12th century BC

A person literate in this century inherits a world of interconnected courts: Egyptian pharaohs correspond with Hittite kings as equals, Ugarit's harbor moves grain and tin between Cyprus, the Levant, and the Aegean, and Mycenaean wanaktes employ scribes trained in a syllabic script borrowed for palace bookkeeping. Within two or three generations, most of that world stops existing. The precise cause is still argued: drought, systems collapse in overextended palace economies, the raiders and migrants later Egyptian texts call the Sea Peoples, earthquake, internal revolt, some combination of all of it. What is not argued is the result. The Hittite capital at Hattusa is abandoned. Ugarit, whose royal archive was still receiving letters describing enemy ships on the horizon when its tablets were baked hard in the fire that destroyed the city, goes silent. The Mycenaean palaces burn one after another, and with them goes Linear B, the only script the Aegean world possesses; Greek will not be written again for roughly four hundred years.

Egypt survives, but visibly diminished. Ramesses III turns back an invasion by land and by river battle, an episode his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu commemorates in unusually literal detail, as though the state needed to insist on the win. The empire in Canaan and Nubia that earlier New Kingdom pharaohs had projected largely dissolves within the following decades; Egypt turns inward. Assyria enters this century already paying for the previous one's overreach: Tukulti-Ninurta I's conquest of Babylon by force, commemorated in an epic poem composed in his own court's honor, had ended in his assassination around 1207 BC, and Assyrian power now contracts rather than builds on what he took. Babylon's Kassite dynasty, which had ruled with unusual stability for over three centuries, is finally toppled by Elam around 1155 BC, roughly this century's midpoint rather than its end. Nowhere is there a clean break; everywhere there is contraction.

For the scribes who remain employed, in the temple and palace corners that do survive, the work continues with striking continuity. Babylonian editors at this time are fixing the standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the version that later Assyrian libraries will copy for another six hundred years, and canonizing centuries of celestial omen watching into what becomes Enuma Anu Enlil. Egyptian scribal schools keep copying wisdom instruction and love poetry as if the state around them were not shrinking. In India, reciters continue compiling the hymn collections that will become the Atharvaveda, Samaveda, and Yajurveda, entirely by ear, no writing system yet involved. In China, Shang diviners at Anyang keep cracking bones and inscribing the answers, a state cult of divination untouched by anything happening two thousand miles west. The collapse is a Mediterranean and Near Eastern event; it does not touch the Yellow River valley or the Ganges plain at all.

What a literate person could know in this century, then, depends entirely on where they sat. In Hattusa or Ugarit in the century's final years, they could know that letters were no longer coming and preparations were failing. In Babylon or Egypt, diminished but intact, they could know a slower, managed decline, cushioned by scribal institutions old enough to outlast a single dynasty's troubles. In the Aegean, within a generation, no one could know how to read at all.