The Catastrophe
Our story begins in the late Bronze Age, c.2200—1900 with the arrival from the north of the “Hellenes” on the Greek mainland, an event identified by a discontinuity in material culture, indicated by the differences between Early Helladic II and Early Helladic III pottery. These migrants spoke an early form of Greek, an Indo-European language. The language of the original inhabitants is not known for certain. The Greeks had various names for these “aboriginals”—Pelasgians, Leleges and Carians—by which they acknowledged that their race and culture was a fusion of more than one peoples. During the ensuing epoch the Minoan culture, issuing from Cretan palaces such as Knossos, Phaistos and Malia, came to dominate the Greek and Aegean world. From 1600 onwards, we can talk of a distinctive “Achaean” Greek culture on the mainland known as the Mycenaean. Both the Mycenaeans and the Minoans were highly organised societies conducting extensive international trade with all parts of the known world, from Spain (silver) and Britain (tin) in the west to Egypt and Mesopotamia in the East, from the Baltic region (amber) to the north, to Libya and Ethiopia (ivory) to the south; their industry and trade were centrally administered from large palace complexes. But in the early Minoan “neo-palatial” period (c.1600—c.1380) Crete was politically dominant and mainland Greece trod after her; while in the later Minoan “post-palatial” period (c.1380—c.1200) Mycenae took the lead. It is thought that a series of natural disasters that struck Crete—the volcanic eruption of the island of Thera (an event of colossal force dated variously between c.1650 and c.1500), and earthquakes (c.1450 and possibly c.1380), weakened the Minoan economy and gave the Mycenaeans the edge. By c.1380 Knossos was occupied by Greek speaking overlords, and the non-Greek of the Minoan Linear A writing was replaced by the Greek of Linear B as the language of palace administration.
Then c.1200 a catastrophe or series of catastrophes occurred that affected the entire civilised world of the Near East; this is known collectively as the Bronze Age Collapse. In mainland Greece and in Crete the principal known palace centres were destroyed—Mycenae, Tiryns, Midea, Pylos, Thebes, Orchomenos, the Menelaion (“Sparta”), Knossos and Cydonia. (Athens is thought to have survived, though damaged.) The Hittite empire collapsed and disappeared. Troy was destroyed. In Syria and Upper Mesopotamia all the major cities were destroyed, including Ugarit, Aleppo and Carchemish. Destruction was also wrought upon the cities of the Levant, including Megiddo, Ashdod, Bethel and Lachish. Likewise, the major cities of Cyprus were destroyed: Enkomi, Kastro, Sinda and Kition. Egypt came under severe attack from invaders known as the “Sea Peoples”, and though it repulsed them on more than one occasion, the invasions marked the end of ancient Egyptian power and prosperity. It may surprise the reader to learn that taken overall, this catastrophe constitutes the single greatest disaster to have befallen the Western civilised world. During the Bronze Age Collapse it is likely that the population of the Near East decreased by as much as 90%.
Following the Bronze Age Collapse Greece entered a Dark Age, (c.1200—c.750), after which the Greeks once again learned to write. Then, from c.750 down to the Persian Wars, when Xerxes lead a huge force into Greece and was defeated at sea at the Battle of Salamis (480) and on land at the Battle of Platea (479), we have the archaic period. These, then, form the principal epochs of our study: (I) Before c.2100: Middle Bronze Age (“Pelasgians”); (II) c.2100—c.1600: Late Bronze Age (“Hellenes”); (III) c.1600—c.1380: Minoan phase (“Achaeans”); (IV) c.1380—c.1200: Mycenaean hegemony (“Mycenaeans"); (V) c.1200—c.750: Dark Age; (VI) c.750—479: Archaic period; (VII) 479 onwards: Classical and subsequent periods. Between the Mycenaean period and the Dark Age, lying on its boundary, occurs the catastrophe of the Bronze Age Collapse.
“Boundary” events may be associated with the other transitions: between the Minoan and Mycenaean periods there was a possible earthquake at Knossos and a “capture” of that palace by Greek-speaking “overlords”; between the Greek Dark Age and the Archaic period there was the inception of the Olympic Games in 776. Discontinuities in material culture that are marked by changes in pottery styles, architecture and the other plastic arts may be associated with these significant boundary events. They belong to the centre and pattern of the disturbances, and so help to explain them. Most significant of all was the seismic disturbance of the Bronze Age Collapse; it stands at the centre of explanation of the three great transformations that I have already indicated.
Explanations of the Bronze Age Collapse: (A) those dealing with events located on the boundary, such as the attempted invasion of Egypt by the “Sea Peoples”, which are “triggers” or “immediate consequences”; (B) those dealing with long-term causes, such as crop failure, climate change, and changes in methods of warfare; (C) those dealing with the system response to a crisis, that emphasise the vulnerability of the system prior to the crisis, and its failure following it. It seems likely that all three types of explanation are involved, but here the system response is taken as decisive. Whatever events may have triggered the destruction of this or that palace, no such trigger will account for the wholescale destruction of civilisation, or for the fact that the population did not quickly recover. The routine response of any culture to a disaster is to rebuild, so the central problem that we must address is why such rebuilding did not take place, why, in the case of Greece, a Dark Age lasting four or five hundred years followed. There is nothing comparable in all human history to the Bronze Age Collapse.
Prior to the Bronze Age Collapse, Greek society held to a matriarchal religion in the context of a cognitive structure denoted here by primitive materialism and practiced human sacrifice. At some time after the catastrophe Greek culture adopted a patriarchal religion, the cultural elite changed their cognition to Ionian consciousness, and Greeks gave up in principle the practice of human sacrifice.
Among the explanations of the category of triggers there is the explanation that the Greek historians themselves developed and elaborated—the theory of a Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese. We are now in the position to demonstrate that this theory is false. One criticism against this thesis is that there is no evidence for it in the archaeological record. However, it is the internal inconsistencies of the account that tell most decisively against it. The palaces were destroyed on or around 1200, a fact not known to Greek historians, so an invasion postulated to have taken place in 1104 cannot explain the Bronze Age Collapse.
There are other practical inconsistencies. Anyone who has visited Greece will realise that it is a mountainous country that favours defence over attack, and makes travel by foot, whether there are roads or not, very difficult. The distance between two points may be measured “as the crow flies”, but a more practical measure could be “the time it takes to walk it”. A topological map of walking distances of Mycenaean Greece needs to be made. Reports indicate that the Mycenaeans had some road network, but not such as would have made the marching of invasion armies into an everyday occurrence. Roads in mountainous countries are easily defended by posterns. When Thucydides wrote, “Mycenae was certainly a small place, and many of the towns of that period do not seem to us today to be particularly imposing,” (Peloponnesian War,1.40) he cannot have visited the cyclopean ruins of that citadel’s walls, or have seen Gla, or realised that ancient Thebes occupied a ground twice the size of Mycenae. This is important: what Thucydides says about prehistoric Greece is a description of its Dark Age—he does not know of the Mycenaean palace culture any more than Homer did. The idea of large invasion forces seems out of place with what the geography and topology of Greece suggests. We should speak of slow migrations and fusions of peoples, rather than of conquests. The impression that Mycenaean Greece was a warrior-society is, of course, affirmed by the legends, which speak of two wars of monumental proportions—a double conflict between Argos and Thebes, and the expedition against Troy. Yet Argos scarcely existed as a centre of importance in the Mycenaean age; it is true that Thebes was destroyed, and possibly twice, and there is just the shadow of a chronology suggested by the archaeological record that we can date its second destruction to just before 1200, the time of the ‘Epigonae’ (Seven Against Thebes) of Greek legend; that would make Thebes the first of the palaces to be destroyed, just before the boundary period of the Bronze Age Collapse onto which we must place the Trojan War, if it ever took place. (The dating is by pottery styles and concerns the differences between pottery of the Late Helladic III B2 style and the Late Helladic early III C style. This boundary occurs on or around 1190.) Invasion of the Peloponnese by a Dorian horde crossing the Corinthian Gulf and then traversing a mountainous land route is highly unlikely. Perhaps a sea-borne invasion is possible.
This connects to the “Sea-Peoples” theory. In this theory the cities of Asia Minor and the Greek palaces were destroyed by sea-borne invaders. The evidence for Sea-Peoples comes from Egyptian inscriptions that point to invasions of the Delta in the third year of Merneptah, 1207, and to invasions in the fifth, eighth and twelfth years of the reign of Rameses III. Of these latter, the invasion in the eighth year is taken to be the most significant, and this is currently dated to 1177. Additionally, letters discovered at Ugarit in Syria date its destruction to between 1190 and 1185 specifically by sea-borne forces.
None of this serves to account for the Bronze Age Collapse and why that collapse lasted so long. A city or palace may be destroyed, but the people flee to the surrounding lands, return and rebuild. The Sea Peoples themselves would appear to be Achaean Greeks predominantly. Among the Sea Peoples the Peleset are identified with the Philistines, who are thought to be Greeks, and are often connected with Cretans. The forces mounted by the Sea Peoples do not appear to be very large, even in the Egyptian records, where details and numbers may be inflated by pride. The force attacking Ugarit in the letters is said to comprise no more than seven ships, not more than 1000 men, and if this force did overwhelm that city it is because the king’s forces were away defending the Hittite Empire, just as King Ammurapi states in his letter to Cyprus. So, it seems we need to postulate another Sea Peoples to attack and destroy both Mycenaean Greece and the Hittite Empire, looking upon the Sea People mentioned in the Egyptian texts and elsewhere as a secondary force of displaced people arising from the first. There is no historical evidence at all for this first Sea Peoples, though some historians have simply postulated an invasion from Central Europe, or from Sardinia or Sicily to provide a supply of missing men.
The logistics of war must also subvert this theory decisively. A sea-borne force might invade and overwhelm Pylos, but could their numbers be so great as to mount successive invasions of Mycenae and its port Tiryns, both extensively fortified, and then go on to devastate a whole land for more than four hundred years? At best, we have here glimpses of the triggers, but the underlying causes are not revealed. Thus, on the contrary, when the invasion hypothesis collapses because it is wholly empty of explanatory force, we must revert to the hypothesis of internal conflict. Among all the causes of terrible destruction, civil wars are the worse in their effects, and there is one kind of civil war that is known to bring about terrible loss of life and unprecedented cruelty, and this is a war of religion—witness the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and the French Wars of Religion.
Then c.1200 a catastrophe or series of catastrophes occurred that affected the entire civilised world of the Near East; this is known collectively as the Bronze Age Collapse. In mainland Greece and in Crete the principal known palace centres were destroyed—Mycenae, Tiryns, Midea, Pylos, Thebes, Orchomenos, the Menelaion (“Sparta”), Knossos and Cydonia. (Athens is thought to have survived, though damaged.) The Hittite empire collapsed and disappeared. Troy was destroyed. In Syria and Upper Mesopotamia all the major cities were destroyed, including Ugarit, Aleppo and Carchemish. Destruction was also wrought upon the cities of the Levant, including Megiddo, Ashdod, Bethel and Lachish. Likewise, the major cities of Cyprus were destroyed: Enkomi, Kastro, Sinda and Kition. Egypt came under severe attack from invaders known as the “Sea Peoples”, and though it repulsed them on more than one occasion, the invasions marked the end of ancient Egyptian power and prosperity. It may surprise the reader to learn that taken overall, this catastrophe constitutes the single greatest disaster to have befallen the Western civilised world. During the Bronze Age Collapse it is likely that the population of the Near East decreased by as much as 90%.
Following the Bronze Age Collapse Greece entered a Dark Age, (c.1200—c.750), after which the Greeks once again learned to write. Then, from c.750 down to the Persian Wars, when Xerxes lead a huge force into Greece and was defeated at sea at the Battle of Salamis (480) and on land at the Battle of Platea (479), we have the archaic period. These, then, form the principal epochs of our study: (I) Before c.2100: Middle Bronze Age (“Pelasgians”); (II) c.2100—c.1600: Late Bronze Age (“Hellenes”); (III) c.1600—c.1380: Minoan phase (“Achaeans”); (IV) c.1380—c.1200: Mycenaean hegemony (“Mycenaeans"); (V) c.1200—c.750: Dark Age; (VI) c.750—479: Archaic period; (VII) 479 onwards: Classical and subsequent periods. Between the Mycenaean period and the Dark Age, lying on its boundary, occurs the catastrophe of the Bronze Age Collapse.
“Boundary” events may be associated with the other transitions: between the Minoan and Mycenaean periods there was a possible earthquake at Knossos and a “capture” of that palace by Greek-speaking “overlords”; between the Greek Dark Age and the Archaic period there was the inception of the Olympic Games in 776. Discontinuities in material culture that are marked by changes in pottery styles, architecture and the other plastic arts may be associated with these significant boundary events. They belong to the centre and pattern of the disturbances, and so help to explain them. Most significant of all was the seismic disturbance of the Bronze Age Collapse; it stands at the centre of explanation of the three great transformations that I have already indicated.
Explanations of the Bronze Age Collapse: (A) those dealing with events located on the boundary, such as the attempted invasion of Egypt by the “Sea Peoples”, which are “triggers” or “immediate consequences”; (B) those dealing with long-term causes, such as crop failure, climate change, and changes in methods of warfare; (C) those dealing with the system response to a crisis, that emphasise the vulnerability of the system prior to the crisis, and its failure following it. It seems likely that all three types of explanation are involved, but here the system response is taken as decisive. Whatever events may have triggered the destruction of this or that palace, no such trigger will account for the wholescale destruction of civilisation, or for the fact that the population did not quickly recover. The routine response of any culture to a disaster is to rebuild, so the central problem that we must address is why such rebuilding did not take place, why, in the case of Greece, a Dark Age lasting four or five hundred years followed. There is nothing comparable in all human history to the Bronze Age Collapse.
Prior to the Bronze Age Collapse, Greek society held to a matriarchal religion in the context of a cognitive structure denoted here by primitive materialism and practiced human sacrifice. At some time after the catastrophe Greek culture adopted a patriarchal religion, the cultural elite changed their cognition to Ionian consciousness, and Greeks gave up in principle the practice of human sacrifice.
Among the explanations of the category of triggers there is the explanation that the Greek historians themselves developed and elaborated—the theory of a Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese. We are now in the position to demonstrate that this theory is false. One criticism against this thesis is that there is no evidence for it in the archaeological record. However, it is the internal inconsistencies of the account that tell most decisively against it. The palaces were destroyed on or around 1200, a fact not known to Greek historians, so an invasion postulated to have taken place in 1104 cannot explain the Bronze Age Collapse.
There are other practical inconsistencies. Anyone who has visited Greece will realise that it is a mountainous country that favours defence over attack, and makes travel by foot, whether there are roads or not, very difficult. The distance between two points may be measured “as the crow flies”, but a more practical measure could be “the time it takes to walk it”. A topological map of walking distances of Mycenaean Greece needs to be made. Reports indicate that the Mycenaeans had some road network, but not such as would have made the marching of invasion armies into an everyday occurrence. Roads in mountainous countries are easily defended by posterns. When Thucydides wrote, “Mycenae was certainly a small place, and many of the towns of that period do not seem to us today to be particularly imposing,” (Peloponnesian War,1.40) he cannot have visited the cyclopean ruins of that citadel’s walls, or have seen Gla, or realised that ancient Thebes occupied a ground twice the size of Mycenae. This is important: what Thucydides says about prehistoric Greece is a description of its Dark Age—he does not know of the Mycenaean palace culture any more than Homer did. The idea of large invasion forces seems out of place with what the geography and topology of Greece suggests. We should speak of slow migrations and fusions of peoples, rather than of conquests. The impression that Mycenaean Greece was a warrior-society is, of course, affirmed by the legends, which speak of two wars of monumental proportions—a double conflict between Argos and Thebes, and the expedition against Troy. Yet Argos scarcely existed as a centre of importance in the Mycenaean age; it is true that Thebes was destroyed, and possibly twice, and there is just the shadow of a chronology suggested by the archaeological record that we can date its second destruction to just before 1200, the time of the ‘Epigonae’ (Seven Against Thebes) of Greek legend; that would make Thebes the first of the palaces to be destroyed, just before the boundary period of the Bronze Age Collapse onto which we must place the Trojan War, if it ever took place. (The dating is by pottery styles and concerns the differences between pottery of the Late Helladic III B2 style and the Late Helladic early III C style. This boundary occurs on or around 1190.) Invasion of the Peloponnese by a Dorian horde crossing the Corinthian Gulf and then traversing a mountainous land route is highly unlikely. Perhaps a sea-borne invasion is possible.
This connects to the “Sea-Peoples” theory. In this theory the cities of Asia Minor and the Greek palaces were destroyed by sea-borne invaders. The evidence for Sea-Peoples comes from Egyptian inscriptions that point to invasions of the Delta in the third year of Merneptah, 1207, and to invasions in the fifth, eighth and twelfth years of the reign of Rameses III. Of these latter, the invasion in the eighth year is taken to be the most significant, and this is currently dated to 1177. Additionally, letters discovered at Ugarit in Syria date its destruction to between 1190 and 1185 specifically by sea-borne forces.
None of this serves to account for the Bronze Age Collapse and why that collapse lasted so long. A city or palace may be destroyed, but the people flee to the surrounding lands, return and rebuild. The Sea Peoples themselves would appear to be Achaean Greeks predominantly. Among the Sea Peoples the Peleset are identified with the Philistines, who are thought to be Greeks, and are often connected with Cretans. The forces mounted by the Sea Peoples do not appear to be very large, even in the Egyptian records, where details and numbers may be inflated by pride. The force attacking Ugarit in the letters is said to comprise no more than seven ships, not more than 1000 men, and if this force did overwhelm that city it is because the king’s forces were away defending the Hittite Empire, just as King Ammurapi states in his letter to Cyprus. So, it seems we need to postulate another Sea Peoples to attack and destroy both Mycenaean Greece and the Hittite Empire, looking upon the Sea People mentioned in the Egyptian texts and elsewhere as a secondary force of displaced people arising from the first. There is no historical evidence at all for this first Sea Peoples, though some historians have simply postulated an invasion from Central Europe, or from Sardinia or Sicily to provide a supply of missing men.
The logistics of war must also subvert this theory decisively. A sea-borne force might invade and overwhelm Pylos, but could their numbers be so great as to mount successive invasions of Mycenae and its port Tiryns, both extensively fortified, and then go on to devastate a whole land for more than four hundred years? At best, we have here glimpses of the triggers, but the underlying causes are not revealed. Thus, on the contrary, when the invasion hypothesis collapses because it is wholly empty of explanatory force, we must revert to the hypothesis of internal conflict. Among all the causes of terrible destruction, civil wars are the worse in their effects, and there is one kind of civil war that is known to bring about terrible loss of life and unprecedented cruelty, and this is a war of religion—witness the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and the French Wars of Religion.
Illustration derived from a Greek vase, C5.
This icon is said to depict a scene from a satyr play, but expresses ideas not a part of any “entertainment”. It is a frank look at cruelty, depicting a man being tortured: while he is being beaten with a flail, his tongue is being pulled out by a man using tongs. Others look on and mock; another prepares to deal a blow with an oar. Cruelty has a history that cannot be separated from the evolution of religion.