Revisiting 1177 BCE and the Late Bronze Age Collapse

Eric Cline’s 1177 BC (2014, 2021) introduced the world of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean and its “collapse” to a very wide audience. More than a book about collapse, though, Cline painted a vivid picture of the region as a lively, interconnected world of kingdoms and empires, engaged in trade, diplomacy, and warfare. It has done an excellent job of popularizing the period and bringing good archaeological and historical research into the mainstream.

Whilst sticking to a multicausal stance on “the collapse” in the book and Forum essay here, Cline observes that there is growing evidence for climate change ca. 1200 BC, which suggests that drought or megadrought was a key factor in collapse, as was proposed originally by R. Carpenter (1966). This climate change has been linked with a series of large and violent migrations, into the Balkans, Greece and Anatolia, and from Greece and the Aegean east to Cyprus and the Levant, traditionally associated with “the Sea Peoples.” I have expressed some skepticism about these two aspects of the now prominent climate-collapse-migration narrative before (as have others) but am grateful to have the opportunity to respond to Eric’s essay in this Forum with my own views (see for example: Middleton 2015, 2018, 2020b; Knapp and Manning 2016 and Knapp 2021 and references therein).

The evidence for climate change or “megadrought” ca. 1200 BC may seem compelling as more papers are published providing paleoclimatic proxy evidence from different regions of the eastern Mediterranean, as Cline suggests. From my perspective, however, the paleoclimatic data is still spread too thinly across the eastern Mediterranean to draw convincing conclusions about wider and local conditions; and for those already wanting to suggest an eastern Mediterranean climate event, or a 3.2 kya BP megadrought, what we do have is not without its problems and inconsistencies, for example, the conflicting conclusions about onset date and duration. Can the limited evidence be drawn upon to suggest a pan–eastern Mediterranean mega climate event? Can we expect climate conditions to have been the same everywhere— across every microregion?

Some of the evidence, in any case, contradicts the narrative. For example, in their recent study of a stalagmite from a cave near the Pylos palace in Messenia, Greece, Finné and colleagues (2017) concluded that “the new paleoclimate evidence from the Greek mainland does not support a clear chronological synchronism between the destruction of the Mycenaean Palace at Pylos and drier conditions”—rather, conditions were wetter before the collapse and drier after. If their reconstruction is broadly correct, we ought to conclude that we have at least one collapse before and without climate change or megadrought—one prior to which the Linear B texts still record the palace’s disbursements of grain.

What we really need in order to move forward on the climate issue is substantial, highly resolved data with a wide chronological spread on a microregional scale— multiple datasets not only for Greece but for each region within Greece, both palace state and non-palatial areas; we need the same for every other part of the eastern Mediterranean. With significantly more data, errors and uncertainties could be ironed out and a much more convincing high-resolution picture of climate history created for both local areas and the wider region. After that, the impact of climate on LBA and early Iron Age societies could be more convincingly debated. As yet, a clear picture does not exist.

The climate claim supposedly dovetails with and explains Hittite and Ugaritic textual evidence for famine and crisis—drought is seen as the cause of these. Certainly, a number of texts of various kinds refer to grain shortages and shipments, sometimes of very large amounts of grain being moved about the far eastern Mediterranean. A Hittite prince, Heshmi-Sharrumma was involved in overseeing imports from Egypt, but in the mid-thirteenth century, as we know—much earlier than the Hittite collapse and not necessarily connected to it (Bryce 2005: 322). The texts are often interpreted as describing an increasingly serious crisis, worsening over time from the mid-thirteenth century (Mazzoni 2020: 212...