The Late Bronze Age

Aeneas And His Family Departing From Troy, by Peter Paul Rubens

This essay is intended to organize my knowledge of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean. This is a subject that touches on archaeology, Greek mythology, Hittite, Egyptian and (slightly) Biblical history.

1. A Greek-centric Overview

While writing was known throughout the Late Bronze Age (LBA) Eastern Mediterranean (the Greek language is first documented on clay tablets using a syllabary called Linear B), so few clay tablets have survived that archaeology is our main source of knowledge, and that means relying on pottery for knowledge. The relevant pottery sequence is Late Helladic IIA, IIB, IIIA1, IIIA2, IIIB1 & IIIB2, with IIIC seemingly associated with the Bronze Age Collapse. Archaeologists’ attempts to assign dates to pottery have weak epistemic status, but lucky for us Egypt was engaged in foreign trade in the sort of things that needed pottery containers. So for example, when the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten’s capital was abandoned, shards of small closed Late Helladic IIIA2 pots suitable for transport of costly perishables were left behind for archaeologists to find. Some Egyptians were buried with IIA pots while Thutmose III ruled (for reasons unclear to me, archaeologists assume IIA as already in use in Ahmose I’s time). IIIB1 & IIIB2 in Egypt have been found in the context of Pi-Ramesses, the capital Ramesses II built on/near the site of the old Hyksos capital Avaris.

As can be seen in any Classical historian from Herodotus on, Greek mythology was conceptualized as taking place over a few hundred years up to the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War, circa 1200 BC. The early Hellenistic Parian chronicle furnishes a particularly exact example of this mindset. Though such things must be taken with a lot of salt, a date range of 1574/3 to 1209/8 BC for the span from Deucalion to the fall of Troy approximately matches the 18th and 19th Dynasties of Egypt that the Mycenaean civilization was demonstrably contemporary with.

During the IIA phase, Crete was culturally dominant over Mycenae and the other cities of the mainland (Tiryns, Pylos & the Menalaion of Laconia in the Peloponnese, Athens, Thebes & Orchomenos in central Greece, Iolkos in Thessaly). “It is during LH IIB that the dependence on Minoan ceramics is completely erased. In fact, looking at the pottery found on Crete during this phase suggests that artistic influence is now flowing in the opposite direction; the Minoans are now using Mycenaean pottery as a reference.”

The term “Minoan” for the Bronze Age civilization of Crete is problematic. The Cretan palace-states came into existence circa 2000 BC, while the mythic kings of that name are a nephew of Kadmos and an older contemporary of Theseus. Some of our sources for Greek mythology, like the Bibliotheka of pseudo-Apollodoros, provide a king list for Knossos, the most important Cretan palace and city. It goes Asterion (mortal husband of Europa, who was abducted from Phoenicia by an amorous Zeus) – Minos son of Europa – Lykastos – Minos II, who was husband of Pasiphae, father of Ariadne and Deucalion, stepfather of the Minotaur – Deucalion’s son Idomeneus, who had the authority to involve all Crete in the Trojan War with 80 ships. Folk memory recorded no dynastic break in the relevant time frame except Minos son of Europa himself.

IIIA is an era of uniform mass production. Potters employed in all the palace-states (note, not necessarily by the palaces – we can actually see a mix of state-run and free market industries in palace-states) produced indistinguishable output, which was spread by trade networks from Upper Egypt to islands north of Sicily. I’d think this implies generations of internal peace, if not a single “Achaean” - Ahhiya(wa) in Hittite - kingdom.

IIIB (starts after the abandonment of Akhenaten’s capital, post-1334 BC) saw a decrease in uniformity and a dramatic decrease in trade with Cyprus. It would be nice to know why, but Late Bronze Age Cyprus with its cities and scribes is a lost civilization. The corresponding period in Egypt was Ramesses II and his 19th Dynasty predecessors. At the end of this period, the palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos were burned. While mobs who burn buildings are usually enemies of civilization, the fire at Pylos baked the clay tablets that had most recently been written on. Numerous Pylos tablets record assignments against an expected sea attack.

2. Greek Cities

2.1. Mycenae

“Rich in gold” was its Homeric epithet, and in the Iliad its king was able to command the kings of other cities. The citadel covered ~3 hectares, almost 50% larger than the unfortified palace of Thebes, with a peak city size of 32 hectares.

The sequence Late Helladic IIA-IIIB2 purportedly spanned 350-plus years ending ~1190 BC. Greek mythology only records seven generations of kings, two of which ruled after the sack of Troy:

Perseus

Electryon (father of Alcmene, Heracles’s mother), Sthenelus

Eurystheus

Atreus (new dynasty)

Agamemnon

Orestes (also king of Argos and Sparta)

Tisamenus (same, Mycenae destroyed)

However, the facts on the ground are that Mycenae either had the oldest royal line in mainland Greece, or we’re looking at preservation bias. Grave Circle B, 117 meters west of the Lion Gate, has 12 simple cist graves and 14 shaft graves, at least 6 of which were family tombs because multiple bodies were found in them. The latest pottery found in the graves is LH I. The oldest graves are cists for men, with poor grave goods. The later the grave, the more they found women, along with gold and unknown imports once contained in Cycladic and Cretan pots.

The younger Grave Circle A has 5 family shaft graves plus a lone male grave, whose 19 bodies and their grave goods were excavated by Schliemann. He gave artifacts names associated with the Iliad, which is much too young: there was nothing in them later than LH IIA. In later phases, royalty was buried in more imposing tholos tombs. We know the people in “A” continued to be seen as important ancestors until the Bronze Age collapse, because it was one of the sites the LH IIIB walls were built to enclose. It’s tempting to think of Atreus as a real person, ordering the building of walls around the palace as well as the 9 tholos tombs (of the Perseids?) and Grave Circle A from whose dead the King of Mycenae derived his authority.

2.2. Tiryns

The site of Tiryns is only 15 kilometres Southeast of Mycenae in the Argolid. Pausanias reports the tradition that the walls of both were “cyclopean”, i.e. must have been built by cyclopes. “Even two mules working together couldn’t have moved the smaller stones.” In mythology, it was said to have been founded by Proteus, twin brother of Perseus’s grandfather Acrisius. The twins were enemies and Proteus fled to Lycia, raising an army to help him return to Argos, where they recruited cyclopes and founded Tiryns over Acrisius’s objections.

The 2-hectare acropolis hill of Tiryns actually goes back much further than even myth, with a poor Neolithic village succeeding by a larger Early Helladic (Early Bronze Age, third millenium BC) village. In LH IIA, the village on the south half of the hill was turned into a palace. On the plain below the hill, a city grew to more than 20 hectares during LH IIA-IIIB. At some point the entire hill was fortified even though there was nothing of value on the north half – besides the high ground itself. Nonetheless, mysterious attackers still managed to burn the palace at the end of LH IIIB.

However, Tiryns was reoccupied and the lower town grew to 25 hectares in LH IIIC. It was not abandoned until the 8th century BC, when the city of Argos gained hegemony in the Argolid.

Argos, did you steal my ancestors?

If oral traditions have a core of truth, we still have to expect them to get reworked for propaganda purposes. Near the beginning of the Classical Period, 490 BC or a bit later, Aeschylus the Athenian wrote a tragedy about Danaus the Egyptian and his 50 daughters, who fled to Argos in the first pentekonter so the king of Egypt couldn’t force them to marry their first cousins. They beg King Pelasgos of Argos for protection.

“Pelasgos” is obviously a mythic ancestor for Pelasgoi, who Greek historians say were in the land when their ancestors arrived. Mythographers, writing in Classical through Roman times, assigned the Danaid Hypermnestra and her husband Lynceus, their son, grandsons Acrisius and Proteus and Acrisius’s daughter who gave birth to Perseus to Argos. If we assign the characters to Tiryns and Mycenae instead, we can associate the Danaids with the mysterious gold-bearing women of Grave Circle B & A.

2.3. Pylos, in writing

Pylos was a town even in the Middle Bronze Age, occupying an area of 5.5 hectares and growing to 14 in Late Helladic IIIA, when the palace is believed to have been built.

Greek mythology records only four kings of Messenia, the region Pylos controlled: Perieres (son-in-law of Perseus), his son Aphareus, Neleus, and his son Nestor (who adventured with three generations of heroes).

The number of Linear B tablets recovered from Pylos is 1,087 – a quarter as many as Knossos, Crete but an order of magnitude more than anywhere else on the mainland. Surviving tablets were used for administrative records, so what they reveal are divine and personal names, land ownership, tax collection, what craftspeople were employed by the palace, and at Pylos in particular orders for soldiers.

The largest landowner was the wanax. He owned three times as much land as anyone else and it was tenemos, perhaps meaning sacrosanct. Centuries later, in Homer’s still-archaic Ionian dialect, this word reappears as anax, referring to the high kings Agamemnon and Priam… and Zeus. The word definitely had divine as well as “feudal” connotations, just like English “Lord.” This title also shows up later in personal names like Demonax (“people-lord”) and the pre-Socratic philosophers Anaxagoras (“lord of the forum”), Anaximander (“lord of the estate”) and Anaximenes (“the lord endures”).

Next came the lawagetas, whose duties in the tablets are scarcely distinguished from his superior. Just before Pylos palace was burned, there were three other landowners who owned as much, but he was the only person besides the wanax whose land was a tenemos.

Pylos was one of only two towns in Messenia: the average settlement size, even for tax collection centers of which there were 9 in the eastern province alone, was 1.53 hectares, meaning their population was probably just under Dunbar’s Number.

Administrative activity was closely related to religion, and we have preserved numerous deities:

Anemoi (the winds) in the form Anemon Hiereia (wind priestess), Ares, Artemis, Dionysus, Diwo (i.e. Zeus), Diwia (“Goddess” – Dione?), Eileithyia, Enyalius (later both an epithet and a son of Ares), the Erinyes, Hephaetus (indirectly through personal name Hephaistion), Hera, “Mater Theia”, Paean, Poseidon and Posidaeia.

Some goddesses are uncertain because they were called by the titles wanassoin, “two ladies” – the mainstream guess is Demeter and Persephone, or potnia, “our lady.” a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja seems to be Athena, but there was also “Our Lady of Thebes”, “Our Lady of Grain” (Demeter?), “Our Lady of the Labyrinth”, etc.

The tablets include personal names. Female names attested at Pylos include Alexandra, Theodora, Eritha, Korinsia (Korinth-woman, a slave) and a VIP named Karpathia, a “key-bearer” who owned two plots in the Sphagianes district. Male names include Wedaneos the lawagetas, Akhilles, Alektruon, Amphimedes, Augewas (who the wanax feasted when he was appointed a ko-ro of the demos), Echelawon (who owned a ship of the fleet and huge estates), Glaukos, Hektor, Khalkeos (“smith”), Klumenos (a commander in the coast guard and ko-re-te official), Lukios (Lukka-man, a slave), Ploutinos (“rich”), Poimen (“shepherd”), Orestes (a junior officer), Tros, Turios (Tyre-man).

2.4. Laconia

Sparta and its region Laconia are fundamental to the Iliad. But when Mycenae, Pylos and other LBA cities were surveyed by archaeologists and Athens and Thebes were shown to be power centers at the time, Sparta was missing. The closest connection to the Bronze Age world was the Menelaion 5 kilometres away, where an Archaic hero cult to Helen and her husband grew up around a Mycenaean aristo’s great hall (megaron).

That changed in 2008 when farmers who owned land 11 kilometres south of Sparta, in the parish of a one-room church named Ayios Vasileios, tried to dig a new terrace for their olive orchard and dug up a Linear B tablet instead. Since writing was used for palace management in LBA Greece, archaeologists knew the farmers had dug into a palace archive and swept in.

The first tablets published were about the sale of weapons, textiles and perfume, showing you what industries a Mycenaean palace engaged in rather than leaving to independent craftspeople.

Ayios Vasileios was a large town even before the LHIIIA palace buildings archaeologists have found so far: growing from nearly nothing to 21 hectares during Late Helladic I. Those buildings were destroyed at the end of LHIIIA, a century before the Bronze Age collapse. Stone foundations were split, there’s a fire destruction layer, and one room had 20 bronze swords in a layer of organic debris. More mysteriously, another room had a thick layer of animal bones, potsherds and precious objects, as if a temple left a big mess.

Greek mythographers like the Bibliotheke author record a substantial list of “Spartan” kings. The first inhabitants of Laconia were said to be the Leleges under an eponymous leader Lelex. Like him, his son and grandson Eurotas (also the name of the river where Ayios Vasileios and Sparta were located) were petty chiefs of marsh land, until Eurotas drained it to improve farming.

Interestingly, a prestigious linguist proposed that Lelege is cognate to lulahi, a class or tribe mentioned in Hittite texts as too impure for priests and other temple servants to talk to.

Eurotas married his daughter Sparta to Lakedaemon, supposedly the son of Zeus and a star (the Pleaid Taygete). Their dynasty lasted another 4 generations: Amyklas, Kynortas, his sons Perieres and Oibalos, and Oibalos’s sons Hippokoon and Tyndareos. Tyndareos’s “sons” the Dioskuri died young and the Atreides married into his family, triggering the Trojan War. That was the end of the independent kingdom until supposedly two Heraclidae founded a new one after destroying the Mycenaean state.

2.5. Athens

It may not have had anything to do with Jerusalem, but Mycenaean Athens might have had to do with ancient Israel. The acropolis continued to be occupied throughout the “Greek Dark Ages”, with a dramatically impoverished population huddling inside Mycenaean walls called “Pelasgian” throughout the Archaic period (~776-490 BC), after which new fortifications were built in the aftermath of the Persian Wars. Although they’re not identified as Pelasgoi in the Iliad, the Athenians maintained a tradition that they were indigenous people who picked up the Ionian Greek dialect from their neighbors, having neither been conquered at the beginning of the Heroic Age by Achaeos and Ion nor by the Heraclidae.

So if the “Pelasgian” tradition isn’t a later fiction, Late Helladic IIIC Athenians emigrating from the overpopulated acropolis might have been one element in the Peleset who conquered the southern coast of Canaan during the reign of Ramesses III.

Because it was continuously occupied and became a large, rich city again, preservation bias works against the LBA acropolis and lower town of Athens. It’s known that the Erechtheion, which gets its name from a mythic king, Erechthonios or Erechtheos, was built on top of a palace building. The association with both a Heroic age king and Athena (the Periclean Erechthion was dedicated to both Athena and Poseidon, but replaced a mid-6th century temple of Athena burned by the Persians) suggests a folk memory of the sacred function of a Mycenaean king. Another of the few Mycenaean finds on the acropolis is a fountain associated with Late Helladic IIIB/IIIC, echoing the strategic water source attested in Classical times.

The coastal towns of Thorikos, Brauron (later called sacred to bear-Artemis) and Marathon have LHI material including tholos tombs at Thorikos and Marathon, making it possible they developed before Athens had a lower town. The agora had a LHIIB cemetary, and it’s certain that the palace was built by this phase.

A tradition reported by Strabo was that when Kekrops the serpent man was king of Attica, his subjects lived on farmsteads in the midst of their fields, and because they were being attacked by pirates and the Boeotians to their north, he ordered them to move into 12 towns for protection: Kekropia (Athens or the acropolis), Thorikos, Brauron, Eleusis, Aphidna, Tetrapolis (all archaeologically identified), Tetrakomoi, Epakria, Dekeleia, Kytheros, Sphettos and Kephisia. Eleusis subsequently had its own priest-kings, and Kekrops’s descendant Erechtheos was said to have gone to war with Eumolpos of Eleusis to reunify Attica, in a myth that suggests the existence of Mycenaean period human sacrifice.

In the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, Menestheus son of Theseus brings half as many ships (50) as Mycenae, suggesting a realm half as populous or developed, which does not contradict the LH IIIB evidence.

Mythic kings of Athens:

Kekrops - Kranaos - Amphiktyon, uncle of the first “Hellenes” - Kekrops’s foster-grandson Erichthonios the serpent man - his son Pandion I - Erechtheos and his brother Kekrops II - Pandion II - Aegeas (usurper) - his son Theseus - Theseus’s sons Menestheus and Demophon, who fought at Troy

2.6. Thebes and Orchomenos

In the century before the Bronze Age collapse, the palace of Thebes, Kadmeion after the hero Kadmos, occupied the center of the acropolis, forming a stone-walled “castle keep” in the middle of a larger defensible area of high ground. The potsherds are Late Helladic IIIB followed by evidence of burning circa ~1200 BC, indicating instability a century before the collapse that was successfully dealt with, unlike the great collapse later. Note that preservation bias works against the site, which like Athens had a long occupation history to destroy Mycenaean remains.

The Kadmeion has produced a treasure trove of Linear B tablets 1/6 or less the size of Pylos. I’ll go into those another time; annoyingly a Wikipedia-level review will show you nothing but controversy. One noteworthy detail is the claim that the island of Euboea was ruled by Thebes.

The Iliad and other mythic material preserve a belief that there were two states in Heroic age Boeotia, and this is corroborated by its capital “Minyan Orchomenos” being another major archaeological site. Somewhat confusingly, the Middle Bronze Age (2000-~1600 BC) pottery of mainland Greece is called “Minyan ware”, despite the fact that the mythic genealogy places their founder Minyas only a few hundred years before the Trojan War.

The palace seems to have been built in LH IIB, after a long existence as a village as early as the Neolithic. Like most, it was burned at the end of LH IIIB.

Between the two cities, Lake Kopais was drained for agriculture and one of the strangest fortified settlements of the Mycenaean civilization was built. Gla (an Albanian name, indigenous name speculative – perhaps Homeric Arne) was a large village or… something surrounded by 20 km of walls. Permanent buildings were few and potsherds were distributed at uneven depth, making it reasonably probable that farming occurred within the walls, with residents erecting short-lived huts in whichever fields were fallow.

2.7. Iolkos

The Bay of Volos forms the southeastern extremity of classical and modern Thessaly. The overland route to the region passes from Boeotia through the sparsely-populated mountainous district of Phocis on the upper Kephisos and then north through Thermopylae in Malis. By sea, the Bay of Volos sits right at the north end of the island of Euboea.

Greek mythology records Thessaly’s original name as Aeolia and treats it as a wild region, productive for horse husbandry and populated by centaurs as well as uncivilized Hellenic tribes, but with an outpost of civilization at Iolkos (Volos). This fits the archaeological evidence: three of the few Mycenaean settlements in Thessaly are ports on the bay, Dimini, Kastro, and Pefkakia. At the beginning of this century, archaeologists turned up a Mycenaean palace at Dimini. An untouched tholos tomb (Kazanaki) with gold grave goods also turned up, and oh by the way, Iolkos really only figures in Greek mythology in the generation before the Trojan War, when Jason was sent on a suicide mission for the Golden Fleece by King Pelias, his usurping uncle.

The pottery evidence indicates that the Bay area was incorporated into Mycenaean civilization during Late Helladic IIA, or some time between ~1550 BC and the middle of Thutmose III’s sole reign. The plain of Larissa and the west only start to adopt Mycenaean material culture even selectively in LH IIIA. It’s currently understood that LH IIA economic development was driven by “Minoan” need for metals, with a string of sites radiating north from the silver mines of Lavrion (which remained famously productive in Classical times). From Lavrion, Brauron and Thorikos, ports/outposts appeared in Boeotia and on the east coast of Euboea, ending at the Bay of Volos. At the end of this period, either the colonized or parties unknown in the Peloponnese (the gold-rich elites of Mycenae are most likely, but trade with Crete is also believed to have created the Laconic and Messenian elites) overthrew not only the Cretan navy but also seized Knossos, after which Linear B tablets replace the undeciphered Linear A.

At Dimini, Linear B is only attested in a couple of inscriptions: no tablets have yet been found. This is probably only because of the lack of a fire-destruction layer. Dimini was abandoned at the end of LH IIIB with the other palaces save Kekropia (acropolis of Athens) and Tiryns, or very early in IIIC, presumably starved out by economic disruption. Curiously though, there’s also a dearth of seals and religious iconography, so the rulers were probably less sacred and controlled a smaller economy, which matches the palace being the smallest.

2.8. Crete, circa 1400-1200 BC.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Sir Arthur Evans upended our understanding of Western history by excavating a pre-Greek civilization on Crete, which he gave the problematic name Minoan after King Minos. While in Greek mythology Minos was a nephew of Kadmos the founder of Thebes, Knossos and lesser cities Evans excavated had palatial layers dating back to 2000 BC, half a millennium older than the mainland civilization. There was indoor plumbing and statuettes and frescoes depicted women in flounced, structured skirts and tight bodices with plunging necklines.

But you can read about that in any survey of the Minoans, from book-length to Wikipedia entry. What we’re concerned with are the last centuries of the Greek and Near Eastern Bronze Age. Alas, this is complicated by the long shadow Evans casts over Cretan archaeology: he dated the “final destruction” of the Knossos palace, which follows a Protopalatial Period (Middle Bronze Age), native Neopalatial and then a period of rule by Greek-speakers, to shortly after 1400 BC. However, later archaeologists found stirrup jars and other material Evans dated to 1400 BC at Thebes and Pylos in Late Helladic IIIB context – just before the Bronze Age collapse. The “Palmer-Boardman dispute” over whether to associate destruction at Knossos and the Linear B evidence with the general collapse or keep the ~1400 BC date remains unresolved.

It’s generally accepted that palaces at other cities on the island - Phaistos, Mallia and Zakros - were abandoned when Greek-speakers conquered the island circa 1450 BC. The towns themselves remained occupied with much-reduced population, but authority was centralized at Knossos. A second important center was Chania or Kydonia, a harbor town in the west. Chemical analysis suggests that the Cretan stirrup jars on the mainland were made from clay local to this area, unsurprising as it was well-suited to trade with the Peloponnese and central Greece. Linear B finds from this settlement are securely dated to Late Minoan IIIB (= LH IIIB), followed by evidence of fire.

In general, IIIB shows evidence of a breakdown in security/prosperity. Coastal villages where the pottery sequence goes through IIIA show a break in settlement, in favor of better-defended villages further inland. Then while civilization per se disappeared on Crete following the general collapse, the current evidence does not suggest post-apocalyptic depopulation: after probably absorbing an influx of refugees, LM IIIB settlements continued into IIIC and the Early Iron Age, including Knossos itself.

3. Anatolia

3.1. Milawata, and Greek culture in Hittite cuneiform.

Having covered all the cities of mainland Greece, let’s look at Miletus on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. Called Millawanda and later Milawata in Hittite tablets, the latter name also appears in Linear B tablets from the archives of Pylos and Thebes. Archaeologists have found “Minoan” artifacts at the site of the archaic/classical Miletus (strengthening the identification) they date as early as 1900 BC, a century after Crete’s First Palace Period began and well before Cretan presence in Greece. When Mycenaeans took over Knossos, Millawanda passed into their control.

The first Hittite references to Millawanda occur circa 1320 BC, when it supported a rebellion against King Mursilis II after his second campaign season. King Uhha-Ziti of Arzawa called the new Great King “a child” for demanding the extradition of defeated princes who fled to him and formed an anti-Hittite alliance with Seha River Land and Ahhiya (i.e. Achaea, which had a pan-“Hellenic” sense in Homer rather than the north coast of the Peloponnese). Uhha-Ziti was defeated and Millawanda has an LH IIIA destruction layer followed by Hittite-plan fortifications.

The city is then mentioned in the “Tawagalawa letter”. Unfortunately this was a multi-tablet letter of which only the third has been found, but the author is generally believed to be Hattusilis III, Mursilis II’s youngest child, and from it we know that Millawanda was ruled from Ahhiya, had a governor named Atpa and his/the city’s territory included a place called Atriya (Atre-land – note that Atreus’s family was said to be from Asia). The titular Tawagalawa, brother of the King of Ahhiya, has been suggested by numerous scholars as a Hittite rendering of “Eteokles”, as it would have been in the Bronze Age before Greek dropped most w-sounds (e.g. wanax -> anax).

The real purpose of the letter, though, is another Hittite extradition request. It seems that an adventurer named Piyama-Radu had made himself king of Wilusa (Ilium) but had lost the throne in a conflict with the Hittites. He was now an exile in Ahhiya and the Great King of Hatti wanted him, promising “my brother” of Ahhiya safe conduct. Amazingly, he says further that “these days we have an agreement on Wilusa, over which we went to war.”

Finally, the name of the city shifts in the “Miliwata letter”, now closely matching the Linear B spelling. This letter demands that the recipient client ruler resolve a dispute over hostages, turn over fugitives from Hittite justice, and turn over a pretender from Wilusa to a Hittite envoy so that the Hittites can reinstall him as king there. The letter reminds the recipient that the recipient’s father had turned against the Hittite king. The Hittite king then installed the recipient as king in place of that one’s father. It also alludes to Piyama-Radu as a troublemaker of the past.

Not surprisingly, Miletus then has a destruction layer associated the Sea Peoples.

3.2. Troy

We must of course mention Troy VIIa, perhaps the most famous destruction layer of the Bronze Age collapse (I won’t mention Cyprus, because we have no texts and fire-destruction there could be associated with invasions by two Hittite kings, father and son, the father Tudhaliya IV ruling during the last 25 years of Ramesses II). Mainstream archaeologists date Troy VIIa to 1300-1190 BC. Its richer predecessor Troy VI, covering 27-30 hectares, is dated circa 1700-1300 BC and was destroyed by an earthquake. In Greek mythology, “earthshaker” Poseidon and his nephew Apollo built Troy walls during the reign of Laomedon, an ancestor of Priam (of confused genealogy). I need to research the rationale behind that absolute date of ~1190 BC, but if its place in the relative, material-based chronology can be pushed up to more than a decade before the Mycenaean palace burning and burning of Ugarit at the end of LH IIIB, it raises the credibility of Homer as a source.

4. the LBA Levant

5. The Bronze Age Collapse

5.1. The Sea Peoples

In Greece at the end of Late Helladic IIIB, the palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns & Pylos were destroyed by fire, and the scribes of Pylos tell us they were watching for attack by sea.

“The Sea Peoples” are a famous term in ancient history. The term finds its origin with French Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé in 1855, describing a pylon documenting Year 8 of Ramesses III. Ramesses III was crowned in 1186 BC, second pharaoh of the 20th Dynasty, son of two nobodies – no confirmed relation to the first two Ramesseses. However, Egypt’s troubles with Sea Peoples started with Merneptah (1213-1203). In his Year 5, the Libyans (nomads and/or stateless fishermen) formed an alliance with “Northerners coming from all lands”: Ekwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Sherden, and Shekelesh. The names Lukka, Sherden and Shekelesh are sometimes linked to the Classical Lycia region of modern Turkey, Sardinia and the Siceloi of Sicily.

Thirty years later in the Ramesses III narrative, the list of attackers has changed to Denyen (could be Danaan, one of Homer’s two terms for all “Greeks”), Peleset (very probably Hebrew Plišt, Philistine), Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh, Tjekker, and Weshesh. The Hebrew Bible tells us that the Philistines lived in the coastal cities of Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron and Gath, where archaeologists have found locally-made Late Helladic IIIC pottery – above a terminal Bronze Age destruction layer at Ashdod and Ashkelon. Hazor, Acre, Megiddo, Sukkot (last scarab before destruction was of Queen Twosret, ruled 1191–1189 BC), Bethel and Lachish are other sites in Canaan with evidence of terminal Bronze Age destruction.

Further details about the Sea Peoples:

Only two of these groups are named before the Bronze Age collapse apparently starts (which is in the middle of Merneptah’s 10-year reign). The Sherden are first mentioned, already as sea raiders, in the context of Ramesses II’s Year 2 (1278 BC).

“The unruly Sherden whom no one had ever known how to combat, they came boldly sailing in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them.”

Having defeated them at Egypt’s coast, he incorporated many of them into his royal guard. They armed themselves with torso armor, horned helmets, shields and long swords (by bronze standards). Now here’s the weird part: as early as 1200 BC, bronze statues of warriors wearing those horned helmets appear on Sardinia. Isolated from the eastern Mediterranean world by the Strait of Messina, Sardinia was already home to what’s called the Nuragic civilization (despite lack of cities and writing), a culture whose striking feature is that almost every square mile, every village in a settlement density equal to 11th century England, had a stone tower (nuraghe). Did they have a reliable route from Sardinian to Egypt and the Levant throughout the 13th century BC, or were they conquistadors who conquered Sardinia after being defeated in Egypt? This theory points to the plain around Sardis whose farms later supported the Lydian capital being called the Sardinian plain, suggesting that the island was “new Sardinia.”

The Lukka were Hittite vassals from the western part of modern Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, called Lycia in Classical times, when Ramesses II fought the Great King and his assembled vassals at Kadesh.

In Merneptah’s great Karnak inscription, the Sherden and Lukka are joined by never-before-attested groups called the Shekelesh, Eqwesh and Teresh. The theory of de Rougé was that Shekel-esh could be identified as Sikel-oi, Eqw-esh as Homeric Achaeans and Ter-esh as Turrhēn-oi. Thucydides mentions the Sikeloi in vi.4 when recounting the history of Sicily, and says they lived on the east coast of Italy before migrating to the island which took their name. Turrhenoi are... more complicated.

Then Ramesses III’s mortuary temple hieroglyphs and Papyrus Harris I found nearby say that during his late majesty’s Year 8 (1178 BC), Sherden, Shekelesh and Teresh teamed up with more peoples we’ve never heard of before, the Denyen, Peleset, Tjekker and Weshesh. Denyen could be Homer’s Danaans (used interchangeably with “Achaean”) or the Israelite tribe of Dan (see second page of Kelder, "The Egyptian Interest in Mycenaean Greece"). The Peleset are very probably the Philistines (Hebrew Pleset), who manufactured Late Helladic IIIC pottery in Canaan. But if they were from the Greek sphere, why “Pleset” and not “Achaean” or “Danaan”? Ah, well just because they had Greek material culture doesn’t mean they were ethnic Greeks: since 1873, the name has suggested to have the same root as Pelasgoi, the indigenous people Greek historians say their ancestors replaced.

Still, it’s very weird for three ethnic groups no one had ever heard of to appear as raiders ~1208 BC and more to team up with them 30 years later, don’t you think?

Whoever they were, if the Sea Peoples were threatening the civilizations of Egypt, Canaan, and mainland Greece, you’d expect ports in between to feel the effects too. Indeed, just like Pylos, we have clay tablets from the port of Ugarit baked during the fire, from the city’s prince/king to a senior king of Cyprus:

“My father, behold, the enemy’s ships came; my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Land of Hittites, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka?… Thus, the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.”

Per Wikipedia, Ugarit’s destruction level contained LH IIIB ware, but no LH IIIC. Therefore, the date of the destruction is important for the dating of the LH IIIC phase. An Egyptian sword bearing the name of Pharaoh Merneptah was found in the destruction levels.

The Hittite Empire ports of Mersin, Tarsus and Alalakh also have fire-destruction layers, as does Byblos in northern Lebanon. Further inland, Aleppo, Carchemish on the Euphrates and the Hittite capital Hattusas have terminal Bronze Age destruction layers. As far as I know, those three sites have no known connection to the Sea Peoples alliance. So which happened to the high king in Hattusas first, burning of ports or badly losing a war inland?

5.2. Did 150 years of drought cause the Bronze Age collapse?

A 2013 study of fossilized pollen particles from the Sea of Galilee shows a 150 year drought. In the region where pollen would waft into the Sea of Galilee, apparently climate change caused a succession of severe droughts from about 1250 BC to about 1100 BC, leading to a sharp decline in oak, pine and carob trees... and the economically-important olive tree. If this finding could be replicated further north, we might have a story of agricultural laborers turned desperadoes.

5.3. Postscript from Greek mythology.

In Greek mythology, the last etiological myth is “the return of the Heraclidae”, which they used to explain the population speaking the Dorian dialect. Heracles’s son Hyllus was said to be an exile in Thessaly because of the schemes of Eurystheus, king of Mycenae before Atreus and Agamemnon, and his patron Hera. Aegimius the Dorian adopted him and, skipping irrelevant details, the third generation of Heraclidae built a fleet to land a Dorian army on the coast of the Argolid, ending the dynasty of Mycenaean kings by defeating the son of Agamemnon’s son Orestes, burning the city, and transferring power to Argos as well as taking over the isthmus of Corinth, Sparta and conquering Messenia, which had been ruled from Pylos in the mythic age.