Ep. 018 – The Beginning of the End

In today's episode we take a look at just what the title suggests, the beginning of the end for the cultures and powers of the Bronze Age world. We'll make our first visit to the Levantine trade center of Ugarit, a city that will factor heavily in our look at the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Then, after a look at the broad roadmap of occurrences during the period, we'll see the first mention of the Sherden, a group that became part of the Sea Peoples. The Hittites and Egyptians clash at Qadesh, the Aegean begins to unravel, and the Assyrians deal a death blow to the Hittite Empire. We finish by looking at a treaty that sought to cut off Assyrian access to the Mediterranean trade routes. Thanks for tuning in!

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Episode Transcript

Introduction

We finished up last time looking at some theories regarding the historicity of the Trojan War, but we also looked at the broad trend of the Bronze Age powers around the Mediterranean. That trend was on a decidedly downward slope, and today, we’ll being to see the angle of that slope steepen even further. Seeing as how we’re on Episode 018, if we go by our canonically numbered episodes, anyway, I thought it might be worthwhile to try and end our look at the Bronze Age by episode 020, at which point we can perhaps take a whirlwind tour review episode through everything thus far. I’d like to try organizing the different major periods and topics of focus into what we could call ‘seasons,’ so for example, our first 20 episodes about maritime history in the Bronze Age can be season 1, then we’ll take season 2 to look at the start of the Iron Age, things like the emergence of the Phoenicians, the rise of Greek sea power, and some of the interesting battles and other topics, the Delian League, the Peloponnesian War, et cetera. I think season 2 will really be our season of examining the first true thalassocracies, so who knows how many episodes will emerge in the end.

Evidence from Ugarit

Let me know any thoughts on that game plan moving forward, but for now let’s open the book on today’s episode. I think an appropriate page on which to start today is on that concerning the city of Ugarit. This city will be somewhat central to our story today, and it’s a city that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention when it comes to talk of Bronze Age history, at least not outside academic circles it doesn’t. Ugarit is among the oldest of cities on earth. It was occupied in neolithic times, and archaeologists have dated it’s oldest fortified wall to around 6000 BCE. The city reached its pinnacle period beginning in 1800 BCE and as for its end, we’ll get to that briefly. Ugarit was situated on a headland or cape in northern Syria, putting it in prime location to be a trade center for the region. What’s more, this port city also sat at the perfect location to serve as an entrepôt for the overland trade route to the Tigris and Euphrates. All in all, Ugarit was a trade center utilized by almost every Bronze Age civilization. It’s been called the “premier international port of its time,” “the Hamburg or Rotterdam of the Late Bronze Age.”

There’s a remarkable letter found in Ugarit that introduces us by name to a wealthy merchant from the city. His name was Sinaranu and right around the year 1260 BCE we know that he sent a ship to Crete. This trade connection between a Levantine city and an Aegean island is something we’ve seen multiple times now, so no surprise here. The intriguing aspect of this letter is that it’s an official letter, a declaration that upon returning to Ugarit, Sinaranu’s ship full of grain, beer, and olive oil is exempt from the standard royal tax. I suppose this could be some Bronze Age tax incentive at work, a palace official or king seeking to incentivize trade. This seems to have been a common practice in Ugarit, at least, for there are other texts exempting other merchants from any tax on trade with Egypt, the Hittites, and another smudged out land. This trade with the Hittites makes sense, as the royal house of Ugarit was a vassal state of the Hittites, allied by marriage but still documented as sending lavish amounts of tribute to the Hittite capital of Hattusa.

Sinaranu’s ship sailed around 1260, so trade was still alive and well. On a broad level, the state of affairs around the Mediterranean at this time was as we have discussed. Egypt and the Hittites had clashed at Qadesh in 1275 BCE but had subsequently hashed out a treaty. Meanwhile, the Mycenaeans honed their raiding skills along the western coasts of Anatolia, possibly fighting the Trojan War, but assuredly stirring up trouble to their east. We’ve speculated that the Mycenaean meddling in Anatolia can be seen as coinciding with the emergence of cyclopean architecture at the Mycenaean palace cities around the Aegean. This was the addition of great walls around their previously unfortified palaces, the stones used for these walls so large that later peoples thought the walls must have been constructed by the mythical Cyclopes. One possible interpretation for the emergence of these Mycenaean fortifications is that they palaces had become vulnerable like they’d not been before. As has been our theme of late, we really don’t know the causes behind these occurrences, we simply see the symptoms of something still hidden beneath the surface of the past.

We’ve now visited Ugarit, and reestablished our bearings in the Late Bronze Age. Where to from here? This time period is perhaps our most difficult yet, so in my mind, I think we’ll be better off if we get the birds-eye view of what is about to happen, sketch in the lines if you will. After we know some of what’s to come, the details will make much more sense and won’t seem like a fixation on one tree to the detriment of the forest. Lastly, keep in mind that this series of events is simply the best way that current archaeology can reconstruct the timeline based on what we’ve found so far in academic study. The dates are useful in giving us a theory about how the Late Bronze Age Collapse may have played out and they’re relatively accurate based on most chronologies, but we really can’t know for sure how accurate these theories are.

A General Timeline of the Late Bronze Age Collapse

Despite that caveat, here’s a bullet-point summary of current theory, after which we’ll zoom in on some fascinating details:

Our looks at the Bronze Age world have shown us that from at least 1500 BCE, the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean were heavily involved in a complex international trade of raw materials and finished goods, trade that only grew in complexity as the societies that engaged in the trade prospered and grew.
We call this entire period the Bronze Age because bronze weaponry and instruments were the central pillar of the trade networks and societal growth. Bronze is a composite of copper and tin, and as we saw from the evidence of shipwrecks at Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya, copper and tin were traded in their raw and finished forms.
I’m not sure how much stock to place in this statement, but Carol Bell, a scientist and archaeologist focusing on the Bronze Age collapse, has an interesting take on the economics of the Bronze Age and what drove the collapse. In here view, tin in the Bronze Age held a similar strategic importance to crude oil in today’s economies, a pillar of exchange and the key piece in maintaining stability across our global economy(s). This is worth mentioning here, though it will also come into play later in the story.
The Ulubrurun wreck has been dated to 1300 BCE and Gelidonya closer to 1200. The Uluburun wreck proved a much wealthier wreck, so we know that high level trade continued in the year 1300 and beyond and that Levantine merchants were quite active.
In our look at the basis for the Trojan War myth, we saw that Mycenaean raiders were active in Anatolia for much of the Bronze Age, though things seem to have picked up after the year 1300 BCE with more signs of fighting and destruction in Anatolia. This can’t be looked at in relation to two main points: after 1300 BCE the Hittite empire had begun to decline in power. At this same time, the Mycenaean palace centers, city-states essentially, also seems to have seen trouble. Earthquake damage is evident and signs of economic stress begin to emerge.
It’s in 1280 BCE that we have our first mention of a group that was part of what came to be known as the Sea Peoples. The Shardana are mentioned by name on a stele from Tanis, a location in the Nile delta where Ramesses II claimed to have defeated the “rebellious Shardana in a sea battle.”
The assumption is that Ramesses must have taken some of the Shardana captive after defeating them, because in his inscriptions regarding the Battle of Qadesh in 1275, he mentions them again, saying that they fought for him as part of his personal bodyguard.
Skip ahead to 1250 BCE, the point at which some place the historical basis for the Trojan War. Mycenaean palaces and Troy itself show signs of destruction by earthquake. We’ve talked about this in detail already, so the main point is to re- emphasize that the centralized, palace-controlled Mycenaean economies were beginning to weaken. This can explain at least part of their forays into Anatolia to capture slaves and goods. Such raiding would only provide a temporary solution, however.
In 1230 BCE, the Hittite army was defeated by the Assyrians at the Battle of Nihriya. The Hittite defeat didn’t destroy their empire immediately, but it certainly consigned the empire to ultimate collapse and signaled a shift of power away from the Hittites. They would be completely gone within 30 years.
Before the final destruction, we have record that in 1210 BCE the Hittite king had to fight off an invasion fleet coming from the direction of Cyprus. He employed ships from Ugarit in making his defense, which was ultimately successful, but the invasion itself shows that the island of Cyprus had become a staging ground for invasion and that the King of Cyprus had lost control of at least part of the island. In fact, it’s likely that Cyprus had been a staging point for seaborne raiders for a substantial portion of the Bronze Age, though it seems to have increased late on.
Three years later, 1207 BCE, we see the first mention of the group we commonly call the Sea Peoples. We’ll look in detail at the various inscriptions describing this invasion. They summarily describe an invasion of Egypt by what they call Libyans, along with a group called the Sea Peoples. This group was made up of five or six separate ethnic groups that are listed on Egyptian monuments and which give us some insight into where these invaders may have come from.
By the 1200 BCE things had well and truly come unraveled. Earthquakes had rocked the Aegean and portions of the Mediterranean since 1225. Famine and drought had begun to become an undeniable problem around the Bronze Age world. The dates for city destructions vary around the regions, but it is clear that by 1200 many cities had already been destroyed or abandoned, for various reasons. Perhaps the chief of these was Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite empire. It was destroyed and subsequently abandoned in 1200. The Hittite Empire would not be rediscovered for another 3700 years.
Destructions continued for a period of decades, though again, we’ll be more specific in time. Ugarit was destroyed in 1190 BCE, and the ruins of this once great trade center have recently revealed a wealth of textual evidence that give us some insight into the dying moments of a Bronze Age city.
Then, in 1180 BCE, destruction of city and palace centers become more pronounced in Mycenaean Greece. Pylos is ruined, as is Troy VIIa. In the ensuing years, yet more palace centers are abandoned or destroyed, among them Boeotia, Tiryns, Lefkandi, Kynos, and Mycenae itself.
The most remarkable, and most revealing event of the Late Bronze Age occurs in 1177 BCE. Inscriptions from The Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu tell and show us a great series of battles between Egypt and the Sea Peoples. Some of these battles happen on land, while a breathtaking inscription depicts a chaotic naval battle that Egypt again claims to have won.
The effects of the Late Bronze Age Collapse continued to play out even past 1177 BCE, the last mention of the Sea Peoples. The Assyrians became dominant and the Egyptians retained a smaller measure of their once great power. The Levant saw a shake up and it’s thought that a substantial portion of the Sea Peoples settled there. From this region the Phoenicians would become a great maritime power. Meanwhile, a period of decline occurred in the Aegean. I hate the term ‘Dark Ages,’ but it is a succinct term to attach to post-Bronze Age Greece.

All right then. That’s my summary of the bullet points so we have somewhat of a roadmap going forward. What we can say at the outset of our discussion is that we know fairly well how things operated at the height of the Bronze Age, the year 1300 or so, and in the century before. We also know fairly well how things ended up around 200 years later, 1100 BCE when the Cyclades had been largely abandoned, mass migration and shift had occurred, and the Assyrians had become powerful with the Phoenicians emerging to their south in Levant. Our focus now is the jumbled mess of what could possibly have happened in the interim, especially in the century between 1250 and 1150 BCE.

Ramesses II Mentions the 'Sea Peoples'

As listed earlier, the first clear mention of a seaborne threat connected to the enigmatic Sea Peoples is found on a pair stelae commissioned by Ramesses II, both of them referring to an incident that happened around 1280 BCE. Let’s take these in turn, shall we? The stele found at Aswan recounts Ramesses’ claim to have “destroyed the warriors of the Great Green” so as to let Egypt “spend the night sleeping peacefully.” It’s fairly well established that in naming the “Great Green,” Egypt was referring to the Mediterranean, at least in this context. Aswan then tells us that Egypt was invaded by seaborne warriors. It’s the second stele, found at site of Tanis in the Nile Delta, that affixes a name to these warriors, a people that Ramesses calls the “Sherden” or “Shardana.” On this artifact, Ramesses tells us this story: “As for the Sherden of rebellious mind, whom none could ever fight against, who came bold-hearted in warships from the midst of the Sea, those whom none could withstand; He [Ramesses] plundered them by the victories of his valiant arm, they being carried off to Egypt] as prisoners.”

Now, I’m no Egyptologist and I’m certainly in the dark when it comes to hieroglyphics, but in a fascinating paper about the ships used by the Sea Peoples, archaeologist Jeff Emmanuel points out that the inscription on the Tanis stele describes the clash with the Sherden in a unique way. It appears that the Egyptians had to invent a new word to describe the types of ships used by the Sherden, a term roughly translated as ‘warship’ or more literally, ‘ships of fighting.’ This is rather strange, since the Egyptians had certainly used ships in a military setting before and were intimately familiar with many types of sailing vessels, as we’ve seen by now. I apologize for tantalizing you with this tidbit right now, but it can only be fleshed out later on, toward the end of the events involving the Sea Peoples, since it’s only late on that we have a depiction of their ships that can inform this new word they forced Egypt to conjure up for their ships. A little sneak peak, though: there is solid evidence from the later depictions that the Sea Peoples did indeed sail on a unique and more developed type of ship, so stay tuned over the next two episodes for some more on that.

sherden_qadesh — A depiction of the Sherden in Ramesses II's account of the Battle of Qadesh.

Moving on from the appearance of Sherden and their defeat by Ramesses II in 1280, it’s interesting to see them pop up again only five years later. This time, they’re connected with Egypt still, but this time they fight in a battle on Egypt’s side. The Battle is none other than the significant Battle of Qadesh, a battle in 1275 where Egypt clashed with the Hittites at the extreme edge of their empires, a region that they both hoped to bring more fully within their control. This battle happened in Qadesh, as I said, which is modern day Syria, so even more than 3000 years ago world empires made Syria the site of their struggles for power. I feel like I say this more frequently as the podcast progresses, but some things never change, “there’s nothing new under the sun,” and however else you want to state it.

qadesh_treaty — The Hittite version of the treaty between Egypt and Hattusa after the Battle of Qadesh.

Anyhow, the detailed records of what Ramesses claimed as his victory at Qadesh tell us that a contingent of Sherden warriors fought as part of the personal bodyguard of Ramesses himself. We have no proof, but it seems reasonable to think that he’d taken some prisoners in that first battle with the Sherden and incorporated him into his bodyguard. We could get into the depictions of the Sherden at the battle, but I think that would bog us down a bit. The other relevant info to come from Qadesh is that two groups that later would fall under the heading of Sea Peoples were fighting for the Hittites at Qadesh, against Egypt. These two groups were the Karkisha and the Lukka. The Karkisha don’t really pop up after this that I’ve been able to track, but the Lukka should sound familiar to you back from episode 014. They were variously described by the Hittites and Mycenaeans a pirates, raiders, and all around rebels. They occupied southern Anatolia and their name likely stuck around in the region, that area later coming to be called Lycia. It makes sense, considering their Anatolian origin, that the Lukka would have fought for the Hittites. They likely had a vassal-state treaty with the king as did the Dardanoi who also fought for Hattusa at Qadesh, so maybe we even have the proto-Sea Peoples fighting alongside the Trojans and others for the Hittites against the Egyptians on a battlefield in Syria. Holy crap. Very similar to the modern day indeed.

It seems, however, that these Bronze Age powers who fought at Qadesh knew that the geopolitical situation was irreversibly against them at this point. There were a few more skirmishes in the Levant where Ramesses took some cities from the Hittites and the Hittites took some from Ramesses. Fifteen years after the Battle of Qadesh, though, the Hittites and Egyptians hashed out a treaty. This amazing treaty, dated to around 1260 BCE, seems to have been a move by the Hittites to bring their war with Egypt to a halt, not because they wanted to, necessarily, but because they had much bigger problems much closer to home.

1250 BCE - The Hittite Empire Collapses, and Other Decline

So, as I had begun saying, it’s around 1250 BCE that the story really get’s murky for us. We talked earlier about how it’s at this point that the precariously balanced economic and political structure of the Mycenaean city-states begins to tip in the wrong direction. Their raiding in Anatolia signals this, as does the appearance of their Cyclopean architecture. This uptick in defensive building seems to have been prompted by a wave of destruction at various locales around the Aegean in the years around 1250 BCE. Thebes was destroyed and there are indications that a portion of Mycenae was also burned. Some theorize that this wave of attacks is what prompted the Mycenaeans to build their Cyclopean defensive works, particularly at Mycenae, but this is only a guess. Not much happens as far as invasion in the Aegean in the two decades after 1250, but it appears that the situation for the Hittites continued to decline.

This decline culminated in the Battle of Nihirya in 1230 BCE, which was a death knell of the Hittite Empire even though it struggled on for another few decades. This battle was itself the culmination of a conflict between the Hittites in Anatolia and the rising power of the Middle Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia. These two powers clashed over control of the region in between them, a region that had previously been controlled by the Mitanni. The city of Nihirya lay on the Tigris River, in the southeastern corner of modern-day Turkey. To make a long story short here, the Assyrians won a huge victory, a victory that shifted the balance of power in the region away from the Hittites and toward the Assyrian king Tukulti- Ninurta. It’s interesting then to note something that Cline points out, if we place Assyria’s eclipse of the Hittites next to our knowledge that the Hittites and Mycenaeans didn’t get along very well. After his victory at the Battle Nihirya, there is some evidence that the Assyrian king sent a generous gift of lapis lazuli to the Mycenaean king of Thebes. Hard to read much into this, but as I said, it’s certainly worth noting.

The last major item of concern today is to see how the Hittites reacted to their defeat and how it may be one more evidence of a Mycenaean campaign of raids along Anatolia’s western coast, both before the year of 1225 BCE but perhaps even up until that point. The Hittite reaction to their defeat by Assyria came in the form of a treaty with the king of Amurru. Amurru was a kingdom that extended to the coasts of northern Syria. Taking into account the fact that the Assyrian empire did not have any direct access to the Mediterranean, we can connect the dots to see that in making a treaty with Amurru, the Hittites were seeking to cut off Assyria’s trade access to the Mediterranean and to Mycenaean goods in particular. This goal is actually spelled out quite clearly in the treaty, in several places.

The first place is right at the beginning. The treaty begins with the parties to the treaty, saying: “And the kings, who are of the same rank as myself, the king of Egypt, the king of Babylonia, the King of Assyria” and then a party that was intentionally crossed out, “the king of Ahhiyawa.” Apparently in 1225 BCE, the general time this treaty was written, the Hittites still didn’t consider the Mycenaeans to be their friends, nor were the Assyrians, so in this case we have the old case of my friend’s enemy is my enemy. The Hittite king who drafted this treaty stated as such, though in converse terms. His scribe wrote as follows, the term ‘your’ throughout referring to he the Hittites expected the King of Amurru to act:

“If the king of Egypt is the friend of My Majesty, he shall be your friend. But if he is the enemy of My Majesty, he shall be your enemy. And if the King of Babylonia is the friend of My Majesty, he shall be your friend. But if he is the enemy of My Majesty, he shall be your enemy. Since the King of Assyria is the enemy of My Majesty, he shall likewise be your enemy. Your merchant shall not go to Assyria, and you shall not allow his merchant into your land. He shall not pass through your land. But if he should come into your land, seize him and send him off to My Majesty. Let this matter be placed under oath for you.”

So here we again see the treaty of cooperation and the reality that it seems the Hittites were trying to cut of Assyrian access to any trade on the Mediterranean. This is made even more explicit in a later line where the Hittite king says flat out “You shall not allow any ship of Ahhiyawa to go to him,” the him being the king of Assyria.

late_bronze_age_collaps — The general movements and forces at play during the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

We’ve seen the text of this treaty then, and it seems that in large part, the Hittites were coming under pressure from all sides, hence their treaty with Amurru. They apparently hoped to neutralize the growing strength of the Assyrians to their east and their harsh treatment of the Mycenaeans here, Ahhiyawa was their term, shows us that they also had problems to the west. I’ll stop there for now, but at the start of our next episode we’ll see that these weren’t the only threats that were hounding the ever-shrinking edges of the Hittite empire. More threats came from the south, born on the Mediterranean Sea and possibly emanating from the island of Cyprus. We’ll look at that next time, as well as the role that Ugarit played in the dying stages of the Hittite Empire, plus the growing destruction that swept the Bronze Age World around 1200 BCE, some of it at the hands of the Sea Peoples, some of it not. That’s the plan for episode 19 and then episode 20 will focus entirely on the Sea Peoples, their Battles with Egypt, and the end of the Bronze Age.

Sources

Bell, Carol, The Merchants of Ugarit: Oligarchs of the Late Bronze Age Trade in Metals?, in Eastern Mediterranean Metallurgy and Metalwork in the Second Millennium BC, pp. 180–187 (2009).
Braudel, Fernand, Memory and the Mediterranean (2001).
Casson, Lionel, The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times (1959).
Cline, Eric H., 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014).
Emmanuel, Jeffrey, Sea Peoples, Egypt, and the Aegean: Transference of Maritime Technology in the Late Bronze–Early Iron Transition, in Aegean Studies, pp. 21–56 (2014).
McGrail, Seán, Early Ships and Seafaring: European Water Transport (2014).
Mee, Christopher, Anatolia and the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age, in Aegean and the Orient, pp. 137–148 (1998).
Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
Wachsmann, Shelley, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant (2008).
Wood, Michael, In Search of the Trojan War (1985).