After 1177 B.C.
Eric Cline on the survival of civilizations after the Bronze Age collapse
In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with archaeologist Eric Cline, author of After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton University Press, 2024)
You can order the book from Princeton University Press, Bookshop, or Amazon.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.
THE USONIAN: Your previous book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, unpacked the story of the end of the Bronze Age, when an international system of cultures in the Mediterranean disappeared, apocryphally due to the mysterious incursions of the so-called “Sea Peoples.” As an archaeologist, what drew you to the transition phase between the Bronze Age and Iron Age, and what made you interested in returning to this time period in the sequel After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations?
ERIC CLINE: The first book in this series was 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. I was interested in working on the period because it brings the Late Bronze Age—the period that interests me the most from the ancient world—to a sudden and catastrophic end. We don’t really know what happened. This is one of history’s great mysteries. So when Rob Tempio [editor at Princeton University Press] asked me to write about this, I said, Sure. Rob was quite right in saying that the hook is what ended the age. So the beginning and ending of the first book is about the Sea Peoples and what else might have caused this collapse.
In the middle of the book, I had fun telling people about the civilizations of the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, the Hittites, and the archeologists that discovered them. That was why I agreed to write the book. I’m frankly astounded at the reception it’s had. I never thought that more than a couple of dozen people would care about the Late Bronze Age and what ended it. But apparently, there’s more than a couple of dozen that are interested. So we went on to write the sequel, and we may well continue from there.
TU: In some ways, After 1177 B.C. is a departure from some of your previous works in that it feels more public-facing, with references to the musical Hamilton. It’s also reminiscent of works of similar genre, like Jared Diamond’s Collapse (Viking, 2005) and Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome (PU Press, 2017), in that you work hard to bring the ancient world to life for casual readers, and then work to explain why that world vanished. When you’re writing to a non-specialist audience, what are the choices you have to make as a storyteller?
EC: To my mind, the only difference was that the first book was chronological and the second book was geographical. But now that you bring it up, I wrote two books in the intervening years between 2014—when 1177 B.C. came out—and ten years later, when After 1177 B.C. came out. First I wrote Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology, and then I wrote Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon.
In between the two books, I wrote two or three others that were public-facing, in which I started to hone my style in terms of audience. I signed the contract [for 1177 B.C.] in 2007, I started writing it in 2009, finished it in 2013, and it came out a year later.
[Over time] I got used to writing for a public audience, and found I enjoyed it. And therefore, After 1177 B.C. is more public-facing because I was more comfortable with that style. But After 1177 B.C. is much more detailed and granular. There are many more names, dates, and places. I was at great pains to try and explain it to a general audience without losing them.
In the first book, I included some pop-culture references. It’s a little game I play with the editors and publishers to see if I can get references by them without them noticing, or have them notice and say, “Okay, fine.” In After 1177 B.C., there are a couple of references to the musical Hamilton, which made sense, becauseour family had watched it on Disney+ dozens of times. We’d settle down for the evening and ask, “What are we going to watch?” And somebody would say, “Let's watch Hamilton again.” We decided that there was a line from Hamilton for every occasion—so I put them in.
TU: After 1177 B.C. animates many forgotten episodes of archaeological history, such as Pierre Montet’s discovery of the spectacular tomb of Psusennes I at Tanis, Egypt, in 1939 (and the secret chamber containing the lost pharaoh’s sarcophagus). Maybe you can talk about how the history of archaeology itself is intertwined with the evidence we have for the period following the Bronze Age collapse.
EC: One of the things that I find so fascinating about all this—and why I’m as entertained as the readers are—is that the process of writing for me is not a chore. It’s an act of discovery.
I liken it to being a sculptor. I write a block of things, and then I chip away at it to get at the story that’s in there. And one of the things that I found is that these stories of the archaeologist and the original discoveries are sometimes absolutely fascinating, and a lot of them I didn’t know myself until I started going down the rabbit holes.
Pierre Montet finding this tomb of Psusennes I at Tanis—I didn’t know that story. It’s not known to many people, because he found the tomb in 1939, and the outbreak of World War II completely eclipsed it. But when I was doing research, I ran across one line in one book that mentioned it, and I’m like, “There was a secret room. Wait, what?” Promptly, I went and got his books, which are in French, and sat there and translated them, and I’m like—this is Indiana Jones, this is absolutely amazing.
That was the type of thing where I thought to myself that the story of the discovery of the tomb is as interesting as the tomb itself, which is why I put it in there. It’s also a matter of transparency. I’m telling the readers about this tomb with the secret chambers, but I also want to tell them how we found it.
I don’t want to be seen as some prophet from on high, saying, “Here’s what we know and why you have to believe it.” I’m like, “Look, here’s what we think we know, and here’s how we know it.” You have the fact of this amazing tomb with these secret chambers. But what makes it into a story is the tale of Montet actually excavating it and going, “Wait a minute, what’s going on?” And that makes it into a story, and makes it much more interesting.
TU: Owing to my research background, The Usonian’s companion blog, The Cyprus Files, often considers the long history of Cyprus. How did Cyprus fare after 1177 B.C. in comparison to its neighbors?
EC: Cyprus did very well in the Iron Age. And I say that with the caveat that there’s a lot we don’t know about Cyprus in that time period. We have very few texts and the most of the ones that we do have, we can’t read.
We are limited to pretty much straight-up archaeology—tomb types, vessel types, burials, and things like that. But having said that, we can get a lot of information. We know tons about Bronze Age Cyprus, and then we know a fair amount about Iron Age Cyprus, so we can compare the two. We can see things like that some of the sites were abandoned, especially after their harbor silted up at the end of the Bronze Age, and they moved three kilometers away. So you get Egkomi, Kition, Salamis and so on. But we don’t have all the inscriptions we have from the Neo-Assyrians or the Egyptians, where they’ve written everything down.
So we are working with limited resources, but it’s amazing how far we can go. And in terms of surviving the Late Bronze Age collapse and being resilient, I have argued in After 1177 B.C. that Cypriots and the Phoenicians are the two most resilient societies out of all of the Late Bronze Age “G8” civilizations—which included the Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites and Canaanites—because the Cypriots seem to be the ones that turn to iron before anybody else.
Iron had been around already, but it had only been found from meteors (there’s a dagger in King Tut’s tomb with an iron blade, but it’s made from a meteor.)
Who invented iron and started using it has long been a matter of debate, but the most recent publications seem to come to the consensus that it’s the Cypriots. Lina Kassianidou has shown that while doing bronze working with copper, Cypriots probably came across smelting iron and figured it out. They didn’t abandon bronze in favor of iron, but they supplemented it, and they started manufacturing these bimetallic knives and daggers where the blade is made of iron, but the rivets and the hilt are made from bronze, and they shipped these knives to Greece on the one side and the Levant on the other.
I think the Cypriots were what I call “antifragile,” meaning they flourished in this age of chaos. I borrowed that idea from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who wrote a book titled with that term. And it’s really when you take advantage of the chaos to flourish, that’s what the Cypriots did through the invention of iron.
And the change to iron comes about because of the collapse. It happens during and after the collapse, not before.
But the Cypriots have company, because the Phoenicians were also antifragile. The Phoenicians were the surviving Canaanites from Central Canaan in what today we would call Lebanon, and of course they didn’t call themselves Phoenicians—that’s what Herodotus and the Greeks called them. They would have said, I’m from the city of Tyre, I’m from the city of Byblos, or I’m from the city of Beirut.
[The Phoenicians] standardized the alphabet and the production of purple dye, and they spread those ideas across the Mediterranean. They were taking advantage of the disruption of the trade routes during the collapse and take over the Mediterranean. Wherever we find Phoenician things, over in the Aegean or on the western Mediterranean, we’ve also found Cypriot stuff. So either they were going hand in hand, or the ships were bringing both things, or they were colleagues. It’s possible they were competitors, but it seems to have been a peaceful competition. So Cyprus actually fares better than anybody—except for the Phoenicians.
After the collapse, the other societies could have learned a lot from the Cypriots, because they didn’t fare nearly as well.
TU: Like how Peter Brown’s body of work on Late Antiquity caused historians to reevaluate whether the Middle Ages were really all that “dark,” your book suggests that the so-called “Dark Age” after the Bronze Age should really be referred to as the Iron Age. Can you elaborate on the distinction?
EC: As with the Middle Ages, scholars don’t want to talk about it being a dark age. Rather, they frame those periods as Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages. Scholars of the Iron Age have been pushing back and saying, “We don’t want to call it a dark age.” In After 1177 B.C., I’m at great pains to give credit to the scholars whose voices I’m basically parroting and with whom I’m in agreement. What I’m saying is nothing new to the scholars. They’re all arguing that the Iron Age was a period of innovation and invention—any period that sees things like the standardization of the alphabet, like the spread and use of iron technology, cannot remotely be considered to be a dark age.
The problem is that it depends on where and when you look, because one of the definitions of a dark age is that the society will kind of revert back to a lower level of social, economic, and political complexity. And if you look at Greece, that did happen. The Mycenaean society went away, and they basically had to rebuild from scratch. But if you look at the Assyrians, that didn’t happen. Same with the Phoenicians. So I had to make that argument both for and against myself.
Honestly, the main reason we used to call it a dark age was because we didn’t know anything about it. It was dark to us, but there’s been so much work done in the last couple of decades on this period that it’s not dark at all anymore to scholars. However, to the general public, it may still be dark because the information hasn’t gotten out there. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the sequel.
TU: You note that the spread of the Phoenician alphabet was one of the outcomes of the Bronze Age Collapse, eventually leading to higher levels of literacy as written languages became less complicated than their hieroglyphic and cuneiform antecedents. What are other major impacts of the decline of this age and the start of a new one that we can still feel today?
EC: The standardization of the Phoenician alphabet allowed more people to write and read. And of course, that led directly to an era which I don’t talk about in this sequel, because I ended the sequel in the early eighth century B.C., so I don’t even get to Homer. I don't even get to Sappho or the other early Greek poets. But having the Phoenician alphabet become the Greek alphabet in the Aegean and then become the Latin alphabet over in Italy—we’re still using the Latin alphabet today—it starts a whole era of literature.
The good thing is that I am about to start working on the third book in the unintended trilogy. Because now we have the question of, so what happens after the early eighth century? And so I’m going to do in this third book, which will be called 776 B.C.—not as I wanted, “After After 1177 B.C.”—but we’re going to start with the Olympics and end around the death of Alexander the Great and explain what happened. After all—what did all that lead to?
It not only led to all kinds of Greek literature, but once they got the international trade route network up and running again, there were advances in all sorts of things which then led to “small” ideas like democracy, and eventually the Periclean building program and the construction of the Parthenon.
So in some ways, ending After 1177 B.C. with the early eighth century B.C. was ending it too early. There were all sorts of things during the eighth century that I wanted to include. But again, I ran up against the word limits, and I was already topping out at 20,000 more than I was supposed to have.
And then that was when I said to Rob, we need a third book to keep going, because there’s so much that I wasn’t able to put into this book. So that’ll be in the next one. But you notice also in the centuries, from the eighth century to the fourth century, was when the clashes of civilizations began, and that will be the subtitle, because that period included the Persian Wars, and within Greece, the Peloponnesian Wars. Also in that time, the Neo-Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, and the Neo-Babylonians destroyed the southern kingdom of Judah. And so I thought that that would be very interesting to discuss these clashes in the next book.
Those centuries are also often called the “Axial Age,” where you have the pre-Socratic philosophers, Buddha, Confucius, and all kinds of interesting philosophical developments happening during those centuries.
The very first book started at the 17th century B.C., and now we’re going to go down to the end of the fourth century. I never intended to write a long-winded narrative history of 1500 years. But here we are, and I’m finding that I’m enjoying it.
Over my 30-year career, I’ve taught the history of Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Near East, and Israel. The big challenge is what to tell and what to leave out. I’m going to hit that challenge even more in this next book, because when you talk about the period from the eighth century to the fourth century, there are thousands of books and tens of thousands of articles. But the major impacts of what happened after the Late Bronze Age are still being felt today, because in some ways, our modern western world is a direct descendant of what came out of the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
TU: Your book suggests that many of the societal transitions in the period after 1177 B.C. were rooted in climate change, and in the final chapters, you try to identify how resilient each particular Bronze Age civilization was in terms of their success adjusting to the new normal. In the twenty-first century, climate change again poses a threat to the current societal model. What can we learn from the experience of the Iron Age? What should we be ready for?
EC: This all comes back to what I found I like to do—to show how ancient history is still relevant today. Why should people care? Okay, on the one hand, they can read the book and have a lot of cocktail party trivia and impress their friends and family with how much they just learned from this book.
But I wanted to go beyond that. One thing that I had brought up in the first book, which then continues into the second, is the fact that a lot of the causes of the collapse are around today. We’ve got climate change, drought, and famine. We have migrants and invaders. We have earthquakes. Most of the problems that they had are around today, including disease—just look at the pandemic.
And when they had that series of unfortunate events, they collapsed. And the people that today say, “Oh, that won’t happen to us, we’re too big to fail.” I would say that's pretty hubristic. Everybody has failed, right?
Either you transform, you adapt, you cope, or you go out of existence. And so at the end of the sequel, having presented all of the history, I then wanted to say—okay, what can we do with this? There are lessons to be learned. We basically have eight case studies about what to do and what not to do if your society is undergoing a collapse. So let’s look at what happened to them and their reactions. Let's define the differences between transformation and adaptation and coping.
Let’s make use of the terms used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and let’s show that this is not just ancient history. And in the end, after having gone through my analysis, I basically break the fourth wall, and I talk directly to the reader. I ask them, if we collapse, are we going to be Mycenaeans? Or are we going to be Phoenicians? Are we going to be antifragile, or are we going to essentially disappear and have to rebuild from scratch? The choice is up to us.
So in this next book, I will follow the data and see what happens. But I definitely think that there is a lot we can learn from the ancient world. And again, that’s what makes archaeology and ancient history so fascinating. It’s not dead—it continues to educate us today, if we’re willing to listen.
Editor’s Note: Check out my previous interview with cartoonist Glynnis Fawkes, who created a graphic history version of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed for PU Press.
Eric H. Cline is professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University. He is the author of Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology, Digging Deeper: How Archaeology Works, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, and (with Glynnis Fawkes) 1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (all Princeton).