Chapter One

THE CATASTROPHE AND ITS CHRONOLOGY

THE END of the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age, in the twelfthcentury B.C., was one of history's most frightful turning points. Forthose who experienced it, it was a calamity. In long retrospect,

however, the episode marked a beginning rather than an end, the "dawntime" in which people in Israel, Greece, and even Rome sought their ori-gins. In certain respects that assessment is still valid, for the Age of Ironstands much closer to our own than does the world of the Bronze Age. Themetallurgical progress-from bronze to iron-was only the most tangibleof the innovations. More significant by far were the development andspread of alphabetic writing, the growth of nationalism, of republicanpolitical forms, of monotheism, and eventually of rationalism. These andother historic innovations of the Iron Age have been frequently noted andcelebrated.

The bleaker objective of the present book will be a close look at thenegative side. In many places an old and complex society did, after all,come to an end ca. 1200 B.C. In the Aegean, the palace-centered world thatwe call Mycenaean Greece disappeared: although some of its glories wereremembered by the bards of the Dark Age, it was otherwise forgotten untilarchaeologists dug it up. The loss in Anatolia was even greater. The Hittiteempire had given to the Anatolian plateau a measure of order and prosper-ity that it had never known before and would not see again for a thousandyears. In the Levant recovery was much faster, and some important BronzeAge institutions survived with little change; but others did not, and every-where urban life was drastically set back. In Egypt the Twentieth Dynastymarked the end of the New Kingdom and almost the end of pharaonicachievement. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean the twelfth centuryB.C. ushered in a dark age, which in Greece and Anatolia was not to lift formore than four hundred years. Altogether the end of the Bronze Age wasarguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous thanthe collapse of the western Roman Empire.1

The end or transformation of Bronze Age institutions is obviously atopic of enormous dimensions. From the modern perspective it is the disap-pearance of many of these centuries-old forms that gives the years ca. 1200

1 For the comparison see Fernand Braude1, "L'Aube," in Braudel, ed., La Mediterranee:l'espace et l'histoire (Paris, 1977), 82-86. In Braudel's words, "la Mediterranee orientale, auxii- siecle avant J.-c., retourne au plan zero, ou presque, de I'histoire."

2W"M m. F. Edgerton d

edinet Hab" an John Wils 'plate 46 u, Volumes 1 on, HIstorical R da c " ' ; Breasted, AR I and lJ, Translated w· h eCor s of Ramses 111: The Texts in(D~bu In W. A. Ward ;n~oM4, nos. 59-82. Leona:~ HExPlanat~ry Notes (Chicago, 1936),tem I que, 1992), 151-56 h' S. Joukowsky, eds Th CLesko, Egypt m the 12th Centurythat the,that Ramesses III ' as argued that this ins"cr' e, rtSIS Years: The 12th Century B.C.

e even d appropr' d' IptlOn was < Mof R ts escribed' , late It for his cut lor erneptah's mortuaryamesse III 10 It occu d ' own temple M d'

could hardt . But the Swath of rre In t?e eighth year of M at e met Habu, and thereforestanding y have taken place d destructIon through "A e;,neptah (1205 a.c.) rather than, at the a unng M mor that th' " 'Inscripti Ccession of Q erneptah's re" e mscrIptlOn mentIOnson attrib Ueen y, Ign, SInce th L ' " . 'campaign h Utes to the E ,wosret. In add't' e evantme cItIes were stili

t at M gyptla h I Ion the d < ' ,erneptah cI ' n p araoh is ~ elenSlve posture that thISaimed to h not easIly 'Iave conduct d ' reconcl ed with the offensive

e In the hSout ern Levant.

3 On the high chronology Ramesses II's accession year was 1304 B.C., on the middlechronology 1290. The high chronology has been generally abandoned by specialists. The lowchronology was effectively advocated by E. F. Wente and C. C. Van Siclen, "A Chronology ofthe New Kingdom," in J. H. Johnson and E. F. Wente, eds" Studies in Honor of George R.Hughes (Chicago, 1976),217-61. For other arguments see Paul Astrom, ed., High, Middle,or Low? Acts of an International Colloquium on Absolute Chronology Held at the Universityof Gothenburg 20th-22d August 1987 (Goteborg, 1987).

4 K. A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II (Warminster,

1982),207.5 The confusion, at once the bane and the delight of Egyptologists, was much c1ari6ed by

Alan Gardiner, "Only One King Siptah and Twosre Not His Wife," lEA 44 (1958): 12-22.

4 I TROOUCTIO r

B.C. their ext di. h raor mary import .WIt that topic only in pa in ance. l~ this bO?k, however, I shall dealConcrete: the phy ical de tructi My ubJ~et here ISmuch more limitedandt~~t although the phy ical de t on ~f clue and palaces. One might objectClUes and I ruction was trag' £ h. pa ace in que tion " . lC or t e occupants oftheent~lled the collapse and disai 10 It elf it need not and should not haver~zmg ~f Athens in 480 B C :pe~rance of Bronze Age civilization. The

dt.e Penclean city and thO"ba er. a I, cleared the ground for the templesoftreed b ' e urnmg of R '. y y an unprecedented b orne 10 387 B.C. was followed

sacking f " ursr of Roma 'o cmes ca. 1200 n expansIOn. But although thepearan f B.C. was not a s ffi ' , .C

ce 0 Bronze Age "J" u cient condition for the disap-anaan . C1VIrzanon in G A '

h' It Was certainly a n reece, natolia, and southern

t at I shall th J: ecessary conditio I' h d. erelOre try to . I . ,n. tIS t e estruction ofsites~penod of forty or fifty exp am, and this topic is itself enormous. Within

Mte ~elfth century alm~etars at th~ en.d of the thirteenth and beginningofedlter severy signif ., ranean world w d cant city or palace in the eastern

again as estroyed m f h: ' any 0 r em never to be occupiedThis destruction-which

~hatashtroPhe"-I shall revie h~reafter I shall refer to simply as "theat owev . w rn some der '1' hth '. er, It will be useful thaI 10 c apter 2. Before doinge penod i hi 0 tread 0 hlook E n w Ich the Catastro h k ur way c ronologically through

is E to, gypt, since the only p ~ too. place. For a chronology we mustgyptlan hi narratlve hlstor done d istory, Most schol y we can write for this perio

ocument ars would agr h h . 1Ram ary SOurceon th C ee t at t ere survIves at eastesses III p e atastrophe d h' . .,This is th ut upon the wall of his ,an t at lSan InSCnptlOnthat

Rame Ie famous text acco ~ortuary temple at Medinet Habu.sses II cel b ' mpamed by' . 1 1 h hhis eighth e ,rates the victor th h plctona re iefs, in w ic

enemy h Jear.2 Smce Ramesses X I at e won over the "Sea Peoples" inassumptt ahlreadyravaged Hatti eAclarehs.that before attacking Egypt the

on t at th" ,as la and A " blSome of th d e mscnption fu . h' mor, It lS a reasona ee estru . rms es a ter .ctlOn attested' h mmus ante quem for at leastm t ese places.

THE CATASTROPHE AND ITS CHRONOLOGY 5

Dates for the reign of Ramesses III depend on the accession year chosenfor Ramesses II, the illustrious predecessor whose name the young kingadopted; and in this study I shall follow the "low" chronology that nowseems to be accepted by most Egyptologists. On this chronology, Ramessesthe Great ruled from 1279 to 1212, accounting-all by himself-for mostof the Nineteenth Dynasty." When the old king finally died, close to the ageof ninety, he was succeeded by his oldest surviving son, his thirteenth,Merneptah. The latter was, at his accession, "a portly man already in hissixties."4 As king, Merneptah lived another ten or eleven years and was inturn succeeded by one of his sons, either Seti II (whom Merneptah haddesignated as his successor) or Amenmesse. At any rate, Seti gained thethrone not long after Merneptah's death.

For the first time in decades, Egypt was not ruled by an old man. But themiddle-aged Seti II had an unexpectedly short reign. After ruling only sixyears, Seti died, leaving the succession in some confusion.s His principalwife had been Twosret, but the pair had no surviving son. In the event,Seti's nominal successor was Siptah, who was still a child or adolescent.Although Siptah was evidently the son of Seti, his mother was not Twosretbut Tio, one of his father's secondary wives, and Siptah must have owed hiselevation to the exertions of powerful mentors. Twosret survived the boy,and she herself ruled as pharaoh for at least two years, being only the fourthwoman in almost two millennia of Egyptian history to reach the throne.During the reigns of Siptah and Twosret (a period of at least eight years), thepower behind the throne seems to have been Bay, a Syrian who had risen tobecome "Great Chancellor of the Entire Realm." With the death of Twosret(the circumstances in which any of these people died are unknown), a manof uncertain origin, Setnakhte, drove "the Syrian" from his position asking-maker and established himself as king. Thus ended the NineteenthDynasty and began the Twentieth. Although Setnakhte ruled for only twoyears, Egypt was fortunate that the upstart had a son as capable as himself:this was the young Ramesses III, who faced the Catastrophe and survivedto describe it.

11 For a <\iscussion of all the evidence on the end of IIIB and the beginning of mc see PeterWarren and ';ronwy Hankey, Aegean Bronze Age Chronology (Bristol, 1989), 158-62. Themost important synchronism comes from a faience vase with Twosret's cartouche found in ashrine at Deir 'Alia (ancient Succoth), along with a range of LH IIlB pottery. Warren andHankey note that the pots were not heirlooms but functional vessels in the service of thesanctuary. The authors adopt Kitchen's slightly later dates for the last rulers of the NineteenthDynasty and so conclude (p. 161) that "we may place the boundary between IIlB and mc c.1185/80 BC, the time of Tewosret or a few years later,"

6 INTRODUCTION

N.Although the regnal dates for Ramesses III, his father and theirIneteenbth-Dynas~ypredecessors cannot be precisely fixed, the following

seem to e approximately correct-s '

Nineteenth DynastyRamessesII 1279-1212 B.C.

Merneptah 1212-1203 B.C.

Amenmesse 1203-1202 B.C.

Seti II 1202-1196Siptah 1196-1190 B.C.

B.C.Twosrer 1190-1188Ii B.C.

wentieth DynastySetnakhte 1188-1186R B.C.

amessesIII 1186-1155 B.C.

On this reckoning the terminthe crucial eighth' f R us ante quem for much of the Catastrophe-enough ith year 0 amesses III-will be 1179 B C That fits well

Wit a recently di d ..Euphrates down t f. scovere tablet indicating that Emar (on the

, ' s ream rom Carche . h) f 11 . h 'shlpak, king of Bab I 70 ,mls e In t e second year of Mehk-Emar must have beyon. k dn}.A. Bnnkman's Mesopotamian chronology,h. . en sac e III the 1180 8 A dit IS tirne at Ras Sha h s. n even more recent rscovery,

Ugarit, began whe m~, sows that the rule of Hammurapi, the last king ofreign of Siptah andQ ern~tah was ruling Egypt and extended into thewas still standing in 11u;~n wosrer.? The synchronism proves that Ugaritbefore 1190.10 B.C., and suggests that the city was not destroyed

THE CATASTROPHE AND ITS CHRONOLOGY 7

The relative chronology supplied by Mycenaean pottery must be fit intothe absolute framework derived from Egypt. It now seems probable thatthe transition from LH IIIB to IIIC pottery occurred no earlier than thereign of Queen Twosret. On the low Egyptian chronology this would meanthat IIIB pottery was still being produced ca. 1190 B.C.l1 Since that is onlya terminus post quem, and since it is likely that a few years elapsed betweenthe last of the IIIB wares and the resumption of pottery making in theArgolid, the earliest IIIC pots probably were not made before ca. 1185. Thedestruction at Tiryns and Mycenae may have occurred shortly beforeRamesses III came to power. A few sites in the Aegean, on the other hand,seem to have been destroyed several decades before the end of the IIIBperiod, evidently while Ramesses the Great still reigned.

Altogether, then, the Catastrophe seems to have begun with sporadicdestructions in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, gathered momen-tum in the 1190s, and raged in full fury in the 1180s. By about 1175 theworst was apparently over, although dreadful things continued to happenthroughout the twelfth century. Let us now take a close look at the physicaldestruction that the Catastrophe entailed.

6 S'sc ince in some cases only a terminus 0

hernes have been proposed a d hPst quem for a monarch's death is available, variousplaced h ' n on t e low h I he accessi '"A anyw ere from 1188 to 1182 B.C C rono o~ t ,e accession of RamessesIlI IS

CChronology of the New K' d . For several pOSSIbIlItIessee Wente and Van Siclen,

hronol ' ing om" and K A ' 'ogy In Relation to the B ' '. Kitchen, "The Basics of Egyptian7 D 'I ronze Age '" A ..52 arne Arnaud, "Les textes d'E ,m strom, ed., High, Middle, or Low? 37-55.

A(1975): 87-92. The tablet dar dmarMetIa chronologie de la fin du Bronze Recent," Syria

rnaud th f e to elik-sln k' ,b

ere ore concludes that I ipa s second year ISa short-term contract;etween th ' , on y a very h ' d

8 B' e wnnng of the COntractand h s ort nrne ("quelques semaines") elapse,nnkman, "Notes on M ,t e destruction of the city.

otheca 0' /' esopotamlan H' ,b M ,rlen~a IS 27 (1970): 306-7. I tstory In the Thirteenth Century B.C.," Bibli-

(J978,)Blerbner, "The Date of the D' am n:'uch mdebted here to the explanations furnished: 136-37 A estructlOn of Ed' 64latest d f . t n. 2, Bierbrier note har " mar an Egyptian Chronology," lEA

9 J ate or year 2 is 1185 ±5 B " stat Professor Brinkman now informs me that hisacques Freu "L .c,

(1988): 395-9' a tablette RS 86.2230 et I 'reign 0 I 8. Tablets found at Ra Ib ' a ,phase finale du royaume d'Ugarit, " SyrIa 65the thrver aPhPedthat of Merneptah a sd hnHam had already established that Hammurapi's

one w en B he " ' n t enewtabl indi 'II10 Ib'd ay, t e Grand Ch II et in icates that Hammurapi was sn onI ., 398 ance or" fo S' h. r Ipta and Queen Twosret, held his office.

------------------------~Chapter Two

THE CATASTROPHE SURVEYED

ANATOLIA

~

EVERY Anatolian site known to have been important in the Late11 F 1Bronze Age the Catastrophe left a destruction leve . igure

shows a wide distribution of places in Asia Minor that ca. 1200B.C. suffered what Kurt Bittel described as a "Brandkatastrophe." Four ofthese sites are within the arc of the Halys River, the heartland of the GreatKingdom of Hatti, and perhaps this region of Anarolia suffered more t~anothers. In the centuries following the Catastrophe the intra-Halys sitesseem to have been occupied only by squatters, and it is safe to say that for along time after 1200 there were no cities in the area. h

Hattusas itself was plundered and burned at the beginning of the twelft. . levelcentury (SlOceno Mycenaean pottery was found in the destruction ,

correlation with Aegean sites is problematic). The excavators found ash,chaned wood, mudbricks, and slag formed when mudbricks meltedf'".:the IOtense heat of the conflagration. The nearby site of Alaca Hoyu ,twenty kilometers to the northeast suffered a similar fate: an ashy destruc-. I I' stion eve extends over the entire excavated surface. Southeast of Hattusa ,the Hittite city at Alishar-protected by a stout wall-was destroyed byfire.

2

A hundred kilometers to the east, at Masat Hoyiik, a palace that hadhelpe~ to anchor the frontier against the Kaskans went up in flamesearly 10 t~e twelfth century. Here some LH lIIB pottery supplies a roughsynchroOIsm.3

Between the Sangarios and the Halys three sites have been excavated, butonly ~ne seems to have been destroyed in the Catastrophe. Gordion andPolarl] have yielded no evidence of destruction but Karaoglan met a fieryand violent end. Skeletal remains of the victims were found on the site." On

I Kurt Bittel surveyed th id . f hi "Dieho

o

I ' e eVI ence on Anatolia at the Zwettl symposium: c. ISarc an oglsche Situ ti 'K!' . d ierJahrhunderte ... S~ I~; rn emaslen urn 1200 v. Chr. und wahrend der nachfolgen en ~~~rend der "D; klAn Ig:1 vDeger-Jalkotzy, ed., Griechenland, die Agais und die Levante uia _

2 r ges ( lenna, 1983),25_47.H. H. von der Osten Th AI' h . 7) 289

J Bittel "K!' . ' e IS ar Huyuk:Seasonsof1930_1932 (Chicago, 193, .' emaslen .. 34 su h b A weshould perhaps 11th' ,ggests t at ecause Ma§at is so distant from the egean 'II

a ow epottery"" N 1190wInot be excluded. elmges achlebens." If so, a date even later than4 Ibid., 31.

• 0 destroyed in the Catastropheo • Major SitesF 1 The Eastern Mediterranean.IGURE •

32. Kadesh33. Qatna34. Hamath35. A1alakh36. Aleppo37. Carchemish38. Emar

16. Tarsus17. Fraktin18. Karaoglan19. Hattusas20. Alaca Hoyuk21. Masat22. Alishar H6yuk23. Norsuntepe24. Tille H6yuk25. Lidar Hoyuk

GREECE

1. Teichos Dymaion2. Pylos3. Nichoria4. The Menelaion5. Tiryns6. Midea7. Mycenae8. Thebes9. Lefkandi

10. Iolkos

SOUTHERN LEVANT

39. Hazor40. Akko41. Megiddo42. Deir'Alla43. Bethel44. Beth Shemesh45. Lachish46. Ashdod47. Ashkelon

CYPRUS

26. Palaeokastro27. Kition28. Sinda29. Enkomi

CRETE

11. Kydonia12. Knossos

ANATOLIA SYRIA

13. Troy 30. Ugarit14. Miletus 31. Tell Sukas 0

15. Mersin h 0 obable but not certain., in the Catastrop e IS pr* At sites in italics destrucnon I

10 INTRODUCTION

the western coast of Anatoli fh . ia a ar more im Lwas t e CIty of Miletus (prob bl M'I portant ate Bronze Age centerte~ts), around which a great w:ll ~a 1 a~a~a, or Milawanda, in Hittite~tletus too seems to have been d s built In. the thirteenth century B.C.SIte may have been desolate f estroyed dunng the LH mc period. Thebefore the beginning of the Pron some tlI~e but was apparently resettled

At the site of HI'S lik ogeometnc period.>VII sar 1 two con .. .a-were destroyed at the end s~cutIve settlements-Troy VIh and Troycities seem to have burned Th da the Bronze Age, and in both cases theare .much disputed but it'. e atel,sfor the destruction of the two levelsfortIfied . d I' IS now ikely th t T Vf

' cita e, which is lik I h a roy I-an impressivelyarnily, its courtiers and w e.y to ave been occupied primarily by a royal

thEethirteenth cent~ry B CarInorhs-£fellsometime during the second half ofo pl' . n tea te h fT

eop e-humbler but sha ' h rrnar 0 that destruction a crowdroy VIh ' nng t e sa' 'b 'I' -moved into the cit d I me material culture as the lords of

but dmg a warren of small h a e, repairing the fortification walls andurned ca 119 ouses. This iry To . . 0 or 1180,6 but t ' CI , roy VIla, was probablyccupled the site (Vllb) throu h ~ survrvors again rebuilt the walls and

g t e twelfth century.

5 The most lucid di .Desborough, The La ISCUSSlonof the evidence on M' "c. 1000 B C (0 c st Mycenaeans and Their S iletus ISstili that provided by Vincent

Hh '. xtord 1964) 1 uccessors, An A hi' let iterreich (V" ' ,62-63. Alth gh .' rc aeo ogtca Surveyc.1200-

said nothing ab~~~U:' :986), discussed at gre~~1 F~tz Schachermeyr, Mykene und das6 Blegen's argu t e hateof Bronze Age Milet engt the Milawata of Hittite sources, he

of th III menu at Troy VI us.e B period is still' was destroyed in the .days generally rega d d Widelyaccepted but his d middle and Troy VIla toward the endchronology and 0 rhe as much too hi~h (BI ~tes-ca. 1275 and ca. 1240-are nowa-

n t e assum . egen s dates b dpresent excavato H .pnon that LH mc b were ase on the high Egyptian1250, and Vila ~a~t11~~arhk, Manfred Korfman~g:: at the end of Merneptah's reign). The(1990): 232. As d i See Korfmann "AI ,ggests that Troy VI was destroyed ca.

note in cha ,tes und Nno earlierthan the rei pter1,itnowappea h eues aus Troia," Das Altertum 36but follows the Egy Ign

lof.Queen Twosret. Eve rfst at the transition to LH mc can be placed

1190 d pto OglStS'10 h n lone accept BI '

h,an ofTroy VI as I w c ronology on Id s egen s analysis of the pottery,

ave co . ate as 1225 B ,e cou date th f II fnvmced several s '. . ut even lower d e a 0 Troy VIla as late as~rguments, see Michael 4;ecl~hsts that VIla was sfl~tes are probable. Studies of the pottery. ~ton, "Has the Trojan ;'0 ,In Search of the Tr I s,~~nding in the mc period. For thetn eed found in VIla I I ar Been Found'" A .olan war (New York 1985) 224' and D.and T eve s th d . ntlqulty 59 (1 ",rad' rloyVI could have be: de estruction date for VII 985): 189. If mc sherds werein ~c~~f the new schemes i~t:stroyed in thelast quart a would be no earlier than ca. U80,Pod~u a~sel, ed., Sudosteuro at of.Christian Podzuwe~tr~f t~e thirteenth century. The mostpotte Welt reanalyzed the pc!:raZWischen 1600 und 1000 Die mykenische Welt und Troja,"Podzry ~as used not only i ery from Troy Vlh and V v. Chr. (Moreland, 1982), 65-88.the s~we~'~ analysis, one wO:I~he VIla settlement but ~Iand concluded that late LH mCof TroyO~1Iaif of the twelfth cen~eed to date the destru:/

oIn the Vlh city. If one accepts

a ell"m die ersten J hry. Podzuweit conclud 10hnof the great city-Troy VI-toa rzente d 1 es t at the h hes 1. Jahrhu d muc umbler settlement

n erts" (p. 83).

THE CATASTROPHE SURVEYED 11

In southeastern Anatolia two important sites-Mersin and Tarsus-were burned during the Catastrophe, and here too there was recovery.Twelfth-century Tarsus was in fact a sizeable city, and a few pieces of LHmc pottery show that it was in sporadic contact with the Aegean. On theheadwaters of the Seyhan River, two miles from the rock reliefs at Fraktin,unknown aggressors destroyed a Hittite town "durch eine grosseBrandkatastrophe," probably after 1190 B.C.(the date depends on a singleLH mC1 stirrup jar found in the destruction debris)." Finally, on the upperEuphrates in eastern Anatolia other centers were burned in the Catastro-phe: the excavations at Lidar Hoyiik (150 kilometers upstream from Car-chemish) and at nearby Tille Hoyiik, as well as those at Noquntepe (on theMurat Nehri, near Elazig) show that the Late Bronze Age structures therewere destroyed in site-wide conflagrations.8

CYPRUS

Bronze Age Cyprus has become very interesting, since archaeological workon the island has in the last thirty years moved at a faster pace than in eitherSyria or Anatolia. The Catastrophe in Cyprus divides Late Cypriote 11fromLC III (LC III is thus contemporary with LH mc in Greece). Recent excava-tions have shown that the LC II period was one of general prosperity.Ashlar masonry, which had been regarded as an innovation of the post-Catastrophe period in Cyprus, now seems to have been employed in civicarchitecture for much of the thirteenth century."

Among the major Cypriote cities that were sacked and burned at the endof LC II were Enkomi Kition and Sinda.10 In fact each of the three sites, 'may-like Troy-have been destroyed twice in the period of a few decades.The old view was that there were two waves of destruction, the first ca.

7 Bittel, "Kleinasien," 31 and 34.8 Harald Hauptmann, Arch. Arz. 1991,351, reports that Lidar Hoyok was destroyed "in

das 1. Viertel des 12. Jhs." On the 1989 salvage excavations at Tille Hoyiik, which discovereda "large burnt building" destroyed c~. 1200 B.C., see S. R. Blaylock, AS 41 (1991): 4-5. On

Nor§untepe see Bittel, "Kleinasien," 33.9 Ashlar blocks have been found in LC II contexts at Ayios Dhimitrios and Palaeokastro.

At Vournes, near Maroni, Gerald Cadogan has found an ashlar building that should be dated"probably to the earlier part of the 13th century." SeeCadogan, "Maroni and the Late BronzeAge of Cyprus," in V. Karageorghis and J. Muhly, Cyprus at the Close of the Late Bronze Age

(Nicosia, 1984), 8.10 James Muhly, "The Role of the Sea\Peoples in Cyprus during the LC I.II Period," in

Karageorghis and Muhly, Cyprus, 41. Fo~ a full survey of the Catastrophe III Cyprus seeVassos Karageorghis, The End of the Late 'Bronze Age in Cyprus (NlCOS1~~1990); and thesame author's "The Crisis Years: Cyprus," in Ward and Joukowsky, CTiSIS Years, 79-86.

THE CATASTROPHE SURVEYED 1312 INTRODUCTION

1230 B.C. and the second ca. 1190 (tho d 'assumption that 1230 h se ates were predicated on theIIIC). Paul Astrom h wa,s tde approximate date for the beginning of LH

as revise and compre d 11 hi d 'conflagrations to ca 1190 d h sse a tms, anng the first set of(1179). A more radical sot~, t e slcond to the eighth year of Ramesses IIIby Vassos Karageorghi , u ion, a v~nced by James Muhly and accepted

CIS, IS to recognize 0 I fyprus and to date it to the d f LC n y one wave 0 destructions in

S' d ' en 0 lIC 11 I 'in a, m the interior and E k ' d ,. n any case, at all three sltes-

, n orm an Kiti h hwas reconstruction afte th C on on t e sout ern coast-there

hr e atastroph d 't rough the twelfth e, an a sizeable community

century.Several smaller sites were not d '

d~ned. In a Late Cypriote lIC ci zi: lO t~e ~a,tastrophe but aban-River, a few kilomete d ty Ayios Dhimitrios (on the Vasilikos

rs ownstream fr K Imeters up from the so th om a avasos and some three kilo-id u coast) there'eVI ence does not s IS some trace of burning but "the, , , uggest a great conflazrati , ,actIVltles."12 In additi agranon or deliberately destructive

bI ion to much C 'ut no IIIC imports Anoth ' ypnote pottery, the site yielded LH II1B

Kokki . er site aband d d 'o inokrernos in h one unng the Catastrophe was, , sout eastern Crageorghis, This was a sh I' d yprus, recently excavated by Ka-

m h earli ort- rve settle haviuc earlier than ca 1230 K ment, avmg been established not. . arageorghi di d h 's iscovere t at Kokkinokremw

was abandoned suddenly obvi Ibronzesmi , VIOUSY as a re If'onzesmirh concealed h' f SUto an Impending menace. Thea t facrs i IS ragments of co 'reacts m a pit in the pper ingots and some of his tools andand courtyard, the silvers 'th ,,'some scrap metal b rru concealed his two silver ingotsfull ' etween two stone f b hy put away in a pit all the i II s 0 a enc , and the goldsmith care-all hoping, as happens in s Jew

heery and sheets of gold which he had. They were

treasur b uc cases that th Ides, ut they never did.13

' ey wou return and recover their

That none of the th 'su h ree smiths ret dggests t at they were kill d urne to retrieve the hidden valuablesOn the western e or enslaved.

earthed ' coast of Cyprus at P I k"I more eVidence of the C ' a aeo astro, Karageorghis un-a ayer of thi k atastrophe H h, lC ashes and d 'b ' . ere t e excavations produced

city was buil e ns atte ti 'th

re U1 t SOon after the di s 109 a violent destruction." 14 Thee reoccup' I Isaster and LH IIIC. atiOn eve!. The ' , :1b pottery appeared in

generatiOn f reoccupatlo, a ter which the . n seems to have lasted about asite was abandoned 15

II Muhl " •I ' y, Sea Peoples" 51' K2 Ahson K S h ' , arageorgh' "c"

Karageorghis ~n~% ' "Kalavasos-Ayios Dhi~itri nSlS Years," 82.13 Karageorghis ,~~ly,Cyprus, 14, os and the Late Bronze Age of Cyprus," in

Cyprus 20 ' ew LIght on Late B, . ronze A e C " '14 Ibid., 21. g yprus, 10 Karageorghis and Muhly,

15 Catling AR (1986, -87): 71.

SYRIA

How terrible the Catastophe was in the Levant is attested both archae-ologically and in the Medinet Habu inscription. Because the Levantinesites were in relatively close contact with Egypt, several of the destructionlevels here have yielded artifacts dated by a royal Egyptian cartouche. Thesame sites produced a quantity of Aegean pottery, especially LH IIlB ware,and thus serve to tie together the ceramic chronology of the Aegean with

the dynastic chronology in Egypt.The large city of Ugarit, which had been an important center in western

Syria since the Middle Bronze Age, was destroyed by fire at the end of theLate Bronze Age and was not reoccupied.16 The destruction level con-tained LH IIlB but no mc ware, and a sword bearing the cartouche ofMerneptah. Because the sword was "in mint condition" it was for sometime taken as evidence that Ugarit was destroyed during Merneptah'sreign. As we shall see in chapter 13, however, the sword is likely to havebeen in mint condition primarily because it was unusable. At any rate, atablet discovered in 1986 establishes that the burning of Ugarit occurredwell after Merneptah's death and indeed after Bay became Great Chancel-lor (which he did, on the low chronology, in 1196 B.C.),t7 The last king ofUgarit was Hammurapi, but although Hammurapi's reign certainly over-lapped that of Suppiluliumas II in Hattusas, a more exact Hittite synchro-nism is not to be had. H. Otten supposed that the fall of Hattusas openedthe way for the destructive assaults on the Cypriote cities and on Ugarit,while G. A. Lehmann concluded that Ugarit was destroyed before Hat-tusas.If The eighth year of Ramesses III is assumed by all to be the terminuspost quem non for the fall of Ugarit. On the chronology followed here, theconflagration at Ugarit would have occurred sometime after 1196 but

before 1179.When Ugarit was destroyed some hundred tablets were being baked inthe oven, and so from this site we have documents written on the very eve ofits destruction. One of these tablets "from the oven" -a letter from acertain Ydn to "the king his master"-mentions prm (hapiru), and re-, ,quests that the king "equip 150 ships."19 A tablet from the Rap anu Ar-

16 Marguerite Yon, "The End of the Kingdom of Ugarit," in Ward and Joukowsky, The

Crisis Years, 111-22.17 According to Freu, "Tablette," 398, "il faut done abaisser la date de la destruction

d'Ugarit apres 1195, sans doute pas avant 1190." , " '18 On the relative sequence of the destruction of Ugant and HattuSas see H. ,?tten, Die

letzte Phase des hethitischen Grossreiches nach den Texten," in Deger-jalkotzy, Grlechenland,21; and Lehmann's remarks in the discussion that followed Otten's paper (Griechenland, 22-

23).19 RS 18.148 = no. 62 (pp. 88-89) in PRU, vol. 5.

14 INTRODUCTION

chive, and so somewhat earlier than h ' ,threat that the last kin s of U ari t e oven ,tablets, indicates the kind offrom the king of Ugar7t t hg ~,t and AlashI~ faced (the tablet is a letterships came (here)' my citi 0 \ e 109 of Alashla):2o "behold, the enemy'scountry. Does no; my falt~es ~ ) were burned, and they did evil things in mythe Hittite Country, and al~~ n:h~ that a," my troops and ~hariots (?) areinCountry is abandoned t ' lf JS are 10 the land of Lycia? ... Thus, thethe enemy that came h 0 !t~e £1: ay my father know it: the seven ships ofUgarit closes the letter ~~;hlO I~ted much damage upon us." The king ofby any means possible i/h ~ P ea that the king of Alashia send a warning,letter is one of thre f' eeheR. of other enemy ships in the vicinity. ThisAl e rom t e Ran' A hiashia and Ugarit II p. anu rc rve that were sent between

, , a concerned with " h "wreak havoc and raze cit' d h ~ e enemy who suddenly sail in,Not far fro U . res, an t en sail away,21

m gam, the coast I Istroyed at the same ti h ,a sett ement at Ras Ibn Hani was de-h . ime as t e caprt I H ht e SIte was re-used or. ere, owever, there is evidence that

very Soon aft th d 'coastal site also sh d er e esrruction.V Tell Sukas another, , ' ows a estru ti I I " 'CItIes of western S . c IOn eve at this tlme.23 The great inland

1yna were also b d G 'ca. 200 B.C. one would h urne. omg upstream on the Orontes

Kadesh (Tell Nebi M' d ave passed Alalakh, Hamath Qatna and finallyk dIn, on the 0 "sac e ,24 In his excavation of Tel~pper rontes), apparently all four. were

came down upon the ' Atchana, Leonard Woolley immedIatelylif f" massIve dest ' Ieo anCIent Alalakh 25 "Th b ruction evel that effectively closed thethe city shared the fat' f i e urnt ruins of the topmost houses show that

C' ' e 0 ItS rno f!tIes in eastern S ' re power ul neighbours "26Al I . yna may hav b I .eppo, YIng midway b e een ess affected by the Catastrophe.ently k etween the 0sac ed,27 But C herni rontes and the Euphrates was appar-Alth h ' arc eoush h 'oug Included in Ra ' on t e Euphrates, may have escaped.nents th' messes Ill's Ii t f I ', ere ISreason to b I' sop aces destroyed by hIS oppo'work d h e teve that C h ish survi ' Ihone t ere early in thi arc errus survived. Archaeologlca

t at could b' IS century d'd 'd . . Ie assIgned to th' . 1 not 1 entIty a destructIOn leveISpenod 1: bl f '. a ets rom Ugarit show that Talml'

20 R£.20,238 from hdence on the La;t D t e Rap'anu Archive. Tr" '

21Th I ays of Ugarit " AJf\ 69 anslatlon from Michael Astour "New EVI-24' e etters are RS20 18 RS (1965): 255 '

In Ugaritica vol 5 . , Ll, and RS 20 238 .22See the s~ '. . ; these are, respectively, nos. 22,23, andSt· mmary by A 'ruction of the 'C . . nllle Caubet '"R '

23 R D B flSISYears,' " in W:ard ' d eoccUpatlOn of the Syrian Coasr after the De-. . arnett "Th an Jouk k24See G. A. Leh' e Sea Peoples," CAH . ows y, Crisis Years, 124-27.

:aum in der Zeit de~=nn, Die mYkenisch-fruh vol. 2~part 2, p. 370.New Evidence" 254Seevolker"-Invasione grzechzsche Welt und der ostliche Mittelmeer-

2S WOolleyA Ii ;Barnett, "The Sea pn urnI 1200 v. Chr. (Opladen, 1985) 14; Astour,26 Ibid., 164 orgotten Kingdom (Ha eop es," 370. '27 Ibid, . rmondsworth, 1953), 156-64.

THE CATASTROPHE SURVEYED 15

Teshub, king of Carchemish and vassal of Suppiluliumas II, Great King ofHatti, was contemporary with Hammurapi of Ugarit. Recently publishedtablets indicate that after the destruction of Hattusas the kings of Car-chemish began to use the title "Great King of Hatti."28

Whatever the fortunes of Carchemish may have been, recent excavationshave shown that Emar, downstream from Carchemish on the Euphrates,was destroyed by fire during the Catastrophe,29 And Emar is that rare sitefor which, as Annie Caubet has noted, we have "evidence for both thedestroyers and the chronology."30 Two tablets found here report that"hordes of enemies" attacked the city, the attack evidently occurring in thesecond year of Melik-shipak, king of Babylon (ca. 1185 B.C.). The datingformula employed on these two tablets shows that at Emar the year justconcluded was described as "I'annee OU les taruu ont afflige la ville," tarvubeing translated by D. Arnaud as "hordes," or as masses for whom thescribes of Emar had no proper name or conventional designation.

THE SOUTHERN LEVANT

The Catastrophe took a heavy toll in Palestine and what in the Iron Agewas called Israel. At Deir 'Alla (ancient Succoth) a settlement was destroyedafter 1190 B.C., since the destruction level yielded, along with much LHIIIB pottery, a vase bearing the cartouche of Queen Twosret.P Lachish mayhave been destroyed at the same time or a few years later. LH IIIB potterywas found throughout Stratum VI at Lachish, which underlies the destruc-tion level, but there is some indication that Stratum VI did not end until threign of Ramesses III. If that is so, LH IIIB wares were still being producedin the late 1180s, some years after they are generally supposed to have beensuperseded by LH IIIe. Trude Dothan, however, has proposed that afterthe destruction of Lachish a limited settlement, "probably an Egyptiangarrison," was established above the ruins.32 On this argument, the sol-diers or squatters were there in the reign of Ramesses III, but the destruc-tion of the city (and the last importation of LH IIIB pottery) had occurred

before Ramesses' accession.

281- D. Hawkins, "Kuzi-TeSub and the 'Great Kings' of Karkamis," AS 38 (1988): 99-

108.29 See Arnaud, "Les textes d'Emar," 87-92.30 Caubet, "Reoccupation, » 129.31 H.1- Franken "The Excavations at Deir 'Alia, Jordan," VTll (1961): 361-72, Trude

Dothan, "Some As~ects of the Appearance of the Sea Peoples and Philistin~s in Can~an~ inDeger-Jalkotzy, Griechenland, 101, notes that the Twosret cartouche prOVIdesus With theterminus ad quem for Myc. IIIB pottery. " .'

32 Dothan, "Sea Peoples and Philistines,» 101; d. her review of LachlSh, vol. 4, In IE] 10

(1960): 58-63.

16 INTRODUCTION

The important centers along the yo M .from Egypt to Syria ( d ra arts of Palestine, the route that ledvirtually all destroyed I'an

thmCore particularly from Gaza to Jaffa) were

h In e atastroph M idd 't e ongest Stratum VII . . e. egr 0 seems to have held out

, runnmg witho t i .century until ca. 1150 33 U interruptron from the thirteenthAshkelon, and Akk F B.C. Among the earlier victims were Ashdodb o. or Ashdod n E . 'ut the ceramics indicae I 0 gypnan synchronism is availableSean ear y twelfth 'tratum XIV produced LH IIIB ott -ce.ntury date: the predestructionXIII some LH IIIC'lb P ery, and m the postdestruction Stratumexcavated at Ashdod ~dottery ~as found. At any rate, Moshe Dothanwhi h i di a estructIon lay (85 . .IC In Icate that thi . er ca. ern), contammg ashesti " ISstratum In A A B' 'IOn. 34 At Akko the d .' rea - ,ended In a heavy conflagra-"th I ,estructlOn ca b d d .e owest ash refuse la "f h n e ate with some precision. Inwith the name of Q ~r 0 t e destruction level was found a scarabAkk ueen rwosrej evid hf 0 no earlier than 119035 Th I. ence t at places the destruction ofound that in the reoccu .. h e CIty was rebuilt, and the excavators

clo I I panon t e res'd dse y re ated to Myc I ents use a monochrome potteryIn add' . enaean IIIC ware 36

mon to the rna' 0 " .have been under EgYPti~n\C~tl:s alon? the Via Maris, all of which wouldsettlements were also d g m~ny In the early twelfth century smallerwould I estroyed In th C 'sure y have been I e atastrophe. These little townswould I h vassa s or dep d .a so ave been prot d en encies of the major cities and soesty A ecte very' d' I ' .. mong the smallet· des In irect y, by Egypt's imperial rna]-at Tell J sues estroy d i hI h emrneh, Tell Sippor a d Tc lIe I~ t e Catastrophe were the towns

n t e mterior th I' n e .lerishe.a?'AlIa h ,e ear y twelfth-. as already been ment' d century destruction at Lachish and Deirtune wer f lOne Oth . I d siSh he, rom north to south Tell I er In an sites destroyed at the sameKh~~:: RTell el-Hesi (Eglon?), ~e~1-~~dah .(~azar), Beitin (Bethel), Bethburned habud (possibly Debir) 38 A en Mirsirn (Debir or Eglon), and

,t e destruction being '·h s everywhere else, these cities wereen er total or so extensive that archaeolo-

33 W'II'I lam Dever "Th

Canaanites '5 P' eLate Bronze_E I34 ,ea eoples' d ar y Iron I H' '. .M. Dothan "A hd' an Proto-Israelites'" \Xl; onzon In Syna-Palestine: Egyptians,

Age," in Frank C;o s dod at the End of the L t mB ard and Joukowsky, Crisis Years, 101.Ing of the America:ss e

h., Symposia Celebratina;h r;nze Age .and the Beginning of the Iron

126. cools of Oriental Rese gh (e eventy-Fifth Anniversary orthe Found-3S T arc 1900 1975rude Dothan "5 - ) (Cambridge, Mass., 1979),

scarab" .' ea Peoples ..is may prOVidea termi and Philistines," 10

a termmus post que h nus ante quem for th d 4.. Dothan goes on to say that the36 Ib'd m t at th e estruct f hI ., 103. e scarab actual!' IOn0 t e Late Bronze city." But it37 Ibid 108 Ygives us.

"L "; for a tab Iate Bronze " 100 u ar preSentation of PI' .38 PI' . a estIman' d10 . Iau Lapp, "The Co Sites estroyed and spared see Dever,

gtca Monthly 38 (1967n.quest of Palestine in the Li).283-300. ght of Archaeology," Concordia Theo-

THE CATASTROPHE SURVEYED 17

gists assume that virtually the entire city was destroyed. After the destruc-tion, most of the sites in the interior were soon occupied by squatters: atHazar, Succoth, and Debir there are traces of post-Catastrophe huts orsmall houses, storage silos, and crude ovens.I? Some cities near the coast,on the other hand, were substantially rebuilt. At Tell Ashdod and Tell Morthere is evidence for considerable occupation after the Catastrophe.e?

A few settlements, finally, were spared. There is evidence for continuousoccupation from the thirteenth century through all or most of the twelfth ata number of major sites: Beth Shan, Taanach, jerusalem, Shechem, Gezer,and Gibeon. Still other sites show no destruction in the late thirteenth orearly twelfth century because they were unoccupied at that time: paradox-ically, jericho and Ai, two of the cities whose destruction is dramaticallydescribed for us (Joshua 6-8 celebrates the slaughter of all the inhabitantsof jericho and Ai, and the burning of the two cities), were deserted tells atthe time of the Catastrophe.f!

MESOPOTAMIA

The closest the Catastrophe came to Mesopotamia was the destruction ofNorsuntepe, in eastern Anatolia, and of the Syrian cities of Emar and-possibly-s-Carchemish. Emar was destroyed by nameless "hordes" andperhaps the same can be assumed for Norsuntepe. The Euphrates river andthe jezirah may have furnished something of a barrier to protect the Meso-potamian cities from the devastation experienced in the Levant, but it isalso likely that the kingdom of Assur served as a deterrent. Generally,Mesopotamian history in the late thirteenth and twelfth centuries followsthe pattern of earlier times.f-' Wars were common, but they were betweenperenniel rivals. It was primarily the palaces at Babylon and Assur thatc~mpeted for primacy, with the kingdom of Elam playing a major role fromtIme to time.

It is instructive to see what the kings of Assur were able to accomplishbefore, during, and after the Catastrophe. Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244-1208B.C.) was perhaps the greatest of the Middle Assyrian kings. After subduingthe barbarians who lived to the east, in the Zagros mountains, he marched

39 Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of LiberatedIsrael, 1250-1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1979), 195.

40 Moshe Dothan, "Ashdod," 127-28.. 41 William Stiebing, Jr., Out of the Desert? Archaeology and the Exodus/Conquest Narra-

tIVes (Buffalo, 1989), 80-86..42 For the history of Mesopotamia see the relevant chapters by J. M. Munn-R.ankin, D. J.

Wiseman, and Rene Labat in CAH, vol. 2, part 2; for a summary direc.tly pertInent to thepresent study see Richard L. Zettler, "Twelfth-Century B.C. Babyloma: ContInUIty andChange," 174-81, in Ward and Joukowsky, Crisis Years.

18 INTRODUCTION

through the mountains of K d'and Urmia. His greatest triu~r ~s:: and reache~ the district of Lakes Vanthe Kassite king of Babyl . p ~ have come m 1235, when he defeatedunderlings governed th on

f, soonht ereafter he captured Babylon, and his

ere or per aps s Whwas murdered by his son.Assvri even years. en Tukulti-Ninurta

d" on, ssynan power . . f .omnuon rapidly rec d d b was riven m action and Assur's

h lee, ut Assur and th h . . feart and came through th C e ot er cities 0 the Assyrian

Babylon in 1160 and t kef atas~rophe unscathed. Ashur-dan I defeated. . 00 rom It several f . . .apparently had no diffi 1 '" ronner cines. His successors

1 d . cu ty mamtammg thei 1an m the second half f h eir ru e over the Assyrian heart-against Akhlamu and oAt e twelfth ~entury, but they did have to do battleA' ramu warriors (b thramalc-speaking tribe ) h 0 names probably refer toA . smen w 0 th t dssyna. Still more seri . rea ene on the north and west off M lOUSwas an invasi br~m ushki, under five chieftains sion y twenty thousand warriorsraided the lands around th ' ,,:h~ crossed the Taurus mountains andby Ti,glath-Pileser I (l1l5~ ~gper ~Igns. But the Mushkians were beatenKurdisran, 77) m a great battle in the mountains of

In southern Mesopotam' haft . . la t e Kas .t l'er Its mterruption by -n k I.N' Sl e me reestablished itself in Babylondo . , ill U n- murt d .mmion. Apparently it was while ~ an .enJoyed another forty years of1~?4) that so many cities in th L Melik-shipak ruled at Babylon (1188-s Ipa~ nor his son seems to ha:e evant,were destroyed, but neither Melik-~ome ~n 1157, when the city of Be~p~nenced serious trouble. Trouble did

Curne by the Elamites. Alth ha h~ ~n ','Vasstormed and parts of it wereatastrophe th " oug t ISincident izh b ,.ti 1 li . ' e sacking" of B b lon i mig t e rermrnscent of the

rve y irnited d fi a y on m 1157tamia hi an ts quite well within th seems to have been rela-Ash n

distory: three years after h ' e nbormal expectations of Mesopo-

ur- an a k avmg een bk' f ' wea Kassite kin d eaten and humiliated bymg 0 Elam d hi g was efeated b Shplunder ' an IS large army The El ' y utruk-Nahhunte, the

parts ofth . . amite kin 11 d hipants ale city-razing some s ' ,g a owe IS troops toesson-and h h ectlons mod hAlthough Sh k e t en removed th r er to teac the occu-

no effort to u~~ -Nahhunte put an end t e statue of Marduk to Elam.the city. So~~ ~~gate .Babylon permanent~ ::e Kassi~e dynasty, he madelished by a warlor~rf hiS de~arture a new lab ~ c~rtamly did not destroybut also estab1' h drom Ism. Babylon not 0 / man dynasty was estab-river. IS e some control over to n y recovered its independence

wns as far north as the Diyala

THE CATASTROPHE SURVE YED 19

invaders who threatened to do in Egypt what had already been done inAnatolia and the Levant. Because the kingdom of Egypt survived the Catas-trophe we have Egyptian inscriptions advertising what happened thereduring the years in which so many other lands lost their principal cities and

palaces.In some respects, it is true, Egypt did notrsurvive the Catastrophe. Al-

though prosperous and secure during the long reign of Ramesses the Great,after the accession of Merneptah Egypt entered upon a time of troubles thateffectively ended its long history as the dominant power in the Near East.Merneptah and Ramesses III were able to repel the attacks upon Egypt andthen celebrate their accomplishments in a princely fashion, but they werevirtually the last of the great pharaohs. The successors of Ramess

es IIIwerehard-pressed to maintain any Egyptian presence in the Levant. UnderRamesses IV (1155-1149) there may still have been Egyptian garrisons atBeth Shan and a few other strategic posts in southern Canaan, but theymust soon have been overrun or withdrawn.43 The last evidence of Egyp-tian power so far north is the name of Ramesses VI (1141-1133) inscribedon a bronze statue base at Megiddo.44 At home, the last kings of theTwentieth Dynasty left few architectural or inscriptional monuments, andin the Twenty-First Dynasty royal power in Egypt reached a low ebb.

The victories of Merneptah and Ramesses IIIwere thus the swan song ofthe Egyptian New Kingdom. Merneptah celebrated his triumphs in var-ious places, but especially in the Great Karnak Inscription and on theHymn of Victory Stele (sometimes referred to as the "Israel Stele"), foundacross the river, at Thebes. 45 For our purposes, however, the inscriptions ofMerneptah and Ramesses IIIare important not so much because they are afinal celebration of pharaonic power but because they illuminate the natureof the dangers that Egypt and many other kingdoms faced in the Cat~stro-phe. Merneptah's troubles began in his fifth year, 1208 B.C., when a ~Iby~nking named Meryre attacked the western Delta. Meryre brought With hl~an enormous army, most of his men being from Libya itse~f bu~ a fairnumber being auxiliaries from "the northern lands." They are Identlfied byMerneptah's scribe as Ekwesh, Lukka, Shardana, Shekelesh, and Tur-sha.

46The Libyan warlord also brought with him his wife, children, and

even his throne, obviously intending to set himself up as ruler of the west-

43 James Weinstein, "The Collapse of the Egyptian Empire in the Southern Levant," in

Ward and Joukowsky, Crisis Years, 142-50.44 Weinstein "Collapse" 144. !tamar Singer "Merneptah's Campaign to Canaan and the

Egyptian Occu~ation of the Sou;hern Coastal Plain of Palestine in the Ramesside Period,"

BASOR 269 (1988): 6.4S For the Great Karnak Inscription see Breasted, AR, vol. 3, noS. 572-92; f~r the C;ymn

ofVietory Stele, see nos. 602-17. Lesko, "Egypt," 153-55, has argued that the year 5 an?"year 8" inscriptions of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu were originally cut for Merneptah s

morruary temple.46 Breasted, AR 3, no. 574.

EGYPT

Like Mesopotamia Ethe Catastrophe I' gypt was spared the d 'b . twas n h estructlo f .

etween 1208 and 1176 o~ owever, spared th f n 0 Its centers duringt e pharaohs had t be ear of destruction for

o attle re dl ' .peate y agamst

THE CATASTROPHE SURVEYED 21

frontiers had ceased to cause problems or to insult Egyptian interests.Dreadful things were beginning to happen in the 1190s, and in Canaanespecially Egypt's vassals must have been crying for assistance. But the lastrepresentatives of the Nineteenth Dynasty-Seti II, Siptah, and Twosret-had all to do to keep a feeble grasp on the throne.

With the establishment of the Twentieth Dynasty our documentationresumes.V and it is obvious that the situation has become more parlousthan it had been under Merneptah. Ramesses III faced no less than threeattacks upon the Delta in his first eleven years. In his fifth year (1182 B.C.) aLibyan force that must have been counted in the tens of thousands(Ramesses claimed to have slain 12,535 of the invaders) attacked the west-ern Delta. Three years later, in 1179, a force consisting mostly of Philistinesand Tjekker, but assisted by men whom his scribe identified as Shekelesh,Denyen, Weshesh, and apparently Tursha, attacked from the east.Ramesses bested the invaders in a land battle at Djahi, somewhere in thesouthern Levant, and defeated another contingent of the same coalition ina sea battle. Finally, in his eleventh year (1176) Ramesses had to face yetanother Libyan invasion. The inscriptions credit Ramesses with theslaughter of 2175 Meshwesh tribesmen (and the capture of another 1200)on this occasion.P Altogether, the assaults upon Egypt in the reign ofRamesses III seem to have constituted the most serious external threatthat Egypt had faced since the invasion of the hyksosin the seventeenth

century B.C.

20 I N T ROD U C T ION

ern Delta. Against the i dh hi e mva ers Mernept h dt e t ird day of the third h f a mustere all his forces and on. 1 mont 0 summ h d f 'precise ocation of which' di er e e eated them at Periri the

cult battle. According to thiS.Ispu~e~. It was undoubtedly a long and diffi-

1e mscnption on th A h ibiarmy s ew over 6000 Lib ans e t n ISstele, Merneptah's

200 Shekelesh (how m y L' as well as 2201 Ekwesh, 722 Tursha anddetermined).47 The Lib;: ki:k~a a?d ~hardana were killed cann~t be

The Hymn of Victory St 1 g1 ~d m dls~rder and disgrace.ove~the Libyans and their :l~ie: tshough pnmarily celebrating the victory~aJo.r campaign in Canaan 48 H clan that Merneptah also conducted apacified" various places i~ I d~ c alms here to have "plundered" and

IYanoamtoo was evidently' a ~i~ )lOTghselveralcities (Ashkelon and Gezer:srael and H y . e and of C d h '

hurru were chastised 49 U'I anaan an t e peoples of

avecarnpai d i . nn recentl M h"b

igne m southern C y ernepta s claims tout Frank Yurco di anaan were di . dR urco discovered that wa . sm.lsse as mere propaganda;amesses II and in which th 11 reliefs, which were once attributed to

actually co " e capture of A hk 1 .G mmlssIOned by M s e on IS portrayed wereM"or must haw decl.,ed th:im.ep;ah.50It now "ems that Ashkd~n anden~:;e~tah's reign and were br~~~h~~e~de~~e from Egypt at the outset ofb e ICpharaoh.» The tro bl 0 ee y this elderly but surprisinglyh:en so~e~hing new. Here M~n: presented by men of Israel must have

MedrtradlthIOnallybeen Egypt's cptah wabsdealing not with the cities thatnepta evid I oncern ut . h ..."the' d .VI ent y battled agai h Wit uncivilized tribesmen.ir see ISn t" h mst t em and . fli dIsrael 0 , e announced S' m rete some casualties:

to Me~nasnohtt~e ~ithholding of t;I'blOce the offense of the tribesmen ofepta It lik ute or the re ..assault .' IS I ely to have b nuncianon of allegianceagamst on een somethi . diCanaan e or more of the h 109 m irect, such as an. p araoh's v 1" .From th . assa cities lO southern

e reigns of Meof foreign conflicts T rneptah's ephemeral su. hat certainly d ccessors we have no record

oes not mea h b471b'd n t at arbarians on bothI .,no. 601 (in th K

48 Th e arnak I .49 e text of this stele h nscnption the fi ur .

For a recent treatm as also been translated g es are slightly different).and Recent The' ent of this much-d b by Wilson, ANET 376-78

so I ones of Israelite 0 . " e ated text see J J B"' .flank thn~:77,while working hngms," ]SOT 49 (1991)"3' 2lmson, "Merenptah's Israel

e Peace! on IS docto I d" . - 9.Seti II) bel reaty Text" and disc ra Issertation Yurc ."M onged not to Ra overed that the 0 . " 'I 0 exammed the reliefs that

erenptah' C messes II h ngma cart h"3200- Ye s anaanite Campai n:' as ad been assumed b ouc es (underlying those ofalso Lawr:~~l~ Picture of Israeli;es'ffuARCE 23 (1986): 189~~~~.Merneptah. See Yurco,Eretz-Israel 18 (tager, "Merenptah I n~ 10 Egypt," Bib. Ar h R' and the same author's

shkelon ReI" 1985): 61-62. Fo~ srae, and Sea Peoples' ~. ev. 16 (1990): 20 ff. Seesee "Once A le~at Karnak and the I objectIons to the iden~ifi e~ Light on an Old Relief,"

1 Singer ~~' Merenptah's Bartl:r~\S~e1e,,, IE] 36 (1986)~a~~; see D. Redford, "The, erneptah's Campai "e Ie s at Karnak," IE] (£ -200; for Yurco's reply

gn, 3. orthcommg).

None of the palaces of Late Helladic Greece survived very far into thetwelfth century B.C.54 The nature of the Catastrophe here has been welldefined by Richard Hope Simpson and Oliver Dickinson: "By the end ofLH IIIB almost all the great mainland centres had been destroyed by fire,several being deserted thereafter. The destructions seem to concentrate ats~teswhere there were palaces or comparable large buildings, or fortifica-tIOns." 55 Since a great deal of archaeological work has been done in

S2 Breasted, AR, vol. 4, nos. 21-138.S3 Edgerton and Wilson, Historical Records of Ramses III: The Texts in "Medinet Habu, "

Volumes I and II, Translated with Explanatory Notes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1936), plate 75.54 The standard survey of the Catastrophe in Greece is Vincent Desborough's The Last

Mycenaeans and Their Successors: An Archaeological Survey c. 1200-c. 1000 B.C. (Oxford,1964). R. Hope Simpson and a.T.p.K. Dickinson, A Gazetteer of Aegean Civilisation in theBronze Age, vol. 1: The Mainland and Islands (G6teborg, 1979), provide an excellent site-by·

site summary.ss Hope Simpson and Dickinson, Gazetteer, 379.

GREECE AND THE AEGEAN ISLANDS

22 I N T ROD U CTI 0 N

Greece, hundreds of Bronze A e si f .known. The following s g ill fo rom the mainland and the islands arelIIB sites. But becau urvey fcI I focus on the destruction of the principal

dse we are ortunate t h idence for Greece in th . d i . 0 ave consi erable material evi-

e peno irnmediat I f II .may also note the several pI h bey 0 owmg the Catastrophe, wef h

aces t at ecam . . .o t em deserving to b II d " . e Important cornmurunes (someIn Greece the he ca e cities) m the nrc period.

nort ernmost evid f hcomes from the settlement and" alace" or t e Catastrophe (see figure 1)has not been well publi h d d c e at lolkos. Unfortunately the siteTh IS e , an one ca b 'epalace (from which f f nnot e sure what happened here.

. resco ragment d hwas evidently burned b bl . s an muc pottery was recovered)however, have contin~e~r~ ~ y earI.y in the LH me period. lolkos may,for a considerable am feoccupied after the destruction of the palaceh

. ount 0 mc 't ere ISevidence for a P pottery was found at the site Althoughwhether habitation wa roto~eometric settlement at lolkos it is not clear

o f s Contmuous fr mc 'ne 0 the first of th G k om to Protogeometric times.v"Theban palace, well bef~ rehe palaces to be sacked was apparently theonly t b d re t e end of LH IIIB Io e estroyed fo . t may have been rebuilt

" d r a second ti h 'peno chamber tombs but no b . ~meat t e end of Illb. From the mcdoubtful that Thebes was a si U1~dmgshave been found. 57 It is thereforetwelfth century. gmficant settlement in the middle of the

On the Euboeanpolis" f coast a town at Lefk did

.' a ew hundred yards f an I (or more precisely at "Xero-unng th C east 0 Lefka di) d

h be atastrophe NO'd n I was estroyed at least once

as ee f d . eVI ence fo d .h

noun , but that rna b b r estruction at the end of LH Illbmuc new b ildi Y e ecause ea I . hthe lIIC set ler mg at the site (whatever th r y in t e mc period there wasThis' t emenr was considerabl I e I1IBsettlement may have been,

bt iCity~as "destroyed in a g yarger and deserves to be called a city).

u It was rm di reat confla . "when it was ~e lately rebuilt and continug~atlOn durin.g the me period;For Ath nallYabandoned.58 e to be occupied until ca. 1100,

ens, the onl Iare no remai y cone usion now ible ihappenedmtoa~n~of an LH llIB palace POSSIIe ISa non liquet. Since there

Itm the I ' we cannot k hsettlement at At ear y twelfth centur I" now w at may havethe lIIB ho

ushens was much smaller thY' t IhslIkely, however, that the mc

Ies on th h an t e pr d'ater period d e nort slope of th A ece mg settlement, since

, an ver f e cropoliy ew llIC bu . I h s were unoccupied in therIa Save b f

6 Desborough La een ound in the Agora.59

273. ' 5t Mycenaean5 128, -29· H57 Ho . ' ope Simpso

Grl' b" Pbe Simpson and DI"k' n and Dickinson, Gazetteer,ec ISC e Frith c mson G

5 M ge5chicbte (Vien ' azetteer, 244-45·59 D .~. Popham, L. H. Sack na, 1984), 119-22 ("Pal ,~ee also Fritz Schachermeyr,

9 es orough, Last Mycen en, et al., eds., Lefkandi I. ~~ atastrophe in Theben ").. aean5, 113; Hope Simps' edDarkAge (London 1980) 7

on an D" k' " .IC !llson, Gazetteer 198-,

THE CAT A ST R 0 P HE SUR V EYE D 23

Perhaps the largest community in Attica during the IIlC period was onAttica's east coast. At Perati, on the north side of the Porto Rafti bay, acemetery of more than two hundred chamber tombs from the mc periodhas been excavated. The town was undoubtedly near the cemetery but hasnot yet been found. The Perati tombs furnish much of what is known aboutmc Attica.s"

On the Corinthian Isthmus attention focuses on a fortification wall,built late in the thirteenth century B.C. Apparently intended to span theentire isthmus, the wall may never have been completed. It is usually as-sumed that it was built by Peloponnesians who feared an attack from thenorth.v! Almost nothing is known of Corinth in this period, but at nearbyKorakou-on the Corinthian Gulf-there is evidence for an LH II1Bsettle-ment (the houses were excavated by Blegen). Although it was once thoughtthat Korakou survived intact into the II1C period, it is possible that theplace may have suffered some damage and was briefly abandoned at theend of Illb, At any rate, it was certainly reoccupied in II1C and enjoyed aperiod of some prosperity before a final destruction and abandonment.

62

In the northeast Peloponnese almost a hundred Bronze Age sites havebeen identified, although many of these are known only from .surfacefinds.63 At those Argolid sites that have been excavated the pattern ISclear:shortly after 1200 the site was either destroyed or abandoned. Prosymnaand Berbati-both in the interior-were evidently evacuated without be-ing destroyed.s" and the same was probably true of Lerna. The little un-walled settlement at Zygouries, also in the interior, was apparently de-stroyed at the end of LH IIlB and was not reoccupied in me»

In his excavations at Mycenae, Wace found evidence for a destruction atthe end of LH II1B,but only in the houses outside the citadel ("Ho~se of theWine Merchant," "House of the Oil Merchant," etc.). His e~cavatIons a~soshowed that at the end of LH mc the entire site-includmg everythmgwithin the citadel-was burned. On the basis of these findings, the schol-arly consensus until the 1960s was that enemies attacked Mycenae ca.1230 B.C. (the old date for the end of LH II1B)but were unable to penetratethe citadel itself. and that the citadel was not sacked until the end of the,

60 Spyridon Iakovides, "Perati, eine Nekropole der Ausklingenden Bronzezeit in Attika,"in H.-G. Buchholz, ed., Agiiische Bronzezeit (Darmstadt, 1987), 437-77.

61 Desborough, Last Mycenaeans, 85. ' d"62 For the earlier view see Desborough, Last Mycenaeans, 85-86. Jere~~ Rutter s "Isser-

tation, "The Late Helladic IlIB and IlIe Periods at Korakou and Gonia (University ofPennsylvania, 1974), pointed out that although no evidence for destruction at Korakou was

f d h.' I' I '"fi . c the site provides no stran-

oun , t e argumentum ex silentIO has Itt e slgnl cance sm egraphic record of the transition from IlIB to me.

63 Hope Simpson and Dickinson, Gazetteer, 27-74 (nos. A 1through A 94a).

64 Desborough, Last Mycenaeans, 77.65 Ib.id., 84; but d. Podzuweit, "Mykenische Welt," 70.

l.r

24 INTRODUCTION

twelfth century Thi .h . ISview was sh b .w ose twenty years of excavatio~wn to e I~correct by George Mylonas,found that the earl' d . at that site began in 1958 M Iier esrrucnon d . y onascentury-had indeed includ d ~now. ared to the early twelfth~uctures within the fortifica~io~h:~lltadel Itse~f. At that time masonry

e ~H mc pottery from the' smelted 10 a fire of great intensit .cupatl~n of the citadel settlemes~:e6~husrepresents a rebuilding and reo;

At Tiryns the citadel itself al . .~~hl~end of LH ma Here t~o ~~g with everything outside it, was burned

~Cperiod there was alar eere vnb a reoccupation, and through thec~astlIne some two hundred mgt town etween the citadel walls and the~Ief~om the citadel),67At Mide ers to the south (today the coastline is a

:n~~~~~;s~~ion by fire at th:' e~:7~i~~:~17:lk f~om Tiry~s, there wasA .' I ea was not reocc . penod. Unlike Mycenae

LHt Asine, on the gulf coast D ubPledafter the destruction. 68mB was ' es orough co I d d hhand th meagre in the extreme "69 I hnc u e t at "habitation in

hous~s fr~~oh~latio.n of Asine was' cons~:r eb~IICperiod,. on the otherAsine th t ISperiod have been excav t d ~ e~ and a fair number offor at iea~r~vwas a s~all settlement that\:d b t Ina, d~wn the coast from"at the ve e C~nt~nes; but excavations een ~ontmuously occupiedafterward7,~~gmnmg of LH nrc, and th:;~w t~at It was destroyed by fire

In Lacon' h e site was abandoned shortlyI ia t e most'eft bank of th E Important LH mB ."palatial" bU'I~' urotas? near what wo 1~I~ewas the Menelaion, on thewhich the si: 109on this site went up in~ ater be Sparta. A large andB.C.7I In post eCseemsto have been aba damesdatthe end of LH IIIB, afterered lies on th atastrophe Laconia the 0nl o~e . until the eighth century

e east coast n y slgmficant' h fpresence of a mc ' near Monemv . Ch site t us ar discov-occupied the a community here (thasia. I amber tombs attest to the

. f d cropolis of E id e sett emenr .oun in the tomb" pi auros Limer ) Th IS ~upposed to havethat period "72 s suggests that thO . a. e quantity of IIIC pottery

B' ISsite was an .etween 150 and 2 Important survivor in00 settlemen

66 S. Iakovid " ts, most of them t'99-141 es, The Present S my, are known from

67 • tate of Research thKlaus Kilian " at e Citadel of M

Romisch-German" Zum Ende der m ' ycenae," BIAL (1977):68 Paul A _ ISchenZentTa/m ykemschen Epoch .1'0 strOm "D' useums M . e In der A 1'''Tschungen ZUT' Ie Akropolis von M' aznz 27 (1980): 166-9 rgo IS, Jahrbuch des

International aegaelSchen VOT e ,Idea um 1200 v " , 5.69 Desb en Ko//oquiums 7.8g schlchte: Das Ende d'Chr., In Eberhard Thomas ed

orough La . . julr 1984 . eT myken' h ' .,~ H?pe Simp ~n a~t~ce~aeans, 82; d. ~ Koln) (Cologne, 19;~~ en Welt (Akten des

Ibid. 107-8 Dickinson, Gaze ope Simpson and D' ? 7-10.Ibid., 117; cf D tteeT,50. Icklnson, Gazetteer, 49.

. esborough Las, tMy cenaeans, 89.

i

,.

THE CATASTROPHE SURVEYED 25

LH mB Messenia, and 90 percent of these were abandoned after theburning of the" Palace of Nestor" at Pylos.F' Most of the abandoned placesare known only from a scattering of pottery, and are likely to have beeneither single homesteads or small clusters of houses. The palace at Pyloswas not the only place in Messenia that was destroyed in the Catastrophe.Two towns northeast of the palace-Mouriatadha and Malthi-were de-stroyed by fire, as was Nichoria on the Messenian Gulf. The date of thesedestructions can hardly be much later than ca. 1190 B.C., since of thethousands of pots found at Pylos it is questionable whether any have mcfeatures.Z"

There is little stratigraphic evidence for the LH III period in Elis, but thepottery found in the area suggests a fairly dense population in IIIB timesand a sharp decline in IIIC,?5 The Mycenaean period in Arcadia is evenmore obscure. It is often assumed, perhaps correctly, that Arcadia was ofmarginal importance before the Catastrophe. A large cemetery of chambertombs indicates that in the IIIC period a community of some size wasestablished at Palaiokastro, a few miles east of Andritsana.I"

For Achaea we do have evidence for sites destroyed by fire during theCatastrophe. But Achaea was also one of the areas to which people movedafter the Catastrophe, and a fair number of mc settlements are knownfrom their cemeteries (most of which are backed up against the Pana-chaikon mountain range)."? At two coastal sites the settlements themselveshave been found. In westernmost Achaea, on Cape Araxos, TeichosDymaion was burned at the end of LH IIlB, but was reoccupied in mc andwas at that time protected by a fortification waIl.78 At Aigeira, a Burgbergfacing the Corinthian Gulf, the Austrians have excavated a mcsettlement. 79

73 Pia de Fidio, "Fatrori di crisi nella Messenia della Tarda Eta del Bronzo," in John Killenet al., eds., Studies in Mycenaean and Classical Greek Presented to John Chadwick (Sala-

manca, 1987; Minos supplement), 127-28.74 Desborough, Last Mycenaeans, 94, accepted Blegen's mc classification of a dozen

Pylos pots; Hope Simpson and Dickinson, Gazetteer, 129, believe that the vases whichBlegen's team assigned to early LH mc "can hardly be placed so late."

75 Desborough, Last Mycenaeans, 91-93.76 Hope Simpson and Dickinson, Gazetteer, 83.n Emily Vermeule, "The Mycenaeans in Achaea," AlA 64 (1960): 1-21.78 Cf. the description by Hope Simpson and Dickinson, Gazetteer, 196: "A fine acropolis

strategically placed on the Araxos promontory at the NW tip of the Peloponnese; the seawould once have covered the present marshes on the SW flank .... The site appears to havesuffered destruction by fire in LH IlIB, but was reoccupied in strength in LH mc, to which thebulk of the finds belong, to be destroyed again and thereafter deserted until LG."

79 On the situation of the site d. Gerhard Dobesch, "Historische Fragestellungen in derUrgeschichte," in Deger-Jalkotzy, Griechenland, 205n.74: "Aigeira war von Natur aus gutgeelgnet als Stiitzpunkt und Wachrposten gegen Seerauber, die von den Meeren westllch von

Griechenland kamen."

26 INTRODUCTION

Moving to the islands of the A~atastrophe and its aftermath' I' e~eadn,we find that evidence for then R IS mute but '11 've. ecent excavations on the island f occasiona y quite inforrna-now, known as Koukounaries th 0 Paros have s.hown that at a citadelpossibly deserving to be d ib d as was an extensive LH IIIB complexa d b escn e as a "p I "Th 'n urned, and the excavators f a ace. e complex was sackedthe skeletons of some of th . .ound not only a great deal of ash but alsoth' e vicnms Acc die excavations, "preliminar stu " ?r mg to D. Schilardi, director of~~ounaries is slightly later th:n th~Yd~ndlCatest~at the destruction of Ko-

epottery should be classified in t Isaste~s,which afflicted the mainland.After this destruction' h he transinon of LH mB2 to LH mc "80built' II In t e early twelfth .In IC and was protected b . century, the settlement was re-ever, the Cyclades were not ha d hi a,fortification wall.s! In general how-stages. The few major Mycen:ea It,In the ~atastrophe, at least in it; earlyern Aegean (Phylakopi on Mel n;.I~es o.n Islands in the central and west-seeFmtORhhavesurvived untillat~Sin :;:a IIIrIICnion ~ea, and Grotta on Naxos)

or odes and h e penod 82comes aim t. e other islands of th .did di ost exclusIvely from t b e southeast Aegean evidence

1 or id h om sand it i h fcemet ' not appen to settlements' 12~ IS t ere ore uncertain whatIIIB t:;~~~ ~~wever, suggests the esse~~: I 0 ~.c'.The continuity of thesettleme t' On the other hand there ~a contmuity of population fromthe city :f ~a~ternsappeared in th~ twelft~ reason to believe that very newincrease in ~ ysos'. on the northern coastcentury. The tombs suggest thatsouthern p~rtP~:atlo~, and considerable ro~f R?odes, .enjoyed a fivefoldbeen excavated~~ Island ',¥ere aband~ed.;~nty, while some sites in thecontinuous occ ,e Seragho site-and h ~n Kos, a settlement has

upanon until well do . ere t ere seems to have beenwn Into the mc period.s>

CRETE

What happened on Cdebate Tbere : rete during th C. ere ISreason ' e atastro he isuffered as much d' to beheve that d . P s a matter of vigorous

80 F as Id the Greek mainla~ndnbgthheCatastrophe the islandrumD Scld cli' , ut ow m h 'd

Greece 1980~8 ~ar s report on K k' uc eVI ence there, 1 In AR ou ounan .

:: ~e th~,su~aries b;~8g-~1): 36. es, Included in H. Catling's "Archaeology in

(1986-~~~. ~~pson and Dick;ns;~ l~, AR (1988-89): 90· and E F83 H '.' ' autteer,305 314 32 . rench, 68.

4 c~t:SImpson and Dickinso ' , 5-26; to which add Catling, AR(1 6) Macdonald "Pr bl n, Gazetteer 348

8 .: 149-50. ,Oems of the Twelfth .Desborough Century Be in th D

teUeer,360 ' Last Mycenaea e odecanese," ABSA 81. ns, 153 and 227. ., Hope SImpson and D' k'IC Inson, Ga-

THE CATASTROPHE SURVEYED 27

ishere for physical destruction is disputed. The palace at Knossos, possiblythe most splendid and extensive palace of the Late Bronze Age, was at sometime destroyed, but the date of Knossos's destruction has conventionallybeen set in the early fourteenth century B.C. rather than in the early twelfth.How credible the conventional chronology is can best be judged after asurvey of the rest of the island in the LM II1Band mc periods.

It has long been known, on the basis of evidence from sites other thanKnossos, that economic and cultural activities on Crete did not declinedrastically after 1400. In Pendlebury's words, architecture and potteryfrom Cretan sites other than Knossos indicate that in LM III "Minoanculture continued unbroken but on a lower level."86 But the picture offourteenth- and thirteenth- century Crete has become much rosier than itwas in Evans's and Pendlebury's books. It is now clear that the Cretans ofboth the LM iliA and II1Bperiods were "prosperous and enterprising. "87In fact, thanks to Philip Betancourt's survey, we can now say that thethirteenth century was the golden age of the Minoan ceramic industry.88The pots-especially the kraters and the thousands of stirrup jars-suggest a lively export of some liquid (wine, olive oil, or possibly an oint-ment or perfumed oil).89 Some of the pots demonstrate what had alwaysbeen suspected anyway: Linear B continued in use on Crete until ca. 1200B.C. In addition to inscribed LM mB pots found in Crete itself, stirrup jarsexported from Crete have been found at fivemainland sites, and on the jarsare Linear B legends that were painted on before firing.

9o

In western Crete there appears to have been an important thirteenth-century center at Khania (classical Kydonia), now being excavated by aGreek-Swedish team. A great deal of LM IIIB pottery w~s ev~de~tlyshipped from this site. A number of vases found at Khania bear mscnptlons

j

l

86 j.D.S. Pendlebury, The Archaeology of Crete (London, 1939), 243, .87 A. Kanta, The Late Minoan III Period in Crete: A Survey of Sites, pottery, and Their

Distribution, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, vol. 58 (Goteborg, 1980), 313, Kanta,who accepts the orthodox dating (ca. 1380) of the "final destruction" of the Knossos palace,found lirtle sign of decline thereafter in the island as a whole. C£. her conclUSIOnat p, 326:«Art and life in Crete are best summarised as having continued at a reasonably high level afterLM 1lIA 2, and the relative material well being of the average Cretan did not detenorate 10 the

wake of the destruction of Knossos."88 Philip Betancourt, The History of Minoan pottery (Princeton,. 1985). At p. 159 Betan-

court observes that in terms of volume, "the third Late Minoan penod ISa tIme of IOcreasedproduction and expanded commercial enterprise. Mycenaean pottery reaches both the NearEast and the West in increasing quantities vivid testimony to the thriving Aegean economy.

C,. h' fi bl t d "Tablet

rete, well within the Mycenaean sphere, has a good share 10 t ISpro ta e ra e.K700, which inventories over 1800 stirrup jars, "is a good example of the new performa~ceexpected from LM 1lI potters." As for the qualiry of the pots, "technically, LM IllB ISthe high

POInt of Minoan potting and pyrotechnology" (p. 171).89 Kanta, Late Minoan III Period, 296.90 Betancourt, History of Minoan pottery, 173,

,,-I

5

28 IN T ROD U CTI 0 N

referring to a wanax a d h. ' n per aps we may hquestion resided somewh h . assume t at the u/anax inK d . . ere on t e Island 91Wh th hy oma Itself is unclear alth h L" e er t ere was a palace inrecently been found the ' 92Aoug mear B tablets of ~M IIIB date haveB.C., presumably sh . re'

ht any rate, Kydonia was destroyed ca 1200

armg t e same fate th k .over the ~astern Mediterranean.v' at overtoo cities and palaces all

There IS evidence that at the b . .central and eastern Crete bandoned of LM IIIC numerous sites inKn were a andoned A' h hossos, seems to have be . mrusos, t e arbor town forfountain-house and a shri~~ ;~stly ~nocc.upied in LM IIIC, although ahave been some burning but I con:mue m use.

94At Mallia there may

abandoned soon after 1200 95~ost 0 the site seems to have been simplyfom Palaikastro indicates ;b dOthe eastern tip of the islaod, the evidenceer to a site on Kastri hill in ~~Co~6m~ntat the end of LM IIIB, with trans-that ~rom LM I to LM lIIB ther~ Finally, excavations in 1987 revealedo:unos, near Mirabello Bay and t;as a large setdement at Aghios Pha-t e twelfth century.97. ' at this City was also deserted early in

The most noticeable fthe sudd f eature of habitatio hif .en pre erence, ca. 1180 f . n snitts m Crete, however, wasand well-protected places A ,or relatively large settlements in remoteeastlern Crete concluded 'tha~e~en~survey of the Late Bronze Age sites insett ements . h unng LM lllB thh ,Wit many people livi ere were a great many

ouses. In LM mc rvmg either in ha I .this period .' on the other hand such .m ets or m isolated.. people hved m larger vill ' . small sites are unattested: in

umg into the Iron A VI ages or m towns Th IIIC .The mc ge, cover approxim I . e Sites, con tin-

d. towns were typicall I ~te y one hectare.f"

vate sites all in Yp aced high in threfuge".' eastern Crete have co e mountains. Three exca-, smce they were appa:ently fou:~~n~y been referred to as "cities of

91 Louis Godart"L d y people who sought securityMusti d L ' a ca uta dei r . ., e., e origine dei G . egm rnicenei a Cret I" .

92 Louis Godart reCl: Dori e mondo e a e invasione dorica," in DomenicoRFIC 119 (1991)' la2ndYanmsTzedakis "L geo (Rome, 1990), 174-76.. 9-49 ' es nouveaux t .

93 Godart, "La cad ". extes en Lineaire B de la Canee "94 Vi' S" uta, 185 '

elt turmer"D E .Forschungen, 33-'36 as nde der Wohnsiedlun' .95 S ..' gen m Malia u d A .turmer, "Ende" 34 n mmsos," in Thomas edver!assen werden'" , says that at the end f L ' .,

96 K' 0 M IIIB allanta, Late Mi parts of the city "e d "1 .97 Catling, AR (19;o;n III Period, 192. n gu tlg98 Donald C H . -89): 107.

(1991): 291' "k aggls, "Survey at Kav .or small . on Age sites are fe . OUSI, Crete: The Ir A

1

.towns, and occupy ! wer IIInumber but a I on ge Settlements " A]'A 95popu atlon de new ocatlon ' re arge settlem . 'highlands in L~~~~ at the end of LM 1II;~~~.One question is wheth:;;~' certamly villagesoccupy locations' C

i···The Iron Age sett! ather, a nucleation of settle ere IS a slgmficant

III c ose proximity to a bleme?ts are large in size m1lentm the Kavousira e SOli and wat .,usua y about 1ha ander supplies." ,

THE CAT A S T R 0 P H E SUR V EYE D 29

from city-sackers. Karphi is a mountain aerie some six airline miles inland~r~mMallia, on a peak thirteen hundred feet above the Lasithi plain (whichISItself twenty-eight hundred feet above sea level).99For understandablereasons nobody lived there in the LM mB period, but in the mc periodthere was a sizeable town at Karphil?" A second "city of refuge" wasVrokastro, little more than a mile from the western corner of MirabelloBay, but high on a precipitous peak. The town on Vrokastro peak wasconstr~cted at the same time that the settlement at Aghios Phanourios, inthe plain below Vrokastro, was abandoned.101 The third of the LM mcmountain sites in eastern Crete is Kavousi, which is actually a double site(t~e ".lower" settlement near Kavousi is Vronda, while Kastro is perchedst.lllhigher on the mountain).102 Although excavations here are still contin-umg, it is once again very clear that these twin sites were established at the

beginning of LM me.. For the building of towns in such appalling locations a powerful motiva-tion must be imagined. This flight to the mountains early in the twelfthcentury was very likely precipitated by a particularly frightening instance?f the Catastrophe nearby: whatever security the Cretans had relied uponin the lllB period was now gone, and the population was left to defend itselfas best it could. One can hardly avoid the conclusion that the regime bywhich the eastern half of the island had been ruled and protected in the LMIllls period was routed and annihilated shortly after 1200. If Evans wascorrect in dating the final destruction of the Knossos palace to ca. 1400,then one must assume that in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C.c~ntral and eastern Crete had been administered from some palace yet to bediscovered; and that when this other palace is discovered, with its stocks ofprovisions and its Linear B tablets, it will prove to have been destroyed in

the early twelfth century.

SUMMARY

Destruction by fire was the fate of the cities and palaces of the easternMediterranean during the Catastrophe. Throughout the Aegean, Anatolia,Cyprus, and the Levant dozens of these places were burned. Although

99 Pendlebury et aI., "Excavations in the Plain of Lasithi. m," ABSA 38 (1938-39): 57-

145..100 Desborough, Last Mycenaeans, 175, concluded that Karphi was founded in "the

middle or latter part of LH. me." Cf., however, Kanta, Late Minoan III Period, 121: "It isnow clear that the town of Karphi was first inhabited during a relatively early stage in LM III

C."101 Catling, AR (1988-89): 107.102 For the most recent report on these twO sites see G. e. Gesell, L. P. Day, and W. D.

Coulsen, "The 1991 Season at Kavousi, Crete," AJA 96 (1992): 353.

30 INTRODUCTION

many small communities were not destroyed, having been simply aban-doned in the early twelfth century B.C., the great centers went up in flames.In fact, in all the lands mentioned it is only in the interior of the southernLevant that one can find at least a few significant centers that were notdestroyed by fire at least once during the Catastrophe.

In the aftermath of destruction many centers were rebuilt, and a surpris-ing number of them were on or within sight of the seacoast. Tiryns, Troy,Ialysos, Tarsus, Enkomi, Kition, Ashdod, and Ashkelon are the best-known of these twelfth-century coastal settlements, but there were manyothers. Another expedient, favored especially by the survivors of the Catas-trophe in eastern Crete, was to locate new towns high in the mountains.Small, unfortified settlements were far less common in the middle of thetwelfth century than they had been a century earlier.

Egypt escaped the Catastrophe, inasmuch as no Egyptian cities or pal-aces are known to have been destroyed, although after Ramesses III pha-raonic power and prestige entered a sharp decline. And in Mesopotamiathe ~atastrophe seems to have done little damage: the kings of Assurremained strong through the twelfth century, and Babylonia's troubleswere of a conventional kind. But in all other civilized lands, the Catastro-phe was synonymous with the burning of rich palaces and famous cities.

PART TWOALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS

OF THE CATASTROPHE

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