1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

by Eric H. Cline

Merneptah is perhaps best known to students of the ancient Near East as the Egyptian pharaoh who first uses the term “Israel,” in an inscription dating to this same year (1207 BC). This inscription is the earliest occurrence of the name Israel outside the Bible.

Beyond Egypt, almost all of the other countries and powers of the second millennium BC in the Aegean and Near East—those that had been present during the golden years of what we now call the Late Bronze Age—withered and disappeared, either immediately or within less than a century.

There was a tendency on the part of earlier scholars to attribute any destruction from this period to the Sea Peoples.23 It was also sometimes asserted, especially in earlier textbooks (and now on the internet), that the Sea Peoples were able to be so successful because they possessed iron weapons, but that is incorrect; their weapons were of bronze, just like those of everyone else.