1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (28 page)

But what factor, or combinations 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. However, until recently, the Ugaritic and other Eastern Mediterranean textual documents containing reports of famine provided the only potential evidence for climate change or drought, and even that was indirect. As a result, the issue has been debated on and off by scholars for decades.
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The topic has recently been given new impetus, though, as a result of findings published by an international team of scholars, including David Kaniewski and Elise Van Campo of the Université de Toulouse in France and Harvey Weiss of Yale University, who suggest that they may have direct scientific evidence for climate change and drought in the Mediterranean region at the end of the thirteenth and into the beginning of the twelfth century BC. Their research, which first suggested that the end of the Early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia, toward the end of the third millennium BC, might have been caused by climate change, has now expanded to propose that the same thing may have occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age as well.
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Using data from the site of Tell Tweini (ancient Gibala) in north Syria, the team noted that there may have been “climate instability and a severe drought episode” in the region at the end of the second millennium BC.
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In particular, they studied pollen retrieved from alluvial deposits near the site, which suggest that “drier climatic conditions occurred in
the Mediterranean belt of Syria from the late 13th/early 12th centuries BC to the 9th century BC.”
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Kaniewski’s team has now also published additional evidence of a probable drought on Cyprus at this same time, using pollen analysis from the lagoon system known as the Larnaca Salt Lake Complex, located by the site of Hala Sultan Tekke.
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Their data suggest that “major environmental changes” took place in this area during the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, that is, during the period from 1200 to 850 BC. At this time, the area around Hala Sultan Tekke, which had been a major Cypriot port earlier in the Late Bronze Age, “turned into a drier landscape [and] the precipitation and groundwater probably became insufficient to maintain sustainable agriculture in this place.”
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If Kaniewski and his colleagues are correct, they have retrieved the direct scientific evidence that scholars have been seeking for a drought that may have contributed to the end of the Late Bronze Age. In fact, they conclude that the data from both coastal Syria and coastal Cyprus strongly suggest “that the LBA 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.”
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Working independently, Brandon Drake of the University of New Mexico has provided additional scientific data to add to those of Kaniewski and his team. Publishing in the
Journal of Archaeological Science
, he cites three additional lines of evidence that all support the view that the Early Iron Age was more arid than the preceding Bronze Age. First, oxygen-isotope data from mineral deposits (speleothems) within Soreq Cave in northern Israel indicate that there was a low annual precipitation during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Second, stable carbon isotope data in pollen cores from Lake Voulkaria in western Greece show that plants were adapting to arid environments at this time. Third, sediment cores from the Mediterranean reveal that there was a drop in the temperature of the surface of the sea, which in turn would have caused a reduction in precipitation on land (by reducing the temperature differential between land and sea).
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He notes that while it “is difficult to directly identify a point in time when the climate grew more arid,” the change most likely occurred before 1250–1197 BC,
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which is precisely the time period under discussion here.

He notes also not only that there was a sharp increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures immediately before the collapse of the Mycenaean palatial centers, possibly causing droughts, but that there was a sharp decrease in temperature during the abandonment of these centers, meaning that it first got hotter and then suddenly colder, resulting in “cooler, more arid conditions during the Greek Dark Ages.” As Drake says, these climatic changes, including a decline in the surface temperature of the Mediterranean Sea before 1190 BC that resulted in less rainfall (or snow), could have dramatically affected the palatial centers, especially those that were dependent upon high levels of agricultural productivity, such as in Mycenaean Greece.
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Israel Finkelstein and Dafna Langgut of Tel Aviv University, in conjunction with Thomas Litt at the University of Bonn in Germany, have now added additional data to the picture. They note that fossil pollen particles from a twenty-meter-long core drilled through sediments at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee also indicate a period of severe drought beginning ca. 1250 BC in the southern Levant. A second core drilled on the western shore of the Dead Sea provided similar results, but the two cores also indicate that the drought in this region may have ended already by ca. 1100 BC, thereby allowing life to resume in the region, albeit perhaps with new peoples settling down.
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Nevertheless, exciting as these findings are, at this point we must also acknowledge that droughts have been frequent in this region throughout history, and that they have not always caused civilizations to collapse. Again it would seem that, on their own, climate change, drought, and famines, even if they “influenced social tensions, and eventually led to competition for limited resources,” are not enough to have caused the end of the Late Bronze Age without other mitigating factors having been involved, as Drake is careful to point out.
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I
NTERNAL
R
EBELLION

Some scholars have suggested that internal rebellions may have contributed to the turmoil at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Such revolts could have been triggered by famine, whether caused by drought or otherwise, or earthquakes or other natural disasters, or even a cutting of the international trade routes, any and all of which could have dramatically
impacted the economy in the affected areas and led dissatisfied peasants or lower classes to rebel against the ruling class, in a revolution akin to that in 1917 czarist Russia.
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Such a scenario might be invoked to explain the destruction seen, for instance, at Hazor in Canaan, where there is no evidence for an earthquake, nor is there specific evidence for warfare or invaders. Although Yadin and Ben-Tor, two of the primary excavators of the site, have both suggested a destruction by warfare, probably at the hands of the Israelites, the other codirector of the current excavations, Sharon Zuckerman of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has recently suggested that the destruction of Hazor Stratum IA, dating somewhere between 1230 and the early decades of the twelfth century BC, was caused by an internal rebellion of the city’s inhabitants, rather than an invasion by external peoples. As she states simply, “there is no archaeological evidence of warfare, such as human victims or weapons, anywhere in the site … the view of the final destruction of the LBA city of Hazor as a sudden unexpected attack on a strong flourishing kingdom does not concur with the archaeological evidence.”
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She suggests instead that “mounting internal conflicts and gradual decline, culminating in the final assault on the major political and religious foci of the city’s elite, provides the most plausible alternative framework for the explanation of the destruction and abandonment of Hazor.”
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Although there is no doubting the destructions observable at the various Mycenaean palatial centers and Canaanite cities, there is, quite frankly, no way to tell whether revolting peasants were responsible. It thus remains a plausible, but unproven, hypothesis. And again, many civilizations have successfully survived internal rebellions, often even flourishing under a new regime. Thus, on its own, the hypothesis of internal rebellions is not enough to account for the collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.

(P
OSSIBLE
)
INVADERS AND THE
C
OLLAPSE OF
I
NTERNATIONAL
T
RADE

Among events that could have led to an internal rebellion, we have just glimpsed the specter of outside invaders cutting the international trade routes and upsetting fragile economies that might have been overly
dependent upon foreign raw materials. Carol Bell’s comparison of the strategic importance of tin in the Bronze Age to that of crude oil in today’s world might be particularly apt in this hypothetical situation.
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However, even if an internal rebellion were not the outcome, the cutting of the trade routes could have had a severe, and immediate, impact upon Mycenaean kingdoms such as Pylos, Tiryns, and Mycenae, which needed to import both the copper and the tin needed to produce bronze, and which seem to have imported substantial quantities of additional raw materials as well, including gold, ivory, glass, ebony wood, and the terebinth resin used in making perfume. While natural disasters such as earthquakes could cause a temporary disruption in trade, potentially leading to higher prices and perhaps to what we today would call inflation, more permanent disruptions would more likely have been the result of outside invaders targeting the affected areas. However, who would these invaders have been? Or is this where we invoke the Sea Peoples?

Rather than the Sea Peoples, the ancient Greeks—ranging from historians like Herodotus and Thucydides in fifth-century BC Athens to the much-later traveler Pausanias—believed that a group known as the Dorians had invaded from the north at the end of the Bronze Age, thereby initiating the Iron Age.
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This concept was once much discussed by archaeologists and ancient historians of the Bronze Age Aegean; among their considerations was a new type of pottery called “Handmade Burnished Ware” or “Barbarian Ware.” However, in recent decades it has become clear that there was no such invasion from the north at this time and no reason to accept the idea of a “Dorian Invasion” bringing the Mycenaean civilization to an end. Despite the traditions of the later classical Greeks, it is clear that the Dorians had nothing to do with the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age and entered Greece only long after those events had transpired.
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Moreover, recent studies now indicate that even during the decline of the Mycenaean world and the early years of the succeeding Iron Age, mainland Greece may still have retained its trade connections to the Eastern Mediterranean. These connections, however, were probably no longer under the control of the elite classes who had dwelt in the Bronze Age palaces.
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In northern Syria, on the other hand, we have numerous documents attesting to the fact that maritime invaders attacked Ugarit during this time period. Although we have little firm evidence for the origins of
these marauders, we cannot dismiss the possibility that they included the Sea Peoples. In addition, 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.
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However, we should not overlook the fact that Ugarit would have been a tempting target for both external invaders and homegrown pirates, as well as other possible groups. In this regard, we should consider again the letter from the Southern Archive, found in Court V of the palace in Ugarit (but not within a kiln), which mentions seven enemy ships that had been causing havoc in the Ugaritic lands. Whether or not these particular ships had anything to do with the final destruction of Ugarit, such enemy ships would have disrupted the international trade upon which Ugarit was vitally dependent.

When such dramatic situations occur today, it seems that everyone has a piece of advice to give. Things were no different back then, during the Late Bronze Age. One letter found at Ugarit, possibly sent by the Hittite viceroy of Carchemish, gives the Ugarit king advice on how to deal with such enemy ships. He begins, “You have written to me: ‘Ships of the enemy have been seen at sea!’ ” and then advises: “Well, you must remain firm. Indeed, for your part, where are your troops, your chariots stationed? Are they not stationed near you? … Surround your cities with walls. Bring (your) infantry and chariotry into (them). Be on the lookout for the enemy and make yourself very strong!”
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Another letter, found in the House of Rapanu and sent by a man named Eshuwara who was the senior governor of Cyprus, is undoubtedly related. In this letter, the governor says that he is not responsible for any damage done to Ugarit or its territory by the ships, especially since it is—he claims—Ugarit’s own ships and men who are committing the atrocities, and that Ugarit should be prepared to defend itself: “As for the matter concerning those enemies: (it was) the people from your country (and) your own ships (who) did this! And (it was) the people from your country (who) committed these transgressions(s) … I am writing to inform you and protect you. Be aware!” He then adds that there are twenty enemy ships, but that they have gone off in an unknown direction.
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