More than three thousand years ago, the eastern Mediterranean was a connected world. Egypt was ruled by mighty pharaohs. The Hittites controlled an empire in what is now Turkey. In Greece, Mycenaean kings ruled from palaces with storerooms full of oil and wine. On the coast of Syria, the city of Ugarit was a bustling trading port.

These kingdoms wrote letters to each other, exchanged gifts and traded goods across the sea. They arranged royal marriages and signed peace treaties.

Then, within a few decades around 1200 BC, much of this world fell apart.

The fall

The Hittite capital, Hattusa, was abandoned and burned, and the empire disappeared. In Greece, the great Mycenaean palaces — Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns — were destroyed or abandoned. Ugarit was burned and never rebuilt. Cities in Cyprus, Syria and Canaan were destroyed.

Egypt survived, but it was weakened and lost its territories in the Levant. The international trade network that had linked these societies collapsed.

The Sea Peoples

Egyptian records describe invaders called the Sea Peoples, a confederation of groups who arrived by land and sea. On the walls of his temple at Medinet Habu, Pharaoh Ramesses III recorded his victory over them in a great battle, around 1177 BC. The inscriptions describe how they had already overrun other lands: "No land could stand before their arms."

Who were the Sea Peoples? Nobody knows for sure. They may have come from the Aegean, Anatolia, Sicily, Sardinia or elsewhere. Some may have been refugees fleeing disaster rather than invaders. One group, called the Peleset, are often identified with the Philistines, who later settled on the coast of Canaan.

Why did it happen?

For a long time, historians blamed the Sea Peoples. But today, most think the invasions were a symptom of a larger crisis, not its only cause. Several factors may have combined.

The archaeologist Eric Cline argues that the collapse was a "perfect storm": many problems hitting interconnected societies at once, so that the failure of one helped bring down the others.

A connected world

The Uluburun shipwreck, discovered off the coast of Turkey in 1982, shows how connected the Late Bronze Age world was. The ship, which sank in the late 14th century BC, carried about ten tonnes of copper from Cyprus, a tonne of tin from far away, glass ingots, ebony, ivory, jewellery and goods from at least seven different cultures.

The dark age

After the collapse, Greece entered a period historians call the Greek Dark Ages. The Mycenaean writing system, Linear B, was forgotten. Population dropped, and large buildings and long-distance trade became rare.

Writing returned to Greece centuries later, around the 8th century BC, with the Greek alphabet, adapted from the Phoenician script. Out of the ruins came new societies: the Greek city-states, the Phoenician trading cities and, eventually, the world of Homer, who sang about the heroes of a lost age.