The Bronze Age is usually seen as a period of proto-globalisation,
with remarkably complex societies like Mycenaean Greece, Egypt, Sumer and Mesopotamia establishing
elaborate networks of trade and diplomacy all the way from Sicily to the Indus valley. However,
towards the end of the second millennium BCE, we see many of these societies seemingly collapse,
simultaneously, at a remarkable speed. This event, described titularly as the Bronze Age Collapse,
is often attributed to the mysterious Sea Peoples and their devastating raids in the Near East.
However, more recent scholarship has questioned this narrative. What exactly unfolded in the
Late Bronze Age, and can it really be defined as a total collapse of civilization, as the old
narratives imply? Welcome to our video on the end of the Bronze Age, where we will explore
the changes that occurred in this formative era of history, and discuss how apocalyptic it truly was.
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Before we delve into the withertos and whyfors of its potential collapse, we must
first understand the political and economic systems in place during the Late Bronze Age.
The Amarna Letters, a collection of cuneiform letters of correspondence
between Egypt and Near Eastern states, gives us a window into an elaborate network
of diplomatic connections between Kingdoms, with monarchs exchanging diplomatic gifts and
wives on a regular basis.[CN1] It is important to note that these kings refer to each other
as ‘Brother’ possibly as an early form of diplomatic courtesy. Bronze Age trade networks,
meanwhile, created a Mediterranean world defined by regionalisation, and technological development.
This allowed for craft specialisation, and created sharply stratified societies where skilled
professions like miners, standardised potters, and transportation specialists could exist.
During this era, Greece was mostly on the periphery of Bronze age society.
Nevertheless, the sea lords of the Mycenean palace complex were prolific across the Mediterranean.
Naval archaeological discoveries like the Uluburun shipwreck show that these proto-Greeks exported
large amounts of materials over long distances, including talents, oil lamps, and pottery.
Moreover, it is likely that mercenaries from Greece were present in the region
doing work for various other Bronze Age states, a testament to the broader interconnectivity of
the Mediterranean world at the time. However, as mutually cooperative as it often was, this
network of sophisticated states was not without its conflicts. Throughout the era, various actors
and factions fluctuated in their prominence, a phenomenon often attributed to an ongoing ‘Cold
War’[CN4] between the New Kingdom of Egypt and the Hittite Empire for control over the Near
East. [CN2] With that said, despite underlying political tensions, the Bronze age travel network
was massive by pre-modern standards, from its westernmost extremities in Italy and Spain,
where traders bartered for obsidian, to the Indus Valley civilization in the far east, with whom
the states of the Persian Gulf often interacted with, even adapting its seals for royal usage.
Now that we have painted a broad picture of the Bronze age world, let's discuss how,
or more appropriately, if, it all fell apart. The common narrative we have of the end of the
Bronze Age is that of destruction and war. The usual culprit of this comes in the form of the
so-called Sea Peoples. Who exactly the Sea Peoples were is one of history’s most enduring mysteries.
However, surviving records of rebellions and desertions occuring in the Hittite Empire
around the same time as Palace complexes in Mycenaean Greece were being abandoned
and Egypt’s levantine provinces were contracting suggest that they were a multi-ethnic group of
likely disparate raider groups, whose only commonality was that some external
force had driven them from their homelands. Whoever the Sea Peoples were, the level of
destruction their raids brought upon the cities of the Bronze age world is highly
debated. Evidence of their raids do appear in the archaeological record, but the picture is not so
clear as to suggest they took the form of massive invasions that led to total societal collapse.
Various Linear B texts from Mycenaean Greece speak of continuous use of palaces until a sudden
sharp end, which ostensibly supports the narrative of a devastating mass-invasion.
However, the archaeological record shows no hard evidence for any sort of violent mass migration.
All sorts of goods moved around the Bronze age mediterranean for all sorts of reasons,
and discovering say, an influx of Cypriot goods in Levantine ports during the era the collapse
does not automatically prove a mass invasion took place from the former region to the latter,
as those goods could have arrived there for any number of non-invasion related reasons.
Inversely, archaeological evidence shows us that some centres in Greece linked to
Sea Peoples continued to be actively inhabited well after the era of the supposed collapse,
which detracts from the narrative of massive bodies of people leaving their homelands.
So, with all that said, let us shift our emphasis away from invasion, and towards climate change.
Drought has been seen as a possible cause of the complex systems of interactions that occured at
the end of the Bronze Age. Evidence of episodic periods of drought are indeed prominent in the
analyses of ancient pollen. This could have led to waves of limited migration from the affected areas
to economically more promising regions, resulting in incremental and segmented migrations that wore
down existing palatial systems over time, rather than destroyed them in a single,
dramatic mass-invasion. To add on to this point, centres of culture and commerce had always been
shifting in the Bronze age. For example, Crete went from a well organised and structured trade
centre in the Middle Bronze Age, to a fragmented peripheral system in the late Bronze Age. All of
this concludes that the Late Bronze Age seems to have been a period of crises and adaptation,
rather than a total, apocalyptic collapse. We can see examples of these crises and
subsequent societal adaptations in Mycenaean Greece, which in the late bronze age appeared to
have been experiencing significant change in their connectivity with the rest of the Mediterranean,
as various forms of internal political instability in the Near Eastern states
such as the Hittite Empire disrupted many of their traditional trade relations, necessitating
Mycenaean society to change and adapt to an increasingly regionalizing Mediterranean world.
One way this was done was by asserting strict control over strategic resources.
For example, the production of textiles was very heavily regulated.
Returning to scripts in Mycenaean palaces, we can observe that the palatial elite
appeared able to control every aspect of the workers’ lives in this very strategic industry.
This political instability caused trade networks to peripheralize in other regions too,
resulting in the realignment of prominent trade centres, which beget the rise of cities like Tyre
and Sidon. [CN8] The changes in these economic circumstances appear to have had significant
demographic impacts in the Aegean and the Near East, with new centres drawing a lot of immigrants
from other regions. Some of these immigrants may have been driven to piracy for various reasons,
which led to the ubiquitous narratives of destructive sea peoples during this era.
The economic and demographic transformations we have discussed so far
had multiple effects in terms of the social structures of the Mediterranean.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this change lies in the cosmopolitan island of Cyprus.
The nature of the island’s early society is unclear, and its first inhabitants,
called the Eteocypriots, also have unclear origins. In the early bronze age,
Cyprus was known for its copper exports, which allowed for the development of specific economies,
which continued to thrive towards the end of the Bronze Age, despite the island being victim to
some raiding. [CN9] As the Mediterranean became more regionalized and politically unstable,
Cyprus’ stable position as an intermediary between the Near East and the Mediterranean
likely led a lot of artisans and other specialists to migrate there.
This gradually led to the appearance of Greek and Phoenician speaking communities on the island.
These communities may originally have included raiders or pirates, but almost certainly also
had artisans who sought to benefit from the island’s new advantageous position.
These new artisans may have had to adapt their art to Cypriot elite audiences, who already
had contact with Greek and Near Eastern cultures. These cultural contacts led to an increasing Greek
and Phoenician presence on the island, which would define the island’s history in subsequent periods.
The change in these organisational structures across the Mediterranean
is best seen as a simultaneous shift in ideology. The long-term processes involved in
the regionalisation and individualisation of trade often led to local and rural communities rejecting
traditional royal authority. The royal and martial culture we see in Mycenaean Greece, for instance,
changed as warrior tombs became less relevant. In Geometric Greece, the less privileged appeared to
lose trust in the old Mycenaean political system, leading to the rise of what would become the Greek
idea of the demos. In Egypt, however, the story was rather different, as the Kingdom would survive
for a few more centuries until the conquest of the foreign Libyan and Persian Dynasties.
In fact, Pharaoh Ramesses III appears to have been important in fending off raids and fighting off
Nubians in the south. The Middle Assyrian Empire also managed to take over large parts of the
Hittite Empire, as well as Babylon, and seemed to have little contact with coastal raiders.
As for Anatolia, regional kingdoms would persist and later new central polities would take their
place, such as the Kingdom of Lydia. Overall, the changes at the end of the Bronze Age allowed
for access to new locations, resources and populations. The relationships and newfound
circumstances that emerged allowed for massive socio-economic changes, defined the regimes and
states in which people organised themselves in and created new forms of networks that people used.
The world of the Early Iron Age Mediterranean was one of colonies rather than large empires,
and only in later periods would large empires like the Neo-Assyrians and the Persians rise again.
The idea of total collapse, either by climate or by invasions, of the broader Mediterranean system,
does not stand up to scrutiny. Instead, it is best for us to see the decline as a series of long-term
processes and short-term events including the phenomenon of the Sea Peoples and climate change,
but also of the processes like the change in the centres of trade and economic migrations.
Economic shifts in the Late Bronze Age led to a change in inter-state and class-relations. These
stresses led to the decline of palatial authority in Greece, and the collapse of the Hittite Empire.
These changes, however, were uneven, with other societies surviving, and trade continuing in the
broader Mediterranean. The demographics of the Mediterranean changed and new regional economic
systems emerged. The result was a broader period of changes that led to the world of the Iron Age.
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