exactly the question I've been asking myself until now. Cline really seems to be saying - we just don't know enough. We can see that something happened, and it wasn't just a coincidence. But what exactly, and how it unfolded, we just don't know.

EPILOGUE: AFTERMATH
So, Cline didn't really draw a conclusion in Chapter 5. Let's try again in the Epilogue. Here, he says that although we can't point at a cause, we can draw some reliable conclusions:
1. Trade continued up to the collapse, and possibly beyond.
2. But change occurred, and the year 1177 is a reasonable benchmark for an otherwise rolling event.
3. It took between decades and centuries to rebuild following this.
4. The causes were complex.
5. It affected institutions and populations.
6. A new world emerged, and perhaps the 'dark age' wasn't so dark.
7. Last words: "Sometimes it takes a large-scale wildfire to help renew the ecosystem of an old grown forest and allow it to thrive afresh."

On this item 6, Cline mentions some interesting sounding work on the subject if what happens after a 'collapse'. These include works by William Dever and Christopher Monroe. And, of course, Collapse by Jared Diamond. All of which I'm intrigued to look into.

Thoughts?

Chris wrote: "Ready to move on to Chapter 5 "A Perfect Storm of Calamities" and the Epilogue "Aftermath"....?

Another crystal clear summarising, thank you Chris ! My thoughts when I get to the end of the Epilogue.

This short piece relevant to the discussion appeared in the recent Ancient Near East Today newsletter:

https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2022/12...

I have to admit to being underwhelmed by Cline's last chapter and epilogue. After such a lot of build up he essentially ends up by saying, well, we don't know. Now, I'm all for scholarly caution, but in a book of this kind I'd rather see some colours nailed to a mast somewhere! He seems inclined towards the systems collapse suggestion, but only in a kind of reticent and uncommitted way. And it's noticeable that his arguments suddenly become uncompelling just here.

I remember being gripped by, for example, his sections on the various shipwrecks around the Eastern Med, but his appeal to technobabble with long words like multiplier effect, complexity theory, and nonlinear combinations just doesn't work for me. Back in the long-ago day I looked at what over here we tend to call catastrophe theory - it's a very hard area of maths in which it is very difficult to draw firm conclusions. Now, nonlinear systems genuinely can behave quite bizarrely, and there certainly is a lot of simplistic stuff out there which assumes the whole world is a straight line - but at the same time it seemed to me that Cline didn't have a real grasp of these topics, and was simply tossing labels around.

For example he talks about "variables" interacting with each other, and it wasn't at all clear to me that he knew what the variables were or how to define them - he alludes to a whole society being a variable, as well as an earthquake or an independent trader, and a whole melange of other things. So he doesn't actually have a model to work with to explore. Also, nonlinear systems can equally throw out peculiar tendencies to aggregate together when you wouldn't expect it, as well as tendencies to break apart. So I was unconvinced. [In passing, I have never once come across the phrase "black swan event" which he seems to treat as universally understood?]

What was entertaining was the apparent rivalry between Cline and Drews - Cline here says "Drews... may have misjudged and underestimated some of these [potential causes]" while Drews wrote "Simply stated, the systems-collapse hypothesis does not address the essence of the Catastrophe". I remain personally more persuaded by Drews's proposal that changes in warfare made vulnerable the elite chariot warrior and hence the social structures that made them elite - but I'm very glad to have read Cline's book and seen his arguments.

Some other thoughts:
1) I found it fascinating that the Egyptians in Canaan had apparently planned for a drought by increasing grain production and breeding different strains of cattle. This is not something I had come across before. I wonder if anyone has tried to link this with the Joseph story in Genesis, even though the timing is wrong if you just count biblical years?

2) "The most important conclusion to be drawn about the 'Dark Age'... is that it was nothing of the sort". Yes, I think this is an important step to take - absence of surviving written sources makes the writing of history a dark art, perhaps, but the society at the time may have been anything but dark.

30 "From [new people groups and city states] eventually came fresh developments and innovative ideas, such as the alphabet, monotheistic religion, and eventually democracy". One can almost hear a certain national anthem being played here. Can he really be serious about including this? It's like his sudden, to me bizarre, step of including a New York Times editorial piece in his chain of evidence. Really? Why should I suddenly care about a piece of journalism in this context? So there was some weirdness going on in this last chapter and epilogue which definitely detracted from the whole. A friend of mine I mentioned this to suggested "I suspect... the editors' inability to get Cline to write a truly general book. It is from Princeton University Press, so there's that weird pull of academic publishing unequally yoked to writing something that will sell more than 11 copies." :)

Well, I'm glad Cline has the honesty to realise that all the factors for which there is either textual or archaeological evidence do not a collapse make, even when added all together and shaken well. He cites Nancy Sanders who wrote almost 40 years ago now : there have always been all those disasters (earthquakes, droughts, famines, revolts), they aren't enough to bring down a civilisation, much less several.

He also cites someone else : what jumps out (!) from Rapanu and Urtenu is "the tremendous amount of international connection that apparently still existed in the Eastern Mediterranean even at the end of the LBA."

What came to mind was : ergo the "collapse" wasn't as dire as was believed, and decades of evidence-gathering still does not provide answers. I think Cline has not (yet) taken the next logical step : admit that the question he asks is not a question at all. He should not ask : if not all those disasters, if not the Sea Peoples, what did cause the collapse ? ; he should say : there wasn't a collapse, so I should stop looking for the causes of one.

And then Chris posted that link. Perfect ! Thank you Chris, I enjoyed that article muchly. Short and to the point.

An aside : much of the first section of Chp 5 had me inwardly howling because of the blind, dogmatic subscription to Marxist economics as an infallible revealer of reality. Cline writes : some scholars suggest that "social inequality may have contributed to the turmoil at the end of the LBA..." Cf. the 1917 revolution in czarist Russia. Thank goodness ! When I read that last sentence, my inward howling turned into a good laugh. Scholars my foot ! Social "inequality" was believed to be the natural order, as we all know. Any hint of "equality" amongst men and (gasp) women and (gasp) children and everyone would have known the world was about to end. Cataclysmically.

By the way, in my edition, there isn't a section subtitled "Aftermath." But I think it's simply a change of words. The last section in Chp 5 is about the sum of evidence being inconclusive as to a collapse.