Michal Milewski wrote:
> So, it seems that the Hittites were able to arm all their soldiers
with
> iron weapons long before the invasion of the Sea Peoples took
place.
Bronze was still widely used by the Hittites. Especially for the
elites. The Hittites too employed many mercenaries from Western
Anatolia (Lukku, Ahhaiwaya, Turush etc) who seemed to use Bronze
weapons. The Shardana employed by Rameses II also used bronze (as
did the later Nuraghe culture of Sardinia derived from these people).
Michal continues
And
> according to you and Mark, even if iron was inferior to bronze, it
gave
> Hettites the advantage over much smaller enemy armies armed with
bronze.
Yup! You have the elements of it. You then ask
> Does it mean that the advantage of the Sea People over Hettites was
not
> related to iron swords they (both?) used, but was rather caused by
some
> other factors (surprising tactics, mobility, number of soldiers)?
I think it is rather that the Hittites had previously had an
advantage in the use of iron. This had enabled them to dominate
Anatolia. Once the Sea Peoples (or was it Phyrgians? Mushki? Most
probably Kaska) had iron, this balanced the scales. Having a more
decentralised, tribal organisation they were able to fight a
guerrilla war which parallysed the Hittites (Hittite control had
never extended far into the Kaska Hill country to the north). Like
Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite system seems to have been a centralised
elite, with a bureaucratic chain of command that made it very
vulnerable once the agricultural system on which they depended
collapsed in widespread famine.
Michal asked again
> Did the
> Sea People learn their iron technology from Anatolians, or was it an
> independent invention? Was the Balkan pennisula (Thracia)
an "unknown"
> metallurgy center at that time, which supplied Phrygians and
Dorians with
> tons of iron weapons?
I don't know the answer to this one. The Urnfield culture of Central
Europe is supposed to have been an early iron using culture, but Iron
really only took off in the following Hallstaat phase. Phrygians had
probably crossed into Anatolia in advance of the Hittite collapse.
They are mentioned amongst the allies of the Trojans, and
etymologically some have seen a connection between the Phrygian Myrsi
and the Mushki repulsed by Ashurnasirpal of Assyria in the 900's.
The Mycenaeans seem to have been concerned to keep the Black Sea
route open - first the Argonauts, then Herculides attack on Troy, and
a generation or two later, the full Trojan War. There were extensive
movements happening in Late Hittite times across the Dardanelles
(Dardana from Illyria also being involved). Whether these people
were still using Bronze weapons or had adopted iron is still too
early to say. Certainly the Trojan excavations all show Bronze was
used, rather than Iron.
As for the Dorians, they have been pushed later back in history. It
is now widely thought that the so called "Dorian invasion" did not
occur much before 1,000, and the areas they moved into were already
larely depopulated. There was not much resistence here. This leaves
questionable who were the enemies that Pylos was defending against?
Philistines perhaps? Thus the Dorians would have had iron weapons
because of the collapse of the tin trade. But by then all peoples in
the Eastern Mediterranean (apart from Egypt) had substituted bronze
with iron.
The Tyrrhenoi who in about 800 arrived in Etruria were already
arriving into an area which had long used iron. The Villanova
culture which preceeded them had derived from the European Urn
Fields, from whence they had learned their tool making.
<snip> Michal again
> Thanks for this wonderful post. If I understandd you correctly the
fall of
> Hettite Empire was caused by many different factors and the iron
weapons
> used by " invaders from the sea" was not the most important one.
Honestly
> speaking, the "big catastrophe theory" seems not very convincing
to me,
> but maybe I need to read more on this subject.
Whatever the nature of the collapse, it wiould seem that a climatic
factor was involved. It shows up in Greenland Ice Cres that 1180 BCE
was one year of a climatic anomaly. There is references in later
classical writers of widespread famine throughout the Aegean and
Anatolia, and contemporary records from Ugarit contain an appeal to
the Egyptian Pharaoh for grain to releave the famine that had
occurred in this area.
As for the causation (whether from a Tunguskaya type event or a major
volcanic erruption) it is still too early to show. Either way,
natural events have the habbit, in situations of polutical insecurity
of encouraging discontented people from taking rapid action.
Hope this helps you further
Regards
John