2025-02-03
update 2026-07-25

When civilization control-alt-deletes: prehistoric Europe’s false dawn and long reboot | Razib Khan

Reflecting on Europe’s lost 5,000-year-old first draft

Fascinating that the collapse of Neolithic Europe was so complete and so fast, under the advance of Indo-Europeans. But the evidence has mounted showing that total collapse of civilizations is not an anomaly, but common, and actually, to be expected.

'Indo-European Europe was a massive regression from what came before, Neolithic cultures that left copious and often spectacular material remains. Those earlier Neolithic cultures, called “Old Europe” by the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, descended directly from the continent’s first farmers. They created the first European civilizations, long predating Sumer and Egypt. At the Neolithic’s end, Europe boasted some of the most complex and sophisticated societies in the world, where inhabitants routinely produced everything from intricate gold finery to colossal stone monuments. All this disappeared after 3000 BC, and would be forgotten in the millennium it took Europeans to pull themselves up from the depths of the collapse.'

They displaced the foragers of pre-Neolithic Europe, with little intermingling: 'The farmers had paler skin and dark eyes, while the foragers had brown skin and blue eyes.' 'Western Europe’s indigenous foragers assimilated the descendants of earlier hunter-gatherer societies whose ancestors had arrived on the continent more than 30,000 years ago.'

Neolithic Europe was dominated by farmers: 'Farming‌ mostly spread as farmers themselves migrated, first from Anatolia to the southern Balkans 9,000 years ago. From there, the lifestyle leapt across the Mediterranean, establishing bridgeheads along pockets of the Italian coast, before vaulting west to Spain’s eastern seaboard 7,700 years ago. Meanwhile, other groups of farmers pushed upstream along the Danube, reaching modern Germany by 7,500 years ago.'

• [/] +paleoanthropology: need to complete prologue •stoweboyd.io +civilizational collapse +Neolithic Europe +paleoanthropology

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Reflecting on Europe’s lost 5,000-year-old first draft

Gold-work from the Varna civilization, circa 4500 BC

No matter our efforts at neutrality, the light of our day has a way of coloring our conception of past and future. Westerners, perhaps Americans most of all, have a strong bias towards viewing history through a “Whig” lens; the present is better than the past, and the future will be better still. See “OK Boomer.” Though a Whig conception of history was first articulated in the 20th century, its origins run deeper, starting with Britain’s 18th-century Enlightenment, the age of Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine and Isaac Newton’s mechanics, and culminating in Britain’s 19th-century industry-powered empire. The Whig sensibility that crystallized during these centuries filed the past away as darker, more primitive and poorer than the present, and looked eagerly towards a utopian future that would put the present to shame. Though this idea emerged in England, its spirit is best developed in the US, a nation that in 250 years has gone from a loose set of colonies with a few million citizens to the most powerful, wealthiest nation the world has ever known.

But in an age of scientifically-driven innovation, where famine is abolished so completely that in developed nations obesity has become a reliable marker of poverty, it’s easy to forget that far more common has been an alternate view of time’s march: a mindset where the past was a “Golden Age,” and the present a fallen one. The idea that the present is meaner than the past is not obscure; Homer’s Greek contemporaries looked back to a prior society of great heroes and powerful kings that had since degenerated into the petty clans of their day. Christianity too assumes a fall from an Edenic state, memorializing earlier epochs peopled by demi-gods and long-lived patriarchs. More recently, the ethos of the Renaissance arose from the sense that European civilization’s apex had been long prior, under the Greeks and Romans, with the intervening collapse into a Dark Age, a woeful state from which Western man now had to lift himself. These ideas can even be seen in the scientific age. The late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers were the “original affluent society,” with subsistence requiring just some 3-5 hours of work per week. For Sahlins and his peers, agriculture ushered in a regime of ceaseless toil, one that has not been transcended by modern man’s 40-hour work week.

Viewing the trend-line on the scale of millennia, Steve Pinker’s argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined fairly captures a global pattern of increased complexity, wealth and individual liberty. But this is only on the whole, and obviously individual humans don’t have the consolation of living “on the whole.” Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization illustrates how social, political and economic dynamism took a major hit in Western Europe with the Roman system’s collapse after 500 AD. In countless times and places, as in late Rome, we observe massive and persistent decline, even if the slope of the line over the longest time scales trends positive. Pinker and most Whig thinkers would emphasize the overall trend, but the further back in time you go, the deeper and longer these periods of decline and disarray drag on. The transition between the last two Chinese dynasties, the Ming and the Manchu Qing, took 40 years, from 1644 to 1683 AD. In contrast, after the fall of the Later Han in 220 AD, the Sui did not reunify China for another long 369 years.

But at least after the collapse of the Han and the ensuing centuries of chaos, the Sui and their successors resurrected a society and state offering recognizable continuity with the past. This contrasts with the Greeks after Bronze-Age Mycenaean civilization’s 12th-century BC collapse. The Mycenaeans were on the periphery of an international system centered on great powers like Egypt, the Hittites and Babylonia. A warlike people, they constructed imposing citadels from massive boulders, and were ruled by kings who relied on scribes to track trade and taxation in exquisite detail. Eric Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed outlines the global system of the late Bronze Age, with extensive trade ties reaching as far north as Scandinavia and Cornwall and eastward into Afghanistan. This network quickly unraveled in the decades after 1200 BC. In 1180 BC, the Hittite capital of Hattusa was burned to the ground, and save for Biblical mentions, history forgot the Hittites. To the west, the same century was a time of troubles for the Mycenaeans, whose citadels were sacked or abandoned, returning Greece to a humble realm of peasants, shepherds and petty tribal chieftains.

Historiography conventionally defines the period between 1200 BC and 800 BC as the Greek Dark Ages, because the peninsula was sucked back into the mute darkness of prehistory. The Linear B writing system Mycenaean scribes used was entirely forgotten after the 1180’s BC, and when Greeks began to write again, with the first attested script dating to 740 BC, it was in a modified Phoenician alphabet. Classical civilization was a reboot. Even if genetically and ethno-linguistically the Greeks maintained continuity with their Bronze-Age ancestors, no institutional or cultural memory of the earlier incarnation remained aside from vague glimmers in Homeric paeans to Mycenae’s bygone glory, with its lion gate and boar-tusk helmeted warriors. Hesiod’s Theogony, too, recalls a lost golden age from the vantage of the 8th century BC, attesting to the diminished world four centuries after its fall, still preserving a dim recollection of the Mycenaean age of great polises and international expeditions of conquest.

Truly, the further back you go into history, the more devastating collapses prove. Over the last decade, ancient DNA has made it clear Europe saw a massive demographic turnover starting 5,000 years ago, but this was already plain in the archaeological record. J. P. Mallory, author of In Search of the Indo-Europeans, dryly observed on the podcast that his vocation was to haunt burial mounds, because in most cases, they represent the sum total of material evidence the early Indo-Europeans he studies left us. They might have been conquerors of the continent, fearsome warriors who overturned civilizations, but archaeologically the Indo-Europeans are wan ghosts at most, the true sweep of their legacy only clear once we could read the record of the genes themselves.

Indo-European Europe was a massive regression from what came before, Neolithic cultures that left copious and often spectacular material remains. Those earlier Neolithic cultures, called “Old Europe” by the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, descended directly from the continent’s first farmers. They created the first European civilizations, long predating Sumer and Egypt. At the Neolithic’s end, Europe boasted some of the most complex and sophisticated societies in the world, where inhabitants routinely produced everything from intricate gold finery to colossal stone monuments. All this disappeared after 3000 BC, and would be forgotten in the millennium it took Europeans to pull themselves up from the depths of the collapse.^[1]

Societies at the climax of Neolithic Europe 5,000 years ago

The European Neolithic ushered in farming as the continent’s dominant way of life. This shift’s chronological and geographical scope is straightforward: the earliest farming communities were in the southeast, and over thousands of years these villages spread west and north. In the late 20th century, archaeologists debated whether the farming lifestyle’s new ubiquity was driven by the farmers’ migration (by genes), or via the diffusion of ideas (by memes). By 2010, allied with advances in archaeology, the new science of paleogenomics had settled the question. Researchers established relationships between populations, and using isotope analysis of bone composition, inferred that upon the arrival of a new people, diets shifted to typical farmer fare. Farming‌ mostly spread as farmers themselves migrated, first from Anatolia to the southern Balkans 9,000 years ago. From there, the lifestyle leapt across the Mediterranean, establishing bridgeheads along pockets of the Italian coast, before vaulting west to Spain’s eastern seaboard 7,700 years ago. Meanwhile, other groups of farmers pushed upstream along the Danube, reaching modern Germany by 7,500 years ago.

The earliest reconstruction of relationships between migrant farmers and indigenous foragers showed they were quite distinct populations, with genetic distances on roughly the scale separating modern Germans and Chinese (some 10%, where the value between two modern European populations runs about 1%). Several factors drove this. First, forager populations were dispersed, with frequent bottlenecks driving rapid accumulation of genetic differences between geographically separated populations. And while both foragers and farmers seem to have derived predominantly from different hunter-gatherer societies that occupied the Balkans, Anatolia and the Caucasus, each mixed with other very different populations. Anatolian farmers had ancestry from a population geneticists term “Basal Eurasian,” so called because it split off from other Eurasian populations first after the “out of Africa” bottleneck 60,000 years ago. In contrast, Western Europe’s indigenous foragers assimilated the descendents of earlier hunter-gatherer societies whose ancestors had arrived on the continent more than 30,000 years ago.

Finally, reconstructing the appearance of early Holocene European farmers and foragers with forensic genomic methods makes it clear they would have regarded each other as different races. The farmers had paler skin and dark eyes, while the foragers had brown skin and blue eyes.

Newgrange tomb in Ireland

These biological differences likely go part way toward explaining widespread cultural segregation that seems to have persisted between the two populations in Europe for millennia. The Linear Pottery Culture (LBK) pioneered farming in Northern Europe. According to ancient DNA results, after arriving to these northern latitudes, for nearly 2,000 years farmer and foragers remained genetically segregated in western Germany, only to merge after 3500 BC. The only remotely comparable analogs would be the Indian caste system’s millennia-long track record of inviolable endogamy strictures, or the total genetic separation between foragers and expansionist Bantu farmers across East Africa 3,000 years ago. Both cases reflect strict genetic segregation, indicating the relationship between old and new populations may sometimes have entailed a peaceful toleration, but genuinely no deeper engagement.

DNA and archaeology also resolve long-running anthropological debates about the societies of Neolithic Europeans. When Gimbutas theorized in the 1950’s that Indo-Europeanization occurred via the in-migration of a patriarchal and pastoralist population from Ukraine’s Pontic steppe, which overwhelmed a peaceful, egalitarian mother-goddess worshipping culture of farmers, she was half right. Her “Kurgan hypothesis,” that steppe nomads who buried their elites in kurgan mounds also distributed their language and genes across Europe, has been proven broadly correct. And her inferences about that people’s patriarchal nature seem pretty spot-on, too, judging both from Indo-European mythology and the clearly patrilocal DNA patterns in steppe burials.

But Gimbutas’ ideas about the indigenous Neolithic European farmers of Old Europe they replaced, turn out to have been wide of the mark. Germany’s LBK people lived in collective longhouses dominated by single paternal lineages. This is known from the clustering of the same Y-chromosomal haplogroups in villages’ burial grounds, while females seem to be unrelated and consistently represent disparate lineages. Tribal conflict seems to have been abundant, with high numbers of remains exhibiting evidence of skeletal trauma. The LBK are also responsible for the first clear massacre site in Europe dating to 7,000 years ago, where half the victims slaughtered were children, refuting any idea that Indo-Europeans besmirched an idyllic Neolithic world unfamiliar with their war and violence. LBK propensity for war is familiar to us, and illustrates deep human commonalities extending back to the Neolithic. Lawrence Keeley in The War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage reports that as farmers swept across Northern Europe, where they impinged upon the territories of marine foragers, who had much higher population densities than inland hunter-gatherer societies, the competing groups’ wars roiled Europe's coastal plain for centuries.

Europe’s final Neolithic societies also exhibit evidence of extreme inequality that would prefigure what was to follow. Five years ago, geneticists discovered the remains of a young man buried in Newgrange, a megalithic passage tomb, who was the product of first-degree incest. The strange genetic fact that this youth's parents were close relatives, combined with his burial in such a majestic location, suggests he was viewed as part of a special lineage, above the common people (and thus allowed to violate the taboo against near-kin matings). In addition, he carried a Y-chromosomal lineage connecting him to others buried in similar tombs across Neolithic Ireland, indicating that one elite lineage dominated much of the isle more than 5,000 years ago.

Callanish standing stones of Scotland, circa 3000 BC

This trend toward stratification, with the exaltation of a few atop a broader social hierarchy, so typical in later history, including in the modern world, has deep roots in the European Neolithic. Over 6,000 years ago, at the Bulgarian site called Varna, the local Neolithic people were burying their elites with a generous complement of ornate grave goods. It is here, in Neolithic Bulgaria, that we find the planet’s first extensive gold-working. Not in China, the Near East or India, but in the mists of prehistoric Europe. The Varna site held 13 pounds of gold artifacts, fashioned into jewelry, weapons and other decorative items. Certain human remains were associated with a particularly abundant surfeit of grave goods, while others were more modestly arrayed, again reflecting the widespread stratification of social station. In addition to pioneering goldwork, the Varna people produced axes and chisels for trade, making them the world's center for large-scale copper tool production.

To the northeast of the Varna culture, in the late 6th millennium BC, a farming society emerged in today’s southwest Ukraine and northwest Romania called the +Cucuteni-Trypillia. Notable for its intricate and distinctive pottery, suggesting a large and prosperous artisanal class supported by agricultural surplus, the society endured for over 2,700 years, disappearing just after 3000 BC. A village-based culture, near its civilizational peak around 3100 BC, some of the Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements likely counted over 10,000 inhabitants, making them perhaps the world’s largest urban centers, save for Mesopotamia’s Uruk (which is thought to have counted nearly 50,000 citizens).

While the Cucuteni-Trypillia were reaching the apex of agricultural urbanism, in the west, Neolithic Europeans had begun erecting massive stone monuments. The megalith-building custom began on the Atlantic coast around 4800 BC, and continued until the Neolithic collapse sometime after 3000 BC. Starting in Brittany, it diffused along the coastal fringe, likely via trade routes. In the south, the monuments began showing up in Portugal in 4000 BC, and eventually even Malta in the Mediterranean, while reaching Britain, then Denmark, northern Germany and Southern Sweden by 3500 BC. Neolithic Britons erected Stonehenge around 3000 BC. An entire field is devoted to understanding what Stonehenge meant to the various peoples who venerated and rebuilt it over several millennia, but the utility of passage graves found across Western Europe seems clearer. These, and cruder dolmens, seem to have been elite graves. This was still clear to the people who succeeded their Neolithic builders in places like Scandinavia, where wholly unrelated Bronze-Age successor cultures reused the structures of their predecessors, rather than build elite tombs of their own.

Trade networks, along with cultural and political ties interconnected Neolithic Western Europeans across the continent. Despite their widespread distribution from southern Sweden to the central Mediterranean, the similarities between the megaliths, and the baseline amount of social coordination necessary to erect them, point to some sort of pan-Western European identity knit together by networks of commerce, communication and migration. Stonehenge’s raw material was quarried 140 miles to the west, reflecting a large investment of time and labor. The geographically far-flung locations of quarry sources for the stone and the manpower needed to haul them hundreds of miles with Neolithic technology indicate coordination between many local communities. In analogous anthropological contexts, such cooperation is only possible with a shared common religion and perhaps ethnolinguistic identity. Finally, many of the megaliths were maintained and rebuilt over multiple centuries, underlining cultural continuity and a collective memory spanning generations.

Clearly, these were not simple subsistence farmers scraping by in meager isolated homesteads, living harvest to harvest. They coalesced into massive villages and accrued enough surplus to support a specialized artisan class producing luxury goods for elites. All this wealth allowed them to deploy their collective economic resources to erect public monuments that awe even today, millennia later. Neolithic Europe was one of Eurasia’s most advanced regions 5,000 years ago, nearly on par with the Near East, matching India and surpassing China in material terms. In some domains, like gold-work, Europe was the pioneer, with the craft eventually diffusing to the Near East and beyond. We may have forgotten this Europe, but it was hardly a backwater. It was a central engine of world civilization 5,000 years ago.

And yet within a few centuries of 3000 BC, Neolithic Europe had wholly collapsed. What had once been cultivated fields became pastureland, with roving bands of men driving their cattle there, burning what forest remained to sustain the herds. These herders brought their Indo-European culture, overrunning the continent in less than a millennium. But their arrival also marked the end of the fertile era of the artisan, the megalith builder and indeed of the great mega-village. Night fell over Neolithic Europe, for nearly five millennia its eloquent remains the lone, inscrutable witnesses to a long-lost culture’s attainments; 18th-century scholars even misascribed Stonehenge’s construction to the Celts who clearly arrived thousands of years later.

Agriculture did not spread across Northern Europe in one fell swoop. It finally arrived in Britain and Ireland in 4000 BC, over a millennium after reaching the continent. Farmers also reached Scandinavia around 4000 BC, penetrating Norway’s fringe and reaching central Sweden only after 3500 BC. The reason for the late expansion to these regions was two-fold. First, grain crops originally adapted to the Near Eastern climate needed millennia to adapt to Northern Europe’s harsher clime. Second, the native forager populations along the coasts of the British Isles and in Scandinavia already had access to rich marine resources, supporting more populous and dense societies than their cousins to the south. Agriculture exhibits a 1,000-year standstill in Northern Europe because the foragers had a good thing going and they held fast to it for many generations.^[2]

When the farmers finally pushed northward, genetic data makes clear that they mixed only minimally with the forager population they would demographically overwhelm. Neolithic societies had been in Northern Europe for 1,500 years, and having adapted to local conditions, had a full cultural toolkit well enough adapted to the region’s climate not to feel any pressure to integrate with the indigenous people. In Scandinavia, the dynamic observed in Germany with the initial arrival of farmers and their segregation from foragers recapitulated itself; the Neolithic Funnelbeaker people occupied the hinterlands, while hunter-gatherers called the Pitted Ware Culture (PWC) continued to flourish along the coastal fringe.

This modus vivendi continued for centuries, when suddenly, in the last few centuries of the Funnelbeaker period in Scandinavia, after 2800 BC, a frenzy of defensive-palisade construction occurred. This coincided with ‌a new group arriving in Scandinavia, the steppe-descended Battle Axe Culture (BAC). Within 150 years, the Funnelbeaker people were gone (the PWC persisted until 2300 BC). Notably, the Funnelbeaker people leave almost no genetic imprint upon the BAC. All that would remain of Scandinavia’s last Neolithic culture were the somber dolmens scattered across the landscape, mute relics that the BAC would reuse for their own burials.

This pattern of collapse and demographic implosion is common across Northern Europe after 3000 BC, as one Neolithic society after another regressed and fell extinct. The cultures that had dominated the continent for millennia vanished, replaced by newcomers streaming out of the eastern steppes. In Southern Europe, the dynamic was distinct. Not only was there greater assimilation of Neolithic heritage, but some pre-Indo-European holdout societies like the Basque’s and the Etruscans’ ancestors persisted into historical times, their cultures and languages intact. The highest proportion of Neolithic ancestry today persists among Sardinians, isolated on their island from continental cultural currents until the Iron Age. When the first Swedish Funnelbeaker genetic result came back in 2012, the project’s lead scientist observed that, “The farmer is most genetically similar to people living in Cyprus and Sardinia today.” In contrast, ‌Indo-Europeans arrived in Britain around 2500 BC and within a few centuries, had genetically replaced 90% of heritage on the isle. And in Scandinavia, the BAC successor people carry no imprint of Funnelbeaker heritage.

How could this all happen in such short order? Climate may have been a factor. Starting around 3200 BC, Europe began to cool and become more arid. By 3000 BC, the Cucuteni-Trypillia’s massive villages had dissolved, and the region’s culture shifted away from farming to pastoralism. Across the continent, in Britain, dense farming societies also switched to herding, leaving sharply reduced populations and abandoned villages. In the Near East, the Uruk civilization, whose settlements extended out of Mesopotamia to modern day Syria and north into southeast Turkey, also abruptly collapsed in 3100 BC. Uruk’s towns entirely disappeared outside of its core heartland in southern Mesopotamia, what would later become Sumer.

We know that when human populations burgeon in a subsistence economy, they tax resources, pushing up against the Malthusian limit that curbs human population growth. The dynamics that check growth include war, famine and disease. We see this again during the Medieval Climatic Optimum, when Europe’s population doubles between 1000-1300 AD, bringing widespread immiseration to a peasantry precariously treading the edge of subsistence. Those teeming masses of malnourished serfs proved the ideal incubators for the bubonic plague, which broke out in 1347 and swept through the continent, slashing population numbers by 30-50%. The population’s susceptibility to plague was clearly an outgrowth of overpopulation and malnutrition; European monarchs never lacked for food, and during the decades of the Black Death, only one, Alfonso of Castile, ever succumbed to plague.

A 2024 paper suggests that in late Neolithic Europe, disease may have played a similar role to its well-known medieval impact. The authors found that at least 17% of their data set of late Scandinavian Funnelbeaker individuals were infected by Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that caused bubonic plague. The authors note that given the likelihood of false negatives, if anything, they are underestimating the infection rate. Yersinia pestis is famously incubated in Eurasian marmots indigenous to the steppe, a classic zoonotic disease jumping between species.

Of course, we may never know for certain what precise mix of factors ultimately triggered Neolithic Northern European societies’ dramatic collapse and extinction in the centuries after 3000 BC. Neolithic Europe left us no written records, and the totality of its demographic replacement across the North European plain erased any cultural legacy. The newcomers, descended in the main from nomadic Pontic-steppe pastoralists, were just as warlike and patriarchal as their Neolithic predecessors, but their societies were more mobile, less tied to fixed settlements. It is possible that they had experienced waves of plague earlier than the Neolithic societies to their west, and so enjoyed immunity to the disease then felling their rivals (not unlike the first contact between Europeans and Amerindians after 1492). Either way, we know that from 3000-2500 BC, all of Northern Europe’s Neolithic people fell to Indo-Europeans from the east, and it would be many centuries, after 2000 BC in Scandinavia where the trough was the deepest, before societies regained the complexity and stratification they had known at the Neolithic’s peak.

These inferences, or historical reconstructions, are only possible with modern archaeology and genetics’ newly honed techniques that peel back the layers of the past. Archives and mythologies will never shed any further light on these mysteries because Northern Europe’s first known civilization disappeared so utterly and with such finality, a golden age unrecorded and unmourned. It lies just beyond the reach of history, cultural erasure obliterating any detailed recollection. From roughly a millennium from 3000 BC onward, a Whig reading of European prehistory would seem plainly false, contradicted by the spectacular collapse of a complex, advanced civilization that had emerged over the course of the Neolithic. The great settlements, gone. The skilled artisans deftly fashioning ornate goldwork, gone as well, their skills faded into eclipse instead of passed down to a new generation. The society’s knowhow, coordination and will to build vast stone works evaporated, its most imposing attainments scattered across the landscape, cold totems of a lost age.

Perhaps the moral of the last prehistoric civilization’s end is a greater humility about our ignorance of other unrecorded arcs, other rises and falls still hidden from us, beginnings like Egypt’s Old Kingdom with its pyramids, and ends like the 12th-century BC late Bronze-Age’s spectacular collapse into darkness. Who knows what lost golden ages lie beyond our ken? What Promethean fire roared at the heart of prehistoric camps, only to dim and falter, its forgotten glories the stuff of improbable legend? What golden ages do we only vaguely suspect, we distant, distracted descendents, busy questing after our own age’s idea of greatness?

The reference to 'collapse' above leads to this blurb on Amazon for 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated (Turning Points in Ancient History Book 6)
by Eric H. Cline

A bold reassessment of what caused the Late Bronze Age collapse

In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh's army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians. The thriving economy and cultures of the late second millennium B.C., which had stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, suddenly ceased to exist, along with writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture. But the Sea Peoples alone could not have caused such widespread breakdown. How did it happen?

In this major new account of the causes of this "First Dark Ages," Eric Cline tells the gripping story of how the end was brought about by multiple interconnected failures, ranging from invasion and revolt to earthquakes, drought, and the cutting of international trade routes. Bringing to life the vibrant multicultural world of these great civilizations, he draws a sweeping panorama of the empires and globalized peoples of the Late Bronze Age and shows that it was their very interdependence that hastened their dramatic collapse and ushered in a dark age that lasted centuries.

A compelling combination of narrative and the latest scholarship, 1177 B.C. sheds new light on the complex ties that gave rise to, and ultimately destroyed, the flourishing civilizations of the Late Bronze Age—and that set the stage for the emergence of classical Greece.