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According to Ramses’s inscriptions, no country was able to oppose this invading mass of humanity. Resistance was futile. The great powers of the day—the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the Cypriots, and others—fell one by one. Some of the survivors fled the carnage; others huddled in the ruins of their once-proud cities;
for an additional, private letter at Ugarit, usually thought to be one of the last communications from this period, describes an alarming situation: “When your messenger arrived, the army was humiliated and the city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floors was burnt and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it! May you know it!”
In terms of assigning a date to these events, one can in fact argue that 1177 BC is to the end of the Late Bronze Age as AD 476 is to the end of Rome and the western Roman Empire. That is to say, both are dates to which modern scholars can conveniently point as the end of a major era, though they are simply chronological placeholders.
“Collapse is fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.”
And yet, scholarly publications still continue to suggest a linear progression for the Late Bronze Age Collapse, despite the fact that it is not accurate to simply state that a drought caused famine, which eventually caused the Sea Peoples to start moving and creating havoc, which caused the Collapse.
