Revealing long-lost secrets of the real First World War

Archaeologists investigate a major European battle fought more than 3,000 years ago in the late Bronze Age collapse

- DAVID KEYS

Archaeologists are revealing the long-lost secrets of the real First World War – a series of conflicts that unfolded across much of Europe, the Mediterranean, north Africa and the Middle East some 32 centuries ago.

New research published yesterday reveals how two substantial armies from two different parts of Europe fought to the death in a major battle just south of the Baltic Sea. The two armies appear to have come from at least 400 miles apart – a southern one from Bavaria (or from what is now the Czech Republic) and a northern one from what is now northeast Germany.

But the battle, involving up to 2,000 warriors, seems to have been part of a series of conflicts and crises which caused chaos across a large swathe of the world from Scandinavia to the Sahara and from Western Europe to what is now Iraq. The battle, just south of the Baltic, was fought in the valley of the River Tollense in around 1250BC.

“It appears to have been just the tip of a conflict iceberg which spread turmoil across vast areas in the mid-to-late 13th and early-to-mid 12th centuries BC,” said one of the world’s leading authority on the period, Professor Barry Molloy of University College Dublin.

It was a time of huge political and economic instability, which saw the fall of the first great Greek civilisation (the Mycenaeans) from around 1230BC, the collapse of the Middle East’s Hittite empire in the 1190s BC, the weakening of ancient Egypt from around 1180BC, and the decline of Babylon by 1155BC.

It also seems to have seen the final 13th century BC collapse of the Indus valley civilisation, the 12th century decline of major political centres in Romania, Hungary and northern Serbia and the construction, in the 13th century BC, of defensive ramparts (ie, probable evidence of conflict) in Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, and as far west as Ireland.