1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated (Turning Points in Ancient History)

I’ve been obsessed with the Bronze Age Collapse for a good fifteen years. I only bought Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed because I’d run out of other books to buy. Would I learn anything new from Cline after I’d studied the primary literature and other more approachable works like Drews’s and Yasur-Landau’s? Also, I was certain that Cline would get things wrong. In fact, I learned some things that were new to me. In fact, Cline gets nearly everything correct. In 1177 B.C., Cline provides an enjoyable, easy-to-read overview of one of history’s greatest mysteries: what caused the collapse of eastern Mediterranean civilizations in the beginning of the 12th century B.C.? (Use of B.C.E. accomplishes nothing since year one is still based on an alleged year of Christ’s birth.) Cline provides a comprehensive and evenhanded presentation. Cline’s prose is lively, engaging, and conversational. There is occasional humor and a “revolting” inside joke on p. 138 that Bill Devers should enjoy. 1177 B.C. is thoroughly researched. Cline knows the literature. The book is rich with specifics to back up its assertions. But to understand the enormity of what was lost, we have to understand the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. Cline spends quite a few words explaining the Bronze Age before we get to the collapse. This is necessary. The Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean was a high point in Western Civilization. It was a time of trade, international correspondence, and generally peace. Here the newbie may suffer. There are a lot of names of places and people. Reread. Rereread. The places and people will start to come together. Cline does a great job summarizing the hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the Bronze Age Collapse. In the end, he opts for some combination of factors, and he may be right. However, a “perfect storm of circumstances”, some combination of “drought, famine, earthquakes”, and invading Dorians lusting for the taste of human flesh need not be invoked to explain the Bronze Age Collapse. As a scientist, I can tell you that the simplest explanation is not always the correct one, but here is my simple explanation. The Hittite Empire and a united Mycenaean kingdom, which the Hittites called Ahhiyawa, both fell apart. As such, they could no longer exercise their police function in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean (Hittites policed through their vassals). Groups already prone to piracy took advantage and went on a series of plundering expeditions. The result was mass destruction. Mycenaeans fled to the relative safety of the east, taking their pottery with them, except for the Mycenaeans in Tyrins, who thrived. The Sea Peoples have to have home bases somewhere (here I agree with Elizabeth French). Hatti’s demise is easily explained. Hatti was surrounded by enemies and had hardly any natural defenses (read Trevor Bryce). Whenever the Hittites went to war in one direction they were necessarily weakened on other frontiers. The capital, Hattusa, had already been abandoned once to the Kaskans (pronounced Kashkans) attacking from the north. We know that the capital was abandoned again at the end of the Bronze Age. Presumably it was the Kaskans once more. We also know the last Hittite king had to campaign along the south to recover lost vassal kingdoms. The Hittites may have lacked the military strength to fight both in the north and the south, and so the Hittite ship sank. The end of Ahhiyawa is trickier. In Hittite annals, Ahhiyawa is a united kingdom. In the Mycenaean records, we see only isolated city-states. But those records were only preserved because they consisted of clay tablets that were fired when the palaces that stored them were burned during the Collapse. Older tablets had been erased and reused. A united Ahhiyawa must have existed earlier, but then broke up. It’s fun to speculate as to the cause of the break up. We have a letter from a Hittite king to an unnamed king of Ahhiyawa whose brother, who also seems to be a king, was named Tawagalawa. It may not look like it, but Tawagalawa is equivalent to Eteocles. We see Eteocles and his brother, both kings, in the much later tradition of Seven Against Thebes, in which there is civil war. The attempted creation of a wall across the Isthmus of Corinth points to just that—civil war. Pirate attacks followed naturally. All it takes is the collapse of those two polities, Hatti and Mycenaean Greece, to account for the disastrous rise in piracy and city sacking that made up the Bronze Age Collapse. What to read next? Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War is a fun history of archeology in general and the search for the Trojan War more specifically. “In Search of” is a little out of date, and Wood goes off the deep end when he imagines conversations with Agamemnon. But that’s towards the end of the book. Most of the “In Search of” is great. You can watch the TV version on YouTube. (Warning: at one point I was reminded of Robert Plant’s trousers in The Song Remains the Same.) Yasur-Landau’s The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Bronze Age is more focused on one topic, technical, and scholarly than Wood’s book. Drews’s The End of the Bronze Age is also more technical and scholarly. Drews provides a good overview of the destruction, demolishes all previous explanations for it, but then offers his own hypothesis which is highly speculative. Redford ridiculed Drews’s minimalism in an endnote to Egypt and Western Asia in the Late New Kingdom: An Overview. That endnote is key. “Islands in the midst of the sea” must refer to the Aegean. Throughout all of your reading, keep in mind an idea that Cline attributes to Annie Caubet: “One cannot always be sure that the people who resettled a site after its destruction are necessarily the same ones who destroyed it in the first place.” Caubet’s idea should be obvious, but it is neglected in much of the literature. I do not attribute the LH or LC IIIC pottery scattered from Cilicia south to what became the Philistine pentapolis to the Sea Peoples but rather to the peaceful migration of Mycenaean refugees mentioned above, in spite of the linguistic equivalence of Peleset to Pelishtim.

This is a good read and has lots of details, including supporting evidence. Some of the stories could've been interpreted and that would have made the book even better. For example, the "Hippo and the Pharaoh" story has a rather funny interpretation but you have to find another source as this book mentions the story with no interpretations. The author consistently uses the term "Indo-European" when most other authors use "Indo-Aryan". This clearly shows some Euro-biases, not surprising as the author is an American that was educated at Yale. But it does make a reader question the author's scientific approach and further research is required to determine if he is prone to "Confirmation Bias" as well. Overall, a good read, a few tweaks will make it a great read.

In the annals of history, there are pivotal moments that alter the course of civilizations. "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" takes us back to a tumultuous era—the Late Bronze Age—when the world as it was known came crashing down. Marauding groups, shrouded in mystery, swept across the Mediterranean. These enigmatic "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt, triggering a chain of events that reverberated far beyond the Nile. Eric Cline meticulously unravels their impact, revealing how their assault weakened Egypt and set off a cataclysmic domino effect. Cline presents a compelling case for a "perfect storm" of interconnected failures. Natural disasters, political intrigues, and cultural clashes converged, leading to the collapse of not one but several powerful civilizations. The Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians—all found themselves on the precipice of oblivion. Before this book, the prevailing theory attributed the collapse primarily to the Sea Peoples. Cline's research transcends this simplistic narrative. He delves into the complexities of trade, commerce, and cultural exchange among these heterogeneous societies. The Bronze Age, with its brilliance and grandeur, crumbled under the weight of multiple crises. Cline's work is a testament to meticulous scholarship. He sifts through archaeological evidence, ancient texts, and historical accounts to construct a vivid tapestry of a bygone world. His prose is accessible, making complex ideas digestible for both scholars and curious readers. Whether you're a history enthusiast, an archaeology buff, or simply curious about the rise and fall of ancient cultures, 1177 B.C. offers a riveting journey through a pivotal year that reshaped the world.

This book happened to hit the right ratio of forest to trees, and the right spot on the continuum from pop to scholarly, for me, although it waffles about what spot that is – who the book’s audience is. Despite heavy-duty detail on topics many would consider arcane, we are still reminded almost every time it comes up that Crete is an island. Got it? ISLAND. Cyprus is too. Also a tsunami is a big wave. Some readers find the book well-written and even enjoyable. This was not my experience. The author never uses one word when two words will do, and goes in for petty redundancies of the kind that drove your high school English teacher nuts -- "may possibly," "must necessarily," linked together.” More seriously, the same points are made many times, often with a wad of extra words like “as we have discussed above.” Thirty percent less book would have been more forceful, clearer, and way more fun. Some reviewers don't like the relevance-seeking and lesson-finding—parallels between the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations and the present moment. I usually don't either but here it did resonate. I did learn a lot and suspect Cline's judgments about controversial issues in history and archaeology are reasonable. So, overall, aesthetically painful but kind of worth it.

Don't think you are going to read a nice easy novel. This book about the reasons for the fall of the Bronze age kingdoms, is written in a scholarly manner with a large number of citations to back up statements. First, you will be impressed with the reliance on archaeological knowledge including written texts where available to support the author's statements. But, the author also let's the reader know when there are disagreements by various historians as to the history. One thing that appalled me was how often kingdoms would go to war even over retribution for old family disputes. I wonder how many young men died to satisfy the power-hungry urges of a king. The same thing that is happening now in Ukraine. Finally, there is a huge lesson to be learned about climate change. I feel that climate change that occurred for 200 years during this period, was the cause of the increase in the fall of kingdoms, the escalation of war over resources, and the eventual loss of bronze age trade. An ominous message for us today! IF there is one failure in this book, and it is one readily acknowledged by the author, it is that there is very little information on the lives of the common laborer and of women and children during this time. Since the archaeological record is written by the aristocracy and by tradesmen, we know very little about the common life of the different kingdoms. But, I also can't help thinking that archaeologists and historians just aren't interested in what the common peoples lives were like. Maybe not enough gold, ivory, silver, swords, arrows, and heroic stories.

...But I felt that other important information was missing from the overall analysis. Maybe an update could be done in the years to come as we are finally understanding more about seismic, weather, astrological and solar events in the earth's history, especially 2-4 millennia ago. Also missing were the novel academic speculations by the late Gavin Mendes which are now being confirmed by more recent scientific research methods.

Eric Kline’s 2nd Edition of the book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed is an epiphany for those who stood before the mute stones of Mycenae, Troy, Egyptian Pyramids, and Armageddon trying to decipher events a thousand years hence. Professor Kline’s book presents hard facts, dates, and direct Bronze age reports of mythological events recorded centuries later in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Hebrew Bible. We know the stories but what is the reality reflected in the folk memory of such cataclysmically important events. Decades of science and scholarship slowly reveal a sometimes-frightening story of vibrant lives snuffed out by uncontrollably violent, tragic events. The most direct reports come from cuneiform letters on clay tablets between kings, merchants, and high official recording treaties, marriages, gift exchanges, requests for foreign aid, and so many other events of the day sounding as if they were yesterday’s CNN news reports. These tablets from sites in present day Egypt, Israel, Syria, Cyprus, Crete, and Iraq summarize the results of over 100 years of archeological excavations, documentation, and scholastic study of clay document records. A historical literature describing a highly sophisticated cooperative societies existing over thousands of years. The intensity of trade and interchange of Bronze age civilization is most poignantly portrayed in careful reports of underwater excavations of trading ships off the coast of Greece, Egypt, and Turkey. George Bass from Texas A&M created a new field of study by documenting the 1300 BC shipwreck at Uluburun, Turkey with goods from sources in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Afghanistan, Cyprus, Mycenae, Minos, and many other ports of call around the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. Most important were the discovery of tin ingots from Afghanistan and copper ingots from Cyprus, used for smelting of Bronze. Enough to create swords and armor for 300 soldiers of the king’s army. This lively trade, interchange and prosperity over centuries came to a crashing close for multiple collaborating empires – Hittite Empire, Kingdom of Minoa, Kingdom of Mycenae, and Babylonia. Only the weakened Egyptian Empire survived following their triumph over the invading sea people in 1177 B.C. It was the end. What caused the rapid decline and collapse of such a vibrant civilization. For almost a century scholars attributed downfall to invasion by the “sea people” mentioned in multiple Egyptian documents. This convenient explanation could not be corroborated with archeological evidence to show who they were, where they came from and why they so suddenly appeared with forces sufficient to topple established empires with powerful armies. Using instrumentation developed in physics laboratories, experts dated events of destruction using Carbon-14. Electron microscopy of pollen deposition in cores from lakes, rivers, and seas show a clear century-long picture of mega-climate change relating to written historical events. The global summary is a chilling picture of one possible future for present-day civilizations. A mega-drought lasting centuries caused famine, political unrest, revolution by the lower classes and organized emigrations of forces – raiding armies – to find better living conditions. Trade collapsed due to roaming bands of bandits and pirates. The final chapter of Kline’s book ponders the constant rise and fall of empires, kingdoms and entire collaborative groups forming a coherent civilization. He concludes “we should not think our current world is invincible, for we are in fact more susceptible than we might wish to believe.” 1172 B.C. is a worthwhile read especially when considering the ever-crazier people behavior in response to stresses. Many wish to ignore the risks of increasing carbon dioxide gas content in the atmosphere caused by human activities. Science competes with magic for the attention of the masses. Science appears to be losing.

Eric H. Cline's "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" stands as a remarkable synthesis of scholarly rigor and engaging storytelling, captivating both academic and popular audiences. Despite its focus on the ostensibly niche subject of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, Cline masterfully weaves a narrative that transcends disciplinary boundaries. His meticulous examination of the era's complexities, from the rise of kingdoms to their enigmatic collapse, challenges conventional explanations, notably debunking the oversimplified attribution of catastrophe solely to the Sea Peoples. Cline navigates through centuries of interconnected civilizations, deftly incorporating archaeological findings and textual evidence to illuminate the intricate tapestry of ancient societies. His nuanced analysis encompasses diverse factors such as earthquakes, climate shifts, and socio-political upheavals, eschewing simplistic narratives in favor of embracing the inherent complexity of historical causation. While Cline's exploration leaves certain avenues unexplored—most notably, the potential role of epidemics in societal destabilization—his book remains a landmark contribution to the field. By balancing accessibility with scholarly rigor, Cline ensures that "1177 B.C." will endure as an indispensable resource for both specialists and lay readers alike, enriching our understanding of a pivotal period in human history.