CHICAGO

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed
Dr. Eric H. Cline, Professor of Classics and Anthropology, Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at The George Washington University, in Washington D.C.

For more than three hundred years during the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 BC to 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Egyptians,Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, and Canaanites all interacted, creating a cosmopolitan and globalized world-system such as has only rarely been seen before the current day. It may have been this very internationalism that contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that ended the Bronze Age. When the end came, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from Greece and Italy in the west to Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia in the east. Large empires and small kingdoms, that had taken centuries to evolve, collapsed rapidly. With their end came the world’s first recorded Dark Ages.
It was not until centuries later that a new cultural renaissance emerged in Greece and the other affected areas, setting the stage for the evolution of Western society as we know it today. Blame for the end of the Late Bronze Age is usually laid squarely at the feet of the so-called Sea Peoples, known to us from the records of the Egyptian pharaohs Merneptah and Ramses III. However, as was the case with the fall of the Roman Empire, the end of the Bronze Age empires in this region was not the result of a single invasion, but of multiple causes. The Sea Peoples may well have been responsible for some of the destruction that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but it is much more likely that a concatenation of events, both human and natural — including earthquake storms, droughts, rebellions, and systems collapse — coalesced to create a “perfect storm” that brought the age to an end.

Dr. Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology at The George Washington University, in Washington DC. A Fulbright scholar, National Geographic Explorer, and Pulitzer Prize nominee, Dr. Cline holds degrees in Classical Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology, and Ancient History, from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania. An active field archaeologist, he has excavated and surveyed in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States. A three-time winner of the Biblical Archaeology Society’s “Best Popular Book on Archaeology” award (2001, 2009, and 2011) and winner of the 2014 “Best Popular Book” award from the American Schools of Oriental Research for 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Dr. Cline has written (authored, co-authored, or edited) a total of sixteen books, which have been published by prestigious presses including Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Michigan, and National Geographic. His books have been translated, or are currently being translated, into thirteen languages, including French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian.