Hey folks,
If you are like many people these days, you fawn over the latest episode of The Walking Dead, enjoy movies like the Hunger Games, or lost your mind during Mad Max Fury Road.
We seem to think a lot about what the apocalypse for our society might be like.
Well, what if the apocalypse already happened… say 3,200 years ago.
The bronze age has an interesting mystery to it.
It ended in a remarkably fast time.
I am talking about an entire civilization, with several major empires collapsing in just 30 to 50 years.
In the blink of an eye archaeologically speaking, the Mycenaeans, Minoans, and Hittites were wiped from the map.
Other empires like the Canaanites and Egyptians faced massive declines.
This decline between the late bronze age and early iron age we call the dark age.
It was several centuries where civilization disappeared.
People forgot how to write, people retreated to remote mountaintop villages in Crete, and the monuments got much smaller in Egypt.
Historian Robert Drews summed it as "the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire."
So what happened?
As with many things in archaeology, there’s a big handful of theories and its likely a mix of all of them.
One of the primary things people suspect is an environmental confluence of disasters.
Some suspect a change in temperatures akin to the little ice age resulted in damage to crop yields, and using pollen, archaeologists have suspected that here was a major drought around the beginning of the collapse.
Piled on top of all of this, there’s a volcano in Iceland that was due to erupt around that time, possibly reducing sunlight and affecting crops.
People in this age were not simply victims of environmental devastation.
Many human causes for the collapse have been cited as well.
A Ugarit slab refers to a series of invasions by at least nine varieties of ‘sea peoples’.
This mix of Luwians, Greeks, and Canaanites reportedly raided up and down the eastern Mediterranean coast.
Many reported an increase in piracy, slave raiding, and other types of attacks.
After these raids, new cultures and ethnicities seem to pop up around the region.
Large migrations of Semitic, Indo-European, and Colchis tribes spread across the land.
We think they moved because of the earlier mentioned droughts, possible earthquakes, and simple availability of new methods of warfare.
What really turned tides was the new tactics of infantry.
People realized that the ling rush strategy worked, and that more people with more weapons could defeat even the most trained elites on chariots.
The ability to mass produce javelins and swords in casts opened the door for the many to defeat the few.
Empires that relied on elites on chariots, would no longer be able to assert their dominance.
The last possible explanation comes from the realm of complexity theory.
The simple societies that followed these Bronze age empires suggests that different factors led to a general system collapse.
Each cause would build upon and create feedback loops with other causes.
It can lead to a very rapid collapse of a complicated system in a surprisingly short time.
Bronze age empires with top-heavy organization, centralized authority, and hyper-specialization actually made them vulnerable to quick collapse if just one cog in the machine came out of place.
What do you guys think?
What caused the bronze age apocalypse?
Let me know down below.
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