GoKawiilThis 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.
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