Jesse Millek
This volume offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the destructions that allegedly occurred at sites across the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age, and challenges the numerous grand theories that have been put forward to account for them. The author demonstrates that earthquakes, warfare, and destruction all played a much smaller role in this period than the literature of the past several decades has claimed, and makes the case that the end of the Late Bronze Age was a far less dramatic and more protracted process than is generally believed.
About the author:
Dr. Jesse Michael Millek (PhD University of Tübingen, 2017) is an ancient historian and archaeologist specializing in the history and cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE). He is the author of Exchange, Destruction, and a Transitioning Society: Interregional Exchange in the Southern Levant from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron I (Tübingen University Press, 2019), and has written numerous articles on the archaeology of destruction, the Sea Peoples and their effect on the Eastern Mediterranean, trade during the Late Bronze Age, Egyptian hegemony over the southern Levant, and what actually occurred in various regions ca. 1200 BCE based on a reanalysis of the archaeological and historical records. Millek has won several prizes for his research including the Sean W. Dever Memorial Prize from the W. F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research.
A video interview and Q&A session with the author at Invicta History
Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age
More info
6x9 inches
xiv + 380 pages (plus index)
978-1-948488-83-9 (hardcover)
978-1-948488-84-6 (PDF)
978-1-957454-01-6 (EPUB)
February 2023
Reviews
"This is an important investigation that needs to be taken account of by any historian of the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age period."—Lester L. Grabbe in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 48.5 (2024): 13.
Destruction and Its Impact throws up an important point for the study of any collapse, which is the necessity of first identifying and describing what we are seeking to explain; this in itself is not straightforward.… By going back to original reports and tracing citation chains back from claimed destructions, the book clearly shows that the dominant narrative of "the collapse c. 1200 BC" is at least in part a modern myth and an artefact of scholarship. This view must be addressed by those who propose sweeping explanations of collapse.—Guy D. Middleton in Antiquity 98.397 (2024): 261. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.187