1177 B.C. Quotes

“Unfortunately, identifying Ramses II as the pharaoh of the Exodus, which is the identification most frequently found in both scholarly and popular books, does not work if one also wishes to follow the chronology presented in the Bible.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“In a complex system such as our world today, this is all it might take for the overall system to become destabilized, leading to a collapse.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“We must now turn to the idea of a systems collapse, a systemic failure with both a domino and multiplier effect, from which even such a globalized international, vibrant, intersocietal network as was present during the Late Bronze Age could not recover.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“One tablet, for instance, is concerned with the ice that Zimri-Lim was using in his summer drinks, which included wine, beer, and fermented barley-based drinks flavored with either pomegranate juice or licorice-like aniseed.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“But what factor, or combination of factors, may have caused the famine(s) in the Eastern Mediterranean during these decades remains uncertain. Elements that might be considered include war and plagues of insects, but climate change accompanied by drought is more likely to have turned a once-verdant land into an arid semidesert.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“the question of whether the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt was an actual event or merely part of myth and legend also remains unanswered at the moment .. alternative explanations of the Exodus story might be correct. They include the possibility that the Israelites took advantage of the havoc caused by the Sea Peoples in Canaan to move in and take control of the region; that the Israelites were actually part of the larger group of Canaanites already living in the land; or that the Israelites had migrated peacefully into the region over the course of centuries .. the Exodus story was probably made up centuries later, as several scholars have suggested. In the meantime, it will be best to remain aware of the potential for fraud, for many disreputable claims have already been made about events, peoples, places, and things connected with the Exodus. Undoubtedly more misinformation, whether intentional or not, will be forthcoming in the future.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Joseph Maran, of the University of Heidelberg, has further noted that, although we don’t know how contemporaneous the final destructions actually were in Greece, it is clear that after the catastrophes were over, “there were no palaces, the use of writing as well as all administrative structures came to an end, and the concept of a supreme ruler, the wanax, disappeared from the range of political institutions of Ancient Greece.”4”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“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. Some”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Sometimes it takes a large-scale wildfire to help renew the ecosystem of an old-growth forest and allow it to thrive afresh.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“seismic disasters known as earthquake storms,”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Now more than ever, we realize that understanding the ancient past is essential to our understanding of the present and just plain fascinating.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“scholars have recently pointed out that many of the city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Ugarit in particular, may have been hard-hit by the collapse of the international trade routes, which would have been vulnerable to depredations by maritime marauders. Itamar Singer, for instance, has suggested that Ugarit’s downfall may have been due to “the sudden collapse of the traditional structures of international trade, which were the lifeblood of Ugarit’s booming economy in the Bronze Age.” Christopher Monroe of Cornell University has put this into a larger context, pointing out that the wealthiest city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean were the hardest-hit by the events taking place during the twelfth century BC, since they were not only the most attractive targets for the invaders but also the most dependent on the international trade network. He suggests that dependence, or perhaps overdependence, on capitalist enterprise, and specifically long-distance trade, may have contributed to the economic instability seen at the end of the Late Bronze Age.17”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“archaeology is a continuously evolving field with new data and new analyses requiring the rethinking of old concepts.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“According to Joseph Tainter, who literally wrote the book on the collapse of complex societies, “collapse is fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Mark Twain reportedly once said, history might not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“In the survey released in February 2020 cited at the beginning of this book, one respondent noted the interrelatedness of the factors involved in our own current world situation, writing: “While extreme climate events are weakening the societal governance and infrastructure, food and water security will become more and more serious, causing large-scale immigration and further inequity. If several geopolitical crises occur in parallel, many states cannot handle the situation properly, due to lack of resources and with the internal conflict, it would cause catastrophic outcomes all over the world.”13 The parallels between events in our modern world and what happened during the Bronze Age Collapse in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean were already readily apparent, but now we need also to take into consideration the catastrophic direct effects of the COVID-19 virus and the ripple effects of the contagion on financial and economic systems that went global at about the same time as the release of the survey.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“In addition to the loss of populations and the collapse of ordinary buildings and palaces alike, it seems likely that there was a loss, or at least a significant decline, in the relationships among the various kingdoms of the region. Even if not all of the places collapsed at exactly the same time, by the mid-twelfth century BC they had lost their interconnectedness and the globalization that had previously existed, especially during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. As Marc Van De Mieroop of Columbia University has said, the elites lost the international framework and the diplomatic contacts that had supported them, at the same time as foreign goods and ideas stopped arriving.6 They now had to start afresh.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Joseph Maran, of the University of Heidelberg, has further noted that, although we don’t know how contemporaneous the final destructions actually were in Greece, it is clear that after the catastrophes were over, “there were no palaces, the use of writing as well as all administrative structures came to an end, and the concept of a supreme ruler, the wanax, disappeared from the range of political institutions of Ancient Greece.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“In a recent article entitled “Lessons from the Past, Policies for the Future,” Princeton professor John Haldon and his coauthors noted that the manner in which previous societies have responded to stress depends upon three things: their complexity, their flexibility, and their systemic redundancy, “all of which together determine the resilience of the system.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Instead, there were a number of different stressors, each of which forced the people to react in different ways to accommodate the changing situation(s). Complexity theory, especially in terms of visualizing a nonlinear progression and a series of stressors rather than a single driver, is therefore advantageous both in explaining the Collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age and in providing a way forward for continuing to study this catastrophe.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Thus, while it is possible that complexity theory might be a useful way to approach the Late Bronze Age Collapse once we have more information available as to the details of all the relevant civilizations, it may not be of much use at this stage, except as an interesting way to reframe our awareness that a multitude of factors were present at the end of the Late Bronze Age that could have helped destabilize, and ultimately led to the collapse of, the international system that had been in place, functioning quite well at various levels, for several previous centuries.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Moreover, it is especially relevant that the kingdoms, empires, and societies of the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean can each be seen as an individual sociopolitical system. As Dark says, such “complex socio-political systems will exhibit an internal dynamic which leads them to increase in complexity.… [T]he more complex a system is, the more liable it is to collapse.”25”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“of the territory they conquered.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“describes the Philistines as “destroy[ing] indigenous cities and supplant[ing] them with their own in the four corners of the territory they conquered.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“the enemy of my friend is also my enemy; the friend of my friend is also my friend.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“emerging out of the chaos that was the end of the Late Bronze Age.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“for the Israelites are among the groups of peoples who will make up a new world order,”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“and is generally accepted as the earliest mention outside the Bible of an entity known as Israel.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“an inscription that dates to 1207”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“mentioned by Pharaoh Merneptah in his “Israel Stele”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed