Bronze Age: The Collapse

    Ever since individuals dispersed the seed of wild grasses along the banks of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean region built a world that seemed to be becoming smaller and easier to control. With agriculture, their populations grew, cities developed, and more individuals were free from the task of feeding themselves and their families. With this spare time and labor, they looked beyond their immediate homes to their neighbors, as well as to the world around them. These cities sought to acquire more resources in order to become political overlords, trade hubs, cultural centers, havens of science and technology, and places of heaven on Earth. They cooperated and competed with one another-sharing ideas and innovations, fighting wars, intermarrying, and trading goods-forming and strengthening bonds found within what we could imagine as a large web. This web developed to become more interconnected and more complex as time marched on, until it gradually emerged as what we might call a "civilization", as we might with the West, the Islamic world, or East Asia. However, this came at a cost of the entire system becoming more and more vulnerable to disaster-disaster that would come in the form of what we today call the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

    Two thousands years after the rise of agriculture, the eastern Mediterranean was in the midst of the Bronze Age. The Egyptian New Kingdom was clearly the center of this network. Situated on the Nile, the river's famously regular flooding allowed for a historically stable Egypt, while also providing easy access to drinking water, irrigation, and trade. The pharaohs used this to their advantage, building a large, centralized kingdom with an efficient bureaucratic structure. Found in Anatolia, the Hittites are best known today for being the first to work with iron, which required a higher temperature to extract and work with than copper or tin. To their east, the Assyrians of what is today northern Iraq and Syria managed to subdue the ancient Sumer-Akkadian city-states to their south. Remembered as a ruthless military power, the use of chariots and early siege equipment carved an empire throughout the Fertile Crescent; the wealth drawn from this being used to build great structures like the Library at Nineveh. These three powers were often rivals, similar to England, France, and Spain in the early modern period. Meanwhile, the pre-Greek Minoans were established on the island of Crete and the proto-Greek Mycenaeans lived on the Greek mainland and surrounding islands.

    Of these peoples, the Egyptians seem to be the only ones to form a centralized state (as evidenced by a lack of walls around their cities, suggesting they weren't fighting one another). Meanwhile, the other powers were primarily collections of city-states, ruled by a central hegemon that held varying degrees of authority over other cities. This was also the very beginning of secular political leaders. Before, religious leaders, able to speak to the gods and read both the natural and spiritual worlds, would make political decisions. Among the first secular rulers, individuals like Hammurabi of Babylon or the pharaohs of Egypt still needed to make sure the priestly caste was kept well-fed and happy. Other than food, much of what was being bought and sold was made of Bronze, and alloy made from mostly copper and a smaller amount of tin. Being easy to work with and stronger than other available materials, jewelry, chisels, farming equipment, arms and armor were being made from bronze. Copper was readily available in the region, with a significant source being found on Cyprus. Tin was harder to come by, with the closest large tin deposits, historians believe, being found in the British Isles. The Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean powers were possibly developed enough to sail all the way there (out into the unpredictable Atlantic Ocean) on a regular enough basis to get tin cheapest at the source. More likely, much of Europe developed a trade network of its own, within the economic orbit of the eastern Mediterranean. European merchants would pass the tin on from merchants in one trade hub to the next, marking their price up each time. Either way, this would've taken two thousand years of development in order to achieve the bronze-based economy we see in the eastern Mediterranean.

    Upon the arrival of the 13th Century, something or things happened that would topple this entire Bronze Age structure, and they seemed to have occurred virtually overnight (in terms of archaeological timescales). Whatever it was, we aren't entirely sure, for record-keeping becomes rare in the part of the archaeological record. We have a few theories as to what might've happened. The most famous (or infamous) is that of the Sea Peoples, a supposed alliance of nations sailing across the Mediterranean, raiding and pillaging as they went. While a group of outsiders migrating to this more abundant land is plausible, some have posited that these Sea Peoples were also inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean. They could be refugees of natural disasters, such as a cataclysmic volcanic eruption or even and earthquake storm, coming upon the lands of their longtime neighbors, looking for a place to live and grow food. Some even suspect that some Mycenaeans or Minoans, fleeing destruction from their homeland, made landfall in the Levant. There, they perhaps became the Philistines found in the Torah/Old Testament, and lended their name to the region of Palestine.

    Whatever happened, it seems clear that the response from the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean wasn't sufficient to keep much of their developed civizational network intact. Living in that interconnected, globalized society, the powers of the eastern Mediterranean became increasingly dependent and interdependent on one another. So much so, that some believe that the Late Bronze Age Collapse might've been the combination of one or several triggering events, as well as the destructive reactions on the parts of the governments, militaries, merchants, and farmers. In this scenario, it is likely that if something bad enough happens to one part of this system and the decision-makers respond with more harm than good, they could be the first in a series of dominoes, tumbling the entire system into a dark age.

    The Collapse marks the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. By the time the dust settled, the Hittites perhaps experienced peasant revolt, civil war, or feudal infighting; their capital of Hattusa was razed to ash and the Hittites disappeared from the face of the Earth. The Minoans also disappeared, leaving only ruins in their cities. The Assyrian Empire fell, it's once great empire shrinking back into northern Mesopotamia. The Mycenaeans fell into the Greek Dark Age, probably living as those in Western Europe did after the fall of Rome; it wouldn't be for another 400 years until they bounced back and gave rise to the Hellenic Classical Period. The only power left was Egypt, but it was a shadow of its former self. It, along with the lands of the Hittites and Assyrians would Achaemenid Persian Empire. The peoples of the Levant, once sandwiched between those three rival Bronze Age powers, would then have the chance to rise on their own as the Phoenicians and Israelites. It seems to be a new world, a clean slate for new players on the world stage.

    A growing amount of historical evidence shows that the politics, economics, technology, and culture of Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean peoples were interconnected to some degree. Of course, the world we live in today is similar, with globalization letting us travel the world, share ideas, and manufacture and purchase goods ever more quickly and efficiently. A collapse occurring in our civilization, in the near future or for future generations, is something we'd like to avoid. In order for us as a species to save ourselves from the history we would be doomed to repeat, we must learn as much as we can from the Bronze Age civilization, and the factors and triggers which brought about its Collapse.