1177 B.C.

“all civilizations eventually experience violent restructuring of material and ideological realities such as destruction or re-creation.”

However, both Gibbon and Diamond were considering how a single empire or a single civilization came to an end—the Romans, the Maya, the Mongols, and so forth. Here, we are considering a globalized system in antiquity, with multiple civilizations all interacting and at least partially dependent upon each other.

at Medinet Habu the Egyptian pharaoh quite clearly states: Those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and soul are finished forever and ever. Those who came forward together on the sea, the full flame was in front of them at the river-mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore. They were dragged in, enclosed,

To begin with, it will be apparent by now that the Sea Peoples and the so-called Collapse or Catastrophe at the end of the Late Bronze Age are both topics that have been much discussed by scholars over the course of the past century, and that they are linked more often than not in such discussions.

Although I am primarily interested in examining the possible causes of the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations in this area, I also raise the question of what it was that the world lost at this pivotal moment, when the empires and kingdoms of the second millennium BC came crashing down. I am also interested in the extent to which civilization

When Thutmose III began his first campaign—the first of seventeen that he instigated over the next twenty or so years—he managed to put himself into the history books, quite literally, for the itinerary and details of his journey and conquests in 1479 BC were transferred from the daily journals kept along the way and inscribed for posterity on the

It turned out that the cargo carried in the Uluburun ship consisted of an incredible assortment of goods, truly an international manifest. In all, products from at least seven different countries, states, and empires were on board the ship. In addition to its primary cargo of ten tons of Cypriot copper, one ton of tin, and a ton of terebinth resin,

The six individual groups who made up the Sea Peoples during this wave of invasion—the five mentioned above by Ramses in the Medinet Habu inscription and a sixth group, named the Shardana (also sometimes called the Sherden), mentioned in another relevant inscription—are far more shadowy than the lands that they reportedly overran. They left no insc

It is now clear that when the Mycenaeans took over Crete, probably sometime between 1450 and 1350 BC, as mentioned above, they also took over the international trade routes to Egypt and the Near East. They suddenly became players in the cosmopolitan world—a role that they would continue to exploit for the next several centuries, until the end of th