‘The Bronze Age came to a crashing halt around 1200 BC, thanks to a “systems collapse”’
James I. Porter, Author of Homer: The Very Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
What makes an age ‘dark’? In a polarised world like ours, people are more likely to point to an impending dark age than to say that we are already living through one.
Ancient Greece has a ‘Dark Age’ on the books, though what this amounted to is hotly debated. The periodisation is not in doubt. The Bronze Age that preceded it came to a crashing halt around 1200 BC, thanks to a ‘systems collapse’. Across the Mediterranean, from Greece to the Levant and Asia Minor, palace civilisations were wiped out within a span of around a century, but for no obvious reason. Archaeology suggests a welter of causes: earthquake and fire storms, external invasions and massive climatic disturbances are all candidates, with natural disasters more decisive than man-made ones. At this point, the record goes ‘dark’. Knowledge of writing and other technologies all but disappeared. Palaces were abandoned, populations thinned and were redistributed through massive migrations, trade slowed to a trickle.
