Book Review: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric H. Cline. 4.5 out of 5 stars; an interesting overview of the end of the Late Bronze Age. Almost worth it just for the social network diagrams created from the Amarna Letters and the Royal letters in the Ugarit archive, and the map of sites destroyed about 1200 B.C. I mostly just wish it was twice as long!

Full disclosure: I got this book over a year ago, but things went handbasket-wise. So I hadn’t gotten more than about 15 pages in until Hurricane Sally. Meaning much of this was read by cloud-light a few pages at a time between Ominous Creaks and Crashes and gusts of wind stripping branches off trees.

Given this book is about trying to figure out just what happened to end the Late Bronze Age, reading it during a more local disaster was… interesting. That said, this book has all kinds of cool tidbits, like Zimri-Lam, a king of Mari in what’s now Syria, building an icehouse about 1750 B.C. Or Ramses III getting taken out by a Harem Conspiracy in 1155 B.C. – we had the records, but a 2012 x-ray analysis has since shown that someone quite literally cut his throat. Or the idea that tin, supplies of which were absolutely critical to make bronze for armor and weapons, was as much a strategic commodity as crude oil in recent modern history.

And like oil-using nations today, the cultures and empires of the Mediterranean and Near East Late Bronze Age were connected by trade and war, forming a complex system that may have collapsed over years and decades once prolonged drought and earthquake storms affecting one area rippled into others, causing feedback loops to shake the whole civilization apart.

This book’s strength lies mostly in its breadth, covering who was connected to whom, when, why, and where through about four centuries. I’d recommend it to anyone building a fictional world for the examples of how nations and individuals interacted, clashed, and adopted bits of culture and tech from each other. It also gives excellent examples of the kinds of evidence your dungeon-delving adventurers might be able to track down to uncover lost tombs, from legal records to monument inscriptions to treaties written on silver tablets, like the Silver Treaty between Ramses II and Hittite king Hattusili III.

It’s a window into the past, assembled from untold tiny fragments of archaeological info, and the long bibliography in the back promises avenues for further investigation if you want to delve deeper. I intend to reread it in a week or so when the hurricane mess calms down a bit. At the moment I’m just cackling over the bit on p 82 when Ramses II boasts about single-handedly beating back the entire Hittite army, and imagining some wild-eyed grad student in a superhero ‘verse pointing to this as historical evidence for ancient metahumans.

…Why yes, I might put that in the book…. *G*

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