The world in 1200 BC

Africa

Egypt in 1200 BC was caught in a fight over the throne. In the history of the period written by the Egyptologist Pierre Grandet for the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, four descendants of Merneptah (Amenmesse, Sety II, Siptah and Sety II’s widow Tauseret) contested the kingship for nineteen years, until Tauseret died without an heir and Sethnakhte seized power as the first king of the 20th Dynasty; Grandet dates Sethnakhte to 1198–1195 BC and his son Ramesses III to 1195–1164 BC. In his eighth year Ramesses III fought the invaders the Egyptians called the “Peoples of the Sea,” a war that the archaeologist Eric Cline sets in 1177 BC, while a 2011 radiocarbon study by David Kaniewski’s team lists historical dates of 1179 and 1176 BC and a radiocarbon range of 1188 to 1177 BC. On the walls of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, on the west bank at Thebes, the king claimed that “no land could stand before their arms,” and in Cline’s reading Egypt was the only major power to hold them off.

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West Asia

Ugarit, a trading kingdom on the coast of Syria, left a plea on a clay tablet: its king wrote to the king of Cyprus that “the ships of the enemy have come,” while his own infantry was stationed in Hittite territory and his ships were away in the land of Lukka. Cline notes that the tablet was not, as its excavators first reported, found in a kiln waiting to be baked, and that it was probably a copy of a letter that did reach Cyprus. At Gibala, a harbor town on the southern edge of Ugarit’s kingdom now called Tell Tweini, Kaniewski’s team dated the ash of the destruction layer to 1192–1190 BC, and pollen cores the same group later took from Cyprus and coastal Syria record a drought from about 1200 to 850 BC that they tie to crop failure and famine. Inland, the historian Trevor Bryce wrote in 2005 that excavations at Hattusa, the capital of the last known Hittite king Suppiluliuma II, found the city invaded and burned early in the 12th century BC, after many of its people had already left with their valuables and the official records.

Europe

The Mycenaean palaces of Greece were destroyed one after another in these decades. At Mycenae, in the account of the Dartmouth College archaeologist Jeremy Rutter, fire consumed the whole area inside the citadel walls and the palace was never rebuilt; at nearby Tiryns, the German excavators blame a similar destruction on an earthquake, a question on which no final consensus exists. The palace at Pylos in Messenia also burned and was never rebuilt, and some scholars read its Linear B tablets on the “watchers-by-the-sea” as evidence that its rulers feared a raid from the water. The 2011 PLoS ONE study places the pottery transition that marks the end of palace life in mainland Greece between 1210 and 1175 BC.

• Copper, tin and glass off Uluburun: a Bronze Age cargo, 19821300 BC

East Asia

The Shang kings ruled north China from Yinxu, near modern Anyang in Henan, a city that oracle-bone inscriptions call dayishang, the Great Settlement Shang. Radiocarbon dates taken from the oracle bones themselves, published in 2021 by Kexin Liu and colleagues at Peking University, put the reign of Wu Ding at 1254 to 1197 BC and the bones of his successors Zu Geng and Zu Jia at 1206 to 1177 BC, so the throne was changing hands around 1200 BC. The same team dated a bone hairpin from the tomb of Fu Hao, Wu Ding’s wife. A 2017 study of skeletons from Yinxu by Hua Zhang and colleagues found osteoarthritis common across the city’s population, a sign of the heavy work that the Shang kings demanded of the people oracle inscriptions call “the masses.”

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South Asia

The Rigveda, the oldest collection of Vedic hymns, carries no date of its own; it was handed down with not a syllable or accent allowed to change, and its age has to be worked out from other evidence. Michael Witzel of Harvard’s Department of South Asian Studies, writing in the Journal of Biosciences in 2019, argues that its language is younger than the Indo-Aryan words found in Mitanni texts of about 1400 BC and older than the Iron Age in the Greater Punjab of about 1000 BC, which leaves roughly 1400 to 1000 BC for its composition. Ancient DNA from the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan, analyzed by Vagheesh Narasimhan and colleagues in Science in 2019, begins around 1200 BC and shows ancestry from Bronze Age herders of the central steppe that came mostly through women. Witzel dates the Indo-Aryan arrival in Swat, which the Rigveda calls su-vāstu, “good land,” to around 1250 BC on the strength of that genetic work.

Central Asia

On the steppe of what is now Kazakhstan, Bronze Age herding communities were starting to eat grain from far away. Isotope readings from human and animal bones, compared in a 2019 study by Alicia Ventresca Miller and Cheryl Makarewicz, show that low levels of millet, a crop whose earliest domestic grains come from northeastern China, entered pastoralist diets in central Kazakhstan late in the second millennium BC, at the tail end of the Bronze Age. The same study notes that bronze daggers and socketed axes of the Andronovo or Karasuk type turned up in northeast China during this period. South of the steppe, Narasimhan’s team sampled people from sites of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex and its immediate successors down to 1400 BC and found that ancestry from the steppe herders had passed south through these desert oases on its way to South Asia.

The Americas

San Lorenzo, an Olmec town on a river island in the lower Coatzacoalcos basin of Veracruz, was at a turning point. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) dates the site’s two earliest phases, Ojochi and Bajío, to 1500 to 1200 BC, and says its population grew dramatically between 1200 and 850 BC, reaching about 13,000 before 900 BC, as millions of cubic meters of fill were moved to terrace the island. Its sculptors carved colossal heads and thrones from volcanic boulders hauled from the Sierra de los Tuxtlas. In northeastern Louisiana, hunter-gatherers were building the ridges and mounds of Poverty Point above the Mississippi floodplain; the National Park Service dates the construction broadly to 1650 to 700 BC and describes a trade network that reached out from the site for almost a thousand miles.

Oceania

In the Bismarck Archipelago, off the northeast coast of New Guinea, the pottery archaeologists call Lapita had been in use for at least a century. A 2012 statistical study of radiocarbon dates by Tim Denham, Christopher Bronk Ramsey and Jim Specht puts its first appearance on Mussau at 3470 to 3250 years before 1950 and in the rest of the Bismarcks at 3360 to 3240 years before 1950. On the same reckoning, Lapita reached Vanuatu by 3250 to 3100 years before 1950 and Fiji by 3130 to 3010, which works out to between about 1300 and 1060 BC: the first crossings into Remote Oceania were under way around 1200 BC.

• Stilt posts in a lagoon: the Lapita village at Talepakemalai, Mussau1300 BC

Sources

• Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Prologue, "The Collapse of Civilizations: 1177 BC" (Princeton University Press sample chapter)
• Pierre Grandet, "Early to Mid-20th Dynasty," UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2014), peer reviewed, eScholarship, University of California
• Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago: Medinet Habu, Volume I. Earlier Historical Records of Ramses III (Epigraphic Survey)
• Kaniewski, Van Campo, Van Lerberghe, Boiy, Vansteenhuyse, Jans et al., "The Sea Peoples, from Cuneiform Tablets to Carbon Dating," PLoS ONE 6(6): e20232 (2011)
• Kaniewski, Van Campo, Guiot, Le Burel, Otto and Baeteman, "Environmental Roots of the Late Bronze Age Crisis," PLoS ONE 8(8): e71004 (2013)
• Trevor Bryce, "The Last Days of Hattusa," Archaeology Odyssey, January/February 2005, republished by the Biblical Archaeology Society
• Dartmouth College, Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology: Lesson 28, The Collapse of Mycenaean Palatial Civilization (Jeremy B. Rutter)
• Liu, Wu, Guo, Yuan, Ding, Fu and Pan, "Radiocarbon Dating of Oracle Bones of Late Shang Period in Ancient China," Radiocarbon 63(1): 155-175 (2021), open access at Cambridge Core
• Zhang, Merrett, Jing, Tang, He, Yue et al., "Osteoarthritis, labour division, and occupational specialization of the Late Shang China: insights from Yinxu (ca. 1250-1046 B.C.)," PLoS ONE 12(5): e0176329 (2017)
• Michael Witzel, "Early 'Aryans' and their neighbors outside and inside India," Journal of Biosciences 44: 58 (2019), Indian Academy of Sciences
• Narasimhan et al., "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia," Science 365(6457): eaat7487 (2019), full text at PubMed Central
• Alicia R. Ventresca Miller and Cheryl A. Makarewicz, "Intensification in pastoralist cereal use coincides with the expansion of trans-regional networks in the Eurasian Steppe," Scientific Reports 9: 8363 (2019)
• Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), Mexico: San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan
• U.S. National Park Service: Louisiana: Poverty Point National Monument
• Denham, Bronk Ramsey and Specht, "Dating the appearance of Lapita pottery in the Bismarck Archipelago and its dispersal to Remote Oceania," Archaeology in Oceania 47(1): 39-46 (2012), abstract at the Australian National University research portal