The Late Bronze Age collapse
Within fifty years almost every palace civilisation in the eastern Mediterranean is destroyed.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 50 years
- Known to
- ± 30 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Between about 1200 and 1150 BCE the Hittite empire disappears, Mycenaean Greece falls and its script is forgotten, Ugarit is burned, Cyprus and the Levantine cities are destroyed, and Egypt survives only in reduced form. Trade routes fail, cities shrink, and Greece enters a dark age of four centuries with no writing. No single cause fits: drought, earthquake swarms, the Sea Peoples, systems collapse in an over-connected trade network and internal revolt have all been proposed, and the current consensus favours all of them together.