Collections: The Late Bronze Age Collapse, A Very Brief Introduction

This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system across the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East during the 12th century (that is, the 1100s) BC. In the broader Mediterranean world, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is the event that probably comes closest to a true ‘end of civilization’ event – meaningfully more severe than the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West (although as we’ll see LBAC is also not as ‘total’ of a collapse as was sometimes supposed). This is going to be, by our standards here, something of a brief overview, roughly the equivalent to the lecture I give to my students when we cover this period (with a bit more detail, because text is more compressed). A full ‘deep dive’ of all of the debates and open questions of this period would no doubt run quite a few posts and more importantly really ought to be written by specialists in the bronze age. This is also a very archaeologically driven topic, which makes it more sensitive than most to new evidence – archaeological site work, but also epigraphic evidence (mostly on clay tablets) – that can change our understanding of events. As we’ll see, our understanding has changed a fair bit. So what we’ll do is run through what we know about what happened in the collapse (which is the most visible part of it) and then we’ll loop back to the question of causes (which remain substantially uncertain) and then finally look at the long-term impacts of the collapse, which are considerable. But first, as always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon; members at the Patres et Matres Conscripti level get to vote on the topics for post-series like this one! If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

The (Partial?) Collapse We need to be clear, to begin with, that while we have scattered fragments of epigraphic evidence (that is, inscriptions), almost all of our evidence for the Late Bronze Age Collapse is archaeological. Without archaeology, we would remain largely in the dark about this event. But archaeological evidence also brings with it challenges: it can tell you what is happening (sometimes) but often not why and dating with precision can be challenging. Most of what we’re tracking in understanding LBAC is site destruction, identified by the demolition of key buildings or ‘destruction layers’ (often a thin layer of ash or rubble indicating the site was burned or demolished), but dating these precisely can be difficult and there are always challenges of interpretation. With that said, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is a sequence of site destructions visible archaeologically from c. 1220 BC to c. 1170 BC, which are associated with the collapse or severe decline of the major states of the region (the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East). We generally conceptualize these destrictions as a ‘wave’ moving in sequence beginning in the Aegean, moving over Anatolia, sweeping down the Levant and arriving in Egypt but in many cases my sense is the chronology is more complex than that. Many sites in the path of this ‘wave’ were not destroyed, with some declining slowly and others declining not much at all; other sites (I have in mind Tiryns) see the destruction of their political center but the decline of the urban settlement around it happens slowly or later. First, we ought to set the stage of the Late Bronze Age. What really marks out the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC to c. 1200 BC) from earlier periods is that the emerging state systems in Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia and Egypt had expanded to the point of coming quite fully into contact with each other, with a significant degree of diplomatic, economic and cultural interconnectedness, to the point that we sometimes refer to the ‘Late Bronze Age Concert of Powers’ (evoking 19th century European balance of power politics) when talking informally about them. Via Wikimedia Commons map (in Spanish, there wasn’t an English version, but it will do) of the rough political situation in the 1200s BCE.

The Hittite Empire (labeled as the ‘Hatti,’ another name it went by, after another major ethnic group within it) in Anatolia, the Assyrian (Asiria) Empire in N. Mesopotamia, Kassite Babylon (Babilonia) in S. Mesopotamia and (New Kingdom) Egypt. Now I should caution, we often provide these nice neat maps of the Late Bronze Age powers (and they’re useful to a degree) but the borders of these states were quite fuzzy – their outer ‘possessions’ were often tributaries under the rule of local kings which might be weakly attached to the imperial center. Nevertheless, going from East to West: southern Mesopotamia was dominated by the ‘Middle Babylonian’ Empire, ruled by the Kassite dynasty (the Kassites being an ethnic group who had taken power around 1530 BC) while northern Mesopotamia was dominated by the Middle Assyrian Empire (from about c. 1350 BC). Anatolia and the Northern Levant was controlled by the multi-ethnic Hittite Empire, which seems to have sparred regularly with the New Kingdom of Egypt which controlled Egypt and the southern Levant. Basically all of these powers had less settled, often pastoral peoples in their hinterlands which presented on-going security challenges for them. These larger imperial states were more economically complex as well. In particular, their large armies required significant amount of bronze which – because its core ingredients of tin and copper effectively never occur in the same place – demanded substantial long-distance trade, though trade was hardly only in copper and tin, but also included other high value goods and even (where feasible) bulk staples. So while these powers clashed regularly, at the elite level (if not at the level of the subsistence economy) they were also reliant on each other to some degree. Finally, at the edge of this state system is the Mediterranean and especially the Aegean. In the Aegean – in Greece and Crete especially – we see effectively miniature versions of these state structures, complete with (by Near Eastern Standards) itty-bitty palaces (the Minoan urban centers on Crete had come under Mycenean (=Greek) rule in c. 1450, the palaces there largely abandoned). Cyprus shifted between being nominally subordinate to either the Hitties of the Egyptians but seems to have mostly run its own affairs and was integrated through trade into the state system.

This is a slide I use when teaching the Late Bronze Age (particularly in Greece), contrasting the entire settlement and palace complexes (essentially the entire urban core) at Knossos (the largest Minoan palace) and Tiryns (one of the larger Mycenean palaces) to scale with Karnak, the main temple complex outside of Thebes, Egypt, to make the point that you could fit the entire urban core of major Greek and Minoan bronze age settlements inside individual monumental structures in their Near Eastern equivalents. As noted above, LBAC starts perhaps as early as 1220 or so, and what we see in very rough sequence is as follows. As far as I know, we still generally think the earliest rumblings are instability in the Mycenean Greek palace states. Things had been unstable in this area for a few decades and we have some scattered destructions (Thebes) and intensified fortifications around 1250, suggesting things were not going great in Greece. Then from c. 1200 to c. 1180 we see the destruction or collapse of basically all of the palace centers in Greece. In some cases the urban core continues for a while, in other cases it doesn’t – in a number of cases, once the site is abandoned, it is not reinhabited (e.g. Mycenae itself, the largest of the palace centers). Via Wikipedia, a map of major Mycenaean palace centers and proposed palace states. As we’ll see below, the impact in Greece is greater than basically anywhere else because the collapse of the LBAC is more severe in Greece than basically anywhere else. Meanwhite, the Hittite Empire was itself not in good shape when this started. As far as we know, the Hittites were very much on the ‘back foot’ in the late 1200s, pressured by the Assyrians and Egypt and so potentially already short on resources when their neighbors to the West began imploding. As far as I know, precise dates are hard to nail down for this, but the Hittite Empire in the early 1100s comes apart under pressure and by 1170 or so it is gone.

That collapse of imperial power is matched by a significant number of site destructions across Anatolia, including the Hittite capital at Hattusas and the large settlement at modern Hisarlik, now fairly securely identified as ancient Troy. Some (like Troy) were rebuilt, others (like Hattusas) were not, but centralized Hittite power was gone and there’s a marked reduction in urbanization and probably population. Moving into the Northern Levant, Syria and Northern Mesopotamia, we see Assyrian power – which had been advancing before, you’ll recall – contract sharply alongside more site destructions, though again chronology is tricky. One of the key sites here is Ugarit, a major Bronze Age Levantine coastal city which was destroyed c. 1190 – before the last of the Mycenean palaces (but after the first of them). The city’s destruction in fire preserved clay tablets with diplomatic messages from the local king of Ugarit (a Hittite vassal) frantically writing to his Hittite superiors for reinforcements in the face of significant (but frustratingly unnamed) threats prior to the destruction of the city. That said, destruction in the Fertile Crescent is very uneven. The Middle Assyrian Empire contracts, but does not collapse, while the Kassite Dynasty in Babylon clearly suffers some decline, but largely stabilizes by the 1160s before being run over by the Elamites in the 1150s. Site destrictions in the Levant are uneven and some key Bronze Age centers like Sidon and Byblos were not destroyed and remained major centers into the Iron Age.1 My understanding is that while there was significant decline in the southern Levant, it is hard to pin any specific large-scale site destruction to the 1220-1170 period. Finally we reach Egypt in a period we refer to as the ‘New Kingdom’ (1570-1069); we can trace politics more clearly here due to surviving Egyptian inscriptions. Egypt was also in a weakened position going into this crisis, facing pressure from Libyan raiders coming overland from the West and also some internal instability.