Essays at Law & Liberty have debated the national conservative challenge to market conservatism. Market conservatism has been the conservative consensus since the Thatcher-Reagan years. This variant of conservativism minimizes political economy and favors spontaneous order, proposing that the free development of markets—including global trade—delivers liberty and equality better than state management. The variant stems from a particular interpretation of Adam Smith influenced by anarcho-capitalism. For this reason, proponents believe it is an Enlightenment politics.

By contrast, national conservatives support a robust political economy. One Nation Toryism looks back fondly to organicist models of human community typical of the Middle Ages. Normed by liberty and equality, it stresses state management to ensure markets work for the local and national common good. An unintended contribution to this debate comes from an academic work on ancient archeology. Eric H. Cline’s After 1177 B.C. is a university monograph on resilience theory and, assuming its guiding question to be meaningful, gives the nod to national conservatism. People and nations that weathered the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age had self-sufficient economies, a desideratum of national conservatism.

Our streaming services are populated by apocalypticisms—The Day After, The Walking Dead, and The Road, to name only a few. Cline shows that apocalypticism is not the right way to think about civilizational failure. Professor of Classics and an archeologist at George Washington University, Cline ponders the implications of the Collapse, when “the interconnected world as its inhabitants had known it during the Late Bronze Age ceased to exist. Many of the large empires and kingdoms that had flourished during the second millennium BC fell like dominoes.”

The causes of the Collapse that ended the Bronze Age’s “internationalized world” remain a mystery, but evidence points to possible causes being climate change, drought, famine, earthquakes, invaders, and disease. None of these alone would have been sufficient to bring down the elaborate civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East, which included, for example, central governments with complex palace architecture. However, if, as is believed, they all occurred at roughly the same time, then “a perfect storm of calamities,” likely proved fatal. Whatever provoked the Collapse, the important point is that 1177 BC was not an apocalypse but a period of winnowing decay and renewal. Some civilizations did not just weather the storm but grew under its pressure.

“So, are we Mycenaeans, or are we Phoenicians?” wonders Cline. Besides curiosity, why do we postmoderns need to think about 1177 BC? Sifting the archeological evidence is the bulk of the book, with the final chapter developing a rubric of resilience. Cline believes studying the runners and riders of the Bronze Age Collapse can inform how we can best go about organizing polities to weather our own civilizational stressors. Mycenaeans vanished during the Collapse, the Phoenicians endured. Why? Phoenician social order included redundant administrative systems to back-stop those failing, a military tuned to defense with broad alliances, and though trading, its communities were economically self-sufficient. In addition, the civilization’s settlements had a secure water supply and a political order with elites and working class integrated. These attributes comport more with national than market conservatism. For conservatives, it seems One Nation Toryism is the horse to back.

Not for Everyone

In the ever-fascinating genre of books on the fall of civilizations, Cline defines collapse as the loss of central administration and writing, the disappearance of traditional elites, population declines and migrations, and the disappearance of impressive architecture. Loses on this scale inaugurate a Dark Age but this is not what happened post-1177 BC. Some peoples proved resilient, others not. The Hittites “ceased to be uniquely identifiable.” Some, like the Egyptians, were fitfully successful afterwards but the country lost great power status. Others, like the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, strengthened. Yet others made a great leap forward. Canaanites morphed into the Phoenicians, trading purple dye for silver and other metals from Sicily, Sardinia, and Iberia. Adornment drove the Canaanites reborn as Phoenicians to grow the “largest information network the world had ever seen.” Cline does not say but it appears human vanity has remarkable staying power. Interestingly, as we begin a global competition for rare earth minerals, 1177 BC is a story built around metals. Cypriots were at the forefront of metallurgy, and they inaugurated the Iron Age with the Phoenicians acting as middlemen. For Cline, Phoenicians and Cypriots “both could even be labeled as anti-fragile, flourishing during the chaos that followed the Collapse.” 

This volume is not “big history,” like Neil Price’s Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. Also an archeologist, Price’s book ranges across the myths that held the Viking world together as well as what graves can tell us about how the Vikings thought about gender. Cline’s book includes little speculation. For example, he mentions warrior burials and notes that frequently a woman was buried with the warrior. Almost always he was cremated, and she was not. He does not speculate why the man is cremated nor does he tell us whether the women were murdered. Price tells us that the women buried with Viking warriors were murdered and surely slaves.

Cline’s offers a cautious scientific summary. “All of this is difficult to model or predict, even in hindsight, because of the variety of factors involved, both known and unknown.” Maps at the start of the book help, but this is not a page-turner like Tom Holland’s Pax , nor does it have a driving thesis like Ian Morris’s history of England, Geography Is Destiny. This volume is primarily for someone who is an enthusiast of the period and who wants to know the state of contemporary academic reflection. The book is 300 pages and includes a 50-page bibliography and 50 pages of footnotes all for further exploration. After 1177 B.C. includes data on the restarting of copper production on Cyprus during the eighth century BC, but no stories revealing how life was lived or imaginative embellishment of the self-understanding of Hittites and Canaanites. Obviously, there is an understandable tension between scientific modesty and telling a rollicking tale.

Runners and Riders

Cline thinks it unlikely that anyone considered themselves Mycenaeans after ca. 1050 BC. The Greeks barely made it through the period, being reduced to pockets of survivors consigned to a hard-scrabble life. Mainland Greece shows a population loss between the end of the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age of somewhere in the range of 40 to 60%. It is an arresting thought that a people who barely got out of the Bronze Age fitfully evolved into a people who birthed our civilization.

As would be expected, Bronze Age geography and climate were important to survival. Geopolitics aided the Assyrian and Babylonian empires to make it through the “system change.” They fared better than Egypt. All situated on major rivers—Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates—the Assyrians and Babylonians inland did not have to contend with constant incursions from marauders on the Mediterranean. Droughts were felt more away from the great rivers and “warmer and wetter conditions that would last for the rest of the Iron Age … may have helped the societies rejuvenate.”

Cline observes the startling fact that there is no evidence to date that any of these civilizations recorded “a change in their world system.” None appears to have shown any awareness that they were in the clutch of, for many of them, a death spiral. What evidence we have of their fates comes from multiple, often curious, sources. For example, the Egyptians kept meticulous notes of the trials of royal tomb grave robbers. Post-Collapse, lists of items stolen being bronze rather than gold show a decline in prosperity since the days of Tutankhamun. Evidence that the Pharaohs began to lose legitimacy is likely attested by the fact that many mummies after the Collapse show evidence of axe mutilation. This suggests that the aura of royal sacrality withered and forced loyal priests to remove the dead to safer venues.

Archeologists of this period and region often use the Bible to corroborate archeological finds and sometimes the assist goes the other way. It is remarkable but up until 1992, there was no extra-Biblical evidence for the existence of kings David and Solomon. In 1992, stone inscriptions written in Aramaic using Phoenician lettering attesting to the House of David were discovered. The inscriptions were found in a monument dating to 841 BC, so about a century and a half after David is thought to have ruled. Also discovered, and likely buried in an earthquake, is an extensive apiary of Anatolian honeybees. Found in the Canaanite city of Rehov and imported from some 300 miles away, it is evidence of commerce in honey and beeswax and helps make sense of why the Bible describes the Jordan Valley as “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Cyprus bounced back from the Collapse almost immediately, its highly sought-after metalwork generating wealth and prestige. Objects first made of iron sourced the iron from meteorites but by the eleventh century BC “the Cypriots were seriously exporting iron objects, especially knives and swords.” Cline does not confirm something pointed out by Ian Morris that Iron Age burial sites show far more evidence of violent deaths than Bronze Age sites. Cline mentions the high prestige of the Cypriots but does not speculate that this might be because they introduced a revolution in military affairs.

And there was quite a thirst for killing. Assyrian stone inscriptions celebrate conquests and slaughters. Tiglath-Pileser boasts of his being king of the universe with many stone testaments repeating claims like, “I cut off their heads and stacked them like grain piles around their cities.” In light of his penchant for slaying, most of his enemies fled into the desert like jerboa, small hopping desert rodents, he tells us. Inscriptions on stone pillars express his genocidal hopes of eliminating all enemy seed from the land. The stone inscriptions of a later Assyrian king, Aššurnasirpal II, celebrate him for impaling enemies and burning to death the male and female teenagers of the conquered. Defeated leaders were flayed and their skins draped over city walls. To our eyes, these trophies must have sat awkwardly beside the Assyrian gardens. Inscriptions speak of their palaces laid out with trees of all varieties and boxwood hedges. They also record trade in rare animals, gold, and bronze objects, as well as “linen garments with multicolored trim.” The human proclivity for both adornment and slaughter is well-attested by the Assyrians and not only came through the Collapse intact but very likely intensified with satisfying technology to hand.

Who Are We?

“So, are we Mycenaeans, or are we Phoenicians?” Is this question meaningful? Attributes of resilience identified comport well with national conservatism, but I wonder whether market conservatives might wonder about the full implications of not only the “system change” of the Collapse but that other epochal “system change” from agrarian to commercial civilization. Adam Smith characterizes our civilization as agrarian plus machines. Cline thinks his rubric predictive, as more or less in play for any civilization.

This seems right, as far as it goes, but for people like us, there is another critical element that might be a game changer. As Adam Smith explains, we are a markedly different people from those who came before us because at an early age, we are slotted into the division of labor that so defines our civilization. The book begins with Covid and Cline’s sense that as he started on the book collapse did not seem far away.

My takeaway from those times is the very opposite. Remarkably little changed. The food supply remained intact even with the policy of lockdowns restricting production and distribution. This is not to say that an Act of God could not strike us down. However, it may well be that the division of labor means that our collapse would have to be truly apocalyptic if we were to be knocked off our perch.