Yet this ‘collapse’ is one of the best-documented episodes of the era, thanks to the survival of archives, especially from the Hittite Empire, the most spectacular of the vanishing polities and one long vulnerable to famine and disease. Of that there can be no possible doubt whatever. After his attempt to explain the disappearance of many palaces, cities, states and literate cultures around the Aegean and in southwest Asia in the early 12th century BC, Eric Cline – surely an unconvincing alias for Gilbert and Sullivan’s character – concludes by proclaiming, ‘we undoubtedly do not know’. Whose identity lurks behind the picture, purportedly of the author, on the dust jacket of 1177 BC? To judge from his language and style, the real writer might be the haplessly muddled Grand Inquisitor from The Gondoliers. The long peak leaves the rest of his face in shadow, deepened against the background of glaring sunshine and sand. A great interview with a world-class researcher-it easily could have gone for three-hours.His dark glasses are heavy and impenetrable. As historian Eric Cline demonstrates in his gripping book, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, a much more brutal ‘dark age’ hit the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago, an event now known to us as the Bronze Age Collapse.
What caused a catastrophe so extreme that the First Dark Age descended over the world: a mysterious invading culture-the Sea People, plague and pestilence, earthquake, climate change, all of the above? 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed discusses each possibility in turn. City after city, empire after empire, civilization after civilization: annihilated to extinction, one right after another, and in a shockingly short amount of time. And both epics, one mythology and one history, are about the same extraordinary time.Ĭline recreates the late Bronze Age in fascinating detail and then describes its utter and complete destruction. Cline writes about the Minoans and Mycenaeans, the Trojans and the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians. Homer wrote about the Age of Olympians: Zeus and Apollo, Odysseus, Achilles and Hector. The prose is superb so good that it's hard to put down. Why? Because it's serious archaeology, history and anthropology, but it reads like a mystery novel. Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2015) is THE must have, must read book of 2014, and 2015.
Available again as a 2nd edition hardback, and soon in the 10th edition paperback with a new Afterword by the author, Eric H.
After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came. It quickly sold out in hardback, and then, within a matter of days, sold out in paperback. Buy a cheap copy of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization.
0 kommentar(er)
