Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris

So when nearly every major city in the Western core, from Greece to what we now call the Gaza Strip, went up in flames around 1200 BCE, the aliens would have assumed it was another disruption like 2200 or 1750 BCE—a big one, to be sure, but nothing to worry about in the long term. Even when disaster engulfed the palaces so suddenly that their scribes barely had time to record it, the aliens would lose no sleep.

An unusual clay tablet from around 1200 BCE found in the ruined palace at Pylos in Greece opens with the ominous line “the watchers are guarding the coasts” another from the same site, written in evident haste, seems to be describing human sacrifices meant to forestall an emergency, but then trails off, unfinished.

One is from the Hittite king, begging for food: “it is a matter of life and death!” In another, Ugarit’s king writes that while his troops and ships were away supporting the Hittites, “the enemy’s ships came here; my cities were burned, and they did evil things in my country.”

Darkness fell all around, yet so long as Egypt still stood, hope remained. In a temple he built in his own honor, Pharaoh Ramses III set up an inscription that seems to pick up the story from Ugarit:

“The foreign countries had made a conspiracy in their islands,” it says. “No land could stand before their arms.” These foreigners—the Peoples of the Sea, Ramses calls them—...

Now, in 1176 BCE, they came against Egypt. But they had not reckon...

Ramses III’s Peoples of the Sea were probably also the villains in the Pylos and Ugarit stories.

Most think Shrdn was pronounced “Sherden,” an ancient name for Sardinians, and the Shkrsh were Sheklesh, Egyptian for Sikels (Sicilians). Dnyn is less clear, but could mean Danaans, a name Homer would later use for Greeks. With Prst we are on firmer ground: it means Peleset, the Egyptian name for the Philistines of biblical fame.

The evidence is spotty, but some archaeologists point to signs of higher temperatures and lower rainfall in every part of the Western core after 1300 BCE

reran the 2200 BCE scenario, setting off migrations and state failure.

There were also changes in how people fought; new swords for slashing and deadlier javelins might have given swarms of irregular, lightly armed infantry from the peripheries the weapons they needed to defeat the core’s gleaming but inflexible chariot armies.