The Fire Last Time: Bronze Age apocalypse

Every city in a Desolate Crescent from the Aegean to the Sinai was razed to the ground: a bloody, sudden inverse of millenia of building. People lost cities, cultures, names. Gods were forgotten. Traditions died. Empires ended: splintering first into regions, then cities, then smaller. The mightiest and best organized, like Egypt, managed to bend every nerve, staving off collapse for a generation before shattering.

Finally, there was a gap: the long total blank that frustrates the hell out of anyone trying to look back. What is known is that everything stopped, with the catastrophe's survivors left only with legends of a better time and a centuries-long struggle for bare subsistence.

This was the Bronze Age Collapse, the first Dark Age in recorded history, and the one everyone forgets about (when you think of Dark Age, do Egyptians battling the Sea Peoples come to mind? No, it's togas, Goths and vomitoriums) despite the fact that it was arguably more devastating than the end of the Roman Empire.

 

To imagine the scale, picture this: almost every city in Western Europe and North America destroyed. Not reduced, not scaled down. People-don't-live-here-anymore-just-ruins destroyed. Everywhere else is in turmoil. Armed bands, growing larger with every subsequent disaster, keep spreading out in search of new loot. Some particularly rich pocket of civilization (East or West Coast U.S., France, Japan, Australia, take your pick) strains every nerve to deal with the threat, drafting all able-bodied adults to arms. The immediate physical danger is stopped (say by air power and machine guns), but the process so uproots the civilization that it too collapses in a generation.

 

It was that nasty. It was an apocalypse. That's why there's a hell of a lot to be learned from the first time the lights went out.

 

Egyptian soldier fighting the Sea Peoples

 

To this day, historians are still debating over what caused the collapse. The records are fragmented, and theories range from natural disaster to ye olde "barbarian" (funny word that, as we'll see in a second) invasions. As with most world shatterings, there's almost never a single cause.

 

What every account agrees on was that the collapse was sudden, shocking and violent, as evidenced by the grief-stricken lamentations of a slew of final kings and the layers of destruction found by archaeologists. Human civilization had deep roots throughout the area. These empires, kingdoms and city states were thousands of years old, with highly trained, well-equipped militaries and a complex trade network. Shortly before this time of turmoil began, the Egyptian and Hittite Empires were both at their greatest extent, while the confederation of Mycenaean Greek kingdoms was powerful enough to take over venerable Crete and launch expeditions across into Anatolia.

 

But looks can be deceiving. In 1274 B.C. Egypt's dynasty and the aggressive Hittites fought each other to a bloody standstill in the largest chariot battle ever. Less than a century later, the Hittites would be gone and Egypt would be reeling.

 

Over in the Aegean, Homer's telling of the Trojan War may well have been myth, but it almost certainly reflected a real conflict. A long, brutal one at that. Remember The Iliad and remember both the countless petty rivalries between the Greek kings and the insane amount of destruction they inflicted as standard practice.

 

Now add a drought or earthquakes. Hell, add any element that shakes up the status quo. All of a sudden conflict-stressed trading networks and economies are stretched even farther, and some of them break. It takes just one bad run -- a rotten harvest or few cities flattened by earthquakes -- for the breakdown to begin.

 

My father, behold, the enemy's ships came; my cities were burned, and they did evil things in my country.

Ammurappi, last king of Ugarit, in a plea for help. The letter never left his city, which burned.

 

the lands were removed and scattered to the fray. No land could stand before their arms.

Inscription about the Sea Peoples on Rameses III's tomb

 

A little speculation offers an explanation for the rest. Say a few city-states or minor kingdoms collapse or descend into lawlessness. A few of your traditional "barbarians," in the sense of neighboring peoples with a more primitive culture, see an opportunity. Probably strapped with a bad harvest and weakening trade themselves, they move in and sack said cities. This has happened plenty throughout history, but it doesn't always end in collapse. So why this time?

Well you add in populations already impoverished and war-weary from the great power conflicts that are now suddenly homeless. Disaster happens. Refugees streaming into neighboring territories worsen the situation even further. 

But what if some of those homeless, while desperate, see an opportunity. Eager to take land for their own (and you know, not starve), and with no love of the warrior aristocracy that ran the myriad civilizations (into the ground), they take up arms and attack the next town. Some of them may even be military units from toppled regimes. After all, if the invaders just put the king's family to the sword, why not get the fuck out and try to carve out your own turf?

The cycle repeats, and city after city falls. The result? The Sea Peoples.

The above isn't just my speculation. The few records remaining from the time indicate that the Sea Peoples were made up of many ethnicities, given names like the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh and Denyen. Some of the names -- Hatti and Eshewan -- suggest that the Sea Peoples may well have included Hittite and Achaean survivors amongst them. Later descriptions indicate that carts with noncombatants and children followed the Sea Peoples on their attacks.

Unlike the hordes of later Roman times, however, with their separate waves, feuds and identities, the Sea Peoples seem to have functioned more as a confederation, pulling off sophisticated military attacks on well-defended targets.

This too makes perfect sense. After all, they wouldn't just have been raveningly hell-bent on destruction. Compare to 16th and 17th century pirates who, finding themselves in a similar situation, hammered out quasi-democratic rules for governing themselves and dividing the spoils. Such a multi-ethnic alliance of convenience might well have been what Egyptian rulers at the time dubbed with epithets like the Nine Bows.

It was also incredibly effective, as can be judged by the results. The Sea Peoples quickly developed tactics that shredded apart their enemies. Besides the eponymous use of naval power, they also went far inland. Iron had reduced the former aristocratic monopoly on weaponry, while sheer numbers and organized infantry crushed the chariot-based militaries of the day. The Mycenaean and Hittite elites vanished practically overnight. That the elites were the targets is indicated by the fact that the Sea Peoples would occasionally leave residential areas untouched, but completely devastate the palaces and religious structures.

Furthermore, to use a technical term all too popular today, their methods were viral. Every victory ensured more random armed bands that would have much the same enemies as they, and thus be potential allies or at least disrupt their next target. Likewise, every people tired of their constantly feuding (and raiding and slaughtering...) rulers would flee, desert (if drafted to fight) or outright rebel. 

The Sea Peoples were eventually checked by Rameses III -- along with some brilliant tactics and every Egyptian he could muster -- in two epic battles, one on land and one on the Nile Delta. 

However, Egypt was exhausted and turning a complex society into an armed camp, however briefly, has devastating effects. The Egyptians never regained their empire and had crumbled into competing factions by a hundred years later.

Yes, historically we can say "well they fell too" but going overly systemic here is a problem. The Egyptian victory is a reminder of the role that individual circumstances can play in breaking what seem to be inevitable tides of history. A century is a long time and to those who lived out their lives in relative peace, it meant a great deal.

The rest of what we now call the West had a far worse time. Greece saw 90 percent of its small towns disappear, along with almost every large city (Athens, Sparta and Thebes managed to stick it out, but in very different ways). The dead were countless, but easily over half the population perished in many areas (to put this in perspective, the Black Plague only killed a quarter of Europe). Pushed back and lacking easy common enemies, the Sea Peoples probably broke up the area into brawling, illiterate statelets of their own. Darkness descended for centuries.

Stories of the previous, comparatively incredibly civilized and prosperous era entered into societal memory as a lost Golden Age. Stories of the fall itself made easy fodder for doomsayers. After all, the great monuments and palaces had been destroyed. Odds are, you were dead. If that's not an apocalypse, what is?

Lessons

 

So what can be learned from all this carnage?

No Villains: There's not a mustache-twirling Dark Lord in all this. The closest things to villains might have been the more bloodthirsty and careless warrior aristocrats, who exhausted their civilizations through their own relentless feuds, thus weakening them to the point where a collapse like this became more likely.

The Sea Peoples are commonly viewed as the ruthless invaders, but despite all the destruction they caused, their motives -- desperate survival and finding a new home -- are perfectly understandable. They did wreak incredible havoc, but in their sacking of cities and pillaging they weren't doing anything that the region's overlords hadn't done for centuries. From a modern perspective, one can even admire the desire of oppressed peasants and impoverished neighboring peoples to take revenge on those who had so long ravaged them. But they were an instrumental part of a death toll that, per capita, has rarely been equaled in history.

The World is Not a Chessboard: The era just before the collapse was the high-water mark of the region's great power politics. The armies at Kadesh were massive, part of a long ongoing rivalry by expansionist empires. The actual battles behind the Trojan War myths, along with the Mycenaean taking of Crete, show increasingly powerful leaders that intended to eliminate their rivals and become High Grand Poobah or whatever the fuck pretentious title you use for sacking everything around you.

The biggest threat, though, came from the groups they ignored: outlying primitives and their own serfs. Instead of making them unassailable, their century-long bids for power only weakened them, using up precious resources, straining trade networks and taxing their economies. For what? All the empires ended up collapses or drastically reduced, and the old dynasts were often the first to die.

This lesson is particularly important, as a lot of foreign policy thought in powerful nations today look at the world exactly in this matter: invade here, stare down enemy there, expand sphere of influence, control world. Neoconservatism is probably the worst example, but far from the only one. The Bronze Age collapse provides a grisly object lesson in how devastating these delusions can be. Borders are something only humans acknowledge, problems usually don't care.

It can happen very quickly: In such a strained environment, all that needed to occur was a trigger: the dice just had to come up wrong one year and everything began going to shit. Society's more fragile than it looks, and disconnected elites + taxed treasuries + disaster can easily send things spiraling into chaos.

 

By the same token, once the process began, it proved very hard to stop. All it took was a few parts of the region descending into chaos, and the Sea Peoples become unstoppable. Once most humans hit the point where they desperately fear for their own survival enough to say 'fuck it' to the larger society, the descent feeds on itself.

 

Going local didn't help: The palace economies that constituted the Mycenaean confederation, the Hittite Empire and various city states were a model of local efficiency. I've heard more than one back to the lander tout them (or more usually the Cretan variety) as more sustainable way of life. As the palace provides a central cultural, economic and military meeting ground and takes in most resources: it's a system that allows for a great deal of local self sufficiency, significant central planning and a highly evolved degree of art and technology. If there's a central king, they're usually "first among equals," with each locality still having a great degree of control over their own affairs. On paper it works great.

 

In practice it only made things worse. The Hittites and Mycenaeans were famous for their constant feuds and low-level wars. Some of the aristocracy may have started out as community leaders or protectors, but by the time of the great power struggles, they'd become vain overlords. Think about the descriptions of Achilles and Agamemnon. Would you really want to be ruled by a shit like that?

 

Furthermore, while the local centers of power were somewhat insulated from larger economic shocks, they also insured constant competition, fatally weakening trade networks over time. Importantly, it made a coordinated response to a threat like the Sea Peoples virtually impossible. 

 

The only country that staved off disaster was a centrally-run, highly organized empire. In the next regional Dark Age Byzantium would pull off a similar feat. Local is great, but it can simply lead to more chaos. While the Pharaohs were no saints, the nature of their state insured that Lord A wasn't always attacking Lord B, with the people caught in the middle. Comparatively then, they had more loyalty from their populace and, not having to bribe Lords A-Z for their assistance, could more quickly rally the massive resources needed to fight the Sea Peoples. 

---

We may not have roving bands of sea-borne marauders today. Oh, wait? We do? Okay, we have different sea-borne marauders. But the breakdown of a society can have very similar results in any time. The similarities between the development of the Sea Peoples and John Robb's observations about the potential spread of Mexico's collapse to narco-guerillas are too eerily close to be ignored. 

 

Humans change, but they don't change that much, and the dynamic that gave us our first apocalypse can easily reproduce itself, no matter the level of technology, no matter how secure nations think themselves. It offers the stark object lesson that bombs, zombies and killer robots are not at all required to send humanity toppling back into the mud. All collapse is cultural, and so must be its solution.

 

Postscript:

Santayana's advice about forgetting the mistakes of history has been repeated to death. It's still true, of course, just over- and misused. But anyone seeking to unravel the current time can tell that both Dark Age and Renaissance are very real possibilities. We need to understand then, how it all falls apart, and one of the ways to do that is to understand how other Dark Ages (or more modern societal collapses) have come about. The Fire Last Time will be an irregular feature here that attempts to salvage a few lessons from the wreckage.

 

-David Forbes

Comments

[Jake]

Great write up. I honestly had never read much about this collapse before.

[Chris L]

Thanks for this post. I definitely appreciate your thoroughness. And I like the idea of this being a feature (however irregular).

[m1k3y]

brilliant. look forward to the next in the series.

the Sea People are my new favourite bit of history!

[Jim]

Pretty amazing. I wish you cited sources, though. Given that you weren't there, there must have been a book, a website or movie that turned you on to this.

The best book I've read in the last three years(and is the one that turned me on to this) is "The Upside of Down" by Thomas Homer-Dixon. That books draws heavily from Joseph Tainter's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
book "The Collapse of Complex Societies".

Similar to Jared Diamond, but not the same at all.

Tainter doesn't mention the Sea Peoples at all, but it could fit together.

[twitter.com/SmithMillCreek]

Re-reading this after forgetting reading it the first time.

Seem to be some triggers for collapses:
- plagues (McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, http://j.mp/50FpP5 )
- Malthusian exhaustion of the soil http://j.mp/6oIiKb
- meteors/comets http://j.mp/YDryas
- volcanoes (maybe not yet)

[Richard Welch]

A goodly account of a little known historic episode. It might be noted that the invasions of the Sea People are something of a reenforcement of the Atlantis legend which is basically the tale of an intrusion into the east Mediterranean from the west. Most of the Sea People tribes can be traced to old Atlantean territories in the western Mediterrranean (see Roots of Cataclysm, Algora Publ. NY 2009).