Bronze Age Collapse: What exactly happened in OTL?

Neither did the Assyrians (the Aramaeans made sure of that)

Or Ugarit for that matter. Likewise even those states that did not collapse usually felt a significant impact- Egypt and Babylonia for example. It also led to a partial collapse of the pan-Mediterranean trade and exchange network that had emerged over the course of the Bronze Age.

However, even the 'total collapse' of Mycenaean Greece is overstated. Mycenaean material culture continued to be produced (meaning you see the same style of tools and pots and buildings etc) until c.1050 BCE when you see a big paradigm shift into what's called Proto-Geometric material culture, a growing number of sites actually turn out to have been inhabited continuously throughout the 'Greek Dark Age' (such as the sites at Lefkandi, Elateia, Mitrou, and Kynos), and a number of technologies remain intact throughout this period; as seen with the material culture issue people are still making the same daggers, pots and houses, but we also don't see any regression in ship-building capacity, for example, or decline in agricultural technology. In general there is almost no evidence for a systemic collapse of polities in Central and Northern Greece at all, the active collapse of states is pretty heavily confined to the Peloponnese, Attica (probably) and specific areas of Central Greece.

However, this is not a basket of roses period either. So let me describe what we actually know disappears in this era. The visible population of Greece reduces, in this period, to 1/10th of its previous size. For every 100 people we see in the Late Helladic (c. 1550-1200 BCE) we see 10 in the Submycenaean (c.1200-1050 BCE). This should not be misread, because this can be due to a shift in settlement patterns- if populations are dispersing into the countryside *or* concentrating in specific settlements then it's likely to affect the visible balance quite heavily. However, at the very least this reflects a huge change in settlement patterns, and it's likely that this is not the only reason.

In addition to this demographic evidence, we also find that over a 25-30 year period every single palace-citadel/city of the Mycenaean world bar possibly one outlier is abandoned or destroyed. In the case of Mycenae it was still occupied afterwards, and bits of the citadel/palace were re-used by whoever was still living there. But for one reason or another the palaces collapsed as a political institution in Greece. Accompanying this seems to have been a change in leadership; in the Linear B tablets we have the wanax as being the supreme king of a given palace/kingdom in general, but by the time we get access to writing again the term (often morphed to anax by the Archaic era) is no longer commonly used. Instead we find the term basileus (which is considered a pre-Greek word adopted by Greek speakers) being the most common term for a sovereign. Interestingly, the term basileus (though obviously spelled differently) turns up in the Linear B tablets as well, often as a title for various palace officials but sometimes referring to those outside of it, and in these texts the basileis are always subordinate to the wanax.

We also lose Linear B, speaking of which, which is probably the loss most familiar to everyone in the thread aside from the palaces themselves. An important note is that it's believed less than maybe less than a hundred individuals in the entire Mycenaean world could actually write and understand Linear B, which I recall was concluded from the extremely tiny pool of different identifiable hands producing the tablet corpus we have access to. Even if that's an under-estimate it still seems likely to have been an incredibly small class of scribes capable of using Linear B. Given this and the attachment of the large bureaucracies to the palace it's fairly understandable that this is something that goes. Neither do any of our Linear B tablets seem to be for any purpose other than bureaucracy, with the closest we get to a narrative coming from one or two tablets recording things regarding charioteers and another regarding the departure of ships. It's also worth pointing out that, to our current understanding, Linear B only represents a single dialect of Greek. The Greek that it represents, dubbed Mycenaean Greek, is only a single dialect/language, and it's also unlikely that this represents a highly centralised single state because the tablets themselves much more consistently refer to separate kingdoms. It seems to have been a very fragile ecosystem.

However, this also links to other technological changes due to a bureaucratic collapse- in the region of Messenia there seems to have been a very highly organised linen industry during the Late Helladic, and, well, suffice to say that doesn't seem to have made the journey across eras. Trade with the Eastern Mediterranean seems to significantly decline, although it doesn't vanish; we still find some Aegean islands in the Submycenaean that maintain trade links, and there also seems to have been a functioning link between the Italian Adriatic coastline and the Eastern Mediterranean into this period; indeed, this trade route seems to increase in its volume and over a period otherwise marked by a decline in international links. There also some social changes visible- the subject matter of paintings on pottery and other artifacts shifts. These are still relatively poorly understood, particularly as this period is often less well studied as either the Late Helladic or the Proto-Geometric (where we see a departure from figurative representation of any kind).

But no less important are the huge, fundamental gaps in our understanding of Mycenaean era society in the first place. For starters, I mentioned earlier that the Mycenaean language is just one of the Greek group. It is not the ancestor of modern Greek, in fact. Only the ancient Arcadio-Cypriot dialect of Greek is likely to be descended from Mycenaean, and I've seen suggestions that Pamphylian was as well. The reason for this is that Mycenaean had already diverged from our reconstructed Proto-Greek, and already had different innovations+archaisms to those we see present in the ancient Greek dialect groups like Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic. Now realise how limited a cultural picture we have of Greece in this period, because some precursors to these sister dialects must have already come into existence but we have precisely 0 evidence of it. We can't map out, with any precision, where Greek was spoken as a whole. We can only speak of specific palaces and sites with a Linear B presence, but Knossos is one of those sites with a Linear B archive and that's on Crete. We don't know if pre-Greek languages were still spoken, we don't know where Greek wasn't spoken at all. We get more evidence of this era's politics and foreign policy from Hittite diplomatic tables than the actual Linear B evidence. We poorly understand the process by which a number of places in this era seem to have become colonised by Mycenaean speakers, in particular Cyprus. We don't really have any knowledge of their religious practices, all we know is that a number of their deities have the same name as later ancient Greek ones. But we have no idea how they conceived of them, what aspects they had, all we really know is the names of some of them and what was sacrificed to them.

We even less understand the process by which Greek speakers came to the area in the first place. The estimate for the arrival of Greek speakers in the area comes from two things; the relatively abrupt replacement of Early Helladic material culture with Middle Helladic, and a rough estimate as to the spread of Indo-European languages. Unfortunately the Middle Helladic is a relatively austere era, with relatively plain pottery, few known settlements, and the abandonment of many of the Early Helladic sites. The Middle Helladic is often associated with the term Minyan, and Late Helladic with Mycenaean. Both of these are primarily due to the late 19th century archaeologists who began the excavations of (what was at that time) prehistoric Greek sites. Mycenaeans were dubbed due to the assumed relationship between Homeric Mycenae as of the Trojan War and the culture discovered at the Late Helladic era layers of the city of Mycenae. This unfortunately means that we have, variously, 'Mycenaean Greek' which is the Linear B dialect and a specific language, 'Mycenaean' as pertaining to a specific kingdom based around Mycenae, and 'Mycenaean culture' as pertaining to the entire Late Helladic modes of material culture. Likewise the association of Minyans with Middle Helladic is due to the Greek legends regarding their existence as an ancient Hellenic/pre-Hellenic people and their association with the site of Orchemenos (which was the one being excavated). But we really don't know what actual cultural identities we're dealing with, and where they map on to, and how much of this is essentially fictionalised. And given the profusion of pre-Greek terms in the Greek languages this is something we'd dearly love to have more solid information on.

And, last but not least, much of the reconstructions of the LBA and its collapse in Mycenaean Greece rely on the scanty contemporary sources from elsewhere and much later Greek accounts. The entire narrative of 'Sea Peoples' comes from Egyptian sources, and much is made about trying to diagnose who these Sea People were based on Egyptian artistic depictions and their ethnonyms in Egyptian texts. This is usually supported with the evidence of Ugarit- first and foremost the city was destroyed, and secondly it sent a rather desparate letter to the King of Alashiya (89% likelihood this means Cyprus) saying that their fleet was away and that they needed help. Likewise people gleam as much information about any potential Greek entities in this period from other Egyptian sources, which mostly consists of trying to work out if various place and people names are transliterations of Greek ones. But, given that the Greek of this era is different to later Greek in the first place, this is rather like using a microscope to examine a photograph to see if there's a picture of another, smaller photograph within it, and then trying to see what that smaller photograph says. Hittite diplomatic tablets have provided some of our best new insights into the LBA Mycenaean world, but ultimately we don't actually know precisely what the Kingdom of Ahhiyawa refers to. Given that no other Greek-sounding rulers of equal stature to the King of Hatti are mentioned it would seem obvious that it refers to Mycenae, given how big that palace is compared to most of the others. But that implies that we know for sure that Mycenae was the 'first among equals' of the LBA, and we don't. It could easily refer to a specific Greek-ruled kingdom in Anatolia itself, for all we know.

And as for those later Greek accounts, we have the Homeric epics, which are part poetic compendium, part folk tale, part cultural document, and part entertainment. The poems come from probably the 9th or 8th centuries BCE originally, and were standardised in the 6th century BCE. Our increasing but limited view of prehistoric Greece enables us to say that they are a cultural chop suey. They mix seemingly direct memories of a LBA world with that of their own period of composition, and we have no idea how most of their ethnonyms map onto the era of composition, let alone their relationship to any LBA cultural groupings. Why do the epics seem to use 'Argive' and 'Danaan' as syonyms for 'Achaean', and does 'Achaean' mark a full analogy to the later 'Hellene'? Likewise it's dangerous to use mythology, or literature (and in this case we're dealing with both) to map onto archaeology as they did so easily in the 19th century excavations. But sometimes there seems to be no choice, and not only to use the Homeric epics but also all of the various mythologies and ethnographies of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic eras of Greece. Suffice to say that nearly all of our extant material disagrees amongst itself, and often mix in attempts to understand the past with cultural posturing and the opportunity for a good folk tale. They too had tried to unravel many of the same parts of their own past that we now struggle with, so some of these mysteries have been bothering inquirers for at least 2400 years which is something. But for many Greeks their legends and myths were happily regarded as genuine historical past, and we've absolutely no way of knowing which has a basis in reality and which does not. It's entirely futile taking myth as assumed representation of reality, because as much as people distort and misremember and hyperbolise real events over a long time they also often make up stores entirely.

Any truthful and accurate answer to your question should begin by saying 'we don't really know'. There is a lot that we do not understand about the Aegean in the Bronze Age, let alone during and after the collapse of states in that area. It is most likely that the wave of social collapses we see in the LBA across the Eastern Med and Near East are, ultimately, the result of no-one factor but a perfect storm of overlapping issues. Comparable social collapses we're aware are all deeply complex, and rely on multiple factors rather than one. You'll have noticed that people have been debating the fall of the Roman Empire for hundreds of years by this point, and the lesson to be learned there is that no-one factor can overridingly explain the collapse of the Roman Empire. Ditto for other such collapses, and likely ditto for the Aegean's own collapse as well. The Bronze Age Collapse is becoming much less mysterious in the study of the Hittites, given that there is much more written material to hand there and much more is being learned about the post-Hittite world. Likewise it seems to have become a relative consensus that the Phillistines are ultimately the descendants of Mycenaean Greeks, due to the unusual profusion of Aegean material culture in that area during the LBA/Submycenaean. But these are slow and small increases to the depth of our picture, usually coming from extensive cataloguing and re-examining of existing textual sources or the process of acquiring new ones.


When it comes to alternate history in this period I'm currently writing just such a work. Rather than being a plug for my timeline, however, I'll bring up my own position both as historian and writer on the subject- the area is so full of holes that you must supply entirely fictional elements simply to create a society complete enough to be written about. There's no other choice. My own work combines current (and probably soon to be outdated) archaeological research with ancient Greek myth and lots of my own ideas that have no real basis in any current theories, or that couldn't possibly be proven. It's simply the nature of the beast in this scenario. A Bronze Age Collapse timeline set in Assyria, or Egypt, or Babylonia likely has a lot more information to hand and can try to attempt a much closer historical fidelity, though even they have their issues. Anywhere else and you are getting increasingly into the area where simply to have a background setting you have to write fiction, not just when it comes to what characters are doing and what events are happening.
 
What is difference about this one is that while we know how the Roman Empire or Han China collapsed, we know relatively little about exactly how the Bronze age civilization "collapsed". I mean, you can cite cyclic history all you like, it just doesn't stop making it an interesting discussion.
This is a good point, a society surviving for extended periods of time is a historical anomaly (hence why civilizations that last long periods have such influence and are so fascinating) but it is still interesting to know exactly why these civ's collapsed if not for the sake curiosity.
There is a difference between "why" a civilization collapsed and "how" a civilization collapsed.
I can compare it to the death of an old man:
"Why" did the old man die? - Because everybody dies, we all gonna die.
"How" did the old man die? - He worked too much on that particular day, he did not sleep the previous night, he had a cold/chill with high temperature, he drank two bottles of beer, he had a fight with his angry wife, he got overexcited and so on and so forth.

The same with civilizations - like old men they become weak and fragile and some unhappy things like draughts or eruptions of volcanoes or barbarian migrations or climatic changes or some internal infightings or all these put together might lead to a collapse of a civilization.
But ask yourself - are these the real reasons of the collapse?
No, they are not, as if a civilization is young and healthy these things will not kill it.

That is the other question - why any civilization (before 1500-1600 A.D.) was supposed to collapse. I guess the answer will take a few hundred pages or so.
But roughly -
One Mongol of Chengiz Khan was worth 100-500 Chinese in warfare. It is a Darwinian work of tens or even hundreds of generations.
The same goes for the Goths and the Romans of the late WRE - 40 thousand male Goths could rule over 5 million or so male Romans. Civilization make people weaker, that's a rule.

Something like that might happen during Bronze Age collapse.
 
Very interesting post Daeres. Lots of stuff I didn't know.

With regards to the mysteriousness of civilizational collapse, we have an enormous amout of detail on what was happening before, during and after the Soviet collapse, and still no-one today can tell you why the Soviet Union collapsed. The problem of saying why the Bronze Age collapse occurred (or even if there was a collapse and when it happened) is orders of magnitude larger. Very difficult question, and a very interesting one.

fasquardon
 

RousseauX

Donor
There is a difference between "why" a civilization collapsed and "how" a civilization collapsed.
No, they are not, as if a civilization is young and healthy these things will not kill it.
It is a Darwinian work of tens or even hundreds of generations.

The same goes for the Goths and the Romans of the late WRE - 40 thousand male Goths could rule over 5 million or so male Romans.
Civilization make people weaker, that's a rule.

No it's not, this is just 19th century intellectual masturbation based on cherry picked evidence
 
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what about the somewhat slim evidence that the Philistines were the Sea Peoples (or at least part of them) and related to the Mycenaeans in some way.

the evidence I've seen, such as it is, is the great similarities between bronze plate armor found in the city of Mycenae and Philistine plate armor circa 1100.
 
what about the somewhat slim evidence that the Philistines were the Sea Peoples (or at least part of them) and related to the Mycenaeans in some way.

the evidence I've seen, such as it is, is the great similarities between bronze plate armor found in the city of Mycenae and Philistine plate armor circa 1100.

I understand what you're saying here, but personally I avoid using the term 'the Sea Peoples' altogether. It implies a sort of unified nature to what's going on that we just can't attest to, and it's also a term that only comes from Egyptian sources. Given the lack of information that we have the 'Sea Peoples' might unpack into X people just launching a military conquest, Y pirates, and Z migrations, obviously with some scope for overlap between these things. But my point is that 'the Sea Peoples' term assumes that a) there's a phenomena unique to this period and out of the ordinary and b) that it's all strongly interrelated.

As for whether the Phillistines are Mycenaeans, that much seems to be considered the consensus at the moment. So far as I know it's not due to such a specific thing as similarity in armour, but because of the heavy presence of Mycenaean material culture in the area; in particular the earliest Phillistine pottery all seems to be an adaptation of Late Helladic (i.e Mycenaean) pottery styles, along with things like similar loom weights and a building similar to contemporary Mycenaean megarons. This is also related to very circumstantial evidence, like the fact that several Phillistine personal names, place names, and loanwords into Hebrew all seem to have Indo-European roots. It is still all a bit shakey, but of note is that further north is the Kingdom of Palistin, one of the early Neo-Hittite states. Nobody knows what, if any relationship this has to the Phillistines, and we don't see the same evidence of Aegean material culture there.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
You're thinking of the Thera Eruption? ... general geo-archiological opinion the last decade or so, puts the Thera Eruption at somewhere around 1642-1627BC give or take a few decades, based on Greenlandic Ice cores, size of tree rings, and chinese records of a year-long winter with frost in mid summer, being a important player in collapsing the Xia Dynasty (making way for Shang)

Indeed. In fact, those descriptions are very good indicators of the existence of the Xia Dynasty in some form or another. As the traditional Chinese histories were vindicated by the discovery of the oracle bone script and its corroborations with descriptions of Shang, so the geological evidence is beginning to corroborate Xia.
 
I understand what you're saying here, but personally I avoid using the term 'the Sea Peoples' altogether. It implies a sort of unified nature to what's going on that we just can't attest to, and it's also a term that only comes from Egyptian sources. Given the lack of information that we have the 'Sea Peoples' might unpack into X people just launching a military conquest, Y pirates, and Z migrations, obviously with some scope for overlap between these things. But my point is that 'the Sea Peoples' term assumes that a) there's a phenomena unique to this period and out of the ordinary and b) that it's all strongly interrelated.

As for whether the Phillistines are Mycenaeans, that much seems to be considered the consensus at the moment. So far as I know it's not due to such a specific thing as similarity in armour, but because of the heavy presence of Mycenaean material culture in the area; in particular the earliest Phillistine pottery all seems to be an adaptation of Late Helladic (i.e Mycenaean) pottery styles, along with things like similar loom weights and a building similar to contemporary Mycenaean megarons. This is also related to very circumstantial evidence, like the fact that several Phillistine personal names, place names, and loanwords into Hebrew all seem to have Indo-European roots. It is still all a bit shakey, but of note is that further north is the Kingdom of Palistin, one of the early Neo-Hittite states. Nobody knows what, if any relationship this has to the Phillistines, and we don't see the same evidence of Aegean material culture there.

I feel like this is a good place to point out that there were almost certainly internal factors involved in the LBA collapse as well. For example, one of the main factors in the collapse of the Hittite state was the fact that the Hittite succession law was never really stabilized into a consistent rule or procedure, meaning that there was a continuous expansion in the pool of potential claimants to the throne(setting aside the increasing likelihood of western Anatolian breakaway states) and more room for what seems to have been a period of coup and countercoup, combined with a shift of political power away from the Anatolian heartland of the Hittite state to its southeast and especially to the very powerful vassal kingdom of Carchemish, which almost certainly has a continuous royal line through the collapse of the empire. It makes more sense to speak of the LBA collapse as a extended period of disintegration, rebuilding, and realignment in which some political structures fell apart(like the Hittite Empire or the Mycenaean palace economy) or shifted and new political structures emerged to replace them(like the Luwian and Aramean states, many of which adopted non-Imperial royal titles like IUDEX(Tarwanis, with a meaning something like Judge or Prince) or REGIO.DOMINUS("Country-lord") and which may established a sort of Luwian regional koine), and which eventually towards the close of the period built up to the rise of several new powers like the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In some ways the period resembles less the Mongol conquests than Late Antiquity.

Incidentally, isn't there evidence of an extended period of low rainfall at the
 
would widespread deforestation have been one of the problems they faced at this time, or is it too early for that? I know that deforestation was one of the root problems at the collapse of several societies (the Indus valley and Easter Island being two of the most prominent)...
 
would widespread deforestation have been one of the problems they faced at this time, or is it too early for that? I know that deforestation was one of the root problems at the collapse of several societies (the Indus valley and Easter Island being two of the most prominent)...

It's been suggested that Deforestation is brought up in The Epic of Gilgamesh as a problem, so, sure, maybe.
 
I read an interesting article a while back, which I'll try and find to post here, suggesting that the Bronze-Age Collapse was caused by a period of low rainfall leading to drought and consequent societal collapse. As I recall, one of the pieces of evidence it used was a drought in modern times which struck most of the Aegean area, although for reasons I cannot remember the area around Athens was much less affected. Athens, of course, was one of the few Mycenaean sites to survive the Dark Ages.
 
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