Post by @artemiscollective

The Sea Peoples Part 3 🏺 | Did the Sea Peoples cause the collapse of the Bronze Age? For most of the last century, the answer was yes. Except the evidence points to something much messier. Drought began decades before the main collapse. Earthquakes repeatedly struck major cities. Trade networks fractured. Food shortages spread. The Hittites were begging Egypt for grain. Ugarit was writing about famine in its final days. And the Sea Peoples never even reached some of the inland states that were also declining. So rather than a single invasion destroying the Bronze Age world, the picture looks more like a system failing from multiple directions at once: climate stress, famine, earthquakes, disrupted trade, migration, warfare, and political instability all feeding into one another. The Sea Peoples were part of the collapse. They probably were not the whole cause. And that may be the more interesting lesson, because highly interconnected systems can be incredibly powerful right up until the moment that interdependence becomes their greatest weakness. Sources:  Cline, Eric H. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Cline, Eric H. After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. Wiener, James Blake. "Interview: The Mysterious Bronze Age Collapse with Eric Cline." World History Encyclopedia, 2015. Kaniewski, David, Elise Van Campo, Joël Guiot, Sabine Le Burel, Thierry Otto, and Cecile Baeteman. "Environmental Roots of the Late Bronze Age Crisis." PLOS One 8, no. 8 (2013): e71004. Kaniewski, David, Elise Van Campo, Karel Van Lerberghe, Tom Boiy, Koenraad Vansteenhuyse, Greta Jans, Klaas Nys, Harvey Weiss, Christophe Morhange, Thierry Otto, and Joachim Bretschneider. "The Sea Peoples, from Cuneiform Tablets to Carbon Dating." PLOS One 6, no. 6 (2011): e20232. Langgut, Dafna, Israel Finkelstein, and Thomas Litt. "Climate and the Late Bronze Collapse: New Evidence from the Southern Levant." Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 40, no. 2 (2013): 149–175. Nur, Amos, and Dawn Burgess. Apocalypse: The Great Earthquake and the Coming of a New World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Drews, Robert. The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. "Did the Sea Peoples Cause the Bronze Age Collapse?" Greek Reporter, July 9, 2026. "What Caused the Bronze Age Collapse?" History.com, January 31, 2025. #ancienthistory #ancientgreece #theseapeoples #theodyssey #historytok