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Human history is not a straight line of progress. Around 1200 BC the palace kingdoms of Bronze Age Greece collapsed, and writing disappeared there for some 400 years, until the Greeks adopted a new alphabet from the Phoenicians.

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Historians call the habit of telling the past as a steady march towards the present “Whig history”, a label made famous by Herbert Butterfield's 1931 book The Whig Interpretation of History. The Late Bronze Age collapse is one of the clearest counter-examples. In the late 13th and early 12th centuries BC, many cities of the eastern Mediterranean were destroyed or abandoned. The Hittite Empire in Anatolia disappeared; Egypt and Assyria survived, weakened. Suggested causes include drought, attacks by seafaring raiders known today as the Sea Peoples, disease and the breakdown of long-distance trade, probably working together. In Greece, Linear B, the script palace officials used for their records, fell out of use. When writing returned around 800 BC, it came as an alphabet adapted from the Phoenician one, the first with letters for vowels. Through the Etruscans and Romans, it is the ancestor of the letters you are reading now.

Türkçe oku
İnsanlık tarihi düz bir çizgide ilerlemez. MÖ 1200 dolaylarında Tunç Çağı Yunanistan'ının saray merkezli krallıkları çöktü ve yazı bu topraklarda 400 yıl kadar unutuldu. Yunanlılar ancak Fenikelilerden aldıkları yeni bir alfabeyle yeniden yazmaya başladı.

Tarihçiler geçmişi bugüne doğru kesintisiz bir yürüyüş gibi anlatma alışkanlığına “Whig tarihçiliği” der. Bu adı, Herbert Butterfield'ın 1931'de yayımlanan The Whig Interpretation of History (Tarihin Whig Yorumu) adlı kitabı yaygınlaştırdı. Geç Tunç Çağı Çöküşü, bu bakışı en açık biçimde çürüten örneklerden biridir. MÖ 13. yüzyılın sonu ile 12. yüzyılın başında Doğu Akdeniz'deki pek çok kent yıkıldı ya da terk edildi. Anadolu'daki Hitit İmparatorluğu ortadan kalktı; Mısır ve Asur ise zayıflayarak da olsa ayakta kaldı. Olası nedenler arasında kuraklık, bugün “Deniz Kavimleri” diye anılan denizci yağmacıların saldırıları, salgın hastalıklar ve uzak ülkelerle ticaretin çökmesi sayılıyor; büyük olasılıkla bunlar birlikte etkili oldu. Yunanistan'da saray görevlilerinin kayıt tutmak için kullandığı Linear B yazısı unutuldu. Yazı MÖ 800 dolaylarında geri döndüğünde Fenike alfabesinden uyarlanmış yeni bir alfabeyle geldi; ünlü harflere de yer veren ilk alfabe buydu. Etrüskler ve Romalılar üzerinden, şu an okuduğunuz harflerin atası da odur.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Late Bronze Age collapse
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