Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Hittites & Misses
1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed
By Eric H Cline
Princeton University Press 264pp £19.95 order from our bookshop
His dark glasses are heavy and impenetrable. His hat lies low on his brow. The long peak leaves the rest of his face in shadow, deepened against the background of glaring sunshine and sand. Whose identity lurks behind the picture, purportedly of the author, on the dust jacket of 1177 BC? To judge from his language and style, the real writer might be the haplessly muddled Grand Inquisitor from The Gondoliers. After his attempt to explain the disappearance of many palaces, cities, states and literate cultures around the Aegean and in southwest Asia in the early 12th century BC, Eric Cline – surely an unconvincing alias for Gilbert and Sullivan’s character – concludes by proclaiming, ‘we undoubtedly do not know’. Of that there can be no possible doubt whatever.
Yet this ‘collapse’ is one of the best-documented episodes of the era, thanks to the survival of archives, especially from the Hittite Empire, the most spectacular of the vanishing polities and one long vulnerable to famine and disease. Around 1300 BC, King Mursili II reproached the gods for a plague:
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger