The End of the Bronze Age and Beginning of the Iron Age in the Eastern Mediterranean

Chapter 8 The End of the Bronze Age and Beginning of the Iron Age in the Eastern Mediterranean 1 Introduction: Changes in Society In the decades surrounding the turn of the 12th century BCE, the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean experienced political, economic, and demograph- ic changes every bit as remarkable as the internationalism that had marked the period before. Palaces, kingdoms, and empires were destroyed or reduced to shells of their former selves; people were on the move by land and sea; the eth- nic composition of localities and territories was altered; and the socio-political and economic systems which had fueled the opulent palatial world of the Late Bronze Age came to a relatively abrupt end. The political and administrative systems of the Mycenaean palaces disappeared, never to be seen again; the Hittite empire ceased to be governed from Ḫattuša, with power instead devolv- ing to Karkamiš and the ‘rump states’ of the Syro-Hittite Iron Age; Egypt’s New Kingdom was set on an inexorable path toward decline; and once important sites like the Syrian emporion of Ugarit were ravaged, abandoned, and forgot- ten to history for centuries. Responsibility for these destructions and the societal changes that fol- lowed was long assigned to invading ‘Sea Peoples’ – victims or perpetrators of the Mycenaean collapse who sailed east from the Aegean along with fellow- travelers from the East Aegean-West Anatolian sphere, leaving destruction in their wake (in the case of portions of Canaan, destructions were also attrib- uted to the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible). The invasion during Merneptaḥ’s reign has been seen as “little more than a prelude to mass movements by the Sea Peoples by both land and sea” (Bryce 2003b: 87), which are highlighted in great detail on the walls of the ‘Mansion of a Million Years’ of Ramesses III (1186–1153 BCE), at Medinet Habu in Thebes. The ominous claims in the tem- ple’s Great Inscription of Year 8 that “The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands” and that “No land could stand before their arms, from Ḫatti, Kode, Karkemiš, Arzawa, and Alašiya on” (Edgerton and Wilson 1936: 53), and the accompanying reliefs and inscriptions referring to land and sea battles – with the former including ox carts, women, and children – were taken as evidence for a massive migratory movement into the Eastern Mediterranean, with a significant number ultimately reaching the southern Levant (see further © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004430785_009 198 Chapter 8 below; cf. also Ben Dor Evian 2016: 160). The seemingly clear Aegean affini- ties of material culture elements from sites on the southern coastal plain of Canaan, combined with the evidence for destruction and depopulation at Mycenaean centers (discussed further below), further fueled the perception of these events as being centered on a destructive migratory movement by land and sea from the Aegean and western Anatolia into the Near East. In all, this period and its events – which have been referred to by such terms as “watershed” and “catastrophe” – left in their wake an Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world that bore little resemblance to that which had preceded it (Hallo 1992: 2; Drews 1993; cf. also, inter alia, papers in Ward and Joukousky 1992; Gitin, Mazar and Stern 1998; Oren 2000; Killebrew and Lehmann 2013). As recent summary of the long-held conventional wisdom regarding these people and events puts it: The overall impression is that by 1200 the eastern Mediterranean was being plagued by fluid and unstable alliances of pirates and mercenar- ies, able occasionally to form large enough navies and armies to pillage centres such as Pylos and Ugarit, possibly, indeed, to conduct a campaign against Troy which resulted in the fall of Troy VIIa. Sometimes they must have been attacking their own homeland, from which (to judge from later Greek legends) many a hero had been exiled. Sometimes the sack of their homeland led to an exodus of fighters who sought to recover their for- tunes by attacking Cyprus, Ugarit or even the Nile Delta. Among them it is possible to identify the people of Taruisa, the area next to or fused with Wilusa. For that, and not the much later Etruscans, best explains the name Tursha; in other words, the Trojans were both Sea Peoples and victims of the Sea Peoples. Abulafia 2011: 52 It is largely unsurprising that “deconstructing” this understanding of events “is not easy because so many assumptions have become embedded in the discussion,” thereby rendering such historical interpretations, in the words of one scholar, “more … romance than reality” (Dickinson 2006a: 47, 50). Along with recognition that the events of the Late Bronze-Early Iron Age transition took place over a significant temporal period, though, more recent research and analysis has brought much-needed nuance to the discussion and its many elements, from collapses and shifts in populations and political systems, to shifts in intercultural contact and the negotiation of identity, to the role of groups like the ‘Sea Peoples’ in the process (e.g. Cline 2014; Knapp and Manning 2016; and the papers in Bachhuber and Roberts 2009; Karageorghis and Kouka 2011; .

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