The Bronze Age Collapse

The Nile River, home to civilization for almost 7,000 years, with its nourishing waters has continued to be the lifeline of the Egyptian people since the very birth of agriculture. Today, its delta remains home to ninety percent of the country's population who depend on its waters for their livelihood. survival, but more than 3,000 years ago this peaceful Delta was the scene of an armed conflict of almost unprecedented scale that pitted the forces of the New Kingdom of Egypt against an enemy that had reduced the nations of the eastern Mediterranean to ashes. capitals of Greece, Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, they left no records of their own and our current knowledge of them is derived entirely from the records of their opponents in surviving inscriptions.

They are called adversaries, a plague on civilization itself, where they came from, we do not know. their Kingdom was the very sea from which they emerged to challenge the power of the Egyptian Empire. His attack was doomed to failure, but the force of his blow plunged Egypt into disorder and decay. It would soon join the other foreign nations of the East as the light. of civilization fizzled out over the centuries to come, it is the story of the

collapse

of the Bronze Age and the Sea Peoples, who are so commonly blamed, that has sparked a century of debate among archaeologists over the last few years. one hundred years, almost every detail. of its events has been discussed at one time or another how it happened, when and most important of all, who or what was behind it, was it the fault of the mysterious Sea People or what other factors behind the disappearance of the nations of the Bronze Age of the In the eastern Mediterranean, most of these questions are still debated in one form or another, but the details we already know are more than tantalizing, along with centuries-old theories about war and foreign invasions, new theories about famine, civil unrest and natural disasters are slowly coming into view.

The result was a saga both dramatic and mundane and one that bears eerie parallels with our own civilization in the 21st century, but before we can begin to understand the reasons behind the

collapse

we have to familiarize ourselves with what the world of the late from the Bronze Age. Already looking more than a millennium old, it was a world of surprising complexity, covered in warring nation-states and containing more than one great power. In the west, plunder Greece, home to the great power centers of Mycenaean culture, in the East, Assyria was the hegemon of Mesopotamia. and control of the ancient cities of Sumeria and Babylon, and in the middle, separated by a patchwork of vassals stretching across modern Palestine and Syria, were the opposing forces of the attacking Empire and the Egyptian New Kingdom.

The direct conflict between the two had existed for a long time. passed, but he was still checked for power over the great Eastern trade routes from which flowed the precious tin and copper on which all kingdoms depended for survival. At first glance, the world of the 13th century BC. C. seems stable with its key players firmly. entrenched in their respective homelands, but over the span of the next century each of these nations would suffer a series of catastrophic setbacks, the lucky ones reduced to a shadow of their former selves, most of the rest torn apart. Only MIPS is transmitted. by word of mouth throughout the dark ages that followed them, the sources of the cataclysms are complex and at the moment we only have a rough understanding of each of these factors, even so, which does not give us a tantalizing glimpse of How even the most powerful of nations can be thrown off course by events beyond their control, but let's not get ahead of ourselves if we want to understand exactly how an established order can collapse so quickly that we will first have to go back in the history of each of them. their nations and where It is best to begin our journey then with the first civilization that fell victim to collapse.

Many of us know at least a little about ancient Greece, its great philosophers and scientists, the rivalry between Sparta and Athens, and the growing power of Macedonia in the north. but what we find when we look back at the archaic Greek world of 1500 BC. C. is something both familiar and foreign to its classical successor, since, at least since the mid-Bronze Age, Greece had been a nation of agrarian villages governed by a mosaic of 19th-century palatial centers. deciphering their written language now known as linear, we can say that they indeed spoke a version of Greek and that the gods of classical Greece were already being worshiped within their halls.

These palatial kingdoms were probably inspired by that of the Minoans in Crete. dominant trading powers within the Mediterranean and whose distinctive clothing and textiles have been found as far away as Mesopotamia from each other, the local ruler known as the Basel annex Laius would have sought to extend his power and acquire exotic goods for a complex hierarchy of administration and Some of these rulers were more powerful than others, but the greatest by far was my Sanae, whose power extended over an area almost three times larger than that of his closest rival at the time, in the mid-15th century BC.

The disaster occurred in Crete debate is still debated over its exact nature, it may have been an earthquake very similar to the one that shook the Minoan civilization around 1700 BC. It has also been suggested that a volcanic eruption at Fira is the culprit, although radiocarbon dating now appears to debunk this theory, whatever the source, it was sufficient. so as not to leave them in any palace in disarray my Sanae was quick to take advantage and soon the great palaces of Knossos confronted us and many of us were invaded by the mainland Greeks with this the money rolled The Minoan civilization came to an end and the Mycenaeans quickly took their place as one of the dominant trading nations in the eastern Mediterranean, from there they would expand into the Aegean establishing settlements in the Damas Siq and on the western coast of Anatolia, but this unbridled growth could only last for a time and from the 14th century in later appeared to have come into conflict with several cities in western Anatolia, the name of one in particular is still known today and was kept alive thanks to a legendary war it supposedly fought with the Bronze Age Greeks, the Hittites may have caught, he looked, while his opponents knew it. as ilium, but despite the name by which it is more commonly known today, Troy, unfortunately the story of the collapse of the Bronze Age is not yet that of the Trojan War;

Instead, at the time, Western Anatolia was busy rebelling against the region's emerging superpower founded somewhere between centuries. In the early 17th and 16th centuries BC, the Hittites were not the first people to rule in Anatolia, but they were by far the most successful. They emerged from the city of Hattusa under the first known king and had to be fools who were the first to spread throughout the peninsula, often spreading their influence. that is the tip of a sword in their wars, as if we had a simple objective, just as modern civilization depends on the two main resources of oil and gas, life free millennia ago also depended on two difficult to find metals, its function was simple. because together they could be used to break the

bronze

that the rulers of the time relied on to equip their armies.

The first of these copper was one that the Hittites had in abundance or received from the copper mines of their neighbors in southeastern Anatolia. The second Tim was It has been suggested that in the ancient world it is more difficult to find sources of this precious metal, from mines far to the east in modern Afghanistan or from ones further west in the Balkans of Europe. Securing access to this precious metal would require Hittite control over the main trade routes of Anatolia and Syria, and over the next century they set out to achieve just that: to the south they conquered lands around Silesia and gained access to the Mediterranean; in the east, they drove to Aleppo, winning a series of victories over how to sell their grandson Missoula. gained them access to the lucrative Euphrates trade to the West, things went in their favor there as well, the Hittites encountered resistance from a group known as the Bitter Countries centered in western Anatolia, today they are best remembered for the likely presence of Volusia or Troy. within their ranks, although he appears to be more frequently an ally than an enemy of the Hittites, either way, it does not matter whether Lucia and Izawa were conquered by the Hittites, although they would repel each other many times in the centuries to come in the late 16th century.

The Hittites would campaign to Mesopotamia, when the ancient city of Babylon was severely sacked and images of its main deities were taken and then, before long, these conquests were undone. Masoli was assassinated shortly after returning from Babylon and died at the hands of his own brother-in-law over the next century, the extent to which his rule would fluctuate over time extending as far as Syria and, as ours, before collapsing again in his Hartman around of central Anatolia after the conquest of Aleppo by the Egyptians in the mid-15th century. The Hittites saw fit to pay homage to Pharaoh Thutmose III shortly after his fortunes revived again under King Thalia, the first to see them expand eastwards defeating Aleppo and a new state.

Mitanni advanced westward again this time defeating a new confederacy. known as sewer and for the first time a nation known as kiawa is recorded to be active in western Anatolia, where they twice attacked Hittite vassals in our own. The identity of our kiawa remains controversial even today, but the most recent evidence points the finger across the Aegean. to the halls of Mycenae, but this success was all temporary with the death of two Talia, his kingdom collapsed with enemies invading it from both the north and the east. From the north, the people of the Cask Islands invaded the Hartman Hittites themselves burning KATUSA to the ground.

Despite these setbacks, the Hittite kingdom persisted until the 14th century BC. C., when a remarkable recovery began and it is to one king in particular to whom this recovery can be largely attributed. His name was Sapele Loomis. He came to the throne at the beginning of the 14th century BC. C., overthrowing. his brother in the process and from then on set about turning his kingdom into an empire, taking advantage of the turmoil in the south, he conquered a lapper and regained access to vital maritime trade, after which he captured the capital of Mitanni and encouraged the Egyptian vassals to rebel.

Throughout Syria, in the West, he was less successful, but he was still able to extend his great influence forever as far as Arzawa, where any of his immediate predecessors were such the pinnacle of his power that the widow of the Egyptian pharaoh such as Tooting Harmon wrote to him for Ask to send him one of his sons so he can marry her and rule Egypt. Julie sent a son, but the journey would result in his disappearance despite this setback due to his own death, so Pella Loomis had made his kingdom one of the most preeminent within the Mediterranean, if his immediate successors had been so lucky, many of them would be doomed to spend much of their early reigns putting down revolts in both the east and the west, even once these rebellions were put down, the Hittites still found powerful rivals surrounding their borders to come into conflict with them again in the north. the people of Casca, who once again sata2 lord still wounded the Hittites and their conflict with another nation to the south would cement their imperial status for a century.

That rival was really powerful for more than 15 years. For centuries Egypt had been one of the preeminent powers in the world at the time of the 15th century BC. His new kingdom was flourishing under the leadership of the 18th dynasty, his ships plied the seas of the eastern Mediterranean where he traded with the Minoans in search of clothing and weapons with the people to the Sinai in search of copper and turquoise and even to our country and further afield. south in the Land of Punt after the collapse of the Minoan civilization, the Mycenaean trade took its place, which the Egyptians referred to as Nadja's for the rest of the century, the new kingdom would expand conquering Nubia, Canaan and Syria with the Pharaoh Thutmose the third crossing the Euphrates to campaign against Mitanni, but in the 14th century BC.

C. its power would be weakened by the ATS in effect when the pharaoh of the time and men had previously sought to change the state religion to a more monotheistic direction by renaming himself Akhenaten, introduced a system of worship centered around the solar disk or Aten, this deity was presented as the true ruler of Egypt with the pharaoh as his temporal equivalent on earth. Akhenaten probably made the change to To burnish his own power and weaken that of the priestly classes of Egypt, the result he achieved was rebellions in both Nubia and Syria. The Hittites were quick to take advantage of his death.

The Mattson cult was abandoned by his son and Carmen's successor. witha new city he built on the east bank of the Nile, Tutankhamun did not long with the boy pharaoh's own demise, the 18th Dynasty slowly came to an end with a series of short-lived successes that paved the way for the 19th Dynasty. Under this new leadership, the Egyptians would soon revive their status as the Mediterranean hegemon under SETI. The first to take control of Aegis' vast mineral wealth, including copper and tin in the Sinai and gold in Nubia, slowly, SETI forces returned to Canaan and Syria, fighting the Hittites' city of Kadesh, where he and his son Ramses entered triumphantly, but the occupation did not last, the Hittites regrouped.

Maysoon recaptured the city and much of northern Syria, an uneasy peace descended thereafter, the Hittites maintaining control of the city while SETI returned. to Egypt to deal with the rebellion in Nubia, but the tensions between the two sides could not remain suppressed forever in the fourth year of the reign of SETI's successor, Ramses II, they finally boiled over and the result was one of the best battles documented In the ancient world, the Battle of Kadesh, the battle took place outside the city gates. Here the Hittite cows supposedly leaked a false position to their opponents and threw them into an ambush.

Our main source for the events of the battle itself comes from Egyptian inscriptions which stated that over fifty thousand men were deployed between the two forces along with over 5,000 chariots, the largest number ever deployed in a single battle. Its exact outcome was uncertain. Egyptian inscriptions report a victory for their side, but their claims were mocked in a letter addressed to Ramses himself by the later Hittite king. Patterson is ultimately postponed. Neither side appears to have suffered a clear defeat. They withdrew but the Egyptians failed to take the city. The two sides would fight for advantage for most of the next two decades until a war of succession between the Hittites forced them to come to an agreement.

The Treaty of Solva was finally signed in the 21st year of Ramses' reign and may have even been sealed with a form. of the royal marriage peace with Egypt came at a fortuitous time for the eastern Hittites, a new power was emerging among the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, perhaps existing as early as the 25th century BC. C. Assyria had been the seat of its own Empire at the end of the 3rd century. millennium BC C. and for more than a thousand years it had remained a strong regional power, all this would change with the rise of Mitanni in the 16th and 15th centuries BC.

C., after which Assyrian power began a slow decline in the mid-15th century BC. C. Asser itself was sacked. and the nation was reduced to Mitaina and Basel, this situation continued until the mid-14th century, when unrest among a pro-Assyrian faction within the royal court of Mitanni allowed the old king to rid himself of his influence once and for all. to his son Asher, who shot him. He was even able to annex and hold Ian's territory by taking advantage of the weakness of his former overlords. After dinner, the Loomis and Hittites crushed their power west of the Euphrates, around the same time Asher sent a letter to Akhenaten in Egypt announcing himself and his kingdom as equals of Mitanni and ushering in the middle Assyrian Kingdom. , ambitions were assured and their successors would lead them to a status far beyond that of Mitani.

Over the next century, they slowly expanded their borders at the expense of Mitanni to the west and Babylon to the west. towards the east in the 14th century BC. C., Ash's son and successor, Enlil Murari, would name himself Shiro Rabi or Great King in his letters to the Hittite ruler. His great-grandson, Shower Mesa, would go further by defeating a combined force of Matane ian's Hittites and his allies. In the middle of the 13th century BC. C., under his predecessors, Assyria had already expanded to the limits of Hittite rule, but now Mesha seized his high-ruled territories in the West, incorporating what remained of Mitanni into his kingdom.

He didn't finish, he took care of the enemies of him. a new coup by taking control of the copper mines of the sewer of him, on which the Hittites depended so much to produce the precious

bronze

of him. Ike's troubles were far from over for the rest of the century. Assyria continued to pressure them to expand their lands westward toward Syria, the Hittites. responded as best they could to arrange a marriage alliance with Amuro on the coast of Syria with the general goal of totally restricting Assyria's access to the Mediterranean trade under King, as the fourth would also invade Cyprus, known for its rich supplies. of copper, but their efforts failed. 1237 BC C., the Assyrians defeated them again in the attack of Nerías, further weakening their great influence within the region, now led by the superficial Mises Sun to court Nareta, the Assyrians turned their gaze eastward and finally placed their king himself on the throne of Babel after this attack.

He assumed the ancient title of the Akkadian Empire naming himself king of both Sumeria and Akkad, eventually going even further assuming a title made famous by the Persian kings over half a millennium later, King of Kings and finally around the end of the 13th century. BC we stand on the edge of a precipice in the space of the next half century almost all the powers we have recorded here would fall into ruins for much of human history the reasons behind this collapse would remain unclear towards the end of the 19th century A theory was presented based on a series of reliefs found in the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramses of the 20th dynasty.

The third here intricate scenes describe a battle that took place in the early 12th century BC. C. between Ramses' forces and a mysterious sailor. Confederacy, if we take the inscriptions at face value, the Kneeling Sea Peoples were responsible for the destruction of Mycenae of Izawa and the Hittite Empire of Cyprus and the city-states that stretched across Syria and the canyons, It took very little time, as they appeared on the world stage only two decades earlier, in 11 77 BC. C. they appeared on the eastern coasts of Egypt in the inscriptions at Medinet Habu. They are depicted as a diverse group who wear different forms of dress and speak many languages.

We also learn from here. their names the cherdon and the shekel Esch the set of Pella and the Denon the Tajik oh and the desire it seemed that they had the intention of settling in Egypt because with them they brought their families in strong ox carts they would confront the Egyptians twice, first on land and then. In the waters of the Nile, according to the inscriptions, their invasion was a failure as Ramses defeated them in the Battle of the Delta. Thousands of intruders were killed or captured and Ramses was forced to settle his prisoners in camps along the Nile.

Fret was eventually defeated thanks to the power of the Egyptian pharaoh. The few survivors of the Sea Peoples fed eastward, settled among the rubble of Syria and the canal, and became the ancestors of the biblical Philistines. Were these invaders really responsible for the collapse of the Bronze Age? For much of the 20th century, the Sea Peoples theory was accepted as the driving force behind much of the devastation seen across the eastern Mediterranean at this time, but in recent decades scholars have become more skeptical of this theory and, in fact, raises many problems when considering it. the archaeological evidence we now have at our disposal to demonstrate this let us look at how the collapse affected each nation in turn we begin again with Mycenaean Greece here it is universally accepted that the sights of Mycenae, the Tyrians, Midea and Pylos were all violently destroyed somewhere between the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 12th century BC.

C., other sites such as Argo Lead or Carinthia seem to have been completely abandoned. Many of these sites also show signs of massive fortification in the decades before their final destruction, suggesting that perhaps they knew there was trouble. On the horizon, the most tantalizing evidence comes from the pilots, where a linear tablet b indicates that in the final years of the palaces their rulers placed Watchers in the sea shortly after this pylos was burned with the setting hot enough to melt both walls of his powers. and the gold of their fine ornaments at face value, these destructions fit well with the fury of the sea people, but in many places the source of this violence is now disputed in some cases, as in the Tyrians, the destruction was more more likely the fault of an earthquake than the fault of Violent Invasion: my Sanae shows ample evidence of a cataclysmic fire, but there is no evidence that the site is deeply populated nor are there any telltale signs of arrowheads on weaponry when I expect to see an army conquistador leaving behind places like pylos.

I leave open the possibility of sea plunderers, but there are still other culprits to consider: the Greeks of the classical era would place the blame squarely on another group, the Dorians, who supposedly migrated to Greece from lands further north. The tradition of their migrations was well established in the world of the 5th century BC. C. with individual city-states that identified with Doric or Ionian ethnicities, but compared to modern evidence, the history of these migrations rings false. In the following centuries new settlements appear throughout Greece. Ceramic styles, although rougher, still retain many of the shapes. The Mycenaean era and the disappearance of linear b writing can be explained by the destruction of the power centers from which the scribes worked. would have functioned, in fact the great Doric centers of Sparta and Corinth show no obvious signs of being inhabited until long after the collapse;

Instead, the presence of these new linguistic groups could be better explained by the elimination of existing power elites that would have allowed regional dialects to emerge. To come to the fore, on the whole, it seems unlikely that the Sea Peoples were behind the unrest in Greece, so what about the rest? Let us turn our attention to Anatolia, where the Hittites were fighting to retain their empire. Here again we see many destroyed cities. Around the beginning of the 12th century BC. In western Anatolia there are clear signs of destruction at Troy with a layer of destruction dating to approximately 1180 BC.

C. KATUSA was burned around 1200 BC. C., after which it was abandoned along with many other central Anatolian sites. With its destruction, the Hit Sir empire came to an end never to rise again, but if the sea peoples were behind its disappearance, if we rule out Troy, there is no evidence of widespread destruction in western Anatolia, whose coast the sea peoples sea ​​they could have sailed their way. On the route to Syria and Egypt, most of the cities here simply appear to have been abandoned with little or no signs of violence and if we stop to consider the destruction in central Anatolia, the picture becomes even less clear, firstly, If the Sea Peoples were truly sea people by Nature, then what were they doing here high in the mountains and valleys of central Anatolia and how would they have had the siege capabilities to overcome the fortifications of Tusa?

For many archaeologists, the answer is simple: they didn't point the suspicious finger. Elsewhere, to the many enemies that their actions had slowly accumulated over the previous centuries, the main candidates were the people of Casca, who remember sata2 lord only a hundred years before, but how did the Hittites find themselves so vulnerable to the collapse that had been the Heartland? invaded many times in the previous centuries, but this time their kingdom simply seems to have collapsed into oblivion, to explain this we must return again to the theory of the sea peoples and their activities in the southern reaches of the Empire, this is because that around 1225 B.C.

A wave of destruction spread across the Hittite territories in Cyprus and Syria. Cypriot settlements in places like Come Keith Yan and Cinder were raided and destroyed in quick succession, while in northern Syria we see the destruction of cities like Kadesh Alaka and an ogre emerging from the ruins. From the latter a tablet written just before the final destruction of the city has been unearthed. Its text is fragmentary but what is readable contains a chilling plea from the ogre ruler. He is calling for a beaten King Ike whose help never came. My father. Behold, the ships of the enemy came, my cities were burned and they did evil things in my country, does not my father know that all my troops and chariots are in the land of Hati and all my ships are in our land of Lucca, for what the country is left to itself? my father knows, the seven enemy ships that came here inflicted a lot of damage on us shortly after, the city was destroyed here, so it seemed like we finally had some evidence of the sea people's activities, but while the Seabourn Raiders certainly seemed linked to someOf the destructions seen in Syria, the sea peoples are not the only candidates, in fact the Egret tablet never mentions them by name and the only other mention attributed to them comes from the EEMA site in the interior of Syria, destroyed approximately at the same time the ruger it tablets were found.

There written in Akkadian they refer to various hordes but again do not refer to the sea peoples by name. There are also difficulties in squaring geography and dates and many of these interruptions with an established narrative in the inscriptions in Egypt. Radiocarbon dating now places the destruction of many of these sites around 1190 BC. So if the Sea Peoples were behind the destructions in Syria and why it took them another decade to reach Egypt, the destructions in Cyprus also pose problems for the Sea Peoples' fear. I heard that the destructions were not followed by an imposition of any new culture, we see instead the slow emergence of a new synthesis of Cypriot, Asian and Levantine social identities, which was to prosper in the following century, whatever the source of these. destructions were catastrophic for the Hittites. of Cypress also meant the loss of its precious copper reserves and destructions in Syria and southern Anatolia may have cut off its access to Mediterranean trade in the northwest Nozawa also falls eerily silent perhaps robbing the Hittites have access to its vital tin roots these developments came at the worst possible time, as it is clear from Hittite correspondence that central Anatolia was also suffering from a devastating famine and that grain had to be imported from vassals in northern Syria and even from places as far away as As far away as Egypt, with these lifelines cut off, the Hittites were simply torn apart by a combination of war and famine, so here it seems we may very well have found a kernel of truth behind the idea of ​​the Sea Peoples, if we keep our interpretation, the peoples of the wide sea are not the activity of displaced Marauders from other parts of the Mediterranean could well have done so.

If the vital ties holding the Hittite empire together were severed, one might think that these events would also have been a gift to Hittite rivals in Egypt and Assyria, who would have been free to seize former Hittite vassals in Anatolia and Syria, but at that time both were too busy with their own set of problems that were substantial enough to prevent their advance towards the ancient Hittite world in the foreseeable future to the east. Assyria appears to have avoided the worst of the collapse seen throughout the Mediterranean and what destruction has been found is unlikely to be related to the sea peoples;

Instead, this violence appears to stem from Syrian conflicts with this state of alarm in the western reaches of modern Iran coupled with the activities of a temporarily resurgent Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar the First of the Assyrians. They would eventually seize many of the ancient Hittite lambs in Syria, but by the mid-11th century BC. C. also appear to have gone into decline over the following century, much of their empire was slowly lost, but Assyria and its central territories remained a powerful power. actor in Mesopotamian politics, but at the end of the 10th century BC. C. its fortunes would change again and over the next 300 years it expanded to form the Neo-Assyrian empire, the largest state the world had yet known, so in the long term it seems that the collapse of the Bronze Age may have worked to favor of the Assyrians, but what about the Hittites and other rivals, the Egyptians, who around the same time were opposed to confronting the sea peoples in the Nile delta?

Surely victory there would have left them ample opportunity to advance into silent lands that had previously been battered. In fact, if we follow the inscriptions of Ramses III, the period after the Sea Peoples invasion appears to have been one of continuity and stability in Egypt during which expansion could have been a real possibility, but we now know that many of the monuments built by Ramesses III Thirdly, to mask larger problems in Egypt, it seems that as Egypt was facing a greater threat such as that posed by the sea peoples, the economic realities of dealing with these problems together with the Libyan tribes They were making frequent raids in the west of the country.

A famine that appears to have struck Egypt in the final years of her reign raised the price of grain and in the process weakened the centralized nature of the state. Widespread corruption also forced Ramses to reorganize the priesthood of Egypt and it was during this process that he made a fundamental decision that in the long term would spell doom for his dynasty. In the course of this restructuring he made a series of enormous land grants, particularly to the high priests of our moon in Phoebs, soon almost a third of Egypt's arable land was within their reach. and this rival economic center slowly contributed to the collapse of Ramses's authority, ultimately proving to be his undoing as his waning power led to a conspiracy against him from within his own harem.

The results of this pot can still be seen on the mummy of him today were a deep knife wound Mars the froat of him Ramses III was the last effective ruler of the 20th Dynasty after his death. Egypt's Syrian and Palestinian provinces were divided and Egypt itself would retreat further inland soon after losing access to the Nubian gold mines on which they depended. pay their armies and decorate their tombs slowly the country fragmented descending into the third intermediate period centralized government would not return for the best part of 400 years with the events of the collapse of the late bronze age having ended, beyond Among them was a Dark Age during which mass migration would change the shape of the Mediterranean.

The Philistines settled in the Levant where the Phoenicians would also emerge from the 12th century BC. in Syria and Anatolia several Neo-Hittite kingdoms would hold on while Lydia slowly expanded to cover most of Asia Minor, and from activities in Greece we know that relatively few writings would reappear there until the 8th century BC. C. and by then the events of the collapse had been largely edited by generations of oral accounts that transformed them into the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, so that who they really were We have seen abundant evidence of destruction and raids on the towns of the sea throughout the eastern Mediterranean, but can we say with certainty that they were behind them?

Unfortunately, we lack evidence to definitively link the appearance of the towns in the Medinet Habu reliefs with the destructions that lie there. behind the collapse of the Bronze Age and therefore with much of the rest of the Ramsey Rain, there may be good reason to doubt the veracity of the inscriptions themselves on their statues and monuments. Ramsey seems to go out of his way to compare himself to his illustrious predecessors. In particular, he seeks to imitate the golden age of the reigns of Ramses II and his son Merneptah and may well have embellished his own achievements to match the case of the Sea Peoples.

He was a prime candidate for this embellishment because we now know that There was in fact another earlier invasion by the Sea Peoples which the Egyptians again repulsed in a battle near the Nile Delta. This invasion which took place during the reign of Mineta occurred around 1207 BC. C., when Ramses himself would have been a child. Inman Eptas's narrative is detailed in the large Canuck inscription in his The Enemies Are Five, with the plane crash, the Luka and the Teresh taking their places alongside the Cherdon and the Shekel Ash, all of whom fought alongside a great force. of Libyan raiders.

By comparison, Ramsey's story only has the last two in common and their enemies are six. or seven nations, as mentioned above, one of them from the Pella set has since been identified with the biblical Philistines, but for the other four identifications there are far from certain associations between the denyen and the teresh with Homeric Greece and Troy , while the origins of the others, that jacker and the wes still remain uncertain, furthermore, in minetti's account only the pure lair, the ash shekel and the equi are named as Sea People, while the others are simply northerners who come from all lands.

Ramsay's account also names the shared n as of the sea, but not the shekel Esch with desire and teresh taking its place, complicating matters, the part seems to have been well known before the overseas peoples were named Seaborn Marauders. from the 14th century BC. C., Ramses II even remembers having repulsed one of their raids. himself in the Nile delta in the second year of his reign, after which many of them joined the Egyptian army. There are even credible accounts that nsharers were reported to have fought in the Battle of Kadesh. These inconsistencies between the various accounts do so.

It is somewhat reckless to label the Battle of the Delta as an outright fraud; However, it is plausible that the conflict was of a smaller scale than Ramses himself claims, particularly since the other problems of his reign would be more than enough to explain Egypt's decline, but problems elsewhere in the Mediterranean were have been less easily explained, we must ask ourselves if the Sea Peoples were not in the cataclysmic force behind the collapse of the Bronze Age, then many theories have come and gone over the decades and recently many archaeologists have gravitated towards theories of drought and climate change, as mentioned above, a major drought was certainly ravaging Anatolia and the timing of the destruction of the Hittites and pollen analysis from Cyprus now appear to indicate that conditions there were much drier than normal at the time of collapse.

Analysis of sediments at sites throughout the Mediterranean also seemed to confirm the idea of ​​a general drought in the late 13th century BC. C., which in turn could explain the appearance of new groups of raiders and refugees. Drought could also explain the apparent abandonment of settlements across Western Anatolia or isolated violence in the cities, to put it simply. huzzah Atkin an in Meissen a in Greece here scholars have theorized that the destructions may have been the result of peasant rebellions as in both places the areas of power associated with grain storage seemed to have received the brunt of the damage.

Climate change certainly seems like a compelling factor, but there are sites where other elements appear to have been at work, some showing clear signs of widespread destruction, while others have clear evidence of arrowheads and weaponry within their layers of destruction. In the case of the former, many archaeologists have now proposed that earthquakes were the cause of In fact, much of the devastation are examples of misaligned walls and collapsed masonry that can be found throughout the Mediterranean, with visible damage in cities such as mice in a tear in the media Pylos Troy to Sir Luger it Megiddo and many others in fact.

It now appears that the Bronze Age collapse period was correlated with an unusually large amount of seismic activity within the Mediterranean and the rate of earthquakes only decreased beyond the 12th century BC. These earthquakes would have inflicted serious damage on Bronze Age cities and palaces. Bronze Age world, but this destruction does not appear to extend far enough to explain the collapse itself. In most of the cities listed, the damage was quickly repaired and only a few, such as Terrans in Greece and Tel Hazor in Cannon, appear to have been abandoned immediately. Thereafter, certainly, damage might have made sites more vulnerable to invasion, but in most cases the final destructions occur years or decades later, long after the worst of the damage had been repaired, as we conclude our journey through the events of the Late Bronze Age collapse.

It seems that there are multiple factors behind its events: earthquakes, invasions, climate change and the collapse of trade routes. From the evidence we have, it appears that none of them is solely responsible and that increasingly the events of the collapse can only be explained by a combination of. However, any conjecture about an exact timeline remains speculative. but it is not unreasonable to say that the true story of the collapse may have looked a little like this. In the late 13th century BC, an extended wave of drought sweeps across the Bronze Age Mediterranean, leading to crop failures and famine, which in turn led to local uprisings, damage caused by earthquakes only They accelerated this upheaval and this, in turn, made the cities more attractive targets for migrating raiding gangs.

Some of these towns wellThey may have united, as the Sea Peoples did, after which they would have traveled to Southwood in search of new lands to settle in the wake of its destruction, many sites were abandoned completely and were later repopulated by peoples carrying new languages ​​and cultures. This unrest, together with the increase in piracy throughout the Mediterranean, would have collapsed the commercial networks in which the kingdoms were located. depended on the era one by one, the major powers fell and much of the civilized world disappeared into a Dark Age. Some international trade would have continued, but less and less came under the control of the formerly centralized states over the following centuries. decadences and new kingdoms are founded in mythical circumstances throughout Greece and Anatolia, over time a new world would emerge, one of the Fenians and Spartans of the Assyrians and Babylonians and in the distant future why the powerful Persian empire of Cyrus the Great arose and with They arose a new metal that would soon take the place of bronze as the arbiter of the empires that the Iron Age had begun.