Around 1177 BC, the interconnected empires of the Mediterranean — Egypt, the Hittites, Mycenae, Ugarit — collapsed almost simultaneously, and writing itself went dark for centuries. Drought, earthquakes, mysterious seaborne raiders, and a globalized economy too fragile to survive: nobody has ever fully agreed on what killed the first international age.
Archaeologist Eric Cline's now-legendary lecture laying out how a web of thriving Late Bronze Age kingdoms unraveled together. The perfect entry point into the whole mystery.
The overview: how the Eastern Mediterranean's palace economies, trade networks, and writing systems vanished between roughly 1200 and 1150 BC, and the competing theories for why.
A vivid, illustrated tour of the connected world at its peak — bronze itself required tin and copper mined continents apart, binding rival kingdoms into one delicate system.
The shadowy raiders that Egyptian inscriptions blame for burning cities up and down the coast — and why modern historians think they were a symptom, not the disease.
Who were they? A confederation of unknown origin, named only by their victims, defeated by Ramesses III in 1177 BC — and still unidentified 3,000 years later.
A feature-length, atmospheric deep dive into the drought, famine, and cascading failure that toppled kingdom after kingdom in a chain reaction.
The aftermath: a centuries-long dark age where Greece forgot how to write and mighty cities became empty mounds. What survived, and what was lost forever.