Reddit reviews The End of the Bronze Age

I'm going to list 2, in reverse chronological order:

The battle of Marathon. good book on it.
The end of the Bronze Age.

Marathon

All that most folks think about it was a myth created in the late 19th century: that some dude ran 26.2 miles back to Athens, croaked "rejoice we conquer" and fell over dead.

Oh, what a perversion.

Philippides lived at a time when no one drove cars. So when Athens learned that the Persians were going to land at Marathon and then march to Athens, they sent Philippides to run 70 miles to Sparta to get their military assistance. The Spartans, being a superstitious lot, said that they weren't going to go to battle until after the next new moon. So Phillipides ran 70 miles back to Athens, only to find that the troops had already left for Marathon. So he ran to Marathon and joined the battle. The Persians decided to get most of their troops back onto their ships and sail around the peninsula to attack Athens directly, and the 5000 Persian troops left behind were to keep the Athenians occupied so they could not get back to Athens in time. Instead, the Athenians beat the Persians and then faced the issue of getting back to Athens in time. Since the quickest route (which was the 26.2 mile route) went up about 5000 feet in the first couple of miles, they only sent the youngsters (those in their teens and 20s) along that route, with everyone else taking the coastal route (which was flat and more like 35 miles). Almost every one of the Athenian warriors made it back to Athens before the Persian ships got close enough to land. When the Persians saw that the folks they fought had made it there before them, they turned and left.

If Athens had been beaten by the Persians, based on how the Persians relocated and treated the conquered, there would be no history of democracy for us to follow. Athens had been a democracy for about 10 years by the time of that battle, and was still the only democracy in the world.

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The end of the Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is widely considered to have ended around 1150BC. The author calls the destruction of at least 47 cities (the ones we know about, and probably 1/3 of those were discovered in the second half of the 20th Century) the "catastrophe." If you aren't a history buff, then the only one of those cities that you've heard of would be Troy (yep, that one - wooden horse, face that launched a thousand ships, those legends written several hundred years later by Homer about the city that was destroyed in 1200BC). It was followed by a political and economic vacuum that endured for several centuries which allowed the Greek, Phonecian, Persian and Roman empires to spring up. The only civilization that survived the onslaught was the Egyptian empire, and it was weakened so severely that uprising rebels from the south were able to take over. The Egyptian empire withdrew from what is now called Libya and Gaza to concentrate on the Nile area, and shrivelled into irrelevancy prior to being conquered by the Greeks almost 900 years after the catastrophe. The Hittite empire vanished and one of their military outposts, located at what we now call Persepolis, became the nucleus for the Persian empire.

The city burners, who some archeologists call the "sea peoples" [1] were so effective at destroying cities and their surrounding areas that they left no one able to read or write. One of the cities that was destroyed and never rebuilt was called Ugarit. Ugarit (located on the coast of what is now called Syria, and close to the Turkish border) is important for this story because they were destroyed so quickly, that there were clay tablets left in an oven for drying them when the city was destroyed. One of the tablets that sat in the oven for almost 3k years mentions raiders from the sea, and would the Egyptian Emperor please send troops to aid his faithful vassals in Ugarit please. There were also a number of swords abandoned there that were so new, they had never been sharpened after manufacture.

The Sea Peoples had destroyed every city (going clockwise) from what is now Greece, through Turkey, through the Levant and Mesopotamia all the way to Gaza. The Egyptians waged several battles with them in 1208BC and 1176. The last known battle with the Sea Peoples was that one in 1176BC. By then, they had engaged in at least 30 years of continuous warfare during an era when the life expectancy of a person was less than that. As far as we know, there weren't any Bronze Age cities north or west of Greece.

The author delves into several competing hypotheses and rebuts them rather well. Two of the main alternative explanations for the "catastrophe" involve earthquakes or drought. Tree ring measurements show that there was no widespread drought at the time. If cities were destroyed in earthquakes, then loot tends to get buried in the rubble, and the cities that perished in the "catastrophe" were picked clean except for hiding places inside walls or floors. Which implies that the city burners killed everyone rather than torturing folks for details on their treasures.

Three new weapons appeared shortly before this war: javelins (previously used in hunting, but not common in warfare), lances and a new type of sword (called by archaeologist the Naue Type 2) that was suitable for slashing. Previous swords were almost exclusively stabbing instruments [2]. Prior to the collapse/catastrophe, chariot warfare was widespread and common. Subsequent to the dark ages that lasted for several hundred years after the collapse/catastrophe, chariots were far less common. I suspect that the javelins and lances were part of new military tactics that rendered chariot based warfare obsolete. Armor for legs was rather rare prior to the period of the Sea Peoples, but very common afterwards. This leads me to conclude that chopping at legs was an effective tactic that previous infantry was poorly equipped to deal with.

We don't really know who the Sea Peoples were, nor why they waged a multi-generational war to destroy all civilization in the world. Everyplace they conquered became illiterate. The list of names of participants include many tribes/nations that we've never heard of. The names that we do know of include tribes from Afghanistan, Italy and the Baltic Sea (the Naue Type 2 sword is considered to have be developed in the Baltic Sea area). What united such disparate tribes? We'll probably never know. Why did they do it? Again, without some astonishing breakthroughs, we'll never know that either. What we do know is that a wide range of tribes were so angry that they united for at least 3 decades to eliminate civilization from the face of the Earth.

Notes:
1 - The name Sea Peoples comes from an interpretation of some heiroglyphics that survived. One of the stelae involved mentioned Israel, and that it had been destroyed by the Sea Peoples about 1200 BC. You could see the stelae if you watched the first episode of Heritage: Civilization and the Jews.
2 - Later swords in some regions continued to be stabbing based weapons, such as the Roman Gladius.

One theory is based on large migrations of new groups of people, along with new military tactics and the rise of the javelin as a counter to the typical chariot warfare of the time. This book advances a theory that the Peoples of the Sea, (a group of seafaring raiders who were most documented for their invasions of Egypt) were one group partly responsible for the fall of the Bronze Age civilizations.

The graduate seminar I took on this used Drews, The End of the Bronze Age. Drews presents and evaluates the evidence for a number of different theories (12?) ranging from systems collapse to earthquakes to climate change to invasion. In the end he settles on technological innovations that allowed mass infantry to successfully confront chariot armies.

I'm not entirely convinced, but it's a good argument.

Check out The End of the Bronze Age by Robert Drews.

The End of the Bronze Age Princeton University Press https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691025916/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdo_t1_.XcJBbE2K75XH

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World https://www.amazon.com/dp/069114818X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_C1cJBbZV1V1W6