The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

Traditionally, the explanation behind “the fall of the Bronze Age” says that sometime between about 1250 and 1100 BCE, something horrifying happened to the areas in the ancient world that were anywhere close to the Mediterranean Sea. Some sort of phenomenon or event or series of events affected states and peoples from the central Mediterranean all the way east into modern-day Iraq. Hundreds of cities were destroyed or abandoned. Famine, war, disease, political upheaval, volcanoes, earthquakes, piracy, human migration, and climate changes such as drought are mentioned in the sources and found in the data. Somehow and at some point, the complex, interconnected system of trade and communication supporting the very centralized states in this era was disrupted. By about 1100 BCE, many of the formerly centralized societies had reverted (or fragmented into) more localized, smaller political entities, while wealth (such as evidenced by grave goods included in burials) declined in opulence.