It now seems that such a disastrous drought may have affected northern Italy in the Bronze Age. There are indications that the Terramare culture, which had flourished in the Po delta/plain in northern Italy since the seventeenth century BC, suddenly collapsed around 1200 BC. Kristian Kristiansen, a highly regarded scholar of Bronze Age Europe,

we do know what they look like—we can view their names and faces carved on the walls of Ramses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. This ancient site is rich in both pictures and stately rows of hieroglyphic text. The invaders’ armor, weapons, clothing, boats, and oxcarts loaded with possessions are all clearly visible in the representations, so

the migration of the Sea Peoples was not a single event but a long process involving several phases,

“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

this was only the beginning of what would become a “Golden Age” of internationalism and globalization during the following fourteenth century BC.

However, both Gibbon and Diamond were considering how a single empire or a single civilization came to an end—the Romans, the Maya, the Mongols, and so forth. Here, we are considering a globalized system in antiquity, with multiple civilizations all interacting and at least partially dependent upon each other.

it was probably not the Sea Peoples alone who were to blame. It now seems likely that they were as much the victims as they were the aggressors in the collapse of civilizations.27 One hypothesis suggests that they were forced out of their homes by a series of unfortunate events and migrated eastward where they encountered kingdoms and empires

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.

We are no longer certain that all of the sites with evidence of destruction were razed by the Sea Peoples. We can tell from the archaeological evidence that a site was destroyed, but not always by what or by whom. Moreover, the sites were not all destroyed simultaneously, or even necessarily within the same decade. As we shall see, their cumulative