After 1177 B.C.

I began writing this book early one morning in February 2019 while sitting on the balcony of a rented apartment in Rethymnon, Crete. We were there for the beginning of my wife Diane's Fulbright grant to teach at the University of Crete. I had arranged to have the semester off from our own university so that I could accompany her, and we were enjoying the weak winter sun and visiting familiar archaeological sites before her classes began. We were also marveling at the ubiquity of antiquity in modern marketing, personified by depictions of Ariadne holding a ball of yarn and Minoans leaping over bulls. That wouldn't be particularly surprising except that the scenes were emblazoned on the sides of a dusty refrigerator full of Cokes outside a shop in an alleyway deep in the oldest part of the city. That particular morning it was peaceful and quiet, with the sun rising in front of me over Homer's beloved Mediterranean Sea, and with the snow-capped White Mountains off to my left in the far distance. All seemed well as I sipped my coffee and surfed the internet, reading various periodicals online while lending half an ear to the news on streaming audio. Then I started listening more closely to what was being reported by the BBC. We were being warned about the possible collapse of our current civilization, courtesy of a multitude of interrelated factors ranging from climatic to economic. These, according to a study that had just been published and was now being breathlessly described by the journalists, could soon result in, quote, economic instability, large-scale involuntary migration, conflict, famine, and the potential collapse of social and economic systems, end quote. It had been almost exactly five years to the day since I first published 1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed, which examined the causes of the collapse that took place in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age, more than 3,000 years ago. In it, I explained what life was like during the 15th to the 12th centuries BC in those regions, from what is now Greece, across to Iran and Iraq, and from Turkey down to Egypt, to put it in modern terms. I described the G8 of that time, the Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Cypriots, Canaanites, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, and then examined the possible causes of the collapse that ended their internationalized world, though exactly why and how it happened so quickly and so completely is still very much a mystery.