Eric H. Cline is the author of the new book After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations. His other books include 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. He is a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University.
Q: Why did you decide to write After 1177 B.C., and how would you compare the time period you write about in this book to that of your book 1177 B.C.?
A: Having written about the great kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean regions, and the sudden collapse of their network within a matter of decades, in my book 1177 BC, I thought it would be of interest to do a follow-up book and write about what happened immediately after the collapse, looking especially at how each of the various societies dealt with the new world in which they now found themselves, i.e. what we now call the Iron Age.
Some were extremely resilient and able to transform, like the Phoenicians and the Cypriots. Others were less resilient but managed to either adapt, like the Assyrians and Babylonians, or simply cope, like the Egyptians. And still others were unable to survive the transition with their society intact and disappeared for all intents and purposes, like the Mycenaeans and the Hittites.
To me, this period is just as fascinating as that of the Bronze Age, albeit for different reasons, including the fact that we have so many inscriptions left to us that we are able to know about some things in great detail.
I also think that what happened during that period holds lessons which might be of use to us today, especially in terms of resilience and contemplating what we might have to do if our own societies and civilizations collapse because of any number of potential factors, not least of which is climate change, not to mention things like a world-wide pandemic and supply chain issues, both of which are factors in our world today.
This is, in some ways, a very different book from that of 1177 BC and yet I think readers will recognize it as a continuation of the story that I began telling in that first volume.
Q: The writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb said of the book, “You cannot understand human civilization and self-organization without studying what happened on, before, and after 1177 B.C.” What do you think of that description?
A: I am very pleased with that description, for it encapsulates and embodies what happened during the Late Bronze Age Collapse and immediately thereafter, when the network of interdependent and thriving great kingdoms in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean suddenly collapsed and the survivors were forced to deal with the aftermath.
Most of them never saw the collapse coming and yet a few societies were well enough organized that they were able to pivot and transform, even as other societies failed to survive.
As I mentioned above, I do think that there are lessons to be learned, if we are willing to study what happened to those who have come before us, even if the events took place 3,000 years ago.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I’ve been studying the Late Bronze Age ever since my freshman year in college; it’s my favorite period in history. But, to put it into proper context, I had also studied the periods before and after it, which is where the Iron Age comes into play.
In addition, I’ve been teaching general surveys of ancient history for more than 30 years now, including specific classes on the history of ancient Greece; the history of ancient Israel and neighboring lands; and the history of ancient Egypt and the Near East.
So, I already knew the general outlines, and a lot of the specific details, from these four centuries that make up the Iron Age, from the 12th to the eighth centuries BC, and I knew basically what I wanted to touch upon as some of the highlights.
However, when I got right down into the nitty gritty and began catching up on all of the work that has been done in the past few decades, it was really amazing to see how much how our thinking has changed, and how much new data is now available, just since I was in graduate school.
What wasn’t a surprise to me, but will be a surprise to many readers, is that the so-called Dorian Invasion of Greece, which you can still find mentioned everywhere in general books and encyclopedias, especially on the Internet, probably never happened. I open with that, in the Prologue of the book, and hope that the discussion will grab the readers and draw them into the rest of the book.
Q: How did this period come to be known as the First Dark Age, and why is it now known as the Iron Age?
A: This era has long been called a Dark Age by previous scholars, most often those studying ancient Greece, because of comparisons both to the Bronze Age just before it and the Archaic and Classical periods that came after it.
It was seen, and to some degree rightfully so, as a time of lower socio-political complexity, following the collapse of the great powers of the Late Bronze Age.
However, the extent to which this period was actually a Dark Age has always been debated, especially by scholars of the ancient Near East, since it was clear that some societies, like the Assyrians and the Babylonians, did not retreat into such lower levels of complexity.
And now it is becoming ever clearer that this period also saw great leaps forward, like the standardization and spread of the alphabet across the Mediterranean and the invention and spread of iron as a replacement for bronze.
Thus, in recent years, so much light has been shone on this period that it really isn’t considered to be a Dark Age at all anymore by scholars. As several of my colleagues have said previously, an era which sees such dramatic innovations, like iron and the alphabet, cannot possibly be seen as a Dark Age. Therefore they, and I as well, suggest that to call it the Iron Age instead is a more meaningful, and accurate, label.
And yet, that new knowledge, and the changing interpretations, hasn’t really made it out into the big wide world yet, so that you still see it called a Dark Age all over the internet and even in a lot of textbooks for both high school and college classes. I hope that my book will go at least a little way towards changing that.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am just now finishing up a book on the Amarna Letters, which is an archive from the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten that was found in 1887.
It consists of about 50 letters sent either from or to the Pharaohs from the other Great Kings, i.e., in Babylonia, Assyria, Cyprus, Mitanni (in modern Syria), and Anatolia during the 14th century BC. There are also more than 300 additional letters sent from vassal rulers in the various Canaanite city states to the two pharaohs during that same time.
In the opening chapters of the book, I tell the story of the race to decipher the tablets in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including some of their missteps, and then in the rest of the book I discuss the contents of the tablets themselves and use them to help reconstruct the world of the ancient Near East during what we now call the Amarna Period.
The letters provide us with a huge amount of information about the diplomacy and international relations from that period, which has allowed us to get a glimpse of what it was like back then.
It turns out that it was a pretty wonderful period if you were one of the Great Kings but was also a period of almost continual petty intrigues and conflicts if you were one of the lesser vassal rulers in Canaan.
But, as soon as I’m done with it, which will be very soon, I will begin work on the next volume in what I’m calling the “unintended trilogy” (for I never anticipated that I would write three such books and follow the course of history for a thousand years or so).
In that volume, which is tentatively called 776 BC: The Clashing of Civilizations, I am planning to pick up the story right where I left off at the end of After 1177 BC, starting with the first Greek Olympics in 776 BC and continuing straight on for the next four centuries or so, right down to the time of Alexander the Great.
It won’t be focused just on Greece, of course, but rather will cover the same regions that I’ve discussed in the previous two books, including the Aegean, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Eastern Mediterranean all the way to Mesopotamia.
It’s a fascinating period, of course, which sees poets, playwrights, and historians from Homer to Herodotus in Greece; great empires rising and falling across the ancient Near East, from the Neo-Assyrians to the Persians and then the invading Macedonians; philosophers and artists such as Socrates and Plato to Pheidias; and dramatic events such as the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC and the subsequent Babylonian Exile.
And, of course I’ll need to discuss the Persian Wars, when Xerxes and Darius tried to invade Greece, including the battles at Marathon and Thermopylae, as well as the great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.
It’s what some have called the Axial Age, which is a concept that I shall explore in the book, and is also the period that saw the invention of democracy and the Periclean building program in Athens, which gave us the Parthenon on the Acropolis, among any number of other accomplishments. However, at the same time, we see a continual clash of civilizations during these centuries.
I think that it’ll be a very interesting book, if I’m able to continue telling the story as I am currently envisioning it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Not that I can think of, except that I usually name my pet fish after ancient rulers. I have three at the moment: Suppiluliuma, Ramses, and Cleopatra. Sadly, the fourth one, Julius Caesar, did not even make it to the Ides of March this year...
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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