In the early 12th century BCE, the civilizations of Egypt, Greece, the Levant, and Mesopotamia experienced some sort of major catastrophe. For a long time, historians pointed at the invasion of marauders known as the Sea Peoples, but this explanation has proved insufficient. To the archaeologist Eric Cline, as Julia Fridman writes, the real culprit was a confluence of unrelated factors (free registration required):
Recent high-resolution pollen analysis of a core taken from the Sea of Galilee . . . has irrefutably shown that the years between 1250 and 1100 BCE were the driest seen throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. This corroborates with the information from clay tablets found in Afek in Israel, Hattusa in Turkey, Emar in Mesopotamia, and Ugarit in Syria that record a terrible drought and the resulting difficulties attributed to it.
“There is evidence in the archaeological record of . . . climate change, drought (resulting in famine), earthquakes, invasions, and internal rebellions at this time. Normally if a culture is faced with just one of these tragedies, it can survive it, but what if they all happened at once, or in quick succession?” asks Cline. “It seems that this is what happened between about 1225 BCE and 1175 BCE, and I think that the Late Bronze Age civilizations were simply unable to weather the ‘perfect storm’ and came crashing down.”
[The Sea People] were also victims . . . looking for a better home where they could survive. They were more of a symptom than the cause of the collapse, says Cline.
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