Each case is a well-documented and widely accepted example of political interactions between different states in the Eastern Mediterranean. Cline illustrates these points through a number of examples: exchange between Crete and Mesopotamia in the Middle Bronze Age the appearance of envoys from Crete in the tombs of New Kingdom Egypt political tensions between New Kingdom Egypt and the Mitanni of Syria and interactions between the Mycenaeans and Hittites along the western coast of Turkey.
The main aim of chapter 1 is to establish that the major civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean belonged to an interconnected system by the start of the Late Bronze Age in the fifteenth-century and that this system originated in the preceding Middle Bronze Age. This builds to chapter 5, where Cline suggests possible explanations for this collapse. The fourth chapter then argues that at the start of the twelfth-century-roughly contemporary with the battle between Ramses III and the Sea Peoples-this interconnected system fell apart and the various participating civilizations collapsed. The first three chapters establish that the various civilizations of the Near East and Aegean were economically and politically interconnected beginning as early as the fifteenth-century. Reliefs from Medinet Habu accompany the discussion, placing faces with names. As one of the foremost scholars on the Sea Peoples, Cline’s knowledge of the sources-both primary and secondary-is exceptional and he distills decades of his research into a concisely written summary of the major points. The prologue introduces the Sea Peoples and the circumstances surrounding their clash with Ramses III in 1177 B.C. Cline establishes as the focus of his book the collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and he warns that there are lessons to learn for today’s global society. The preface begins by dramatically juxtaposing the end of the Late Bronze Age with modern day upheaval such as the Arab Spring and the financial crisis in Greece. Cline is careful not to suggest that this battle alone was responsible for the wave of destructions dated to the beginning of the twelfth-century rather, he treats this battle as a point of departure for addressing a variety of calamities-both natural and anthropogenic-that affected much of the Eastern Mediterranean and brought an end to the Late Bronze Age. Cline’s book takes as its crucial event the battle between Ramses III of Egypt and the so-called Sea Peoples in 1177 B.C., a point in history that marked the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In the words of Strauss, this series “looks at a crucial event or key moment in the ancient world”, 1 and the series seems targeted-judging from this first book-at a broad audience of both students and experts in the field. This book by Eric Cline is the first in the series Turning Points in Ancient History edited by Barry Strauss.
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