1177 B.C. (Revised and Updated)

In early 2020, as I was working on the revision of this book, I saw a banner headline in The Guardian, Humanity Under Threat from Perfect Storm of Crises. The world is facing a series of interlinked emergencies that are threatening the very existence of humans, wrote environmental correspondent Fiona Harvey. She was reporting on the results of a survey taken of 222 leading scientists from 52 countries. They had concluded that there are a number of principal emergencies facing us today. Climate change with weather extremes, species loss, water scarcity, and a food production crisis. What was particularly worrisome, she said, is that the combination of all is amplifying the risks of each, creating a perfect storm that threatens to engulf humanity unless swift action is taken. I found that alarming, of course, but also intriguing, for the contemporary situation that she describes has many similarities to 1177 BC. That was a time more than 3,000 years ago, when the Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations collapsed, one after the other, changing the course of history. Clearly, calamitous collapses have happened before. Could it happen again? It's a question I've been asking since 2014, when the first edition of this book was published. I have long believed that the answer is yes. It's a matter of not if, but when. And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit full force, with devastating effects worldwide, millions of people infected, and hundreds of thousands dead. The full effects of this pestilence, on top of the perfect storm of other stressors affecting our globalized world, remains to be seen. But it is already clear that the future history of life on this planet will be changed, perhaps as fundamentally as life changed in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean regions some 3,200 years ago. Now, however, the changes that lie ahead are not limited to those areas, but are global in scope. I argued in the first edition of this book that 1177 BC was a pivotal moment in the history of civilization, a turning point for the ancient world. By that time, the Bronze Age in the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East had lasted nearly 2,000 years, from approximately 3,000 BC to just after 1,200 BC. When the end came, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, most of the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from what is now Italy to Afghanistan and from Turkey down to Egypt. Large empires and small kingdoms, which had taken centuries to evolve, collapsed rapidly, from the Mycenaeans and Minoans to the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mitanians, Cypriots, Canaanites, and even Egyptians. And, with their end, came a period of transition, frequently described by scholars as the world's first Dark Age. It was not until centuries later that a new cultural renaissance emerged in Greece and the other affected areas, setting the stage for the evolution of society as we know it today.