In Ugarit, a once prosperous fortified city on the Syrian coast,
archaeologists discovered a clay tablet, upon which was written
an answer to someone's plea for help.
It read,
"My Father, behold, the enemy's ships came.
My cities were burned and they did evil in my country.
All of my troops and chariots are in the land of Hatti and all of my ships are in the land of Lukka.
The country is abandoned to itself."
But this response to some other king's plea for aid was never delivered.
It was found still lying in the kiln.
And around that kiln were found the remnants of Ugarit;
Burnt to the ground and littered with foreign made arrows.
This is one of the only records we have of a world coming apart.
If you've heard anything of the Bronze Age collapse,
You've probably heard the tale of mysterious marauders from the sea,
suddenly appearing on the coasts of the ancient world.
They pillaged, they burned, and then they disappeared from history just as suddenly as they came.
These are the sea people.
We have a few records mentioning these invaders, most of them from Egypt.
And most of these Egyptian records are simply proclamations to the world,
that Egypt was able to face the sea people,
where other nations had fallen.
As an inscription by Ramses III proclaimed,
"Those who reached my boundary,
their seed is not.
Their hearts and their souls are finished for ever and ever.
As for those who have assembled before them on the sea,
the full flame was their front before the harbor mouths.
And a wall of metal upon the shore surrounded them.
They were dragged, overturned, and laid low upon the beach,
slain and made heaps from stern to bow over their galleys,
While all their things were cast upon the water
But as awesome as such inscriptions are,
we do have to ask, "How much were they intended as propaganda,
and how much were they intended as an accurate record of historical fact?"
Because we know that Egypt didn't stop the sea people.
No one did.
So who were these enigmatic terrors from the sea?
Nobody knows.
It's one of the great mysteries imbedded in the larger mystery of the bronze age collapse.
To make matters worse, the sea people might not have been one people.
Historians have identified at least 9 different groups or tribes that make up the various waves of sea people,
and we're not even certain that all of them were actually outside invaders.
Some hypothesize that certain groups of these amphibious attackers were the biblical Philistines.
Others suggest that the sea people were simply unpaid mercenaries, or peoples in revolt.
But when considering historical mysteries, I always tried to ask whether events are causal or symtomatic
Were the sea people the REASON for the Bronze Age Collapse, or merely a symptom that made it worse?
Let's look at what I think are the two broad possibilities.
One, that the sea people were invaders from outside the core Bronze Age kingdoms,
or, two, that the sea people were made up of factions from inside the Bronze Age kingdoms,
moving about as armed groups.
Let's considered the first possibility
In this case, there would have had to be a reason that all of these mysterious people took to the sea,
and decided to attack what in the past had seemed like strong and defensible kingdoms.
Something must have displaced them,
and something must have convinced them that they could win this fight.
This implies to me that the sea people were symptomatic to the Bronze Age collapse.
That some other cause drove them to attack,
and that something else had to have weakened the bronze age kingdoms before they got there.
So, what about the other possibility?
If the sea people came from within the bronze age kingdom,
as either mercenaries or people in revolt,
then we have to ask ourselves,
"Why did they revolt now?
These societies had existed under fairly consistent conditions for thousands of years.
So what led people to rise up right then?"
Well, either the kingdoms were in a weakened state,
giving the people reason to think that they could overthrow them,
or that the peoples' own situation had deteriorated to such a point,
that they believed the gamble was worth it.
Either way, it again, implies that some other event started the decline,
before the sea people started to arrive.
The lesson here?
If history teaches us anything, it is this:
Always pay your mercenaries
(Oh and maybe DON'T invade Russia, because that never seems to work.)
Really though, what I take away from this is that
while the sea people may have hammered the final nail in the brionze age coffin
we have to look elsewhere for the root cause.
But before we can do that, there is one other hypothesis that we have to discuss;
which is that the sea people came bearing iron
that they had a technological advantage which allowed them to sweep aside the Bronze Age kingdoms.
In this scenario, regardless of their motivation,
they really would be the root cause for the Bronze Age Collapse.
Now this was once a popular theory, but as our ability to date things has improved,
it seems to have been largely disproven.
there are some iron artifacts dating back to the period of the collapse,
but it wasn't until 200-300 years later that we really start seeing iron being used on any sort of mass scale.
So it seems pretty unlikely that the sea people won by bringing iron weapons with them,
or as was once speculated,
by procuring vast amounts of iron weapons in their initial attacks on the Hittites,
and then, using those to crush the surrounding kingdoms.
So what does that leave us?
Well, natural disasters is always a possibility
And there is evidence of natural disasters happening around this region during this period.
But there had been natural disasters before, too,
and we actually have a very well established archaeological pattern for what happens when natural disaster strikes civilizations in history.
The disaster happens, a bunch of stuffs breaks, and then people rebuild and life returns to normal.
It's pretty consistent.
But in the Bronze Age collapse,
people just didn't rebuild.
The cities that we found that got leveled,
For whatever reason, they just were not rebuild
Instead, we start seeing new pockets of civilization,
appearing on mountain tops,
or secluded region far away from the sea
This implies to me that while natural disasters may have contributed to the chaos to the collapse,
they weren't the root cause.
And judging from the locations that society appeared to retreat to,
it seems that those who survived, were far more afraid of the sea people than nature's whims.
So, what about disease, then?
What if some sort of plague weakened this civilization ?
Well, again, there is some evidence for disease in this period,
but it seems to be a result of the collapse, rather then the cause of it,
happening after the fact, and worsening the result.
which leave us with the last possible sweeping cause;
f a m i n e .
This argument seems the strongest to me.
Shortly before this period,
there is evidence of volcanic eruptions happening,
eruption strong enough to cause change to the climate
And though there is some dispute as to whether this specific climate change caused it,
there are also record of droughts and famine across the Bronze Age kingdoms around this time.
And ongoing drought can explain almost everything else on this list.
Drought forces people to migrate,
which, in turn, brings them into conflict with other people, in more fertile lands.
Lower nutrition means higher likelihood of disease.
reduced govermental revenue, means the inability to pay mercenaries
or [to] maintain armies to fight off invasions.
And lack of resources mean that towns don't get rebuilt after natural disasters,
especially if their once fertile fields are now fallow.
And people revolt as their kings & pharaohs no longer seem to be able to protect them,
or to guarantee a good harvest.
But even if drought or famine were the root cause,
(Which is a still big IF,
as historians are still vigorously debating this),
why was the collapse so complete?
Why did it lead to a Dark Age that took humanity centuries to pull itself out of?
Join us next time, as we talk about the theory of of systems collapse,
and how all of these pieces might fit together to create the end of an age.