Picking Up the Pieces of Civilization

A review of Eric Cline's "After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations"

So your civilization has collapsed. What comes next?

That’s the question archaeologist Eric H. Cline seeks to answer in his new book After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations. It’s a direct follow up to his 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which detailed the concatenation of political, social, and environmental crises that brought the Late Bronze Age to an end in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Earthquakes, drought, and military invasions, disease, famine, and climate change all conspired bring down both individual civilizations and the “globalized Mediterranean network” that connected them all together.

Much of After 1177 B.C. amounts to an overview of the latest scholarly research into the divergent fates of post-collapse civilizations. It’s an account that’s alternately bone-dry and intriguing; though it’s often overly academic and bogs down in places, Cline’s workmanlike prose generally gets the job done. What’s crystal clear, though, is that the Late Bronze Age Collapse involved a great deal of human suffering and destruction as well as resilience and eventual innovation. Cline attempts with some success to thread the intellectual needle between traditional arguments that characterize post-collapse eras like the end of the western Roman Empire as “dark ages” and more recent contentions that such collapses amount to mere “transitions.”

Cline accordingly devotes the bulk of his attention to how Eastern Mediterranean civilization rebuilt itself after the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Some civilizations like the Myceneans and Hittites disappeared altogether, while new ones like the Phoenicians—progenitors of the phonetic alphabet, among other rudiments of both ancient and modern civilization—and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah emerged from the rubble of various Canaanite civilizations in the Levant. Others like the Neo-Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians reconstituted themselves after periods of significant turmoil, while a grievously wounded Egypt staggered forward a shadow of its former self.

But what determined whether a civilization survived the collapse in some way, shape, or form? Cline cribs from a 2012 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to suggest a combination of resilience and a society’s ability to innovate socially as well as technologically. Societies can either cope with disasters, “just trying to absorb the blows and maintain the status quo,” or adapt and transform to meet the challenge posed by such severe threats. Egypt, for instance, coped with the Late Bronze Age Collapse, while Assyria and Babylon adapted well to changed circumstances and, after a significant period of disruption, picked back up where their predecessors left off.

The book does pose the question—implicitly throughout its substantive chapters and explicitly in its introduction and conclusion—of just how resilient our own societies are today. Cline himself leaves the question fairly open and paints what’s probably a too dark-and-gloomy picture of our own current predicament.

At first glance, it might seem wise to concede the point, at least when it comes to the United States. Dysfunctional domestic politics, an attempted coup, a convicted criminal running once again for the nation’s top political post, an inability to build much of anything due to legal and bureaucratic red tape, an economy excessively devoted to financial wizardry above all else—pick your poison, America will probably have had a taste of it in recent years. These severe problems can’t be ignored. But the evidence of the past five years or so tells a much more positive story of American resilience in the face of a string of calamities.

Take the response to the COVID-19 pandemic: despite a wholly unfit president in office during the first year of the pandemic and political instability after his election loss in November 2020, the United States fared this global catastrophe better than just about any other nation. The country’s otherwise sclerotic political institutions actually sprung into something approximating action, with Congress passing massive emergency assistance legislation—the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan—and two different presidential administrations developing and then distributing vaccines at record speed. Later laws like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act all testify to a much more flexible and responsive political system than many Americans imagine they possess.

What’s more, the United States emerged from the pandemic with the best-performing economy among industrial nations. America has outperformed its peers in the G7—countries like Germany, Japan, and Canada—by significant margins over the past five years, with the International Monetary Fund predicting the American economy will grow this year by more than the European Union and Chinese economies combined. Right now, it even looks like the U.S. economy will soon see a much-sought-after “soft landing,” with inflation cooling off without sparking a recession or widespread unemployment.

No one handled the COVID-19 pandemic “well” by any stretch of the imagination. But the United States emerged from the pandemic much better off than many other nations, including virtually all of its peers and rivals—though it did so far too often in spite of itself. It’s also in keeping with Cline’s observation that different societies endured the Late Bronze Age Collapse with differing degrees of success.

Our present circumstances are nowhere near as dire as those Cline describes in After 1177 B.C.—as bad as it was, the COVID-19 pandemic never threatened to collapse the entire global political economy—but that’s no reason for complacency. Dictators in China, Russia, and Iran all seek to tear down the current international political system and profit from the resulting anarchy, much as a number of post-Late Bronze Age Collapse players did. But as the first half of the twentieth century shows, chaos rarely redounds to the benefit of its instigators. And as Cline notes, those civilizations who took advantage of the Late Bronze Age Collapse—the Phoenicians and the Israelite kingdoms, for instance—didn’t and couldn’t foment it.

Then there’s America’s own domestic instability, driven almost wholly by the illiberal and thuggish political and societal forces unleashed by President Donald Trump’s near decade in the national political spotlight. If Trump wins another term in the White House this November, the United States will join the ranks of those nations seeking to collapse the existing international order rather than adapt it to new exigencies. Here, there are clear parallels to the travails of ancient Egypt (which barely survived the Late Bronze Age Collapse) and the Hittites (who didn’t) of Cline’s account: both civilizations faced chronic bouts of internal political chaos that left them unable to adapt as well as they could have—or indeed at all—to events as they buffeted them.

But perhaps the best parallel is to our own recent history and the sanguinary breakdown of the European imperial system from 1914 to 1945, a collapse that involved two world wars and a great depression. It was a narrow-run thing, but humanity pulled itself back from the brink and averted a civilizational collapse that would have made the Late Bronze Age Collapse seem downright appealing. And with Franklin D. Roosevelt at the helm of the United States during two of these epochal crises, America and the world got very, very lucky—but it now looks like even odds at best as to whether America’s luck will finally run out this year.

Contemporary American society may be more resilient than many of us believe, but as Cline’s After 1177 B.C. shows us, no society is resilient enough to survive self-inflicted moral wounds.