Chapter 8
THE COLLAPSE
Around 1200 BCE, multiple civilizations fell nearly simultaneously—and we don’t know why.
8.1 The Catastrophe
For three centuries, the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a connected world.
Egypt under the New Kingdom pharaohs dominated the Nile and extended influence into Canaan. The Hittite Empire ruled Anatolia and clashed with Egypt over Syria. Mycenaean Greeks built palace complexes at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos, trading across the Aegean. The city of Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, served as a commercial hub where Egyptians, Hittites, Cypriots, and Mesopotamians exchanged goods and ideas. Cyprus exported copper; Crete exported finished goods; Afghanistan supplied lapis lazuli that reached tombs in Egypt.
The system was complex and interdependent. Palace economies administered production and distribution. International treaties regulated commerce and diplomacy. Letters in Akkadian—the lingua franca of the age—traveled between great kings who addressed each other as “brother.” It was not a golden age, but it was a system—stable, productive, interconnected.
Then it ended.
Between roughly 1200 and 1150 BCE, the system collapsed. Not one civilization but many, not in one region but across the entire eastern Mediterranean. The destruction was rapid, widespread, and devastating.
The Hittite Empire. The great power of Anatolia simply ceased to exist. The capital, Hattusa, was burned and abandoned around 1180 BCE. The population scattered. The empire that had rivaled Egypt vanished so completely that its very existence was forgotten until archaeologists rediscovered it in the nineteenth century.
Mycenaean Greece. The palace complexes were destroyed or abandoned. Pylos burned; the Linear B tablets we can read today were preserved only because the fire baked the clay. Mycenae itself declined. The population dropped precipitously. Writing disappeared from Greece for over three hundred years—the period historians call the Greek Dark Ages.
Ugarit. The commercial city was destroyed around 1185 BCE. One of the last tablets found there is a letter never sent: “Enemy ships have been sighted at sea… My father, the enemy forces are many against us… Behold, the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.” The city never recovered. It was never rebuilt.
Cyprus. Major cities were destroyed. Some were rebuilt; others were not. The copper trade that had made Cyprus wealthy contracted drastically.
Egypt. The New Kingdom survived, but barely. Pharaohs Merneptah and Ramesses III fought off invasions by peoples they called the “Sea Peoples”—groups with names like Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen. The battles are recorded in dramatic temple inscriptions. Egypt won, but the effort exhausted the state. Within a century, the New Kingdom fragmented into competing powers, and Egypt entered a long period of decline.
Canaan. Numerous cities were destroyed. Hazor, the largest Canaanite city, was burned around 1230 BCE. The coastal cities declined. Into the vacuum, new peoples emerged—including, according to some scholars, the early Israelites.
Mesopotamia. Further east, the effects were less dramatic but still significant. Kassite Babylon fell to Elamite invasion around 1155 BCE. Assyria survived but contracted. The international trade networks that had connected Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean withered.
In a few decades, a world was unmade.
8.2 The Suspects
What caused the collapse? Scholars have proposed many explanations. None is fully satisfying. The truth is probably complex—multiple factors interacting in ways we can’t fully reconstruct.
The Sea Peoples. Egyptian texts describe seaborne invaders attacking in waves. The names given—Peleset, Shekelesh, Weshesh, Denyen, Tjeker—don’t clearly correspond to known peoples. Some scholars identify the Peleset with the Philistines, who appear in Canaan after the collapse. Others link various groups to Sardinia, Sicily, Anatolia, or the Aegean.
But who were the Sea Peoples, really? Raiders? Refugees? Migrating populations displaced by some other catastrophe? The Egyptian texts treat them as enemies to be defeated; they don’t explain where the peoples came from or why they were moving.
And the Sea Peoples can’t explain everything. Some sites were destroyed by enemies, but others show no signs of battle—just abandonment. The Hittite capital fell, but not to sea raiders; Hattusa is far inland. The Sea Peoples may have been a symptom as much as a cause.
Drought and climate change. Paleoclimate data suggests that the eastern Mediterranean experienced a prolonged drought around 1200 BCE. Tree rings, lake sediments, and pollen records indicate drier conditions lasting perhaps three centuries.
For agricultural societies dependent on reliable rainfall or irrigation, extended drought would be catastrophic. Crop failures would lead to famine. Famine would lead to unrest, migration, violence. The palace economies, which stockpiled grain and managed distribution, might have failed under the pressure—their collapse leading to the collapse of the states they served.
This explanation fits some evidence but not all. Drought was real, but droughts had occurred before without civilizational collapse. Why was this one different?
Earthquakes. The eastern Mediterranean is seismically active. Some destroyed sites show evidence of earthquake damage—collapsed walls, fallen columns. A sequence of major earthquakes could have devastated cities, disrupted infrastructure, broken the systems that held civilization together.
But earthquakes, like droughts, had happened before. They explain localized destruction, not a region-wide collapse lasting decades.
Internal rebellion. Some scholars emphasize social factors. The palace economies were exploitative—elites extracting surplus from peasant populations. Perhaps the collapse was, at least partly, a revolution from below. The palaces fell because the people who sustained them stopped cooperating.
Evidence is thin. We have no manifestos from Bronze Age revolutionaries. But the pattern of destruction—palaces burned, villages surviving—is consistent with this theory.
Systems collapse. Perhaps the most sophisticated explanation is also the least specific. The Bronze Age Mediterranean was a complex system with many interdependent parts. Trade connected regions; political alliances balanced powers; agricultural surplus supported specialists who didn’t farm.
Complex systems can be resilient—absorbing shocks, adapting to change. But they can also be fragile. If enough components fail simultaneously, the whole system can cascade into collapse. Each failure causes others; feedback loops amplify damage; what starts as a manageable crisis becomes unsurvivable.
This may be what happened. Drought stressed agriculture. Famine triggered migration. Migrants became raiders. Raiders disrupted trade. Trade disruption broke palace economies. Palace collapse removed the administration that organized defense. Without defense, more raiders came. Each shock weakened the system’s ability to absorb the next shock.
No single cause. A cascade.
8.3 The Mystery
The honest answer is: we don’t know.
We have theories, evidence, possibilities. We don’t have certainty. The collapse happened over decades, across thousands of kilometers, in societies that left incomplete records. The records that survive are fragmentary, often damaged, frequently ambiguous.
Some things we can say:
The collapse was real. The destruction layers are there. The population decline is measurable. The loss of writing, of monumental building, of international trade—all are documented.
The collapse was multicausal. No single factor explains the pattern. Drought, invasion, earthquake, rebellion—each played a role in some places, none explains all places.
The collapse was not total. Egypt survived, diminished. Assyria survived, contracted. Some cities were destroyed; others merely declined; a few prospered in the aftermath. The Phoenician cities—Tyre, Sidon, Byblos—emerged from the collapse to dominate Mediterranean trade for centuries.
And new peoples appeared. The Philistines settled the southern Levantine coast. The Israelites crystallized as a distinct identity in the Canaanite highlands. The Greeks, after their Dark Age, would eventually create the civilization we call classical. The collapse was an ending but also, as all endings are, a beginning.
What we can’t say: exactly how it happened, in what sequence, with what intentions and contingencies. The evidence permits multiple reconstructions. Future discoveries may narrow the possibilities. They may not.
The collapse remains a mystery—not because we know nothing, but because we know too little to choose confidently among competing explanations.
8.4 The Warning
Why does the Bronze Age collapse matter?
It matters because it happened. Complex civilizations, interconnected economies, sophisticated administrations—all can fail. The people living in 1250 BCE had no idea their world would end within a generation. The letters from Ugarit, begging for help against approaching enemies, went unanswered. The help never came. The city burned.
It matters because the causes are recognizable. Climate change. Migration. Political instability. Economic disruption. These are not ancient problems only; they’re contemporary ones. The Bronze Age world was smaller and simpler than ours, but the dynamics of collapse may scale.
It matters because recovery took centuries. The Greek Dark Age lasted from roughly 1100 to 800 BCE—three hundred years without writing, without monumental architecture, without the complexity that had characterized Mycenaean civilization. Knowledge was lost. Skills were forgotten. Populations declined. The people who emerged on the other side were not the same as those who had entered.
We sometimes imagine collapse as dramatic—a single event, a clear before and after. The Bronze Age collapse was more gradual, more confusing, more partial. Cities fell over decades. Some regions suffered more than others. Life continued, diminished and difficult, in the ruins of what had been.
This is how civilizations end: not with a bang but with a cascade, not all at once but in stages, not everywhere equally but in patterns shaped by geography, resources, and luck.
The Bronze Age collapse is a reminder that complexity is not guaranteed. Systems that seem permanent can prove fragile. Interdependence that enables prosperity can transmit disaster. The blessings of civilization come with vulnerabilities that may not be apparent until the system fails.
We build our world on assumptions: that trade will flow, that institutions will function, that knowledge will be preserved, that tomorrow will resemble today. The Bronze Age world was built on similar assumptions. The assumptions proved wrong.
They may prove wrong again.
Coda: Into the Silence
Part II has explored what we don’t know.
Scripts we cannot read. Tombs we cannot find. Questions we cannot settle. A collapse we cannot fully explain.
The silence is not empty. It’s informative. It teaches that knowledge has limits, that the past is not fully recoverable, that humility is the proper posture before history.
But Part II has also shown something else. The limits of knowledge are not reasons to stop inquiring. Scholars continue to work on Proto-Elamite and Linear A, on the historicity of David and the Exodus, on the causes of the Bronze Age collapse. Each generation adds something. The picture becomes clearer, even if complete clarity remains beyond reach.
The past is gone. What we have are traces—tablets, ruins, texts, memories distorted by transmission. From these traces we reconstruct what we can. We hold our reconstructions lightly, knowing they may be revised or overturned. We accept uncertainty without surrendering to ignorance.
This is what it means to study the past honestly: to seek what can be found, to acknowledge what cannot, to remain open to both discovery and disappointment.
Part III turns from what we don’t know to what we are. The anomaly of human existence—our uniqueness, our acceleration, our strangeness in the cosmos. We’ve seen what the past contains and what it conceals. Now we ask why there’s a species here to uncover it at all.
The mystery deepens. So does the inquiry.