The Late Bronze Age Didn't End — It Was Erased Across Three Continents in About a Century

Sometime between roughly 1225 and 1177 BC, every major palace civilization in the eastern Mediterranean either fell or shrank dramatically. Mycenaean Greece's palaces at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos burned. The Hittite capital Hattusa was abandoned and torched. New Kingdom Egypt held on but lost its empire. Cypriot trading cities declined. Whole writing systems — Linear B, the Hittite cuneiform — went dormant for centuries. The historian Eric Cline titled his 2014 book on the subject simply 1177 B.C., after the year an Egyptian inscription records Ramesses III repulsing a coalition of "Sea Peoples" who had already overrun much of the coast.

The causes are still being argued, and the argument has gotten more interesting as more data has arrived. Tree-ring chronologies in Anatolia register a severe drought between roughly 1198 and 1196 BC. Archaeoseismology has identified a swarm of strong earthquakes through the same century. Climate proxies from speleothems show a broader cooling and drying trend across the Levant. None of these alone destroys an empire; together, with the migrations they triggered, they look enough like the proximate cause.

What is striking is how much continued. Tin imports — from sources as far as Afghanistan and Cornwall — neither stopped nor decreased after 1200 BC. Jesse Millek's recent re-audit of "destruction layers" found that more than half of the sites traditionally listed as destroyed showed no such evidence on closer inspection. The collapse was real, but it was patchier and slower than the textbook narrative.