This hefty 535-page conference volume edited by Mait Kõiv and Raz Kletter stems from the 9th Melammu Workshop, which was held in Tartu, Estonia, from 7-9 June 2019. The official title of this conference volume (and of the original workshop) is Responses to the 12th Century BC Collapse: Recovery and Restructuration in the Early Iron Age Near East and Mediterranean, published by Zaphon in February 2024. Most, though not all, of the papers which were presented at the workshop are contained in this volume, meaning that the original conference and the publication of the book serve as bookends to the years of lockdown during the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic.

What we find here are very detailed and lengthy discussions, with fourteen contributions written by a total of fifteen different authors, including an extended introduction by Kõiv and Kletter. The papers dive deeply into a variety of topics primarily concerned with the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, written by a stellar array of scholars, many of whom are not usually associated with studies concerned with the Late Bronze Age Collapse and its aftermath, which brings a fresh perspective to some of the topics being investigated. They include Sebastian Fink, Vladimir Sazonov, Joanna Töyräänvuori, Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò, Andres Nõmmik, Maria Iacovou, Carol Bell, Jonathan Wood, Saro Wallace, Julien Zurbach, Kurt Raaflaub, Hans van Wees, and Kathryn Lomas, in addition to the editors, Mait Kõiv and Raz Kletter, who also both have papers in the volume in addition to having penned the Introduction.

The papers are uniformly very long, averaging 38 pages in length (which in my experience is unusual for conference papers), and are extremely detailed in both the actual data discussed and the footnotes/references given throughout. One participant (Kurt Raaflaub) specifically mentioned that he was writing up the final version of his presentation for this volume during the pandemic, giving a caveat that it was very difficult to use either a library or interlibrary loan resources during that period, but there was also a silver lining which he did not mention, namely that the presenters had plenty of time to work on their manuscripts. That situation, unanticipated at the time of the actual workshop, may account for the length of the contributions, as well as the depth of detail and the plentiful footnotes in all of them.

So, what do the authors say in their lengthy contributions? As might be expected, the topics range in coverage, both areally and temporally, from the western Mediterranean to the eastern Mediterranean and from the Early/Middle Bronze Age to the Roman period. The majority are concerned with the period between the 13th and 8th-6th centuries BCE, i.e., the final centuries of the Late Bronze Age on down through much of the Iron Age in those regions. Among the specific issues into which the chapters delve are a consideration of whether the period of the 12th century BCE collapse in Assyria was a turning point or a fairly typical "usual crisis;" an examination of the political organization in northern Syria after the Late Bronze Age Collapse; discussions of Judah in specific and of southern Canaan as a whole in the Early Iron Age; a look from within at the Cypriot response to the Collapse during the 12th-6th centuries BCE; a provocative view of the westward expansion of the Phoenicians; and discussions of what transpired on Crete, in early Greece as a whole and specifically in the Argive Plain and within the North Cemetery at Corinth, and in southeastern Italy (with the latter focusing particularly on the 6th century BCE).

However, the editors also correctly note in their extremely useful introduction, which should be read even if one does not have the time or the inclination to read anything else in the volume, that "[e]xplaining the divergent lines of development in a world of increasingly networked communities and cultures" (6) presents a challenge for scholars studying this period, not least because of the scarcity of literary evidence from many of the areas under consideration during the centuries immediately after the Collapse. This means, as they point out (3), that we must rely primarily on the archaeological record, focusing on burials, pottery, and other artifactual evidence for material culture and innovations. Nevertheless, it is possible to get a reasonably good idea of what transpired during these centuries and to quantify and describe either the interim or ultimate outcomes resulting from the steps that each of the cultures and societies took to adapt and survive in the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

I should point out here, both in the interest of full disclosure and also since it is a matter of intellectual significance, that the gestation period for this volume, from 2019-2024, was also the exact same time frame during which I was working on my own sequel volume for Princeton University Press on the same topic and centuries (After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations), which came out just a few weeks after this conference volume, in April 2024. Since I did not attend the conference, and since they obviously had no access to what I was writing, I find it extremely interesting that the various presenters reached very similar conclusions about the areas and time periods as did I. Perhaps that should not be surprising, since we were all looking at the same sorts of data, but nevertheless I believe that it should be seen as encouraging that I have very few points of disagreement with any of the papers in this volume.

Thus, I certainly agree with the various authors that the responses, and the end results, were many and varied. Some of the cities and peoples not only survived but flourished, like the Phoenicians and Cypriots. Others adapted to the new normal, maintaining their administration, writing systems, and general economy, waiting for the moment to expand out once again, as the Neo-Assyrians did by the mid-ninth century BCE when they began to establish their control across much of the ancient Near East. Still others, like the Egyptians, made do as best they could, essentially retreating from the world of international contacts in order to grapple with internal political and administrative changes and challenges. In contrast, the Hittite empire per se did not survive and gave way to numerous smaller city-states and polities in southwestern Anatolia and northern Syria, where the Syro-Anatolian or Syro-Hittite kingdoms continued some of the legacies while dealing with the new realities. And in the Aegean region, the Mycenaean and Minoan entities of the Bronze Age also did not survive beyond the mid-eleventh century, at least in terms of the major palatial centers like Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, and Knossos; the inhabitants essentially had to start from scratch again, but eventually went in a new and innovative political direction, with the rise of the polis system and then eventually democracy, such that "collective government became normative for Greece, as it became for the Italian city-states from the 5th century onwards" (5).

In sum, despite the pandemic, or perhaps because of it, we now possess this very valuable conference volume containing the final versions of papers originally presented at the 9th Melammu Workshop in June 2019. The editors and all of the contributors, as well as the publisher, copyeditor(s), peer reviewers, and everyone else involved in the publication process, are to be heartily commended for their hard work in persevering and bringing this extremely useful volume to fruition.

Eric H. Cline