The End is Always Near - Dan Carlin

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the crisis period (1180 BCE).[18] His surviving written accounts portray him as a sort of bulwark of civilization, fighting off a coalition of alien forces that he said had launched a conspiracy together and had been unstoppable. Ramesses tells that these peoples or tribes had already overthrown several other great states, raping and pillaging the coasts and seas like ancient Norsemen—until they ran into him: “The foreign countries conspired in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could resist their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on being cut off at one time. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people and its land was like that which had never existed. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared for them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denen, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts were confident and trusting as they said ‘Our plans will succeed!’”[19]

      The pharaoh said the plans of these many united foreign tribes failed, that the Egyptians crushed the invasion and the survivors fared badly: “As for those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and their soul are finished forever and ever. As for those who came forward together on the seas, the full flame was in front of them at the Nile mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore, prostrated on the beach, slain, and made into heaps from head to tail.”

      It’s not unusual for people who aren’t historians to assume this is an accurate retelling of events, and indeed this could be extremely important information. But can we fully believe it?

      Some historians point out that Ramesses III may have taken a small encounter and magnified it to enormous proportions to exalt his own greatness. Others suggest that he was simply retelling an event that had happened in the time of a previous Egyptian ruler (the pharaoh Merneptah, who reigned from 1213–1203 BCE and carved a victory report in the walls at the Temple of Karnak) and claiming the earlier pharoah’s victory as his own. He was certainly fibbing to some degree, as historians and archaeologists have proved that some of the cities he says were destroyed were not. And it may have been that he was writing for a particular audience and had certain things he wanted them to know or believe. The question of motive and context are crucial when deciding how far to believe a contemporary account.

      Finally, there’s all the data that modern scientific methods and technology can add to the picture, the value of which is immeasurable. The list of specialties working on aspects of the Bronze Age mystery includes people who study climate, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, agricultural trends, underwater archaeology, the paleoenvironment, and a host of other fields. But extrapolating actual answers from such information to help clear up the mystery itself seems no easier to come by. At least not yet.

      If we look again at our list of prime suspects and the cases for and against them, it becomes clear just how difficult solving a case as cold as this can be.

       Suspect #1: The Sea Peoples (and Related Causes)

      Part of what makes really ancient history so interesting is that there are lots of peoples who seem to just appear from nowhere in the historical records. It’s like Star Trek without the space travel. One minute there aren’t any people like the Arameans or Phrygians or Kassites, next minute they’re seemingly everywhere you look.

      History, especially the further back one travels, has a way of compressing the events of the past, so that trends that occurred over generations seem to us to happen almost in an instant. The “sudden appearance” of a new tribe or people into ancient history may have actually occurred over many lifetimes. What history has called “invasions” may sometimes have been more like migrations, and what history has termed “migrations” and portrayed as entire peoples simultaneously on the move may in many cases have been more like gradual long-term immigration.

      It’s possible that’s how it was with the so-called sea peoples.

      The sea peoples were public enemy number one in what might be termed the “invasion theory.” In the mid-twentieth century, it was popular to portray the urban “civilized” world of the Bronze Age as an oasis of development ringed by a sea of antagonistic barbarism. There was an osmosis-like dynamic that kept attracting the hardscrabble tribal types on the outside to the rich (but perhaps soft) “civilized” peoples. That human sea was kept at bay only through great effort. At times, the barbarian tribes would break through and overwhelm a given city, region, or even state.

      In this view, the crisis at the end of the Bronze Age was akin to a perfect storm that set in motion many of these outsider peoples, creating a “time of troubles” led by fierce tribal warriors who overwhelmed all but the strongest of political entities.

      As the historian Chester G. Starr wrote in 1965:

      The [Bronze Age] monarchs failed until too late to notice that new waves of invasion were mounting. From the desert Semitic tribes lapped against the strongpoints of the cities; from the north a terrific assault broke forth in the late thirteenth century. Ugarit was burned and destroyed forever, as were many other Syrian centers; the Hittite realm vanished from the map shortly after 1200, as did also the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece. Egypt, attacked by land and sea under Ramesses III (1182–51), barely rode out the storm. So too Assyria survived, but lost any capabilities of expansion for the next few centuries.

      Several other once popular hypotheses could also be wrapped into the invasion theory. For example, the idea that much of the calamity from this era can be attributed to the discovery and wide use (among some) of iron fits nicely into any idea that warfare was a prime component of the Bronze Age catastrophe. Many once thought that iron was the secret superweapon of the ancient world in this age, and that once some peoples acquired the ability and know-how to produce it, they gained a huge advantage militarily over their enemies. People who had this capability (such as the Hittites) were said to jealously guard the secret of its manufacture.

      This idea is much less popular than it once was, but it has evolved somewhat and now forms a component in other theories relating to, for example, the collapse of regional trade. The exchange among developed states in copper and tin was a key pillar of the economy in the interconnected Mediterranean Bronze Age.[20] Few places had both those metals, so trade was vital and lucrative. Iron’s main value had less to do with its hardness than with its abundance.[21] If it was cheaper to outfit soldiers with iron weapons than bronze ones, that certainly would have had military implications. If it severely damaged the economies of the major trading states, that would have had ripple effects as well.[22]

      Then there are the last two elements at play here that may fall under the “sea peoples and friends” category—piracy and human migration. These also overlap with the next potential suspects on the list.

      Let’s start with piracy. Whether it’s the Egyptians talking about “northerners in their isles,” or written correspondence from the coasts of the Levant, there’s a general feeling about the late stages of the Bronze Age (and what happened in the famed “Viking Age,” from about 700 to 1100 CE) that periodic outbreaks of large-scale piracy were not an unusual historical occurrence. In addition to the raiding of coastal settlements and the burning of villages, towns, and even major cities, the taking of ships and cargoes at sea could wreak havoc on the all-important Mediterranean maritime trading network. A small amount of piracy in this region was no doubt normal,[23] but if conditions fostered an explosion in the number of seagoing bandits, it could be system threatening. The sea peoples were once blamed for the majority of pirate activity, but unearthed records have shown that in at least some cases the pirates may have been from the same city-state as their victims, a case perhaps of turning to piracy when economic conditions deteriorated.

      But pirates are hit-and-run entities, and some of these humans may have wanted to move en masse to the more advanced or wealthy states permanently. The idea of a Bronze Age version of the Germanic Völkerwanderung[24] (essentially, a migration), disrupting the equilibrium and setting in motion the collapse of the age, has been around for a long time. The Egyptian inscriptions depict families in wagons accompanying some of the “sea people” and Libyan tribes. The implication is that whole peoples

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