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The importance of parents and parenting is almost universally accepted. Like toughness, it is an aspect of humanity that we almost intrinsically understand to be extremely influential in how a person turns out as an adult, but it’s challenging to assess its impact on individuals in the past or on human history as a whole. Yet it would seem strange to suggest that the way parents reared children was of no great historical import at all. What if they reared everyone wrong?
“Wrong” is a culturally determined concept, of course. Every age and culture has its own ideas on the best way to raise progeny. But while parents in any place or time usually try to do what’s best for their offspring, in the past much of the information they had was fallacious. Out of ignorance they may have harmed children while doing things they believed would be beneficial. Today the modern understanding of health and science, and the widespread dissemination of parenting information, has probably created the most knowledgeable generation of parents ever. Of particular emphasis is early childhood development. The effects of poor childhood nutrition, prenatal damage from alcohol and drugs, bad hygiene, child abuse, and just awful parenting during a child’s formative years are well known. Parents deemed unfit or abusive or who can’t meet minimum societal standards often lose custody of their children. In very bad cases, they can go to prison.
There’s no doubt that these measures have, over time, tremendously improved the child-raising climate in our modern societies. The benefit to individual kids is incalculable. But trying to determine how this adds up at the societal level is extremely difficult. It’s obvious that it has to make a large difference, and yet it’s almost impossible to say exactly how or to what degree it actually has. Do huge cultural improvements in child rearing create a better society? Conversely, how much did poor childhood environments affect the societies of the past?
Some of the theories on the subject can seem far-fetched, but they definitely prompt us to think about things that might have slipped below the radar scanning for the traditional names, dates, and events we usually seek out when we’re trying to understand history. Could you, for example, suggest that child-rearing practices can affect a nation’s foreign policy? If it seems unlikely, imagine a world where half the adults are child abuse victims, and then consider the many strange and unforeseen consequences that might manifest. It’s a fascinating question.
One of the earlier voices exploring the potential historical importance of child-rearing practices was Lloyd deMause.[1] (#litres_trial_promo) DeMause specializes in psychohistory, a controversial discipline that focuses on, among other things, child-rearing practices and the effect they might have on the way history unfolds. He takes a rather dim view of parents in the past, writing in The Emotional Life of Nations, “Parents until relatively recently have been so frightened and have so hated their newborn infants that they have killed them by the billions, routinely sent them out to extremely neglectful wet nurses, tied them up tightly in swaddling bandages lest they be overpowered by them, starved, mutilated, raped, neglected, and beat them so badly that prior to modern times, I have not been able to find evidence of a single parent who would not today be put in jail for child abuse.”
DeMause and the psychohistorians look at societies of the past in the same way psychologists and psychiatrists look at individuals today, trying to figure out if the early development of and influences on children affected the societies they created later.[2] (#litres_trial_promo) DeMause believes that most children up until recent times would likely have met modern criteria as child abuse victims, which he and others like him believe may help explain why, for example, eras like the Middle Ages were so barbarous.[3] (#litres_trial_promo)
But human cultures are so varied that such blanket statements seem too sweeping. While such theories might appear applicable to some complex urban societies, many premodern and tribal societies had age-old patterns of human upbringing that involved plenty of parental and extended family love and nurturing. Yet members of such societies too often involved children in practices and activities that we today would assume would cause lasting damage. But some of these things were merely aspects of living life in another era. The violence, for example, that a child growing up several thousand years ago may have seen on a regular basis may have had little or no negative effect on her compared with its effect on a modern child. It just might have been part of life in her world.
One of the important variables in this discussion concerns whether culture can be said to have shielded the children of past eras to any degree from the effects of what we today would call abuse, neglect, or emotional and psychological trauma. If a behavior that we moderns consider horribly deviant were viewed in a more positive and culturally reinforced way in the past, some argue that the effects would have been less damaging. It feels a bit like grading child abuse or bad parenting on a historical curve, but if something is more socially accepted and lacks the stigma it would have today, does that lessen its damage? Some would argue that the damage is a constant regardless of the society or era, others that it is culturally influenced. Either these people of the past were basically normal and well-adjusted adults despite their childhood experiences and the differences in parenting, or they were, as deMause argues, almost universally what we would today classify as abused children living in a society created by, operated by, and led by abused children.
The easiest way to imagine how bad things might have been for children growing up in past societies is to simply imagine what our own would look like if we removed today’s prohibitions, investigations, and enforcement concerning such things as child abuse and neglect. Even with our modern attention and efforts, children are abused, mistreated, and neglected in every society on earth. Without those rules and enforcement, such mistreatment would almost certainly be much worse. Imagine how bad it might get if a society actually encouraged such behavior.[4] (#litres_trial_promo)
BEATING CHILDREN WAS a common form of discipline from the earliest days of human history to relatively recent times. Many in the Greatest Generation, for example, grew up in a culture that did not think the general practice unusual whatsoever.[5] (#litres_trial_promo) In fact, beating was considered by many to be the preferred and proper way to raise good, well-adjusted adults. It was routinely done to students in schools. And while a parent today who regularly struck his child with a belt twenty or thirty times would be considered abusive by the vast majority of people, he would have been considered positively lenient by the standards of past eras, when a belt might seem a poor substitute for something designed specifically for the task of beating kids.
DeMause’s The History of Childhood describes various implements of corporal punishment, including
• whips of all kinds,
• cat-o’-nine-tails,
• shovels,
• canes,
• iron and wooden rods,
• bundles of sticks,
• “disciplines” (whips made of small chains), and
• “flappers” (school instruments with a pear-shaped end and a round hole, used to raise blisters).
Today there is almost no chance we would countenance the use of a discipline tool specifically designed to raise blisters on a seven- or eight-year-old child. Yet the oft-cited line “spare the rod and spoil the child” asserts that a parent who is too lenient with physical punishment on children is doing them harm. People took this admonition seriously for a long time.[6] (#litres_trial_promo)
It’s hard to blame parents for not seeing the potential damage they were doing to their children, because, after all, this is how they themselves had been raised. If we are imagining what a society of abused children might be like to live in, consider for a moment how they might raise their own offspring. The historian M. J. Tucker in an essay in TheHistory of Childhood gives an account of the harsh treatment Lady Jane Grey[7] (#litres_trial_promo) endured at the hands of her parents and then writes that “Jane’s parents were typical … Common usage decreed that parents who love their children will beat them.” He says that this is how the children often saw it as well: “Little girls, like Lady Jane Grey, never doubted that her beatings issued from parental concern and blessed herself that her parents took their responsibility so seriously.” Lady Jane Grey would be executed as a teenager after being caught up in a royal succession crisis. Had she lived, though, and wished to have been a good mother by the standards of the time, how would this beaten child have been likely to behave toward her own kids?
While child beating has gone out of fashion, corporal punishment is still practiced in some public school systems in the United States, and there are still people who defend its use as valuable (albeit not to the degree of severity we just talked about). The same cannot be said for some of the other kinds of abuse that many children of past ages were subjected to. For instance, some societies and cultures of the past held wildly differing ideas of what should and shouldn’t be okay sexually between adults and children.[8] (#litres_trial_promo) It not only makes it difficult for us today to relate to those cultures and peoples but it’s hard to imagine that such cultural perspectives didn’t have a large effect on their reality. It wasn’t particularly uncommon in many cultures in past eras for children to be viewed as sexual objects and sometimes to be used as such. There are four-hundred-year-old accounts of sailors who encountered overtly sexual women on Pacific Islands, but some of these “women” were as young as ten. To us, such sexual relations may seem bizarre or even obscene, but what if the society these sailors existed in didn’t think so?
In other ages, antiquity for example, the mores were often very different from our own when it came to sex and children.[9] (#litres_trial_promo) In the ancient Mediterranean, both heterosexual and homosexual sex between adults and children was in many places an accepted part of the culture. Would the children in those ancient cultures experience the same long-term adverse effects we would expect to see in children who had sex with adults today? If they did, one wonders how this might have affected how those societies developed. If they didn’t, that’s also interesting—one would have to wonder why.
Even parents who wanted to do the best for their children and were perhaps less inclined to outright beat them could do great damage to them by simply following the prevailing wisdom at the time—inadvertent child abuse, if you will.
One common practice throughout much of human history was to give children liquor or opium to relieve teething pain or to help them sleep. As recently as the 1960s, it wasn’t unusual for a doctor to prescribe sleeping medication for children, or for parents to rub whiskey on a teething infant’s gums. We know now these substances are harmful, but there were some people who recognized the problem even hundreds of years ago. The History of Childhood quotes a British doctor named Hume, who complained in 1799 of thousands of child deaths caused by nurses “forever pouring Godfrey’s cordial down little throats, which is quite a strong opiate, and in the end as fatal as arsenic.”
Once upon a time, it was considered good parenting to teach your children a moral lesson in right and wrong by taking them to witness public executions. To make the lesson really stick, parents sometimes beat their children as they watched, forever linking the spectacle with physical pain. And the practice of beating a child so he or she wouldn’t forget was done for other reasons, too. Anglo-Saxons sometimes beat kids so that they would recall a given day for legal reasons, such as presenting evidence at trial—physical violence as a kind of notary public service, or long-term reminder note.
In modern times, we worry about our kids’ exposure to simulated violence on television or in video games and whether it desensitizes them to real-life atrocities. But in many past eras it may have been actual violence, not the made-for-TV variety, that desensitized children to more of the same. Think of the children who grew up in cultures where they would have seen real-life killings and torture up close by the time they were five, six, or seven years old. In some cases, they might have even participated in it.[10] (#litres_trial_promo)
If we heard of a modern child with such a bloody or violent upbringing, we would assume he or she would be a very damaged person in need of counseling and help. It’s hard to determine, though, if all children in all times and all cultures would be affected the same way by such experiences. It’s possible that people in earlier eras who grew up seeing animals butchered and people killed as a matter of course weren’t affected the way a person with modern sensibilities would be. Today we might assume certain things would hurt any human being at any time, but this may not be true. Actions don’t have to cause obvious harm to create a significantly different version of a human being. A child (either today or in the past) who has witnessed several very violent live public executions is going to be different from the other children in our society. Any modern child with the same life experiences would probably be prescribed some sort of therapy and perhaps medications for a long time.
After considering such heavy-duty abuse, you might think something like physical or emotional child abandonment would sound like a lightweight issue—but modern experts who deal with children have no doubt about the lasting negative impact that a lack of sustained contact between parents and children can have. The psychohistorians assert that such situations may have damaged a lot of children in the past. This seems like a no-brainer on the surface, but trying to determine how this might have affected the past on a macro scale is seemingly impossible.
In many past societies, parents and children had less contact than we are accustomed to today.[11] (#litres_trial_promo) Even the bonding experience of a mother feeding her infant was something often farmed out. For thousands of years, in many societies and cultures, the human institution of the wet nurse was very popular. There are stories of wet nurses—women who breastfeed other women’s babies—in the Bible and going back to ancient Babylon.Roman wet nurses gathered at a place called the Columna Lactaria (the “milk column”) to sell their services. For mothers who couldn’t produce milk or had died in childbirth, the wet nurse filled a real need, especially when many such societies didn’t believe in giving infants animal milk.
Yet the practice often still meant sending children away from their homes to live with a wet nurse, sometimes for years. The casual giving away of children in past eras can astound; in various writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, children sometimes sound like litters of puppies rather than human beings. The mother-in-law of one nineteenth-century gentleman wrote about a baby that had been promised to another family: “Yes, certainly the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned,” she wrote, “and if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others.”
The trauma didn’t end with the sending away. After the child spent years bonding with the wet nurse, they were eventually returned to their biological parents, essentially ripping him or her away from the only parent he or she had known.[12] (#litres_trial_promo) Sometimes the wet nurses were unkind to their charges, making returning home a blessing, but either way, the child was now faced with complete strangers. Lloyd deMause quotes a piece written by the chief of police in Paris in 1780 estimating that of the, on average, 21,000 children born in that city every year, only 700 were nursed by their biological mothers. (Marie Antoinette, writing in a letter to her mother, noted after her daughter recognized her as her mother in a room full of people, “I believe I like her much better since that time”—which suggests she hadn’t liked her all that much before.)
Children could also be seen much more like a commodity than a family member. Selling children was a profitable business (and there are parts of the world where it still occurs). Children were also farmed out for labor. The Middle Ages institution of the apprenticeship took kids as young as five or six to a neighboring castle or community to begin their working life. This wasn’t seen by parents as a form of punishment or abuse, but more like an internship in which the child would learn valuable foundational skills necessary for later adult success. And farm families since agriculture began have used every strong hand available to work the land and keep food on the table.[13] (#litres_trial_promo) But seeing children as nothing more than easily exploitable low-wage labor was all too common. It wasn’t until the late 1930s in the United States that child labor in such dangerous industries as mining and manufacturing was outlawed. There was much more opposition to the reform attempts at the time than might be thought. But today the idea of sending a thirteen-year-old into a mine or a twelve-year-old onto an assembly line seems like one destined to stunt the child’s development.
It makes one wonder why our ancestors—many of whom were perfectly smart people—didn’t see how damaging these practices were. Yet perhaps our concept of what constitutes “damage” is different from theirs. They were raising kids to live in their world, a world alien to us. Besides, who knows what child-rearing experts of the future will think about our current practices? Maybe our best practices now will be deemed abusive or damaging to children by future standards. In our defense, we could probably say that we did the best we could knowing what we know now—but that’s also probably what our ancestors would have said.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_4bccea7e-6ac3-5400-b421-d418715edc57)
THE END OF THE WORLD AS THEY KNEW IT (#ulink_4bccea7e-6ac3-5400-b421-d418715edc57)
THE IDEA OF “progress” is not without bias. Is transitioning from a hunter-gatherer society to one where humans live in cities an advance, or do we just think it is because that’s where we mostly live now?[1] (#litres_trial_promo) If a society that is literate is supplanted by one that is not, is that a backward step in the progress of civilization? If the economic vitality and wealth of a society is reduced to a level far below its highs, is that necessarily a “decline”?[2] (#litres_trial_promo)
Since human civilization first arose, societies have “risen” and “fallen,” “advanced” and “declined”—or so the histories written decades ago often said. More commonly now, historians refer to societies in “transition,” rather than use terms that denote forward or backward development. Continuity, too, is often emphasized, instead of the emphasis found in earlier historical accounts of hard breaks from a previous era.
So, did the Roman Empire “fall” to the “barbarians,” or did it transition to an equal yet more decentralized era, one with a more Germanic flair?
In the period after the Roman Empire disappeared in the West (the time formerly called “the Dark Ages”), many of the capabilities of the people who lived in its wake deteriorated. Eventually, those who lived in what formerly were Roman lands couldn’t repair or build anew the infrastructure that had previously existed. The aqueducts, monetary system, and trade routes were not what they had been. Literacy plummeted in most areas, and other groups and outlets began to perform some of the functions that formerly had been provided by an organized central authority.[3] (#litres_trial_promo) What would we call it today if we could not emulate the technological, economic, or cultural achievements of our forebears?[4] (#litres_trial_promo)
The 1968 film Planet of the Apes provides an instructive illustration of the inherent fallacy of the position that our version of humanity represents its final incarnation. In the movie, a bedraggled Charlton Heston (in a loincloth, no less) screams, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” In his character’s mind, the apes are beneath him, but to the apes, humans are the inferior species.
At the very end, Charlton Heston escapes, and in the final moments of the film, you see him riding a horse down a beach with a preverbal (i.e., inferior) human girl he’s rescued. When he rounds a bend, he’s confronted with the Statue of Liberty, from the bust up to the crown, sticking out of the sand at an angle, and we realize that the movie is set on earth in a far-flung future.
“You maniacs! You blew it up!” Heston bellows, his fist pounding the sand.
We moderns almost unconsciously consider ourselves exempt from outcomes such as this, which is one of the reasons why that final scene in Planet of the Apes is so effective.[5] (#litres_trial_promo) It is unimaginable to us that we could have descendants who might live in a world more primitive than our own. Likewise, it was just as impossible for Romans living in the era we now label “antiquity” to envision a future in which the place they knew as “the Eternal City” would ever be a ruin.
THE EARLIEST PIECE of storytelling in the Western canon appeared around the eighth century BCE. The Iliad was supposedly composed by the blind Greek poet Homer, though historians have long thought its text was actually distilled from an oral storytelling tradition that was far older.
The Iliad tapped into a potent mix of dramatic elements that humans have shown an enthusiasm for ever after. The epic poem features facets of superhero films mixed with the J. R. R. Tolkien–style mythical golden age of a far-flung past. It’s the original and ultimate “sword and sandals” epic, an action-packed saga of gods, demigods, and swashbuckling heroes, where the “Greeks” leave their homeland to rescue the kidnapped oh-so-fair wife of a king and embark on a quest that leads them across the sea to fight a great war for a decade and eventually topple a powerful, glorious kingdom led by a rich and lofty monarch. The story has everything—magic and spearplay, dead characters that come back to life as ghosts, the gods fighting among themselves and taking sides with the mortals, sex and romance between star-crossed adversaries, bloody single combats, and heroic loss. It’s even got a sequel, if you consider the Odyssey to be such. But whereas our modern fantastic tales and epics are intended—and are taken by the audience—as fantasy, the ancient Greeks, Macedonians, and Romans often considered their versions more like history.[6] (#litres_trial_promo)
One of history’s greatest military leaders, Alexander III of Macedon (known as “the Great”; 356–323 BCE), allegedly slept with a copy of Homer’s Iliad under his pillow, and he may have considered himself inspired by, and a direct descendant of, the story’s überhero, Achilles.[7] (#litres_trial_promo) Before attacking the Persian Empire in 334 BCE, Alexander visited a site the locals said was the tomb of Achilles, and the classical writers say that he donned the “ancient” armor he found within.[8] (#litres_trial_promo) To him, Troy was history from a long-gone great age, and he had the antique armor of a demigod to prove it.
Later scholarly opinion disagreed that the Iliad was history, however. Starting with increasingly skeptical and evidence-based academic approaches in the eighteenth century, historians trying to disentangle truth from fable considered the tale of the Trojan wars to be legendary. In the late nineteenth century, however, a German named Heinrich Schliemann, one of several people who believed in the existence of the ancient city and was actively looking for it, found the remains of one on a hill in modern-day Turkey. Over time it became clearer and clearer that the site Schliemann had found was indeed the location of the city at the center of the West’s oldest written tale. Somehow, through hundreds of years of oral storytelling, the Greeks had kept alive a distant memory of an advanced and prosperous time that existed on the far side of an intervening dark age.[9] (#litres_trial_promo)
This discovery of “Troy” by an amateur (as most archaeologists were in that era) searching for artifacts caused an international sensation and helped jump-start the modern era of archaeological discovery. Digs, excavations, and fieldwork all over the Mediterranean and the Near East began to unearth and illuminate a world that was already ancient when the Athens of Pericles (495–429 BCE) and the Sparta of Leonidas (540–480 BCE) were young. Troy was but a tiny fraction of it. A snapshot from about 1500 BCE would show a multipower geopolitical landscape encompassing the whole region: ancient Egypt at its pharaonic height in the New Kingdom; the powerful and important Hittite Empire, controlling a large chunk of modern-day Turkey and down into Syria; Assyria and Babylon, strong societies in what is now Iraq; the Elamite people, occupying southwestern Iran; Minoa, a great maritime trading state based in Crete; and the Mycenaeans, who occupied Greece.[10] (#litres_trial_promo)
It was an era of great cities, many of them crowned with ornate palaces, and urban life was at its highest level of sophistication so far seen. It was a golden age of wealth, power, writing, trade, military sophistication, and long-distance communication. This era, which modern history calls the Bronze Age (approximately 3000 to 1200 BCE), represents a high-water mark in the region’s development in many measurable areas. The last stage of the Bronze Age was the most golden of all.[11] (#litres_trial_promo)
But the glory of the Bronze Age wouldn’t last. By the time of the Iron Age, the classical Greeks of Athens and Sparta were beginning to rise to levels of wealth, trade, and literacy that were comparable to the lofty heights of the previous era (in probably around 700 BCE-ish)—in fact, those earlier states and civilizations of the late Bronze Age could well have been represented to the Iron Age as Planet of the Apes represented ours. The remnants of their former greatness were nearly totally in ruins, and their history was relegated to myths and legend.
The “collapse of the Bronze Age” is a transformation on par with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but what caused it has become one of the great mysteries of the past, a whodunnit that casts historians in the role of detectives trying to determine a cause of death for one of humankind’s great time periods.
It apparently happened relatively quickly. That’s why words like “collapse,” “destruction,” and “fall” are often used when talking about how this literal end of an era concluded. Unlike the Roman Empire, there would be no “decline and fall”—the Bronze Age would tumble from its highs like a stock market crash. An older person alive in the regions most affected during the steepest dive (from about 1200 to 1150 BCE) would likely have seen a very different world than the one she had been born into.
Histories written a century or even a half century ago have relatively definite conclusions about the fall of the Bronze Age (and a hundred other subjects). Times have changed. Modern standards and methods in many fields have subjected any and all theories to acid tests that historians of the past never dreamed of. From dating technology to DNA sampling to a thousand other tools, modern researchers have resources that can unlock—or debunk—information as never before.
It is in the nature of such scrutiny that existing theories get shot down more easily than new ones garner support. The historian John H. Arnold pointed out that history is an ongoing process—it never can, nor will, reach its final conclusion, and revisions will always be happening, as more facts and data become available and older theories are modified or disproved.
One by one, modern researchers are debunking (or at least casting reasonable doubt on) many of the theories about the end of the Bronze Age. But though today’s experts have immeasurably more information about the time, they are less sure about what befell it than ever before.
A good detective might have two questions to set the parameters for any investigation:
1 What happened?
2 How (why) did it happen?
If question number one can’t be answered, it becomes extremely difficult to answer question number two. And the truth is, experts still disagree about that first question.
Traditionally, the explanation behind “the fall of the Bronze Age” says that sometime between about 1250 and 1100 BCE, something horrifying happened to the areas in the ancient world that were anywhere close to the Mediterranean Sea. Some sort of phenomenon or event or series of events affected states and peoples from the central Mediterranean all the way east into modern-day Iraq. Hundreds of cities were destroyed or abandoned. Famine, war, disease, political upheaval, volcanoes, earthquakes, piracy, human migration, and climate changes such as drought are mentioned in the sources and found in the data. Somehow and at some point, the complex, interconnected system of trade and communication supporting the very centralized states in this era was disrupted. By about 1100 BCE, many of the formerly centralized societies had reverted (or fragmented into) more localized, smaller political entities, while wealth (such as evidenced by grave goods included in burials) declined in opulence.
Most of the states that did survive the era emerged looking like bruised and battered boxers who’d survived a grueling bout—somewhat diminished, if not permanently reduced, in power and influence. Egypt would never be the same. Writing would almost die out in Greece. And the powerful Hittite Empire, a large and strategically placed kingdom for two and a half centuries, was somehow destroyed.[12] (#litres_trial_promo) Several major states never made it out of the Bronze Age at all.
The historian Robert Drews has said that the end of the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age was one of history’s most frightful turning points and a calamity for those who experienced it. According to Drews, almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean was destroyed over a fifty-year period running from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the twelfth century BCE. He ran down the list of damages:
In the Aegean, the palace-centered world that we call Mycenaean Greece disappeared: although some of its glories were remembered by the bards of the Dark Age, it was otherwise forgotten until archaeologists dug it up. The loss in Anatolia was even greater. The Hittite empire had given to the Anatolian plateau a measure of order and prosperity that it had never known before and would not see again for a thousand years. In the Levant recovery was much faster, and some important Bronze Age institutions survived with little change; but others did not, and everywhere urban life was drastically set back. In Egypt the Twentieth Dynasty marked the end of the New Kingdom and almost the end of pharaonic achievement. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean the twelfth century B.C. ushered in a dark age, which in Greece and Anatolia was not to lift for more than four hundred years. Altogether the end of the Bronze Age was arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the western Roman Empire.
So much for the “what happened” side of the investigation.
The second part of the investigation concerns how or why it happened.
Theories have never been in short supply:
1 The sea peoples (and related causes)
2 Famine/climate change/drought
3 Earthquakes/volcanoes/tsunamis
4 Plagues
5 Internecine warfare
6 Systems collapse
7 Any or all of the above in combination
There’s more.[13] (#litres_trial_promo) But the problem isn’t one of finding evidence—there seems to be data available in one form or another to support cases for and against all of these suspects in some places and during some times—but rather, the damage that was done seems so extensive that it’s hard to imagine any single cause capable of wreaking such widespread and long-lasting havoc.
In addition, the evidence is tricky.[14] (#litres_trial_promo)
Take destroyed cities: Often when destroyed cities from thousands of years ago are found, visible signs of their end are present. Soot and ash layers from torched buildings are the most obvious evidence at most sites, but bodies lying where they fell, weapons such as arrowheads embedded in walls, and other forms of damage are also sometimes found. This certainly tells you that the city died a violent death, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you who was responsible. One normally thinks of a force of alien outsiders, but the perpetrators could also have been the city’s inhabitants fighting a civil war among themselves or going through a political upheaval.[15] (#litres_trial_promo) It’s hard to finger the culprit based solely on the archaeological evidence.
The written word might be used to cross-check the archaeological findings, but words come with their own problems. First, the Bronze Age was obviously a long time ago. The Hebrew Bible was still centuries in the future when the Bronze Age ended. Despite a surprising amount of written material (again, a sure sign of an advanced era), far less than enough is available to solve this riddle.
Yet there are inscriptions from this period that discuss subjects that might be germane to this mystery.
If, for example, you find destroyed cities in the archaeological record, and then get written accounts of invasions by marauders in that same area and around the same time, the evidence looks damning. In Egypt, there are official records (with pictures!) carved into stone of violent encounters with the mysterious “peoples of the sea.”[16] (#litres_trial_promo) The Egyptians made it sound as though these sea peoples were raping and pillaging and burning cities throughout the entire eastern Mediterranean like a horde of Bronze Age Vikings. They were thought by historians decades ago to be a primary reason for the chaos at the end of the era.
But can the Egyptian records be taken at face value? Could they be misleading, or an outright lie? Historians are specifically trained in the fine art of disentangling and interpreting evidence with a skeptical eye, and they’ve found problems with the Egyptian account.
Multiple Egyptian rulers documented violent encounters with peoples whom they themselves connected to the sea or to islands. They would say of this or that tribe that they were “of the sea” or “of the countries of the sea,” or mention them “in their isles.” These sea peoples are made out to be different tribes or states of warlike and seaborne groups whose origin isn’t clear.[17] (#litres_trial_promo) Just as the crisis period of the late Bronze Age began, at least one pharaoh was using some of these tribes of “sea people” warriors as mercenary soldiers fighting for Egypt, so it’s unlikely that they would have been totally alien or unknown. We may not know who they were, or from whence they came, but it’s very possible the Egyptians might have.
Ramesses III (1217–1155 BCE) claimed to have defeated some groups of sea peoples in a battle that is often dated to right in the middle of the crisis period (1180 BCE).[18] (#litres_trial_promo) His surviving written accounts portray him as a sort of bulwark of civilization, fighting off a coalition of alien forces that he said had launched a conspiracy together and had been unstoppable. Ramesses tells that these peoples or tribes had already overthrown several other great states, raping and pillaging the coasts and seas like ancient Norsemen—until they ran into him: “The foreign countries conspired in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could resist their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on being cut off at one time. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people and its land was like that which had never existed. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared for them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denen, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts were confident and trusting as they said ‘Our plans will succeed!’”[19] (#litres_trial_promo)
The pharaoh said the plans of these many united foreign tribes failed, that the Egyptians crushed the invasion and the survivors fared badly: “As for those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and their soul are finished forever and ever. As for those who came forward together on the seas, the full flame was in front of them at the Nile mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore, prostrated on the beach, slain, and made into heaps from head to tail.”
It’s not unusual for people who aren’t historians to assume this is an accurate retelling of events, and indeed this could be extremely important information. But can we fully believe it?
Some historians point out that Ramesses III may have taken a small encounter and magnified it to enormous proportions to exalt his own greatness. Others suggest that he was simply retelling an event that had happened in the time of a previous Egyptian ruler (the pharaoh Merneptah, who reigned from 1213–1203 BCE and carved a victory report in the walls at the Temple of Karnak) and claiming the earlier pharoah’s victory as his own. He was certainly fibbing to some degree, as historians and archaeologists have proved that some of the cities he says were destroyed were not. And it may have been that he was writing for a particular audience and had certain things he wanted them to know or believe. The question of motive and context are crucial when deciding how far to believe a contemporary account.
Finally, there’s all the data that modern scientific methods and technology can add to the picture, the value of which is immeasurable. The list of specialties working on aspects of the Bronze Age mystery includes people who study climate, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, agricultural trends, underwater archaeology, the paleoenvironment, and a host of other fields. But extrapolating actual answers from such information to help clear up the mystery itself seems no easier to come by. At least not yet.
If we look again at our list of prime suspects and the cases for and against them, it becomes clear just how difficult solving a case as cold as this can be.
Suspect #1: The Sea Peoples (and Related Causes)
Part of what makes really ancient history so interesting is that there are lots of peoples who seem to just appear from nowhere in the historical records. It’s like Star Trek without the space travel. One minute there aren’t any people like the Arameans or Phrygians or Kassites, next minute they’re seemingly everywhere you look.
History, especially the further back one travels, has a way of compressing the events of the past, so that trends that occurred over generations seem to us to happen almost in an instant. The “sudden appearance” of a new tribe or people into ancient history may have actually occurred over many lifetimes. What history has called “invasions” may sometimes have been more like migrations, and what history has termed “migrations” and portrayed as entire peoples simultaneously on the move may in many cases have been more like gradual long-term immigration.
It’s possible that’s how it was with the so-called sea peoples.
The sea peoples were public enemy number one in what might be termed the “invasion theory.” In the mid-twentieth century, it was popular to portray the urban “civilized” world of the Bronze Age as an oasis of development ringed by a sea of antagonistic barbarism. There was an osmosis-like dynamic that kept attracting the hardscrabble tribal types on the outside to the rich (but perhaps soft) “civilized” peoples. That human sea was kept at bay only through great effort. At times, the barbarian tribes would break through and overwhelm a given city, region, or even state.
In this view, the crisis at the end of the Bronze Age was akin to a perfect storm that set in motion many of these outsider peoples, creating a “time of troubles” led by fierce tribal warriors who overwhelmed all but the strongest of political entities.
As the historian Chester G. Starr wrote in 1965:
The [Bronze Age] monarchs failed until too late to notice that new waves of invasion were mounting. From the desert Semitic tribes lapped against the strongpoints of the cities; from the north a terrific assault broke forth in the late thirteenth century. Ugarit was burned and destroyed forever, as were many other Syrian centers; the Hittite realm vanished from the map shortly after 1200, as did also the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece. Egypt, attacked by land and sea under Ramesses III (1182–51), barely rode out the storm. So too Assyria survived, but lost any capabilities of expansion for the next few centuries.
Several other once popular hypotheses could also be wrapped into the invasion theory. For example, the idea that much of the calamity from this era can be attributed to the discovery and wide use (among some) of iron fits nicely into any idea that warfare was a prime component of the Bronze Age catastrophe. Many once thought that iron was the secret superweapon of the ancient world in this age, and that once some peoples acquired the ability and know-how to produce it, they gained a huge advantage militarily over their enemies. People who had this capability (such as the Hittites) were said to jealously guard the secret of its manufacture.
This idea is much less popular than it once was, but it has evolved somewhat and now forms a component in other theories relating to, for example, the collapse of regional trade. The exchange among developed states in copper and tin was a key pillar of the economy in the interconnected Mediterranean Bronze Age.[20] (#litres_trial_promo) Few places had both those metals, so trade was vital and lucrative. Iron’s main value had less to do with its hardness than with its abundance.[21] (#litres_trial_promo) If it was cheaper to outfit soldiers with iron weapons than bronze ones, that certainly would have had military implications. If it severely damaged the economies of the major trading states, that would have had ripple effects as well.[22] (#litres_trial_promo)
Then there are the last two elements at play here that may fall under the “sea peoples and friends” category—piracy and human migration. These also overlap with the next potential suspects on the list.
Let’s start with piracy. Whether it’s the Egyptians talking about “northerners in their isles,” or written correspondence from the coasts of the Levant, there’s a general feeling about the late stages of the Bronze Age (and what happened in the famed “Viking Age,” from about 700 to 1100 CE) that periodic outbreaks of large-scale piracy were not an unusual historical occurrence. In addition to the raiding of coastal settlements and the burning of villages, towns, and even major cities, the taking of ships and cargoes at sea could wreak havoc on the all-important Mediterranean maritime trading network. A small amount of piracy in this region was no doubt normal,[23] (#litres_trial_promo) but if conditions fostered an explosion in the number of seagoing bandits, it could be system threatening. The sea peoples were once blamed for the majority of pirate activity, but unearthed records have shown that in at least some cases the pirates may have been from the same city-state as their victims, a case perhaps of turning to piracy when economic conditions deteriorated.
