Usually when an empire falls, it’s just that one empire; maybe it might bring the
whole region down with it into some kind of dark age, but usually the other political
entities survive in some way.
The Late Bronze Age Collapse however was a little bit different, as it was the simultaneous
fall of basically all the great powers of the ancient Near East in some way.
Egypt, the Hittites, the Akkadians, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, every major civilization in
the region suddenly fell around 1200 BC.
So, what happened, exactly?
In order to understand the Late Bronze Age Collapse, perhaps it is less important to
understand the collapse itself, so much as what was collapsing.
By the latter centuries of the 2nd millennium BC, numerous civilizations dotted the Eastern
Mediterranean, namely the Egyptian New Kingdom under its 19th dynasty, the Hittite Empire
expanding to the north, the Phoenicians establishing their trade empire from the comfort of their
autonomous city-states, the Minoans to the west building palaces on Crete, and the Mycaeneans
establishing what we will know as Greece.
Perhaps the most important factor to understanding both this period of history and what was to
come however, was that these societies weren’t just random kingdoms completely isolated from
one-another and that sometimes went to war with each-other to conquer lands they would
have wanted, but deeply interconnected trade partners.
In fact, the Eastern Mediterranean of the Late Bronze Age was one of the earliest examples
of true globalization, at least before they knew it was a globe they were standing on.
Seeing as this was, you know, the Bronze Age, these civilizations had become dependent on
bronze tools.
Bronze is a metal made of 9 parts copper and 1 part tin, and while copper is relatively
abundant, tin is much more rare and less evenly distributed.
In fact there were no real tin deposits in the area, so if they wanted tin, they had
to get it from somewhere else.
Because of this (as well as for other goods) trade wasn’t just something they did every
now and then, it was how their kingdoms functioned.
Even within their borders however, these civilizations had developed incredibly complex societies.
For one, they were all administered by ultra-centralized governments, like so centralized that farmers
were generally told what to plant, where to plant them, when to plant them, and where
to irrigate their fields, in order to be able to most efficiently supply the whole of the
kingdom and supply all their other interests, like the cities, and the trade, and the cat
statues, and the triangles and the horsey bois, and the stabbey-stab-stabs.
Central to this were the scribes, a select elite class who were the only members of society
who knew how to read and write, making them important in a society dependant on writing
for basic administration, tallying every harvest and import, and where those resources went.
The writing systems of Egypt and Mesopotamia were not easy systems to learn, meaning that
the profession was essentially locked to those who had trained to be scribes, being essentially
as replaceable as skilled warriors or charioteers, which as these empires would find out was…
not very.
With all this in mind, perhaps you can begin to see what would happen were something to
come along and take out even a single gear of the machine.
My personal favorite metaphor for all this comes from Extra Credits, likening the complexity
of these societies to a Jenga tower, in that it might stand tall (even with a few pieces
removed), but remove just one too many pieces, and…
This put these civilizations in a precarious position by the time it all started to unravel.
The methods of agriculture used in these areas were not always sustainable, and even in Egypt
with a nutrient-replenishing river at their disposal, agriculture of this kind on this
scale started to mean a gradual decrease in crop yields over time.
This isn’t what likely caused the Bronze Age Collapse, but the unsustainability of
this kind of agriculture was an important factor.
Okay so these societies were vulnerable sure, but even the driest match needs to be struck
first, so what happened?
One thing people always talk about when discussing the Bronze Age Collapse are the Sea People,
invaders from far-off lands who pillaged and destroyed numerous cities, but whoever they
were, many speculate that they might not have been the cause of the Bronze Age Collapse,
but a symptom.
What more likely caused the collapse was a combination of climatic effects, such as droughts
and earthquake storms.
More records were written on the Sea People than droughts, but it is unlikely they would
have invaded were they not pushed out of their homelands by something like a series of earthquakes
and/or droughts, which themselves would have also affected the Eastern Mediterranean.
One theory states that it was a combination of earthquakes and poor harvests, of course
normally when an earthquake destroys a city they rebuild, but combine a series of earthquakes
with famine brought on by low harvests, and this not only results in displaced peoples
from outside coming to your shores and disrupting the precious balance of trade, but all that
also results in political instability within, and in that political instability kingdoms
couldn’t properly administer their farms and mines, meaning they couldn’t feed as
many people anymore, leading said people to lose faith in their leaders, and leading to
a whole spiral of collapse as trade started to halt until eventually the once prosperous
cities are abandoned and the once powerful kingdoms all but non-existent.
Thus by around 1150 BC, the gears of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean came to a halt,
the cities abandoned and left to dust.
The Hittite capital of Hattusa was abandoned around this time, as were Mycenae in Greece,
and Ugarit in Syria.
Egypt and the Middle Assyrian Empire would survive, though in very different states,
and with new empires forming from the ashes.
The next few centuries afterward however were somewhat of a dark age for the region (especially
in Greece), with little in the way of written records from the time.
That doesn’t mean little was happening, but not as much as the centuries before, or
the centuries afterward.
It’s easy to see the Late Bronze Age Collapse as a cautionary tale for our own civilization
(2020 or not), seeing as the complexity of these civilizations arguably made them more
vulnerable to change.
In a sense, this is *kind of* true, but also definitely a warning we should at least listen
to.
As civilizations expand and develop they inevitably get more complex, this is not at all a bad
thing, so long as said civilization can be reasonably maintained, especially during a
period of sudden change, political or environmental.
Civilizations can weather singular calamities like pandemics or natural disasters perfectly
fine, but the Bronze Age Collapse wasn’t one singular drought or earthquake or invasion,
but a combination of all these factors that together led to a vicious chain reaction ending
in the collapse of the social and economic order.
Overall though, historians and archaeologists still aren‘t completely sure as to what
actually happened, so I‘d take a lot of this with a healthy dose of salt.
But that‘s just a theory, a… history theory!
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