The bronze collapse is a term that archeologists and historians refer to the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in the ancient Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. In this region, the change of epochs was associated with catastrophic changes in the social order, the loss of many production and cultural traditions, including writing, the destruction of all major states and many cities of that time. On a large part of the territory comes the period of “dark ages”.
In the period 1206-1150 B.C. the invasion of the “peoples of the sea”, the collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia and Syria and the end of the domination of the Egyptian empire in Syria and Canaan led to the extinction of trade routes and literacy. At the first stage of this period, almost every town between Troy and Gaza was destroyed and often after that it was no longer populated: so, Hattusa, Mycenae, Ugarit were abandoned.
Civilizational and technological disaster led to significant regressive phenomena in all areas of life and material culture. Shipbuilding, architecture, metal processing, water supply, weaving, painting, were rejected for many years and began to revive only about five hundred years later in the period of the late archaic. Thus, the myth of the death of King Minos in the bathroom from the hot water sent through the pipes of the king of Sicily was considered a fantastic exaggeration even in the Hellenistic period, since in the Mediterranean only in the Roman times there were pools with pipes separately for hot and cold water. The multi-storey palaces of Knossos and Fest, the stone houses of the townspeople and the sewerage of the cities of Santorini and the islands of Ionia, the huge non-residential buildings open in Cyprus and Sicily – all this still requires comprehension by future historians.
The crisis culminated in the gradual end of the dark ages, as well as the rise of the Israel-Jewish kingdom, the Syro-Hittite Aramaic kingdoms of the mid-tenth century BC. and the New Assyrian Empire.
Possible causes
As a potential stimulus of the catastrophe, the increase in tectonic activity at the specified time, in particular, the super-powerful eruption of the Hekla volcano, dated to 1159 BC, was considered. Other archaeologists attribute this eruption to a later time. Amos Nur believed that the stimulus was an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 on the Richter scale in the Mediterranean.
Harvey Weiss , a professor of Middle Eastern archeology at Yale University, based on the Palmer drought index for 35 sites in Greece, Turkey and the Middle East, concluded that one of the incentives for the collapse was a prolonged drought that worsened the socioeconomic position of the large region, which led to wars and migrations.
Ekrem Akurgal, Gustav Lehmann and Fritz Schachermair, based on the ideas of Gaston Maspero and on the findings of a large number of swords such as Naue II or German Griffzungenschwert originating from the south of Eastern Europe, as well as Egyptian and Ugaritic references to the invasion of the”peoples of the sea” migration is the main cause of the disaster. At the same time, the documents of the Mycenaean kingdom recorded in line B, dating back to the period immediately before the collapse, indicate an increase in piracy and raids to capture slaves, especially from the coast of Anatolia. Soon after the reign of Ramses II, Egyptian fortresses along the coast of Libya were built to withstand sea raids.
Leonard Palmer suggested that iron was in much larger quantities than bronze , and allowed more numerous troops to arm, which could defeat smaller armies using bronze weapons and chariots, although weapons from iron were of poor quality.
Perhaps the role was played by the factor of the trade gap over long distances as a result of the systemic crisis, because of which the supply of tin stopped or decreased significantly, which, in turn, made the production of bronze impossible.
The general systemic collapse occurred, apparently, not only in the Eastern Mediterranean. Thus, in Central Europe there was a noticeable regression between the period of culture of the fields of funerary urns of the 13th-12th centuries. B.C. and the appearance of the Hallstatt culture in the X-IX centuries. B.C. which was synchronous to the Greek dark ages after the demise of the Mycenaean civilization. It remains, however, unresolved the question whether this systemic crisis was the cause or effect of the bronze collapse.
In the specific context of the Middle East, a number of factors – including population growth, soil degradation, drought, bronze casting and iron forging – could, in combination, lead to an increase in the cost of the weapon.
Sources:
Oliver Dickinson. The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age