Three thousand years ago, in the space of a single lifetime, every great power in the eastern Mediterranean collapsed at once. Almost every great city on earth was burned to the ground within a few decades, writing itself was forgotten, and no one has ever fully worked out why...
We call it the Late Bronze Age Collapse, and to understand how strange it is, you have to see how advanced the world was before it. Around 1200 BC the eastern Mediterranean was a connected web of superpowers: the Mycenaean Greeks, the world of Homer's heroes. The Hittite Empire in Anatolia. The wealthy port kingdom of Ugarit. Egypt at the height of the New Kingdom.
They traded metals and gold across thousands of miles, sent letters back and forth, married into one another's royal families, and ran vast economies that had held together for centuries.
And then, within roughly two generations, nearly all of it was gone...
The cities burned: Mycenae, Pylos, the Hittite capital of Hattusa, Ugarit, and dozens of others were destroyed by fire, many never rebuilt. The Hittite Empire vanished so completely that its capital was lost for three thousand years. In Greece the palaces fell, the population dropped, and the Greeks forgot how to write, plunging into a dark age so total that literacy did not return for roughly four hundred years.
No one has ever agreed on what caused it, only a list of overlapping catastrophes that struck at once: waves of mysterious searaiders the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples, decades of drought and famine, earthquakes, and the breakdown of the trade routes that every kingdom depended on.
What should make us reflect is that these were the most advanced civilizations of their age, and they never saw it coming. Once it began, they could not stop it. As the historian Robert Drews once wrote: "Within a period of forty to fifty years at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth century almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again."
The people who lived through it did not know they were living at the end of an age. No one ever does...