1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
Eric H. Cline · 2014
"The Late Bronze Age's interconnected civilizations — Egypt, the Hittites, Mycenaean Greece, and others — collapsed within a few decades not from any single cause but from a cluster of simultaneous shocks (drought, earthquakes, invasion, trade collapse) hitting a system too interdependent to absorb them all at once."
Around 1177 B.C., a wave of destruction swept through the Eastern Mediterranean's major civilizations almost simultaneously. Cline's argument: it wasn't one cause, like the mysterious 'Sea Peoples' invaders long blamed — it was a systemic collapse under compounding stress.
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