The Bronze Age Collapse: A Thread

About 4,000 years ago, something new began to emerge on the world stage: a complex system of interconnected states in the Eastern Mediterranean, Southwest Asia, and neighboring regions.

This was the Bronze Age World of the Mycenaeans, the Hittites, the Minoans, the Babylonians and Egyptians and Assyrians. When you read about King Tut in Egypt, or Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War, or the Labyrinth of the Minotaur at Knossos, this is the era you’re reading about.

Sophisticated, literate states dominated a large part of the world. They traded extensively with each other. They exchanged ambassadors and engaged in international diplomacy. Like French in the early modern period, they used Akkadian as a diplomatic and cultural lingua franca. They built monumental architecture and recorded extensive bureaucratic records and literature. They administered economies from centralized palace institutions. They imported tin from as far away as what is now Afghanistan and were in contact with the distant Indus Valley Civilization.

About 3,200 years ago, this world collapsed.

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

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