Bronze Age Collapse - The Sea Peoples
Every major civilisation of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed within about fifty years around 1200 BC, and the Sea Peoples are the traditional explanation. The scale is the striking part. The Hittite Empire ceased to exist; Mycenaean Greece was destroyed and its palaces burned; Ugarit, a wealthy Syrian port, was abandoned and never reoccupied; Cyprus and the Levantine cities were sacked; and Egypt survived in a much reduced form. Writing disappeared in Greece for four centuries. The Sea Peoples come from Egyptian sources. Ramesses III's inscriptions at Medinet Habu describe a coalition — the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, Weshesh and others — moving with families and ox-carts, defeated by land and in a naval battle in the Nile delta around 1177 BC. The identification of who they were has never been settled. The Peleset are generally connected with the Philistines who settled the Levantine coast. Modern scholarship treats them as a symptom rather than a cause. The contributing factors proposed include a prolonged drought attested in pollen cores and lake sediments, earthquakes along a fault system, famine — Ugarit and the Hittites were importing grain urgently in their last years — and the fragility of an economy in which bronze required tin from central Asia and copper from Cyprus, so that one broken route disabled the whole. Iron replaced bronze partly because it could be found locally. Ugarit's last letters were baked hard in the fire that destroyed the palace. It is the closest thing to a systems collapse the ancient world records, and the argument about what caused it is still open.
- Year: 1200 BCE
- Category: Military
