Ancient World discussion

A happy and peaceful Christmas everyone !

Daphne wrote: "...I think Cline has not (yet) taken the next logical step : admit that the question he asks is not a question at all..."

I suppose "1177 BC, The Year Civilization Carried on Pretty Much as Normal" doesn't make such a catchy title...

I thought it was a decent survey on the matter. I have no trouble reading the title as intentionally ironic. It might not even be his title, might be the publishers. I thought Richard’s friends comment about selling more than 11 copies was pretty funny. They probably sold more than 1177 copies! That’s ok. For me there were not too many surprises in the book. I already knew there was no ‘year’ civilization collapsed, and already suspected there wasn’t as much a collapse as people make out, so much as a ‘rearranging the furniture’. But a lot of stuff did get thrown out, and even if we don’t think of ‘collapse’ we should still look for why so many people seemed to be on the move, and why Mycenaean culture changed so much, as was it all pure coincidence that so much happened in Greece, Anatolia, Babylonia, and Egypt all within the span of 100 years? I don’t think this will be the last book we’ll see on the topic.

And yes, Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

Richard wrote: "Daphne wrote: "...I think Cline has not (yet) taken the next logical step : admit that the question he asks is not a question at all..."

I suppose "1177 BC, The Year Civilization Carried on Pretty..."

This made me laugh pretty loud

I have switched to audiobook only at times, though when I catch on a name that I want to look into further I go to the matching section of the book. That's because, as Chris put it, this book is indeed a "survey" and not an argued premise. Setting aside feelings of being the target of a bait and switch title, I have enjoyed the accumulation of different events in my head, even though they don't dovetail neatly into a story. That's history anyway, isn't it? Real history. History only makes stories in two ways - by happy accident or by authorial manipulation.

Also I'm really discombobulated right now! I just drove 29 hours strait and aside from one hotel stop and a handful of gas stations and food joints, spent from Monday at 4 until Wednesday at 2 in a car driving from Kokomo Indiana to San Diego California. A victim of the storm/airline crisis. It all seems very surreal at this point as I type with my dog at my feet.

Ray wrote: "Also I'm really discombobulated right now! I just drove 29 hours strait... It all seems very surreal at this point as I type with my dog at my feet"

Sounds grim Ray, and your typing is remarkably coherent for coming through all that :)

Chris wrote: "... even if we don’t think of ‘collapse’ we should still look for why so many people seemed to be on the move, and why Mycenaean culture changed so much, as was it all pure coincidence that so much happened in Greece, Anatolia, Babylonia, and Egypt all within the span of 100 years?..."

A lot did change in that timespan, especially looking at cities abandoned or destroyed, evidence of migration, evidence of one cultural behaviour pattern displacing another, or being adapted and/or adopted into one region's traditional culture. The thing that distorts that view of things is that the question "What remained the same?" has been left out.

I would suggest that if one looked at what changed and at what remained the same in that 100-year timespan, the verdict of 'collapse' might... well... collapse. Would one need to ask then why there were x changes next to 999x non-changes ? Wouldn't those changes begin to look more like ordinary evolutions ?

Ray wrote: "... I just drove 29 hours strait and aside from one hotel stop and a handful of gas stations and food joints..."

I hope you are now cosy and de-stressed in California !

Cozy, yes! Thanks. Now to deal recouping gas and rental costs from the airline.

Daphne wrote: "I would suggest that if one looked at what changed and at what remained the same in that 100-year timespan, the verdict of 'collapse' might... well... collapse. Would one need to ask then why there were x changes next to 999x non-changes ? Wouldn't those changes begin to look more like ordinary evolutions ?"

I think that's a really good way to look at things. So what did definitely change?
- Ugarit for one - it never recovered as a city and its rediscovery in the early C20th was essentially by chance.
- the cessation of the Hittites as a major regional power, though slightly offset by specific persistent enclaves.
- increasing attempts by the Mesopotamian polities to control and acquire territory along the Med coast, together with insufficient local clout to stop them.
- Philistine settlement in the lowland plain (and a few other places) for another, together with subsequent rivalry with the hill country groups.
- Canaanite hill country prevalent settlement patterns and loyalties.

Things that stayed the same
- Phoenicia.
- Egypt (arguably the end of the New Kingdom over 100 years later would have happened anyway) though certainly her enthusiasm for retaining buffer states in the Levant waned rapidly, perhaps because there was a feeling that the groups that they had settled in the southern Levant served the same purpose, and there were defensive structures in the Sinai still as backup.
- Greece changed, to be sure, but the whole rival city-state system kept going for a long time so probably this could be classed as evolution not collapse?

Kassite Babylon, an old and stable kingdom, also came to an end.

Richard wrote: "Daphne wrote: "I would suggest that if one looked at what changed and at what remained the same in that 100-year timespan, the verdict of 'collapse' might... well... collapse. Would one need to ask..."

Perhaps this is a cultural lens? Per Chris' comment, "who cares about the Kassites," metaphorically speaking? But Egypt? Different. And, to the degree the Sea Peoples are tied to Philistines are tied to Israel? Much different.

While I did not read along, I have followed you people and yes, I too was underwhelmed by Cline's conclusions--they weren't really all that conclusive. As you note, the evidence of "collapse" is mixed: some places collapsed others did not. The most impressive collapse seems to have happened in Greece, and perhaps more broadly in the Balkans, where whole areas appear to have become depopulated and standards of living, as evidenced by material culture, have dropped dramatically. Scholars' ideas about "causes" tend to be informed by their social theories--vide refusal to allow the possibility of cannibalism and insisting on calling the evidence "instances of defleshing," insistence that the human species was not really aggressive until.... x or x or x (inequality, bronze, religion and so forth, take your pick). Scholars are like most of us, I guess.

I must have been somewhat behind in my reading ; my edition had quite a few more pages before the "Aftermath" section. Chapter 6, in fact.

Having now read it, I must say I was glad to see, not once but more than once, that very honest phrase : we just don't know. Or words to that effect. Cline does recognise then that the thesis of world collapse isn't as strong as he may first have thought. 100 points to Cline.

He goes on to examine the complexity theory to see if it applies. I see how it can help understand what I still prefer to call an evolution. Because who expects a system, even a simple one, to last forever ? An especially complex one, like "the civilisations of the LBA", had its heyday, but it couldn't last forever, even if drought, earthquakes and other natural disasters miraculously disappeared. It was going to evolve, and not necessarily in positivist fashion.

The paragraphs relating the "collapse" to present circumstances, though not lengthy, were still de trop in my humble opinion. The present is evolving. Nothing new under the sun.

Hello Daphne
Maybe the presentation is a problem. Something really did happen in about 1300-1200 BC. For example... a thriving bronze age culture based in Transylvania, responsible for what Polish archeology calls Zyndram's Castle--a bronze age era trading post/city in Southern Poland, built entirely in Mycenean style, about 1300 BC, in STONE (which made no sense in local terms, stone was hard to come by, in Poland we built earthworks and palisades) was suddenly abandoned.
All Mycenean cities fell and the archeological record shows a 400 year gap of very poor material culture.
Something happened. It affected eastern europe/the balkans/greece/anatolya a lot; coastal greater syria and egypt less; mesopotamia not at all

Tom wrote: "Hello Daphne
Maybe the presentation is a problem. Something really did happen in about 1300-1200 BC...."

Hello Tom.
Something happened. We agree on that. What was that something ? Some of those who have been wondering have been presenting a picture of that something as cataclysmic. That's the presentation that does not have me at all convinced.

Of course, it all depends on how one defines "cataclysmic." What has been called the "Black Death" -- plague throughout Europe in mid-fourteenth century -- might qualify as a cataclysmic event. And yet it is manifestly ridiculous to say that medieval civilisation collapsed in Europe with the Black Death.

Whatever happened, it clearly affected some people quite severely. Others, perhaps, very little, and as in any time of great change, a few were able to turn the turmoil to advantage. Whether we call this a cataclysm, a collapse, or a catastrophe is largely a semantic argument.

The interesting question to me at the heart of this book is not how we define this Bronze Age Boogaloo, but whether it was a global phenomenon and if so, what was the cause of it. Clearly, the first question wasn’t answered to everyone’s satisfaction, though I’m personally still off this belief. And if you didn’t buy the first argument, well, the second is probably a non-starter anyway. For those who do buy the first, like me, the second answer (of system collapse) is intriguing, but not really well developed here.

This is why I see the book as more of a survey of the topic, rather than a thesis. It did a decent job of outlining the research, reasoning, and speculations around collapse, but even so only managed to draw lukewarm conclusions. And that is probably just the reality of the space for now, until we get the next big breakthrough.

Thanks to all who commented on the book, BTW. It’s nice to see the number of participants is slowly expanding.

I’ve started a new thread to discuss a potential winter read, if anyone has a book to suggest. If not, I’ve got lots of candidates on my shelves to select from.

All, if anyone is on Academia.edu the following paper (below) might prove an interesting read. The author divides the whole Late Bronze age up into 4 periods and classifies destructions into four types:
Type 1: Complete Burning of an Entire City
Type 2: Signs of Fire only in the Public Buildings
Type 3: Signs of Fire by the Fortications
Type 4: No Signs of Fire

He considers a whole bunch of cites across the southern Levant broken down by a0 period and b) destruction type and basically show that it is difficult to draw simple conclusions - the same kind of destruction may be used by different groups at different times, or else the same group may use different levels of destruction depending on their overall aims. He highlights several cases where the motive appears to be rivalry between different Canaanite groups rather than anyone external.

A useful summary can be found near the end of the article
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The end of this period, LBA III/IA IA, shows two or possibly three phenomena. A northern cluster of sites was destroyed by a Type 2 destruction. These destructions seem to be a direct continuation of the crisis that began in LBA IIB and, similarly to most of the sites in that period, these sites were quickly reconstructed retaining the previous Canaanite culture. It does not seem likely that these destructions are the result of the activity of the so-called Sea People or other foreign elements, but rather a result of internal conicts between Canaanite cities or raiders (Mazar 2010: 259). The second phenomenon occurs in the coastal plain and involves the destruction of different sites following a Type 4 destruction. As these destructions are not characterised by re, some scholars have suggested that there were no destructions here at all, and that the transition between the periods in the
coastal plain was a smooth one (Yasur-Landau 2010: 220-227). However, the great amounts of de facto refuse found in these sites suggest that these sites underwent some sort of trauma. As the sites continue to function without a clear break in occupation and later show Philistine culture, the scenario that may be suggested is that upon the arrival of the so-called Sea People some of the inhabitants of these sites rapidly ed and left many
of the possessions in their houses. As the destroyers of the sites were not interested in a wholesale destruction but, probably, to settle in these cities, they did not burn them. On the other hand, sites on the periphery of there-settled sites were violently destroyed following a Type 1 destruction, so as to not pose a threat for the newly reconstructed cities. To summarise the second process, due to the location of the sites close to the coastal plain, and to the later replacement of the Canaanite cities by new Philistine cities, these destructions are probably
associated with the phenomenon of the arrival of the Sea People. It should be noted, however, that this process was not by any means uniform. This stands in line with the concept that the Sea People were not a single homogenous group, and thus perhaps were not coordinated in their arrival.
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https://www.academia.edu/31400379/Kre...

Thanks very much, Richard. I read things at academia.edu all the time !

Ditto - I'll add it to my list. :-)