Some time around the year 1200 B.C.E., human civilization did an oopsie.
Within the short span one generation, the majority of Earth's most technologically advanced
civilizations faced an existential crisis.
Nearly all of them failed the test.
The resulting collapse was a turning point in human history, similar in scope to the
collapse of the Roman Empire.
The old world died, and the Bronze Age died with it.
The odd thing is that we barely understand why this happened.
There are a bunch of theories, but nothing definitive.
We'll get into that in a moment, but first, an introduction.
When the Bronze Age began in Western Asia, it brought to an end an old world of tiny
city-states ruled by an oppressive class of totalitarian priests.
The new world that came after was one full of possibilities.
Vast, sweeping empires grew up seemingly out of nowhere.
New religions, new systems of government, new cultures, new technology, all at once,
all at a breakneck pace.
Revolutions in farming lead to massive food surpluses which in turn allowed for these
huge, bustling, multicultural cities.
These new cities participated in dynamic system of international trade, totally unlike the
cloistered city-states that preceded them.
By the Late Bronze Age, the big players were Egypt, Cyprus, the Mycenaeans, the Hittite
Empire, Assyria, and Babylonia.
Each of these states, without exception, faced an existential crisis around the year 1200
B.C.E.
Within a generation, most of them were gone.
Here's what we know.
Some time around the beginning of the 12th century, the King of Ugarit, a city in the
Hittite Empire, wrote a letter to the King of Cyprus.
"My father, now the ships of the enemy have come.
They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land.
Doesn't my father know that all of my infantry and chariots are stationed in Khatte, and
that all of my ships are stationed in the land of Lukka?"
Khatte was another name for the Hittite capital, several hundred kilometers inland.
Lukka was several hundred kilometers to the west, on the Aegean coast.
"They have not arrived back yet, so the land is thus prostrate."
Defenseless.
"May my father be aware of this matter.
Now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us.
Now if other ships of the enemy turn up, send me a report somehow, so that I will know."
The Hittites promised to send King of Ugarit reinforcements, but it was too late.
The last known letter to leave Ugarit reads, "when your messenger arrived, the army was
humiliated and the city was sacked.
Our food in the threshing floors was burnt, and the vineyards were also destroyed.
Our city is sacked.
May you know it!
May you know it!"
The King of Cyprus was well aware of what was happening on the mainland.
But he had problems of his own.
Cyprus was under attack at around the same time.
Several larger cities, especially on the western coast, were burned, and many of the smaller
cities further inland were simply abandoned.
Wealthy residents buried their valuables, with plans to return once the crisis had blown
over.
They never returned.
Things were different in Greece.
For the last hundred years, the Mycenaeans had been plagued by internal instability.
There are signs of destruction everywhere.
The ruins of these cities leave evidence of massive fires intermixed with arrowheads and
weapons, which paints a pretty clear picture of a series of battles in which the defenders
were ultimately defeated.
Other cities leave evidence of smaller fires confined solely to the palace structures in
the center of the cities.
This indicates some kind of popular uprising in which local kings were overthrown, not
just in one city by in many cities.
Still, other cities show signs of being abandoned, either because of famine or natural disaster
or both.
On the whole, the picture is fuzzy, but it's fair to say that there was chaos in Greece.
It was even worse in Anatolia, the homeland of the Hittites.
Archeological evidence suggests that every major city in Anatolia may have been at least
partially destroyed during this period.
This was especially true up and down the coast.
In fact, we now know that the city of Troy was destroyed at this time.
Recent archeological digs there have found arrowheads still lodged in the ruined walls
of the city, and evidence of a fire.
Further inland, things get a little more mysterious.
The Hittite capital, which only a few years earlier was being protected by the the King
of Ugarit's army, was largely abandoned.
It would later be stormed and burned just like all the others.
For a long time this abrupt region-wide collapse was inexplicable.
Historians knew that it happened, but they couldn't tell you how or why it happened.
But in the second half of the 19th century, Egyptian archeological discoveries provided
a hair-raising and revolutionary explanation for this mysterious collapse.
This inscription was discovered in an Egyptian temple in Medinet Habu.
It changed our understanding of the Late Bronze Age forever.
Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses III describes several waves of foreign invaders arriving on the
shores of Egypt over the course of 30 years.
The inscription at Medinet Habu reads: "the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their
islands.
All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray.
No land could stand before their arms."
[...] "They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them."
[...] "They laid their hands on the land as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts
confident and trusting: 'Our plans will succeed!'"
The Egyptians had some guesses as to who these invaders were, but they couldn't be certain.
Historians have simply taken to calling them the Sea Peoples.
We now think that the Sea Peoples were loose coalition of groups from all across the Mediterranean.
We can't be 100% sure of this, but we can say with some confidence that most of them
were from Sicily, Sardinia, Crete, and the Aegean coast.
Maybe some other places too.
Some wore feathered headdresses, while others wore horned helmets or simple leather caps.
Some wore kilts, while others wore tunics.
Some went into battle wearing full body-armour, while others fought shirtless.
What united these groups was their reason for coming.
This was a migration.
We know that they came on boats and on wagons with their families and all of their worldly
possessions.
What brought them here is another question that we'll get into later.
By the time the Sea Peoples finally arrived down in Egypt, virtually every other Bronze
Age civilization had been overrun.
The Mycenaeans in Greece, the Hittites in Anatolia, Canaan in the Levant, Cyprus in
Cyprus, all gone.
Some states further inland were less affected by the invasions, but they were so weakened
by the collapse of their neighbours that their days were numbered as well.
When the Sea Peoples began their migration, they couldn't have imagined that it would
have been this successful.
All the way up until Egypt, every attempt to resist them failed.
Why?
In order to understand this, we need to talk about Bronze Age warfare.
Chariots.
Chariots chariots chariots.
Bronze Age warfare in Western Asia was all about chariots.
In the Early Bronze Age they were primarily used for transportation, but by the Intermediate
Bronze Age the militaries of every major state in the region were completely designed around
the use of the chariot.
A chariot in this period usually consisted of a team of two horses pulling a team of
two humans, one driver and one archer.
The humans, I mean.
The horses and the driver were trained for speed and maneuverability, and at full speed
could move roughly twice as fast as a human could run.
The archer wielded a composite bow.
Not as clumsy or random as a regular bow, it was smaller and lighter with better accuracy,
range, and firepower.
It was a state-of-the-art piece of technology.
In this period it could punch through 3 inches (7.62 cm) of metal.
So a full chariot team had everyone else beat when it came to speed, range, and firepower.
This is a bit of a tangent but it's said that the moment the HMS Dreadnought touched water
in the year 1906, every other ship in the ocean became obsolete.
The HMS Dreadnought was the best in the world when it came to speed, range, and firepower,
which meant that it could just sit back and pick off enemy ships at a distance, and then
outrun anybody who came too close.
Like the Dreadnought, Bronze Age chariots had speed, range, and firepower.
Like the Dreadnought, they could just sit back and pick off enemies at a distance.
Like the Dreadnought, they could outrun anybody who came too close.
An experienced group of chariots were capable of defeating an army 10 times its size.
This revolutionized Bronze Age warfare.
But they were expensive as hell.
Horses had to be specifically bred and trained, which cost a small fortune.
The equipment was all hand-crafted by artisans, and cost at least twice as much as the horses
did.
The loss of a single chariot was catastrophic, and so chariots went into battle with thousands
of inexpensive spearmen and archers deployed in a defensive line.
The infantry could protect friendly chariots that needed to repair or regroup, or they
could rush forward and destroy enemy chariots that were damaged or caught in a bad position.
As we get into the Late Bronze Age, the region was in the midst of a chariot arms race.
And then the Sea Peoples came.
Unlike the Bronze Age civilizations of Western Asia, the Sea Peoples fought on foot.
Instead of using spearmen and archers to form a defensive shield for their chariots, the
Sea Peoples wielded longswords and javelins, and they fought with an unmatched aggression.
I've seen the Sea Peoples described as skirmishers, but I don't think that quite covers it.
A much better word that I've seen used is "runners."
The Sea Peoples were runners.
They were highly mobile, and weren't locked down into tight little groups like the spearmen
were.
Instead, their way of fighting was to explode outwards in unexpected bursts.
This fact made the Sea Peoples chariot-killers.
The whole reasons chariots were effective was that they could outrun a person on foot.
But was the same true of 10 people?
100 people?
What if they were coming at them from different directions?
What if they got cut off from the main group?
Chariots couldn't exactly turn on a dime, so it only took 1 wrong move for the Sea Peoples
runners to overwhelm and destroy a chariot.
And like I said, the loss of a single chariot was catastrophic.
The defensive line of spearmen and archers were supposed to protect against something
like this, but in practice the highly mobile Sea Peoples were able to get behind their
lines quite easily.
As a response to these new tactics, defensive lines grew and grew and grew.
It appears that by the end of this period, the armies facing off against the Sea Peoples
were ten times larger than they were at the beginning.
As I said before, towards the end of this period Egypt was pretty much the last state
standing.
Virtually all of its neighbours had fallen to the Sea Peoples.
The inscription at Medinet Habu depicts the final battle against the Sea Peoples, at the
mouth of the Nile.
Look at how the inscription emphasizes how large the Egyptian army had become.
Here's a row of spearmen, and then a row of archers, and here's the Pharaoh Ramses III
personally leading the battle, standing on the bodies of his enemies.
And then of course here's the mighty chariot, prominently displayed, but not playing a decisive
role in the battle.
Clearly the bulk of the fighting was among the spearmen and archers.
In writing we are told that the Egyptians protected the mouth of the Nile by making
a wall out of ships, each loaded with archers.
We're also told that every spearman in Egypt was in position and waiting for the Sea Peoples
to landed on shore.
The inscription at Medinet Habu tells us the result of the battle.
Here are some Sea Peoples taken captive and being lead away.
Here is some unspeakable carnage.
Of course this is a piece of Egyptian propaganda, but we have no reason to doubt that this was
the result.
After so many incredible successes, the Sea Peoples were finally defeated in Egypt.
But even in victory, Egypt suffered.
From this moment forward Egypt was a second-rate power, and even after a thousand years it
had not yet fully recovered.
The fact that Egypt was so badly damaged by the collapse of international trade is a clue.
There has to be more to the story than the Sea Peoples.
Scholars have been pulling at this thread for the last few decades, and the evidence
is convincing.
Bronze Age civilizations needed bronze.
Obviously.
Without a constant supply, many of their cutting-edge technologies began to deteriorate.
Bronze is made by combining 9 parts copper with 1 part tin.
Copper is a relatively common metal, but it's difficult to mine.
Most of these Bronze Age civilizations ran their own small mining operations, but the
real action was in Cyprus.
Cyprus was absolutely swimming in copper, and mining it was dead easy.
This transformed the island into a fabulously wealthy hub of international trade.
That brings us to tin.
Tin is funny, because it's actually extremely rare, and it's not evenly distributed across
the Earth.
There was a tiny tin mine in Anatolia, controlled by the Hittites, but it didn't produce nearly
enough to supply the entire region.
After that, there weren't that many options.
The next closest major source was all the way over in modern Afghanistan, more than
3,000 kilometers away.
You can just imagine how expensive and dangerous it was to haul tin all the way from Afghanistan
to Cyprus.
There were alternative sources, but it was tough.
There was a smaller mine in Italy, and another small mine in Spain, but these alone couldn't
meet demand.
There wasn't another deposit on the scale of the Afghanistan mine until you get all
the way to Cornwall on the Island of Britain.
It might shock you to learn that people actually made this trip.
It was a risky voyage, but if you made it back it was worth it.
So as you can see, any disruption in this supply chain meant that it was no longer possible
for Bronze Age civilizations to produce bronze.
Which by very definition was a problem.
So the argument goes that the Sea Peoples attacks disrupted international trade, slowed
down the production of bronze, and weakened every state in the region.
It was a vicious cycle.
More attacks meant less trade.
Less trade made everybody even more vulnerable to additional attacks.
As the Bronze Age states collapsed, the situation grew more and more dire.
But there might have been more to this story.
Even if you put the whole international trade angle to the side, this entire region may
have been much weaker than it seemed.
According to experts, the migration of the Sea Peoples coincided with a 50-year period
where Western Asia was riddled with massive earthquakes.
I'm no scientist, but that seems bad.
It's possible that these earthquakes were absolutely wrecking the economy in the region.
Some of the cities that were abandoned for mysterious reasons may have in fact been abandoned
after a seismic event.
There's at least some evidence of earthquakes destroying cities in Greece, Anatolia, the
Levant, and Cyprus.
Greece seems to have got the worst of it.
Egypt got off easy, which is an interesting fact considering that they were the only major
state left standing.
Maybe the earthquakes played a role.
So what brought the Sea Peoples here?
For a long time, scholars guessed that some kind of famine in northern Europe caused a
domino effect of southward migrations, culminating with the Sea Peoples packing up and fleeing
across the Mediterranean Sea.
This always made sense on paper, but there was very little evidence to support this theory.
Until now.
We now know that around this time there was some kind of environmental emergency.
It turns out that, as predicted, northern Europe was badly affected by this, which would
have caused that domino effect.
But the surprising thing is that the effects were even more severe in the eastern Mediterranean.
We now have ancient pollen samples from northern Syria, which seem to point towards a "dry
event" lasting for 300 years, beginning just before the Bronze Age Collapse.
Pollen samples have also been taken from Cyprus, where things were even worse.
These samples indicate that environmental changes were so severe in Cyprus that there
was no longer enough rainfall to sustain even basic agricultural activity.
This would have been catastrophic.
It may explain why some of the cities were abandoned before the Sea Peoples came.
Similar things have been found in the Levant, Anatolia, and Greece.
In fact, in Greece there's evidence that over hundreds of years, plants that were evolving
to survive a desert-like environment.
Some of the letters we find in the city of Ugarit support this finding.
Apparently during one of the invasions there were crop failures across the entire Hittite
Empire.
One letter to from the Hittite King to the King of Ugarit makes an urgent request for
grain, ending with "it is a matter of life and death!"
There's another letter from the nearby city of Emar, written during one of the later invasions.
It reads, "there is famine in [our] house; we will all die of hunger.
If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger.
You will not see a living soul from your land."
If these reports of an environmental emergency are true, and we think they are, the Bronze
Age civilizations may have been in a state of crisis before the Sea Peoples even arrived.
The best current analysis of the Bronze Age Collapse has landed on something called the
Systems Collapse Theory.
According to the Systems Collapse Theory, the arrival of the Sea Peoples was actually
a medium level threat.
Under normal circumstances, the Bronze Age civilizations should have been able to fight
them off.
But they weren't living under normal circumstances.
Changes to the climate had resulted in widespread famine across the region.
This resulted in the depopulation of key cities.
The famine and the depopulation then lead to internal instability, where some local
populations rose up and overthrew their ruling classes.
We have evidence that this happened with some frequency over this period, especially in
Greece.
These factors and the Sea Peoples invasions caused a collapse in the international trade
system, which just made everything all the worse.
Oh yeah, and the region was absolutely riddled with earthquakes.
The Bronze Age civilizations in Western Asia were dealing with 5 crises at once, with each
crisis creating a multiplier effect for all the other ones.
And then the Sea Peoples came.
We still don't fully understand how or why the Bronze Age abruptly ended, and perhaps
we never will, but the Systems Collapse Theory is pretty good.
One thing that I will point out though is that for all over its clever work collecting
pollen samples and studying ancient seismology, the Systems Collapse Theory does slightly
de-emphasize the destruction wrought upon the Bronze Age civilizations.
The fact that countless cities were destroyed is undeniable.
We have the physical evidence.
The Systems Collapse Theory argues that less of these were destroyed by the Sea Peoples
than originally thought.
And this might be right!
We have all that evidence of environmental changes and earthquakes.
But we don't know for sure.
Scholarship in this area is ongoing.
There have been significant breakthroughs just within the last 10 years.
We may see some definitive answers in our lifetimes.
But for now, we don't know.
We see the aftermath of the Bronze Age collapse, but when it comes to the root cause, all we
have are theories.
Upon closer examination, I think these guys are still alive, and I think they're licking
somebody's foot.
Nasty!