The Bronze Age Collapse
Discover what caused the Bronze Age Collapse — the mysterious catastrophe around 1200 BCE that destroyed multiple civilizations across the Mediterranean.
Around 1200 BCE, within a span of just a few decades, nearly every major civilization in the eastern Mediterranean collapsed. The Hittite Empire was destroyed. Mycenaean Greece fell into a dark age. Egypt survived but was permanently weakened. Cities across the Levant were burned. International trade networks that had connected these societies for centuries disintegrated. It was one of the worst civilizational catastrophes in human history.
The causes remain hotly debated among historians and archaeologists. The traditional explanation — invasion by the mysterious "Sea Peoples" — is now seen as too simple. Modern scholarship points to a perfect storm of interconnected factors: climate change and drought, earthquake damage, internal rebellions, disruption of trade routes, and the very interconnectedness that had made the Late Bronze Age prosperous. When one node in the network failed, the cascading effects brought down the entire system.
The Bronze Age Collapse matters because it demonstrates a pattern that recurs throughout history: highly interconnected, specialized societies are efficient and prosperous under stable conditions but fragile under stress. The parallels to modern globalization have not been lost on contemporary historians. From the ashes of the collapse, new societies eventually emerged — including the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome — but the transition took centuries.