Mystery 5 of 15
5. What Really Caused the Bronze Age Collapse?
Within a relatively short period around the end of the 13th and beginning of the 12th century BC, much of the eastern Mediterranean’s sophisticated political order fell apart.
The Hittite Empire disappeared. Mycenaean palace centers were destroyed or abandoned. Important cities in the Levant were devastated. Long-distance trade networks that had linked major kingdoms broke down.
Egypt survived, but emerged weakened.
For years, popular retellings looked for a single culprit. The Sea Peoples were an obvious candidate. Modern historians generally see the situation as considerably more complicated.
Drought and crop failures may have destabilized populations. Warfare and migration increased pressure. International trade was vulnerable because societies depended on one another for crucial goods. Internal rebellion, political instability, earthquakes, changing military technology, and the failure of highly centralized palace economies may also have played roles.
Why It Is Still a Mystery
The problem is not a shortage of plausible explanations. It is that there are so many.
The Bronze Age world may have experienced a cascading systems failure in which one crisis made another worse. Scholars increasingly favor combinations of causes, but they still debate which pressures mattered most and why some societies collapsed while others adapted.
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