That’s true, but much of the original Canaanite culture collapsed (at least in the southern Levant anyway. The Phoenicians were basically just Canaanites with fancy new boats), which is what caused Israelite culture to rise. Keeping the Canaanite culture going strong would seriously alter world religion.
Pick a state/culture/civilisation to survive the Late Bronze Age Collapse
- Thread starter 8bitninja
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FairlyUninformedGraduate
Gone Fishin'
The Mycenaeans had been involved in the Greek islands, with plentiful Minoan finds in Mycenaean graves. The Iliad, while a poetic myth, has a long list of place names that only make sense from a bronze age perspective (fallen out of use by the time they're recorded) implying a broad sweep of influence. The fact that there seem to have been Mycenaean Greeks among the sea peoples suggests a strong seafaring tradition. Also, the correspondence between the mystery king and the Hittites regarding the city of Wilyum points at an engagement, not always peaceful, with Mediterranean neighbors. Added to this, the resources they need are scattered in the region, in known places, so there's a reason to push south and east. My guess is that if a mainland Mycenaean confederation/empire survives, they first secure the major islands to enable easy sea travel, whilst launching expeditions in Anatolia, assuming the Hittites are collapsing or gone. Within a generation, there'd be cities under their control all along the coast with tribute paying vassals inland. If Egypt wanes, they might try to secure the Cypriot copper mines.
FairlyUninformedGraduate
Gone Fishin'
It doesn't butterfly western civilization as we know it, so....Egypt!
Oh, wait....
Do you remember where you read that? I didn't think we had a precise location for the Aramean homeland, afterall the first confirmed mention of Aramaeans was after they migrated.
That may take me some time to recollect exactly. I will message privately, you, once I look through my books.
Do the Mitanni count? They were already subjugated by the Assyrians by the time of the collapse and their culture was becoming rapidly extinct even before the collapse, but if their wars with the Hittites and Assyrians go better, they might be able to reform after the collapse or at least preserve their distinctiveness and culture long after OTL.
For sure, I’d include them here as their subjugation strengthened the Assyrians and helped that kingdom to weather the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Perhaps if the Hittites came to an agreement with Mitanni over their borders they could team up against the rising power of Assyria. The effect of that might mean Hittites and Mitanni survive but Assyria doesn’t.
You're right, nevertheless it would have been interesting to have a strong regional power in the Hispanic peninsula that survives Cartage or Rome
The Aramaean homeland is reputed to have been the inner steppe of modern Syria, around the area of modern Palmyra, where Assyrian texts mention campaigns against a people named "Akhlamu". This name, IIRC, appears in some late Akkadian texts in reference to Arameans, which is not watertight proof but a very reasonable indication that agrees with everything else we know about early Arameans. It is fairly widely agreed that the general area where Arameans originated is Inner Syria or its vicinity - though I think that some scholars have suggested more "Arabian" locations in modern Jordan or northern/northeastern Saudi Arabia, I consider these less likely. The region East of thee Southern Levant was likely already the home of the speakers of early forms of Arabic, and while the pre-Arabic languages of Northeastern Arabia (the possible home of the Chaldaeans) likely had similarities with Aramaic, they were their own thing.
I think that whether Arameans and Chaldaeans were actually part of the same migration waves with a shared origin is still unclear, it is possible that the latter were "Arabians" (or at last more connected with groups in modern NE Saudi Arabia) and the Arameans came from Syria.
By est of Southern Levant you mean East of modern Amman/ancient Petra or including those areas? Also is "already" the right adjective? In theory Arabs are closely related to NW-Semitics so they must have come from the north themselves and in the late bronze age they likely did not spread south much considering Ancient Southern Arabian was spoken in Southern Hejaz at this time.
I suspect that the Seima-Turbino event touched off a chain reaction/domino effect of migrations of people groups westward into other groups' territory until it eventually cut off the trade routes and unleashed the Sea Peoples.
FairlyUninformedGraduate
Gone Fishin'
I'm sure population migrations were one of the contributing factors, but the scale and speed of the collapse points to other systemic and environmental issues to my mind.
The evidence of burning and urban abandonment in diverse sites can be read as evidence of invasion, but as I understand it there's no clear transportation of another culture, and a culture without obvious artifacts would be unlikely to unseat several states so completely. It can also be read as societal collapse and social disorder, revolt in the face of famine and economic collapse. It can also be read as evidence of widespread natural disaster, as there's little sign of looting or massacres. All in all I'd suspect three, coupled with two, with one occuring before theres a chance to rebuild the civilisation. Refugees then start raiding and evacuating, leading to the sea peoples.
The sea peoples in turn hit the remaining civilisations which are reeling from the loss of trade networks, and the structures are too fragile to resist. Meanwhile peripheral peoples are probably moving in to settle lands no longer defended.
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Immediately East of modern Amman (which is known to have been in at least partly Canaanite-speaking area in the Iron Age). Petra is slightly to the southeast, and we have little clue about what the locals spoke in the Late Bronze (they are likely to be identified with the Shasu of Egyptian texts) but it might have been something closely related to the earliest forms of Arabic.
it is true that Arabic is closely related to NW Semitic, but in the Bronze Age, NW Semitic extends all over the Levant (it earliest known attestation is actually found in Egypt). In the Early Age, we find in Tayma' in Northern Hijaz a Semitic language which can be described as closer to NW Semitic than to Arabic, while not being either. Earliest attested dialects of Arabic are documented to the north of that, in the vicinity of Petra and East and South from there, while the rest of Arabia is... complicated.
What is your reference for South Arabian being used in Southern Hijaz at this time? Minaic is attested at Dadan (alongside Dadanitic North Arabian, which is also "not Arabic" but closer to it than Taymanitic) but it is clearly the product of a merchant settlement from Yemen proper.
The various "Thamudic" inscriptions lack any firmly grounded classification and are often hard to make sense of, which speaks against their being identifiable as a form of Arabic or South Arabian.
Arabic seems to have spreas from an area in the desert parts of modern Jordan and nearby places to the South (and then the East) in century-long process where it superseded the earlier non-Arabic North Arabian languages (Taymanitic, Dadanitic, the various Thamudics, Hasaitic and others) and then most South Arabian as well. So you are right, it spread from the North relative to most of the Arabian Peninsula, as far as our currently available documents allow to say.
Aramaic is very likely to have differentiated by about the same genral timeframe (Mid/Bronze) and immediately to the North/Northwest of Arabic.
Couldn't the more NW features of Taymadic be because of the fact we attest it earlier compared to Arabic?
Well I mainly made the argument because I knew South Arabian didn't exactly respect the modern Saudi-Yemeni border, I know Najran on the Saudi border was under the Sabaeans too.
But what else can they realistically be if not one of those 2 or a branch close to them? In terms of chronological depth and the given geography I don't see how we could get a highly divergent language or branch within the time frame given between the divergence of Central or West Semitic and time we hear of Thamudic.
I imagine the southern spread happened with the Qedarites and Nabatean period.
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1) Regarding Taymanitic, Kootstra and al-Jallad, who are the only scholars I know of who currently have delved deeply on the topic, do not seem to think so. By the way, the inscription found at al-Bayir in SE Jordan, which is now thought to be the earliest document of something that can be tentatively called "Arabic" is thought to be about the same age as the Taymanitic inscriptions - it is undated however, which makes this a reasonable guess and not a certainty.
2) Correct. Ancient South Arabian is documented into SW modern South Arabia and was probably spoken at Najran in the Iron Age - and likely later. Arabic spread there, likely in the Roman period and certainly by Late Antiquity - some of the earliest attestations of Arabic script are from there, dated fifth century CE. Earlier inscriptions from the area are either in South Arabian or in so-called Thamudic F (also called Himaic) but show admixture from likely some form of Arabic.
3) Everyone agrees that Thamudic scripts attest West Semitic languages, and most likely Central Semitic ones. These seem not to fit with either Arabic, NW Semitic, or Ancient South Arabian, and the corpus is too limited and poorly studied to say much, but still it is very likely that we are talking about Central Semitic languages that diverged sometime in the (possibly early) Bronze Age. The main problem seems to be our poor understanding of the inscriptions, and the limitedness of the info they convey (most texts seem to be very short sentences or simple proper names, other are undeciphered). Notably, a different picture occurs in Dhofar, where, outside well-understood examples of Ancient South Arabian, some short inscriptions in what has been called Sa'alkalic 1 and Sa'alkalic 2 have been found. These are very poorly studied, and even more poorly understood, but the educated guess is that they would attest languages ancestral to Modern South Arabian (which is generally thought to be West Semitic, but not Central Semitic, unlike Ancient South Arabian which most scholars now believe to be Central Semitic).
The linguistic landscape of Arabia before the general spread of Arabic seems to have been rather diverse, even if all the languages involved likely belonged to the same branch, and most to the same subbranch within it, of Semitic, and little direct evidence for non-Semitic languages anywhere has been found (indirect evidence in substrate placenames has been proposed).
4) It may have started a bit earlier, but mostly yes, the spread of Arabic into the whole Peninsula is thought to have happened largely in the Qedarite and Nabatean periods, with the exception of Greater Yemen (and perhaps Oman, about which we have nearly no evidence at all). The central parts of the peninsula yield a lot of written material tentatively dated to Hellenistic and Roman periods (mostly Thamudic, but some showing traces of actual Arabic), but very little of it is firmly datable so you have much room for hypotheses.
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There is evidence though of transportation of other cultures, at least in the form of the Assyrian and Karduniash texts regarding the collapse of the Hatti state. Clearly, too the Hatti themselves make mention of invaders to their north. It is known that this happened to their kingdom prior, invaders from the Kaska, Mushki and other confederates sacked their home city and caused a collapse of their state alongside plague and possible famine. The Hatti and their vassals clearly indicate wars of some kind, with two of them being invasions from external areas, others could have been massed rebellions of peasantry and so forth, with the Sea Peoples possibly a form of mercenary rebellion.
And how long is it that you term to be rapid? The entire Bronze Age collapse took around two centuries. Its signs begin in the 1250s in Mycenaen Greece whose sites begin to show signs of intensive wars (coordinating with the common Greek view of an invasion of their lands shortly after the Homeric epics). At the same time, the Hatti reached a grand detente with the Egyptian kingdom. That peace was perhaps hollow, for it is in this period that we find the Hatti using the Assyrians to defend their eastern borders, especially with the Mushki, Kaska and so forth and Assyria's annual invasions are fixed according to assisting the Hatti state. Once this broke down and the Assyrians turned against the Hatti and defeated them during the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I, the Hatti state experienced a collapse from 1209-1178 BCE, wherein the destruction spread from north to south and from the west up to the north.
Assyria then moves in and returns order to the situation, defeating each of the intruders into the region, Tiglath-Pileser I for instance references that he pushed a people across the Halys river (the Phrygians) before returning to Assyria. It was at that point that we see a truly environmental collapse or effect. Famines, plague and invasions of migrants are mentioned then readily by the Assyrians and their temples show evidence of extreme levels of sacrifices. This coincides with a collapse of the Assyrian and Karduniash state that took less than 20 years. In counter, the traditionally referenced Bronze Age Collapse connected to the Mediterranean Sea lasted at least 100 years.