Histories written a century or even a half century ago have relatively definite conclusions about the fall of the Bronze Age (and a hundred other subjects). Times have changed. Modern standards and methods in many fields have subjected any and all theories to acid tests that historians of the past never dreamed of. From dating technology to DNA sampling to a thousand other tools, modern researchers have resources that can unlock—or debunk—information as never before.
It is in the nature of such scrutiny that existing theories get shot down more easily than new ones garner support. The historian John H. Arnold pointed out that history is an ongoing process—it never can, nor will, reach its final conclusion, and revisions will always be happening, as more facts and data become available and older theories are modified or disproved.
One by one, modern researchers are debunking (or at least casting reasonable doubt on) many of the theories about the end of the Bronze Age. But though today’s experts have immeasurably more information about the time, they are less sure about what befell it than ever before.
A good detective might have two questions to set the parameters for any investigation:
1 What happened?
2 How (why) did it happen?
If question number one can’t be answered, it becomes extremely difficult to answer question number two. And the truth is, experts still disagree about that first question.
Traditionally, the explanation behind “the fall of the Bronze Age” says that sometime between about 1250 and 1100 BCE, something horrifying happened to the areas in the ancient world that were anywhere close to the Mediterranean Sea. Some sort of phenomenon or event or series of events affected states and peoples from the central Mediterranean all the way east into modern-day Iraq. Hundreds of cities were destroyed or abandoned. Famine, war, disease, political upheaval, volcanoes, earthquakes, piracy, human migration, and climate changes such as drought are mentioned in the sources and found in the data. Somehow and at some point, the complex, interconnected system of trade and communication supporting the very centralized states in this era was disrupted. By about 1100 BCE, many of the formerly centralized societies had reverted (or fragmented into) more localized, smaller political entities, while wealth (such as evidenced by grave goods included in burials) declined in opulence.
Most of the states that did survive the era emerged looking like bruised and battered boxers who’d survived a grueling bout—somewhat diminished, if not permanently reduced, in power and influence. Egypt would never be the same. Writing would almost die out in Greece. And the powerful Hittite Empire, a large and strategically placed kingdom for two and a half centuries, was somehow destroyed.[12] Several major states never made it out of the Bronze Age at all.
The historian Robert Drews has said that the end of the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age was one of history’s most frightful turning points and a calamity for those who experienced it. According to Drews, almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean was destroyed over a fifty-year period running from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the twelfth century BCE. He ran down the list of damages:
In the Aegean, the palace-centered world that we call Mycenaean Greece disappeared: although some of its glories were remembered by the bards of the Dark Age, it was otherwise forgotten until archaeologists dug it up. The loss in Anatolia was even greater. The Hittite empire had given to the Anatolian plateau a measure of order and prosperity that it had never known before and would not see again for a thousand years. In the Levant recovery was much faster, and some important Bronze Age institutions survived with little change; but others did not, and everywhere urban life was drastically set back. In Egypt the Twentieth Dynasty marked the end of the New Kingdom and almost the end of pharaonic achievement. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean the twelfth century B.C. ushered in a dark age, which in Greece and Anatolia was not to lift for more than four hundred years. Altogether the end of the Bronze Age was arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the western Roman Empire.
So much for the “what happened” side of the investigation.
The second part of the investigation concerns how or why it happened.
Theories have never been in short supply:
1 The sea peoples (and related causes)
2 Famine/climate change/drought
3 Earthquakes/volcanoes/tsunamis
4 Plagues
5 Internecine warfare
6 Systems collapse
7 Any or all of the above in combination
There’s more.[13] But the problem isn’t one of finding evidence—there seems to be data available in one form or another to support cases for and against all of these suspects in some places and during some times—but rather, the damage that was done seems so extensive that it’s hard to imagine any single cause capable of wreaking such widespread and long-lasting havoc.
In addition, the evidence is tricky.[14]
Take destroyed cities: Often when destroyed cities from thousands of years ago are found, visible signs of their end are present. Soot and ash layers from torched buildings are the most obvious evidence at most sites, but bodies lying where they fell, weapons such as arrowheads embedded in walls, and other forms of damage are also sometimes 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