The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  1) The Hittite Empire (the Hatti) collapses in about 1200.

  2) The Mycenaean palaces are destroyed and burned in about 1230.8

  3) The people whom the Egyptian documents variously describe as the Peoples of the North, the Peoples of the Islands, or the Peoples of the Sea, head for Egypt and are defeated twice in 1125 and 1180 approximately (dates of which we can be reasonably sure).

  4) A long period of drought strikes the Mediterranean at the end of the second millennium BC. Was this last player, the climate, the most important of all?

  Let us consider each question in turn.

  The collapse of the Hittite Empire, according to documents discovered at Ugarit (Ras Shamra), took place not at the end of the thirteenth century but at the beginning of the twelfth. There is a slight discrepancy. Claude A. Schaeffer, who was in charge of the excavations at Ras Sharma, wrestled with the explanation for the apparently silent death of this warlike empire. There are a few certainties, but they are negative ones: the Peoples of the Sea followed the coastline, crossed Asia Minor via the west and south, attacked the vassal states who were allies or tributaries of the Hittites, ending up at Cyprus, Cilicia, Carchemish and Ugarit. But there is no trace of them to be found in the Anatolian interior, notably at the excavations at Bogaskoy. A further detail is that the Hittite king, before succumbing in this mysterious way, had defeated the Peoples of the Sea, with the aid of boats from Ugarit, in a naval battle off Cyprus. But that does not rule out the possibility that afterwards, by cutting the Hittite kingdom off from the sea and its vassals, the invaders may have dealt it a mortal blow. Neither were the Phrygians from Thrace (another negative finding) directly responsible for the fall of the Hatti. Like the Dorians in Greece, they arrived on the plateaux of Anatolia after the almost-simultaneous destruction of the great Hittite cities.

  Moving on then, there are at least two hypotheses. Claude Schaeffer does not accept that some invader deliberately burnt down all the public and private buildings of Hattusha (Bogasköy), Kanesh (Kültepe) and Alaça Höyük. ‘Is it likely’, he writes, ‘that a conqueror of the capital city and the other contemporary urban centres of Hittite Anatolia would have derived any advantage from consigning to the flames not only the palaces and fortifications but all the private dwellings in towns which he intended to occupy?’ The letters found in Ugarit and Bogaskoy seem to him to prove that the Hittite Empire collapsed essentially from within, from some central inadequacy, after being weakened by Assyrian attacks, by revolts and defections by its vassals and allies (starting with Ugarit, whose loyalty by the last years of the empire was in some doubt), and lastly by serious drought and famine. The last king, Suppiluliuma II, asked Ugarit to provide a large ship equipped to transport grain to Cilicia from the valley of the Orontes – ‘it is a matter of life and death’, he wrote – plus ‘all the available boats in the country’ to transport the king, his family, his court and his army.

  So by this stage Suppiluliuma had probably already abandoned the capital. Why? Probably, according to Schaeffer, because of repeated famines caused by drought and the devastation of his kingdom by violent seismic shocks: evidence of such shocks throughout the second millennium has come from excavations in Turkey. The Anatolian region of Turkey is an unstable zone with frequent earthquakes, and these could also cause fires to break out. At the time when the Hittite cities were being destroyed and consumed by fire, the archaeological level contemporary with Ugarit was itself, according to Schaeffer, disrupted by some extremely violent earthquakes. Other specialists, however, hold to the theory that there was some form of human intervention, a ‘foreign’ invasion, which might perhaps have joined up with the human tide formed by the Peoples of the Sea on the move in the south.

  The end of Mycenaean civilization is equally mysterious. In the thirteenth century BC it was still very healthy. It was based on a densely settled population, large cities, a wide-ranging network of outposts and flourishing trading relations. The only worrying sign was that all the cities on the Greek mainland were reinforcing their defences and building huge walls around them. On the Acropolis in Athens – which was once a Mycenaean town – the Pelargicon wall dates back to these defensive works, dictated either by prudence or by fear. In the citadels of both Athens and Mycenae, wells dug to a gigantic depth have been found, going right down to underground springs: the besieged city-dwellers would thus be able to drink water drawn from under the feet of their enemies. A huge wall was also built across the Corinth Isthmus, a sort of miniature Great Wall of China (some of it still remains in the south-east part of the isthmus). All this is revealing: the Mycenaean cities felt themselves to be under threat. They were certainly rivals amongst themselves (tradition tells of a war between Argos and Thebes), but some common danger seems to have been looming over them.

  We know that in about 1230 the palaces were destroyed for good, in Mycenae, Pylos and Tiryns, where the skeletons of the defenders have been found under the walls under a mass of burned debris. We know that entire regions were abandoned. So what became of theMycenaeans? Per Alin (in 196Z) tried to trace them across the Greek mainland, by following a trail of pottery in the IIIC style, which became established just after the fall of the palaces. So one might conclude that many Mycenaeans took refuge in the mountains of the north coast of the Peloponnese (which kept the name of Achaea) and that they continued to occupy Attica, whose population and prosperity seem actually to have increased after the destruction of the palaces; that a very few of them remained in Euboea and Boeotia; and that they almost universally deserted the centre of Mycenaean civilization, Argos, southern Messenia, Laconia. Several islands in the southern Aegean were also completely abandoned. In Crete, the local people took to the mountains. These were former Minoans, since their descendants in the classical period were still speaking a non-Greek language in the east of the island and are known as ‘Aeteo-Cretans’, in other words ‘true Cretans’. Other islands however, such as Cephalonia on the west coast, or Rhodes, Kos, Kalmos and Cyprus (which seems to have been occupied by the Mycenaeans after an armed attack), all of them former trading centres, received larger contingents of Mycenaeans. They seem to have settled in Cilicia under the name of Dananiyim (Danaoi).

  Who was behind these flights and emigrations? Who destroyed the great Mycenaean palaces? Who can it have been if not the Dorians?

  There are two possible theories about this as well. The first suggests that there was an Indo-European invasion before that of the Dorians: the invaders might have been those ‘Greek’ peasant populations who had been living for some time on the north-eastern and north-western frontiers of the Mycenaean world, in Macedonia, from where the Mycenaeans imported their pottery, or in Epirus where tombs unlike those at Mycenae (and of a type that later spread through Greece in the Dorian period) had existed since the thirteenth century BC. Bronze armour of Mycenaean origin has been found there. In that case, as Sinclair Hood has remarked, the Mycenaeans would have been defeated with their own weapons (just as the Germanic tribes defeated the Romans using Roman weapons). For we know now that neither this first wave of invaders (if it existed), nor the Dorian wave, possessed iron weapons – as was once believed. The ‘black metal’ did appear in the Aegean towards the end of the thirteenth century, but it came in from the East, via Anatolia. Nor did the newcomers bring the practice of cremating the dead, which also came from Asia Minor.

  If there really was a pre-Dorian invasion, that would solve at a stroke all the problems relating to the destruction of the Mycenaean centres. But we can only guess at this, for want of a better explanation, and it raises in turn other problems which even supporters of the theory such as Vincent Desborough (The Last Mycenaeans and Their Successors, 1964) cannot resolve. Firstly, this warlike raid has left no traces anywhere: in many instances there was no damage, and in any case, there is no trail of unusual objects such as would indicate the passage of foreigners. It is impossible to chart the itinerary of the invaders – something which would help us discover
their origin. And there is no sign of them at their destination either: where on earth can they have settled? Most of the Mycenaean sites were simply abandoned and lay deserted for a long time, without being destroyed by human hands. The palaces were pulled down, but the towns remained standing. They were, however, deserted and the population left them for some new destination, as we noted earlier, for reasons which remain totally mysterious. Can we really believe there was an invasion, when Desborough himself concludes: ‘We have no evidence of any settlement. The natural and logical answer is that the invaders did not settle in any of the zones they conquered, but moved on.’ Rhys Carpenter simply concludes that ‘there were no invaders’. His hypothesis is that some natural, possibly climatic, calamity must have occurred. I am inclined to agree with him, having noted myself long ago the extraordinary historical consequences which may follow a change in the climate in an area like the Mediterranean, in an age when agricultural life still dominated the entire economy.

  The climate or the ‘return of the Heraclidae’. We might bear in mind a remark reported in Plato’s Timaeus, supposedly made by an Egyptian priest in conversation with Solon: the climate inclines periodically either towards rain or towards drought, bringing with it ‘at wide spaced and regular intervals’ a kind of ‘sickness’ in which either water or fire destroys everything. On this particular occasion, ‘the deviation of the bodies turning in the heavens’ had unleashed the chain of disasters associated with drought. This language is not so far removedfrom that of today’s meteorologists, who think that there are oscillations in the climate, and that there are movements extending over several centuries, possibly related to sunspots or the circulation of the atmosphere.

  Every summer in the Aegean, the system of Aetesian winds becomes established. These blow from north-north-west towards Egypt and the African coast. If the sea-crossing from Crete or Rhodes to Egypt was so easy, it was thanks to this wind which blew uninterruptedly for months on end: an absolutely dry wind, blowing out of a clear sky, but raising crests of foam on the waves, and sufficiently strong, if you are island-hopping on a windy day, to slow down the little Greek ferries of our own century. It is the apparent move northwards of the sun in summer which causes the development of this relentless and well-established system of winds. It brings drought with it and affects the Middle East, including Greece and the islands, between March and September. In autumn, the dry winds usually make way for rain from the ocean, carried on the west wind.

  Rhys Carpenter’s theory is that the last decades of the thirteenth century BC saw a persistent phase of drought in the Mediterranean reach a peak. This considerably extended the duration of the Aetesian winds and the zone over which they blew.

  Let us follow Carpenter’s hypothesis, though of course there is no evidence for it. But if it is correct, the Hittites, Mycenaeans and Peoples of the Sea were all victims not of some human aggression but of a drought lasting year after year, extending the summer months, drying up the crops, as the volcanic fall-out of Thera had once done. The cities of Mycenae perished in this long-drawn-out crisis because they were in a particularly dry zone, as was the plateau of Anatolia. They were simply abandoned. If the palaces were sacked and burned that was because they held stores of foodstuffs levied from the toil of the peasants, whom hunger drove to revolt and pillage. And it so happens that the grain store in the palace of Mycenae was the first building to be destroyed.

  What lends credence to this hypothesis is the geographical spread of the abandoned areas and the zones chosen as a refuge by the Mycenaean population. In a time of drought, any precipitation coming in from the Atlantic only benefits west-facing coasts and hills: the windward mountains of western Greece; the northern zones, which mostly escape the curse of the hot dry winds; regions like Attica in the east, at the natural mouth of the Gulf of Corinth which (according to navigational charts) attracts ‘stormy depressions from May to July or in September and October’; plus a few islands unprotected from the incoming rain: Rhodes and Cyprus. Crete, where the mountains run east-west, is less well placed. Plains cut off from the west by high mountains, or islands in the Aegean in the lee of the great Greek peninsula, would be particularly drought-prone. And these regions were in fact all abandoned. Where did the emigrants from Mycenae settle? In Achaea on the edge of the Gulf of Corinth; in northern Messenia and Epirus in western Greece; in favoured Attica, and the islands of Cephalonia in the west, Rhodes and Cyprus in the east, Thessaly and Macedonia in the north. In other words, the geography of rainfall fits the geography of Mycenaean dispersal.

  In this light, what we refer to as the Dorian invasion, and what Greek legend describes as the return of the Heraclidae escorted by the Dorians, may take on a new meaning. The Heraclidae, sons and descendants of Herakles, were probably Mycenaeans from Argos. Tradition has it that they left the Peloponnese after defeat in war and on orders from the oracle at Delphi, and voluntarily went into exile to Epirus, the Pindus mountains, Thessalonia and Macedonia. They returned about a hundred years later, accompanied by Dorian shepherds and soldiers under their orders. Finding their homeland virtually uninhabited, they had little difficulty resettling there. It was equally easy for the Mycenaean inhabitants of Attica, who had never left, to defend their lands against a Dorian invasion. Did these migrations lead to the diffusion of Mycenaean epics, including the story of the Trojan war? It is certainly possible: the oral tradition which led to the writings of Homer took shape at about this time.

  What can be stated with certainty, from the archaeological evidence, is that this return of the northerners spread a form of art known as ‘geometric’: recent excavations indicate that this originated in Thessaly rather than Attica. A hundred years of exile had turned the former Mycenaeans into authentic Dorian peasants and they brought back with them this rustic form of pottery. A more serious effect of their exile was that they seem to have forgotten the art of writing in theinterval. But they had not forgotten their origins. The kings of Sparta knew they were not Dorians but Heraclidae – and centuries later the dynasty of kings of Macedonia, including Alexander the Great, claimed to be descended from Herakles.

  The intractable problem of the Peoples of the Sea would – if thisversion of the Mycenaean drama is correct – become a lot clearer.

  This was a long-drawn-out episode, since the Egyptian records in r 225 BC describe these Peoples of the Sea as being allied to the Libyans, their worrying neighbours who were invading the western delta of the Nile. Among them were Lycians, and some ethnic groups which may correspond (according to the names given them by the Egyptians) to the future Sardinians and Etruscans, as well as Achaeans and Mycenaeans. Were the latter the people whom the Egyptian texts describe as ‘of great stature, with tall white bodies, fair hair and blue eyes’? The battle was a tough but decisive one. Thousands of prisoners remained in the hands of Egyptians, and the bloody booty of the war included heaps of the severed hands and genitals of their slaughtered enemies. This drama occurred very shortly after the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces; it happened in Egypt, a country well known to the seafarers of Argos; and the incomers were allied to the Libyans, a people who, if there had been serious drought, would automatically have migrated towards the Nile. We might therefore imagine that some Mycenaean seafarers, having been suddenly deprived of their usual trades, turned pirate.

  A few decades later, danger loomed again for Egypt, just as it was emerging from a long crisis of authority and thus of military might: the profession of soldier which by its hardships turned a man into ‘an old worm-eaten block of wood’ had become a despised occupation. The new pharaoh, Ramses III, enrolled Libyan mercenaries branded with red-hot iron, and sailors press-ganged from the Syrian coast. These were prudent precautions, since the raid launched by the mixed Peoples of the Sea, whom the last Ugarit documents (1200 BC) show as based in Cyprus and Cilicia, would reach Carchemish and unfurl southwards, destroying Ugarit on the way. Sailing ships from the ‘islands of the Great Green Sea’ (an expression whic
h probably covered the whole of the Aegean, including the mainland coasts) accompanied these overland convoys which followed the shoreline, men, women and children and all their wordly goods travelling in ox-carts. In 1180, Egypt inflicted two bloody defeats on these people, one at sea, probably just off the Delta, and the other on land, in Syria, probably in the Hala plain north of Tripoli.

  Although the Egyptian victory was uncontested, it did not settle the problem for good. It seems that Ramses III eventually had to allow ‘some of the Peoples of the Sea to settle as colonists and mercenaries in the Delta’. As for the Philistines, with or without the pharaoh’s consent, they settled in the land to which they would give their name – Palestine – which they had to defend against the Hebrews. So according to the traditional accounts, the terrible Peoples of the Sea vanish at a stroke into the oubliettes of history. The cities of Syria which had not been occupied were saved by Egypt and later recovered their prosperity – except for Ugarit. But Egypt, although victorious, had lost for good its Asian empire.

  Who were these desperate people? They were certainly a mixture of ethnic groups, as they had been on the occasion of the invasion of the Delta. Among them were the ‘Dananiyim’ of Cilicia, alongside the Ahijjiva and Purasati – in other words Achaeans and Philistines, the latter possibly from the north, although the biblical account, curiously, has them coming from Crete. It seems abundantly clear that some Mycenaeans were still playing a part in this migration, but this time it was those who had been settled rather precariously for about twenty years in Cilicia and Cyprus. We may imagine that they were accompanied by other groups, either driven on by the drought which had ruined their fields or expelled from good agricultural land by a stronger enemy. The Hittites disappear from our view along with the tablets of Bogaskdy and Ugarit. But we later find a neo-Hittite civilization installed, as it happens, not on the plateau but to the south of the Taurus and the Anti-Taurus and in the plains of northern Syria, at the foot of the mountains which provided water, in regions which had once been vassals of the empire. Did the vassals simply have to move over to make room for emigrants from the plateau, or were they expelled and forced to join the populations on the move? The Peoples of the Sea were very probably a mixture of various groups driven on to the road by famine. An Egyptian inscription seems to offer a fittingaccount of the origins of this explosion: ‘The islands shook, and vomited forth their nations all at once’.