Late Bronze Age collapse

c. 1,177 BCETurning pointContested

Across the eastern Mediterranean, palaces burn and trade collapses. Drought, earthquakes and the "Sea Peoples" all play a role.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → First fired clay figures → First pottery → Copper smelting → Bronze Age begins → Minoan palaces on Crete → Mycenaean Greece → Late Bronze Age collapse

Contested history

Consensus: Around 1177 BCE, many eastern Mediterranean civilizations collapsed within decades.

A 'perfect storm' of drought, earthquakes, migration and trade breakdownEstablished

Most historians now see multiple interacting causes.

The Sea Peoples caused the collapseDebated by scholars

Egyptian records describe raiders, but they may have been a symptom as much as a cause.

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Bronze Age collapse (World History Encyclopedia) ↗