Robert Drews (1) (1936–)

A fascinating look at the history of the Bronze Age collapse, one of the least-known but most pivotal periods in history. Even though the invasions of the Sea Peoples were so devastating that there aren't even records of their proper name, and despite the passage of over thirty centuries and the disappearance of most of the historical record, Drews reviews the greater part of the known evidence of the battles that the eastern Mediterranean civilizations fought against them and comes up with fairly convincing theories to explain how so many nations vanished so suddenly during the 12th century BC, how the Egyptians eventually managed to stop them, and what the consequences were for military tactics and Western civilization as a whole.

He begins briskly, with a review of the known evidence. Archaeologists have discovered that around the end of the 12th century BC, many parts of the eastern Mediterranean experienced sudden population decline and epidemics of cities burned to the ground: Turkey, Cyprus, the entire coast of the Levant, Greece and the Aegean islands, Crete, and even parts of Mesopotamia up to the boundary of the Assyrian empire. The only region that appears to have escaped relatively unscathed is what's now Egypt, but whatever happened was so catastrophic that it marks the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of a long dark age lasting at least half a millennium in most of the area. Prior to the calamity, powerful empires like the Hittites controlled large centralized states with strong, mobile militaries, and afterwards there was basically nothing left of virtually every culture anywhere near the Mediterranean coast: "Altogether the end of the Bronze Age was arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the western Roman Empire."

Many theories have been proposed to explain this mass collapse - Drews covers theories of earthquakes, large-scale migrations, the introduction of iron weapons and armor, widespread drought, an increase in barbarian raids, and the all-encompassing "general systems collapse". Each is somewhat plausible, and Drews' contention is that the true answer is essentially a combination of most of the above, with a primary emphasis on changes in military tactics. Much like the Mongols' use of heavy cavalry was so revolutionary as to render them nearly unstoppable for many decades across most of Eurasia, the Sea Peoples' use of heavy infantry caught almost every Mediterranean empire completely off guard. At the time, infantry were used only for fighting small, disorganized bands of barbarians; the chariot, driven by a charioteer accompanied by an archer with a composite bow, was the unit of choice for serious wars between powerful states. In ancient battles like Megiddo and Kadesh, they seem to have fulfilled a role vaguely similar to that of tanks in the North African front of World War 2 as fast-moving tactical shock units (it's funny how after thousands of years warfare in that part of the world can be so similar). Unlike in the classical era, where groups of heavy infantry like hoplites/phalanxes/legionaries were the decisive unit in state-to-state warfare, in the Bronze Age most societies organized their foot soldiers primarily into light infantry, and used them mostly against weaker barbarian tribes, in areas unsuitable for chariot warfare, or as auxiliaries and support in chariot warfare.

That particular structure of forces says a lot, not only about what warfare was like, but also the limits of technology and the social structures of Bronze Age civilizations. By the middle of the Iron Age chariots had essentially disappeared from the battlefield, mounted cavalry being a more efficient use of horse but also seemingly more effective in the supporting role so familiar from the infantry-focused wars of the Romans and Greeks. In between was the Bronze Age collapse, and though hard evidence is frustratingly scanty, Drews is convinced that the invasions of the Sea Peoples, with their more advanced armor, javelins, and swords, were the catalyst for the disappearance of the chariot as a viable unit of warfare. Without chariots, most states were essentially helpless before their assaults, and even the "lucky" Egyptians relied on some decisive naval victories to escape most of the damage. While he's weirdly attached to the theory that the Sea Peoples were originally from Sardinia (given the behavior of later civilizations, it seems like the western Mediterranean would be a more pleasant place to pillage than the eastern), his theory that most of the established cultures just couldn't withstand the Sea People's superior way of war seems solid. Again, much like the Mongols were able to completely obliterate much larger and richer empires by virtue of better military prowess, it seems reasonable to think that the same thing could have happened in the same area in the Bronze Age (although the Egyptians managed to fight off the Mongols that time).

The book is written in a dry, scholarly tone, but there's a chill behind its descriptions of sacks, ruins, and conflict: were it not for Egypt's resistance to the Sea Peoples, what, if anything, would have eventually limited their depredations? Unlike the Vikings or the Mongols, they didn't settle in most of the territories they came across, they just destroyed everything they touched. If they had proceeded unchecked until they ran out of steam, we might never have known about them, and the long interregnum of civilization at the end of the Bronze Age might have been gone on for much longer. I would have liked for him to have spent more time on the theory that the stories of the Trojan War are based in part on the Bronze Age collapse, and to have bothered to translate some primary source quotes from the original Italian, Ancient Greek, etc., but otherwise this was an intriguing look at an irritatingly enigmatic period in world history.… (mehr)

This book is essentially a follow-up to Drews' 1988 work The Coming of the Greeks where he argued (tolerably convincingly to my mind) that the Greek language (or its immediate ancestor) was brought to Greece circa 1600 BC by charioteering conquerors from Caucasia.

Apart from updating that argument to take into account new discoveries made in the interrim, he's adding two additional arguments here: First, that the ancestors of the Germanic, Celtic, and Italic languages were approximately simultaneously brought into Central Europe by similar conquerors from the western steppes. Second, that what enabled these conquests was "militarism", by which he understands not merely an ideology exalting the warrior, but also the practice of pitched battles; earlier warfare had, according to Drews's new idea, consisted solely of raids, ambushes, and, where fortifications existed, sieges.

I find the linguistic argument easier to accept than the military one. We can't know much about what warfare was like in early 2nd millennium BC Europe, but I'm not convinced about pitched battle being unknown in the Early and Middle Bronze Age Near East. It's AFAIK true that we have, as Drews notes, no battle-accounts until after the rise of chariotry, but this is hardly a case where absense of evidence is evidence of absense, given the nature of the historical record. And I'm not convinced by Drews' attempts to explain away the infantry apparently fighting in shieldwall on the Vulture Stele (middle 3rd millennium) - where would you fight in such formation but in pitched battle?

One might of course suggest that the Near East may have known pitched battle (if not militarism in the ideological sense) before the Chariot Age but Greece and Central Europe did not. However, while we may speculate about Europe, charioteering elites unquestionably did set up new kingdoms in the Near East in the middle of the 2nd millennium, so in such a scenario a lack of militarism can't be a prerequisite for conquest by charioteers.… (mehr)

Greek historiography of the Classical and Hellenistic periods is mostly about the recent past, writers like Thucydides or Polybius writing about events in their own lifetimes. Drews here focused on those exceptions that wrote about the Near East and Egypt before the the Persian Wars.

This means in practice mostly Herodotus, whose Histories deal primarily with the rise of the Persian Empire and its subsequent humbling at the hands of the Greeks, but includes plentiful material on the older history of Egypt, Babylonia, and Lydia. Drews says that Herodotus included this partly because he thought it intrinsically noteworthy, partly because it showed how great the Persian Empire had been to conquer such places.

Other writers on the subject survive mostly in fragments and epitomes, although in Ctesias' case those are very substantial. Unfortunately for the modern historian, Ctesias' work turns out to have been about equal parts free invention and court gossip.

Having reviewed this material, Drews uses it as the basis of some arguments about the origin and goals of Greek historiography. I should probably refrain from having any strong opinions of it, not having read much in the way of contrary arguments. But the review itself I found quite interesting.… (mehr)