World History in a Year (Week 18): 1100s BC
The broad pattern of this century is the decline and fall of states and empires in the eastern hemisphere, and the rise of those in the Americas.
The most famous event of the century is the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the eastern Mediterranean. I am greatly indebted to historian Bret Devereaux’s recent blog post for bringing together the different elements of this, and I will be heavily relying on it for my description here.
The most dramatic period of the Late Bronze Age Collapse happened over about the last two decades of the 1200s and the first two of the 1100s BC. States in the western Mediterranean had already stretched their resources to their limits in fighting wars at increasing scale and frequency, and a period of lower rainfall and crop failures tipped things over the edge. This also created a crisis of state legitimacy, because making sure crop failures didn't happen by making sacrifices to the gods was a principal role of the monarch. The impacts were worst in areas, like Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant, that relied on rainfall for agriculture. The Mycenaean state collapsed violently, with the destruction of most of its cities from internal forces (peasant revolts and spiralling internal conflicts). Its fall was so complete that the Linear B script was lost; writing vanished from Greece for centuries. The Hittites, in the same period, fell to raids from non-state peoples from northern Anatolia.
The Mycenaeans and Anatolians and Levantine peoples were seafaring, and when their states collapsed, sizeable armed populations (as well as unarmed populations) took to the seas. This created an expanding network of conflict that destroyed some Levantine cities and challenged Egypt (hence the “sea peoples”). One portion of Mycenaeans settled in the southern Levant: these were the Philistines. Which, in a massive irony, means that the English word ‘philistine’, meaning ‘an uncultured person’, is referring to the guys from the Iliad and Odyssey. It also means that in the Biblical story of David and Goliath, Goliath’s challenge of a battle-deciding single combat resembling one in the Iliad is not coincidental: this is David taking out an equivalent of Ajax with a slingshot.
And on that note, Israelite culture, inland from the Philistines in the hill country, also dates from around this time. There are visible cultural differences – the Philistines kept pigs, the Israelites did not – but archaeologists have not found any evidence of the Exodus and tend to regard the Israelites as local to the region.
Egypt and Mesopotamia, with their river valleys, were less affected by the reduced rainfall, but suffered from both the expanding conflict and instability and from the collapse of their trade routes. Egypt would hang on in a weakened state until the next century. In the east, Babylon and Elam took each other out: the Elamites invaded and destroyed the power of Kassite Babylon around 1155 BC, followed by a resurgent Babylon under non-Kassite rulers (including Nebuchadnezzar I, notably the less famous Nebuchadnezzar vs the later Nebuchadnezzar II of the Bible) destroying Elam before collapsing. These conflicts are also why a lot of ancient Mesopotamian artefacts (including the Code of Hammurabi!) were discovered at sites in Iran, where Elam was centred: the Elamites carried off a lot of loot.
The Late Bronze Age Collapse was basically the reason for the Iron Age. Bronze required copper and tin, which were generally found in different places, relying on long-distance trade. With the collapse of many states and of international trade networks, there was far less capacity to create bronze. Iron was much more common and could be found locally, but was lower-quality unless it was combined with a small amount of carbon to make steel. Over the centuries following the Late Bronze Age Collapse, people gradually figured out how to do this consistently.
The power of the Shang dynasty in China was also declining after its peak in the 1200s BC. Its territory shrunk and its control of outlying areas weakened. Its leadership also appeared to become more rigid. Oracle bones for divination, as mentioned last week, had previously been structured by writing “The king should do x” on one side and “the king should not do x” on the other side, or “x will happen” vs “x will not happen”. In this period, the bones only had “the king should do x” written on them, suggesting the rulers did not want negative responses.
In contrast to events in Asia, in the Americas the power of the Olmec capital of San Lorenzo was rising. The famous massive stone heads (ranging from 1.6m to 2.8m tall, or 5 to 9 feet), probably portraits of rulers, started being carved around this time. They were made of basalt brought from the Tuxtla Mountains, 60km from San Lorenzo, involving substantial investment in transportation whether by river or overland.
The monumental heads have been noted as having headgear similar to depictions of Mesoamerican ball players, and a preserved rubber ball from this period found near San Lorenzo shows that the ball game was part of Olmec culture at this time. The existence of ball courts at other places (for example on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast) prior to this period suggests the growth of common cultural elements across Mesoamerica.
Other monumental stone carvings at San Lorenzo included large rectangular thrones, and substantial bas-relief images of deities; smaller carvings in valuable stones such as jade were also common. The upper classes were literally upper, living on the top of the artificial platform mound at San Lorenzo’s core, while the lower classes lived on terraces further down or on the surrounding forest floor. One estimate places San Lorenzo at 2.7 sq miles in size and having a population of 10,000, but the degree to which the population can be accurately estimated is disputed.
Villages and towns existed in other areas of Mesoamerica at this period, though at a much smaller scale than San Lorenzo, and this is a good time to introduce a map of the region.
The blue area in the map below is the Olmec heartlands on the Gulf Coast.
The green area is the valley of Oaxaca to the south, the Zapotec area; its main settlement at this time, and for around the next half-century, was San José Mogote, which was strongly influenced by the Olmecs.
The yellow area to the northwest is the Basin of Mexico. One of the notable settlements there at this time was Tlatilco, with its own distinctive art styles. Later in history this region would be one to the city of Teotihuacán, and even later the Toltecs and the Aztecs).
The orange area to the east, covering the Yucutan, Belize, Guatemala, parts of Honduras and El Salvador, and the border regions of Mexico, was the region of the Maya. In general, in the southern interior (but not yet to the Atlantic coast) was a highland area, while north of that and through the Yucutan were lowland areas.
A new power was also emerging in Peru: this time not in the coastal lowlands, but in the Andean highlands. This was the city of Chavín de Huantár. It has a complex archaeological background. For a long time it has been recognized as a major religious and cultural centre of the period from around 800 to 400 BC, with pilgrims coming from far around, and art styles that are repeated from throughout the region in that period. However, recent research has found that its main monument, a large and elaborate temple, was built not during that period, but over the course of several centuries before, beginning in the 1100s BC and running to the 800s BC. As best I can tell, it appears that the city itself was largest (reaching a few thousand people) after that time, in around 800-400 BC, and that is also the period when its cultural reach in the rest of Peru was widest.
