REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline

After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, Eric H. Cline (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Sometime around 1150 BC, the dense network of politically, economically, and culturally interdependent states around the eastern Mediterranean collapsed. In 2014, GWU archaeologist Eric Cline wrote a book about it. And then, surprisingly, it became a bestseller.

Okay, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise: most people can recognize an obvious historical analogy when it hits them over the head, and the globalized¹ state system of the Late Bronze Age has extremely clear parallels to the modern day. An interconnected and cosmopolitan world? Centralized state bureaucracy? High-level diplomacy between ruling elites? A technologically complex civilization enabled by extensive international trade along lengthy and elaborate supply chains? Well, gosh, that seems remarkably familiar. An audience that had just weathered a global financial crisis (and, later, a global pandemic) was perfectly poised to appreciate Cline’s exploration of the fragility of complex systems. No wonder it sold! (A copy entered the Psmith household in early 2020 for, uh, obvious reasons.)

Cline’s basic argument in the book was that the Collapse was due not to any single cause but to a “perfect storm” of calamities: drought and accompanying famine, earthquake, internal rebellion, external invasion. These were all problems that the civilizations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean had faced and survived in the past, but under their combined onslaught the most fragile parts of the system at last began buckle. When one society disintegrated, its sudden absence from the interconnected global economy became a new stressor on its surviving neighbors — until at last, domino-like, the whole thing came down.² It would be decades, or in some places centuries, before the standard of living returned to anything like its previous level, and it would be nearly five hundred years before an international system as complex and sophisticated as the world of the Late Bronze Age emerged.

Now, a decade after his original book, Cline has a sequel exploring what happened after the Collapse. Which civilizations were able to rebound to something approaching their former glory, which barely managed to limp along into the Iron Age, and which vanished into the sands of time? And, more importantly, why?

This is a much more difficult story to tell. The original 1177 B.C. spent much of its page count on the zenith of Bronze Age civilization, the 15th through 13th centuries BC, to explain what it was that did the collapsing. It’s a sweeping tale, full of wonderful stories and fascinating digressions into the historicity of the Trojan War (yes) and the Exodus (not archeologically substantiated) as well as being a compelling portrait of a complicated set of societies. Cline’s narrative darts from Egypt to Assyria to the Aegean to the Hittites, treating each in turn as he moves forward through time towards what we all know is coming.

But chronological framing is impossible for the sequel. There is, definitionally — there can be — no grand narrative of regional divergence after the fall of a “world-system.” The fate of Mesopotamia is no longer linked to that of Greece; there are no more Cretan envoys in New Kingdom tomb reliefs, no more battles between the Hittite Great King and the wanax of a Mycenaean palatial center, no more Uzbek tin shipwrecked off the coast of Anatolia. Once the ties are cut, each story must stand alone, and accordingly Cline gives each region its own chapter.

Alas, this is a lot less fun to read.

Part of the problem is that often, there’s not a lot to tell. The collapse itself has a certain drama — the tumbled ruins of monumental architecture, the skeletons and arrowheads amidst the rubble, the panicked requests for aid preserved in the archives of a society that lasted a few decades longer — but any sufficiently thorough collapse will leave few archaeological or historical traces of its aftermath. Civilization is in some sense defined as “stuff that leaves records”: monumental architecture, literacy, large-scale trade, specialist craft production, and so on. It’s much harder for us to know what was going on during an era when people are building with wood (instead of stone), or making pots at home out of lousy local clay (instead of in centralized and semi-industrial production centers), or relying on the oral tradition (instead of carving dynastic propaganda into the living cliff-face in friezes a thousand feet high). When we call these periods “Dark Ages,” we mean you can’t see anything when you look in.

But what surprised me most about After 1177 B.C. is how short this era was. In some places, anyway.

We have a vague picture of what happens after a civilizational collapse, but it’s been disproportionately influenced by two particularly dramatic examples: sub-Roman Britain and the Greek Dark Ages. This was perfectly sensible coming from the Anglo historians and archaeologists who have dominated the public conception of the field — after all, the only thing more interesting than the history of your own island is that of the classical world you’ve been studying since you got your first Latin grammar at age six — but it turns out that neither of these are the general rule. Foggy, faraway Britain, so reliant on imported goods and troops, was far more seriously impacted by the withdrawal of Rome than was most of the Empire and saw a longer and more significant reduction in cultural complexity, standards of living, average stature, and of course population. (Imagine what would happen to a Mars colony if the connections to the home planet stopped working.)

Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeans suffered an even more striking decline. As Austrian archaeologist Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy summarizes:

The impressive palatial structures were not rebuilt, and very little of the representational arts and crafts of the palaces seems to have survived. The complex forms of political, social, and economic organization fell into oblivion. Palaces, kings, and royal families became matter for Greek myths. The art of writing was lost for centuries. In short, Greek civilization was reduced to the level of a prehistoric society.

The Greeks of the classical era had little conception that the Mycenaeans had even existed, let alone that they were their own ancestors: they retained a vague mythological tradition of past kings, but they attributed the few surviving Mycenaean structures to the work of cyclopes. In fact, the disconnect between the civilization of the Late Bronze Age and the later classical world was so great that until Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B, it was an open question whether the people responsible for the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus were even Greeks at all. (The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes: Linear B turns out to be a syllabic script for the most ancient attested form of Greek. It features a number of uniquely Greek words and deity names even in the limited surviving corpus. More recently, ancient DNA has confirmed the linguistic evidence: the classical Greeks were the descendants of the Mycenaeans.)³

But the more you look at the archaeological record, the more you can pick out signs of cultural continuity. Agricultural practices don’t seem to have changed much, nor did Mycenaean pottery styles, and the names and attributes of the gods preserved in Linear B are close if not identical to their forms as codified in Homer and Hesiod. Even the cyclopean architecture continued to provide shelter: the Mycenaean palace at Pylos was almost completely destroyed in the Collapse, but the few rooms that survived intact show signs of having been inhabited by squatters over the next century or two.

Homer too is chock full of details that turn out to be distant memories of the Mycenaean world, somehow preserved in the oral tradition until writing was reintroduced to Greece.⁴ For instance, he describes a kind of boar’s tusk helmet that, by his time, no one had worn for centuries, but which archaeologists have since regularly discovered in Mycenaean shaft graves throughout the Aegean. But my favorite example, which is of course linguistic, is the word for “king”: Homer describes Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus and others with the word anax, which is recognizably the Linear B word 𐀷𐀙𐀏, wa-na-ka, used in the Bronze Age to describe the supreme rulers of the Mycenaean palatial societies. (The w sound was lost with the tragic death of the digamma.) By the classical era, however, anax had fallen out of use in preference for basileus (Linear B 𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄, qa-si-re-u), which in the Mycenaean period had referred to a much lower-level chieftain.

This all paints an evocative picture of a post-apocalyptic world. You can imagine it transplanted to an American context, with the scattered survivors of some great cataclysm huddled around fires built in the corners of a crumbling Lincoln Memorial. You can picture them passing on stories of the great men of the past with their tall tube-shaped hats and the shiny black stones they carried in their pockets. And by the time this remnant rebuilt, they might well have forgotten the word “President” except as an archaism; after centuries of as a small-scale society, “Mayor” might become so deeply engrained as the highest title that two thousand years later they would still use it to refer to their emperor.

But as fascinating as this all is, Mycenaean Greece was as much an outlier as sub-Roman Britain: the civilizational collapse in the Aegean was unusually prolonged and severe compared to the fates of many of the other peoples of the Late Bronze Age. Here I have helpfully reformatted Cline’s chart of how resilient the various societies proved:

Let’s take a brief tour through the various fates of these societies. I’ll come back to the Phoenicians at the end, because their example raises interesting questions when considered in contrast with the Mycenaeans. For the moment, though, let’s begin like civilization itself: in Mesopotamia.

Before the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Assyrian and Babylonian empires had numbered among the Great Powers of the age: linked by marriage, politics, war, and trade to the other mighty kings, they spent much of their time conducting high-level diplomacy and warfare. As far as we can tell, they did well in the initial collapse: there’s a brief hiatus in Assyrian royal inscriptions running from about 1208 to 1132 BC, but records resume again with the reign of Aššur-reša-iši I and his repeated battles with his neighbor to the south, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar I (no relation). But although the kings of the late twelfth century continued much as their Bronze Age predecessors had — waging war, building palaces, going hunting, accepting tribute, collecting taxes, and ordering it all recorded in stone and clay — the world had changed around them. No longer were there huge royal gifts sent to and from fellow great kings, “My Majesty’s brother”⁵ overseas; now their diplomatic world consisted of tiny petty kings of nearby cities who could be looted or extorted at will.

Mesopotamia didn’t escape unscathed forever: beginning around 1080 BC, texts begin to record severe droughts, invading Aramaeans, and total crop failures. There was a major drought in 1060 BC, and then both the Assyrian and Babylonian records record further drought every ten years like clockwork — sometimes accompanied by plague, sometimes by “troubles and disorder” — until the end of the eleventh century BC. Most of the tenth century was equally dire, with chronicles recording grain shortages, invasions, and a cessation of regular offerings to the gods.

But unlike the Mycenaeans, and in spite of real suffering (ancient Babylonia is estimated to have lost up to 75% of its population in the three hundred years after the Collapse), both Mesopotamian empires were able to hang on to civilization. There were still kings, there were still scribes, and there were still boundary stones on which to record things like “distress and famine under King Kaššu-nadin-ahhe.” And when conditions finally improved, Assyria and Babylonia were both able to bounce back. When at last the Assyrian recovery began under Aššur-dan II (934-912 BC), for example, he (or more realistically, his scribe) was able to write: “I brought back the exhausted people of Assyria who had abandoned their cities and houses in the face of want, hunger, and famine, and had gone up to other lands. I settled them in cities and homes which were suitable and they dwelt in peace.” Clearly, Assyria still retained enough statehood to effect the sort of mass population transfer that had long been a feature of Mesopotamian polities.⁶

Over the next few centuries, the Neo-Assyrian Empire would come to dominate the Near East, regularly warring with (and eventually conquering) Babylon and collecting tribute from smaller states all over the region. At its peak, it was the largest empire history had ever known, covering a geographic extent unsurpassed until the Achaemenids. The Babylonians had to wait a little longer for their moment in the sun, but near the end of the seventh century they overthrew their Assyrian overlords and ushered in the Neo-Babylonian Empire. (Less than a century later, Cyrus showed up.)

So how did Babylon and Assyria hold on to civilization — statehood, literacy, monumental architecture, and so forth — when the Greeks lost it and had to rebuild almost from scratch? Unfortunately, Cline doesn’t really answer this. He offers extensive descriptions of all the historical and archaeological evidence for the diverse fates of various Late Bronze Age societies, but only at the very end of the book does he briefly run through the theories (and even then it’s pretty lackluster). He does have a suggestion about the timing — the ninth century Assyrian resurgence lines up almost perfectly with the abnormally wet conditions during the Assyrian megapluvial — but why was it the Assyrians who found themselves particularly well-positioned to take advantage of the shift in the climate? Why not, say, the Hittites?

Sometime around 1225 BC, the Hittite king Tudhaliya IV wrote to his brother-in-law and vassal, Shaushgamuwa of Amurru, that only the rulers of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria were “Kings who are my equals in rank.”⁷ A mere thirty years later, though, his capital city of Hattusa would lie abandoned and destroyed. Modern excavators describe ruins reduced to “ash, charred wood, mudbricks and slag formed when mud-bricks melted from the intense heat of the conflagration.”

And with that, the Hittites essentially vanished from history.

They were so thoroughly forgotten, in fact, that when nineteenth-century archaeologists discovered the ruins of their civilization in Anatolia, they had no idea who these people were. (Eventually they identified the new sites with the Hittites of the Bible, who lived hundreds of years later and hundreds of miles to the south, out of sheer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.)⁸

What happened to the Hittites? Well, Cline suggests the usual mélange of drought, famine, and interruption of international trade routes, as well as a potential usurpation attempt from Tudhaliya’s cousin Kurunta, but the actual answer is that we’re not sure. Given the timing, they may have been the first of the Late Bronze Age dominos to fall; given the lack of major rivers in central Anatolia, they may have been uniquely susceptible to drought. Hattusa may have been abandoned before the fire — its palaces and temples show little sign of looting, suggesting they were already have been emptied out — but many other sites in the Hittites’ central Anatolian heartland were destroyed around the same time, and some of those have bodies in the destruction layer. But whatever the order of events, Hittite civilization collapsed as thoroughly and dramatically as the Mycenaeans’ had done, and with a similar pattern of depopulation and squatters in the ruins. Unlike the Mycenaeans, though, the Hittites would never be followed by successors who inherited their culture; the next civilization of Anatolia was the Phrygians, who probably arrived from Europe in the vacuum following the Hittites’ fall.

There was one exception: in the Late Bronze Age, cadet branches of the Hittite royal family had ruled a few small satellite statelets in what is now northern Syria, and many of these “Neo-Hittite” polities managed to survive the Collapse. A tiny, far-flung corner of a much greater civilization, they nevertheless outlasted the destruction of their metropole and maintained Hittite-style architecture and hieroglyphic inscriptions well into the Iron Age.⁹ (They would be swallowed up by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the late eighth century BC.) And though the Neo-Hittite kings ruled over tiny rump states, we’re now able to translate inscriptions in which they referred themselves by the same titles the Bronze Age Hittite “Great Kings” had employed. The records of their larger neighbors, which had a much greater historical impact, seem to have followed suit: the Neo-Hittites in Syria probably actually were the Hittites of the Bible! Chalk up another one for nineteenth century archaeology.

Our last remaining Great Power of the Late Bronze Age, Egypt, falls somewhere between the Assyrians and the Hittites on the scale of civilizational resilience. Unlike the Hittites, they survived; unlike the Assyrians, they never regained — let alone surpassed — their pre-Collapse level of geopolitical power and societal complexity.

In 1155 BC, the last great Pharaoh, Ramses III,¹⁰ was murdered by a harem conspiracy led by one of his lesser wives. One of the rulers who followed him promptly died of smallpox. The next is notable solely for the fact that it was while cutting his tomb in the Valley of the Kings that workmen accidentally buried Tutankhamun’s tomb and allowed it to survive untouched until the 1920s. Somewhere in there, the Egyptians lost control of the valuable copper and turquoise mines in the Sinai, probably a sign that they were no longer able to project power into the Levant at all, and retreated from Upper Nubia with its gold mines. Grain prices soared. Famine stalked the land. Tomb robberies skyrocketed — and interestingly, the recorded confessions of captured tomb robbers describe funerary goods made of bronze, a far cry from the “wonderful [golden] things” from King Tut’s tomb a few centuries earlier.

It may give you a sense of the chaos that when the last of Ramses III’s sons came to the throne in 1127 BC, less than thirty years after his father’s death, he ruled as Ramses VIII.

This is the point in a strategy game where I usually give up and reload my save.

And then, incredibly, things got worse. Around 1080 BC, the high priests of Amun in Thebes claimed control over Upper Egypt at the same time as an administrator in the north seized power over Lower Egypt. Neither was able to displace the pharaoh (by this point, Ramses XI), but he was reduced to a figurehead, and the two halves of the country were not reunited for another century. Intrigue, administrative disarray, and political fragmentation would remain the rule, despite a few episodes of conquest and centralization under strong pharaohs. By 810 BC, Egypt was split between four competing pharaohs. Around 750 BC, the country was conquered by kings from Kush. In 664 BC the Neo-Assyrians displaced them and installed their own puppets on the throne as vassals. When the Assyrians fell Egypt enjoyed a brief period of independence under the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, but that was the last gasp of Egyptian sovereignty: the Persians, under Cyrus’s son Cambyses II, conquered the country in 525 BC and ruled it as a satrapy until Alexander the Great displaced them without a battle in 332 BC.

The “New Kingdom” of the Late Bronze Age had been the most powerful, prosperous, and geographically expansive period in Egypt’s history. The centuries after the Collapse could hardly compare. You can think of it like the British Empire in comparison to today’s United Kingdom: it’s still there, more or less, but it’s sad and tired and old. Its time of greatness is past.

Why weren’t the Egyptians able to regain power the way the Assyrians and Babylonians did? Again, this isn’t a question Cline even tries to answer, although he does gesture towards a few particularly effective and long-lived kings in both Mesopotamian empires and to a distinct lack of them in Egypt. Perhaps Egyptian culture, which was unusually conservative and change-averse, was poorly equipped to adjust. Or perhaps the Assyrians and Babylonians had been spurred to get their act together by their very proximity to one another; external conquest often strikes people as a greater threat than “mere” internal degeneration and decay.

Or maybe the decay had already happened. Maybe the glory days of the New Kingdom were simply a sort of civilizational fire sale; maybe they were so busy warring and conquering and doing great deeds that the spirit that had brought them to greatness rotted away and when they needed it most they found they had nothing left.

And now, as I promised, I’ll return to the Phoenicians, who are among Cline’s “winners” of the post-Collapse world. When things fell apart, their city-states — Sidon, Tyre, Byblos and all the rest — were just another motley collection of Canaanite settlements along the coast of what is now Lebanon. Two hundred years later, they were the centers of an enormous commercial and information network that spread across the entire Mediterranean world (and perhaps beyond). This makes them more than just resilient, Cline argues: they were actually antifragile, thriving in the chaos that followed the destruction of many of their powerful neighbors. (Can you even imagine how happy this chapter makes Nassim Taleb? Of course he blurbed the book.)

The long-distance trade of the Bronze Age had been dominated by large state actors. The ships were probably built and crewed by men from the Levantine coast, but the cargo was purchased and shipped by local representatives of the Great (and lesser) Powers of the age: luxury goods were an integral part of high-level diplomacy, so most trade was a virtual monopoly centrally directed from the palaces. When these polities were weakened (or in some dramatic cases like Ugarit completely destroyed) in the Collapse, they left behind a vacuum that independent Phoenician traders, operating without centralized control and serving only profit rather than the demands of empire, rapidly filled.

By the tenth century BC, the Phoenicians were importing silver from Spain, copper from Cyprus and Sardinia, and cinnamon from southeast Asia. They exported timber (the much-vaunted “Cedars of Lebanon”)¹¹ and the valuable purple dye extracted from the murex sea snail, as well as a wide variety of finished luxury and quotidian goods they produced at home from raw materials obtained abroad. They founded colonies throughout the Mediterranean. And perhaps most importantly for the future of “the West,” they introduced the alphabet,¹² which enabled the return of literacy to Greece and its far wider adoption than had ever been possible with Linear B.¹³

By the time the ascendant Neo-Assyrians began to encroach on their territory, the Phoenician city-states were so rich and economically well-connected that they were more valuable as semi-autonomous tributaries and middlemen than as conquered subjects. In fact, it was the Assyrian demands for metal (especially silver) that drove Phoenician colonization in the western Mediterranean: they founded Cadiz (Phoenician Gadir) to access the rich silver mines in the Spanish interior, as well as dozens of other smaller entrepôts along the sailing routes to and from the Levantine coast. Eventually they removed so much silver from Spanish mountains that its value in Assyria collapsed, inflated away by oversupply, just like Peruvian silver would destabilize the Spanish economy two thousand years later — but with the roles flipped. I enjoy these echoes.

It’s worth pointing out here that Phoenicians never called themselves Phoenicians: it’s a Greek word, deriving from a Mycenaean era (e.g., pre-Collapse) term for purple dye. In fact, they didn’t even have a term that clearly limned what the Greeks meant by “Phoenician” (essentially, “Levantine traders with really good ships who speak a related set of Semitic languages”). Instead, they sometimes referred to themselves more narrowly by reference to their native cities (Sidonian, Tyrian, Byblian, etc.) and other times more broadly as “Canaanite,” because of the cultural heritage they shared with the other survivors of Bronze Age Canaan. But even if they never employed it themselves, “Phoenician” is a terribly useful word, because these particular city-states had a lot in common with one another but diverged sharply from their Canaanite kin to both north and south.

Bronze Age Canaan had been relatively culturally homogenous, though the cities in the north came into the Hittites’ sphere of influence and those in the south the Egyptians’. After the Collapse, though, the city-states of northern Canaan (modern Syria), like their Neo-Hittite neighbors, seem to have continued more or less as they had been. Those in southern Canaan were not so lucky: weakened by the invading Sea Peoples and the withdrawal of Egyptian hegemony, the southern Canaanites were displaced by (or assimilated to) the new Semitic kingdoms in the region, including Israel, Judah, Edom, and Ammon. And the central Canaanites became the Phoenicians: master sailors and traders, they had seized their opportunity and so thoroughly transformed themselves that we join the Greeks in identifying them by a new name.

Most of the larger cities of the central Levant are buried beneath their modern equivalents, and Lebanon has not been a particularly salubrious place to excavate for the last few decades, so it’s hard to say a great deal about Phoenician continuity with their Bronze Age ancestors. There was obviously some, certainly genealogically but also linguistically and in terms of material culture. However, we also know that their lifestyles changed dramatically as their economic reach expanded and their cities became centers not only of exchange but of manufacturing. We know their commercial firms were organized around extended families, and that they began to settle foreign lands both as colonists in their own new cities and elsewhere as resident merchants with their own dedicated enclaves. And we know that as their city-states grew more powerful, they increasingly directed worship away from the traditional Canaanite pantheon, led by El, and towards the tutelary deity of each individual city. (The story that King Hiram of Tyre actually tore down the temples of El and Baal to make room for a magnificent new temple of his patron, Melqart,¹⁴ is probably an exaggeration, but points to the scale of the break with the past.)¹⁵

If post-Collapse Egypt is Britain, then perhaps post-Collapse Phoenicia is America: a relative backwater, dwarfed by the Great Powers of its day, that suddenly leaps to global prominence when the opportunity arises…but in doing so, changes in some very fundamental ways. Which raises a question about Cline’s subtitle, “The Survival of Civilizations”: what does it actually mean for a civilization to survive?

Sometimes the answer is obvious. The Assyrians and Babylonians clearly survived the Collapse: if you compare their architecture, inscriptions, artwork, settlement patterns, and political structures from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, they are recognizably the same people doing the same things and talking about them in the same way. The Egyptians, too, are plainly the same civilization throughout their (very long!) history, even if they were notably weaker and less organized after the Collapse. The Hittites, just as obviously, did not survive (at least not outside their tiny rump states in northern Syria). But the Greeks and the Phoenicians are both murkier cases, albeit in very different ways.

On the one hand, Mycenaean civilization — the palace economy and administration, the population centers, the monumental architecture, the writing — indisputably vanished. The Greeks painstakingly rebuilt civilization over several hundred years, but they did it from scratch: there is no political continuity from the Mycenaean kingdoms to the states of the archaic or classical worlds. And yet as far as we can tell, there was substantial cultural continuity preserved in language and myth. Admittedly, “as far as we can tell” is doing a lot of work here: Linear B was only ever used for administrative record-keeping, so we can’t compare the Mycenaeans’ literary and political output to their successors the way we can in Assyria or Egypt. We can’t be sure that the character, the vibe, the flavor of the people remained. But the historical and archaeological records of the later Greeks contain enough similarities with the descendants of the Mycenaeans’ Indo-European brethren that the answer seems to be yes.

By contrast, civilization never collapsed in central Canaan. No one ever stopped having kings, writing, building in stone, or making art. The Bronze Age population centers were continuously occupied right up to…well, now. And yet their way of life shifted dramatically, to the point that we call them by a new name and consider them a different people. Cline thinks this is a success story: borrowing an analytical framework from a 2012 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, he praises their “transformation,”¹⁶ which “include[d] actions that change the fundamental attributes of a system in response to actual or expected impacts.” (The Assyrians, by contrast, merely “adapted,” while the Egyptians barely “coped.”) But does there come a point when the change is so great, so fundamental, you’re no longer the same civilization? Can the Ship of Theseus really be said to have “survived”?

In the final section of his book, titled “Mycenaeans or Phoenicians,” Cline asks how we’ll react to the societal collapse we all sort of know is coming sooner or later. Our world just is too complicated, too interconnected, to survive a really massive shock (or, as in the Late Bronze Age, a “perfect storm” of smaller ones). Even the relatively mild disruptions of the past few years have revealed fragilities and vulnerabilities that we’ve done nothing to shore up since. Of course, he has an answer: Transform! Innovate! Flourish amidst chaos! Become a new iteration of yourself, like the bog-standard Canaanite cities that reinvented themselves as an Iron Age mercantile superpower and turned the Mediterranean into a “Phoenician lake.” But at what price?

Or, to think of it another way, what would you prefer for your society five hundred years from now?

Behind Door Number One: governmental collapse, abandonment of the population centers, dramatic reduction in societal complexity, and then a long, slow rebuilding where your time and your people are remembered only as myth — but when civilization is restored, it’ll be by people whose the desires, values, attitudes, and beliefs, their most basic ways of understanding the world, are still recognizably yours. They may have no idea you ever lived, but the stories that move your heart will move theirs too.

And behind Door Number Two: expansion, prosperity, and a new starring role on the world stage — but a culture so thoroughly reoriented towards that new position that what matters to you today has been forgotten. Do they remember you? Maybe, sort of, but they don’t care. They have abandoned your gods and your altars. Those few of your institutions that seem intact have in fact been hollowed out to house their new ethos. A handful of others may remain, vestigial and vaguely embarrassing. But boy howdy, line goes up.

Obviously, given our druthers, we’d all be the Assyrians: seize your opportunities, become great, but don’t lose your soul in the doing. But if it comes down to it — if, when the IPCC’s warning that “concatenated global impacts of extreme events continues to grow as the world’s economy becomes more interconnected” bears out, the Assyrian track isn’t an option — then I’d take the Greek way.

I don’t care whether, on the far side of our own Collapse, there’s still a thing we call “Congress” that makes things we call “laws.” Rome, after all, was theoretically ruled by the Senate for five hundred years of autocracy as all the meaning was leached from the retained forms of Republican governance. (Look, I’m sorry, you can call him your princeps and endow him with the powers of the consul, the tribune, the censor, and the pontifex maximus, but your emperor is still a king and the cursus honorum has no meaning when the army hands out the crown.) I don’t even really care if we still read Shakespeare or The Great Gatsby, although it would be more of a shame to lose those than the Constitution. But I do care that we value both order and liberty, however we structure our state to safeguard them. I care that we’re the sort of people who’d get Shakespeare and Fitzgerald if we had them around. Maybe we should start thinking about it before our Collapse, too.

1. For sufficiently small values of “globe.” But larger than you might expect!

2. The revised 2021 edition apparently gives a larger role to climate factors, especially the 3.2kya megadrought, but that’s not the one I read and anyway the other elements were still present.

3. It’s slightly more complicated than that, because of course it is; see here for more detail from

Razib Khan

.

4. A reasonable ballpark guess is that the poems traditionally attributed to Homer were composed in something like their current forms around 750 BC and written down for the first time shortly before 525 BC, although like the dating of Beowulf there’s a great deal of argument.

5. I really think we should bring back monarchs referring to themselves as “my Majesty.” So much cooler than the royal “we.” Or combine them: “our Majesty”!

6. The Babylonian Captivity, much later in the Iron Age, was far from historically unique.

7. The list actually reads, “the King of Egypt, the King of Babylonia, the King of Assyria, and the King of Ahhiyawa” — the strikethrough appears in the original clay tablet! A generation earlier, under Tudhaliya’s father Hattusili III, the Hittite texts had consistently referred to the king of Ahhiyawa as a “great King” and a “brother,” but apparently the geostrategic position of the Mycenaean ruler had degraded substantially.

8. We now know that the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language and referred to themselves “Neshites,” but the name has stuck.

9. I went looking for a good historical analogy for the Neo-Hittite kingdoms and discovered, to my delight, the Kingdom of Soissons, which preserved Romanitas for a few decades after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Neo-Hittites lasted a lot longer.

10. This was the Pharaoh whose defeat of the “Sea Peoples” back in 1177 BC gives Cline’s books their title. He uses 1177 BC is a sort of “476 AD” date — it’s not that everything actually happened then, but it’s a big year so it’s a nice synecdoche for the fall of the whole system. Which makes you wonder what the shorthand date for us is going to be…

11. For a very funny story about an Iron Age Egyptian attempt to buy some, which I simply could not fit into this review, see the “Story of Wenamun.” Bonus points for imagining how it would have played out under the New Kingdom.

12. Okay, the Phoenician “alphabet” is actually an abjad — it contains no symbols for vowels — but the Greeks quickly added those.

13. It is much, much easier to learn to write with an alphabet than with a logosyllabic system like Linear B or cuneiform.

14. Melqart is also the patron of the Tyrian colony of Carthage, and his name contributes one element to that of Hamilcar Barca. The -bal in Hannibal, Hasdrubal, etc., is of course from Baal.

15. Cline doesn’t give a ton of detail on Phoenician culture; in this section I am also drawing heavily on the opening chapter of Richard Miles’s Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, which sentiment I fully endorse even though I haven’t finished the book yet.

16. “Transformation” is always a term worth taking with a pinch of salt because so often it’s a euphemism for “total civilizational collapse.” In the chapter on the Hittites, for example, Cline quotes one archaeologist to the effect that “[a] deep transformation took place in the former core of the empire around the capital Hattusa, resulting in a drastic decrease in political complexity, a shift to a subsistence household economy and a lack of evidence for any public institutions.” Relatedly, one of my children recently transformed a nice vase into a pile of broken glass.

In this case, though, Cline really does mean transformation.