Bronze Age Collapse: Why Did the Ancient World Fall Around 1200 BCE?
Around 1200 BCE the great kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean fell within a few decades, and the Egyptians blamed the Sea Peoples.
Between about 1200 and 1150 BCE, much of the connected world of the eastern Mediterranean fell apart. Historians now blame a perfect storm of drought, earthquakes, revolts, trade disruption and migrations.
In the Late Bronze Age, the eastern Mediterranean was a connected world of great powers: Egypt, the Hittite empire in Anatolia, Babylon, Assyria, the Mycenaean kingdoms of Greece, and wealthy trading cities like Ugarit on the Syrian coast. They exchanged letters, gifts, princesses and metals. Then, within a few decades around 1200 to 1150 BCE, much of it fell apart.
The Hittite capital Hattusa was abandoned and burned. Ugarit was destroyed and never rebuilt. Mycenaean palaces like Pylos went up in flames, and writing disappeared from Greece for centuries. Egypt survived, but weakened. At Medinet Habu, Ramesses III recorded his victory over invaders from the sea, and his inscription says that no land could stand before their arms, naming Hatti, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya (Cyprus) among the lands overrun.
Tablets from Ugarit give a close-up view: a king writes that enemy ships have come, his cities have been burned, and his own troops and ships are away elsewhere. Another letter from the same archive reports that enemy ships had been sighted and urges the king to be on guard. Excavators recovered these tablets from the ruins of the city itself, a direct record of its final days. They describe raids from the sea, cities burning and allies unable to help.
Historians now see a "perfect storm" rather than one cause: prolonged drought and famine, earthquakes, internal revolts, disrupted trade, and migrations including the Sea Peoples. The collapse ended an international age and led, after a dark age, to the world of iron, the alphabet and classical Greece. The book 1177 B.C. by Eric Cline made the debate widely known.
In one of its last letters, the king of Ugarit reports that just seven enemy ships had done great damage while his own fleet was away, a sign of how quickly a rich city could be left defenseless.
Popular claims that the collapse was caused by a cosmic impact or a single catastrophe are not supported; the evidence points to many overlapping pressures over decades.
