Why did the Bronze Age world collapse around 1200 BC?

Around 1200 BC, the rich, connected world of the eastern Mediterranean came apart, and historians still cannot name a single cause. The best answer today is a combination: drought and climate stress, raiders and migrants such as the Sea Peoples, new ways of fighting, possibly disease, all hitting kingdoms that depended on each other so tightly that a shock in one place cascaded into the others.

Before the fall, Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenaean Greeks and the cities of the Levant traded copper, timber and grain and exchanged diplomatic letters. Their palace economies concentrated wealth at the top and were rigid. Within a few generations the Hittite Empire was gone, the Greek palaces had dissolved into small villages, and literacy fell sharply across much of the region. Egypt and Assyria survived, weakened, while the Phoenicians gained room to grow.

The most haunting witness is a letter from the last king of Ugarit, on the Syrian coast. He wrote that enemy ships had come and his cities were burned. The tablet was found baked in the fire that destroyed his city.

But historians have also learned to be careful. The old picture, in which almost every major city was burned, has been cut down: one archaeologist found that 61% of the destructions blamed on this moment were misdated, poorly evidenced, or never happened. The collapse was real, but smaller and messier than the legend.