This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system across the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East during the 12th century (that is, the 1100s) BC. In the broader Mediterranean world, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is the event that probably comes closest to a true ‘end of civilization’ event – meaningfully more severe than the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West (although as we’ll see LBAC is also not as ‘total’ of a collapse as was sometimes supposed).

This is going to be, by our standards here, something of a brief overview, roughly the equivalent to the lecture I give to my students when we cover this period (with a bit more detail, because text is more compressed). A full ‘deep dive’ of all of the debates and open questions of this period would no doubt run quite a few posts and more importantly really ought to be written by specialists in the bronze age. This is also a very archaeologically driven topic, which makes it more sensitive than most to new evidence – archaeological site work, but also epigraphic evidence (mostly on clay tablets) – that can change our understanding of events. As we’ll see, our understanding has changed a fair bit.

So what we’ll do is run through what we know about what happened in the collapse (which is the most visible part of it) and then we’ll loop back to the question of causes (which remain substantially uncertain) and then finally look at the long-term impacts of the collapse, which are considerable.

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The (Partial?) Collapse

We need to be clear, to begin with, that while we have scattered fragments of epigraphic evidence (that is, inscriptions), almost all of our evidence for the Late Bronze Age Collapse is archaeological. Without archaeology, we would remain largely in the dark about this event. But archaeological evidence also brings with it challenges: it can tell you what is happening (sometimes) but often not why and dating with precision can be challenging. Most of what we’re tracking in understanding LBAC is site destruction, identified by the demolition of key buildings or ‘destruction layers’ (often a thin layer of ash or rubble indicating the site was burned or demolished), but dating these precisely can be difficult and there are always challenges of interpretation.

With that said, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is a sequence of site destructions visible archaeologically from c. 1220 BC to c. 1170 BC, which are associated with the collapse or severe decline of the major states of the region (the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East). We generally conceptualize these destrictions as a ‘wave’ moving in sequence beginning in the Aegean, moving over Anatolia, sweeping down the Levant and arriving in Egypt but in many cases my sense is the chronology is more complex than that. Many sites in the path of this ‘wave’ were not destroyed, with some declining slowly and others declining not much at all; other sites (I have in mind Tiryns) see the destruction of their political center but the decline of the urban settlement around it happens slowly or later.

First, we ought to set the stage of the Late Bronze Age. What really marks out the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC to c. 1200 BC) from earlier periods is that the emerging state systems in Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia and Egypt had expanded to the point of coming quite fully into contact with each other, with a significant degree of diplomatic, economic and cultural interconnectedness, to the point that we sometimes refer to the ‘Late Bronze Age Concert of Powers’ (evoking 19th century European balance of power politics) when talking informally about them.

Via Wikimedia Commons map (in Spanish, there wasn’t an English version, but it will do) of the rough political situation in the 1200s BCE. The Hittite Empire (labeled as the ‘Hatti,’ another name it went by, after another major ethnic group within it) in Anatolia, the Assyrian (Asiria) Empire in N. Mesopotamia, Kassite Babylon (Babilonia) in S. Mesopotamia and (New Kingdom) Egypt.

Now I should caution, we often provide these nice neat maps of the Late Bronze Age powers (and they’re useful to a degree) but the borders of these states were quite fuzzy – their outer ‘possessions’ were often tributaries under the rule of local kings which might be weakly attached to the imperial center. Nevertheless, going from East to West: southern Mesopotamia was dominated by the ‘Middle Babylonian’ Empire, ruled by the Kassite dynasty (the Kassites being an ethnic group who had taken power around 1530 BC) while northern Mesopotamia was dominated by the Middle Assyrian Empire (from about c. 1350 BC). Anatolia and the Northern Levant was controlled by the multi-ethnic Hittite Empire, which seems to have sparred regularly with the New Kingdom of Egypt which controlled Egypt and the southern Levant. Basically all of these powers had less settled, often pastoral peoples in their hinterlands which presented on-going security challenges for them.

These larger imperial states were more economically complex as well. In particular, their large armies required significant amount of bronze which – because its core ingredients of tin and copper effectively never occur in the same place – demanded substantial long-distance trade, though trade was hardly only in copper and tin, but also included other high value goods and even (where feasible) bulk staples. So while these powers clashed regularly, at the elite level (if not at the level of the subsistence economy) they were also reliant on each other to some degree.

Finally, at the edge of this state system is the Mediterranean and especially the Aegean. In the Aegean – in Greece and Crete especially – we see effectively miniature versions of these state structures, complete with (by Near Eastern Standards) itty-bitty palaces (the Minoan urban centers on Crete had come under Mycenean (=Greek) rule in c. 1450, the palaces there largely abandoned). Cyprus shifted between being nominally subordinate to either the Hitties of the Egyptians but seems to have mostly run its own affairs and was integrated through trade into the state system.

This is a slide I use when teaching the Late Bronze Age (particularly in Greece), contrasting the entire settlement and palace complexes (essentially the entire urban core) at Knossos (the largest Minoan palace) and Tiryns (one of the larger Mycenean palaces) to scale with Karnak, the main temple complex outside of Thebes, Egypt, to make the point that you could fit the entire urban core of major Greek and Minoan bronze age settlements inside individual monumental structures in their Near Eastern equivalents.

As noted above, LBAC starts perhaps as early as 1220 or so, and what we see in very rough sequence is as follows.

As far as I know, we still generally think the earliest rumblings are instability in the Mycenean Greek palace states. Things had been unstable in this area for a few decades and we have some scattered destructions (Thebes) and intensified fortifications around 1250, suggesting things were not going great in Greece. Then from c. 1200 to c. 1180 we see the destruction or collapse of basically all of the palace centers in Greece. In some cases the urban core continues for a while, in other cases it doesn’t – in a number of cases, once the site is abandoned, it is not reinhabited (e.g. Mycenae itself, the largest of the palace centers).

Via Wikipedia, a map of major Mycenaean palace centers and proposed palace states.

As we’ll see below, the impact in Greece is greater than basically anywhere else because the collapse of the LBAC is more severe in Greece than basically anywhere else.

Meanwhite, the Hittite Empire was itself not in good shape when this started. As far as we know, the Hittites were very much on the ‘back foot’ in the late 1200s, pressured by the Assyrians and Egypt and so potentially already short on resources when their neighbors to the West began imploding. As far as I know, precise dates are hard to nail down for this, but the Hittite Empire in the early 1100s comes apart under pressure and by 1170 or so it is gone. That collapse of imperial power is matched by a significant number of site destructions across Anatolia, including the Hittite capital at Hattusas and the large settlement at modern Hisarlik, now fairly securely identified as ancient Troy. Some (like Troy) were rebuilt, others (like Hattusas) were not, but centralized Hittite power was gone and there’s a marked reduction in urbanization and probably population.

Moving into the Northern Levant, Syria and Northern Mesopotamia, we see Assyrian power – which had been advancing before, you’ll recall – contract sharply alongside more site destructions, though again chronology is tricky. One of the key sites here is Ugarit, a major Bronze Age Levantine coastal city which was destroyed c. 1190 – before the last of the Mycenean palaces (but after the first of them). The city’s destruction in fire preserved clay tablets with diplomatic messages from the local king of Ugarit (a Hittite vassal) frantically writing to his Hittite superiors for reinforcements in the face of significant (but frustratingly unnamed) threats prior to the destruction of the city.

That said, destruction in the Fertile Crescent is very uneven. The Middle Assyrian Empire contracts, but does not collapse, while the Kassite Dynasty in Babylon clearly suffers some decline, but largely stabilizes by the 1160s before being run over by the Elamites in the 1150s. Site destrictions in the Levant are uneven and some key Bronze Age centers like Sidon and Byblos were not destroyed and remained major centers into the Iron Age.1 My understanding is that while there was significant decline in the southern Levant, it is hard to pin any specific large-scale site destruction to the 1220-1170 period.

Finally we reach Egypt in a period we refer to as the ‘New Kingdom’ (1570-1069); we can trace politics more clearly here due to surviving Egyptian inscriptions. Egypt was also in a weakened position going into this crisis, facing pressure from Libyan raiders coming overland from the West and also some internal instability. In c. 1188, civil war broke out as the last queen of the reigning 19th dynasty was unable to retain control, leading to revolt and the seizure of power by Setnakhte and the 20th dynasty; his son Ramesses III took power in c. 1185. Things didn’t get easier from there as we hear reports of renewed Libyan incursions in c. 1180 (coming from the west) followed almost immediately by an invasion by the ‘sea peoples’ (see below) who were evidently fended off in at least two major battles, the Battle of the Delta (c. 1179ish?) and the Battle of Djahy (c. 1178ish?).

Egypt holds together, but there’s a fair bit of evidence economic strain (likely climate based, see below) and the ability of Egypt to project power outside of Egypt seems largely spent by the end of the reign of Ramesses III; his successors do not appear to have been able to right the ship and Egyptian power continued to fragment and decline, with the dynasty stumbling on until it collapsed in 1077 leading to the Third Intermediate Period (‘Intermediate Periods’ are the term for periods of fragmentation within Egypt).

I should note in this overview that our understanding of this sequence of collapses and declines has changed significantly. The idea of the Late Bronze Age Collapse has been around since the early 1800s when historians first noticed that the end of the Greek ‘Age of Heroes’ (linked by them to the Fall of Troy, which the (Classical) Greeks believed happened in 1184) seemed to map neatly on to the failure of the Egyptian 19th Dynasty. As archaeologists in the later 1800s and early 1900s started actually excavating the Greek ‘Age of Heroes’ (thus discovering the (Mycenaean) Greek Late Bronze Age, which we term the ‘Late Helladic’ period (c. 1700-c. 1040 BC)) and then finding site destructions dateable within a band of perhaps 1250 to 1150 BC in Greece, Anatolia, Syria and the Levant the idea of a general collapse around the legendary date for the Fall of Troy picked up a lot of steam.

My sense of the scholarship is that this ‘civilizational collapse’ narrative has been drawn back a bit as it becomes clear that some sites were not destroyed and also that some site destructions or abandonments happened significantly later or earlier than the relatively tight 1220-1170 BC time frame that emerged for the core of the collapse. No one (that I know of) is arguing there was no LBAC – there was clearly an LBAC – but the scale of the collapse remains something of a moving target as we excavate more sites, adding them to lists of sites that were destroyed, declined or (sometimes seemingly randomly) were spared.

And the list of sites that were not destroyed is significant. Of note, Athens very clearly has a Mycenaean citadel on the Acropolis (which can’t be excavated because the Acropolis is in the way, but it is very obviously there) but there’s no break in settlement in Athens. Already mentioned, Byblos and Sidon remained very prominent centers before and after, while Jerusalem and Tyre, both apparently minor settlements before LBAC (and not destroyed) will become increasingly prominent in the Iron Age Levant. Likewise the great cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia remain, few to no site destructions in either regions. At the same time, many settlements that escape destruction do not escape decline: in many cases these cities continue to shrink (and some places that escape destruction, like Tiryns, shrink slowly rather than vanishing all at once) or grow visibly poorer in a longer process. So the moment of destruction comes with a long ‘tail’ of decline stretching out decades.

So to summarize, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is a series of site destructions, abandonments and declines running from roughly 1220 to roughly 1170 (though decline continues after this point) distributed quite unevenly through the interconnected Late Bronze Age Mesopotamian-and-Eastern-Mediterranean world. Greece and Anatolia are severely impacted, the Levant somewhat less but still fairly strongly, while the states of Egypt and Mesopotamia do not collapse but enter long periods of decline.

What that description leaves out, of course, are causes and effects.

Bad Theories

While the ‘what’ of LBAC can be pinned down fairly conclusively with archaeology, the ‘why’ is tougher – a lot of potential causes (wars, armies, civil unrest) don’t necessarily leave a lot of clues in our source material.

There are a few theories we can largely discount at the outset though. The older of these were theories that assumed that the cause of at least some of the Late Bronze Age Collapse were large-scale migrations of people into (rather than within) the settled, urban zone we’ve been talking about, in particular the idea of a ‘Dorian Invasion’ of Greece as the spark of the collapse. Proposed in the 1800s, the idea here was that the ‘Dorians’ – the ancestors of the Greeks – would have migrated into Greece, destroying the Mycenaean cities and palaces and displacing or dominating the previous (non-Greek) inhabitants. This notion was based on mixed and competing ideas within (Classical) Greek literature: Greek authors both expressed the idea of the Greeks being autochthonous (indigenous to their territory, literally ‘[arising] on their own from the earth’) and also being invaders, arriving at some point forty to eighty years after the Trojan War (e.g. Thuc. 1.12; Hdt. 1.56-58). That idea got picked up by 19th century European scholars who, to be frank, often thought uncritically in terms of population migration and replacement, through an often explicitly racist lens of ‘superior stock’ driving out ‘inferior stock.’ And so they imagined a ‘Dorian invasion’ of the (racially) ‘superior’ Greek-speaking Dorians2 driving out the pre-Greek Mycenaean population, particularly in the Peloponnese.

As an aside, it is not uncommon for a single society to utilize both legendary myths of autochthony and arrival-by-conquest, choosing whichever is more useful in the moment, even though they are obviously, from a logical standpoint, mutually incompatible.

Archaeology has fundamentally undermined this theory – nuked it from orbit, really – in two key ways. First, we have Mycenaean writing, which was discovered in a strange script called Linear B (Minoan writing is Linear A). Originally unreadable to us, in 1952 Michael Ventris successfully demonstrated that Linear B was, in fact, Greek (rendered in a different, older script) and so the Mycenaeans were Greeks. Meanwhile a wide range of archaeologists and material culture scholars, as more late Helladic and early Archaic pottery and artwork emerged, were able to demonstrate there simply was no discontinuity in material culture. The Greeks could not be arriving at the end of the Bronze Age because they were already there and had been for centuries at least. Migrations within the Eastern Mediterranean might still play a role, but the idea that the collapse was caused by the arrival of the Greeks has been decisively abandoned. There was no Dorian Invasion.

Via Wikipedia, a Linear B Tablet, now in the National Archaeological Museum at Athens. You can see that the script is very much not the modern Greek script (which did not yet exist when this tablet was written) but the spoken language those characters represent is a very old form of Greek, as demonstrated by Michael Ventris.

The other cause we can probably dismiss is a single, sudden natural calamity. There are two candidates here to note. The first is simply people confusing the major eruption of Thera (c. 1600) which is sometimes associated with the decline of the Minoan Palaces (though the chronology doesn’t really work well there either) with LBAC. The second is effort to connect the eruption of Hekla in Iceland with LBAC. The problem again is that the chronology does not appear to work out – estimates for the dating of the Hekla eruption range from 1159 to 929 with the consensus being, as I understand it, closer to 1000 BC. For our part, the range doesn’t matter much – even that earliest 1159 date would mean that Hekla’s massive eruption could hardly explain the collapse of Mycenean palaces happening at least forty years earlier. Climate played a role in LBAC, but it is not clear that volcanic climate influence did and it is very clear that Hekla did not (though perhaps it contributed to make a bad decline worse.

So no ‘Dorian Invasions’ and no volcanoes, so what did cause it?

Causes of LBAC

We have no firm answers, but a number of plausible theories and at this point my sense is that just about everyone working on this period adopts some variation of ‘all of the above’ from this list.

We can start with climate. For reasons there’s been quite a lot of research into historical climate conditions and we can actually get a sense of those conditions to a degree archaeology from things like tree rings (where very narrow rings can indicate dry years or otherwise unfavorable conditions). I don’t work on historical climate, but my understanding is there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC, especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).3 And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.

Crop failures may have been particularly politically volatile because of the structure and values of the kind of Near Eastern states (to include Anatolia and Greece here) that we’re dealing with. We haven’t discussed early bronze age states very much but the evidence we have suggests that these were significantly centralized states, with a lot – not all, but a lot – of the resources moving through either state (read: royal) structures or through temple institutions which might as well have been state structures. Which is to say these are societies where the king and the temples (which report to the king) own most of the land and so harness most of the agricultural surplus through rents and then employ the lion’s share of non-agricultural labor, redistributing their production. Again, I don’t want to overstate this – there is a ‘private sector’ in these economies – but it seems (our evidence is limited!) to be comparatively small.

Meanwhile, the clearly attested religious role of the king in a lot of these societies includes a responsibility – often the paramount responsibility – to maintain the good relations of the community with the gods (who provide the rain and make the plants grow).

Repeated crop failures are thus going to be seen as a sign that the King is falling down on the job. Worse yet, they’ll have come at the same time as the King found himself strained to maintain his bureaucrats and soldiers, because the entire top-heavy royal administration this system relies on is fed off of the surplus it extracts.

It is not hard to see how this is a recipe for political instability if large states do not have the resources to fall back on to respond to the crisis.

To which some scholars have noted that the period directly leading up to LBAC seems to have been a period of intensifying warfare: we hear of larger armies operating in the wars in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Levant and we see massively greater investment in fortification in the Aegean all suggesting that the states are pouring resources into warfare. That may have left these states with fewer resources (idle labor, stored grain, money-covertable valuables or simply reserves of public goodwill since long years of high taxes in long wars tends to tire people out) with which to confront a sudden wave of combined political unrest and food shortage.

What is clear is that once the collapse started, it was contagious, likely for two reasons: first that collapsing areas produced invading forces and refugee flows that destabilized their neighbors and second because as you will recall above, these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze) as well as to acquire key prestige goods necessary to maintain the loyalty of the aristocracy.

The clearest evidence of this are the reports in Egyptian inscriptions of peoples grouped under the modern heading of ‘Sea Peoples’ because they are often described as being ‘of the sea’ in one way or another. The evidence here is tricky: what we have are a set of inscriptions, spanning from 1210 through to the mid-1100s describing fighting against – and, this being Egyptian royal writing, invariably the victory of a Pharaoh over – a range of invading peoples. What is tricky is these reports cover multiple periods of fighting and they’re using Egyptian names for these people meaning we’re not always entirely confident that we can tell who exactly the Egyptians meant to identify.

Via Wikipedia, an Egyptian decorated inscription from the Medinet Habu showing the Pharaoh (Ramesses III triumphing over enemies from the North, likely the ‘Sea Peoples’ named in other inscriptions.

Generally, however, what we seem to be seeing is increased pressure on Egypt from c. 1205 to c. 1170 from multi-ethnic coalitions of peoples drawn from the Aegean, Anatolia and the Levant. In particular, inscriptions from the reign of Merneptah (r. 1213-1203) report attacks by the Ekwesh (possibly an Egyptian rendering of Achaioi, ‘Achaean,’ meaning Greek) along with the Lukka (an Anatolian people), the Sherden (probably a Levantine people, perhaps the Philistines) and others even harder to pin down like the Shekelesh (more Anatolians? Sicels? other people on boats?). Later inscriptions from the reign of Ramesses III (r. 1185-1154) report relatively early in his reign victories against coalitions that include the Denyen (possibly an Egyptian rendering of ‘Danaioi,’ meaning Greek), the Sherden (again), the Shekelesh (again), the Peleset (Levantine people, probably Philistines) and others.

The way this evidence is generally read – and this seems the most plausible explanation – is that the disruptions in the Aegean, Anatolia and Levant may have themselves produced armed mass-migrations, moving by sea (these were all sea-faring peoples), perhaps looking for safe harbor. Or perhaps quite literal bands of raiders – the collapse of state structures in Greece and Anatolia might well have left a lot of full-time violence-doers without steady employment and going raiding may have been a natural recourse for some. There is some sense in Hittite documents, for instance that the ‘Ahhiyawa’ (Hittite rendering for Achaioi, meaning Greek) might have been an hostile neighbors to the Hittites and given how heavily militarized elite Mycenaean culture seems to have been, it wouldn’t be shocking if they regularly went on seaborne raids (though, again, the evidence here is very thin).

Meanwhile, while trade does not completely stop, it certainly seems to be reduced by the collapse of these states, possibly interrupting the supply of key goods – the most obvious being bronze – and any state revenues derived from taxing trade (which they did).

Consequently the ‘consensus’ vision – which remains to a degree conjectural, although it is the ‘best fit’ for the evidence – runs roughly like this:

• Intensifying warfare in the E. Mediterranean and Mesopotamia may have reduced the resources available for major states to confront a crisis and perhaps were already associated with some kind of unrest.
• A shift to a drier climate causes harvest failures which begin to push the teetering states over the edge into collapse.
• In Greece, the palace states begin to collapse one by one – probably from internal strains (e.g. an oppressed peasantry) rather than external invasion.
  • Because the ‘palace economy’ was so central (and employed a lot of people, including a lot of warriors), collapse within Greece may have been contagious as raids and refugees spawned by collapsing palace systems fatally strained others.
• Those collapses in turn begin to disrupt trade but also produce outward movements of refugees and/or raiders, which may in part be what is being ‘remembered’ in Homer’s account of the Trojan War or the broader Greek mythological assumption that the Trojan War marks the end of the ‘Age of Heroes’ (which is how the Classical Greeks understood this period).
• That same strain hits the already ailing Hittite Empire, strained by wars and defeats in the Levant against the Egyptians and Assyrians. Battered by harvest failures and increasing raids (such as those Ugarit is crying for help from), Hittite power collapses.
• The states of the Northern Levant, under pressure already now lose their protector, while the other major states of the region (Egypt, Assyria, Kassite Babylon) lose a key trade partner and at least some access to tin in particular (required for bronze).
• The resulting economic contraction produces internal instability (Nineteenth dynasty replaced by Twentieth in Egypt) and combined with further raiding/refugee pressures, all of these imperial powers contract into their homelands, no longer able to project power far afield.
• In Babylon, the Kassites more or less stabilize by the 1160s, but in a weakened state, are overrun by the Elamites – a perpetual local threat – in the 1150s. In Egypt there’s a moment of recovery and stability under Ramesses III of the new Twentieth Dynasty, but further succession disputes – perhaps in part motivated by bad economic conditions – lead to power fragmenting until central rule collapses in the early 1070s. Assyrian power contracts back to the Assyrian homeland in Northern Mesopotamia, but the state survives, to reemerge as a staggeringly major power in the early Iron Age.

You will of course note that we can observe all of these stages only very imperfectly: we’re working with fragmentary letters, inscriptions that are often unreliable and often very good archaeology that can tell us what happened (‘this palace was burned and all of the finery was dumped in a well’) but not why.

The Effects of the Collapse

Just as the collapse itself was uneven – some states and settlements destroyed, others largely spared – so too its effects were uneven, so we might do a brief rundown by region.

But first I want to note the effect the collapse has on our evidence. In many places, I compare it to a lightning bolt at night that takes out the power. Immediately before the collapse, it was dim, but there was some light: though deep in the past, we have large states that are creating records and inscribing things on stone some small portion of which survive; we can’t see anywhere near as well as we can during the last millennium BC, but we can see some things. Then the collapse hits like that bolt of lightning and we suddenly get a lot of evidence at once. Destruction layers are often archaeologically rich (things get deposited that wouldn’t normally) and when, for instance, someone burns an archive full of clay tablets, that fires the clay tablets in ceramic, which can survive. Meanwhile it is easier to excavate sites that were abandoned and not re-inhabited: they probably don’t have major modern cities on them and you don’t have to excavate carefully through centuries of dense, continuous habitation to get down to the bronze age level.

But then in many areas – especially Greece – we are plunged into a lot of darkness. The states that were producing written records are either much smaller or gone entirely. Reduced at the same time is trade in goods that we can use to see long-distance cultural connections. And in many cases poorer societies build in wood and mudbrick rather than stone; the latter survives far better than the former to be observed archaeologically.

The Aegean and mainland Greece – that is, the Mycenaean Greeks – were evidently hit hardest by the collapse. Much like Britain when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West, being on the very edge of the state system as it came apart left them evidently far more isolated with a much more severe decline. Large-scale stone building effectively vanishes in Greece and won’t reappear until the Archaic period (750-480), which in turn makes it much harder to observe things like settlement patterns during the intervening period, sometimes termed the Greek Dark Age (1100-750; many archaeologists of the period dislike this term for obvious reasons). But from what we can see, Greece seems to largely deurbanize in this period, although at least one Mycenaean center survives – Athens. That may in turn explain to some degree why Athens is such a big polis in terms of its territory by the time we can see it clearly in the Archaic.

Perhaps most shockingly, mainland Greece loses writing. The Mycenaean palaces had developed a syllabic script, which we call Linear B, to represent their spoken Greek. This form of writing is entirely lost. In the 8th century, the Greeks will adopt an entirely new script – borrowing the one the Phoenicians are using – to represent their language and we (and they) will be unable to read Linear B until 1953.

The totality of the collapse of central state institutions in Mycenaean Greece may in part explain the emergence of a political institution as strange as the polis. It is clear that through the Greek ‘Dark Ages’ and the subsequent Archaic period, though Greek communities have ‘kings’ – though called basileis (a word that in the Mycenaean Linear B tablets would mean ‘village chief,’ a subordinate to the actual king in the palace, the wanax, a term Homer uses for Agamemnon and Priam only) – they lack the centralized economic engine of the palace economy and instead have much weaker central governing systems. It is something not quite but perhaps close to a ‘clean slate’ from which to develop new systems of governance that will look very different from what societies to their East had developed.

No other part of the Eastern Mediterranean suffers a civilizational setback quite as intense as in Greece, but perhaps the most significant effect is a period of prolonged political fragmentation in Anatolia and the Levant. These regions had been, over the Late Bronze Age, largely under the control of major imperial powers (Egypt, Assyria, the Hittites), but with those powers removed they have a chance to develop somewhat independently. That period of relative independence is going to slam shut when the Neo-Assyrian Empire – itself a continuation of the Middle Assyrian Empire, recovered from LBAC – reasserts itself in the ninth century, dominating the Levant and even Egypt.

But in the intervening time a number of different smaller societies have a chance to make their own way in the Levant, two of which are going to leave a very large mark. In the northern Levant, this period of fragmentation creates space for the rise of the major Phoenician centers – Byblos, Sidon and Tyre (of which the latter will eventually become the most important). As we’ve discussed, those are going to be the starting point for a wave of Phoenician colonization in the Mediterranean, as Phoenician traders steadily knit Mediterranean trade networks (back) together. They are also, as noted above, using their own phonetic script, the Phoenician alphabet, which is in turn going to form the basic of many other regional scripts. Perhaps most relevant for us, the Greeks will adopt and modifying the Phoenician alphabet to represent their own language and then peoples of pre-Roman Italy will adopt and modify that to make the Old Italic alphabet which in turn becomes the Latin alphabet which is the alphabet in which I am typing right now.

Meanwhile in the southern Levant this period of fragmentation creates the space for the emergence of two small kingdoms whose people are developing a very historically important religion centered on the worship of their God Yahweh. These are, of course, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. We are unusually well informed about the history of these kingdoms because their history was preserved as part of Jewish scripture, although verifying elements of that scripture as historical fact is quite hard – scholars remain divided, for instance, about the existence of an actual ‘united monarchy’ (in scripture under Saul, David and Solomon) which would have existed c. 1000 BC (by contrast the later split kingdoms are attested in Assyrian records). The development of these two kingdoms – and thus the development of all of the Abrahamic faiths – is greatly influenced by this period of fragmentation. Readers who know their Kings and Chronicles may have already pieced together that it is that re-expansion of Assyrian power which will lead to the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in the 720s, while the southern kingdom of Judah persists as a quasi-dependency of Assyria before being dismembered and destroyed finally by the Neo-Babylonian Empire (which replaces the Neo-Assyrian Empire, however briefly) in 597 BC.

Of course the difficult thing in all of this is that it is this initial period, where a lot is clearly forming and brewing in the Eastern Mediterranean that our evidence is significantly weaker than we’d like (again, especially in Greece, but note how much uncertainty we have even in the Levant). The first few centuries of the Iron Age, immediately following the Late Bronze Age Collapse are clearly a very important formative period which are going to set some of the key patterns for events to play out in the rest of antiquity as ‘the curtain goes up’ as it were and we start being able to see those events clearly.

All that said, I have to stress this is really a very basic overview. I am doubtless missing out on some of the latest work in this field (because I am a late/post Iron Age scholar) and in any case a lot of this cannot help but be a fairly basic summary. Perhaps one of these days I can get a Late Bronze Age or early Near Eastern Iron Age specialist to guest-write something more detailed on specific facets of the collapse and its impact.

1. Sidon and Byblos, alongside Tyre (settled in the Bronze Age, but only prominent in the Iron Age) would be the most powerful and prominent Phoenician cities in the early Iron Age.
2. That is, speakers of the Doric dialect of Greek
3. Reduced rainfall in the Armenian highlands could, of course, negatively effect the Tigris and Euphrates, but that’s a ‘less water’ problem as opposed to a ‘no water’ problem.