Ten Years Ago, His Book About Civilizational Collapse Got Unexpectedly Popular. He’s Back With a Little Bit of Hope.
Ten years ago, archaeologist Eric Cline’s book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed became a surprise critical and commercial hit and a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize.* It’s since been translated into 16 languages (and, recently, into a graphic-novel-like format) and keeps finding new readers. I read it in the summer of 2017 while honeymooning in Crete, a place whose Minoan civilization figures prominently in Cline’s narrative. My wife and I were struggling to think and plan hopefully for the future at a time when our own nation back home seemed to be tottering. There was something strangely grounding in reading about the more or less sudden evaporation of a handful of Late Bronze Age societies, likely caused by some combination of climate change, famine, political upheaval, and mass migration. The book was frightening in its contemporary implications—not least in showing how the deep interconnectedness of that lost world went, almost overnight, from being a strength to a vulnerability. Once things started going haywire, nations toppled like dominoes. But I also found Cline’s book somehow reassuring. Empires rise and fall, always have—so what? Life goes on. We had our first child the following year.
After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, out this month, picks up where Cline’s earlier volume left off. Much of the eastern Mediterranean is in ruins—though not completely.
Reconsidering his views after criticism from other scholars, Cline has come to see the mass civilizational die-off as less total than he previously believed. While still convinced something devastating occurred, he now depicts the transition more as the fraying of networks between societies, leaving each civilization—the Hittites in southern Anatolia, New Kingdom Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, mainland Greece—to pick up the pieces and start anew. “The world changed as they knew it,” Cline said when I reached him recently by phone. “But in doing all the research, it became clear it was both a collapse and a transformation. It depends on where you look and at whom you are looking.”
Where the first book offered an almost relentlessly grim depiction of decline and fall, the new one gives us a more granular, detailed look at how different societies coped with the transformations of the Late Bronze Age collapse in contrasting ways. Cline’s perfectly chosen epigraph comes from Julian Barnes’ beautiful 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending: “Someone once said that his favorite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born.”
Cline was stunned by the runaway success of 1177, he told me. Though he hoped to interest nonacademic readers, he never expected more than a handful of colleagues to care about the topic. Writing the sequel, he aimed to appeal to both a general audience and ancient-history specialists alike. It’s a difficult balance. Nonspecialist readers could easily get lost in the plethora of strange names—a five-page dramatis personae helps, though it’s not necessary to know the identity of any particular Assyrian royal in order to grasp the larger points—while he fears fellow academics might take issue with a scholar straying beyond his area of expertise and synthesizing the research of hundreds of colleagues.
It’s a messier story this time around, Cline notes, precisely because of the geographical unevenness of the civilizations’ recoveries. The Babylonians did fairly well—even if the population fell by 75 percent for a few centuries. Egypt endured a period of instability and civil war. The Hittites never recovered.
In Greece, the collapse was especially devastating, at least for some. The impressive, palace-based Mycenaean civilization—they of Trojan War fame—almost entirely disappeared. Writing itself became a lost art for a few hundred years. Architecture became less ambitious. Yet Cline suggests some ordinary Greeks may have rejoiced at the fall of their rigidly hierarchical society, whose leaders had imposed onerous taxes and demanded laborers build huge monuments to the elite. “The demise of the palaces may have actually freed these people from a tremendous burden,” Cline writes, “such that some rural areas may have actually experienced a brief moment of prosperity in the decades immediately after the Collapse.” Any contemporary implications of this hypothesis Cline leaves for the reader to imagine.
The Phoenicians of the northern Levant—today’s Lebanon and northern Israel—did fairly well, Borrowing a term from the scholar and popular public intellectual Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Cline calls the Phoenicians “anti-fragile”—they not only endured the disorder of the Late Bronze Age but thrived under the stress. They somehow managed, as another historian whom Cline quotes rather charmingly puts it, to have a “positive collapse.” Well-traveled merchants who invented the alphabet, already used to operating in decentralized frameworks and alliances, the Phoenicians “seem to have actively taken advantage of the chaos,” Cline notes, by springing into the vacuum left by the fall of their larger neighbors, like Egypt, to develop new trade routes and connections with far-flung societies. Cline suggests there are lessons in the resilience of the Phoenicians about having decentralized and redundant systems and being innovative and self-sufficient—qualities that could help societies endure systemic shocks today.
What happened in the Late Bronze Age confirms for Cline that seemingly stable societies are sometimes a lot closer to collapse than they appear. Superficially calm and orderly, the foundations are “actually rotted and weak, so that the smallest gust of wind or stress is enough to begin the process of collapse.” Cline told me that he believes there’s about a 90 percent chance of a global systems collapse in the next century—whether caused by climate change, nuclear war, another pandemic, artificial intelligence, or, as in the Late Bronze Age, some combination of factors. “Again, we’ve got that globalized, connected network,” Cline notes, “and if that crashes we’re pretty much sunk, at least in the short term. We’ll go back to square one, probably back before the age of steam. We might find ourselves living back in the Middle Ages.”
Reading the 1177 sequel in another moment of paralyzing global uncertainty, I again find his work curiously reassuring. “It’s going to happen—it would be hubristic to think it’s not,” Cline told me. “Every society in the course of human history has either collapsed completely or enough that it transforms so you wouldn’t recognize what came afterward.” In the book, he portrays collapse as a disruptive but also potentially creative force that can seed revolutions and renaissances—perhaps even necessary for civilizations to advance in a cyclical pattern of integration and fragmentation over centuries and millennia. “The main takeaway from all of this,” Cline writes near the end of the new book, “is that clearly such a collapse is survivable, provided that we are resilient enough and able to cope, adapt, or transform as necessary. Societal collapse doesn’t always take everyone with it, and often cultures continue, even if at a simpler level or perhaps in a new iteration.”
Cline gets emails all the time from readers who lump him in with others who in recent years have peddled far less respectable just-so tales about the long-distant past. A documentary series Cline appeared in last year, Ancient Armageddon, which was distributed by the streamer Max, often gets confused for the pseudo-archaeologist Graham Hancock’s unhinged and irresponsible Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse, about a supposed pre–Ice Age civilization that seeded precious legacies like monumental architecture to those societies that sprung up once the glaciers melted—a civilization whose existence mainstream scholars have covered up, according to Hancock, for unnamed but presumably nefarious purposes. Cline keeps a separate file in his email labeled “cranks”: a growing number of messages have offered unsolicited opinions about how aliens constructed the pyramids. “A lot of people have interesting ideas, let’s put it that way,” Cline told me. “Others I wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night.”
It’s somewhat surprising that another breed of self-declared visionaries doesn’t yet seem to have found its way to his work: the disruption-obsessed tech crowd. Cline is not an ideological writer—he is not trying to justify a burn-it-down mentality with regard to the present. On the contrary, he mildly affirms that the worst that lies ahead could likely be avoided if our society were to take some common-sense measures. “We have every chance to stop it,” he says, “but if you keep having people bring snowballs onto the floor of the Senate we’re going to collapse in a decade or two.” There is a risk, however, that his serious, scholarly interpretation of what came after the Bronze Age collapse gets misread as a kind of doom-soothing—a suggestion not only that a civilizational collapse can be endured but that it should be. “Rather than a dark age,” Cline concludes, “this period was the start of something new, a set of ideas and cultures that ultimately resulted in the world to which we now belong.”
While undoubtedly true in the very long run, endorsing the sentiment at this moment risks playing into the hands of those accelerationists who would like to bring a collapse on because they think something better might be built among the ruins. But history, ancient or modern, may be only so helpful a guide if what we are facing is the kind of collapse from which there can be no recovery.
