#7 The World That Ended in One Generation

Around 1185 BC, a king called Ammurapi sat in his palace at Ugarit and wrote a letter he must have known was already too late.

Ugarit was a port on the Syrian coast, rich, cosmopolitan, the kind of place where scribes worked in half a dozen languages and someone had invented one of the earliest alphabets on earth. Ships from Cyprus, Egypt, the Hittite lands and the Aegean came and went from its harbour.

But now other ships had appeared. Enemy ships.

Ammurapi wrote to Talmi-Teshub, the Hittite viceroy at Carchemish (his own overlord), to say these adversarial vessels were burning his coastal towns. He was terrified. His army was away in Hittite territory. His fleet was somewhere off the coast of Lycia. His city was open, and he knew it.

The reply to this letter actually survives and it offers some advice to Ammurapi. Fortify your towns, it says. Bring your troops inside, watch for the enemy, stand firm.

Unfortunately, no ships came to his aid. Ugarit was burned not long after, and unlike the other sacked cities in this story, it was never rebuilt. People had lived on that spot for thousands of years but, after this, nobody came back. The harbour silted up, the mound went quiet, and the alphabet its scribes were so proud of vanished with them.

Now, you could read that as one unlucky king caught with his army in the wrong place. But Ammurapi wasn't unlucky. Up and down the coast, in the same few decades, other kings were experiencing similar trauma. Ammurapi was just one light going out across a region where the lights were going out everywhere, more or less at once, and almost nobody who lived through it could see the whole picture.