Advanced search

Sometime around the year 1100 BC, a wave of destruction washed over the Eastern Mediterranean. It wiped whole civilizations off the map, and left only ash and ruin in its wake. This catastrophe, known as "The Late Bronze Age Collapse", has become one of the enduring puzzles of archaeology. Historian Paul M.M. Cooper explores how and why so many societies could collapse all at once, seemingly without warning, as well as examine the lessons it might teach us in our increasingly globalized and interconnected world.

At about 1200 B.C. the major empires in the Middle East collapsed and were invaded by the Sea Peoples. How powerful empires could succumb to invasion from the sea by a primitive group of unknown people has mystified historians but a consensus is beginning to form.

The Canaanite descended from the Sea Peoples, notably the Palset people, infamous for their role in the Bronze Age collapse merging with the indigenous Canaanites on the southeast coast of the Mediteranean sea.