By the end of the thirteenth century BC the eastern Mediterranean was a single, tightly bound world. The Hittite realm in Anatolia, the merchant city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast, the Mycenaean palaces of Greece, the Egypt of the New Kingdom — all of them rested on one model: the palace economy. The life of society was reduced to a centralized accounting kept in the archives of scribes; military might, to the costly elite force of the war chariot. This was the summit of the Bronze Age and, at the same time, its idol: the complex, interdependent system of palaces, storehouses, and chariot armies itself, set in the place of the order of things. The more perfect the interconnection grew, the more imperceptibly its fragility increased.
Between roughly 1200 and 1150 BC this world caved in — not at a single point, but as a whole, as a system. Within a few decades the Hittite Empire fell, Ugarit burned (in its last tablets are desperate letters about enemy ships on the horizon), the Mycenaean palaces collapsed. Historians once laid all the blame on the mysterious "Sea Peoples" — a maritime coalition that swept over the coasts and against Egypt. Today they are seen as a symptom rather than a cause: behind the collapse lay a knot of calamities — years of drought and famine, earthquakes, the severing of trade ties, uprisings. The interconnectedness that had brought wealth turned into a chain reaction of destruction.
Then came the long captivity of the "dark ages." In Greece writing itself was lost — Linear B, which had served the palace accounting, vanished together with the palaces, and for centuries the land fell mute, having forgotten how to write. Splendid centers gave way to scattered villages, the population grew poor and dwindled, and the memory of the past passed into myth.
Yet it was precisely out of this impoverishment that the return grew — not a restoration of the Bronze Age world, but a new Iron Age. Upon the ruins rose the Phoenicians with their light alphabet — a writing no longer of a scribal caste, but of merchants and every literate person; from this alphabet the Greek one would later grow. The polis was born — a city of free citizens in place of the palace-storehouse; Israel too was taking shape. Complexity that had become fragility collapsed all at once — and in this fall of the Bronze Age one reads a warning to later empires, whose greatness too would one day prove to be their weakness.