The Bronze Age Collapse: A Sudden, Violent Plunge into Darkness (Part Two)

Read Part I

The main problem in understanding the Bronze Age Collapse is that we don’t really know what happened. This may look like an oversimplification but it is not. It is, instead, the simple truth.

Of the four great civilizations that faced disaster in this 12th century BC collapse: the Mycenaean Greeks, the Hittites, the Assyrians and the Egyptians, only one gives us any clues as to an inciting event. The other three are more or less unhelpful, serving more to confirm a collapse did actually happen as to tell us why.

We don’t know what happened to the Mycenaean Greeks because their royal dynasties and social structure was entirely lost in the collapse. Nobody wrote down what happened because the collapse was so total that the Greeks even forgot how to write.

What records we have about the world of the Greeks before the collapse is one of mythical heroes and their interactions with the gods. The stories of Homer which survive come from an oral tradition alone, because the break at the end of the collapse was absolute. When the Greeks taught themselves to read and write again, and could capture these stories, it was in an entirely different language, an entirely different alphabet.

The Hittites were well on their way to collapsing on their own by the Bronze Age Collapse, so while we have surviving evidence of their fall it is much more introspective, concerned with dynastic infighting and how they’d burned down their capital all on their own. For the Hittites, the Bronze Age Collapse was merely another problem to (fail to) deal with.

The Lion Gate at the Hittite capital of Hattusa. The Hittites got started early on the Bronze Age Collapse, feuding and falling apart being very much their thing (Bernard Gagnon / CC BY-SA 3.0)

As for the Assyrians, they were honestly pretty much fine with the failure of all these trading links. They were still in the take-everything-by-force phase and appear to have seen the collapse as an opportunity to expand, as they were doing into Hittite territory.

Only the Egyptians give us a clue as to how the Bronze Age Collapse unfolded, and even here the evidence is far from obvious, or complete. It was one Egyptian site, at Medinet Habu across the Nile from modern Luxor, that offered us the first clues.

The site is dominated by the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses III, but was an important site for successive pharaohs of the late Bronze Age. Here, narrative inscriptions from the reigns of three separate pharaohs talk of a confederation of peoples who invaded Egypt, and the Levant, in the 12th century BC.

It was not until the 19th century that Egyptologists made the link between these inscriptions, and collectively christened these invaders as the “Sea Peoples.” Frustratingly we know almost nothing about them despite significant detail being provided here. We know the names of many of the peoples, for instance, but we don’t recognize them. Some are even mentioned here and nowhere else.

Ultimately, all we have is a modern theory based on a coincidence of timing. But the evidence is compelling and the consensus is that these peoples were responsible for the Late Bronze Age destruction in the Levant and the severe weakening of Egypt.

Who were the Sea Peoples? Where did they come from, and why did they pour in their thousands into the eastern Mediterranean? Did they cause the Bronze Age Collapse, or were they its victims?