The Late Bronze Age collapse (approximately 1200–1150 BC) is one of the most dramatic episodes in ancient history: within a period of roughly 50 years, the major palace civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean — Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire, Ugarit and other Syrian coastal cities, Egyptian New Kingdom strength — all collapsed or were severely weakened.

The phenomenon was genuinely system-wide: the same period that saw the destruction of Mycenaean palaces and the disappearance of Linear B writing also saw the destruction of the Hittite capital Hattusa, the burning of Ugarit (which left administrative tablets being written in the kiln at the moment of destruction — one of archaeology's most poignant accidental archives), and the weakening of Egypt under the pressure of the 'Sea Peoples' invasions.

The Sea Peoples — recorded in Egyptian inscriptions at Medinet Habu by Ramesses III — are one of the great puzzles of ancient history. Egyptian sources describe them as invaders by land and sea from 'the islands,' which have been variously identified as the Aegean, Anatolia, and the western Mediterranean. Some scholars have identified the Philistines (who settled the Palestinian coast) as one Sea Peoples group, the Etruscans as another.

Modern scholarship increasingly views the collapse as multicausal: a combination of climate drought (paleoclimate evidence confirms a prolonged drought in the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC), disruption of the long-distance trade networks on which the palatial economies depended, internal political stress, and possibly epidemic disease all contributed. The system-wide collapse suggests that the interconnected Bronze Age trading system had created interdependencies that became catastrophic failure modes when one component failed.