What’s in a Date?
1200 BCE, a date to remember? History as a series of significant dates has never enthralled me. I prefer to dig into the minutiae of daily life, or people’s motivations and strategies as best we can reconstruct them. Writing fiction that portrays the past is hugely liberating. It allows me to cull the necessary vivid details, use the known events and political/religious structures, and fill in the gaps with impunity. As long as I make well-informed leaps.
Some historic dates, however, get tossed around like household names, at least in history-loving households. The Norman Conquest of 1066 is an example. I confess I don’t know much about said conquest beyond the obvious and snippets picked up via historical fiction, and yet I know 1066. (The lack of British history in my education is a different subject…)
1200 BCE
1200 BCE qualifies as another dates that took on its own life in the broader culture. Historians list it as the “traditional” date for the end of the Bronze Age. Also attributed to this year are the many destructions that brought that about. In the case of 1200 BCE, the choice of the actual year is quite random. Maybe, sometime around then, Troy fell, Sea Peoples invaded, the Hittite Empire collapsed (along with several others in the eastern Mediterranean), and a long list of other interrelated events. Yet we know of no single, major event that can be dated to 1200 BCE.
I always assumed 1200 BCE was a sort of agreed upon shorthand. Given the lack of solid, specific dates, historians and archaeologists used a default generality. Actually, the history of the use of this well-rounded date is a tale in itself.
Telling a Tale
This post in Ancient Near East Today, “Why Did the World End in 1200 BCE?” does an entertaining job of telling that tale. And if you want the short course in who the so-called Sea Peoples are, there’s a link below the post to Eric Cline’s answer. But if you want to know the why so much of the world collapsed—the part I find so intriguing and which has no simple answer—read Eric Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. In the meantime, read ANET’s post because, for once, the date has an interesting history.
The photo at the top is an imaginative view of the fall of Troy, painted by Jan Styka in 1878.
Trojan War enthusiasts may also be interested in my review of Eric Cline’s The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.
Accordingly, the sea peoples, were a symptom, of a severe multi-generational drought, Aegean region literally starving people, changing location, along with a surplus of veterans mercenaries.
That is, the sea people it is said, that families were among the hordes, aka, the Philistines.
Drought was certainly a piece of the complex puzzle that added up to empire collapses. People were moving amid the disruptions, and, yes, many brought their families along with them.
I was particularly interested in the discussion on the ASOR blog about how focused historians became on identifying 1200 BCE as the key date–and the reasons for that. I doubt anyone living then would have chosen that particular cycle of the seasons that we id as 1200 BCE as the most significant year!
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