Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (now revised and updated) stands as a monumental achievement in historical scholarship. With meticulous detail and a narrative flair that rivals the best thriller writers, Cline dismantles the simplistic notion that the Bronze Age world ended because of a single invading horde known as the “Sea Peoples.” Instead, he paints the picture of a perfect storm: prolonged drought and climate shifts disrupting agriculture, mass migrations (or invasions) by those same Sea Peoples, internal rebellions in overstretched empires, and the sudden evaporation of international trade networks that had sustained prosperity for centuries. Cline’s multi-causal explanation is a breath of fresh air in a field often addicted to monocausal myths.
He rightly reminds us that civilizations do not topple from one blow but from a convergence of stressors that expose underlying frailties. Yet for all its brilliance, Cline’s analysis harbors a glaring blind spot—one shared by virtually the entire academic establishment. As a tenured professor at George Washington University, Cline operates within a worldview that treats centralized economic planning as not just inevitable but desirable. He chronicles the increasing concentration of resources in the hands of palace bureaucracies during the 14th and 13th centuries BCE without ever asking the obvious question: What if this very centralization was the original sin that made the Bronze Age empires brittle in the first place? What if the emperors’ growing habit of allocating grain, bronze, and labor by imperial fiat—rather than allowing free individuals to trade and innovate—was the slow-acting poison that rendered these societies unable to withstand drought, migration, or rebellion?
The Invisible Hand Replaced by the Iron Fist
Let us examine the evidence Cline himself provides, reading between the lines he leaves conspicuously blank. Throughout the Late Bronze Age, the great powers—Egypt, the Hittites, Mycenaeans, and Babylonians—operated what economists would recognize as command economies on steroids. Palace archives from Ugarit, Pylos, and Knossos reveal meticulous records of state-owned orchards, state-controlled textile workshops, and state-dictated rations for dependent laborers. Taxes flowed upward in kind; finished goods flowed downward by decree. The famous Amarna letters show pharaohs and kings negotiating not as equals in a market but as monopolists divvying up tribute.
Cline notes that by the 13th century, international trade had become “increasingly state controlled.” But what he presents as a neutral fact was in reality a death spiral. When Pharaoh Merneptah boasts of sending 160,000 liters of grain to the Hittites to avert famine, we are meant to applaud Egyptian generosity. But pause for a moment: Why was the Hittite empire, possessor of Anatolia’s fertile plateaus, unable to feed itself?
The answer lies in decades of royal edicts that diverted agricultural surplus into monumental building projects and standing armies rather than market-driven storage or trade. The same pattern appears in Mycenaean Greece, where linear B tablets record palatial linen production quotas that left little room for entrepreneurial weaving villages to supply export markets.
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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?