Why did the Bronze Age end?
The Bronze Age ended around 1200 BCE in a catastrophic systems collapse caused by a convergence of factors: climate change, earthquakes, internal rebellions, invasions by the Sea Peoples, and the fragility of interconnected trade networks. The aftermath saw iron replace bronze as the dominant metal.
The end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BCE was not a gradual transition but a catastrophe — one of the worst civilizational collapses in human history. Within a span of just a few decades, the interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age disintegrated. The Hittite Empire was destroyed. Mycenaean Greece fell into a dark age lasting centuries. Egypt survived but was permanently diminished. Dozens of cities across the eastern Mediterranean were burned and abandoned.
Modern scholarship has moved away from single-cause explanations toward a "systems collapse" model. The Late Bronze Age was an extraordinarily interconnected world — almost a first experiment in globalization. Egyptian gold went to the Hittites, Cypriot copper to Mesopotamia, tin from as far as Cornwall or Afghanistan to bronze foundries across the Near East. This interconnection created prosperity but also systemic fragility.
When multiple stresses hit simultaneously — severe drought confirmed by climate data, earthquakes at several sites, disruption of tin trade routes, internal social tensions visible in the destruction of palaces, and the arrival of the Sea Peoples — the system could not absorb the shocks. Each failure cascaded into others, like dominos falling.
From the ashes of the collapse, a new world eventually emerged. With bronze trade networks destroyed, communities turned to iron — previously a curiosity, now an abundant and locally available alternative. The Iron Age that followed produced a fundamentally different political landscape: the Assyrian and Persian empires, the Greek city-states, and eventually Rome.