Late Bronze Age collapse

• 1. A City Sacked

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  The Late Bronze Age collapse left behind a message from the city of Ugarit in ancient Syria. A letter written after the devastation ends with a plain warning: "Our city is sacked, and may you know it!" The collapse was a period of societal breakdown in the Mediterranean basin during the late 13th to early 12th century BC. It is thought to have reached Egypt, Anatolia, the Aegean, eastern Libya and the Balkans. For many Bronze Age civilizations it was sudden, violent and culturally disruptive. These had been the great powers of their day, and afterward their material wealth fell sharply. This documentary asks what bound such interdependent societies together, and what physical evidence survives from the moment they broke. It asks why some powers fell while others endured in weaker form. It also asks a harder question. Did the catastrophe really unfold as dramatically as historians long believed?

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• 2. Web of Palaces

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  Between about 1550 and 1200 BC, the Egyptians, Hittites, Mesopotamians and Mycenaeans lived in a tightly connected world. Each society raised monumental buildings, worked metal with skill and kept written records. Copper, timber, pottery and farm goods crossed the region along extensive trade networks. Diplomatic ties tightened the bonds further, so each kingdom came to rely on the others.

  The palace economy was the engine inside every one of these kingdoms. Wealth first flowed into a centralized bureaucracy. It was then redistributed according to the sovereign's agenda, and the system mainly rewarded the elite. This arrangement was rigid. Combined with the web of dependencies, it left these civilizations exposed to cascading effects from distant disturbances.

  The idea of a collapse around 1200 BC goes back to the German historian Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren. In an 1817 history of ancient Greece, he ended the first period of Greek prehistory at about that time, relying on a date of 1190 BC for the fall of Troy. In 1826 he placed the end of Egypt's Nineteenth Dynasty at roughly the same moment. Few places show how brittle the old order was more starkly than Ugarit, whose last Bronze Age king was named Ammurapi.

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• 3. Ugarit's Final Letters

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  Letter RS 18.147 comes from Ammurapi, the last Bronze Age king of Ugarit and a contemporary of the last-known Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II. The exact dates of his reign are unknown. A letter by Ammurapi survives on a clay tablet baked hard in the fire that consumed the city. In it he answers a plea for help from the king of Alasiya, which is Cyprus. His troops and chariots were far away in the Land of Hatti, he explains, and his ships were in the Land of Lukka. He reports that "the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us."

  Eshuwara, the senior governor of Cyprus, replied in letter RS 20.18. He insisted that the damage had been done by people from Ugarit's own country, using their own ships. He wrote, he said, to inform and protect his correspondent. The ruler of Carchemish sent troops to help, but Ugarit had already been sacked. Letter RS 19.011 was sent from the ruined city, and many later sources print its closing warning twice for effect. The original tablet does not repeat it. The phrase "the degraded one" in that letter is often read as the army, humiliated, destroyed or both.

  In the residential district called the Ville sud, archaeologists found thirty-two arrowheads scattered about. Twelve of them lay in streets and open spaces. Houses and streets also held two lance heads, four javelin heads, five bronze daggers, one bronze sword and three pieces of bronze armor. Another twenty-five arrowheads turned up around the city centre. Together, this weaponry points to an assault rather than an earthquake.

  An Egyptian sword bearing the name of Pharaoh Merneptah lay among the destruction levels, and it helps fix the date. Those levels held pottery of the Late Helladic IIIB style but none of the later IIIC style. Scholars therefore chose 1190 BC as the start of Late Helladic IIIC. A cuneiform tablet found in 1986 shows that Ugarit fell after Merneptah died. It is generally agreed that the city was gone by 1178 BC, the eighth ruling year of Ramesses III. Tablets speak of an attack from the sea, yet the exact assailant is not known.

  At Emar on the Euphrates, sometime between 1187 and 1175 BC, attackers appear to have singled out monumental and religious buildings. The houses were emptied, abandoned and left standing. Archaeologists read this as burning by attackers, even though no weapons were found at the site.

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• 4. Palaces in Ruins

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  Not one Mycenaean palace of the Late Bronze Age survived, with the possible exception of the Cyclopean fortifications on the Acropolis of Athens. Destruction fell heaviest on palaces and fortified sites.

  Thebes was among the earliest to suffer. Its palace was sacked repeatedly between 1300 and 1200 BC and finally burned completely. Robert Drews reasons that the damage was so severe that Thebes did not regain a significant place in Greece until at least the late 12th century BC.

  At Mycenae, crushed bodies buried in collapsed buildings show that an earthquake struck in 1250 BC. The city was rebuilt, only to be wrecked by a series of major fires in 1190 BC. Drews suggests that the fires came from an attack on the palace. Eric Cline answers that no archaeological evidence of an attack exists. Fire was certainly the cause of the destruction, but who or what set it is unknown.

  An earthquake in 1200 BC wrecked much of Tiryns, including its palace. Yet people probably went on living there for some time afterward. Guy Middleton concludes that "Physical destruction then cannot fully explain the collapse." Nancy Demand proposes an environmental cause instead. The Greek homeland could not grow enough food, and palaces managed the storage of imported supplies. Destroying them would therefore have deepened a shortage that already existed.

  Around 1180 BC, intense fire destroyed Pylos. Tablets there mention "Watchers guarding the coast," which some read as a sign of an expected attack from the sea. Cline replies that the tablet never says what was being watched for or why. He sees no role for naval attacks in the decline of Pylos. Demand argues that, whatever the threat from the sea was, it probably hindered trade and perhaps vital food imports.

  Athens left no remains of a destroyed palace, but living quarters and burial sites moved, which signals a serious recession. Fortifications increased as well. Vincent Desborough reads this as migration away from the city after an initial decline, though a significant population stayed. Demand points to the "enclosed and protected means of access to water sources at Athens" as a sign of persistent drought. Across the Peloponnese, up to 90% of small sites were abandoned, which suggests major depopulation.

  The collapse opened the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted roughly 400 years and ended with the rise of Archaic Greece. Athens stayed occupied, but with a narrower sphere of influence, little evidence of trade and an impoverished culture. It took centuries to recover.

  In Anatolia, the Hittite Empire had dominated for much of the Late Bronze Age. By 1200 BC it was already fragmenting under the strain of famine, plague and civil war. Its capital Hattusa was burned at an unknown date, though it may simply have been abandoned. Karaoğlan, near present-day Ankara, burned, and its dead were left unburied. Troy was rebuilt at once, while Kaymakçı was abandoned. Some evidence suggests that the Phrygians arrived in this period, possibly through the Bosporus or across the Caucasus Mountains.

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• 5. Cities That Did Not Burn

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  Robert Drews once claimed that ruin struck within a span of forty to fifty years. In his words, "almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again." Historians long pictured almost every city between Pylos and Gaza burning, with many left empty afterward.

  The ancient historian and archaeologist Jesse Millek audited that picture. Over 150 years, the archaeological literature ascribed 153 destruction events at 148 sites to around 1200 BC. Of those, 94, or 61%, were misdated, assumed on little evidence, or never happened at all. On Drews's own map, 31 of 60 destructions, or 52%, were false. Sites wrongly listed include Knossos, Carchemish, Tyre and Sidon.

  Cyprus offers a test case. The Hittite king Tudḫaliya IV, who reigned from about 1237 to 1209 BC, briefly invaded the island, either to secure its copper or to prevent piracy. His son Suppiluliuma II reconquered it around 1200 BC. After that, evidence of destruction on the island is thin. The excavator Vassos Karageorghis found "no evidence of violent destruction" at Kition and wrote, "on the contrary, we observe a cultural continuity." At Enkomi, two excavated buildings showed limited burning, and most rooms were undamaged. At Sinda, only some ash was found.

  Maa Palaeokastro is the one Cypriot settlement with clear evidence of destruction around 1200 BC, probably by an attack. The excavators floated pirates, adventurers or remnants of the Sea Peoples as the culprits. They admitted that this was "simply another way of saying that we do not know." Pyla Kokkinokremmos, Toumba tou Skourou, Alassa and Maroni-Vournes were abandoned without being destroyed. Kition and Paphos went against the regional trend and flourished after 1200 BC.

  In the southern Levant, a house fire at Lachish started beside two ovens, and no other part of the city showed burning. The city was then rebuilt more lavishly than before. Most of Megiddo showed no damage. The monumental structures at Hazor were destroyed, but in the mid-13th century BC, long before the Late Bronze Age ended. Ashkelon, Ashdod, Tel Dor and many other sites were not burned around 1200 BC. In Syria, no destruction has been found at Hama, Qatna, Kadesh, Alalakh or Aleppo, although most maps of destruction include them. Tell Sukas showed only minor burning on some floors.

  Trade tells a similar story. Millek showed that the trade in Cypriot pottery largely ended around 1300 BC, and the trade in Mycenaean pottery ended around 1250 BC. Destruction around 1200 BC could not have caused either pattern. Trade with Egypt continued afterward, and Sardinian lead was still imported into the southern Levant in the early Iron Age. Tin, essential for making bronze, kept flowing as well. The nearest sources lay in the modern regions of Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, or perhaps even Cornwall, England.

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• 6. Searching for Causes

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  Since the 19th century, scholars have offered competing explanations for the collapse. Proposals include climate change, volcanic eruptions, drought, disease, invasion by the Sea Peoples, ironworking, and changes in military technology that ended chariot warfare. Many of these explanations are compatible with one another, and none has won consensus. Earthquakes were once favored, but recent research suggests they mattered less than believed. A combination of factors is the likeliest answer.

  Joseph Tainter pioneered general systems collapse theory, which holds that societies collapse when their complexity grows beyond a sustainable level. People then revert to simpler ways of life. Applied here, the Late Bronze Age order had become too intricate to rebuild once seriously disrupted. Its critical flaws were centralization, specialization, complexity and a top-heavy political structure. A revolt of the peasantry, the defection of mercenaries, overpopulation and wars between states exposed those flaws. Piracy that interrupted sea trade, drought, crop failure and famine added further pressure.

  Juniper tree rings in Anatolia record a severe dry spell from about 1198 to 1196 BC. In the Dead Sea region, the subsurface water level dropped by more than 50 meters near the end of the second millennium BC. Researchers applied the Palmer Drought Index to 35 weather stations in Greece, Turkey and the Middle East. They found that a persistent drought like the one that began in January 1972 AD would have struck every site tied to the collapse.

  The climate story is contested, however. One view treats the change as a gear shift in Mediterranean climate rather than an event lasting three years. It was a continual stress over several generations, with no single moment of failure, "nor one straw that broke the back of the camel." Knapp and Manning concluded in 2016 that conditions turned cooler, drier and less stable between the 13th and 10th centuries BC, but not at any one key episode. A study of ancient plant remains from Syria by Karakaya and Riehl found little sign of water stress. A 2012 study suggested a rapid regional temperature drop of 3-4 degrees Celsius from the start of the collapse to the end of the Greek Dark Ages.

  Some Egyptologists date the Hekla 3 volcanic eruption in Iceland to 1159 BC. They blame its volcanic winter for famines under Ramesses III. Other estimates run from 1021 (±130) to 1135 BC (±130), and one gives 929 (±34).

  Recent evidence points to disease as well. An early, now-extinct strain of bubonic plague may have been brought from central Asia by the Sea Peoples or other migrating groups. It may have set off or worsened the collapse in Mycenaean Greece, Hittite Anatolia and the Levant. Primary sources describe large-scale migration at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Drought in the Nile Valley may have helped drive the Sea Peoples' sudden movement across the eastern Mediterranean. Crop failures and a weak Nile flow are suspected of pushing New Kingdom Egypt into political instability.

  Robert Drews points to a revolution in warfare. He sees massed infantry with newly developed weapons and armour, including cast rather than forged spearheads, long cut-and-thrust swords and javelins. Bronze foundries appear to show that mass production of bronze goods suddenly mattered in the Aegean. Homer, he notes, uses "spears" as a stand-in for "warriors." Such skirmishers could swarm and cut down a chariot army, which would destabilize states built on chariots driven by the ruling class. Raiders could then conquer, loot and burn cities.

  Leonard R. Palmer offered a different military argument based on iron. Ironworking spread slowly from present-day Bulgaria and Romania during the 13th and 12th centuries BC. Palmer suggested that iron, superior for weapons, was in plentiful supply. Larger armies of iron users could then overwhelm smaller bronze-equipped forces, which consisted largely of Maryannu chariotry. Gradual changes in metallurgy eventually led to the Iron Age across Europe, Asia and Africa during the 1st millennium BC.

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• 7. Egypt's Costly Victories

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  The Merneptah Stele, carved about 1200 BC, recorded attacks from the Putrians of modern Libya. They came with the peoples of Ekwesh, Shekelesh, Lukka, Shardana and Teresh. The same stele mentions a Canaanite revolt in the cities of Ashkelon and Yenoam and among the people of Israel.

  A second wave came during the reign of Ramesses III, who ruled from 1186 to 1155 BC. The Battle of the Delta and the Battle of Djahy involved the Peleset, Tjeker, Shardana and Denyen. Ramesses won the Nubian War, the First Libyan War, the Northern War and the Second Libyan War. These victories kept the territory around Egypt safe during the collapse. Campaigns in Asia, however, drained the economy, and the state treasuries were nearly bankrupt.

  Ramesses III celebrated his triumph over the Sea Peoples in bold terms. He declared: "My sword is great and mighty like that of Montu. No land can stand fast before my arms. I am a king rejoicing in slaughter. My reign is calmed in peace." With that boast, he implied that his reign was secure in the wake of the collapse. By the time of Ramesses VI, who ruled from 1145 to 1137 BC, the New Kingdom had receded considerably in territorial and economic strength.

  Egypt's withdrawal from the southern Levant took about a hundred years. It was most likely a product of political turmoil in Egypt itself. Garrisons and governor's residences at Deir al-Balah, Ashkelon, Tel Mor, Tell Jemmeh and other sites were abandoned without destruction. Others met violence. The garrison at Aphek was destroyed, probably by warfare, at the end of the 13th century BC. Radiocarbon dates place the destruction of the Egyptian gate complex at Jaffa between 1134 and 1115 BC. Beit She'an was partly destroyed in the mid-12th century BC, possibly by an earthquake.

  Under Ramesses III, the Philistines were allowed to resettle the coastal strip from Gaza to Joppa. The Denyen settled from Joppa to Acre, and the Tjekker settled in Acre. The Denyen may be the tribe of Dan from the Bible, or more likely the people of Adana, also known as Danuna and part of the Hittite Empire. The Story of Wenamun shows that these settlements won independence quickly.

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• 8. Survivors and Memory

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  The Middle Assyrian Empire, which lasted from 1392 to 1056 BC, had destroyed the Hurrian-Mitanni Empire, annexed much of the Hittite Empire and eclipsed Egypt. At the start of the collapse it stretched from the Caucasus Mountains to the Arabian Peninsula, and from ancient Iran to Cyprus. In the 12th century BC, the Mushki, who may have been Phrygians, attacked Assyrian satrapies in Anatolia. Arameans attacked those in the Levant. Tiglath-Pileser I, who reigned from 1114 to 1076 BC, repelled both. The Sea Peoples who ravaged Egypt never threatened Assyria or its colonies.

  After the death of Ashur-bel-kala in 1056 BC, Assyria pulled back to areas near its natural borders. These covered what is now northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, the fringes of northwestern Iran and southeastern Turkey. It kept a stable monarchy, the best army in the world and an efficient civil administration. Its written records stayed numerous and the most consistent anywhere. Still, its empire shrank significantly by 1020 BC, and it declined for a century. From the late 10th century BC it reasserted itself, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire grew to be the largest the world had yet seen.

  Babylonia fared very differently. The Elamites under Shutruk-Nahhunte, who ruled from about 1185 to 1155 BC, sacked Babylon. It lost control of the Diyala River valley to Assyria. Arameans and Suteans spread into Babylonia unchecked, and Chaldeans followed after the collapse. The power of Babylonian kings barely reached past the city limits. Nebuchadnezzar I briefly revived Babylonian fortunes in the 12th century BC by defeating Elam, which waned afterward. He then suffered a series of defeats at Assyrian hands.

  The Phoenicians gained autonomy and power as the military presence of Egypt and Assyria waned in West Asia. Elsewhere, the remnants of the Hittites gradually merged into small Syro-Hittite states in Cilicia and the Levant. Their populations mixed Hittite and Aramean peoples. From the mid-10th century BC, small Aramean kingdoms formed in the Levant. In southern Canaan, Canaanite speakers coalesced into polities such as Israel, Moab, Edom and Ammon. The deterioration of governments across the region had interrupted trade routes and sharply reduced literacy.

  Robert Drews described the collapse as "arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire." Cultural memories of it told of a lost golden age. Hesiod spoke of Ages of Gold, Silver and Bronze, separated from the cruel modern Age of Iron by an Age of Heroes. Rodney Castleden suggests that memories of the collapse influenced Plato's story of Atlantis in the Timaeus and the Critias.

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