The end of the 3rd millennium BC in the Levant: new perspectives and old ideas

Abstract

The end of the 3rd millennium BC in the Levant has been interpreted as a time of settlement collapse and dislocation. A variety of theories have been proposed to account for this, such as climate change and landscape degradation, natural disaster and population movements. This article will review the archaeological evidence for this period in the Levant and offer new insights into what potentially occurred at the end of the 3rd millennium BC.

Keywords:

• Levant
• EB–MB transition
• collapse
• climate change
• natural disaster

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to thank Dr Stephen Bourke for all his useful discussions and comments regarding this paper and its development, and I would also like to thank Prof. Graham Philip for all his editorial inputs. Many thanks must also go to Dr Hugh Thomas and Annabel Kennedy for their editorial inputs, and to Dr Felix Höflmayer and the DAI, Berlin for inviting me to speak on this topic in 2013. Finally, thanks must also be offered to the two anonymous referees for all their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

ORCID

Melissa A. Kennedy http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8620-938X

Notes

1 Numerous chronological expressions have been used to describe the end of the 3rd millennium BC in the Levant: EB IV, Intermediate Bronze Age (IBA), Middle Bronze Age I (MB I), Intermediate Early Bronze–Middle Bronze (EB–MB), and more recently Early Southern Levant (ESL), Early Northern Levant (ENL) and Early Central Levant (ECL). However, the author has chosen to utilize the term EB IV, due to cultural continuities with the earlier EBA.

2 This paper is based in part on a chapter in the author's PhD thesis and monograph (Kennedy 2015b) and a lecture given at the DAI, Berlin in February 2013.

3 Although chronology is a crucial aspect of this debate, this will not be discussed in detail as this discussion is concerned principally with articulating the potential causes for collapse, rather than the chronology of events.