Collapse

Within the span of a single human lifetime, at the end of the thirteenth century BCE, the entire brilliant, connected world of the last chapter came apart. It is one of the most complete societal collapses in the human record, and one of the most instructive we possess, and it is the reason this short chapter carries far more weight than its length.

The scale of the unraveling is hard to overstate. City after city across the eastern Mediterranean was burned and abandoned within a few decades, and many were never reoccupied at all. The Hittite empire, one of the great powers of the age, simply vanished from history: its capital Hattusa was torched, its royal line extinguished, its very existence so thoroughly forgotten that until modern archaeology dug it up, the Hittites survived only as a puzzling name in the Hebrew Bible. The Mycenaean palaces of Greece went up in flames, and their society was so completely undone that the Greeks forgot how to write, losing their Linear B script entirely and sinking into a genuine dark age of some four centuries, remembering their own lost Bronze Age only as a dim and golden legend of heroes that would eventually surface, transformed, in the poems of Homer. The great and wealthy trading port of Ugarit on the Syrian coast was destroyed so suddenly that a clay letter begging a neighboring king for help against enemy ships was found still sitting, unbaked and undelivered, in the oven where it had been left when the end came. Trade routes snapped. Populations crashed. Literacy, art, and monumental building collapsed across whole regions. An interconnected civilization that had stood in splendor for centuries came down, almost everywhere at once, in a couple of catastrophic decades.

What caused it? For a long time the blame fell on a single shadowy enemy recorded in panicked Egyptian inscriptions, the so-called Sea Peoples, a coalition of displaced raiders who came out of the sea and the north to burn the coasts, and whom the pharaoh Ramesses the Third claimed to have narrowly defeated in a desperate battle that saved Egypt but left it permanently exhausted and diminished. But the Sea Peoples now look far less like the cause of the collapse than like one more of its symptoms, themselves refugees fleeing some larger unraveling further on, a wave pushed ahead of the true storm. The honest modern answer is that there was no single cause at all. There was a convergence, a perfect storm of several stresses striking a fragile system at nearly the same moment: a long and brutal drought now clearly recorded in the climate data, a cluster of severe earthquakes along a vulnerable fault zone, the fatal severing of the long and delicate trade in tin, internal social unrest and rebellion, and, yes, waves of migration and seaborne raiding. No single one of these blows would have been fatal to so mature and sophisticated a world. But they did not come one at a time. They came together, and they fed on one another, and the tightly coupled machine of the Bronze World transmitted each failure to all the rest until the whole thing cascaded into ruin. The historian who fixed the collapse in the popular mind under the single date 1177 BCE argued precisely this: that the system's greatest strength, its dense interconnection, was also the exact mechanism of its death, because in a fully networked world a local failure does not stay local.

We must stop here and say clearly why this ancient catastrophe sits at the structural center of this book, because it is not only ancient history. This is the first clear, well-documented, human-scale instance of a pattern we have been tracing since the deep past and will confront directly at the very end. We saw its distant geological shadow in the mass extinctions, when tightly interlocked ecosystems collapsed all together rather than species by species. We saw its outline in the abrupt climate lurches at the close of the Ice Age. Now we see it in full and in human form, in a civilization we can read about in its own letters: complex, interconnected systems do not wind down gently and in proportion to their troubles. They absorb stress invisibly, holding firm, appearing robust and permanent and safe, right up until they cross some hidden threshold no one had marked, and then they fail suddenly, catastrophically, and far faster than anyone living inside them believes possible. The people of the Bronze World did not see it coming. Their world felt sophisticated and eternal right up to the year it burned. That is not a detail. That is precisely how such collapses feel from the inside, every single time, and it is the most important thing the deep past has to say to us, because we now live in the most tightly interconnected civilization that has ever existed on this planet, and we will be forced, before this book is finished, to ask whether we have understood anything at all that the Hittites did not.

And yet collapse, in this book, is never simply the end, and it is worth holding onto that as firmly as the warning. Egypt survived, battered and permanently reduced but intact. And in the very disruption of the old order lay the seed of the new: the severing of the tin trade, which had strangled the making of bronze, drove desperate people to master a new and far more abundant metal, iron, which needed no rare imported alloy and could be dug from ordinary ground almost everywhere. So out of the wreckage of the Bronze World rose the Iron Age, harder and more widespread and, in a grim way, more democratic in its violence, since iron weapons could now be had by many rather than hoarded by a palace elite. The simple alphabet, easier by far than the old scribal scripts, spread among the surviving traders and would soon put reading and writing within reach of ordinary people for the first time. And in the long, quiet centuries of recovery, freed somewhat from the crushing weight of the palace and the god-king who had not, in the end, been able to save anyone, people would begin to think in strikingly new ways about justice, about the divine, and about how a human being ought to live. The collapse cleared the ground, exactly as the asteroid had cleared it for the mammals, exactly as every reset in this whole story has cleared it for what came next.

For out of this rubble, across the first millennium BCE, something genuinely unprecedented was about to happen, and it was about to happen all across the connected world at almost the same time. Humanity was on the verge of changing its mind about nearly everything. The long age of the god-kings was ending. The age of the philosophers, the prophets, and the great questions asked in an entirely new key was about to begin.