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  • 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline
  • John Boardman (bio)
Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 241pp.

The Bronze Age civilizations of the eastern Aegean came to a sudden and overwhelming end in the twelfth century BC—Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites (and Troy), Babylonians, with the fleeting appearance of the mysterious Sea Peoples. Walled cities and citadels were overthrown, the countryside gradually deprived of proper care and cultivation. The olive trees grew wild through neglect, and even Egypt suffered a recession. This collapse has been a popular subject for scholars, not least our author, for a very long time. Here he usefully assembles the evidence and deduces that it was the very complexity of powers, their interrelationships through trade or war, that brought about the collapse, and he is probably right. Droughts breed famines, and the powerful will look to safeguard themselves at the expense of their neighbors. Droughts can also, if severe enough, bring to its knees a culture that depends on the control and exercise of wealth, and invasions that destroy all means of production and storage can be decisive for both attacker and attacked. There is no doubt that it was the belligerent jealousy of superpowers that was the cause of this collapse, however generated—by climate, movement of new peoples into the area, or sheer greed. But is interesting to reflect that the next period of severe climate change, of cold and wet, is now thought to have [End Page 346] occurred in the eighth century BC, the very time when there was a new surge of civilization in the whole area—Homeric Greece, the “orientalizing revolution,” the North Syrians, Phoenicians—and a new burst of travel for trade or settlement (“colonization”) throughout the Mediterranean by growing populations. There are never any easy answers.

John Boardman

Sir John Boardman is Lincoln Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology emeritus at Oxford University and a fellow of the British Academy, which awarded him its Kenyon Medal in 1995. Editor of the Oxford History of Classical Art, his other books include The Greeks in Asia; The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity; The Greeks Overseas; The Triumph of Dionysos; The History of Greek Vases; and The Relief Plaques of Eastern Eurasia and China. He received the inaugural Onassis International Prize for Humanities in 2009.

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