1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

by Eric H. Cline

The identification of the Shardana and the Shekelesh as “countries of the sea” reinforces the suggestion that they are to be linked with Sardinia and Sicily, respectively. The description of the Eqwesh as being from “the countries of the sea” has led some scholars to suggest that they are Homer’s Achaeans, that is, the Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age Greek mainland, whom Ramses III would perhaps identify as the Danuna in his Sea Peoples inscriptions two decades later. As for the final two names, scholars generally accept Lukka as a reference to peoples from southwestern Turkey, in the region later known during the classical era as Lycia; they are also known from earlier inscriptions, those of Ramses II concerned with the Battle of Qadesh in 1274 BC, as well as from a variety of Hittite inscriptions. The origin of the Teresh is uncertain but might be linked to the Etruscans in Italy.17

Neat

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.

Lol

Caphtor (or Kaptaru) was the Mesopotamian and Canaanite name for Crete, while the Egyptians called it Keftiu.

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It is interesting to note that the Minoan civilization was given its name by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in the early 1900s. We don’t actually know what they called themselves, although we do know that the Egyptians, Canaanites, and Mesopotamians each had a name for them, as just mentioned.

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He promptly named the newly discovered civilization “Minoan,” after King Minos of Greek legend, who it was said ruled Crete during ancient times, complete with a Minotaur (half man, half bull) in the labyrinthine subterranean extensions of the palace.

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Pendlebury even published a monograph on the topic, entitled Aegyptiaca, in which he collected and cataloged all of the Egyptian imports found at Knossos and elsewhere on the island, before being shot to death by German paratroopers when they invaded Crete in 1941.18

Not neat

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We are told at one point that a Hittite king named Mursili I, grandson and successor of the above-named Hattusili I, marched his army all the way to Mesopotamia, a journey of over one thousand miles, and attacked the city of Babylon in 1595 BC, burning it to the ground and ending the two-hundred-year-old dynasty made famous by Hammurabi “the Law-Giver.” Then, instead of occupying the city, he simply turned the Hittite army around and headed for home, thus effectively conducting the longest drive-by shooting in history.

Ha

The cause of Tut’s death has been long debated—including the possibility that he might have been murdered by a blow to the back of his head—but recent scientific studies, including a CT scan of his skeleton, point to a broken leg followed by an infection as the most likely culprit. Whether he broke his leg by falling off a chariot, as is suspected, may never be proven, but it is now clear that he suffered from malaria as well and had congenital deformations, including a clubfoot. It has also been suggested that he may have been born of an incestuous brother-sister relationship.

Ew

Carnarvon was under his doctor’s orders to be in Egypt each year, for he had been involved in a car accident in Germany in 1901—having rolled his car while doing the unheard-of speed of twenty miles per hour—and had punctured a lung, leading his doctor to fear that he would not survive a winter in England.

What a time to be alive, to be prescribed an Egyptian holiday each winter to recover from driving 20mph.

it took Carter and his associates most of the next ten years to completely excavate and catalog everything in the tomb, even though Carnarvon himself died of blood poisoning only eight days after the tomb was opened, thereby giving rise to the story of the “mummy’s curse.”

The curse

The Uluburun ship sank in fairly deep water—its stern is currently 140 feet below the surface, with the rest of the ship at an angle sloping even farther down, to 170 feet below the surface. Diving to the depth of 140–70 feet is dangerous, for it is beyond the limit of safe scuba diving. The INA divers were allowed only two dives per day, twenty minutes each time. In addition, at those depths, increased levels of inhaled gases can cause a narcotic effect. Working that deep, Bass said, felt as though they had had two martinis before starting—so every dive and every movement to be made underwater had to be planned out in advance. Over the course of nearly a dozen seasons, from 1984 to 1994, the team dove on the wreck more than twenty-two thousand times without a single major injury, testament to their precautions and the fact that their dives were overseen by an ex–Navy SEAL.

22,000 dives

This story of the Exodus has become one of the most famous and enduring tales from the Hebrew Bible, still celebrated today in the Jewish holiday of Passover. Yet it is also one of the most difficult to substantiate by either ancient texts or archaeological evidence.

Additionally, there was one other language that scholars had never previously seen. It was deciphered fairly rapidly and is now called Ugaritic. It used one of the earliest alphabetic scripts yet known—except that there were actually two alphabetic scripts in the texts, one with twenty-two signs like the Phoenician alphabet and the other with an additional eight signs.

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