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This volume is part of a series called Turning Points in Ancient History.
Turning Points in Ancient History reflects wide-ranging trends in the study of the ancient world. Each book integrates archaeology and classic texts; that is, it combines the evidence of material and literary culture. Books look both at the elite and at ordinary lives.
Greco-Roman world, though that certainly is at its core. We examine as well neighboring peoples of Greece and Rome, the non-Greco-Roman people of Greco-Roman lands, and civilizations and peoples of the wider ancient world, both East and West.
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed begins with the invasion of Egypt by the Sea Peoples in 1177 and moves outward and backward. It takes us to the Late Bronze Age in the glory days of the fifteenth century BC and surveys a range of civilizations from Mesopotamia to Greece, and from Israel to the Hittites. Then it proceeds over the centuries to the processes, people, and events that brought down a world.
frequently described by scholars as the world’s first Dark Age.
Post-1177 B.C.
discussing “collapses” and comparing the rise and fall of empires is not new; scholars have been doing it since at least the 1700s, when Edward Gibbon wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire. A more recent example is Jared Diamond’s book Collapse.4 However, both Gibbon and Diamond were considering how a single empire or a single civilization came to an end—the Romans, the Maya, the Mongols, and so forth. Here, we are considering a globalized system in antiquity, with multiple civilizations all interacting and at least partially dependent upon each other.
The magnitude of the catastrophe was enormous; it was a loss such as the world would not see again until the Roman Empire collapsed more than fifteen hundred years later.
In 1177 B.C.
Modern scholars refer to them collectively as the “Sea Peoples,” but the Egyptians who recorded their attack on Egypt never used that term, instead identifying them as separate groups working together: the Peleset, Tjekker, Shekelesh, Shardana, Danuna, and Weshesh—foreign-sounding names for foreign-looking people.1
the Sea Peoples comprised diverse groups from different geographies and different cultures. Armed with sharp bronze swords, wooden spears with gleaming metal tips, and bows and arrows, they came on boats, wagons, oxcarts, and chariots. Although I have taken 1177 BC as a pivotal date, we know that the invaders came in waves over a considerable period of time. Sometimes the warriors came alone, and sometimes their families accompanied them.3
According to Ramses’s inscriptions, no country was able to oppose this invading mass of humanity. Resistance was futile. The great powers of the day—the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the Cypriots, and others—fell one by one.
“Sea Peoples”.
Anatolia (the ancient name for Turkey)
The Peleset of the Sea Peoples are generally accepted as none other than the Philistines, who are identified in the Bible (Amos 9:7; Jer. 47:4) as coming from Crete.
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.
In 1177 BC, as previously in 1207 BC, the Egyptians were victorious. The Sea Peoples would not return to Egypt a third time.
Although Egypt under Ramses III was the only major power to successfully resist the onslaught of the Sea Peoples, New Kingdom Egypt was never the same again afterward, most likely because of the other problems faced by the entire Mediterranean region during this period, as we shall see
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.
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.24
In our current view, as we shall see below, the Sea Peoples may well have been responsible for some of the destruction that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but it is much more likely that a concatenation of events, both human and natural—including climate change leading to drought and famine, seismic disasters known as earthquake storms, internal rebellions, and “systems collapse”—coalesced to create a perfect storm that brought this age to an end.
The Hyksos invasion of Egypt brought the Middle Kingdom period (ca. 2134–1720 BC) to an end. Their success was quite possibly the result of an advantage in weapons technology and first-strike capability, for they possessed composite bows that could shoot arrows much farther than a traditional bow of the time. They also had horse-drawn chariots, the likes of which had not previously been seen in Egypt.
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. Furthermore, we do not know where they came from, although our suspicion points to Anatolia/Turkey as most likely.
Hatshepsut’s reign, just prior to that of Thutmose III, saw interactions not only with the Aegean but also with other areas of the ancient Near East. It was she who essentially started the Eighteenth Dynasty on its road to international contacts and global prestige, using diplomacy rather than war. She was of fully royal blood, the daughter of Pharaoh Thutmose I and Queen Ahmose—though it should be noted that her father had achieved royal status only by marrying into the family.
when Thutmose II died unexpectedly, the young son was not yet old enough to rule on his own. Hatshepsut, therefore, stepped in to rule temporarily as regent on his behalf. But when it came time to hand the throne over to him, she refused to do so. She ruled for more than twenty years, while Thutmose III waited—probably impatiently—in the background.26 During those two decades, Hatshepsut began to wear the traditional Pharaonic false beard and other accoutrements of office, and men’s clothing with body armor to conceal her breasts and other female attributes, as can be seen in statues created
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Some thirty-four hundred years later, General Edmund Allenby used the same tactics as Thutmose III, in September 1918 during World War I, with the same successful results. He won the battle at Megiddo and took prisoner hundreds of German and Turkish soldiers, without any loss of life except for a few of his horses. He later said that he had read James Breasted’s English translation of Thutmose III’s account, leading Allenby to decide to replicate history. George Santayana once reportedly stated that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, but Allenby proved that the opposite
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it wasn’t a typical Hittite sword but rather was a type not seen previously in the region. In addition, it had an inscription incised into the blade. It initially proved easier to read the inscription than to identify the make of the sword, and so the translation was done first. Written in Akkadian—the diplomatic language of the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East—using cuneiform (wedge-shaped) signs, the inscription reads as follows: i-nu-ma mDu-ut-ha-li-ya LUGAL.GAL KUR URUA-as-su-wa u-hal-liq GIRHI.A an-nu-tim a-na DIskur be-li-su u-se-li. For those few readers not conversant with Akkadian,
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. . . by the ancient site of Hattusa, capital city of the Hittites—now a two-hour car ride (208 kilometers) east of modern Ankara.”
In 1879, at a conference in London, the respected Assyriologist A. H. Sayce announced that the Hittites were located not in Canaan but rather in Anatolia; that is, in Turkey rather than in Israel/Lebanon/Syria/Jordan. His announcement was generally accepted, and the equation is still accepted today, but one has to wonder how the Bible could have gotten it so wrong.
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.
It was left to others, fortunately for the field of archaeology, to continue the investigations of the Mycenaeans. Two of the greatest were an American from the University of Cincinnati named Carl Blegen and an Englishman from Cambridge named Alan Wace. They eventually joined forces to lay out the groundwork for defining the civilization and its growth from beginning to end.
At Pylos, on the very first day of excavations in 1939, Blegen and his team found the first few clay tablets from what would turn out to be a huge archive containing texts written in Linear B.
. . . a form of Bronze Age writing discovered on tablets in Crete, dating from c. 1400 to 1200 BC. In 1952, it was shown to be a syllabic script composed of linear signs, derived from Linear A and older Minoan scripts, representing a form of Mycenaean Greek.
1952. That same year, an English architect named Michael Ventris definitively proved that Linear B was in fact an early version of Greek.
We now know that the Mycenaean civilization essentially began in the seventeenth century BC, at approximately the same time as the Minoans on Crete were recovering from the dramatic earthquake that marks (according to archaeological terminology) the transition from the First to the Second Palatial period on the island.
It is now clear that when the Mycenaeans took over Crete, probably sometime between 1450 and 1350 BC, as mentioned above, they also took over the international trade routes to Egypt and the Near East. They suddenly became players in the cosmopolitan world—a role that they would continue to exploit for the next several centuries, until the end of the Late Bronze Age.
a “Golden Age” of internationalism and globalization during the following fourteenth century BC. For instance, the combination of Thutmose III’s numerous years of campaigning and diplomacy, hard on the heels of Hatshepsut’s peaceful trading expeditions and military exploits of her own, took Egypt to a pinnacle of international power and prosperity that had rarely, if ever, been seen before in the country. As a result, Egypt established itself as one of the great powers for the rest of the Late Bronze Age, along with the Hittites, Assyrians, and Kassites/Babylonians, in addition to assorted
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Some scholars believe that this list is merely propaganda, idle boasting by a pharaoh who had heard of faraway places and yearned to conquer them or wished to convince people that he had. Others believe that the list is not mendacious self-aggrandizement, but is based on factual knowledge and actual contacts in that long-ago time.
Egypt’s list of Crete locations and people.
None of the fragments have been found in their original context at Mycenae. In other words, we have no idea how they were originally used at the site. But the mere fact that they are at Mycenae, and nowhere else in the world, indicates that there is probably a special relationship between this site and Egypt during the time of Amenhotep III, especially since it is at Mycenae that the vase of Amenhotep III was also found, as well as two scarabs of his wife Queen Tiyi.
the Aegean List, or the other lists also in the temple, which together catalog the world as known to the Egyptians in the fourteenth century BC,
we know from other evidence that Amenhotep III recognized the importance of creating relationships with external powers, particularly with the kings of the lands of diplomatic and mercantile importance to Egypt.
Akhenaten was Amenhotep III’s successor, probably serving as coruler with his father for a few years before Amenhotep died in 1353 BC. Soon after assuming sole power, Akhenaten implemented what is now called the “Amarna Revolution.” He closed down the temples belonging to Ra, Amun, and other major deities, seized their vast treasuries, and generated for himself unrivaled power, as the head of the government, military, and religion. He condemned the worship of every Egyptian deity except Aten, the disk of the sun, whom he—and he alone—was allowed to worship directly. This is sometimes seen as
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The letters were written in Akkadian, the diplomatic lingua franca of the day used in international relations,
Akkadian, known from cuneiform inscriptions, is the oldest Semitic language for which records exist. It was used in Mesopotamia from about 3500 BC; two dialects, Assyrian and Babylonian, were widely spoken in the Middle East for the next 2,000 years, and the Babylonian form functioned as a lingua franca until replaced by Aramaic around the 6th century BC.
one Amarna Letter, sent to Amenhotep III by Tushratta, the king of Mitanni in northern Syria who came to the throne about 1385 BC, opens with a paragraph containing traditional greetings and then goes on to discuss the gifts that he has sent, brought by his messengers:
Say to Nibmuareya [Amenhotep III], the king of Egypt, my brother: Thus [says] Tushratta, the king of Mitanni, your brother. For me, all goes well. For you, may all go well. For Kelu-Hepa [your wife], may all go well. For your household, for your wives, for your sons, for your magnates [chief men], for your warriors, for your horses, for your chariots, and in your country, may all go very well … I herewith send you 1 chariot, 2 horses, 1 male attendant, 1 female attendant, from the booty from the land of Hatti. As the greeting-gift of my brother, I send you 5 chariots, 5 teams of horses. And as the greeting-gift of Kelu-Hepa, my sister, I send her 1 set of gold toggle-pins, 1 set of gold earrings, 1 gold mašu-ring, and a scent container that is full of “sweet oil.” I herewith send Keliya, my chief minister, and Tunip-ibri. May my brother let them go promptly so they can report back to me promptly, and I hear the greeting of my brother and rejoice. May my brother seek friendship with me, and may my brother send his messengers to me that they may bring my brother’s greetings to me and I hear them.12
Anthropologists have noted that such efforts to create imaginary family relationships happen most frequently in preindustrial societies, specifically to solve the problem of trading when there are no kinship ties or state-supervised markets.15
probably from the Kassite king Kadashman-Enlil of Babylon to Amenhotep III, directly combines the two, when Kadashman-Enlil writes: Moreover, you, my brother … as to the gold I wrote you about, send me whatever is on hand, as much as possible, before your messenger [comes] to me, right now, in all haste … If during this summer, during the months of Tammuz or Ab, you send the gold I wrote you about, I will give you my daughter.23 For this cavalier attitude toward his own daughter, Amenhotep III admonished Kadashman-Enlil in another letter: “It is a fine thing that you give your daughters in
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Egypt in particular was sought after as a trading partner by the kings of other countries.
. . . because of the gold that the Egyptians commanded, courtesy of the mines in Nubia.
Such an exchange between cultures could possibly explain the similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s later Iliad and Odyssey, and between the Hittite Myth of Kumarbi and Hesiod’s later Theogony.32
We should also note again that gift exchanges between Near Eastern rulers during the Late Bronze Age frequently included physicians, sculptors, masons, and skilled laborers, who were sent between the various royal courts. It is little wonder that there are certain similarities between architectural structures in Egypt, Anatolia, Canaan, and even the Aegean, if the same architects, sculptors, and stonemasons were working in each area.
Cyprus was the primary source of copper for most of the major Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean powers during the Late Bronze Age,
the two last major players of the Late Bronze Age in the ancient Near East, Assyria and Cyprus, finally appear onstage. We now have a full cast of characters: Hittites, Egyptians, Mitannians, Kassites/Babylonians, Assyrians, Cypriots, Canaanites, Minoans, and Mycenaeans, all present and accounted for. They all interacted, both positively and negatively, during the coming centuries, though some, such as Mitanni, vanished from the stage long before the others.
Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhaten, who changed his name and ruled using the name by which we know him today, Tutankhamen, or King Tut. He was not born in Arizona, contrary to what Steve Martin once said on Saturday Night Live, nor did he ever move to Babylonia.40 He did, however, come to the throne of Egypt at an early age, when he was about eight years old—approximately the same age at which Thutmose III came to the throne almost 150 years earlier.
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.
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.41
King Tut.
The huge number of burial goods in Tut’s tomb led some Egyptologists to wonder what might once have been in the tomb of one of the pharaohs who had ruled much longer, such as Ramses III or even Amenhotep III, but all of those tombs had been robbed long ago. It is more likely, though, that the amazing goods in Tut’s tomb were unique and may have been the result of gifts from the Egyptian priests, who were grateful because he had reversed his father’s reforms and given power back to the priests of Amun and others.
