Bronze Age Book Reviews
I recently read two books dealing with the Bronze Age: “Why Homer Matters” (WHM), by Adam Nicolson and “1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed” by Eric Cline. WHM is a fascinating study of the origins, significance and continuing relevance of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Scholarship on Homer has gravitated between two poles: one is that these are generic heroic tales following formulae common to folk poets in cultures worldwide and are absolutely unreliable as a guide to historical people, places or events. The other is that, while the tales told therein may have been heavily embroidered by the author(s) over time, there are threads of history scattered through the cloth. The author tends towards the latter view and cites some archeological research that backs him up. But he also dives deeper into the meaning of Homer, focusing on what it meant and means to be a man, and the culture of bands of young males worldwide and throughout history. This goes beyond the obvious testosterone-fueled Greek machos competing for glory, fame, treasure and breeding rights that populate the Illiad. He contrasts Achilles, in particular, with his opponents, the more civilized, balanced, domesticated Trojans, and with his rival, the crafty (and more sympathetic) Odysseus, the latter tirelessly seeking hearth and wife in his decadal return from the Trojan war. He examines the loneliness of the hero seeking a claim on immortality, or at least less transience than everything else they see dying around them. This yearning for lasting fame, to make a name for oneself that endures beyond the three generations human remembrance usually lasts (how much do any of us know about our great grandparents?) is something basic that we share today, but was even more poignant in an age that saw the afterlife as offering only the specter of sad shadows wandering about forgotten in Hades’ realm. He draws analogies with rappers, urban gangs fighting for turf and recognition in modern cities, the age old rivalry between country and city (the steppe nomads, versus civilized agrarian societies, cowboys versus townies in the Wild West, etc).
“1177 BC” chronicles the end of the first great epoch of globalization, which began around 1500 BC and which, if you believe WHM, may well have been when the events related by Homer took place. The eponymous year is when a mysterious group known as the Sea Peoples show up in the chronicles of the Egyp/ans, who fought and defeated them, but apparently at great cost, as Egypt’s power declined dramatically thereafer. There is a camp of modern scholars that have blamed them for a general collapse of Bronze age civilizations, leading to an early version of the Dark Ages. The identity and origin of the Sea Peoples have bedeviled historians and archeologists. Cline presents and evaluates evidence for alternative explanations of the late Bronze Age collapse including climate change and rebellion against the elites, as well as invasion. He makes a few feeble attempts to draw analogies to the present state of the world but, fortunately, does not push this too far (a la Jared Diamond).
Perhaps most importantly he demonstrates to us what an interconnected, cosmopolitan world the Bronze Age Mediterranean and vicinity really was. The author describes a Bronze Age shipwreck (Uluburum), excavated by marine archeologists off of the SW coast of Turkey, that nicely illustrates how extensive global trade was at in the 15th C BC. The ship’s cargo included copper (Cyprus) and tin ingots (Afghanistan?), Canaanite pottery and terebinth resin, Egyptian glass and jewelry, African ebony, ivory, ostrich shells and hippopotamus teeth, Baltic amber beads, assorted weapons including Greek (Mycenaean) swords. Pretty impressive for 3500 years ago!
The two books intersect in the description from Hittite documents of peoples threatening their empire from the northwest. These correspond very neatly with the location and habits of the Greeks of the Illiad. WHM even speculates that the Philistines, warlike neighbors of the Israelites, were descendants of the Sea Peoples, and that there may have been a large element of Greeks amongst them.
I recommend both books to history buffs, those interested in the evolution of literature and folklore, and the dynamics of civilization and its collapse.
