Around 1200 BC, the great civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean fell apart.
Mycenaean palaces burned, the Hittite Empire vanished and Egypt was badly weakened, all within a few generations. Greece entered centuries of dark age. The cause has been argued over since the 19th century: drought, invaders, earthquakes, plague. The newest twist is that the destruction may have been less widespread than we thought.
In the Late Bronze Age, roughly 1550 to 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean was a connected world of powerful states: Egypt, the Hittites of Anatolia, Mycenaean Greece and the kingdoms of Mesopotamia, bound by trade and diplomacy. Then, in the late 13th and early 12th centuries BC, that system came apart. The palace economy of Mycenaean Greece disintegrated, the Hittite Empire collapsed, and Assyria and Egypt survived only in weakened form. In Greece, literacy fell sharply and small, isolated villages replaced palaces during a dark age lasting to about 800 BC.
The destruction left vivid evidence. At the Syrian port of Ugarit, clay tablets baked hard in the fire that destroyed the city preserve the king's letters describing attacks on his realm. Pylos in Greece burned around 1180 BC; tablets there mention watchers guarding the coast, though what they feared is not stated. Mycenae was damaged by an earthquake around 1250 BC, rebuilt, then destroyed by fire around 1190 BC.
Why it happened remains unresolved, and most scholars now suspect several causes working together. Candidates include a long shift to a drier climate, with tree rings pointing to a severe drought around 1198 to 1196 BC; the mysterious migrating 'Sea Peoples'; new infantry tactics that undercut chariot warfare; the spread of ironworking; disease; and volcanic eruptions. Joseph Tainter's 'systems collapse' idea suggests that highly centralised, specialised societies were simply too complex to recover once several shocks hit at once.
Recent research is also shrinking the catastrophe. The historian Robert Drews once claimed almost every significant city in the region was destroyed within 40 to 50 years. Jesse Millek has reviewed 153 destruction events attributed to around 1200 BC and argues that 61 per cent were misdated, poorly evidenced or never happened at all. The collapse was real, but perhaps more patchy than the legend suggests, and some peoples, like the Phoenicians, actually gained from it.
Source: Wikipedia — Late Bronze Age collapse · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
