Archaeological Institute of America

Public Lecture by Dr. Eric Cline
2025-10-16 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Room 100, McCool Hall (Rogers Auditorium), Mississippi State, MS, 39762, United States
The Cobb Institute is turning 50! Please join us for a free lecture to kick off our anniversary celebration by Dr. Eric Cline, titled “1177 BC Revisited: Updating the Late Bronze Age Collapse”, on Thursday, October 16th at 6pm in Rogers Auditorium (McCool Hall, room 100).
Dr. Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology, the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University, in Washington DC. A two-time Fulbright Scholar, National Geographic Explorer, NEH Public Scholar, Getty Scholar, and member of the Explorers Club, with degrees from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, 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, including ten seasons at Megiddo (1994-2014), where he served as co-director before retiring from the project in 2014, and another ten seasons at Tel Kabri, where he currently serves as Co-Director. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books and nearly one hundred articles; translations of his books have appeared in nineteen different languages. He is perhaps best known for 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies world-wide and was considered for a Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Two of his lectures on the topic, posted on YouTube by the sponsoring societies, have been viewed a total of more than ten million times.
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 and globalized world-system such as has only rarely been seen before the current day. It may have been this very internationalism that contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that ended the Bronze Age. When the end came, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from Greece and Italy in the west to Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia in the east. Large empires and small kingdoms collapsed rapidly. It was not until centuries later that a new cultural renaissance emerged in Greece and the other affected areas, setting the stage for the evolution of Western society as we know it today. In recent years, more data relevant to the potential causes of the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean have become available. The new information includes additional texts from Ugarit in north Syria documenting both famine and invaders; DNA analyses of burials found in the Philistine city of Ashkelon; and new studies of lake sediments, stalagmites in caves, and coring from lakes and lagoons in regions stretching from Italy and Greece to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Iran, all of which suggest that there was an ongoing megadrought. Studying such an ancient catastrophe remains relevant to us today, for we are not as far removed from those days as one might think.
