The Bronze Age Collapse

c. 1200–1150 B.C.The fires

Between about 1200 and 1150 B.C. the palace world of the last two chapters was destroyed, not in one place but in every place. On the Greek mainland Pylos burned so fiercely that its tablets were baked hard, which is why we can read them; Mycenae’s houses outside the walls went first and then the palace; Tiryns and Thebes burned; Gla in Boeotia was abandoned. In Anatolia the Hittite kings left Hattusa, and the city was emptied and burned. On the Syrian coast the merchant city of Ugarit was sacked and never lived in again. Cyprus lost its towns. Down the coast of Canaan the cities were wrecked one after another. Only Egypt held, and Egypt after this was never a great power in Asia again.

The last letters from Ugarit, found in a kiln where they had been baking when the city fell, tell of enemy ships sighted, of the king’s army away in Hittite country and his fleet off Lycia, and of seven ships that had already done great damage. No more is heard. The letters were never sent.

c. 1207 and c. 1177 B.C.The Sea Peoples

The one power that survived left the only narrative. Pharaoh Merneptah recorded about 1207 B.C. a victory over Libyans who came with allies from the north, among them Sherden, Shekelesh and Lukka. Thirty years later Ramesses III carved on the walls of his temple at Medinet Habu a war by land and sea against a coalition of peoples he named as Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, who, the inscription says, had made a camp in Syria and against whom no land had stood, the Hittite land among them. His reliefs show ox-carts with women and children, which suggests a migration rather than a raid, and a sea-fight in the Nile mouths. Ramesses claimed complete victory. The Peleset settled anyway on the coast of Canaan, where the Bible knows them as the Philistines and gives their land its name, Palestine.

The nineteenth-century Egyptologists christened them the Sea Peoples, and the name has stuck to whoever it was that broke the Bronze Age. But the reliefs are a pharaoh’s victory monument, not a history, and the peoples they name cannot be securely traced to any homeland. Sardinia, Sicily, Lycia, Crete and the Aegean have all been proposed for one or another of them.

The argumentWho, or what, did it

No single cause satisfies. Invasion was the first explanation and remains the most dramatic: the Sea Peoples from the sea, and, in Greece, the Dorians from the north, whom Greek tradition remembered as arriving in the Peloponnese two generations after the Trojan War in what it called the return of the Heraclidae. The archaeology has been unkind to the Dorians; no new kind of pottery or weapon arrives with the fires, and the newcomers, if they came, came into a world already ruined. Earthquake was proposed by the excavator of Ugarit, Claude Schaeffer, who saw skewed walls and crushed bodies at his site and at others; earthquakes can burn a city but cannot explain why none was rebuilt. Drought has evidence in the pollen record and in the Hittite letters begging for grain. Others have pointed to the palaces themselves: economies so centralised, so dependent on one long chain of metal and luxury exchange, that a break anywhere brought the whole down, and that the peasants who fed the scribes had every reason not to rebuild them.

The honest summary is that a system already strained by drought, war and its own rigidity was hit by movements of armed and hungry people, and that once the first palaces fell the trade that fed the rest failed too. The order in which the blows landed is not recoverable.

c. 1150–1050 B.C.What Greece lost

Greece fell farther than anyone. The palaces were not rebuilt. The wanax and his scribes vanished, and with them writing: Linear B was never used again, and for some four hundred years no Greek wrote anything. Fresco painting, monumental stone building, ivory carving and gem cutting stopped. The population fell steeply; on some estimates most sites of the thirteenth century were empty by the eleventh. Long-distance trade dwindled to a trickle. People moved: some Greeks crossed to Cyprus, where Greek has been spoken since; others, the Greeks later believed, sailed from Athens to found the Ionian cities on the coast of Asia. Iron came slowly to replace bronze, less as a new discovery than because copper and tin no longer arrived in quantity and iron ore was everywhere.

Athens, the tradition insisted, was never taken, and the Acropolis does show continuity; Lefkandi in Euboea kept its contacts with the east. These were the exceptions.

What survivedThe gods and the songs

Not everything died. The gods of the tablets were the gods of Homer. The Greek language survived, though it split into the dialects whose map is the residue of these migrations. And the memory of the palace age survived in song. Illiterate bards kept alive, in a formulaic verse designed to be remembered, the names of Mycenae rich in gold, of Nestor’s Pylos and of Agamemnon’s Argos, of a war at Troy and a king’s long voyage home; four centuries later, when writing returned, those songs became the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Greeks who read them knew that their ancestors had been greater than themselves. What they did not know was that those ancestors had been bureaucrats. That was the palace’s secret, and the fire kept it until 1952.