Around 1200 BCE, the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East contained one of the most prosperous and interconnected systems of civilizations the world had ever seen. The Egyptian New Kingdom under Ramesses III. The Hittite Empire centered at Hattusa. The Mycenaean palace centers across mainland Greece and Crete. The kingdom of Ugarit and the other Levantine coastal cities. The Cypriot trade ports. The Mitanni successor states. The Kassite dynasty in Babylon. The Elamites in southwestern Iran. Assyria, then in a quiet middle phase. All trading with each other, all maintaining diplomatic correspondence, all moving people and goods across a network that had been functioning more or less continuously for several centuries.

Within fifty years, most of it was gone.

The Casualty List

The Hittite Empire was the largest and most powerful state in the region. Its capital, Hattusa, was burned around 1190 BCE. The empire itself fragmented. The cuneiform archives of the Hittite kings, which had been continuously maintained for over two centuries, simply stopped being written. The Hittite language survived only in remote successor kingdoms in southeastern Anatolia for another few centuries and then disappeared from speech entirely. It would not be deciphered until 1915 CE.

Mycenaean Greece collapsed almost completely. The palace centers at Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes, and Athens were destroyed in waves between roughly 1200 and 1100 BCE. The Linear B writing system was forgotten so thoroughly that classical Greek civilization, when it emerged centuries later, had no idea its ancestors had ever been literate. The population of Greece dropped, by some estimates, by 75 to 90 percent over the following two centuries. The "Greek Dark Ages" that followed lasted approximately four hundred years.

The Levantine coast was devastated. Ugarit, as discussed in the previous post, was destroyed in a single afternoon around 1190 and never reoccupied. Hazor in inland Canaan was burned. Most of the major Bronze Age coastal cities went into either destruction or steep decline. The cultural map of the entire Levant was redrawn — out of the wreckage emerged the Phoenician city-states, the early Israelite hill country settlements, and the Philistine pentapolis on the southern coast.

Cyprus, which had been the major copper-producing hub of the entire Bronze Age trade system, saw most of its cities destroyed in the same window. Enkomi, Sinda, Maa-Palaeokastro, Kition — all destroyed between 1200 and 1150.

Egypt was the only major power to survive intact, and it survived only because Ramesses III managed to hold the Sea Peoples off at the Battle of the Delta in 1175 BCE, in what was probably the largest naval engagement in human history up to that point. Even Egypt was crippled. The Twentieth Dynasty held on for another century but the New Kingdom never recovered its former wealth or reach. By 1070 BCE Egypt was politically fragmented and would not regain unified strength for centuries.

Babylonia, under the Kassites, fell to Elamite invasion in the mid-twelfth century and then to internal collapse. Assyria survived but contracted sharply. The Aramaean migrations into Syria and Mesopotamia changed the linguistic and political map of the entire region.

The trade network that had connected these civilizations went dark. The long-distance movement of tin from Afghanistan stopped. The Cypriot copper trade collapsed. Long-distance grain shipments ceased. Diplomatic correspondence between empires ended because in most cases there were no longer empires to correspond. The Late Bronze Age was over, and what came next was three to five centuries of population decline, political fragmentation, technological regression, and in many regions, the loss of literacy entirely.

Why It Happened — The Single-Cause Theories

For most of the twentieth century, scholarship on the collapse fixated on identifying a single primary cause. Each theory had a moment of dominance and then proved inadequate to the full evidence.

The Sea Peoples. Egyptian inscriptions, particularly the records of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, describe a confederation of seaborne raiders attacking the eastern Mediterranean from multiple directions in the early twelfth century. The Egyptian texts name several groups: the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, the Weshesh. For about a century, the dominant explanation for the collapse was that these Sea Peoples destroyed everything in their path.

The problem with this theory is timing. By the time the Sea Peoples arrive at the Egyptian Delta in 1175, much of the collapse has already happened. Ugarit is already destroyed. Mycenae is already in trouble. The Hittite Empire has already fragmented. The Sea Peoples are at most a contributing factor to a process that was already underway. They are an effect as much as a cause — pushed into the Mediterranean from somewhere by the same pressures that were destabilizing the established kingdoms.

Climate change. Pollen cores, lake-bed sediments, and tree-ring data from across the eastern Mediterranean show a multi-decade drought beginning around 1250 BCE and intensifying through 1175. Brandeis archaeologist David Kaniewski's lake-sediment work in Syria has been particularly persuasive on this. The drought would have devastated agriculture in the rain-fed parts of Anatolia and the Levant, while sparing — for a while — the river-irrigated agriculture of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

But again, climate alone does not explain the collapse. Droughts had hit the region before without producing systemic collapse. The Bronze Age civilizations had developed grain-storage and famine-relief mechanisms that handled multi-year droughts routinely. What was different this time?

Earthquakes. The Aegean region in particular experienced an unusual cluster of major earthquakes between approximately 1225 and 1175. Archaeoseismologist Amos Nur has documented earthquake damage at multiple Bronze Age sites. The temple of Apollo at Mycenae appears to have collapsed in this period. Tiryns shows evidence of seismic damage layered with destruction-by-fire.

Earthquakes alone, however, are insufficient. Bronze Age cities had been built in seismically active zones for centuries. Cities recovered from earthquakes routinely.

Internal revolt. The Marxist historian Andrew Sherratt and others have argued that the palace systems of the Late Bronze Age were sustained by surplus extraction from the rural population, and that the rural population revolted when conditions deteriorated. The destruction layers at the palace centers, in this reading, are the work of the people who used to be ruled by them.

Some palaces show evidence consistent with revolt — burning of administrative buildings while temples are spared, looting consistent with locals who knew where the valuables were. But the pattern is inconsistent across sites, and revolt cannot explain the simultaneous collapse of civilizations that had very different internal class structures.

Disease. There is suggestive but not conclusive evidence of an epidemic or epidemics moving through the eastern Mediterranean in the late thirteenth century. Hittite texts describe a long-lasting plague. The Iliad opens with a plague in the Greek camp. But the genetic and skeletal evidence for a major mortality event in this window is thin compared to what we have for the Justinian Plague or the Black Death.

Each of these single-cause theories explains some of the data. None explains all of it. The collapse is overdetermined — there are too many plausible contributing causes, no single one of which is sufficient.

The Synthesis: Cascade Failure

The most influential modern synthesis is Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, published in 2014 and updated significantly in 2021. Cline's argument, in brief, is that the question "what caused the collapse" is the wrong question. The right question is "why was the system so fragile that any of these causes could trigger collapse?"

His answer is that the Late Bronze Age system had optimized itself into a state of extreme interconnection and low redundancy. Cities depended on long-distance trade for tin, copper, and grain. Empires depended on tribute flows from regions they could not reach quickly with their own armies. Diplomatic stability depended on the persistence of multiple peer empires that could check each other's expansion. Technology — particularly bronze metallurgy itself — depended on supply chains that crossed thousands of miles.

In a stable environment, this interconnection was a strength. It allowed specialization, economies of scale, and the movement of goods and people that supported very high population densities and very sophisticated cultures.

In an unstable environment, the same interconnection became a vulnerability. A drought in Anatolia would not just affect Anatolia; it would interrupt Anatolian trade flows, which would weaken the Hittite Empire's tribute system, which would weaken the Hittite military, which would invite incursions from the Sea Peoples, which would push refugee populations toward the Levant, which would strain Levantine grain reserves, which would create urban food riots, which would weaken palace authority, which would invite further attacks. Each link in the cascade would not have brought the system down by itself. The combination would.

Cline calls this "system collapse." Other scholars use related terms — "complexity collapse," "network failure," "cascade dynamics." The terminology varies; the diagnosis is similar. The Bronze Age system collapsed not because of any single catastrophic event but because the system itself had been built in a way that made cascading failure increasingly likely as conditions deteriorated.

This is, incidentally, the same kind of argument that gets made about modern global supply chains, financial systems, and ecological networks. The Late Bronze Age is the closest historical analog we have for the kind of failure dynamics modern systems are vulnerable to.

What Survived

Some things made it through the collapse. The Egyptian state, in attenuated form. The Phoenician trading cities, who actually expanded their reach in the post-collapse period and would eventually carry the alphabet to Greece. The Israelite hill-country settlements, which became the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The Assyrian core, which would re-emerge as the Neo-Assyrian Empire by the ninth century BCE. The Aramaean polities of inland Syria. The Greeks themselves, in profoundly altered form, who would eventually rebuild on the ruins of their Mycenaean predecessors.

What did not survive was the system. The integrated long-distance trade network that had characterized the Late Bronze Age never came back in its earlier form. The empires that re-emerged after the dark ages were structurally different — more militarized, more decentralized, more dependent on local subsistence agriculture, less reliant on the kinds of multi-empire diplomatic systems that had characterized the Late Bronze Age.

The Iron Age that followed was, in important ways, less prosperous, less interconnected, and less technologically sophisticated than the Late Bronze Age it replaced. It took several centuries to rebuild even a portion of what had been lost.

Why This Matters for the Novel

The First Key opens in Egypt in the years before 1177 BCE, in the court of Ramesses III. The protagonist, Nefertari, is a physician with access to the highest political circles of the New Kingdom. She is in a position to see — and does see — the warning signs that everyone else is treating as isolated bad news. The grain shortages in the Levant. The diplomatic distress signals from Cyprus and Ugarit. The refugee movements down the coastal road. The increasing Egyptian military commitments to defend trade routes that were no longer paying their costs.

She does the thing the Late Bronze Age kingdoms did not do: she recognizes that what is happening is not a series of unrelated crises but a single system entering cascade. And she does what most people in a position to see such a thing have not done across history — she acts on the recognition early enough to build something that might outlast the collapse.

The novel is a thriller, so the dramatization involves seven bronze keys, a conspiracy that splits across two competing networks, and a chase that runs for three thousand years. But the premise underneath the thriller is the same premise that animates Cline's 1177 B.C. and the entire field of complexity studies that has grown up around it: highly interconnected systems are fragile, and the fragility is invisible until it isn't.

We are, by every credible measure, currently in a more interconnected and lower-redundancy global system than the Late Bronze Age ever was. Our supply chains are longer. Our financial systems are more coupled. Our food production is more concentrated. Our information networks are more centralized. Our species runs on infrastructure that, in 1177 BCE terms, would have looked like an act of irresponsible cosmic optimism.

Nefertari saw the pattern in time. Whether anyone in our position is seeing ours in time is, as it happens, the central question of the entire ten-book series this novel begins.

Read her first chapter with that in mind.