The Bronze Age Collapse

c. 1177 BCE — Eastern Mediterranean, Late Bronze Age states

Today: The eastern Mediterranean — Greece, Turkey, Syria, and the Levant

Around 1200 BCE, a connected world came apart. Within two generations, nearly every great power of the eastern Mediterranean — Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire, the wealthy cities of the Levant — collapsed or shrank drastically. Egyptian records blame mysterious raiders, the 'Sea Peoples,' but historians now see them as a symptom, not the cause: drought, famine, earthquakes, severed trade, and revolt struck a tightly linked system all at once, and it fell like a chain of dominoes. It is the ancient world's great warning about complexity — the more interconnected a system, the harder it can fall.

Worth knowing: The collapse was so total that Greece forgot how to write for roughly four centuries — and when writing returned, the old script was gone, unreadable until archaeologists cracked it 3,000 years later.

Pattern: Environmental & resource stress — An environmental shift (drought, cooling) strains food and water systems, amplifying every other tension at once.

Entry 23 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.