The End of the Bronze Age

Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. - Third Edition

Robert Drews

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691209975
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der griechischen Antike

The Bronze Age came to a close early in the twelfth century b.c. with one of the worst calamities in history: over a period of several decades, destruction descended upon key cities throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, bringing to an end the Levantine, Hittite, Trojan, and Mycenaean kingdoms and plunging some lands into a dark age that would last more than four hundred years. In his attempt to account for this destruction, Robert Drews rejects the traditional explanations and proposes a military one instead.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

Chapter One

THE CATASTROPHE AND ITS CHRONOLOGY

THE END of the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age, in the twelfth century B.C., was one of history’s most frightful turning points. For those who experienced it, it was a calamity. In long retrospect, however, the episode marked a beginning rather than an end, the “dawn time” in which people in Israel, Greece, and even Rome sought their origins. In certain respects that assessment is still valid, for the Age of Iron stands much closer to our own than does the world of the Bronze Age. The metallurgical progress—from bronze to iron—was only the most tangible of the innovations. More significant by far were the development and spread of alphabetic writing, the growth of nationalism, of republican political forms, of monotheism, and eventually of rationalism. These and other historic innovations of the Iron Age have been frequently noted and celebrated.

The bleaker objective of the present book will be a close look at the negative side. In many places an old and complex society did, after all, come to an end ca. 1200 B.C. In the Aegean, the palace-centered world that we call Mycenaean Greece disappeared: although some of its glories were remembered by the bards of the Dark Age, it was otherwise forgotten until archaeologists dug it up. The loss in Anatolia was even greater. The Hittite empire had given to the Anatolian plateau a measure of order and prosperity that it had never known before and would not see again for a thousand years. In the Levant recovery was much faster, and some important Bronze Age institutions survived with little change; but others did not, and everywhere urban life was drastically set back. In Egypt the Twentieth Dynasty marked the end of the New Kingdom and almost the end of pharaonic achievement. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean the twelfth century B.C. ushered in a dark age, which in Greece and Anatolia was not to lift for more than four hundred years. Altogether the end of the Bronze Age was arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the western Roman Empire.¹

The end or transformation of Bronze Age institutions is obviously a topic of enormous dimensions. From the modern perspective it is the disappearance of many of these centuries-old forms that gives the years ca. 1200 B.C. their extraordinary importance. In this book, however, I shall deal with that topic only in passing. My subject here is much more limited and concrete: the physical destruction of cities and palaces. One might object that although the physical destruction was tragic for the occupants of the cities and palaces in question, in itself it need not and should not have entailed the collapse and disappearance of Bronze Age civilization. The razing of Athens in 480 B.C., after all, cleared the ground for the temples of the Periclean city, and the burning of Rome in 387 B.C. was followed directly by an unprecedented burst of Roman expansion. But although the sacking of cities ca. 1200 B.C. was not a sufficient condition for the disappearance of Bronze Age civilization in Greece, Anatolia, and southern Canaan, it was certainly a necessary condition. It is the destruction of sites that I shall therefore try to explain, and this topic is itself enormous. Within a period of forty or fifty years at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the twelfth century almost every significant city or palace in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.

This destruction—which hereafter I shall refer to simply as “the Catastrophe”—I shall review in some detail in chapter 2. Before doing that, however, it will be useful to thread our way chronologically through the period in which the Catastrophe took place. For a chronology we must look to Egypt, since the only narrative history we can write for this period is Egyptian history. Most scholars would agree that there survives at least one documentary source on the Catastrophe, and that is an inscription that Ramesses III put upon the wall of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. This is the famous text, accompanied by pictorial reliefs, in which Ramesses III celebrates the victory that he won over the “Sea Peoples” in his eighth year.² Since Ramesses declares that before attacking Egypt the enemy had already ravaged Hatti, Alashia, and Amor, it is a reasonable assumption that the inscription furnishes a terminus ante quern for at least some of the destruction attested in these places.

Dates for the reign of Ramesses III depend on the accession year chosen for Ramesses II, the illustrious predecessor whose name the young king adopted; and in this study I shall follow the “low” chronology that now seems to be accepted by most Egyptologists. On this chronology, Ramesses the Great ruled from 1279 to 1212, accounting—all by himself—for most of the Nineteenth Dynasty.³ When the old king finally died, close to the age of ninety, he was succeeded by his oldest surviving son, his thirteenth, Merneptah. The latter was, at his accession, “a portly man already in his sixties.”⁴ As king, Merneptah lived another ten or eleven years and was in turn succeeded by one of his sons, either Seti II (whom Merneptah had designated as his successor) or Amenmesse. At any rate, Seti gained the throne not long after Merneptah’s death.

For the first time in decades, Egypt was not ruled by an old man. But the middle-aged Seti II had an unexpectedly short reign. After ruling only six years, Seti died, leaving the succession in some confusion.⁵ His principal wife had been Twosret, but the pair had no surviving son. In the event, Seti’s nominal successor was Siptah, who was still a child or adolescent. Although Siptah was evidently the son of Seti, his mother was not Twosret but Tio, one of his father’s secondary wives, and Siptah must have owed his elevation to the exertions of powerful mentors. Twosret survived the boy, and she herself ruled as pharaoh for at least two years, being only the fourth woman in almost two millennia of Egyptian history to reach the throne. During the reigns of Siptah and Twosret (a period of at least eight years), the power behind the throne seems to have been Bay, a Syrian who had risen to become ”Great Chancellor of the Entire Realm.” With the death of Twosret (the circumstances in which any of these people died are unknown), a man of uncertain origin, Setnakhte, drove “the Syrian” from his position as king-maker and established himself as king. Thus ended the Nineteenth Dynasty and began the Twentieth. Although Setnakhte ruled for only two years, Egypt was fortunate that the upstart had a son as capable as himself: this was the young Ramesses III, who faced the Catastrophe and survived to describe it.

Although the regnal dates for Ramesses III, his father, and their Nineteenth-Dynasty predecessors cannot be precisely fixed, the following seem to be approximately correct:⁶

Nineteenth Dynasty
Ramesses II	1279–1212 B.C.
Merneptah	1212–1203 B.C.
Amenmesse	1203–1202 B.C.
Seti II	1202–1196 B.C.
Siptah	1196–1190 B.C.
Twosret	1190–1188 B.C.
Twentieth Dynasty
Setnakhte	1188–1186 B.C.
Ramesses III	1186–1155 B.C.

On this reckoning, the terminus ante quern for much of the Catastrophe—the crucial eighth year of Ramesses III—will be 1179 B.C. That fits well enough with a recently discovered tablet indicating that Emar (on the Euphrates, downstream from Carchemish) fell in the second year of Melikshipak, king of Babylon.⁷ On J. A. Brinkman’s Mesopotamian chronology, Emar must have been sacked in the 1180s.⁸ An even more recent discovery, this time at Ras Shamra, shows that the rule of Hammurapi, the last king of Ugarit, began when Merneptah was ruling Egypt and extended into the reign of Siptah and Queen Twosret.⁹ The synchronism proves that Ugarit was still standing in 1196 B.C., and suggests that the city was not destroyed before 1190.¹⁰

The relative chronology supplied by Mycenaean pottery must be fit into the absolute framework derived from Egypt. It now seems probable that the transition from LH IIIB to IIIC pottery occurred no earlier than the reign of Queen Twosret. On the low Egyptian chronology this would mean that IIIB pottery was still being produced ca. 1190 B.C.¹¹ Since that is only a terminus post quern, and since it is likely that a few years elapsed between the last of the IIIB wares and the resumption of pottery making in the Argolid, the earliest IIIC pots probably were not made before ca. 1185. The destruction at Tiryns and Mycenae may have occurred shortly before Ramesses III came to power. A few sites in the Aegean, on the other hand, seem to have been destroyed several decades before the end of the IIIB period, evidently while Ramesses the Great still reigned.

Altogether, then, the Catastrophe seems to have begun with sporadic destructions in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, gathered momentum in the 1190s, and raged in full fury in the 1180s. By about 1175 the worst was apparently over, although dreadful things continued to happen throughout the twelfth century. Let us now take a close look at the physical destruction that the Catastrophe entailed.

1 For the comparison see Fernand Braudel, “L’Aube,” in Braudel, ed., La Méditerranée: l’espace et l’histoire (Paris, 1977), 82–86. In Br...