2021; 189 pages. Book 6 (out of 2) in the “Turning Points in Ancient History” series. New Author? : Yes. Genres
: Archaeology; Ancient History; Non-Fiction.
Overall Rating: 8*/10.
From the Author’s
Preface to the Revised and Updated Edition:
“…1177
BC was a pivotal moment in the history of civilization—a turning point for the
ancient world. By that time, the Bronze
Age in the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East had lasted nearly two thousand
years, from approximately 3000 BC to just after 1200 BC.
When the end
came, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, most
of the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a
dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from what is now Italy to Afghanistan
and from Turkey down to Egypt.
Large empires
and small kingdoms, which had taken centuries to evolve, collapsed rapidly,
from the Mycenaeans and Minoans to the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mitannians,
Cypriots, Canaanites, and even Egyptians.” (loc. 138)
That’s as good of a way to
introduce this book as any.
What’s To Like...
1177 BC: The Year
Civilization Collapsed is detailed examination of the events taking
place, for the most part in the eastern Mediterranean Sea area from the 15th
century BCE through the 12th century BCE as the local powers make
the unsettling transition from the Late Bronze Age into the Iron Age.
Eric H. Cline gives the reader a close look at the archaeological findings that have been reported
over the past 50 years or so, and I was amazed at just how much new and
surprising discoveries that entailed. Admittedly, it helps that when I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist when I
grew up, and here I especially liked the way the
author shows how archaeologists can reconstruct the ancient history of a site
just from what kind of relics were, and were not, found there.
I was impressed with the approach that Eric H. Cline used to present the material. Each
of the first four chapters covers a discrete century—which kingdoms were the
most powerful at the time, which were the most civilized, and most importantly,
who was doing commercial trading with whom. It was fascinating to watch various kingdoms
rise and fall and, thanks to translatable cuneiform messages carved into clay
tablets, discover the wide variety of goods that were being imported and
exported around the region.
After Chapter 4 chronicles the
collapse of a bunch of local powers in the decades around 1177 BCE, Chapter 5 takes a look at who or what
might have caused all that destruction.
Historically, a group that Egyptians records enigmatically dub “The Sea
People”, has been given most of the blame, but based on recent archaeological
reports, Eric H. Cline opines that it’s overly simplistic to attribute just one
cause to all the mayhem.
In Chapter 6, he offers as a conclusion that
a “Complexity Theory” is a better answer, which in short proposes that when a
bunch of kingdoms are interconnected militarily, culturally, and economically,
when one of them collapses, all the others are in danger of falling as
well. Things close with a short Epilogue, wherein
the author suggests that there are lessons about "interconnectivity" that might apply
to our present-day world as well.
1177 B.C.: The Year
Civilization Collapsed is a short, but slow-yet-interesting read. The text ends at page 189, but the Amazon
blurb says it’s 290 pages in length due to the extras in the back:
Acknowledgments (pg. 189), Dramatis
Personae (pg. 191), Notes (pg. 197), Works Cited (pg. 223), and Index (pg. 267).
The book is written in what I call “scholarly style”, which some
reviewers found to be wordy and dry, but I liked it. Pleasantly and unsurprisingly, there are no
cusswords or adult situations in the text.
Ratings…
Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 1,041 ratings
and 103 reviews.
Goodreads: 3.72*/5,
based on 7,893
ratings and 1,033 reviews
Kewlest New Word ...
Steatopygous
(adj.) : having a fleshy abdomen and
massive—usually protruding—thighs and buttocks.
Excerpts...
One tablet, for instance, is concerned with
the ice that Zimri-Lim was using in his summer drinks, which included wine, beer,
and fermented barley-based drinks flavored with either pomegranate juice or
licorice-like aniseed. (...)
(T)he use of ice in drinks was not new to the
region, even though one king had to remind his son to have servants wash and
clean the ice before actually putting it in the drinks. “Make them collect the ice!” he said. “Let them wash it free of twigs and dung and
dirt.” (loc. 563)
We are told at one point that a Hittite
king named Mursili I, grandson and successor of the above-named Hattusili I,
marched his army all the way to Mesopotamia, a journey of over one thousand
miles, and attacked the city of Babylon in 1595 BC, burning it to the ground
and ending the two-hundred-year-old dynasty made famous by Hammurabi “the
Law-Giver.” Then, instead of occupying
the city, he simply turned the Hittite army around and headed for home, thus
effectively conducting the longest drive-by shooting in history. (loc. 890)
“If anyone bites
off the nose of a free person, he shall pay 40 shekels of silver.” (loc. 890)
My quibbles with 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed are
minor. The book’s title is a bit
misleading: the Bronze Age civilization didn’t collapse within a single year,
even the author admits that. The Sea
People may have greatly weakened the Egyptian Empire to where a dynasty change
occurred, but Egypt as an empire didn’t cease to exist for another millennium.
The ending was
anticlimactic. Yes, a bunch of
traditional powers in the area were replaced, but most of those took place
gradually, and there was no common cause.
Indeed, the mysterious Sea People may well have been a large but ragtag
bunch, fleeing some other collapsed local kingdom, and just looking for a new
place to put down roots. Eric H. Cline
offers many possibilities for things that contributed to the regional upheaval—earthquakes, internal rebellion, external invaders, decentralization, private
merchants, disease, and climate change in the form of drought and famine—but
there is no conclusive evidence as to which combination of those factors helped
collapse which segment of civilization.
That’s not to say this wasn’t a good read. Most people, including me, know next to nothing about the Eastern Mediterranean civilization in 1500-1100 BCE, so I learned a lot from reading this. And as a wannabe archaeologist, I was astounded at how much one can learn from digging up a site where there is the presence of weapons in the ruins (or absence thereof), the presence of bodies beneath collapsed walls (or absence thereof), the presence of pottery shards (or absence thereof), and the presence of burned-out buildings (or just the royal and government buildings destroyed).
Bottom Line: If you read 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed to find out why that year was such a disaster for so many people in the Eastern Mesopotamian region, you'll probably be disappointed. But if you read it to learn more about that area from 1600 BCE to 1100 BCE, you'll find it to be a fascinating book. I did.
8 Stars. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is the first book in a 2-book series titled “Turning Points in Ancient History”. You’d think those two tomes would be labeled “Books 1 and 2”, but they’re not. This one is actually Book 6, and the other one, titled Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire that Ended a Dynasty, is Book 9. Either counting is not the long suit of those who created this series, or else there are a bunch of authors who are delinquent in getting their manuscripts to the publisher.
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