The Bronze Age Collapse: A Sudden, Violent Plunge into Darkness (Part Two)
The main problem in understanding the Bronze Age Collapse is that we don’t really know what happened. This may look like an oversimplification but it is not. It is, instead, the simple truth.
Of the four great civilizations that faced disaster in this 12th century BC collapse: the Mycenaean Greeks, the Hittites, the Assyrians and the Egyptians, only one gives us any clues as to an inciting event. The other three are more or less unhelpful, serving more to confirm a collapse did actually happen as to tell us why.
We don’t know what happened to the Mycenaean Greeks because their royal dynasties and social structure was entirely lost in the collapse. Nobody wrote down what happened because the collapse was so total that the Greeks even forgot how to write.
What records we have about the world of the Greeks before the collapse is one of mythical heroes and their interactions with the gods. The stories of Homer which survive come from an oral tradition alone, because the break at the end of the collapse was absolute. When the Greeks taught themselves to read and write again, and could capture these stories, it was in an entirely different language, an entirely different alphabet.
The Hittites were well on their way to collapsing on their own by the Bronze Age Collapse, so while we have surviving evidence of their fall it is much more introspective, concerned with dynastic infighting and how they’d burned down their capital all on their own. For the Hittites, the Bronze Age Collapse was merely another problem to (fail to) deal with.
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Header Image: Egyptian depiction of Ramesses III fighting the Sea Peoples. These warriors have been identified with the Peleset based on their head dresses. Source: TYalaA / Public Domain.
