ABSTRACT

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 world-system such as has only rarely been seen before the current day. However, it may have been this very internationalism that contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that ended the Bronze Age. In this illustrated lecture, based on his book of the same title (1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed; Princeton University Press, 2014), Dr. Eric H. Cline of George Washington University will explore why the Bronze Age came to an end and whether the collapse of those ancient civilizations might hold some warnings for our current society.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology, former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University, in Washington DC. A Fulbright scholar, National Geographic Explorer, and NEH Public Scholar, 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. He has authored or co-authored nearly 100 academic articles and a dozen books; his most recent is Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology (Princeton University Press, 2017).