1177 B.C.

“all civilizations eventually experience violent restructuring of material and ideological realities such as destruction or re-creation.”

I wanted to write about what collapsed as well as how and why it collapsed, because to me the Late Bronze Age is the most fascinating period in the history of the world.

Robert B. Zoellick, then the president of the World Bank, as saying that “the global financial system may have reached a ‘tipping point,’ ” which he defined as “the moment when a crisis cascades into a full-blown meltdown and becomes extremely difficult for governments to contain.”

We do not know whether the various entities (Hittites, Mycenaeans, Egyptians, etc.) knew they were in the midst of a collapse of their society. We do not know whether there were organized efforts to evaluate and remedy the overall evolving situation and look to the future.

“Proliferating global networks, both physical and virtual, inevitably incorporate more … risks into a more interdependent and ‘fragile’ system,” he wrote. “Any negative event along these lines can create a rolling, widening collapse—a true black swan—in the same way that the failure of a single transformer can collapse an electricity grid.”27 They

As Bell has noted, when a complex system does collapse, it “decomposes into smaller entities,” which is exactly what we see in the Iron Age that follows the end of these Bronze Age civilizations.

the manner in which previous societies have responded to stress depends upon three things: their complexity, their flexibility, and their systemic redundancy, “all of which together determine the resilience of the system.”

“Perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn about the ‘Dark Age’ … is that it was nothing of the sort. Gradually being illuminated by archaeological discovery and research, [this period] emerges rather as the catalyst of a new age—one that would build upon the ruins of Canaanite civilization and would bequeath to the modern Western world a c

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, pop