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What Caused the Bronze Age Collapse?

8/19/2013

32 Comments

 
Last week the Los Angeles Times had an interesting article on new scientific research that claims to have demonstrated that climate changed caused the widespread collapse of Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE. According to research done by David Kaniewski et al. on pollen samples recovered from Cyprus, a massive drought hit at just the time when the Bronze Age cultures are known to have collapsed.

Ancient writings have described crop failures, famines and invasions about the same time, suggesting that the drying trend triggered a chain of events that led to widespread societal collapse of these Late Bronze Age civilizations.

This is particularly interesting to me since the late Bronze Age is one of my favorite periods, especially the survival of memories of it in later mythology.

The Times was reporting on an article published in the Public Library of Science’s PLoS One journal. In it, the authors report the results of their findings, which suggest that climate change between the thirteenth and ninth centuries BCE resulted in widespread destabilization, leading to the collapse of the Hittites, Mycenaeans, and other cultures. The period of climate crisis is roughly equal to the period known as the Greek Dark Age, and the climate apparently began returning to more prosperous and wetter conditions during the Greek Geometric and Orientalizing periods, when trade with the Near East resumed.

According to this analysis, the mysterious Sea Peoples, whom the ancients considered responsible for much of the late Bronze Age crisis, were an ethnic group driven by a climate crisis into the eastern Mediterranean in search of resources.

Who the Sea Peoples were is unknown. Scholars have also proposed that the Sea Peoples were Mycenaeans fleeing the collapse of Mycenaean power in Greece, or Minoans fleeing the same in Crete. Several other hypotheses have also been proposed, including an identification with the Philistines (who are also sometimes identified as early Greek migrants) or the Hittites. In fact, the Hittite hypothesis rests on early climate work that had suggested decades ago that droughts had caused famines around the time of the Sea Peoples’ invasion.

By combining data from coastal Cyprus and coastal Syria, this study shows that the LBA [Late Bronze Age] crisis coincided with the onset of a ca. 300-year drought event 3200 years ago. This climate shift caused crop failures, dearth and famine, which precipitated or hastened socio-economic crises and forced regional human migrations at the end of the LBA in the Eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia.

The Times interviewed archaeologist Lee Drake, who was not one of the study’s authors, but who went beyond the cautious conclusions of the article to essentially blame climate for the Bronze Age collapse single-handed: “We tend to focus on political, human-driven problems, but there isn’t a human driver for the destruction that matches what happened 3,000 years ago.”

I think that overstates things a bit. Right now, due to the current climate change situation, climate change has become a catch-all explanation for civilizational collapse, just as inter-ethnic warfare was a hot topic during the Civil Rights era. The most famous example of climate change destroying civilization—the Maya collapse—has now received criticism from scholars who have found human hands at work in the Maya collapse, particularly in the Maya’s unsustainable agriculture. In other words, climate did not cause the collapse by itself but rather worked in conjunction with human-made systems that were unable to adapt to changing conditions, creating instability, promoting warfare, and leading to collapse.

I wonder if that’s not the case in the Bronze Age Mediterranean as well, as Kaniewski et al. suggest. The collapse occurred because the drought hit at a time when the region had become dependent on marginal agriculture (especially in mainland Greece) and international trade. Disrupting, for example, Mycenaean crops could lead to widespread systemic changes and collapse—but only because the human systems involved were rigid, authoritarian, and dependent on the status quo. Climate has changed more than once, and each change does not lead to collapse. I think it requires multiple components, including human factors, to cause widespread systemic failure.

The Mycenaeans and he Hittites did not burn their rulers’ palaces and temples or abandon half the old gods just because of climate but rather because the elites failed in some way to address the changes and restore prosperity. Climate change exacerbated the tensions between the elite and peasantry, but it required a rigid and hierarchical system for that to occur. In other words, multiple factors result in historical events, and we can’t pin everything on just one cause, be it climate change or alien death rays.

32 Comments
bear47
8/19/2013 11:59:12 am

Jason,
I agree with you on this. Life would be so much easier and quite predictable IF things were simple. Life, and this universe are quite complex, the collapse of a civilization is also due to complex issues, not just a single incident. And yet, one could imagine an ancient society collapsing due to a huge volcanic eruption and/or huge tsunami as a result of said volcanic eruption.
Still, if I were to bet, I'd go with a collection of issues and complexity.

Reply
Thane
8/19/2013 12:40:57 pm

@bear47 Are you referring to the Santorini explosion, which I believe was in the bronze age but don't recall when within that time.

I know that Hekla 3 is/was implicated in the drought in Ancient Egypt (Ramese III's reign) droughts during the bronze age because of its impact on climate.

Reply
The Other J.
8/20/2013 07:45:23 am

I was wondering the same thing about Santorini. That supervolcano blew around 1600 BCE, about 3500 years ago. So it's in the neighborhood and may have accelerated certain events, but hard to say. I'll leave it up to the site's resident experts to weigh in.

Alix
8/20/2013 11:22:14 am

The Other J. - That's a 400 year gap, though, between Santorini and the Catastrophe. It undoubtedly had effects on the region, major ones, and some of those would've rippled down, but it seems like a heck of a stretch to give that any significant role.

Then again, I'm not sold on this famine being the trigger, either. Did it have an effect, and a major one? Undoubtedly. But it's hard to say that just because something happened at a given time, it caused another event/series of events at the time. I'm not going to say the famine was coincidental - it's never that easy - but it might not have been the sole cause, or even the major cause.

The Other J.
8/20/2013 01:16:34 pm

Alix -

Yep, no argument there. That ripple effect is what I meant by "accelerated certain events." (I suppose I could have been more clear.) You could imagine a few populations being displaced because of Santorini, and their movement putting pressure on other peoples as they try to find a new place to settle. That means more mouths to feed, more people to house, possibly some civil strife, etc. So you're left with a few populations that might be on the brink of trouble, and all it takes is a drought or something to tip the balance.

Alix
8/20/2013 03:04:11 pm

The Other J. - Agreed. Also, it might've had other effects - possibly some environmental ones, affecting which cities are in ascendance, messing with trade routes (maybe).

I'm actually kind of curious now to see if anyone's worked out a) how the Santorini eruption disrupted things, and b) how everyone recovered.

E. Harding link
8/19/2013 12:51:07 pm

I concur that the social structure in the Eastern Mediterranean was at least as important an influence on the nature of the LBA collapse as climate. I have commented on this paper here:
http://againstjebelallawz.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/plos-one-article/
and on the causes of the LBA collapse here:
http://againstjebelallawz.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/extrabiblical-history/

Reply
Jason Colavito link
8/19/2013 01:09:14 pm

Thanks for the links! It's nice to get a chance to talk about something that involves actual science and real learning for a change.

Reply
Alix
8/20/2013 11:30:38 am

Nice posts.

I personally can't discount some of the military history theories, either, though that's probably 'cause I'm a student of military history. XD

There are some hints of notable changes in arms and armor around that time, though, which is something I'd love to survey in more depth. And the sheer extent of the Catastrophe is ... frankly kind of amazing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the documentary evidence from the eve of the collapse mentions both famine and looming military threats, yes? I vaguely recall that being the case in a Canaanite letter, but I can't dig up the reference right now 'cause I'm in the middle of packing to move. (Whyyyy do all the interesting conversations happen when I'm moving?)

Are we even entirely clear on the timeline of the late Bronze Age? I seem to recall at least a few problems with syncing up the timelines for different sites.

Reply
E. Harding link
8/23/2013 11:23:20 am

@Alix
"There are some hints of notable changes in arms and armor around that time, though, which is something I'd love to survey in more depth."
-If there were, then those changes could only have led to the demise of the native civilizations of the Mycenaean world, Cyprus, and northern Syria. Egypt didn't decline by the hands of the Sea Peoples, but due to incursions of Libyans. Likewise, it is improbable the Hittite Empire fell due to Sea People influence, as Hattusa, which was burned after it was abandoned, is probably located too far north for the Sea Peoples to have reached it. And, besides, the Hittites moved SE, not NE, after the fall of Hattusa. I think the fall of the Hittite empire is the most mysterious part of the LB collapse.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the documentary evidence from the eve of the collapse mentions both famine and looming military threats, yes?"
-Yes. See http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-near-eastern-world/the-last-days-of-hattusa/
"Are we even entirely clear on the timeline of the late Bronze Age? I seem to recall at least a few problems with syncing up the timelines for different sites."
-I have a Chronology page at http://againstjebelallawz.wordpress.com/iron-age/
If you are looking for Finkelstein 1994, behold- http://www.nelc.ucla.edu/Faculty/Mullins_flies/ANE230_State_Formation_files/Finkelstein_Date_Settlement_Philistines_Canaan.pdf

Reply
Alix
8/23/2013 11:51:22 am

At least a handful of people have pointed out that the sites destroyed - and the sites folks relocated to or built up during this time - suggest that "Sea Peoples" may be something of a misnomer. What you say about the fall of Hatti plays into this - if one lumps that in as part of the Catastrophe, which I think it had to be related to somehow, one gets a different view of the movement of these mysterious marauders than if one excludes them. Also, it's not like other cities are always easy to include or exclude - I know that Carchemish is another debatable one.

I know Drews, at least, argues that the Libyan coalition either was or made use of the "Sea Peoples," but I think that's the most speculative part of his argument. He's on stronger footing when he chronicles the changes in arms and armor, and though he's not entirely behind this, I think his point about the ideas being what spread and not necessarily specific people spreading them is a good one. I really think that the best explanation for the Collapse is a multifaceted one - collapses aren't exactly simple things, since states often have quite a bit of inertia.

Of course, the other point about Egypt is that it declined severely, but it didn't catastrophically collapse like the Hittite Empire. People have pointed out that that's a very good argument for it being on the western fringe of all this catastrophe.

Basically, this whole thing is interestingly thorny, and I could read/talk about this all day. XD

I read that chronology. (I love timelines.) And thanks for the links!

E. Harding link
8/23/2013 01:19:43 pm

@Alix
Using Google Books's "preview" feature, I looked inside "The End of the Bronze Age" and found pages 67-72 to be full of nonsense. The texts describing Cherethites and Pelethites are not "early", but date to the Perso-Hellenistic period! http://againstjebelallawz.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/pelethites-and-peltasts/ Yes, there was a massive Philistine migration in the 12th century BC. This is not something in dispute among the scholarly community. The LB III, the period just preceding the Philistine invasion, was marked by an absence of foreign pottery. The Philistines were invaders. I wonder if he's going to suggest that there was very little Jewish migration into Palestine in the 20th century.

Alix
8/23/2013 01:35:08 pm

Yeah, some of his stuff is pretty weak or wrong. He has some decent points, but also some serious flaws.

His survey of the extent of the Catastrophe is useful, but brief. His weakest part, to my mind, is his second section, where he attempts to shoot down every other theory of the causes of the Collapse, and I think he over-argues some of his points. I mean, I agree with him on a general level, that a lot of these disparate theories, taken alone, seem insufficient to explain the full extent of what happened, but he gets a bit too dismissive.

The part where he catalogs the evolution of arms and armor around the Collapse is the focus of his thesis, though, and it's his strongest section. I just still find it, like the explanations he shoots down earlier, insufficient on its own.

It can be a heck of a frustrating book at times, and it's pretty damn short, but I still find it worth reading.

Out of curiosity, what are your favorite texts on the subject? (I'm shamelessly fishing for more reading material.)

E. Harding link
8/23/2013 01:33:40 pm

"What you say about the fall of Hatti plays into this - if one lumps that in as part of the Catastrophe, which I think it had to be related to somehow, one gets a different view of the movement of these mysterious marauders than if one excludes them."
-Can you clarify this sentence? What "them" are you referring to?
"Also, it's not like other cities are always easy to include or exclude - I know that Carchemish is another debatable one."
-Since the Philistines are known to have settled the lower Orontes valley, they might have led to the fall of Carchemish. I wonder if the SE migration of the Hittites might have led to the fall of Carchemish.
"I know Drews, at least, argues that the Libyan coalition either was or made use of the "Sea Peoples," but I think that's the most speculative part of his argument."
-There are records from the reign of Merneptah that mention the Sea Peoples in close proximity to the Libyans -http://books.google.com/books?id=x1lMiv2PNLAC&pg=PA247#v=onepage&q=Meryey&f=false
I found this out from my preview of the Drews book.
"People have pointed out that that's a very good argument for it being on the western fringe of all this catastrophe."
-Western???

Reply
Alix
8/23/2013 01:44:43 pm

Argh, I am really not being terribly coherent today, sorry.

1. "Them" - the Hittites. If you do lump their fall in with the broader Collapse, you get an entirely different picture of the likely movements of the so-called Sea Peoples, one that requires significant time overland. I apologize - I used the wrong pronoun.

2. I believe there's one text that mentions Carchemish as falling to the Sea Peoples, but iirc there's some controversy over the precise timeline, and so I know a few scholars exclude it.

3. Yeah. (Also? ARE is a fantastic resource.) The big question for me is when and how the Sea Peoples and the Libyans formed their coalition. Far as I know there's no records on that.

4. Erm, isn't Egypt west of Anatolia and Levant? Or did I mix up east and west again? (I actually attempted to proofread that part, but I have a really chronic and really frustrating problem there.)

Even if I did screw up the direction, my point is that Egypt and the Greek mainland seem to be the two geographical endpoints of the Collapse. And it's been noted that in Greece, most of the destruction was on the Aegean side of the peninsula. I don't recall there being sites tied to the Collapse further west than Greece/Egypt, anyway, but I could be wrong.

...I should start a map of all these sites, actually. (Any excuse to play around with Google Earth, really.)

E. Harding link
8/23/2013 03:21:36 pm

@Alix
2. Behold! http://books.google.com/books?id=GCswAAAAYAAJ&dq=Ancient%20Records%20of%20Egypt%20%22atika'&pg=PA204#v=onepage&q=Carchemish&f=false
I don't think whoever is writing for Ramesses III actually knew that the Hittite Empire fell to the Sea Peoples, I think he just assumed it.
4. Egypt is South of Anatolia and West of the Levant, but East of Greece.
I have many places, paths, and overlays in Google Earth, from Nahal Tut to segments of the Great Walls of China. My two finished outlined sections of the Great Walls of China may be found on my blog. I've also published a thoroughly traced outline of the Yangtze on my blog.
See http://rambambashi.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/2300-ancient-sites-on-google-earth/ for several thousand places marked by Jona Lendering :-)

Alix
8/23/2013 03:41:41 pm

2. That's the text I was thinking of! Thank you.

And that's a fair point. I'm not sure I agree - most of what I've read assumes the Hittite collapse was part of the Sea Peoples thing, and so I'm not fully conversant with the other arguments - but it's most certainly something to keep in mind.

4. Yeah, I knew that (in the sense of having a map in my head, not in the east/west confusion sense). I was still thinking in terms of a rough overland route, not really accounting properly for the sea. I wonder why Libya didn't get hit by the Sea Peoples - Egypt in the way? Or were they really allies? Or something else?

Maybe the Sea Peoples didn't have a quibble with the Libyans. I'm now really curious about their motives.

I think I saw those Great Wall sections. Fun stuff.

Google Earth is such a useful tool, no? I currently have a few projects going - mostly mapping various trade routes (I'm vaguely considering trying to distill that into an actual book at some point), but also doing some maps of oldest cities, and now this Collapse destruction layer map. I've got a few rough maps for lines of march, battles, that sort of thing, mostly for making some visual sense of military data.

I <3 maps.

Alix
8/23/2013 03:44:43 pm

Also, I meant to say, thanks for the link to that Google Earth data. That's really useful and interesting.

Cathleen Anderson
8/19/2013 12:57:56 pm

The title should be "Caused" not cause. That was the only error I noticed.

Nice job on that essay.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
8/19/2013 01:06:12 pm

I fixed it. I was rushing today because I had a massive work assignment come in, and apparently I was thinking faster than I typed again.

Reply
Alix
8/20/2013 05:37:13 am

This is one of my all-time favorite topics, too. Thanks for pointing us to that article.

The other factor I've seen people talk about is changes in armor and weaponry right around the time of the collapse, with some scholars (Robert Drews stands out here, probably 'cause his book's on my shelf, but I know of others) proposing that the reason the collapse was so thoroughly successful was that these "Sea Peoples" managed to work out a truly effective way of countering the chariot-dominant armies of their day.

It seems from my perspective like this is one of those things where there's not just one quick and clean answer, but a lot of pieces to a large puzzle. All these civilizations weathered severe droughts before - what happened with this one to make it the last straw? How did this result in so many cities being burned? Why did this sweep across the whole eastern Mediterranean? How does it fit with the scant documentary evidence we have? And so on.

...That's the reason this is one of my all-time favorite topics. I love mulling over mysteries.

Reply
The Other J.
8/20/2013 08:01:54 am

That's really interesting how conclusions about the distant past become a kind of Rorschach test for larger contemporary issues (inter-ethnic warfare, climate change). Is that more or less an accepted state of affairs in archaeology, or are there any studies exploring that angle?

Reply
Alix
8/20/2013 11:18:25 am

Ooh, studies of ancient history as Rorshach tests would be awesome.

It happens with history, too, and doesn't even necessarily need to be all that ancient, though. We never have perfect information, and so there's always a need to put the pieces together, and we fill in the gaps with what makes sense to us. The more ancient or less documented the history, the more gaps we need to fill in.

Reply
Varika
8/21/2013 05:34:00 am

The Other J., from what I've seen--and admittedly I'm an armchair scientist in general--that's not only an accepted state of affairs in archeology, but also In most other sciences. Evidence is still required, but the latest theories often seem to march along with what's foremost in the minds of modern consciousness. On the other hand, I don't think that's something new and different, or something inexplicable. People seem to tend to look at things from whatever is the "popular" angle for a while and see what they can find. And usually, they find something, even if maybe later they find that it wasn't as big a deal as they first hyped it up to be--probably because it's really, REALLY rare for anything in life to have an actual single, isolated cause.

Reply
Alix
8/21/2013 06:10:02 am

<I>it's really, REALLY rare for anything in life to have an actual single, isolated cause.</I>

If there's one thing I really wish was hammered into students' heads in every high school history class, it's that.

Alix
8/21/2013 06:10:55 am

Gah! Apologies for the effed-up formatting.

The Other J.
8/21/2013 09:41:26 am

So being an accepted state of affairs, I'm guessing it's rare for someone to preface their work by acknowledging that it's being shaped by a socially-determined framework -- "We're looking at climate change for the collapse of the Mayan civilization BECAUSE climate change is really important to us right now and is in the news a lot." In academia you usually just get warrants for internal arguments; you don't often get the warrants for why an angle of study was taken in the first place.

Jason Colavito link
8/21/2013 09:44:28 am

I imagine it's more of a zeitgeist thing than an actual conscious decision to apply modern concerns to the past. Often, these can only be seen in retrospect. The Victorians were very big on imperial rivalries as an explanation for history, and they had plenty of those in their age, but so "natural' did empire seem at the time that most didn't give a thought to whether they were projecting their own hopes and fears onto the past since it was just a self-evident truth.

Ralph E Vaughan link
8/25/2013 07:13:40 am

The "collapse" of any civilization is very complex, the reasons difficult to pin down, especially at such a distance in time. We are in the midst of our own civilzational collapse, and seem equally unable to stop it as we are to define its causes, though every ideology has its own sole precipitator, its personal bugaboo. Scientists and scholars who should be above such things often succumb to the movement of the moment, taking the easy path, looking into the past and seeing a mirror rather than facts appropriate to time and place.

I suspect the "collapse" was precipitated by a multitude of things, but a drought was likely not a cause. A drought, even a very long and widespread one, is just a drought, and how a civilization plans and responds to it is indicative of the "health" of that civilization. Strong ones construct aqueducts, built cisterns, or dig stepwells, to name a few, while weak ones collapse entirely.

Though we might understand what contributed to the Bronze Age collapse (some elements were beyond their control while others stemmed from their own foolishness), we will likely never know the "last straw." The people of the time might not have known either.

However, collapse they did, and that would put the affected cultures and civilizations into a post-apocalyptic mode. The civilization was not worldwide, so the resultant post-apocalyptic culture was regional, bumping into all the surrounding peoples to lesser or greater degrees, depending upon their contacts with the socially and economically devastated region. Seen in that light, I think the Sea Peoples become a little easier to understand, kin to the "road warriors" and lawless bands depicted in any number of post-apocalypse films, raiding and pillaging, hiring out to warlords, then turning on them to plunder for their needs, lawless and immoral; in this light, the Sea Peoples are not a cause of the collapse, but one of the results. Obviously, we may see their kind again.

Reply
jcl link
11/13/2014 12:54:27 am

Great read, I have come to the same conclusion. I believe the event that caused the climactic change was Thera.

The tidal waves would have left salt deposits on the land, plus the mini ice age that would have occurred from the ash fallout would have lead to a climactic event of 50 or more years that would have caused the unrest you describe.

Reply
E. Harding
11/16/2014 05:39:50 am

Wrong time period. We're talking about 400 years later.

Reply
Andy Wedgbury link
11/29/2015 04:45:56 pm

Fascinating insights, I hope you don't mind that I have linked to this from my blog!

Reply

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