Late Bronze Age collapse

Between about 1200 and 1150 BCE the great palace states of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed within a few decades, an event historians call the Late Bronze Age collapse. The Hittite capital Hattusa was burnt and abandoned, the Mycenaean palaces in Greece were destroyed and never rebuilt in the same shape, Cyprus and Ugarit were sacked, and Egypt survived but lost its Asiatic provinces and its grip on the Levant. Egyptian inscriptions speak of the Sea Peoples, a confederation of sea-borne raiders named under Ramesses III, though they were only one element in a wider crisis that also hit the Hittites and the Kassites of Babylon. Drought is attested by pollen cores from the Dead Sea and by tree rings in Anatolia and Greece; earthquake storms damaged fortified sites; the breakdown of tin and copper trade cut off the supply of bronze; and the collapse of palace bureaucracy removed the institutions that had organised farming, writing and long-distance exchange. Population fell sharply, Linear B writing was lost, and political life contracted to small villages for centuries. Alphabetic scripts, the rise of Israel, Phoenicia and the Neo-Hittite states, and the recovery of trade from the eighth century BCE all grew out of this transformation.