The various archives of clay tablets attest to connections between any number of rulers and administrators and scribes, often addressing each other ritualistically as “father,” “brother,” “sister,” and the like, implying a somewhat cultish sense of kinship. High-level connections between the kings of different cultures even meant a certain degree of inter-marriage, at least, at the royal level (apart from the merchants and the rulers, we understandably appear to know very little about the day-to-day life of the bulk of these people).
Not only were luxury goods traded by merchants using ships (two shipwrecks dating to this period have been excavated), but there are records of staples such as grain being shipped in times of of famine or shortage (about which more later). In fact, one thing which may be of the greatest surprise to some readers is the degree to which these cultures were interconnected around the basin of the Eastern Mediterranean. The material culture of the era extended beyond clay tablets and the - literally - monumental records of the Egyptian Pharaohs, and it is evident that trade between these cultures thrived. Cline’s story is largely weighted in favour of those cultures which left substantial archives of cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets, some of which were apparently fired inadvertently in the destruction of the cities in which they were made, and therefore preserved. Apart from the Mycenaeans, the Minoans of Crete, and of course the Egyptians, other civilisations make their appearances, including the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mitanni, Ugarites, Hyksos, and others. Many of the names featuring in this cast of players will be familiar to anyone moderately literate in ancient history.
But what we learn from 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Cline’s slim volume (there are 55 pages of citations and notes and bibliography to 185 pages of text, a few illustrations, and maps, which my inner scholar is very pleased with), is a sometimes tantalising look at the world of some three-and-a-half millennia ago, from the 14th to the 12th centuries BCE (Before Common Era*) a time known to historians and archaeologists as the Late Bronze Age. Readers would expect there to be some problems with trying to reconstruct the cultural landscape of the world of 3,000-plus years ago, and they would not be wrong. Cline (Princeton University Press, 2014)Īlmost 150 years later, Eric Cline has taken up that baton to give readers his version of the current state of understanding of that long-ago world, so recent in terms of geologic time, but so very remote from us. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric H.
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