The Bronze Age Collapse
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Related resources
Homer and the Oral Tradition
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The Odyssey - The Long Journey Home
The Odyssey Goes to Hollywood
The Trojan War - Myth vs. History
The World of Homer - Mycenaean Greece
What students do
- Describe how the Mycenaean palace world burned and was abandoned within about two generations
- Weigh the debated causes of the collapse, including the Sea Peoples, drought, earthquakes, and revolt
- Analyze Ramesses III's Medinet Habu inscription as one-sided royal propaganda
- Trace how the loss of Linear B led into the Greek Dark Age and, eventually, Homer's epics
What it covers
- Why historians call it a systems collapse rather than pinning it on one cause
- What Medinet Habu can and cannot prove about the Sea Peoples
- How later Greeks remembered this real, mythologized past as an "age of heroes"
Learning targets
- Describe the Bronze Age Collapse: how the Mycenaean palace world and its eastern-Mediterranean neighbors burned and were abandoned within about two generations around 1200-1150 BCE, and what was lost (palaces, long-distance trade, and Linear B writing)
- Weigh the debated causes of the collapse as a systems collapse - the Sea Peoples and raiding, the breakdown of trade, drought and famine, earthquakes, and internal revolt - and evaluate why one pharaoh's victory monument (Ramesses III at Medinet Habu) is limited, one-sided evidence
- Trace what came after: the loss of Linear B and the Greek Dark Age, the survival of the epics through oral tradition, and how later Greeks remembered this real-but-mythologized past as the 'age of heroes' that Homer sang about
From one teacher to another
No single villain explains why the Mycenaean palace world burned and emptied out within about two generations, and that tension between reaching for one culprit and admitting a tangle of causes is exactly what I want students to sit inside. They weigh the Sea Peoples against drought, earthquakes, and revolt as a systems collapse, then test Ramesses III's Medinet Habu inscription and find it's one pharaoh's victory claim, not a neutral report. By the end they can trace how the silence that followed, the loss of Linear B and the long Dark Age, is the reason Greece had to remember this age of heroes by ear instead of by record.
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