RomanArmyTalk

The end of bronze age - changes in warfare and the catastrophe CA. 1200 bc. - R.Drews - Princeton Paperbacks

Im' a novice about the bronze age, but this book is very "user-friendly" also for novices. The author give a real sensation of fall of a era by violent death. Robert Drews search to demonstrate that the fall of the major part of bronze age cities from Greece to Canaan has been the work of the raiding peoples (northern greeks, anatolian barbarians, philistines, israelites, shardana,etc) at the boundaries of bronze civilization, and this isn't a new hypotesis, and these raiders can win over more powerful states, and this is the new hypotesis of Drews, after century of submission, not for internal weakness but for a evolution in the art of war.

The book is very complete: the first chapter describe the archeological evidences of catastrophe, and the short and long term conseguences.

The successive chapters enumerate the different theories about the catastrophe causes.

three chapter describe the late bronze age art of war evidences and the first iron age art of war, and one the change in weaponry as appears from artistic and archelogical evidences.

The last chapter explicate the military hypotesis for the end of bronge age empires.

very interesting book.

Oh, yes, Drews is a standard work for all us Bronze Age guys! BUT----we use him with care. It's been a while since I read him, and I don't recall all the specifics of the discussion about his theories, but they don't all necessarily hold water. He does have a lot of good information. I'm sure we discussed him at some length over on the Bronze Age Center, but it wasn't recently.

http://s8.invisionfree.com/Bronze_Age_Center/index.php

I love the chapters debunking the various catastrophe theories! Very revealing. Those sections alone are worth the price of the book.

One big problem is that Drews uses the old traditional dates, which are all inflated by 250 to 400 years, creating a bogus "Dark Age". That's the chronology problem that you'll hear me harping about, all due to problems with the Egyptian King List. It's not quite so bad for this book, since it only deals with the end of the Bronze Age. Any work that tries to deal with the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age is a real mess, though! It's just something to watch out for.

Happy reading!

Matthew

Mind you there is no agreement on the timeline distortion (although I think most people now agree there is one) and some of the suggested alternations make, IIRC, some rather odd amendments to the Assyrian king lists hock:

I love Drews' book though his overall thesis is extremely dodgy.

Edit: found an old discussion on SFI
http://forums.swordforum.com/showthread.php?t=32982

Quote:Mind you there is no agreement on the timeline distortion (although I think most people now agree there is one) and some of the suggested alternations make, IIRC, some rather odd amendments to the Assyrian king lists

Can you, Matt, or Dan, point me to sources on the current state of opinion on the timeline? (or give us a synopsis if you have the time)

I read this book several years ago. It is excellent. And it is quite clearly written with an absence of "jargon".

What is dodgy about it?

Quote:Can you, Matt, or Dan, point me to sources on the current state of opinion on the timeline? (or give us a synopsis if you have the time)

Well, I DO hope that most authorities now agree that some sort of adjustment has to be made! In some cases, however, it seems to be the equivalent of grudgingly acknowledging that the living room is on fire by simply closing the dining room doors and carrying on with dinner...

There are certainly holdouts who end up sounding a lot like the guys who went after Gallileo. There was apparently an entire conference held years ago to try to "debunk" the book by James et al., though I don't believe the authors were invited to present their findings to an open-minded audience. Basically it was a kangaroo court. You hear a lot of mud-slinging, character assassination, comparisons to the aliens-built-the-pyramids types, and so on. No reasoned scientific debate by the high chronology crowd so far. Oh, there was one article that attempted to prop up the high chronology with carbon 14 dates, but it seems that only one of the samples they presented was both creditable and relevant. And it ignored that fact that it has become regular practice to simply ignore carbon 14 dates when they fail to match the excavators' preconceptions. Which is all too often...

I read not long ago that carbon 14 dates in Egypt and the east were being calibrated by objects of "known date", a blatant circular argument! If one of King Tut's chairs, for example, yields an uncalibrated date of 1075 BC, but we KNOW he died in 1376, we just tack on 300 years, and presto! Perfect proof once again! You see the problem.

Since most of the Assyrian dates actually depend on cross-references to the Egyptian chronology, it should all work out pretty well when the Egyptian dates are lowered. All the dependent parallels and comparisons will remain intact, in fact in most cases even more are possible. And we can give up all these desperate theories about how cultures were "revived" after the Dark Ages, or how so many artifacts were kept all that tiime as heirlooms, etc.

Mind you, I'm not an academic, so the "Inquisition" can't burn me at the stake or ruin my career! I can keep up the fight with impunity. But that also means that the hard-noses can simply ignore me as a silly amateur. In all fairness, some of those folks have long careers in this field, and it's not easy for them to toss out 30 years of research and publication with a big "OOPS--Never mind!" But a little more open-mindedness and less vitriol would be nice.

Anyway, the website for "Centuries of Darkness" can summarize the whole problem better than I can:

http://www.centuries.co.uk/

Khairete,

Matthew

Quote:...philistines, israelites ...

Does he really mention Israelites/Hebrews as invaders? The most common interpretation today is that the new nation never invaded Kanaan, but has its genesis in the collapse of the Bronze Age cities. The name Israel, of course, does indeed belong to a wandering tribe (see Merneptah stela) but there is no evidence that a Josuah-like invasion ever took place.

His main thesis is that the great chariot civilisations collapsed because of new weapons and tactics used by the barbarian invaders - mainly the Libyans IIRC. His argument fails IMO because the chariot powers adopt the same weapons and tactics around the same time. By this point in time the chariot archer is no longer the dominant unit. Even in Egypt the infantry is once again the primary unit while the chariot plays a supporting role. If both sides are using the same weapons and tactics then neither side gains an advantage.

Thanks Matt! That's what I was looking for.

Quote:His main thesis is that the great chariot civilisations collapsed because of new weapons and tactics used by the barbarian invaders

I agree that the idea that it was the novelty of tactics is far fetched. Didn't he say that the "new" warriors had already been employed as mercenary chariot runners? This makes the situation much more like the Saxon invasion of england.

If I understand this correctly: his time scale is off, so the new tactics did not appear at the time as indicated in the book, therefore his thesis is incorrect. Is that right?

On another subject, is his description of chariot warfare consdered to be correct? I never understood how a weapon system as apparently inefficient as chariots could become so important. To me, his description of chariot warfare made their importance understandable.

The new tactics he mentioned occurred vurtually everywhere at the same time. In Egypt it was around the reign of Merneptah. Before this time Egyptian warfare primarily involved chariot archers with infantry as support units. After this time the infantry dominated and chariots supported. Ramses III is the first Pharoah to be depicted fighting on foot.

I completely agree with Drews depiction of chariot warfare so long as it is limited to the time period outlined above. Afterwards chariots seem to have been relegated to skirmishing activity and remained so until the innovations of Cyrus.

Quote:If I understand this correctly: his time scale is off, so the new tactics did not appear at the time as indicated in the book, therefore his thesis is incorrect. Is that right?

Not really. Since all absolute dates are derived from Egypt, most of the events and persons under discussion are all "tied together horizontally", as it were. Change the Egyptian dates, and they all move "vertically" on the chronology together. The chronology debate is pretty much a different issue from the "Tactics of the Catastrophe" debate, it only makes all the dates different.

Matthew

thanks for clearing up my misconception guys.

Quote:If I understand this correctly: his time scale is off, so the new tactics did not appear at the time as indicated in the book, therefore his thesis is incorrect. Is that right?

On another subject, is his description of chariot warfare consdered to be correct? I never understood how a weapon system as apparently inefficient as chariots could become so important. To me, his description of chariot warfare made their importance understandable.

I agree with it in general. But like Dan, I think there are problems with his thesis about barbarian peltasts over-running chariot armies.

This period really is a puzzle. Someone seems to have conquered Hati, the Mycenean and Minoan states, and Syria and destroyed the palace states there. And something happened to make conservative Egyptian nobles willing to fight on foot. But Egypt seems to have adopted the new infantry tactics fairly quickly (although, in Drews' view, it had a generation of warning or so). So our best evidence comes from the one power which didn't fall.

Enough javelin-men might have been able to overrun a chariot force through weight of numbers, but it seems unlikely they could do it well enough to end civilization in Mycenae, Minoa, Hatti, Syria, and Canaan as Drews suggests. As Dan has written elsewhere, the reason scythed chariots were so vulnerable to javelin-men was that they couldn't stand off and shoot but had to close with the enemy to be effective.

Thomas Hulit has suggested that charioteers may have been versatile multi-role fighters like medieval knights, who might be used for any especially demanding military role. That would also help explain their importance.