about 1500 BC until the collapse of multiple civilizations after 1200 BC—the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mitannians, Canaanites, Cypriots, and Egyptians all interacted, creating a cosmopolitan and globalized system of a type only rarely seen before the current day. This very internationalism may have contributed to the apocalyptic disaster that ended the Bronze Age.
