Over roughly two generations around 1200 BCE the interconnected palace civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean — Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite empire, Ugarit and others — broke down in a wave of destruction, abandonment and depopulation. Major cities were burned or deserted, long-distance trade networks unravelled and writing systems such as Linear B fell out of use. Proposed causes combine drought, earthquakes, internal revolt, system fragility and raiders recorded by Egypt as the 'Sea Peoples'. The collapse was followed by several centuries of reduced settlement often called a dark age.
It is one of history's clearest cases of synchronous urban collapse across a trading system, showing how dense, interdependent settlement networks can fail together when supporting structures break down.
See it on the timeline →