McGee Endowed Lecture Featuring Eric H. Cline

1177 BC and After: The Collapse and Survival of Civilizations 

For more than three hundred years during the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 BC to 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, and Canaanites all interacted, creating a cosmopolitan and globalized world-system such as has only rarely been seen before the current day. However, when the end came, the internation network collapsed rapidly, within just a few decades. The centuries following the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean were a time of catastrophe, but they were also a time of rebirth and resilience. While there are examples of failure to thrive or even to survive in some cases, others managed to adapt and transform. In effect, we have eight case studies of what to do (and what not to do) in the event of a systems collapse, ranging from the Assyrians to the Egyptians to the Mycenaeans and others in between. We will also consider whether there are any relevant lessons to be learned from this dramatic story of resurgence and revival, especially considering what is going on in our world today.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology, the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University, in Washington DC. A two-time Fulbright Scholar, National Geographic Explorer, NEH Public Scholar, Getty Scholar, and member of the Explorers Club, with degrees from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, he is an active field archaeologist with more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey experience in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States, including ten seasons at Megiddo (1994-2014), where he served as co-director before retiring from the project in 2014, and another ten seasons at Tel Kabri, where he currently serves as Co-Director. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books and nearly one hundred articles; translations of his books have appeared in nineteen different languages. He is perhaps best known for 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies world-wide and was considered for a Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Two of his lectures on the topic, posted on YouTube by the sponsoring societies, have been viewed a total of more than ten million times.