Destruction and the End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean

几十年来，学者们一直在寻找一个答案，为什么青铜时代晚期地中海东部的伟大王国在公元前1200年左右崩溃。他们设计的许多理论都有一些常见的疑点：入侵军队引发的战争、农民反抗统治者、毁灭性的气候变化、大地震等自然灾害，或者所有这些的结合。对于这些理论中的每一个，主要城市和小城镇的毁灭都在说明青铜时代末期笼罩该地区的毁灭性事件中发挥了不可或缺的作用。然而，尽管这些清单和地图描绘了席卷该地区的大规模破坏浪潮，但这些破坏事件从未在批判的眼光下进行过审查。这项研究的目的是回答一个主要问题，“在青铜时代晚期东地中海发生的破坏事件的证据是否支持基于广泛同时破坏的崩溃理论？”为此，我将首次研究爱琴海、安纳托利亚、叙利亚和塞浦路斯发生的59起破坏事件，使用一种创新的方法来找出可能造成破坏的原因以及破坏的实际范围。

For decades scholars have searched for an answer to why the great kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean collapsed around 1200 BC. Many of the theories they devised featured the usual suspects, warfare brought on by invading armies, peasants rising up against their overlords, devastating climate change, natural disasters like massive earthquakes, or a combination of all of these. For each of these theories, the destruction of both major cities and small towns play an integral role in illustrating the devastating events which gripped the region at the end of the Bronze Age. However, despite the lists and maps which depict the massive destruction wave which took the region by storm, the destruction events have never been examined under a critical eye. The purpose of this research is to answer one main question, “Does the evidence for destruction events in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean support collapse theories based on widespread simultaneous destruction?” I will do this by examining for the first time 59 destruction events in the Aegean, Anatolia, Syria, and Cyprus using an innovative methodology to find what might have caused the destruction and how extensive the damage really was.