In 1200 BC the great civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean and the middle east underwent a seismic shift. The arrival of a new people from the seas to the west drove them into conflict, and exacerbated an already difficult situation caused by an extended period of drought and heightened volcanic activity.
Over just 50 years almost all of the wealthy, successful palace cities and civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean ceased intercommunication and collapsed in short order. A breakdown in communication meant a breakdown in the trade of tin vital for the bronze weaponry these cultures relied on, and absent that they fell apart.
Here are the ruins of seven of those great civilizations, lost to what became known as the Bronze Age Collapse.
1. Mycenae
The greatest of the Greek civilizations of the Bronze Age, ruled by the legendary king Agammemnon who led the Greek forces to Troy, Mycenae in southern Greece collapsed around 1050 BC. Mycenaean Greek records, written in the proto-Greek known as Linear B, are some of the earliest European records that survive (Andreas Trepte / CC BY-SA 2.5)
2. Thebes
The Greek collapse appears to have started some 200 years before Mycenae fell, with a sudden rash of destruction across the major towns of the continent. Cities such as Thebes in Boeotia with its great fortress of Cadmia were overthrown, burned to the ground and abandoned for reasons which remain unclear (Mirjanamimi / CC BY-SA 4.0)
3. The Kassites of Babylon
When the Hittites sacked Babylon in 1531 BC they left the Kassites in charge of the city, and the Kassites quickly filled the power vacuum in the region, coming in time to be one of the three great powers of the middle east along with the Hittites and Assyrians. However despite coming to dominate much of Mesopotamia the failure of the trade routes saw this mysterious culture, kings of Babylon for centuries, vanish (Nic McPhee / CC BY-SA 2.0)
4. Hittites
The great and feared civilization of Bronze Age Anatolia did not survive the collapse either. The Hittites had in truth been in decline for soe time at this point in the face of aggressive incursions into their territory from their Assyrian neighbors, but the Bronze Age Collapse was the final blow. Their great hidden city of Hattusa in the remotest highlands was sacked and burned, and the Hittite empire fell (Bernard Gagnon / CC BY-SA 3.0)
5. The Egyptian New Kingdom
The Egyptian civilization is a tough one to put down and in truth this most ancient of peoples would be back, but the Bronze Age Collapse arguably saw the end of the portion of Egypt’s history where it was truly great. Its last great period of expansion, the New Kingdom, where under great pharaohs such as Ramesses II Egypt underwent a period of massive territorial growth, came to an end with the breakdown of trade. The Egypt which survived was a shadow of its former self (youssef_alam / CC BY 3.0)
6. Ugarit
Ugarit, ancient Syrian port city at the far end of the Mediterranean, depended heavily on trade with its neighbors Cyprus, the Hittites and especially Egypt. Their mercantile economy could not survive the failure of those trade links, but the city itself was apparently directly attacked and destroyed by the mysterious Sea Peoples, unknown warriors who came out of the west (Disdero / CC BY 3.0)
7. The Amorites
The Amorites were the people driven out of Babylon by the Hittite sack of the city that saw the Kassites installed. Fleeing south and west, they came under the control of the Assyrians, the pre-eminent power in the region. The Assyrians would survive the Bronze Age Collapse but the Amorites would not, apparently overrun and wiped out by an incursion of Semitic nomads called the Ahlamu, themselves almost completely mysterious (Dosseman / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Top Image: Troy burns: the Luwian states fragmented during the Bronze Age Collapse, which in 50 years saw the almost total collapse of civilization. Source: Abraham Bloemaert / PDM.
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