What Collapsed in 1177?

Not far from where you live, in the rural counties outside of town, or in a village just over the border, there are people for whom dates and events like the “Fall of the Berlin Wall,” “9/11,” the “Great Recession,” or “January 6, 2021” hold no particular meaning, or meanings quite different from those they hold for you. This is worth keeping in mind when reading the litany of catastrophes that formed a “perfect storm” for the large political and economic hubs of the twelfth century BCE—a litany that is part of our shared upbringing in an archaeology that has always prioritized civilizational cores: their texts and dynastic chronologies; their art and technology.

In writing my synthesis of the Levantine Bronze Age a few years ago (Greenberg 2019), I had to take a good, hard look at the archaeological evidence on its own merits, without giving too much weight to the famously self-serving texts written by the elites of Egypt, Canaan, and other parts of the ancient Near East, which have so often been used to construct a narrative of Canaan. I also tried to set aside the received technological nomenclature that could place a particular year, say 1201 BCE, in the cosmopolitan Bronze Age and year 1199 BCE in the provincial Iron Age. Looking at the evidence accumulated in some one hundred years of excavation, I found it told a story that diverged from the one we were taught: not so much in its facts as in its tone or theme. I will condense this story here under three headings.

LBA society in Canaan was socially fragmented, headed by a weak network of local elites

The dissolution of the Middle Bronze Age social contract, which allowed large, fortified towns to flourish in concert with a productive village landscape, left a vacuum in Canaan, soon filled by Egyptian imperial ambitions and by power-grabbing individuals or families. For three hundred years Canaan was characterized by great disparities in wealth, a persistently low rural population with limited productive capacity, an inability to mount collective construction ventures, and a political system that was shored up by constant threats and displays of violence. Elites kept and displayed their power—much as they do today—by virtue of a network through which they exchanged precious materials, crafted objects, and marriage partners.

Egypt ruled by proxy

Apart from a thin stratum of Egyptian and Egyptianizing administrators and their representatives, Egypt maintained its interests in Canaan through manipulation of local power brokers and by threats—occasionally fulfilled—of targeted violence. Even when direct Egyptian intervention increased in the latter part of the period, many sites in Canaan were virtually untouched by the purported Egyptian occupation— a striking example is Tel Rehov, described recently by Mazar and Davidovich (2019) as subordinate to Egyptian rule, yet lacking any material manifestations of it. Even sites with an unquestioned Egyptian presence, like Bet Shean, display Egyptian-Canaanite cohabitation and cultural hybridization that sometimes outlasted Egypt’s administrative control, showing that “walking like an Egyptian” does not always imply political subjugation.

Internationalism did not trickle down

Imported objects feature prominently in archaeological reports, but their actual number and economic impact has been greatly overstated: Canaan’s maritime commerce was restricted to small-scale retail trade in coastal craft (cabotage) and, beyond a few coastal sites, neither Cypriot nor Aegean pots or their contents appeared to play an important role in local palatial or urban economies. The exchange of low-bulk, high-prestige craft items, cosmetics, ivories, and metals was the lubricant of the one percent at the top of the social ladder but hardly trickled down below it.

When, as Cline describes in detail in 1177 BC (Cline 2021), the established LBA order unraveled over the long decades between 1230 and 1130 BCE (not in a single year!), new actors began to emerge on the stage. These actors are characterized archaeologically by cultural and material continuity with the Late Bronze Age, and I therefore suggest that they be viewed as an emergent, previously suppressed expression of Canaanite culture and political creativity (sensu Graeber and Wengrow 2021). They include the...