The Bronze Age Collapse is the closest thing the ancient world has to a global catastrophe. Within about fifty years around 1200 BC, the palace kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean stopped writing, stopped trading and in many cases stopped existing. This is the whole account, from the burnt layer that excavators kept finding at site after site to the smaller, poorer, literate world that came after it.

It runs just under two hours, at an even pace, and it is meant to work as well for background listening as for watching.

Chapters

0:00 The Layer They All Found — the burnt layer excavators kept meeting, and what it does and does not prove
10:04 The World That Worked — palaces, scribes and long-distance trade in the Late Bronze Age
20:53 The Great Kings — Hatti, Egypt, Mitanni, Assyria and Babylon, and the letters between them
31:49 Bronze — copper from Alashiya, tin from further east, and the oxhide ingots
43:00 The First Cracks — grain moved by ship, Assyria's border on the Euphrates, and what the climate records can carry
55:37 The Last Letters of Ugarit — the final tablets from a city about to burn
1:06:44 The Sea Peoples — Medinet Habu, Ramesses III, and what the reliefs actually show
1:19:40 The Burning — Hattusa, Ugarit, Mycenae, and which destructions survive re-examination
1:33:53 What Came After — Carchemish keeping the old titles, new material on the Levantine coast, and the arrival of iron

Images

228 items appear on screen, including 19 maps drawn for this episode from Natural Earth data, which is in the public domain. 175 of them are public domain or CC0. The remaining 53 are Creative Commons Attribution, and every one of them is credited in full in the credit roll at the end.

There is no film in this episode. Everything on screen is a still photograph, a printed plate, a museum object, or a map made for this account.

The narration is synthetic speech. It is not a human reader.