The Bronze Age Collapse: A Sudden, Violent Plunge into Darkness

Modern, western history has its origins lost in the past. There cannot be any single date which is held up as “the start of history” for a multitude of reasons, but the principal reason is just how long a time it took.

For the Egyptians, or the Sumerians, or the Caral or Harappans, history started at a point where the British were still flinging mud at each other and the Americans lived in unrecorded (semi) harmony. Finding a dividing line and announcing the start of history is a fool’s errand.

But there are nevertheless seismic events, sudden changes to the world which are useful as dividing lines in our mutual past. Such it is with Indo-European history, which had a very specific event which divided history, or at least our story, into two.

This event was the Bronze Age Collapse, a sudden destruction of almost all of the trade routes of the old civilized world. With this collapse came the fall of cities and royal houses, the destruction of treasures and the scattering of people, and the end of empires.

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After the Bronze Age comes everything that Europeans might be tempted to term as “history.” Out of the Greek Dark Age which followed the collapse of the Mycenaean Greeks and the destruction of their palace cities comes modern Greece, for example.

This progress may still be filled with legends, but these are fantastical accounts of events which generally happened. Democracy in Athens and the warrior perfected in Sparta, the battle of Marathon and Thermopylae: these make for great tales, but they also tell of real events.

This is in contrast with the Bronze Age history, which is one carefully pieced together and more fundamental in its depictions. The Greeks who came out of the Dark Age saw their Bronze Age past as further than legend, and the myths they spun about that age mixed folk memories such as those spun by Homer, with explanatory storytelling that sought to cover everything right back to the creation of the universe.

The Bible follows exactly the same pattern, Up against the creation myths and stories of Genesis, Exodus, the Israelite conquest of Canaan and the reigns of David and Solomon are genuine, discoverable Iron-Age Jewish kings of Jerusalem and Samaria. These real figures can be found in the archaeological record, and almost all are post Bronze-Age Collapse.

The Neo Assyrian black obelisk depicts Jehu, a Jewish King mentioned in the Bible. There is no doubt that Jehu was a real person, but the further back in time you look the more Biblical descriptions become sketchy reconstructions of the Bronze Age by Iron Age priests (GFDL / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Everywhere you look you see this divide. Every civilization which endured the Bronze Age Collapse has it, and you need look no further to the damage done to Egypt and Greece to see its impact. Many civilizations were wiped out, only tangentially linked to the geographical successor states. Some vanished forever, replaced by only nothing.

These were the states that first learned to work metal, that builds great cities and sent out merchants to trade with the world, and to bring back what they had learned. These were great kingdoms that fought and destroyed one another, using shining weapons and armor and riding a wave of technological discovery that came with this metalworking.

But what makes these Bronze Age states so fascinating is that they, largely, do not exist as prehistoric myth nor yet as verifiable history, but somewhere in between. These histories largely come from reduced or denuded cultures struggling to recall, or rewrite, their shared history that defines who they were.

And how they were reconstructed can tell us a lot about how these people saw themselves.