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The Bronze Age continued in the Aegean region, Egypt and the Near East for almost two thousand years, from 3000 BC. Until 1200 a. When the end came, after centuries of cultural and technological development, the situation in most of the worlds of the civilized and international regions of the Mediterranean ended in a tragic end in a vast area stretching from Greece and Italy in the west to Egypt, the region of Canaan and Mesopotamia in the east. Soon, great empires and small kingdoms that had taken centuries to develop. In the end, a period of transition came, and researchers saw it as the first dark age the world was going through. Centuries passed before a new cultural renaissance appeared in Greece and other affected areas, paving the way for the development of Western society in the way we know it today.
Although the book “1177 BC: The Year of the Collapse of Civilization” (2014) by Erik H. Klein (Arabic translation of “The Hindawi Foundation” – 2020) deals mainly with the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations and the factors that led to that collapse more than three thousand years ago, but it may contain lessons that can benefit our contemporary societies that are global in nature and transcend national boundaries. Some might think that there could be no comparison between the world of the late Bronze Age and our current technology-based culture. However, there are enough similarities between the two. Aspects that include diplomatic missions and the prohibition of economic trade; Kidnappings and ransoms, murders and real murders; Luxury weddings and unpleasant divorces; International conspiracies and deliberate military disinformation; Climate change and drought; And even a ship or two crashes, making it necessary to take a closer look at events, people, and places from a time that existed more than three thousand years ago; It is more than an academic process related to the study of ancient history.
In the contemporary global economy, and in a world devastated by earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan and the “Arab Spring” attacks in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the wealth and investments of the United States and Europe are intertwined within of a global system that also includes oil-producing countries in East Asia and the Middle East; There may be many lessons to be learned from examining the scattered remains of ancient civilizations that also overlapped before completely collapsing.
The book begins with the invasion of the Sea Peoples of Egypt in 1177 BC. C., and moves from that point to other places and previous years. It takes us back to the Final Bronze Age in the glorious days of the 15th century BC and explores a wide variety of civilizations from Mesopotamia to Greece, and from occupied Palestine to the Hittites. Then blow through the centuries at the methods, characters, and events that have undermined a world. Warriors entered the world scene and moved rapidly, leaving death and destruction in their wake. Contemporary researchers refer to them collectively as “the Peoples of the Sea”, but the Egyptians who recorded their attack on Egypt never used this term, identifying them instead as separate groups working together: the Philistines, the Tigiker, the Shiklich, the chardana, danana and wishes; They are names with a foreign signature for people with foreign characteristics. Other than what the Egyptian records tell us, we know very little about these people. We are not sure where the Peoples of the Sea came from, perhaps from Sicily, Sardinia and Italy, according to one hypothesis, or perhaps from the Aegean or western Anatolia, or perhaps they even came from the eastern Mediterranean. No ancient site has ever been identified as the place of their origin or of their departure. We believe that they were constantly moving from one place to another, crossing countries and kingdoms as they passed. According to Egyptian texts, they established a camp in Syria before continuing along the coast of the Canaan region (which includes parts of present-day Syria, Lebanon, and occupied Palestine) and Egypt’s Nile Delta.
Earlier scholars tended to attribute any devastation in this period to the Sea Peoples. However, it may be pretentious to blame them for the end of the Bronze Age, in the Aegean and in the eastern Mediterranean. This is likely to give these peoples undignified importance. We have no clear evidence, except for Egyptian texts and inscriptions, which give contradictory impressions. Were the Peoples of the Sea heading to the eastern Mediterranean in the form of a relatively organized army, as one of the most disciplined crusades attempting to seize the Holy Land during the Middle Ages? Were these peoples in the form of a poorly organized group of raiders, like the Vikings who appeared in a later age? Or were they refugees fleeing the disaster and looking for new countries? As far as we know, a truth can be a mixture of all or none of the above.
However, the Peoples of the Sea, throughout decades of scientific research, have been a convenient scapegoat, taking the blame for a situation that was perhaps much more complex and not the cause. Now things are changing; Many scholars have finally made it clear that the ‘story’ of the catastrophic wave of destruction of the Sea Peoples and / or their migration was invented by researchers such as Gaston Maspero, the famous French Egyptologist, from the 1860s and 1970s, and it took hold in 1901. However, it was a theory based only on textual evidence regarding the inscriptions, long before these destroyed sites were actually excavated. Indeed, even the researchers who followed Maspero’s example were divided as to the direction the Sea Peoples took. Some of them believed that these peoples ended up in the western Mediterranean region after their defeat at the hands of the Egyptians, and they did not start from there.
The book begins with the invasion of the Sea Peoples of Egypt in 1177 BC and carries over to other places and years earlier.
The current view is that it is possible that the Sea Peoples were responsible for some of the destruction that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but it is more likely that a continuum of events, both human and natural, including climate change and droughts, and seismic disasters known as seismic storms. Incidents of internal rebellion and the “collapse of systems” combined to form a “perfect storm” that ended this era. However, to understand the magnitude of the events that occurred around 1177 BC. C., we must begin a study three centuries earlier, as the book quotes.
For more than 300 years during the Late Bronze Age, roughly from Hatshepsut’s reign beginning around 1500 BC to the moment when it all fell apart after 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region was home to a complex international world in which they interacted. Minoans, Messenians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Babylonians. The Titans, the Canaanites, the Cypriots and the Egyptians formed a system characterized by a global and global character, something that was hardly seen before our time. Perhaps it was that same universalism that contributed to the overwhelming catastrophe that ended the Bronze Age.
It seems that the civilizations of the Near East, Egypt and Greece were intertwined and interdependent on each other so closely in 1177 BC. C. that the fall of one of them finally led to the fall of the others. Prosperous civilizations have been destroyed, one after another, by human action, by nature, or by a deadly mixture of both.
Finally, the book acknowledges our inability to determine with certainty the cause (of the multiple causes) of the collapse of civilizations and the transition from the end of the Final Bronze Age to the Iron Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, or even definitively identify the origins and motives of the Peoples of the Sea. Furthermore, as Christopher Monroe said, “all civilizations are ultimately subject to a violent restructuring of material and ideological realities such as destruction or reconfiguration.” We are witnessing this in the continual rise and fall of empires throughout time, including the Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Mongols, Ottomans, and others, and we should not think that our world today is far from it. Because we are more vulnerable than we would like to think.
While the collapse of the Wall Street Stock Exchange in 2008 in the United States and the Crown pandemic decline compared to the collapse and plague of the Mediterranean world throughout the Late Bronze Age, the current world order may have reached a decisive turning point, the point at which a crisis gradually turns into a complete collapse. And it becomes difficult for governments to contain it. And in a system as complex as ours today, this is all it would take for the entire system to destabilize and lead to collapse.
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