The Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC is one of the great unsolved problems in ancient history. Within the space of a few decades, the Mycenaean palace economy, the Hittite empire, Ugarit, Alashiya (Cyprus), and several other Eastern Mediterranean polities collapsed simultaneously or in rapid succession. Egypt barely survived.

The traditional explanation — the 'Sea Peoples' invasion documented in Egyptian reliefs at Medinet Habu — is clearly insufficient. The Sea Peoples are a consequence of the collapse as much as a cause: they appear to be refugees and migrants from the very polities that were collapsing.

More recent work points to a convergence of causes. Brandon Drake's climate reconstruction shows a prolonged drought episode across the Eastern Mediterranean beginning around 1200 BC. Eric Cline's 1177 BC argues for a 'perfect storm' of interacting causes: climate stress, drought, famine, internal rebellion, disruption of palace-dependent trade networks, and migration — all feeding back into each other.

The systems collapse model is compelling. Palace economies required continuous long-distance exchange of copper from Cyprus, tin from Afghanistan, luxury goods from Egypt and the Levant. When multiple nodes failed simultaneously, the cascading effects overwhelmed the entire network.