I am not going to do justice to this one, but will do the best I can.

Last night, we went to B’nai Israel in Rockville to here George Washington University Professor Eric Cline talk about the collapse of an entire civilization. The talk was sponsored by the Biblical Archeological Forum, the Biblical Archeological Society of Northern Virginia (in case you haven’t figured it out, which you haven’t, BASANOVA) and the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies. By my count, there were over 150 in attendance.

When did the civilization collapse? In the 12th century B.C.E., over 3000 years ago. (By the way, looking at the audience, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the people there were present at the time.)

Cline is an excellent speaker and presenter and the tale he told was a fascinating one.

We are talking about the Bronze Age, and we are talking about the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. And we are talking about evidence from all sorts of archeological findings and – yes – there is some uncertainty about some of what he tentatively concludes.

He describes are period that, he says, has not been duplicated until very recently. A world in which several powerful empires, spread out over a large amount of land and water, cooperated with each other, traded with each other, and were dependent on each other. We are talking about Egyptians, Cypriots, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Philistines, Mycenaeans, and more, ranging throughout most of today’s Middle East, Turkey, and Greece. And their relatively peaceful and codependency lasted for about 500 years.

Then, chaos hit. The perfect storm. There was drought, there was famine, there were invasions (from the Sea Peoples, as we call them), there were earthquakes, there was disease, there was an enormous number of deaths. Everything came apart. Starting with the ports of today’s Lebanon, the trade and business centers of that world, which no longer received the goods to trade and which were at the same time invaded, it was the proverbial domino theory, as one empire fell after another.

He makes it clear that this did not happen in one day, although you can point to a short period of time when things came to a head, but over maybe a century. But it is clear that it happened.

Between this Bronze Age collapse and the growth of the Iron Age (he makes it clear again that you cannot point to a particular day or week and say “this is the start of the Iron Age”), there is a period that some scholars call a dark age. But Cline says it wasn’t a dark age, it was an age of transformation to a new period, and the transformation took several hundred years, and some areas transitioned better than others.

The areas that had the easiest transition to a renewal of organization and power were Cyprus, one of the first areas to smelt iron, and what became the Assyrian and Babylonian empires we know from the Biblical texts. Areas such as Egypt, he puts in the middle, and the area populated by Hittites (in today’s Turkey) and the areas of what are now Israel, Palestine, etc. had the most difficult and unsuccessful transitions.

This meant that there was a power vacuum in the area now known as “from the land to the sea”, it was this area that was filled by Israelites, and Canaanites, and Philistines, and Moabites, and Edomites, and all of the others tribes we know from biblical texts and which can be identified through archeological findings.

And, unfortunately, this is where things get a bit murky. We don’t really know where all these groups came from. They weren’t there before; they were there after. Did the Israelites come from their exile in Egypt? Quite possible, he says, but the archeological evidence is lacking. And the other groups? Did they come down from the hills of the north? Were they Hittites who moved south? It is apparently still unclear.

Equally unclear is how the Israelites became the most powerful group in the area. The biblical account is clear, but again, as there is no real evidence of the account as set forth in the Book of Joshua. When you look at Jericho and others cities mentioned as conquered and destroyed during the conquest of the land in the Bible, you find no archeological evidence of their destruction. When you look at cities where there is such evidence of destruction, they are not cities mentioned in the Bible.

So there are many theories put forth by many scholars. Invasion and conquest, peaceful assimilation, no migration at all but a transformation of existing peoples. None of these conjectures can be proven.

He went on to talk about all of the current archeological work being done in this part of the world. All of the new techniques being used – including DNA research. New discoveries, new sites. He thinks the next twenty years of archeological discovery will be by far the most exciting yet. He thinks we still have a lot to learn.

Cline ended his talk by speaking of the present. He believes that our society is in great trouble, is probably now in decline, and that further decline is probably inevitable. All of the problems of 3000 years ago are with us today. War, disease, climate change leading to drought and famine, fires, invasions. All here. He believes it is important for us to recognize that, and to prepare for it. So we will wind up like the Cypriots, and not the Hittites.

I didn’t do his talk justice. It was masterful. In 2014, Cline published a book titled 1177 B.C.: the Year Civilization Collapsed, which came out in a revised edition in 2021 (he says ignore the 2014 edition; the revision contains much new material), and this year he published After 1177 B.C.: the Survival of Civilization, on which he based most of his presentation. He thinks that, within ten years or so, that book too will be revised because of a cascade of new discoveries not yet made.

This talk was in person only. I am going to see if we can get him to repeat it for the Haberman Institute. If so, we will do it on Zoom and have it available on YouTube. As RM says, keep your eyes on this space.