The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

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] 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] 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]

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] 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.

But pirates are hit-and-run entities, and some of these humans may have wanted to move en masse to the more advanced or wealthy states permanently. The idea of a Bronze Age version of the Germanic Völkerwanderung[24] (essentially, a migration), disrupting the equilibrium and setting in motion the collapse of the age, has been around for a long time. The Egyptian inscriptions depict families in wagons accompanying some of the “sea people” and Libyan tribes. The implication is that whole peoples were looking for new places to settle, and they were willing to conquer new lands with the sword if need be. The Egyptians were somewhat used to this, as they occupied a comparatively rich breadbasket in their region; Libyan peoples from the west, Nubian people from the south, and all manner of “Asiatics”[25] were often trying to gain entrance to raid or settle. It can be hard to draw a fine line between human migration and invasion in some of these cases.

The invasion theory assumes that this late Bronze Age outbreak of barbarian violence was a somewhat widespread phenomenon, perhaps one involving differing groups of peoples from the Balkans to the edge of China, and occurring at roughly close to the same time.

The theory is less popular today, if for no other reason than some of the invasions offered as evidence are now more doubted. Did the “Dorians” invade and conquer Greece as part of this calamity? Eighty years ago, a majority of historians would have likely thought so and would have blamed those invasions for plunging Greece into a dark age. Today, fewer historians believe those “invasions” ever happened. If multiple invasions didn’t happen—if, instead, warfare and raiding were more piecemeal and less widespread—it becomes tougher to blame them for bringing the entire system down. Some historians have even suggested they may be a historical myth.

While there are still big supporters of the idea that the peoples of the sea were of pivotal importance to the end of the Bronze Age, they are perhaps seen by most these days as more of an effect than a cause. The migrations, piracy, and even invasions may have been a response to something else …

Suspect #2: Famine/Climate Change/Drought

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are commonly given the names Conquest (or Pestilence), War, Famine, and Death. In much of the modern world, the horsemen don’t seem as scary as they used to. War and conquest are still around, of course, but no World War III (yet). We are no longer able to relate to what our forebears went through with disease (pestilence).[26] And mass, society-wide famine is almost unheard of in most of the world. It seems like much of the darkness that humankind lived with from time immemorial has been banished from our future.

But it’s never wise to bet against any of the Four Horsemen long term. Their historical track record is horrifyingly good.

One of the things most of us take for granted is our access to food. There are malnourished and hungry individuals in every nation on earth, but times when food is scarce for whole societies is much, much rarer in most of the world than it’s ever been. Mass food insecurity was more the norm than the exception up until very recently, though. It’s only because of relatively recent changes that enough food can be produced to support our current population levels. Our modern delivery and logistics systems allow large amounts of food to be reliably shipped and to stock the shelves of even distant islands. When scenes of the ravages of modern famine appear on television charity ads, the reality displayed on camera is almost incomprehensible to most of us. But try feeding three hundred million people in the United States today with the farming technology of even two hundred years ago.

There are some incidents of mass fatality–level famine in modern advanced cities or states in the mid-twentieth century. The unusual sight of humans dying from starvation next to modern buildings and on modern streets clashes with the image in our minds of poor, war-torn, drought-stricken, underdeveloped societies on the edge of the globalized world. We are conditioned to think that way by recent history. It’s hard to picture London or Tokyo or New York with mass deaths in the street from starvation.

But that’s the human experience that we need to imagine when thinking about famine. The tales that modern observers and victims of famine tell are of societies that fall apart because there’s no food. Imagine if the region where you live were cut off from food supplies today. As Garry J. Shaw suggests, it might explain why you get sea peoples, migrations, invasions, or insurrections.

When enough people are driven by desperation, not even the greatest state can stop them; symbols of wealth and prestige mean nothing if enough people reject their meaning. In such times, some will rise up, burn, and rebuild on the ashes. Others will leave. And so, in this time of instability, disease, violence, famine, and drought, the assorted ‘Sea Peoples’ took the second option: they travelled eastwards, bringing their families and possessions along with them, leaving their homeland behind. To support themselves or when attempting to settle, sometimes they turned to violence, probably supported by mercenaries, creating their legend.

There’s good evidence for famine during the last few centuries of the Mediterranean Bronze Age in many places around the region. The Hittites, especially, seemed to be facing a dire food crisis over an extended period; a last desperate letter sent from the capital, before the destruction of the city, refers to starvation. In Egypt, cemetery finds show evidence that the population of this era often suffered malnourishment. And people from Libya seemed to always be threatened by hunger; they would raid or even migrate to Egypt periodically over many centuries for food.[27]

Lots of things can cause famine. Insects can eat or spoil food; rivers and water sources can dry up or change course, or complex irrigation systems can be destroyed; poor farming practices can deplete the soil. Usually, though, the weather itself is the greatest threat. Even in the modern age, the utter dependence of agriculture on the right range of favorable climatic conditions is humbling. No nation is immune. Arid weather in the American Midwest created the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, during the Great Depression, which in turn spawned a migration of people and sent forth ripples of historical change that are still felt today. Similar events must have happened innumerable times in humanity’s past.

Weather-related explanations for the end of the Bronze Age are extrapopular right now given the general spotlight on climate change, but historians for many decades have theorized that drought was what really unleashed the Four Horsemen. A prolonged drought, leading to severe famine, could certainly have been the spark that set into motion chain reactions that in retrospect explain things like piracy, migrations, and perhaps internal unrest.

As the historian Malcolm H. Wiener writes: “Warfare and migrations may be both the result and the cause of food crisis, and particularly where the carrying capacity of the land is already stretched to the utmost. The effects may be cumulative, with food shortages leading to overuse and degradation of available land; to rebellions by troops, populace, or captives; and/or to the loss of legitimacy of rulers believed to have lost divine favor.”

It’s hard to know how much localized famine was normal and to be periodically expected, and how much a particularly bad situation represented an unusual larger threat. Studies have shown evidence of a prolonged drought roughly around the relevant time in some of these areas.[28]

A counterargument by some experts, however, is that droughts are not uncommon in this climatic zone, because much of the eastern Mediterranean is somewhat arid to begin with. Why, suddenly, did a particularly dry period bring down a chain of ancient societies in a region where droughts weren’t so terribly rare? And why, if drought explains why peoples began to relocate, did those people sometimes leave known dry areas and migrate to ones that have been shown to be even more arid?[29]

Famine prompts a similar question: If famine wasn’t that rare, why did it topple the structure at the end of the Bronze Age rather than any of the other times it occurred? It certainly may have done so, but proving it is the task still facing historical investigators.

If something like drought or famine was the cause of the Bronze Age collapse, it didn’t wreak its changes by starving everyone to death. Famine would have been more of a spark that set off side effects. Yet it’s terribly difficult, especially thousands of years later, to tie the ripple effects back to whatever rocks were first thrown into the stream. How do you connect the dots, for example, between an attack by the sea peoples and evidence of a drought in their homeland? Having relatively accurate dates for when events occurred would be of great help solving such a puzzle. A drought, for example, a hundred years after the sea people invasions, couldn’t possibly have been its cause, but if it happened ten years before the great attacks chronicled by the pharaohs, then it might indeed have spurred a subsequent migration. But how close can science get to actual specific years when something occurred more than three thousand years ago?

That leads to the next suspect:

Suspect #3: Earthquakes/Volcanoes/Tsunamis

First, let’s step out of our timeline to the year 1815, when the Mount Tambora volcano erupted in what’s now part of Indonesia. It is the only eruption in the last thousand years that merits a 7 out of a maximum 8 rating on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI).[30] It caused tsunamis and earthquakes, darkened the skies, and unleashed enough ash to cover a one-hundred-square-mile area to a depth of twelve feet. The effect on global climate was profound—1816 was known as “the year without summer.” And, among other things, it was thought to have brought on famine.

There have only been a handful of volcanic eruptions to reach that high on the VEI since humans began keeping a written record of their history. One happened near the end of the Bronze Age, in the eastern Mediterranean, in an area that was right at the heart of the whole Mediterranean Bronze Age world.

Today, the location of the volcano is actually the Greek island of Santorini, but the ancient Greeks called the island Thera. Like Tambora, the Thera eruption was one of the most powerful volcanic events in human history; unlike Tambora, we have no surviving contemporary accounts of it. Scientists can find the evidence of its eruption all over the region, but they can’t yet pinpoint the year it happened. If they could, it would become a specific marker that would help date other events.[31] Experts can get close to a date, within a century or so—usually between about 1630 and 1500 BCE—but while that’s a tiny margin of error when compared with the intervening thousands of years, it’s still enough to muddy this investigation. Since the fall of the Bronze Age is usually dated to around 1200 BCE or so, the later the eruption is dated, the more likely it is to have had an effect on the catastrophe.[32]

Experts argue about most things connected to the Thera eruption. In addition to the dating, the amount of damage done to the surrounding areas is in question. If it somehow played a role in the downfall of that age, how did it do so? Tsunamis are one proposed vector of destruction. That one or multiple tsunamis were generated by the eruption seems universally accepted, but disagreements occur over their size and what sort of damage they would have caused. Most of the Thera volcano’s tsunamis would have been created by the quick addition of massive amounts of material into the sea, which generates waves that can reach enormous heights (the same way that a glacier’s calving produces large waves).[33] These waves, known as megatsunamis, are quite different from the more familiar seismic variety of tsunami. Whereas the seismic tsunamis are almost too small to be noticed while moving through the open sea, and they explode in height only when they approach land, megatsunamis start at maximum height upon generation and lose force and height as they move across miles of water. Seismic tsunamis are often preceded by a strange receding of the beach tide, only to have the water roar back later, but megatsunamis are more like rogue waves—they can come out of nowhere.

The reason waves matter is that one of the theories about how a volcano might be tied to the end of the Bronze Age argues that the tsunamis may have decimated the coastal areas of nearby states. Ships in port would be damaged by a tsunami of any sort, but a megatsunami could also have wreaked havoc on ships in the open sea. A huge wall of water speeding across the ocean might sink anything in its path.[34]

The island of Crete, the heart and soul of the powerful maritime Minoan state, was close to Thera and is often thought to have been a likely victim of the volcano’s explosion.[35] If the ships, facilities, and perhaps settlements and coastal population of Crete were badly damaged or destroyed by the sea, the resulting effect on the economy of the region might have been huge.

It’s also been suggested that widespread damage on a large scale might have weakened the Minoans in a way that made them a tempting target for geopolitical predators in their region. Sometime between about 1450 and 1370 BCE, most of the great palaces from the heyday of the Minoans were destroyed, and eventually the area and culture was taken over by the Mycenaeans.[36] But if the Minoan state declined around 1400 BCE or so, that’s still two or more centuries removed from the other parts of the collapse manifesting. It’s possible that the volcano and the resulting tsunami might have been responsible for this, a chain reaction of events that destabilized what had been a stable system, but that would constitute a long lag time between cause and effect.

The other natural disaster that gets brought into the conversation about the end of the Bronze Age is earthquakes. There’s overlap here, because the Thera eruption may have sparked or been preceded by earthquakes, and these might have contributed to the damage spawned by the volcano. And earthquakes are also one of the primary causes of tsunamis.

There’s no doubt that earthquakes were a relatively regular ancient visitor to this very seismically active region. Damage from earthquakes in ancient times (sometimes including crushed bodies found where they fell) has been discovered in structures all over the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. In fact, there seem to have been several big earthquakes dated to around the time of the Bronze Age’s end, and lots of important cities in that area show earthquake damage. In the age before stabilized buildings and modern construction, and when open fires were common, the damage done by earthquakes may have been worse than what we’d find today. Certainly, the ability to deal with an earthquake’s aftermath is better in modern times. An earthquake and a resulting tsunami that killed fifty thousand people today would be much easier for us to clean up and recover from than it would have been for a Bronze Age society.

Yet the evidence points often to rebuilding after the historical quakes, which shows that such events weren’t totally fatal and that the affected society could continue. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that population, prosperity, or geopolitical power and influence would return to predisaster levels.

A single phenomenon (such as earthquakes, droughts, volcanoes, or tsunamis) can explain why a particular city or area suffered damage, but it can’t by itself explain why the entire Mediterranean and west Asian region was affected by something at the end of the Bronze Age. Just because there may have been a volcano on an Aegean island that erupted and caused tsunamis, why did Babylon and Assyria, located in landlocked modern-day Iraq, have problems?

Suspect #4: Plagues

Smallpox is one of the most infamous diseases in history. To give an idea of its virulence, it killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone,[37] but the disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980[38]—meaning half a billion people were killed by smallpox in just eight decades. Those who didn’t succumb to the illness were often left blind, and severely disfigured by scarring. Mercifully, we don’t deal with smallpox anymore, but the illness goes back millennia. When the Egyptian mummy of Pharaoh Ramesses V (r. 1149–1145 BCE) was examined, the body revealed smallpox scarring. (He may have died from the disease.)[39] Smallpox killed multiple reigning European monarchs and five Japanese emperors, and it was likely the cause of many early plagues of history, such as the one in ancient Athens in 430 BCE.[40] Smallpox was also one of the main killers of the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia after first contact, the majority of whom may have died from the disease before the Europeans who first transmitted it across the oceanic disease barrier actually encountered them.[41]

Just as it is difficult for most of us today to imagine the food insecurity that was common in most human populations in most eras, it’s difficult to conceptualize the range of illnesses and diseases against which earlier cultures had no defense. Pretty much nothing separates us more from human beings in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us. We are still victimized by illness and disease of all kinds, but unlike in the distant past, we now have so many more ways to fight back, and such a better understanding of the underlying reasons for maladies. Real plagues—a common experience in all of human history—are thankfully rare today. Some of our greatest modern fears over disease are simply that we might ever again have one plague as bad as any average plague in earlier eras.[42]

Sources make it sound as though Hattusa (the Hittite capital) was dealing with both famine and plague in this general Bronze Age era.[43] Two successive Hittite rulers succumbed to one plague in around the 1320s BCE. There are reports of plague in the Levant, Cyprus, and Egypt. Several regions in Greece saw depopulation during this era that might have been related to an outbreak of disease.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse often ride together, though, and just as famine and pestilence are interconnected with each other, they are often also linked with war.

Suspect #5: Internecine Warfare

We’ve already discussed violence in different forms leading to the problems in the Bronze Age. From sea peoples to revolutionaries to the Trojan War, there was no shortage of bloody outbreaks as the era came to its close. How is one to make a distinction between the “normal” level of violence and something system threatening? Was there anything about the end of the Bronze Age in a military sense that was different or stood out? Yes, there was: Assyria.

Assyria would become the first of the great empires of the next era, the Iron Age.[44] It was in the later Bronze Age that this Semitic-speaking superpower-to-be began to alter the map of the Near East in ways that could easily upset the region’s geopolitical equilibrium. The Assyrian state, located in modern northern Iraq, and centered on several already ancient cities,[45] had an extensive history and had long been a part of regional power struggles. By about the 1390s BCE, Assyria was about to go on another multigenerational historical winning streak, and much of this would come at the expense of neighboring states in the region.

After falling under the domination of another powerful state in the region (Mittani) in about the 1450s BCE, the Assyrians wrested back their independence after a couple of generations, and then began to take their former overlords apart piece by piece. Leading an increasingly fearsome and effective fighting force, aggressive and energetic Assyrian kings like Ashur-uballit I, Tukulti-Ninurta I, and Tiglath-Pileser I expanded the boundaries of their kingdom and added to its resources.

Assyria’s increasing might eventually began to alarm the other great powers. The Hittites, especially, were right in the crosshairs. The Hittite Empire’s territory formed a key international crossroads in the Bronze Age, a potentially indispensable link in the structure of economic, diplomatic, and military interconnectivity that supported that version of an international system. If something damaged the Hittite state, many others in that system could have felt the effects.

Sometime around 1237 BCE, the Hittites were defeated by the Assyrians at the Battle of Nihriya. The resulting loss of territory meant ceding important resource outlets to the Assyrians.[46] There’s a sort of death spiral that can be created in war when a state’s treasury is drained by extended conflict, when manpower is decimated by battlefield defeats, and when possession of the resources that are indispensable for recovering from those losses is lost to the enemy. The year 1237 is right around the start of the traditional era when the Bronze Age seemingly began to come under severe strain, so if we are trying to correlate dates with ripple effects, we can see that the extension of Assyrian power corresponds with some of the large geopolitical changes quite well.

War can be a net positive or negative to a combatant power.[47] War (and the resulting conquests) has often benefited the state doing the conquering. In this case, it might have benefited Assyria.

And while it goes without saying that wars are bad for those who lose them, in many circumstances, wars can be a negative for all involved. By the last year of the First World War, for example, all the nations that had begun the war four years before had been ground down by it. The economies that were paying for the costs of the conflict were in shambles. The damage the war caused to the global system meant that the conflict was harmful even to nations that were not a part of the fight.[48]