Late Bronze Age collapse

In our current view, as we shall see below, the Sea Peoples may well have been responsible for some of the destruction that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but it is much more likely that a concatenation of events, both human and natural—including climate change leading to drought and famine, seismic disasters known as earthquake storms

Few events had a bigger impact on the evolution of the ancient world than the end of the Bronze Age. It was then that the great kingdoms and city-states of prehistory fell. They left behind stirring monuments like the Pyramids and dimly remembered tales such as the ones that were eventually reshaped into the Trojan War saga.

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, note

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. I