It is not intrinsically bad, of course, when state power erodes or disappears. The failure of parasitic elites to maintain their control over subject peoples was, in the long run, a net gain for many people. They no longer had to pay part of their harvest as taxes to bureaucrats and priests. They no longer had to labor for part of the year building the king’s palace or fighting in the king’s army. They were probably better fed and rested, healthier and more prosperous, and *freer* than they had been before. We should not even lament the loss of writing when it reflects an end to the centralized administration of society—people abandon writing when writing doesn’t serve their vernacular needs.

3/9

But that doesn’t mean collapse is a positive experience for everyone living through it, or that it is merely a process that only happens to elites. The Bronze Age Collapse was an incredibly violent, disruptive, and dislocating process for everyone who lived through it.

The Mycenaean palaces were all burned in intense fires. So too were the coastal cities of the Levant, which—unlike the Mycenaean places—were full of unburied corpses and bronze arrowheads. The Egyptians recorded multiple invasions by migrating communities, the infamous Sea Peoples, that severely weakened their kingdom and possibly destroyed several others.

And populations declined. In Greece, the population declined by at least 50% and possibly more like 60 or 70%. Some of these people simply left—the Philistines, who gave their name to Palestine, were probably the Peleset among the Sea Peoples who were resettled in the Levant by the Egyptians. But others simply died, or were unable or unwilling to have children because of declining local conditions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples

4/9

Lots of different theories have been offered for why this happened, but we lack a definitive answer. My best guess is that something like this happened:

Shortly before the collapse, the climate in the region grew sharply colder and drier. This probably put pressure on the region’s agriculture, the backbone of these states. Peasant farmers in Mycenaean Greece might have revolted first, burning the palaces and overthrowing the squabbling Mycenaean warrior-kings—hence the intense fires that ruined those palaces without signs of warfare.

Some of those Mycenaeans, familiar with seafaring and warfare and without state structures to command them, turned to piracy against the other, wealthy states of the region, with which they were already familiar. These groups, like the Peleset, were joined by other peoples in the region fleeing drought and famine, like the Shereden (maybe from Sardinia) and Shekelesh (maybe from Sicily) to form what we now call the Sea Peoples. Many of these people were already familiar with the Bronze Age World—some had served as mercenaries for their kings—and headed for where they knew there was plunder.

These raiders, conquerors, and settlers attacked and destroyed the coastal cities of the Levant, collapsing states like the Kingdom of Ugarit and weakening states like Egypt that were already suffering from their own climate change-induced famines. Trade dropped off as customers disappeared and routes became unsafe, which further undermined these states—without tin imported from thousands of miles away, rulers struggled to make bronze armor and weapons, which in turn weakened them against their adversaries, which diminished demand and further reduced trade, in a vicious negative feedback loop.

5/9

In short, there was probably no single cause. Climate change was almost certainly a driver, but not a sufficient cause by itself. Lower crop yields drove famines, but we must remember that famine is a consequence of political choices about access to food. So we must also look to parasitic elites who probably responded to lower yields by squeezing their peasants even harder, in order to maintain their power and living standards.

Hence the likelihood of revolts and mass migrations, undermining local states and pressuring distant ones. And all of these states relied on constant material inputs via delicate networks of long-distance trade. When those networks were disrupted, elites struggled to continue fueling the complex administrative apparatuses of scribes, tax collectors, financiers, and factory managers that kept these complex social machines running.

Archeologist Eric Cline argues for precisely this systems theory approach: these states were so intensely and delicately intertwined that they were able to mobilize enormous amounts of resources to achieve their goals, but that strength was also an immense vulnerability. Once that system was stressed a little by the climate and one piece of the system broke, the whole thing unraveled in very short order—probably no more than 50 years and possibly more like 20 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1177_B.C.:_The_Year_Civilization_Collapsed

6/9

@Edelruth

Thank you!