Then who was king? Who was not the king? -Sumerian King List on the time of the drought about 2200 BC.

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Much of the (over)emphasis on the impact of various migratory groups (today clumped together under the somewhat inaccurate label "Sea Peoples") is due to an unfortunate tendency to take Egyptian historical inscriptions at face value. Egyptian inscriptions were written to express the Egyptian worldview, not to record "what actually happened," and one should always exercise caution when using them as historical sources. For example, an inscription on the second pylon at Medinet Habu lists the city of Carchemish in Syria as destroyed by invaders, along with other Syrian cities such as Arwad. We know from textual and archaeological evidence from Carchemish, however, that Carchemish not only survived the end of the Bronze Age more or less intact but thrived after the collapse of the Hittite Empire, with an unbroken royal line descended from the Hittite Great Kings of the Late Bronze Age (as Millek notes above). Similarly, the Canaanite (or, as they would be called by the Greeks, Phoenician) city-states of the northern Levantine coast like Byblos and Sidon seem to have survived the end of the Late Bronze Age mostly unscathed.

The Egyptians were no doubt perfectly well aware of this, but they were not concerned with creating a faithful list of conquests and ensuring an accurate list of destroyed cities for future historians. The impact of the list was what mattered. A king who had (allegedly) defeated a confederation of enemies so powerful that they had destroyed the majority of the ancient Near East was a very mighty king indeed.

To cite another example of the often questionable veracity of Egyptian historical accounts, the Libyan battle reliefs from Taharqa's temple at Kawa in Sudan are direct copies of Old Kingdom battles scenes like those from the mortuary temple of Sahure at Abusir, created nearly 1800 years earlier. Even the names of the three defeated Libyans were recycled. This doesn't mean that Taharqa was trying to bamboozle people into thinking he had defeated Libyan forces when he hadn't; rather, the reliefs are simply a timeless expression of the king's role as protector of Egypt and his obligation to bring forth order from chaos.

As for the Sea Peoples, they were essentially dispossessed victims of the disturbances at the end of the Late Bronze Age (including but not limited to a devastating pandemic and prolonged drought) who migrated to other regions in search of greener pastures, both literally and figuratively. Some engaged in piracy (particularly in the vicinity of Cyprus and southern Anatolia), while others established new settlement sites in southern Anatolia and along the Levantine coast, becoming indistinguishable from the local populations fairly quickly (within the span of 1-2 generations).

Several of these groups originated in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Greece, the Aegean islands, and western Anatolia, while others seem to have originated in south-central Europe (including but not limited to Sicily).

Some of the groups are attested more than 200 years before the end of the Bronze Age, often allied with the major powers like the Egyptians and Hittites. In the Battle of Kadesh (ca. 1280 BCE) fought between the Egyptians and Hittites, for instance, the Sherden fought on behalf of the Egyptians, and the Lukka fought on behalf of the Hittites. They were also often hired as mercenaries by the smaller city-states in the Levant. For example, in two letters to the king of Egypt (EA 122 and 123) dating to around 1340 BCE, the vassal king of Byblos complained that the Egyptian governor of nearby Kumidi killed a Sherden within his town.

I've written a bit more about this in a few past posts.

• What do we know about the so-called Sea People's origins?

• Tell me about the Philistines vs others in the Levant 1200 to 800 BCE

• Karatepe and Çineköy inscriptions: Luwian and Phoenician and Sea Peoples

First and foremost thank you for your reply, it is far more informative than I had expected to receive asking this question, that said I may have further questions later reading over this again, as there is a lot of information to digest here.

The research that has been conducted and neglected over time, is there a reasonable basis for why it isn't used, or does it simply not fit the more exciting narrative as some of the points you brought up later?

When you speak of the collapse and how it was not a uniform effect across the entire Mediterranean region, do you mean there is no correlation and it was individual events suffered in these regions that appear to us in the modern day more like a chain reaction since they happened so closely relatively from our perspective? Basically there is minimal relation between what occurred in these seperate regions, one factor being the time periods they occurred in?

According to the information you have given, the disappearance of many settlements would be due more to local issues conflicts, rather than an external force (excluding things like the changing climate) and as such outside intervention would not serve as a catalyst to the diminishing civilizations of the Mediterranean which would answer my question generally that there was no event in Central Europe that contributed to the collapse(s) of the Bronze age civilizations?

One question that pops to mind is, the Egyptians took phenomenal records did they not? IF that is truly the case and I'm not wrong about their record keeping what exactly do their records say? Do they only refer to attacks on Egypt from the "sea people" or do they have extensive writings on the condition of other civilizations at the time?

Thank you again for your information, it is appreciated! I am glad to have found so much helpful input on reddit for this question. That should be all my questions based on the information you gave, if I have more I will let you know!

I don't have a good map with dates for each city, but I do have dates on some notable cities from my notes! I'm in a class on the Ancient Mediterranean.

In general we can tell if a city was attacked or not through archaeological evidence. Cities like Troy (VIIa)*, Gibala, and Ugarit were considered razed because a lot of arrowheads were found embedded in walls & buildings, skeletons show signs of non-crushing violent injury and there is evidence of widespread fires.

In contrast cities like Troy (VI)* and Tiryns were likely destroyed by earthquakes because skeletons show signs almost exclusively of crushing injuries, buildings are destroyed but without any evidence for weapons or (significant) fire, and the specific destruction pattern for the buildings. ((Invaders don't shake blocks out of all of the buildings in a city))

*Troy VI and Troy VIIa are both in the same location, but they're different archaeological layers. i.e. Troy VI was destroyed by an earthquake, but the people rebuilt after the destruction.

This is one of my favorite periods in history and I too question what was going on in the surrounding areas beyond the Mediterranean, especially up in Europe. We know that there was trade coming from Europe such as tin and amber, and the amber was coming from pretty far north so at least some people up in Europe knew about these Mediterranean cultures!

This is a bit of a joke answer, but -The Trojan War.

They were mostly sourced from Cyprus and Syria If I recall correctly?

What a great answer! Thanks for taking the time to write all that out

He’s also an engaging and knowledgeable speaker

https://youtu.be/hyry8mgXiTk

Very in-depth! Thank you!

I think the Dorian invasion is earlier than the Bronze Age collapse. By 500 years or so? It could be there are other arrows on this map that are earlier or later.

I think there is no simple explanation to the events surrounding the Bronze Age collapse; and perhaps that's why it's so tantalizing to speculate about.

Thanks for this link! I just watched about 10 of their videos in a row.

To be honest I don't have a preference either way for whether Central Europe had any influence over the rest of the world at the time, I was really just asking because I noticed trends of people moving from west to east coinciding with evidence through archaeological finds in Central Europe that there has just been a major change in their cultural beliefs of some sort. That by itself is hardly anything to go on, this post is me asking for more information on it since to me that seems to be a weird coincidence in history that there would be a major change in a culture of a region, and subsequent migration of population from that general area with there being no correlation, I'm just curious that's all, no conspiracy theories here

I'm in a class on Ancient Mediterranean history right now and the main issue with the Dorian invasion hypothesis is that there is no archaeological evidence for Dorians specifically.

If Dorians invaded they'd presumably bring Dorian weapons and tools, but we haven't found any dating to that period.

That's part of the mystery that I love. Some places were clearly razed by an army, others seem to have been destroyed by earthquakes, some had the elite section of the city destroyed but the rest relatively untouched, iirc one place had a single temple preserved. Sure seems like a hellish time to live in that area!

If you listen to podcasts, recommend listening to the tides of history, they literally just ended the most recent season talking about the Bronze Age and its collapse a month ago.

Also listen to tides of history podcast, the host literally just wrapped up the most recent season this past month with the Bronze Age collapse. He said he used that book as a reference.

I recommend this gem: https://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed-Turning/dp/0691168385

Where do you think the term "Norman" comes from? Basically a bunch of vikings led by Rollo came down and raided France until France gave them lands and titles. They were literally "northmen".

The only hard evidence we have of the sea peoples is from Egyptian sources. It depicts a barbarian sea faring group. It’s extremely unlikely (read: impossible) that they were from any kind of land locked area. There’s also no evidence that Northern Europe or Central Europe had developed sailing to the level of sophistication needed.

Most historians see the sea peoples as a coalition of raiders strongly backed by Greeks and Mediterranean people.

Sounds very interesting. Do you know where i can find the book?

I'll be honest. This post is written more like a revisionist question. As in, it sounds like you want there to have been more to central Europe during this time, and the mystery and lack of information about it, is the "evidence" or "feeling" you have of them having ties to the mysterious sea peoples.

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There has been an enormous amount of scholarship published on the Bronze-Iron Age transition over the last couple of decades. Unfortunately, most of this research is not reflected in popular history works on the topic.

To begin, one should keep in mind that societies in the Bronze Age were in constant flux; many kingdoms rose and fell over the centuries, and the end of the Late Bronze Age was not an unprecedented event. For example, much of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world experienced a considerable amount of disruption at the end of the Early Bronze Age. Egypt fragmented into petty kingdoms at the end of the Old Kingdom, the Akkadian empire collapsed, there was a large-scale abandonment of walled cities in the southern Levant, and many sites in Greece like the House of the Tiles at Lerna were destroyed or abandoned for several centuries. It has long been thought that this was due primarily if not entirely to climate change and drought, as noted in "Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?"

>The drought hit in roughly 2200 BC, when the Akkadian Empire dominated what is now Syria and Iraq. By 2150 BC, the empire was no more. The central authority had disintegrated, and many people had voted with their feet, leaving the region.

>The overlap between an epic drought and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire was no mere coincidence, according to Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. When he and his colleagues discovered the evidence of drought in the early 1990s, they proposed that the abrupt climate disruption had brought the ancient empire down. This example has become a grim warning of how vulnerable complex societies can be to climate change.

>For Weiss, it was the start of a research endeavour spanning decades. He has become convinced that the drought of 2200 BC was not confined to Mesopotamia, but rather that it had effects around the globe. What’s more, the Akkadian Empire was not the only complex society that was disrupted or overthrown as a result. “We’ve got Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Aegean and the Mediterranean all the way to Spain,” says Weiss. In all these places, he says, there is evidence from around 4,200 years (kyr) ago for a drying climate, for the collapse of central authorities, and for people moving to escape the newly arid zones...

To get back to the end of the Late Bronze Age, this was not a singular collapse – "the" collapse, as OP put it – that affected all regions to the same degree. Rather, the end of the Late Bronze Age affected different regions in different ways over slightly different periods of time.

Some cities and kingdoms were destroyed and never regained their prominence (e.g. Ugarit and Emar), some simply moved locations (e.g. Enkomi to Salamis, Alalakh to Tell Tayinat), and others were scarcely affected by the end of the Bronze Age at all (e.g. Carchemish, Byblos, Paphos). It has become increasingly clear that we must look not at the overall picture but rather specific places at specific times to understand how each of the great powers (and especially each of the regions within them) collapsed, survived, or thrived from 1150-950 BCE.

To take the Hittite empire as an example, some of the southern parts of the empire like Tarḫuntašša and Malatya (Išuwa in the Bronze Age) essentially split off and became de facto independent states toward the end of the Bronze Age. These kingdoms preserved aspects of Hittite culture until the Neo-Assyrian conquests of the 8th/7th centuries BCE – religious beliefs and practices, Luwian and the Anatolian hieroglyphic writing system, architectural and artistic styles, administrative titles, Hittite royal names like Šuppiluliuma and Ḫattušili, etc.

The collapse of the Hittite heartland in central Anatolia was due partly to the loss of these outlying regions (the Hittite imperial core was always short on manpower and grain), but also from pressures unique to the Hittite empire, such as raids from the Kaška who lived in northern Anatolia. I discussed this more in How did the civilizations fall in the end of the Bronze Age? and When and how did we learn that the bronze age had really collapsed and was a thing and not just an imaginary folk idea like Atlantis?

The situation in Syria is similar; some sites disappeared forever at the end of the Bronze Age, whereas others survived or even flourished during the Bronze-Iron Age transition. To quote the ASOR article "What Actually Happened in Syria at the end of the Late Bronze Age?" by Jesse Michael Millek,

>The year, approximately 1200 BCE. The place, the geographic area of modern-day Syria. War has broken out as marauding pirates and nomads ravage the great cites of Ugarit, Emar, and Carchemish, looting and burning everything in their way. These groups became known in the Egyptian records as the infamous Sea Peoples.

>Famine plagued the region as climate change slowly deteriorated the ability to grow crops, and the final nail in the coffin were earthquakes, which destroyed anything left untouched by the ruinous hordes. Once all these calamities passed, the Late Bronze Age came to its end, and the region entered a Dark Age for the next 200 years.

>Or at least that’s how the Hollywood blockbuster version of events would go. But reality is far more complicated than modern scriptwriters - and many archaeologists - would lead us to believe.

>What about the supposed “wave of destruction?” The Sea Peoples are alleged to have destroyed many sites in Syria including Ugarit, Tell Sukas, Tell Tweini, Carchemish, Kadesh, Qatna, Hama, Alalakh, and Emar. The trouble is that only two of these were actually destroyed around 1200 BCE.

>Both Qatna and Hama were destroyed in the mid-14th century BCE, well before the end of the Late Bronze Age, and neither show any evidence of destruction around 1200 BCE. For Alalakh, a reanalysis showed that the supposed 1200 BCE destruction by the Sea Peoples occurred a century earlier, around 1300 BCE.

>Excavators also presumed that the Sea Peoples had destroyed Tell Sukas and Tell Tweini. But a closer examination of the archeological record reveals that neither site was actually destroyed. At Tell Sukas, the Late Bronze Age buildings show no signs of burning or collapse; only some patches of floor had been burned, hardly evidence of a tremendous destruction event. At Tell Tweini, what had been assumed to be evidence of a massive destruction event turned out to be debris from rebuilding activity that took place hundreds of years after 1200 BCE.

>The same pattern is found elsewhere, sites are listed as destroyed but no evidence of destruction has been uncovered. At Tell Nebi Mend, ancient Kadesh, excavations demonstrated that the site continued to be inhabited from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age without interruption. The same is true for Carchemish. There was a smooth transition from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age. This is despite the fact that Carchemish is listed as destroyed in the Egyptian records chronicling the march of the Sea Peoples...

Calvin Coolidge by Amity Shales A Man of Iron : the Turbulant Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland by Troy Senik Polk ; the Man who Transformed the Presidency and Country by Walter Borneman

Just to be clear, all you are going to find are hypotheses. As many have said here, no one knows quite for sure.

In broad strokes, it was systems collapse based on trade of rare resources. The Mediterranean economy at the time was based primarily on copper and tin, which made Bronze (thus the name of the age). Tin, however, is rare, so it's a weak point in the system. Disrupt tin and the whole system breaks down.

But how exactly did this get disrupted? Was it ecological? changing climate? Raiders from outside the area? Most say it was all of that and more. Someone cites that they do see evidence of a string of volcanic eruptions during this time period, which could have led to drastic and sudden environmental change and this could have changed things such that food was scarce and people turned to invasion and war to find resources and feed themselves. But this is a string of hypotheses tied together with no evidence other than a couple of tablets referencing sea peoples.

What's great about this period however it's a bonafide actual mystery puzzle that tantalizes the imagination with something real, and not those BS "ancient aliens" documentaries on the history channel. You have to be ready to accept that you are not going to find definitive answers but it will fascinate you.

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