A Perfect Storm Of Calamities?

The origin of the Sea Peoples and the Catastrophe at the end of the Late Bronze Age such as the destruction of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, ca. 1180 BC, are unknown.

Earthquakes

Claude Schaeffer, was the original excavator of Ugarit. He thought that an earthquake caused the final destruction of the city, for he found visible indications that an earthquake had rocked the city in the distant past.

Photographs from Schaeffer’s excavations, for example, show long stone walls knocked off kilter, which is one of the hallmarks of earthquake damage.6

However, current thinking on the subject puts the date of this earthquake at Ugarit at 1250 BC or a bit thereafter. Moreover, because there are signs of restoration activities in the decades between the earthquake and the final demise of the city, it is now thought that the quake only damaged the city and did not completely destroy it.7

It is, admittedly, frequently difficult to distinguish between a city destroyed by an earthquake and a city destroyed by humans and warfare. However, there are several markers that characterize a destructive earthquake and which can be noted by archaeologists during excavations. These include collapsed, patched, or reinforced walls; crushed skeletons, or bodies found lying under fallen debris; toppled columns lying parallel to one another; slipped keystones in archways and doorways; and walls leaning at impossible angles or offset from their original position.8 In contrast, a city destroyed during warfare will usually have weapons of various sorts within the destruction debris. At the site of Aphek, in Israel, for example, which was destroyed toward the end of the thirteenth century BC, the excavators found arrowheads stuck in the walls of the buildings, just as there are in Troy VIIA.9

Thanks to recent research by archaeoseismologists, it is now clear that Greece, as well as much of the rest of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, was struck by a series of earthquakes, beginning about 1225 BC and lasting for as long as fifty years, until about 1175 BC. The earthquake at Ugarit identified and described by Schaeffer was not an isolated event; it was just one of many such quakes that occurred during this time period. Such a series of earthquakes in antiquity is now known as an “earthquake storm,” in which a seismic fault keeps “unzipping” by unleashing a series of earthquakes over years or decades until all the pressure along the fault line has been released.

In the Aegean, earthquakes probably struck during this time period at Mycenae, Tiryns, Midea, Thebes, Pylos, Kynos, Lefkandi, the Menelaion, Kastanas in Thessaly, Korakou, Profitis Elias, and Gla. In the Eastern Mediterranean, earthquake damage dating to this period is also visible at numerous sites, including Troy, Karaoglun, and Hattusa in Anatolia; Ugarit, Megiddo, Ashdod, and Akko in the Levant; and Enkomi on Cyprus.11 And, just as people are killed during the collapse of buildings and are buried in the rubble when an earthquake hits a populated area today, so too at least nineteen bodies of people killed in these ancient earthquakes have been found during excavations at the devastated Late Bronze Age cities. At Mycenae, for example, the skeletons of three adults and a child were found in the basement of a house two hundred meters north of the citadel, where they had been crushed beneath fallen stones during an earthquake. Similarly, in a house built on the west slope of the ridge north of the Treasury of Atreus, the skeleton of a middleaged woman whose skull had been crushed by a falling stone was found in the doorway between the main room and the front room. At Tiryns, the skeletons of a woman and a child were found buried by the collapsed walls of Building X inside the Acropolis; two other human skeletons were found near the fortification walls, where they had been killed and then covered by debris falling from the walls. Similarly, at nearby Midea, other skeletons were found, including one of a young girl in a room near the East Gate, whose skull and backbone were smashed under fallen stones.12

However, we must concede that although these earthquakes undoubtedly caused severe damage, it is unlikely that they alone were sufficient to cause a complete collapse of society, especially since some of the sites were clearly reoccupied and at least partially rebuilt afterward. Such was the case at Mycenae and Tiryns, for example, although they never again functioned at the level that they had achieved prior to the destruction.13

Thus, we must look elsewhere for a different, or perhaps complementary, explanation for the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.

Climate Change, Drought, And Famine

The Sea Peoples may have begun their migrations because of climate change, particularly in the form of drought, resulting in famine. Although theories formulated by archaeologists frequently reflect the era, decade, or even the year in which they are publishing, such hypotheses regarding the effects of possible climate change at the end of the second millennium BC predate by several decades our current preoccupation with climate change.

For example, drought was long the favored explanation of earlier scholars for the movement of the Sea Peoples out of the regions of the Western Mediterranean and into the lands to the east. They postulated that a drought in northern Europe had pressured the population to migrate down into the Mediterranean region, where they displaced the inhabitants of Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy, and perhaps those in the Aegean as well.

If this occurred, it might have initiated a chain reaction that culminated in the movement of peoples far away in the Eastern Mediterranean. For examples of droughts initiating large-scale human migrations, one need only look back to the United States of the 1930s and the drought that caused the infamous “Dust Bowl,” which led to a huge migration of families from Oklahoma and Texas to California.

This type of migration is frequently referred to as “push-pull,” with negative conditions in the home area pushing the inhabitants out and positive conditions in the area of destination beckoning or pulling the new migrants in that direction. To these, as the British archaeologist Guy Middleton has pointed out, may be added the categories of “stay” and “ability”: the factors contributing to the desire to stay at home after all, and the factors regarding the ability to actually migrate, including knowledge of sailing, passable routes, and so on.14

Perhaps the most famous of the arguments in favor of a drought as an influential factor in the demise of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean was put forth fully fifty years ago, in the mid1960s, by Rhys Carpenter, a professor of archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. He published a very short but extremely influential book in which he argued that the Mycenaean civilization had been brought down by a prolonged drought that had severely affected the Mediterranean and Aegean regions. He based his arguments on what appeared to be a rather dramatic drop in population on mainland Greece following the end of the Bronze Age.

However, subsequent archaeological surveys and excavations have shown that the population decrease was not nearly as dramatic as Carpenter had thought. Instead, there was a shift in population to other areas of Greece during the Iron Age, which may have had little to do with a possible drought. And so Carpenter’s ingenious theory has now fallen by the wayside, although perhaps it should be resurrected in light of new data (see below).16