Around the time of the Trojan War circa 1200 BC, several advanced nations dominated the Middle East and Southeast Europe. The Egyptian Empire, Hittite Empire and Mycenaean Empires were the dominant powers in the region. Then out of nowhere mysterious circumstances led to the collapse of these Bronze Age civilizations. The Sea peoples appeared and began raiding these nations which led to a collapse of the trading systems. This in turn led to the total collapse of those Empires. Only Egypt survive and did so in a very weakened state. This was the first Dark Ages in the Mediterranean region an it would take another 400 years for civilization to recover from this blow.
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is a new book by Eric Cline lays the blame at what cause this sudden collapse of Bronze Age civilization. He blames a favorite bogey man for the Progressive, Climate Change. But before Al Gore and his crowd begins to celebrate this proof of climate change, there is just one big problem. There was no known industrialization back in the Bronze Age that caused the climate to change!
“Throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps,” the new IPCC report says. The panel projects that these changes will cause conflict over land and resources, including water and food.
This has happened before.
According to archeologist Eric H. Cline in his new book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, the great ancient civilizations of the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Mycenaens, the Canaanites, and the Cypriots in the Late Bronze Age may have fallen in large part due to climate change, nearly three millennia before mankind’s first industrial revolution.
Back in the second millennium B.C., civilized societies stretched from Mesopotamia though Egypt to Greece and Italy. These societies traded goods and personnel through an interconnected network, the New York Post’s Larry Getlen writes in a review of 1177 B.C. But each of these civilizations fell in the decades surrounding 1177 B.C. because of violent incursions from a group called the Sea Peoples, a marauding group thought to comprise six different sects, including the Philistines of Biblical lore.
Though many factors including “seismic disasters, . . . internal rebellions, and ‘systems collapse;’” caused the end of these civilizations, Cline writes, climate change spurred droughts, which in turn caused famine, which may have led to the Sea Peoples to migrate, and to come into violent conflict with the peoples settled on the land they were trying to take. The ensuing wars weakened these once great civilizations, and they never rose to their previous prominence again.
What caused this change in climate is up to debate. One of the more likely causes was a meteor strike that radically altered the climate and caused the invasion of the Sea People. One thing for certain, it was not humans who caused this climate change event.
Tags: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Bronze Age Collapse, Climate Change, Eric H. Cline
