What Was the Bronze Age Collapse? When Every Great Power Fell at Once
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In the late thirteenth century BCE the eastern Mediterranean was a connected world of great powers. Egypt, the Hittite empire in Anatolia, the Mycenaean kingdoms of Greece, the merchant cities of Cyprus and the Levant traded copper, tin, grain and luxury goods by ship and wrote to each other's kings in a shared diplomatic language. Within about fifty years of 1200 BCE, nearly all of it was gone. Cities burned, dynasties ended, writing systems were forgotten, and Greece entered a dark age that lasted four centuries. Historians call it the Bronze Age collapse, and they are still arguing about the cause.
The world that ended
The bronze that named the age was made from copper and tin, and the two metals came from different places, copper mostly from Cyprus and tin from as far away as Afghanistan and Cornwall, so the whole system depended on long-distance trade. A ship that sank off Uluburun in southern Turkey around 1300 BCE was carrying ten tonnes of copper ingots, a tonne of tin, glass, ivory, ebony, amber from the Baltic and goods from at least seven cultures. The palaces that ran this trade were bureaucracies, with scribes recording every ration and shipment on clay, and the clay is why we know so much.
The kings knew each other. The Amarna letters from Egypt, three centuries earlier, and the Hittite archives show rulers addressing each other as brother, exchanging gifts and daughters, and complaining about the quality of the gold. It was a world of treaties and embassies, and it fell apart faster than it was built.
The evidence of destruction
Archaeologists find a horizon of burned layers across the region dated to within a few decades of 1200 BCE. Hattusa, the Hittite capital, was abandoned and burned. Ugarit, a wealthy port in Syria, was destroyed so suddenly that a clay tablet was found still in the kiln, a letter from its last king reporting that enemy ships had burned his cities and that his army and fleet were away. The Mycenaean palaces at Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns burned, and the Linear B script their scribes used disappeared with them; Greece would not write again for four hundred years, and when it did it used a different alphabet.
Egypt survived, barely. Inscriptions of Ramesses III at his temple of Medinet Habu describe repelling a coalition of invaders from the sea around 1177 BCE, in the war that gave the Sea Peoples their name, and boast that no land had stood before them, listing the Hittites, Cyprus and Syria among the fallen. Egypt was never again the power it had been.
The suspects
No single cause explains everything, and the modern view is that several struck together. The candidates:
- •Drought: pollen and sediment cores show a severe dry period beginning around 1200 BCE, and Hittite letters beg Egypt for grain shipments to stave off famine
- •Earthquakes: several destroyed sites show collapsed walls and crushed skeletons, and the region sits on active faults
- •The Sea Peoples: migrating groups, perhaps displaced by the drought, who raided and then settled along the coasts; the Philistines were among them
- •Internal revolt: palace economies that squeezed their farmers may have fallen from within when the harvests failed
- •Systems collapse: an interconnected trade network in which the failure of one node cascaded through the rest
How a system fails
The archaeologist Eric Cline argues that the interconnection itself was the vulnerability. Each kingdom depended on the others for something, tin above all, and a drought that cut harvests could set off migration, which disrupted trade, which starved the palaces of the metals and grain their economies ran on, which weakened their ability to respond to the next earthquake or raid. None of the shocks alone would have ended the system. Together, arriving within a generation, they broke every link at once.
The comparison with modern supply chains is made often and is not idle. A world in which every economy depends on a few sources of a few critical materials, and on shipping between them, is exactly the shape of the world that ended in 1200 BCE.
What came after
The dark age that followed was dark mainly in the sense that it left few records. Populations fell, cities shrank to villages, and the palace bureaucracies never returned. But it was also the period in which iron replaced bronze, partly because tin could no longer be had, and iron ore was everywhere. The Phoenician cities of the Levant, which had survived, spread an alphabet of twenty-two letters that the Greeks adapted around 800 BCE and that became, through Latin, the one this article is written in. The small Greek communities that grew up in the ruins of the palaces invented the polis, the self-governing city-state, and told stories about the vanished heroic age that Homer eventually wrote down as the Iliad. The collapse ended one world and, over four centuries, made the one that classical antiquity grew from.
The takeaway
The Bronze Age collapse was the near-simultaneous fall of the Hittite empire, the Mycenaean palaces and the cities of the Levant around 1200 BCE, with Egypt surviving in reduced form, brought on by drought, earthquakes, migration and revolt hitting a trade network that could not absorb them together. It ended the age of bronze and palaces and, after a long dark age, gave rise to iron, the alphabet and the Greek city-state.