The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses. Dan Carlin
found. This certainly tells you that the city died a violent death, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you who was responsible. One normally thinks of a force of alien outsiders, but the perpetrators could also have been the city’s inhabitants fighting a civil war among themselves or going through a political upheaval.[15] It’s hard to finger the culprit based solely on the archaeological evidence.
The written word might be used to cross-check the archaeological findings, but words come with their own problems. First, the Bronze Age was obviously a long time ago. The Hebrew Bible was still centuries in the future when the Bronze Age ended. Despite a surprising amount of written material (again, a sure sign of an advanced era), far less than enough is available to solve this riddle.
Yet there are inscriptions from this period that discuss subjects that might be germane to this mystery.
If, for example, you find destroyed cities in the archaeological record, and then get written accounts of invasions by marauders in that same area and around the same time, the evidence looks damning. In Egypt, there are official records (with pictures!) carved into stone of violent encounters with the mysterious “peoples of the sea.”[16] The Egyptians made it sound as though these sea peoples were raping and pillaging and burning cities throughout the entire eastern Mediterranean like a horde of Bronze Age Vikings. They were thought by historians decades ago to be a primary reason for the chaos at the end of the era.
But can the Egyptian records be taken at face value? Could they be misleading, or an outright lie? Historians are specifically trained in the fine art of disentangling and interpreting evidence with a skeptical eye, and they’ve found problems with the Egyptian account.
Multiple Egyptian rulers documented violent encounters with peoples whom they themselves connected to the sea or to islands. They would say of this or that tribe that they were “of the sea” or “of the countries of the sea,” or mention them “in their isles.” These sea peoples are made out to be different tribes or states of warlike and seaborne groups whose origin isn’t clear.[17] Just as the crisis period of the late Bronze Age began, at least one pharaoh was using some of these tribes of “sea people” warriors as mercenary soldiers fighting for Egypt, so it’s unlikely that they would have been totally alien or unknown. We may not know who they were, or from whence they came, but it’s very possible the Egyptians might have.
Ramesses III (1217–1155 BCE) claimed to have defeated some groups of sea peoples in a battle that is often dated to right in the middle of the crisis period (1180 BCE).[18] His surviving written accounts portray him as a sort of bulwark of civilization, fighting off a coalition of alien forces that he said had launched a conspiracy together and had been unstoppable. Ramesses tells that these peoples or tribes had already overthrown several other great states, raping and pillaging the coasts and seas like ancient Norsemen—until they ran into him: “The foreign countries conspired in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could resist their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on being cut off at one time. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people and its land was like that which had never existed. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared for them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denen, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts were confident and trusting as they said ‘Our plans will succeed!’”[19]
The pharaoh said the plans of these many united foreign tribes failed, that the Egyptians crushed the invasion and the survivors fared badly: “As for those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and their soul are finished forever and ever. As for those who came forward together on the seas, the full flame was in front of them at the Nile mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore, prostrated on the beach, slain, and made into heaps from head to tail.”
It’s not unusual for people who aren’t historians to assume this is an accurate retelling of events, and indeed this could be extremely important information. But can we fully believe it?
Some historians point out that Ramesses III may have taken a small encounter and magnified it to enormous proportions to exalt his own greatness. Others suggest that he was simply retelling an event that had happened in the time of a previous Egyptian ruler (the pharaoh Merneptah, who reigned from 1213–1203 BCE and carved a victory report in the walls at the Temple of Karnak) and claiming the earlier pharoah’s victory as his own. He was certainly fibbing to some degree, as historians and archaeologists have proved that some of the cities he says were destroyed were not. And it may have been that he was writing for a particular audience and had certain things he wanted them to know or believe. The question of motive and context are crucial when deciding how far to believe a contemporary account.
Finally, there’s all the data that modern scientific methods and technology can add to the picture, the value of which is immeasurable. The list of specialties working on aspects of the Bronze Age mystery includes people who study climate, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, agricultural trends, underwater archaeology, the paleoenvironment, and a host of other fields. But extrapolating actual answers from such information to help clear up the mystery itself seems no easier to come by. At least not yet.
If we look again at our list of prime suspects and the cases for and against them, it becomes clear just how difficult solving a case as cold as this can be.
Suspect #1: The Sea Peoples (and Related Causes)
Part of what makes really ancient history so interesting is that there are lots of peoples who seem to just appear from nowhere in the historical records. It’s like Star Trek without the space travel. One minute there aren’t any people like the Arameans or Phrygians or Kassites, next minute they’re seemingly everywhere you look.
History, especially the further back one travels, has a way of compressing the events of the past, so that trends that occurred over generations seem to us to happen almost in an instant. The “sudden appearance” of a new tribe or people into ancient history may have actually occurred over many lifetimes. What history has called “invasions” may sometimes have been more like migrations, and what history has termed “migrations” and portrayed as entire peoples simultaneously on the move may in many cases have been more like gradual long-term immigration.
It’s possible that’s how it was with the so-called sea peoples.
The sea peoples were public enemy number one in what might be termed the “invasion theory.” In the mid-twentieth century, it was popular to portray the urban “civilized” world of the Bronze Age as an oasis of development ringed by a sea of antagonistic barbarism. There was an osmosis-like dynamic that kept attracting the hardscrabble tribal types on the outside to the rich (but perhaps soft) “civilized” peoples. That human sea was kept at bay only through great effort. At times, the barbarian tribes would break through and overwhelm a given city, region, or even state.
In this view, the crisis at the end of the Bronze Age was akin to a perfect storm that set in motion many of these outsider peoples, creating a “time of troubles” led by fierce tribal warriors who overwhelmed all but the strongest of political entities.
As the historian Chester G. Starr wrote in 1965:
The [Bronze Age] monarchs failed until too late to notice that new waves of invasion were mounting. From the desert Semitic tribes lapped against the strongpoints of the cities; from the north a terrific assault broke forth in the late thirteenth century. Ugarit was burned and destroyed forever, as were many other Syrian centers; the Hittite realm vanished from the map shortly after 1200, as did also the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece. Egypt, attacked by land and sea under Ramesses III (1182–51), barely rode out the storm. So too Assyria survived, but lost any capabilities of expansion for the next few centuries.
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