Dark Age

1133 – 961 BCE

The Bronze Age ends with a bang. Recently news stories covered the find of the site of a massive battle in 1250 BCE on the banks of the Tollense river, near the Baltic Sea, probably involving armies of thousands of warriors. Hundreds were killed. The fighters were professional warriors, and many probably came from some distance away.

We have no written record, or even legends, of what was going on here, but in subsequent centuries there are massive disruptions in the civilized world. In the 1100s, the palaces of the Mycenaean civilization in Greece are destroyed, By 1050 BCE, Greece descends into a dark age. The period probably marks the arrival of the Dorian dialects of Greek in the Peloponnese, and the movement of Achaean refugees to Ionia. There is also wide destruction and a collapse of social complexity in Anatolia, Syria, and Canaan. In 1177 BCE, the Egyptians hold an invasion by the “Sea Peoples.” Their provenance is a matter of dispute, but may have included some Mycenaeans, who would go on to settle in Canaan as Philistines.

The causes of this collapse are (as of later Dark Ages) are unsettled.

A recent article shows that the subsequent regression in social complexity may have left its mark on human genes. The chart below show how much Europeans were migrating (top panel).

Several episodes of large scale movement stand out, like the Neolithic, following the spread of agriculture, and the Bronze Age, following the arrival of Indo-European speakers. By contrast, the end of the Bronze Age shows an apparent decline in population mobility, which only picks up as the subsequent Iron Age gets underway.