1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

In one sentence: Archaeologist Eric Cline's precisely dated title isn't really about the Sea Peoples invasion story most people know — it's about how one of the ancient world's most interconnected societies got pulled down by drought, earthquakes, famine, and internal revolt, all compounding at once.

Overview

The book's question is blunt: why did the tightly networked Late Bronze Age world — stretching from Greece to Egypt, held together by trade routes and royal intermarriage — collapse within a few decades, almost simultaneously? The popular answer has always been the Sea Peoples, a mysterious confederation blamed in Egyptian records for two invasions, in 1207 B.C. and 1177 B.C. (the book is named for the second). Cline, after combing through the surviving texts, argues that pinning the whole collapse on them doesn't hold up: roughly 90 percent of what we know about the Sea Peoples comes from Egyptian sources with an obvious propaganda slant, and scholars have mostly been guessing at their origins by sound-alike names (Sherden sounds like Sardinia, Shekelesh like Sicily) — no site has ever been definitively tied to them. He's inclined to read them as refugees rather than invaders. The real culprit, in his telling, is a "perfect storm": a megadrought lasting at least 150 years (up to 300 in some regions), followed by a wave of earthquakes across five decades, drought causing famine, famine cutting off trade — and none of the nine great Late Bronze Age powers were self-sufficient anymore. Tin came from Afghanistan, silver from Greece, gold from Egyptian-controlled Nubia. When one domino fell, the rest went down with it.

Why It's Recommended

The book earns its spot first on sheer weight: Eric Cline is the episode's sole guest, and the show's three-act structure — how the golden age formed, how it fell apart, what came after — follows the argument of the book almost beat for beat, right down to the anecdote of the publisher's email that led him to insist on writing about what was lost, not just how it collapsed. What makes it worth reading is where Cline relocates the disease: not in some outside invader, but inside the system itself. The very interconnectedness that made the Late Bronze Age look like an ancient version of globalization — royal intermarriage, international trade, a shared diplomatic language — is exactly what doomed it, because not one of the nine powers could survive entirely on its own anymore. Cline also holds an honest ambivalence about the word "collapse" itself: he calls it both a collapse and a transformation, adding, "in some ways, if the collapse hadn't happened, we would be living in a very different world today."

The episode also flags Cline's follow-up book, After 1177, which picks up exactly where this one leaves off: the various Bronze Age societies recovered at wildly different speeds — some in 80 years, some in 300, some never — and what separated survivors from casualties was adaptability: switching from bronze to iron once tin supply chains broke, finding new trading partners, migrating when home stopped being viable. The Phoenicians are Cline's go-to example of a society that didn't just survive but thrived, turning the Mediterranean into what amounted to their private lake and spreading the alphabet along with their famous purple dye. That thread is noted here rather than given its own library page.

Source

Eric Cline is a professor of archaeology and classics at George Washington University, interviewed for the 2021-01-11 episode "What Happened After Civilization Collapsed," hosted by Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei. The episode opens by explaining the book's origin: a publisher emailed asking him to write about the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, and he insisted on also covering "what collapsed... how advanced were they" — "and so what resulted was the book '1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.'" Material throughout all three segments — the drought and earthquake evidence, the Hittite-Egyptian relief correspondence, the etymological guesswork behind the various Sea Peoples group names — is drawn directly from the book. The episode's credits note that "a revised and updated edition of the book is coming out in February." (The book was first published in 2014 by Princeton University Press; the revised edition mentioned in the episode is the 2021 edition.)