I've mentioned before that I have an absolute fascination with historical mysteries, which is why if I had the opportunity to visit one place and period, it would be somewhere in western Europe during the "Dark Ages" -- the time between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (usually placed at 476 C.E., when the puppet emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the Scirian leader Odoacer) and the founding of the Carolingian dynasty and re-consolidation of power by Charlemagne 325 years later. During that interval, damn little is known for sure -- we have some names, like Clovis and Charles Martel and Arthur Pendragon -- but how many of the accounts from that period are true and how many later inventions and add-ons, we'll probably never be certain.
There's another time period, though, that is (if anything) more mysterious still -- partly because it's much further in the past. This is the Late Bronze Age Collapse, that happened in the twelfth century B.C.E., in which two of the most powerful civilizations in ancient Eurasia, the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites, suddenly disintegrated, and others in the region, including the Egyptian New Kingdom and the Assyrian Empire, were seriously weakened (although ultimately survived and rebuilt).
Whatever happened, it happened fast. Two of the main cities of the Hittite Empire, Hattusa and Karaoğlan, both burned right around the same time, and from the archaeological evidence, so many people died their bodies were never buried. Greece was equally hard-hit, with just about every Mycenaean palace and citadel burned or demolished; the period afterward has been nicknamed the "Greek Dark Ages," a period of about four hundred years from which we have almost no records. Whatever caused it, the Greek peninsula seems to have been left largely depopulated. One estimate is that ninety percent of pre-collapse settlements in the Peloponnese, the southernmost region of Greece, were abandoned during that one event.
So what caused the collapse?
The simple answer is that we don't know. It may well have been a confluence of bad stuff; earthquakes, plagues, and famines are all possibilities, although it's hard to imagine why any of the three would then lead people across an entire region to destroy just about every last city. Another possibility is severe and prolonged drought caused by a climatic shift, followed by open rebellion by people desperate for food and water. (Recall that back then, the kings were considered to be intercessors to the gods on the behalf of the people; when the rain stopped falling and the crops all died, it's entirely possible the people overthrew their own rulers for not intercessing hard enough.)
It's also possible that both the Mycenaeans and the Hittites were overcome and destroyed by a mysterious group called the "Sea Peoples," who are mentioned in records of the Egyptian New Kingdom (the Egyptians were also attacked, but successfully repelled them and managed to survive). Who these Sea Peoples were isn't known for sure, but they may have been an alliance between the Lukka of coastal southwestern Anatolia, the Peleset of what are now Israel and Lebanon (the name is probably a cognate to the biblical name "Philistine"), and the Weshesh, who may have been from Sicily or southern Italy. But the truth is, we're not sure of that, either. The Sea Peoples left no records of their own and seem to have moved around a lot, so any artifacts they left behind haven't told us much.
And of course, it could be a combination of all of these. Changes in climate and natural disasters are known to have been responsible for famines and epidemics, and when those happen, people often up stakes and try to move to a more congenial venue -- which is inconvenient for the people who already live there. The attacks by the Sea Peoples may have been a result, not the root cause, of the collapse.
But there's no doubt that the effects were devastating. The eastern Mediterranean would take four centuries to recover completely, leaving behind a historical whodunnit that still puzzles us today. But it does highlight how tenuous survival was back then. The people of the ancient world were one bad harvest between relative comfort and famine. Epidemics were regular visitors, sometimes wiping out settlements entirely. When things get desperate, the veneer of civility disintegrates pretty rapidly.
It's to be hoped our modern civilization would be resilient enough to weather such calamities, should they strike, but the reality is, we're not really that different from our distant ancestors. It's nice to think that in severe trials, we'd help each other -- that we might remember Benjamin Franklin's words, "We must hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately." Like us, the Bronze Age empires probably thought they'd be around forever, but when catastrophe struck, they seem to have promptly self-destructed.
Let's hope we can learn some lessons from their failure.
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