Bronze Age Trade & Collapse

Between roughly 1600 and 1200 BCE, the eastern Mediterranean and Near East achieved something that would not recur for two millennia: a functioning international system. Great kingdoms traded goods, negotiated treaties, married into each other's royal families, and maintained diplomatic relationships of a complexity that scholars have compared to modern geopolitics.

Egypt under the New Kingdom. The Hittite Empire in Anatolia. Mycenaean Greece. Kassite Babylon. Assyria. The trading cities of Cyprus and the Levantine coast. These were not civilizations developing in parallel. They were interdependent nodes in a single network. Goods, people, ideas, and technologies flowed between them along routes that stretched from Afghanistan to Sardinia, from the Black Sea to Nubia.

Then, in the span of roughly fifty years around 1200 BCE, nearly all of it came crashing down. The collapse was so total that the centuries following are conventionally called a "Dark Age," a term that reflects the disappearance of written records more than the disappearance of people. It remains one of the great unsolved problems of ancient history.