Article of the Month - August 2020
“Should I Stay or Should I Go? Mycenaeans, Migration, and Mobility in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean”
(Guy D. Middleton: Senior Researcher, Project KREAS, Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University, Prague)
Article Abstract:
It has been argued that climate change at the end of the Late Bronze Age caused mass migrations, ‘vast movements of population’, out of the Balkans into Greece and Anatolia, with migrants destroying cities and states as they went – causing the collapse of Late Bronze Age societies such as the Mycenaeans. These migrants then became the Sea Peoples, who gathered more followers from the Aegean and set off for the eastern Mediterranean, destroying as they went, until they were Vnally defeated by Ramesses III in Egypt. The hypothesis links together the history of the eastern Mediterranean, from Greece and Anatolia to Cyprus and the Levant and Egypt into one ‘global’ narrative based on the large-scale migration of culturally homogeneous groups. In this paper, the author tellingly critiques such stories of the Sea Peoples and offers instead some positive ideas about mobility in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age as a realistic alternative to the paradigm of migration. Mobility might have increased in various ways because of conkicts in the eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth and early twelfth centuries. But it was a normal feature of Mediterranean life. It is in this context that we can place cultural developments, the formation of groups and identities, and economic shifts.
Nomination Statement:
This article presents clear and forceful critique of the paradigms of migration and mobility in the Eastern Mediterranean at the turn of the Bronze and Iron Ages that has implications for our understanding of cultural and political developments across the whole region, and not only in 'prehistory'. It sceptically revisits the evidence for the 'Sea Peoples' and their supposed depredations in the process it completely rethinks a major part of the agreed narrative of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean it does so (to oversimplify a subtle argument) by invoking the general mobility and cultural interdependence of circum-Mediterranean populations thus, it has major implications for Mediterranean history of all periods, not just the Bronze Age, and deserves a wide readership: there's no such thing as 'prehistory'.
Author’s Comment:
This article came out of a long-engagement with ‘what actually happened’ in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean in the years of collapse c.1200 BC, and with what seemed to be a rise in the prominence of migrationist explanations and narratives for events and patterns of material culture in the region, especially linked with climate change. Grand narratives of mass movements of people, and their material culture, have (for years) been conjured out a tiny bits of evidence and fragments of myth (ancient and modern), or no evidence at all, to explain political and culture change around those years. The problems with the underlying evidence, for example from Medinet Habu, seemed often to be bypassed in order to create neat stories of collapse and culture change that could then be argued over (did the migrants walk or go by sea, for example, or how many were there?). Then there was the issue of climate change – why would migrants move into areas where researchers were suggesting there was ‘megadrought’? For me, it did not add up.
Greek history as ‘waves of migrants’, each bearing a particular material culture, seemed far less realistic a picture than one in which mobility was a regular fact of life, and culture something actively appropriated and developed (or rejected) rather than a simple and fixed ethnic indicator. The period of Greek colonisation itself, when movement definitely happened, was itself not straightforward, with ancient foundation myths and stories conjured up by later interest groups (like the formation of identities such as Ionian or Dorian, and ‘their’ migrations). But there is plenty of evidence for real movements of people and traditions and interconnections in the Late Bronze Age, which I found fascinating because there are so many stories at a human level; the discussion, I thought, could more usefully be couched in such terms, and the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean contextualised and characterised as on in which there were always ‘mobilities’ and interactions of various kinds.
The article also came out of a very specific personal context – leaving the UK and Europe and moving first to South Korea and then to Japan, where I spent almost eight years. The view from the other side of the world taught me a lot very directly about how material and non-material culture in an interconnected world ‘works’, both in how eastern countries have selectively adopted ‘western’ things (material and behavioural – clothes, beds, bread, Christmas (but with no Jesus or nativity), for example) and how western countries have adopted ‘eastern’ things (the wok & chopsticks, meditation, sushi etc) – in each case without mass migrations but with mobilities and active engagement and choice (and the social power of ‘fashion’ too). I was reminded many times of profound changes in Japan that took place with little population movement – the introduction of Christianity (initially popular, but then officially rejected) in the sixteenth century, the capture of a Korean potter that inaugurated a new style of ceramics in Japan, or the fashion for exotic Chinese food in the west, for cooking not just eating it. Whilst the context is very different – the modern world having much easier and deeper interconnections, and a mass media with enormous reach – the range of personal contact behaviours is likely to have been similar. All of this has implications for the ‘visibility’ of non-locals (people were mobile but not necessarily visible, while visible changes need not result from any significant population movement) and for how material and non-material culture could change, in a much more convincing fashion than mass population movements leap-frogging the eastern Mediterranean – for which the evidence was, as noted, dubious.
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