What Was the Bronze Age Collapse? When Every Great Power Fell at Once

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, about a century and a half 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.

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 suddenly, and in its ruins was found a clay tablet, 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.

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

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.

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.

Saying that dozens of cities fell within a few decades depends on dating methods that each have limits. Pottery styles change over time in a known sequence, so a burned layer containing a particular style of Mycenaean ware can be placed relative to others. Egyptian records supply fixed points, because the reigns of pharaohs can be counted from surviving king lists and inscriptions, and objects bearing a pharaoh's name, such as a scarab or an inscribed jar, tie a foreign site to his reign. Radiocarbon dating of burned grain and seeds adds an independent check.

These methods also feed a genuine argument about how sudden the collapse was. Some destructions once blamed on the Sea Peoples have been redated and turn out to be decades apart, and some sites were damaged, repaired and destroyed again. Several historians now describe a process spread across a generation or more rather than a single wave of fire. The question matters for the causes, because a quick, region-wide catastrophe points to one shared shock, while a staggered decline fits better with slower pressures such as drought, famine and failing trade.

The Egyptian inscriptions name the invaders, and the names are one of the few direct clues to who they were. The Medinet Habu texts list groups including the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, and the Peleset are widely identified with the Philistines of the Bible. The carved reliefs on the same temple walls show more than warriors. In the land battle, women and children ride in ox carts among the fighters, which suggests whole communities on the move looking for somewhere to settle, rather than raiders who planned to sail home with their loot.

Archaeology in the southern Levant fits that picture. In the twelfth century BCE, towns such as Ashkelon and Ekron began producing pottery in an Aegean style made from local clay, and their rubbish contains far more pig bones than neighbouring sites, a sign of different eating habits. In 2019 a study of ancient DNA from burials at Ashkelon found that people of the early Iron Age carried ancestry linked to southern Europe that was missing from the Bronze Age population before them. Within about two centuries that signal had faded into the local ancestry, as the newcomers and their descendants married into the existing population.

Bronze is usually about nine parts copper to one part tin, and that recipe made the whole Bronze Age economy dependent on long trade routes, because copper and tin were rarely found near each other or near the great cities. Copper came from places such as Cyprus, while tin often travelled enormous distances, from sources as far away as Central Asia.

A shipwreck found off Uluburun on the southern coast of Turkey shows that trade in action. The ship sank in the late fourteenth century BCE carrying around ten tonnes of copper ingots and about a tonne of tin, the right proportion to make bronze, along with glass, ivory, ebony and goods from across the eastern Mediterranean. A network that relied on cargoes like this was vulnerable when the routes were disrupted.

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.