Late Bronze Age Collapse

青铜时代晚期崩溃

Bret Devereaux Collections, R.A.S. January 30, 2026. This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system across the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East during the 12th century (that is, the 1100s) BC. Bret Devereaux 文集，2026 年 1 月 30 日。本周，应 ACOUP 参议院的要求，我们将讨论“青铜时代晚期崩溃”（通常缩写为 LBAC），即公元前 12 世纪（即公元前 1100 年代）东地中海和中东地区青铜时代晚期国家体系的惊人崩溃。

In the broader Mediterranean world, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is the event that probably comes closest to a true ‘end of civilization’ event – meaningfully more severe than the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West (although as we’ll see LBAC is also not as ‘total’ of a collapse as was sometimes supposed). 在更广阔的地中海世界中，青铜时代晚期崩溃是历史上最接近真正“文明终结”的事件——其严重程度远超西罗马帝国的崩溃（尽管正如我们将看到的，LBAC 并非有时所认为的那样是一场“彻底”的崩溃）。

This is going to be, by our standards here, something of a brief overview, roughly the equivalent to the lecture I give to my students when we cover this period (with a bit more detail, because text is more compressed). A full ‘deep dive’ of all of the debates and open questions of this period would no doubt run quite a few posts and more importantly really ought to be written by specialists in the bronze age. 按照我们这里的标准，这将是一篇简要概述，大致相当于我在课堂上讲授这一时期时的讲座内容（由于文字更紧凑，细节会稍多一些）。若要对这一时期的所有争论和悬而未决的问题进行全面的“深度挖掘”，无疑需要撰写多篇文章，而且更重要的是，这些内容理应由青铜时代专家来撰写。

This is also a very archaeologically driven topic, which makes it more sensitive than most to new evidence – archaeological site work, but also epigraphic evidence (mostly on clay tablets) – that can change our understanding of events. As we’ll see, our understanding has changed a fair bit. 这也是一个高度依赖考古学的课题，这使得它比大多数课题对新证据更为敏感——无论是考古现场工作，还是铭文证据（多见于泥板），都可能改变我们对这些事件的理解。正如我们将看到的，我们的理解已经发生了不小的变化。

So what we’ll do is run through what we know about what happened in the collapse (which is the most visible part of it) and then we’ll loop back to the question of causes (which remain substantially uncertain) and then finally look at the long-term impacts of the collapse, which are considerable. 因此，我们将首先梳理关于崩溃过程的已知信息（这是最直观的部分），然后回顾崩溃原因的问题（目前仍存在很大不确定性），最后探讨崩溃带来的深远影响。

The (Partial?) Collapse

（部分）崩溃

We need to be clear, to begin with, that while we have scattered fragments of epigraphic evidence (that is, inscriptions), almost all of our evidence for the Late Bronze Age Collapse is archaeological. Without archaeology, we would remain largely in the dark about this event. 首先我们需要明确一点：虽然我们有一些零散的铭文证据，但关于青铜时代晚期崩溃的证据几乎全部来自考古学。如果没有考古学，我们对这一事件将几乎一无所知。

But archaeological evidence also brings with it challenges: it can tell you what is happening (sometimes) but often not why and dating with precision can be challenging. Most of what we’re tracking in understanding LBAC is site destruction, identified by the demolition of key buildings or ‘destruction layers’ (often a thin layer of ash or rubble indicating the site was burned or demolished), but dating these precisely can be difficult and there are always challenges of interpretation. 但考古证据也带来了挑战：它（有时）能告诉你发生了什么，但往往无法解释原因，且精确断代也颇具难度。我们在理解 LBAC 时追踪的大部分内容是遗址的破坏情况，通过关键建筑的损毁或“破坏层”（通常是一层薄薄的灰烬或瓦砾，表明遗址曾被焚烧或拆毁）来识别，但要精确测定这些遗址的年代很困难，且在解读上也总是存在挑战。

With that said, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is a sequence of site destructions visible archaeologically from c. 1220 BC to c. 1170 BC, which are associated with the collapse or severe decline of the major states of the region (the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East). We generally conceptualize these destructions as a ‘wave’ moving in sequence beginning in the Aegean, moving over Anatolia, sweeping down the Levant and arriving in Egypt but in many cases my sense is the chronology is more complex than that. 话虽如此，青铜时代晚期崩溃是一系列在考古学上可见的遗址破坏事件，时间跨度约为公元前 1220 年至公元前 1170 年，这些事件与该地区（东地中海和中东）主要国家的崩溃或严重衰落有关。我们通常将这些破坏视为一股“浪潮”，从爱琴海开始，经过安纳托利亚，席卷黎凡特，最后到达埃及，但在许多情况下，我认为其时间线要复杂得多。

Many sites in the path of this ‘wave’ were not destroyed, with some declining slowly and others declining not much at all; other sites (I have in mind Tiryns) see the destruction of their political center but the decline of the urban settlement around it happens slowly or later. 在这股“浪潮”路径上的许多遗址并未被摧毁，有些缓慢衰落，有些则几乎没有衰落；而另一些遗址（我想到的是梯林斯）虽然其政治中心被摧毁，但周围城市聚落的衰落却发生得很缓慢或滞后。

First, we ought to set the stage of the Late Bronze Age. What really marks out the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC to c. 1200 BC) from earlier periods is that the emerging state systems in Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia and Egypt had expanded to the point of coming quite fully into contact with each other, with a significant degree of diplomatic, economic and cultural interconnectedness, to the point that we sometimes refer to the ‘Late Bronze Age Concert of Powers’ (evoking 19th century European balance of power politics) when talking informally about them. 首先，我们应该为青铜时代晚期设定背景。青铜时代晚期（约公元前 1500 年至公元前 1200 年）与早期阶段的真正区别在于，美索不达米亚、叙利亚、安纳托利亚和埃及的新兴国家体系已经扩张到彼此充分接触的程度，并具备了相当程度的外交、经济和文化互联性，以至于我们在非正式讨论时，有时会称其为“青铜时代晚期大国协调”（令人联想到 19 世纪欧洲的势力均衡政治）。

[Map description omitted] [地图描述略]

Now I should caution, we often provide these nice neat maps of the Late Bronze Age powers (and they’re useful to a degree) but the borders of these states were quite fuzzy – their outer ‘possessions’ were often tributaries under the rule of local kings which might be weakly attached to the imperial center. 我必须提醒的是，我们经常提供这些整洁的青铜时代晚期大国地图（它们在一定程度上是有用的），但这些国家的边界其实非常模糊——它们外围的“领地”通常是由当地国王统治的附庸国，与帝国中心之间的联系可能非常薄弱。

Nevertheless, going from East to West: southern Mesopotamia was dominated by the ‘Middle Babylonian’ Empire, ruled by the Kassite dynasty (the Kassites being an ethnic group who had taken power around 1530 BC) while northern Mesopotamia was dominated by the Middle Assyrian Empire (from about c. 1350 BC). Anatolia and the Northern Levant was controlled by the multi-ethnic Hittite Empire, which seems to have sparred regularly with the New Kingdom of Egypt which controlled Egypt and the southern Levant. Basically all of these powers had less settled, often pastoral peoples in their hinterlands which presented on-going security challenges for them. These larger imperial states were more economically complex as well. In particular, their large armies required significant amount of bronze which – because its core ingredients of tin and copper effectively never occur in the same place – demanded substantial long- 尽管如此，从东向西看：美索不达米亚南部由加喜特王朝统治的“中巴比伦”帝国主导（加喜特人是一个在公元前 1530 年左右夺取政权的族群），而美索不达米亚北部则由中亚述帝国（约公元前 1350 年起）主导。安纳托利亚和北黎凡特由多民族的赫梯帝国控制，该帝国似乎经常与控制埃及和南黎凡特的埃及新王国发生冲突。基本上，所有这些大国的腹地都有定居程度较低、通常是游牧的民族，这给它们带来了持续的安全挑战。这些大型帝国国家在经济上也更为复杂。特别是，它们庞大的军队需要大量的青铜，而由于青铜的核心成分锡和铜几乎从不同时出现在同一地点，这需要大量的长途……