However, as we have seen, soon after 1200 BC, the Bronze Age civilizations did collapse in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, and Near East, and they exhibit all of the classic features outlined by Renfrew, from disappearance of the traditional elite class and a collapse of central administrations and centralized economies to settlement shifts,

In terms of assigning a date to these events, one can in fact argue that 1177 BC is to the end of the Late Bronze Age as AD 476 is to the end of Rome and the western Roman Empire. That is to say, both are dates to which modern scholars can conveniently point as the end of a major era, though they are simply chronological placeholders. In fact,

In writing about the situation at the end of the Late Bronze Age in his book Scales of Fate, Monroe describes the interactions of the various powers in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean as an “inter-societal network,” which agrees with the picture presented here. He points out, as I have, that this period is “exceptional in the treaties, laws,

In 1987, Mario Liverani, of the University of Rome, laid the blame for the Collapse upon the concentration of power and control in the palaces, so that when they collapsed, the extent of the disaster was magnified. As he wrote, “the particular concentration in the Palace of all the elements of organization, transformation, exchange, etc.—a

However, the second invasion by the Sea Peoples, ending in their cataclysmic fight against the Egyptians under Ramses III during the eighth year of his reign, in 1177 BC, is a reasonable benchmark that can be taken as representative of the entire Collapse and allows us to put a finite date on a rather elusive pivotal moment and the end of an age.

“black swan” events—defined as “unexpected and low-probability events with massive repercussions.”13 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the best-selling author who popularized the term, points to the Harry Potter books, the spread of the internet, and calamities such as WW I as examples of events that were nearly impossible to predict but have had huge

Two decades later, Christopher Monroe cited Liverani’s work and suggested that the economy of the Late Bronze Age became unstable because of its increasing dependency on bronze and other prestige goods. Specifically, he saw “capitalist enterprise”—in which he included long-distance trade, and which dominated the palatial system present in the Late

Renfrew noted the general features of systems collapse, itemizing them as follows: (1) the collapse of the central administrative organization; (2) the disappearance of the traditional elite class; (3) a collapse of the centralized economy; and (4) a settlement shift and population decline. It might also take as much as a century for all aspects of

Such a series of earthquakes in antiquity is now known as an “earthquake storm,” in which a seismic fault keeps “unzipping” by unleashing a series of earthquakes over years or decades until all the pressure along the fault line has been released.8