The Late Bronze Age was a tightly interlocked world of contemporaneous kingdoms — the Hittites, Egypt, Mycenaean Greece, Ugarit, Assyria — bound together by tin and copper trade and by diplomatic correspondence between rulers. Around 1200 BCE this system fell apart. Hattusa burned around 1180; the Mycenaean palaces (Pylos, Tiryns, Mycenae) were destroyed one after another; the last tablets at Ugarit speak of "enemy ships" approaching. Linear B, Hittite hieroglyphs and Ugaritic cuneiform all dropped out of use within a century.

Egyptian sources describe Ramses III defeating a coalition called the "Sea Peoples" at his temple of Medinet Habu — Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Sherden and others. Whether the Sea Peoples were a **cause** of the collapse or one of its **symptoms** remains debated. Most historians now point not to a single cause but to overlapping crises: a sustained drought (documented in lake and pollen records), earthquake storms, epidemics, internal revolts and the fragility of long-distance trade. The system was so interdependent that snapping one link brought it all down.

In the void that followed, iron — which did not need long-range tin networks — spread widely, and a largely illiterate "dark age" lasted some three centuries. The Phoenicians, the Israelites and eventually the Greek city-states all rose out of this gap. The Bronze Age collapse may be the sharpest discontinuity in ancient history.