The Bronze Age Collapse: how an interconnected world fell apart

The previous lesson described a world in which great kings wrote to one another as "brothers." Egypt, the Hittites, Babylon, Assyria and the Mycenaean Greeks traded and made diplomatic marriages. Their ports, such as Ugarit, moved copper, tin, glass and grain across the eastern Mediterranean. This lesson asks what happened to that world. Within about two generations, from roughly 1200 to 1150 BCE, many of its main centres were burned, abandoned or reduced to a fraction of their former size. The disruptions began somewhat earlier, and the aftermath ran on until about 1000 BCE. Historians call this episode the Bronze Age Collapse. In this lesson we will look at the evidence region by region, weigh the causes that scholars propose, and then ask whether the word "collapse" is even the right one. First, a word about method, because this period is hard to study. Historians divide evidence into two kinds. A primary source is material that comes directly from the time being studied, such as a letter, a carved inscription or a burned building. A secondary source is a later account that interprets those materials, such as a modern book. For the end of the Bronze Age we have a small number of primary sources, and many of them are damaged or short. There is also a deeper problem. When a state collapses, the scribes who wrote its records are often the people who vanish. The period therefore produces few written records, and historians must partly read the story from silence. That requires care. Much of our evidence is archaeological. Archaeologists often find a destruction layer, which is a band of ash, broken pottery and fallen brick in the soil. It shows that a settlement was burned or wrecked at some point. A destruction layer tells us that something happened. It does not always tell us who did it, or why, or exactly when. Dating is also approximate. A date such as 1180 BCE should be read as "around 1180," with an uncertainty of years or even decades. This matters, because one of the great debates is whether these destructions were nearly simultaneous or spread over a long time. Begin with Anatolia, the large peninsula that is today most of Turkey. It was the home of the Hittites. The Hittites ruled a powerful kingdom from their capital, Hattusa. By about 1180 BCE, that city was destroyed and abandoned. Archaeologists found burning in elite and administrative buildings. But they also found something puzzling. There are signs that valuables and archives had been removed before the fire. An archive is an organised collection of written records. Taking the archives out is not what happens when a city is overrun in a sudden surprise attack. It suggests a planned abandonment, or a political breakdown that came before the final burning. In other words, the Hittite state may have been failing from within, and the court may have left. The empty city may then have been burned afterwards. By whom, we do not know. What we can say is that the Hittite state ceased to exist as a unified power. The Hittite story did not end completely, however. Some small states in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria carried the tradition forward. One of them was Carchemish. These states are called Neo-Hittite, which means "new Hittite." Many of their people spoke Luwian, a language related to Hittite, and they used Luwian hieroglyphic writing. A city-state is a small independent state made up of one city and the land around it. Several Neo-Hittite centres were city-states of this kind, and they became successor states, meaning states that grew up in the political space left by a fallen power. So even in the case of the Hittites, the word "collapse" hides some continuity. Hittite texts also show that the pressure on Anatolia started before the final destruction. They record grain shortages, and they include requests for grain from Egypt. A state that must ask a rival for food is vulnerable. We will return to this point when we discuss climate, because hunger is one of the strongest threads running through the evidence. The Hittite records also mention peoples and lands in the west of Anatolia and the Aegean, such as Ahhiyawa, Assuwa and Arzawa. These records give us context for a political map that was already unstable, and they remind us that raiding and shifting loyalties were not new in 1200 BCE. Now turn to Greece. The Mycenaeans were the Greek-speaking people of the Late Bronze Age. They built fortified palace centres at Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes and other places. These palaces ran what historians call a redistributive economy. In a redistributive economy, a central authority collects goods from farmers and workers, stores them, and then hands them out again as rations, raw materials or payment. The palace sat at the centre of production and trade. To keep track of all this, palace scribes wrote on clay tablets in a script called Linear B. Linear B was an early form of Greek, written with signs that stand for syllables. It was used mainly for administrative records, such as lists of workers, goods and animals. We do not have Mycenaean literature written in this script. We have accounts. From around 1200 BCE, the Mycenaean palaces suffered destruction and decline. Pylos was burned about 1180 BCE. The tablets found at Pylos include texts that may reflect preparations for coastal watch, meaning men assigned to guard the shore. Some scholars read them as a sign that the palace feared an attack from the sea. But interpretation is uncertain. The texts are short and the language is hard, and the same words might describe more ordinary duties. A careful historian holds this reading loosely. It is an intriguing possibility, not a proven fact. What is clear is what happened afterwards. The Linear B administrative system disappeared. So did the palace-run economies, the monumental building and the long-distance trade. Population fell, and settlement became smaller and more scattered. Mycenae and Tiryns saw some limited continuation, but the age of great palaces was over. Writing was lost in Greece for a long time. Here we can see a link between collapse and literacy. Linear B was tied to the palaces. When the palaces went, the need for the script went with them, and the skill of reading and writing it was not passed on. The Levant is the region along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, including what is now Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Here we hear the most urgent voices. Ugarit was a wealthy port city in northern Syria, and it was one of the great trading centres of the age. It was destroyed around 1185 BCE, or slightly earlier, and it was not resettled. Archaeologists found clay tablets from its last years, and some of them are letters written in a time of fear. One comes from Ammurapi, the last king of Ugarit. Another comes from the king of Alasiya, which is the name used in these texts for Cyprus. These letters speak of enemy ships, of troops stationed elsewhere, and of an urgent need for help. A king who cannot defend his own coast is asking his neighbours for aid, and the neighbours are in trouble too. These tablets are real primary sources, and they are precious. But we must note their limits. They are brief. They are written in the language of diplomacy and alarm. They do not tell us clearly who the attackers were, and they do not tell us how the story ended. The city fell, and the sources fall silent with it. Other places tell a similar story. Emar, a town on the Euphrates river, was destroyed. Many Levantine cities show destruction layers. Yet the picture is not the same everywhere. Some places on the southern coast, and some inland places, survived or recovered. The Phoenician cities came through the crisis, and their power later grew. Phoenicia was the name later given to the coastal cities of what is now Lebanon, with centres such as Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. This matters for how we think about the whole event. If the entire region had simply died, we would not see survivors who went on to become more important than before. The same is true of Cyprus. Several Cypriot sites were destroyed or abandoned, but they were later reorganised. Egypt is the case where we have the longest account of the crisis, and it must be read with great care. Egypt survived, but it was weakened. Our main source is the temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, in southern Egypt. It carries an inscription, which is a text carved into stone, and reliefs. A relief is a carving that stands out from a flat surface, so that the images can be read like a picture story. These carvings date to about year 8 of Ramesses III, around 1177 BCE. They show battles on land and at sea, and the text describes foreign peoples who came, in his account, from the north. According to the inscription, no land could stand before their arms. It names Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya as lands that were destroyed. Then it says the enemy came to Egypt and was defeated, in a land battle and in a sea battle in the region of the Nile Delta. Historians call these invaders the Sea Peoples. This is a modern label, not an Egyptian one, and it covers several groups listed in Egyptian texts. It is a convenient name, but it can mislead, because it makes them sound like one nation with one plan. The Egyptian sources actually list separate names. At Medinet Habu these include the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen and the Weshesh. An earlier text shows that this was not a sudden new threat. The Merneptah inscription dates to about 1208 BCE, a generation before Ramesses III. It lists the Libyans and allied northerners who attacked Egypt, including the Ekwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Sherden and Shekelesh. The Amarna letters go back further still. These are the diplomatic letters, found in Egypt, from the mid-fourteenth century BCE. They predate the collapse, but they already mention raiders and show how the system of kings and vassals worked. So pressure from seaborne groups and from the Libyan side of Egypt's frontier did not begin in 1200. It grew over a long time. Papyrus Harris I is another Egyptian source. A papyrus is a writing sheet made from the papyrus plant, and this one gives a long account of the reign of Ramesses III. Now we must think about the limits of Medinet Habu. It is royal propaganda. Propaganda is information shaped to praise a ruler or to persuade an audience, rather than to give a neutral report. A pharaoh was expected to present himself as the champion who defeated chaos and protected Egypt. So the temple walls may exaggerate the size of the threat, the scale of the victory, and the claim that the invaders had destroyed all those distant lands. A king who wished to look powerful had good reasons to describe a great enemy. This does not mean the inscription is false. It means we should compare it with other evidence. Archaeology does confirm that many of the named places suffered destruction. But the idea of one united enemy sweeping from place to place is partly the shape that Egyptian royal ideology gave to a messy reality. Where did the Sea Peoples come from? The honest answer is that we do not know. Some scholars have tentatively linked their names to places. Ekwesh has been connected with the Achaeans, a name for Greeks in other sources. Shekelesh has been connected with Sicily, and Sherden with Sardinia. But these identifications are contested. They rest largely on names that sound alike, and similar sounds are weak evidence. They could be coincidence, and Egyptian scribes were writing foreign names in their own script. One group has a clearer afterlife. The Peleset are usually linked to the Philistines, who settled on the southern coast of the Levant. There, archaeologists have found material culture, such as pottery, that is related to Aegean styles. Some DNA studies also suggest an Aegean-related origin, followed by mixing with local people. The details are debated, but it seems likely that some migrants really did come from the west and settle. Migration means the movement of people from one place to live in another. This gives us a useful point. Some of these groups were not only raiders. They were people looking for new homes. For a long time, historians treated the Sea Peoples as the main cause of the whole disaster. Today most see them as one factor, or partly as a symptom of wider upheaval. This is a major shift in thinking. People who lost their harvests, their farms or their palaces could themselves become raiders and migrants. If so, the Sea Peoples may have been both a result of the crisis and a cause of further damage. In a chain of events, cause and consequence can switch places. Egypt's troubles continued after the victory. It lost control of its Canaanite holdings during the twelfth century BCE. Canaan was the older name for much of the southern Levant, and it had long been under Egyptian influence. Inside Egypt, there were also serious strains. Under Ramesses III, workers at Deir el-Medina, the village of the craftsmen who made the royal tombs, stopped work. This is often called the first recorded labour strike. A strike is a refusal to work, used to press for better conditions. It shows economic strain at the heart of the state, because these workers were employed by the crown. There was also an assassination plot against Ramesses III. After his reign, the political unity of Egypt weakened. The long era of divided rule that followed is called the Third Intermediate Period, a name for centuries when Egypt had no single strong ruler in the old style. The Tale of Wenamun, from about 1075 BCE, shows how far Egyptian prestige had fallen. It is a story about an Egyptian official who travels abroad to obtain timber and is treated without the respect that Egypt once commanded. Scholars debate whether it is pure fiction or based on real events. Either way, it shows how people in Egypt, and the people they met, understood the new balance of power. In Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Assyria and Babylonia were damaged but persisted. Kassite Babylon fell to Elam around 1155 BCE. Elam was a power in southwestern Iran. Assyria contracted for a time, then revived later. This is an important point for understanding the whole period. Not every state died. Some bent, shrank and survived, and some of them later grew back. Any explanation of the collapse must account for these survivors as well as the ruins. Now the central question. Why did it happen? Historians generally favour multi-causal, systems-based explanations rather than a single trigger. Multi-causal means that several causes worked together. A systems-based explanation looks at how the parts of a society depend on one another. We will take the proposed causes one by one, and then see how they might combine. The first is earthquakes. Amos Nur and others have proposed an "earthquake storm," meaning a cluster of major earthquakes in a short period, which can happen along fault lines. A fault line is a crack in the earth's crust where movement occurs. Eric Cline, a leading historian of this period, treats the idea as suggestive. The evidence is contested. Many destructions show signs of human violence, so they were evidently caused by people, not only by shaking ground. Earthquakes may have helped bring down some places, but they cannot explain everything. The second is climate change and drought. Paleoclimate means the climate of the past. Scientists reconstruct it from natural records, such as pollen and the layers of mud at the bottom of lakes. Pollen is the fine dust released by plants, and the types found in layers of sediment show what plants grew in a region at a given time. This evidence points to a prolonged dry period in parts of the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE. Drought would cut harvests, and it would put pressure on a palace economy that depended on collecting grain. Hittite texts that show grain shortages and requests for Egyptian grain fit this picture well. But how severe and widespread the drought was, and how directly it caused collapse, remain debated. Here a historian must be careful with logic. Drought alone rarely ends a state, and earlier societies had survived bad years. The better question is why these states, at this moment, could not absorb the shock. The third is internal rebellion and social stress. Palace economies were heavy burdens on ordinary people. Elites also competed with one another. Some scholars suggest that overtaxed or hungry populations rose up, or that the elites weakened their own states by fighting. The strike at Deir el-Medina and the plot against Ramesses III show that Egypt did suffer internal strain. But for most regions there is little direct evidence of popular rebellion. So this explanation remains a possibility and not a finding. The fourth is the disruption of trade, especially the supply of tin and bronze. Bronze is an alloy, which is a mixture of metals. It is made mostly of copper and tin. Tin was rare and often came from far away, so bronze-making depended on long trade routes. If those routes were cut, rulers lost the means to make weapons and tools. Some scholars argue that this shortage encouraged people to adopt iron, which is more common in the ground. But iron use grew slowly and mainly after the collapse, so it is better seen as a consequence of the crisis than as a cause. This brings us to the idea that now shapes much of the field. It is called systems collapse. A system is a set of parts that depend on one another. Eric Cline's book 1177 B.C. argues that the Late Bronze Age world was a tightly linked system. Its states depended on one another for metals, grain, luxury goods and diplomacy. In his view, this created interlocking vulnerabilities. A shock in one place could cascade, which means that one failure triggered the next. He describes a kind of "perfect storm," in which drought, earthquakes, migration, invasion and unrest hit societies that were already tightly connected. The same links that had brought wealth in good times now carried damage in bad times. A palace that relied on imported tin, foreign grain and trade partners had no easy fallback when those partners were failing too. Critics make fair points about this view. They say that "systems collapse" language can be vague. It can sound like an explanation when it is really only a description. They also note that regional variation matters. A drought in Anatolia, a sea raid at Ugarit and a palace fire at Pylos may have had different causes. Calling them one event may mislead. And since dating is imprecise, we cannot be sure the destructions were truly simultaneous. They may have been spread over decades. If so, the idea of a single wave of disaster is partly an illusion created by compressing a long process into a short phrase. Now consider what followed. In the affected regions, palace-based redistributive economies largely vanished. So did several scripts. Linear B disappeared in Greece. Hittite cuneiform, a writing system made by pressing wedge-shaped marks into clay, ceased to be used in the Hittite heartland, and so did the formal use of Hittite hieroglyphs there. Long-distance elite exchange, the gift-giving and trade between kings that you met in the previous lesson, also largely disappeared. In Greece, the following centuries are often called a Dark Age. A Dark Age is a term for a period with few written records and with reduced population and wealth. Recent work stresses that this label can mislead. There was continuity, and there was wide local variation. Some places kept their contacts and their skills, and the loss of writing does not mean the loss of all culture. New things also arose. Neo-Hittite and Aramean states appeared in Syria and Anatolia. The Phoenician cities grew in power and trade. Philistine cities arose on the southern coast. Early Israel and neighbouring kingdoms emerged in the Levant. In political terms, the age of great empires and royal brotherhood gave way to a world of smaller states, many of them with new identities. The alphabet matters here too. An alphabet is a writing system in which each sign stands for a single sound. The alphabet was a Phoenician development from earlier Canaanite scripts, and it spread later. Because it needed far fewer signs than cuneiform or Linear B, it was much easier to learn. That made it possible for more people to read and write, and not only trained scribes working for a palace. It would become one of the most important legacies of this age. Iron working also became common in the early Iron Age. And Assyria, after its contraction, later rebuilt an empire. An empire is a large state that rules many peoples and territories, usually by force. So the collapse did not only end things. It cleared ground for new forms. This brings us to the debate over the word "collapse." Some historians prefer "transformation," because new states, new scripts and new economies came out of the crisis. They point out that many people kept farming, herding and raising families, and that whole societies did not simply disappear. Others reply that for the people of Ugarit or Pylos, destruction and the loss of literacy were collapse in the plainest sense. A city was burned and never resettled. A writing system was forgotten. Both views carry weight. A fair summary is that the old international order did collapse, while life continued in new forms, and that outcomes varied sharply from place to place. The right word depends on which place, which people and which level of society you are looking at. Two other debates remain open. One is whether the Sea Peoples were a cause or a consequence of the crisis. The honest answer is that we cannot yet be sure, and the evidence may allow both. The other is how much weight to give climate versus human choices. Some scholars stress environmental shocks such as drought and earthquakes. Others stress politics, war and weak institutions. Most now see these working together, and they would say that a natural shock becomes a catastrophe only when human systems cannot cope with it. The Egyptian accounts bring one more caution. We depend on a pharaoh's temple wall for much of the story of the Sea Peoples, and that wall was built to glorify him. A good historian does not throw such a source away. Instead, the historian asks what it was designed to do, checks it against other evidence, and accepts what the other evidence supports. This habit, of asking who made a source and why, is one of the most important skills in the whole study of history. What can we say with confidence? Around 1200 to 1150 BCE, many great centres of the eastern Mediterranean were destroyed or abandoned. Hattusa, Pylos and Ugarit are clear examples. Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia survived, but in weakened form. Palace economies and several scripts disappeared in the affected areas. No single cause is established. The exact dates of many destructions are approximate. And the origin of the Sea Peoples is unknown. The lesson for a historian is to be comfortable with this uncertainty, and to be wary of any account that makes a complicated disaster sound simple. "We do not know" is an honest and useful sentence. This lesson closes the Bronze Age, and it opens the next chapter. The world that came out of the ruins was smaller, more local and more varied than the one before it. In the centuries ahead we will follow the Iron Age successor states, the rise of Phoenician trade and the spread of the alphabet, the rebuilding of Assyria, and the beginnings of the Greek world that would grow out of the so-called Dark Age.