The Lecture
After 1177 BCE: The Collapse and Survival of Civilizations
In the years after 1177 BCE, many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An interconnected world that had boasted major empires and societies, relative peace, robust commerce, and monumental architecture was lost. Now, in After 1177 BCE, we will trace the compelling story of what happened during the next four centuries across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world. It is a story of resilience, transformation, and success, as well as failures, in an age of chaos and reconfiguration. Those that failed to adjust disappeared from the world stage, while others transformed themselves, resulting in a new world order that included Israelites, Philistines, Phoenicians, Neo-Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, and world-changing innovations such as the use of iron and standardization of the alphabet. It is now clear that this period, far from being the First Dark Age, was a new age with new inventions, new opportunities, and lessons for us today.
The Speaker
Eric H. Cline
Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics, History, and Anthropology, the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University, in Washington DC. A National Geographic Explorer, NEH Public Scholar, Getty Scholar, and Fulbright Scholar with degrees from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, he is an active field archaeologist with more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey experience in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States, including ten seasons at Megiddo (1994-2014), where he served as co-director before retiring from the project in 2014, and another ten seasons at Tel Kabri, where he currently serves as Co-Director. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books and nearly one hundred articles; translations of his books have appeared in nineteen different languages. Among them are Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology; Digging Deeper: How Archaeology Works; 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed and (with Glynnis Fawkes) 1177 BC: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed. In addition, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations has just appeared.