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[narrator] The Eastern Mediterranean some 3,000 years ago.
The ancient world is at its peak.
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Thriving cities dominate the landscape.
Culture and the arts are flourishing.
Trade in gold and luxury items is booming.
We can't even imagine how much trade, exchange of goods and ideas was going on.
It was really a very rich time.
[narrator] Then, suddenly, almost overnight,
this world collapses.
Cities crumble.
Languages die.
Blood and destruction ravage the landscape.
[Yoram] What happened at the end of the Bronze Age?
This is one of the greatest mysteries that continue to trouble us.
It's one of the most challenging events in the history of mankind.
Something catastrophic, something unimaginable.
It looks like history switched off the lights.
[narrator] Now some of the world's top archaeologists
and historians are working together
to figure out what happened.
[Aren] The analytic toolbox that we have in archaeology nowadays has
revolutionized our understanding of the past.
[narrator] And they're uncovering a shocking truth.
We could be facing a similar fate today.
[Eric] The collapse of the Bronze Age
and the immediate aftermath
is far more relevant to today than many people might think.
[narrator] Over 3,000 years ago,
in the late Bronze Age,
life in the Eastern Mediterranean was flourishing.
After years of war, the world was largely at peace.
And like today, was dominated by a few superpowers.
In the north, a people known as the Hittites
had established a mighty empire
that controlled most of what's now Turkiye and northern Syria.
To the west, in mainland Greece,
the Mycenaean civilization, home to Agamemnon,
was thriving and had also spread into Crete.
And in the south, under the rule of Ramses the Great,
Egypt's empire stretched from Sudan up to modern Israel and beyond.
Ships crisscrossed the Mediterranean,
linking these wealthy nations with an extensive network of trade routes.
[Eric] So, what we have in the late Bronze Age
is a thriving internationalized network.
They are interconnected,
they are globalized,
they are dependent on each other for goods.
[narrator] But within a period of little more than 50 years,
this entire world came crashing down.
Almost every significant city or palace was burnt and destroyed.
The vibrant trade links that connected this world ceased to exist.
So complete was the collapse that even the art of writing
which had linked these centers of civilization,
was also largely forgotten.
One by one, each civilization was wiped off the map.
Only Egypt survived,
but its empire collapsed and it was a dim reflection of its former glory.
The world had entered its first recorded Dark Age.
No one knows what happened.
Eric Cline is a professor of ancient history
at the George Washington University
and he spent years sifting through the rubble,
trying to piece together how an entire Age could collapse so quickly.
At the end of the late Bronze Age, about 1200 BC,
something unimaginable happened.
[narrator] He thinks the place to start unravelling the mystery is in Greece.
[Eric] This is Mycenae.
It's my favorite site in the entire world,
and it was one of the most important sites in the ancient Bronze Age.
This is where Homer says that Agamemnon and his men took off for Troy
to try and rescue Helen after she had been kidnapped.
Soon after they got back though, this was a smoking ruin.
And it's been ruined until today.
[narrator] The mythical images of the Mycenaeans and the Trojan war
have been immortalized on countless Greek vases.
The Mycenaeans were clearly great warriors.
But they were also brilliant engineers.
Their architecture is characterized by massive stone structures
that the later ancient Greeks believed must have been built
by the one-eyed giants Cyclopes.
As only they would have the strength to move the blocks into place.
This was a society at the peak of its power.
There were grand palaces, temples and burial monuments like the tholos tombs,
the most famous being the so-called Tomb of Agamemnon.
And yet despite the massive walls
and their mighty warriors,
the city of Mycenae was soon abandoned.
Were the Mycenaeans invaded?
Round about 1250 BC, they were obviously afraid of being attacked by someone.
We don't know who.
But they built new defensive walls around the entire city,
including the famous Lion Gate.
They also built this water tunnel
so that they could get at their water source from inside the city.
In case of attack, they can still get their water.
We don't know who they're afraid of
we don't know what they're worried about,
but they're definitely worried about something.
And probably rightfully so,
because 50 years later, the city is destroyed.
[narrator] And it's not just here.
All the palace complexes of southern Greece,
including nearby Tiryns,
have layers of ash suggesting that however well-fortified,
they too were destroyed.
So, if these Mycenaean cities were overrun,
who might they have been attacked by?
Even though this all happened more than 3,000 years ago,
there are clues as to who the assailants could have been.
And they can be found far from Greece...
in Luxor, Egypt.
At Ramses III's mortuary temple,
there's an extraordinary series of reliefs and inscriptions
recording some tumultuous events that took place here.
Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology
at The American University in Cairo
has long been fascinated by these carvings.
They depict Ramses' conflicts with the mysterious Sea People,
a group of would-be invaders coming from the sea.
[Salima] This enormous wall
is covered with these depictions showing Ramses fighting against
these terrifying Sea Peoples.
And they're all these really detailed reliefs
as well as texts talking about these battles
and the great Egyptian triumph.
And he says, "No land could stand before their armies.
They desolated its people,
and its land was like that which had never come into being."
[narrator] The date of these inscriptions is around 1180 BC,
just 20 years after that key date of 1200 BC.
And according to Ramses, all the other great powers fell to the Sea People.
Not only the Mycenaeans but also the Hittites in Turkiye and Syria,
and the Canaanites in Israel and Palestine.
Only he was able to repel them, he claimed.
[Salima] They were extraordinarily strong, devastating people that
pillaged, raped, looted, and devastated the entire Eastern Mediterranean.
[narrator] Was Ramses' declaration that Egypt alone
survived these attacks just arrogant boasting?
Or was there some truth to all this pharaonic propaganda?
Were the other great Bronze Age powers
all invaded, ransacked and annihilated
by the enigmatic Sea People?
Nestled in the foothills of rural Turkiye lie the ruins of Hattusa,
capital of the mighty empire of the Hittites.
The Hittites had grown to match the Egyptians in power
and had even signed the world's first peace treaty with Ramses the Great.
But according to the writing on the temple walls in Egypt,
they too were brought down by the Sea People.
This would have been no easy feat.
The Hittites were skilled warriors
and Hattusa was remarkable for its strategic location and well-fortified defenses.
The city walls were over five miles in length
and more than 30 feet high.
Archaeologist Christoph Bachhuber has studied
the Hittites for much of his life.
But he is as puzzled as everyone else as to how such a towering power
could have been brought down by some invaders from the sea.
[Christoph] Hattusa was very much like a castle.
A very heavily fortified
and very heavily defended, um,
edifice on top of the mountain.
Uh, seemingly impenetrable up here.
If we look at the scale of these walls,
and sort of appreciate where we are
in the-- in relation to the rest of the landscape,
um, we are looking down for 20 or 30 miles in every direction.
[narrator] Little remains today but Hattusa
was an impressive and unusual city, built on a series of terraces.
Within the city walls, the mud brick buildings were monumental
and almost exclusively state focused.
[Christoph] Our best estimate for the population of Hattusa is about 15,000.
But the vast majority would have lived outside of the walls.
Hattusa, the city, was really built for a very small number of people.
The royal family, of course, living in the palace,
and the priests and attendants of-- of all the temples.
[narrator] But in the end,
their gods and their fortifications didn't protect them.
This great city was destroyed.
Andreas Schachner is directing excavations at the palace of Hattusa.
And everywhere they dig, they find evidence of burnt mud bricks,
dating to the end of the Bronze Age.
Wow. These are most probably Hittite burnt mud bricks.
These are the bricks, the reddish ones.
And here, for example, is one fallen down and here,
for example, also one clearly visible.
Wow, that's really great. Mama mia.
Whoo! Wow.
[narrator] The palace seems to have been razed to the ground.
But how could such a well-fortified city, 150 miles from the sea,
have been overcome by assailants arriving by boat?
Is there something we still don't know?
Almost everything we've learnt about the Hittites
comes from another discovery made back when excavations began.
Thousands of clay tablets were found in a single room in 1907.
Legal texts, um, religious texts,
political correspondence,
texts recording their deeds and their achievements.
The latest evidence for writing, any Hittite writing,
dates to around 1200 BC.
After that, the Hittites fall silent.
[narrator] Hattusa was ruined.
And the Hittites vanished from history around that same date of 1200 BC.
About that, it seems, Ramses was right.
But could the Sea People truly be responsible
or is there more to this story?
Sadly, the Hattusa tablets tell us nothing about what happened here.
But if there was diplomatic correspondence between other Bronze Age cities...
might their letters reveal more?
A cache of desperate tablets written during a city's dying days
could hold some answers.
Could there be clues as to who caused the collapse of all the Bronze Age cities
in the diplomatic letters they were writing to each other?
There is one other great city where
many of their written documents have also survived.
Ugarit, in what is now Syria,
was one of the most important ancient ports
with trade links crisscrossing the known world.
It was a busy and prosperous metropolis.
But it too was destroyed at much the same time.
Archaeologists have found the remains of a port
with streets lined with two-story houses.
And a city surrounded by walls with several temples and other public buildings.
The western edge was occupied by a large palace,
and among the rubble, they found hundreds of cuneiform tablets.
These cover almost all aspects of the life of Ugarit leading up to 1200 BC,
the date everything stopped,
including explicit written testimony about the destruction.
Yoram Cohen is an expert in Bronze Age literature.
[Yoram] We have this fascinating letter which was sent
by the king of Ugarit
to the king of Cyprus,
of Alashiya, and he says as follows.
"My cities were burnt. They did evil things in my country.
The seven ships of the enemy that came have inflicted
much damage upon me and my household."
[narrator] The king is desperate to save himself and his people.
But unfortunately, his cry for help seems to have come too late.
[Yoram] The situation in Ugarit was certainly desperate.
And this we know from the following correspondence.
"When your messenger arrived, the army was humiliated and the city was sacked.
Our food in the threshing floors was burnt
and the vineyards were also destroyed.
Our city is sacked.
May you know about it. You must know about it!"
[narrator] This city was destroyed by invaders from the sea.
And it seems it was not the only one.
In addition to Ugarit, Hattusa and Mycenae
archaeological evidence suggests that
almost every significant city in the Eastern Mediterranean world
was violently attacked and burnt
before being abandoned within a short period around 1200 BC.
But the cities have left no answers as to who the Sea People were
where they came from,
or how they were able to attack powerful empires
that were miles away from the sea.
Is there a clue in the fact that they all fell together,
one after another, like dominoes?
Perhaps their strong connections made them vulnerable.
Evidence of the close links that existed between the states
can be found across the Eastern Mediterranean.
Here in Egypt, tomb paintings show men wearing Aegean style kilts
offering tributes to the pharaoh.
Would the destruction of only one or two places in this extensive network
immediately affect the others as happens today
when supply chains begin to fail or stock markets crash?
[Christoph] Once the same people who'd have invested in these networks,
once these networks began to unravel,
once they, um, began to dissolve
we can imagine the same people being left exposed.
They had become dependent, perhaps over dependent
on the benefits of these long-distance networks.
I think that this would have had dire consequences
for all the rulers of the Eastern Mediterranean.
[narrator] It's possible that the close links between them,
the very thing that had propelled their network up to its great heights,
may ultimately have led to their demise.
Was the trade between the cities essential for their survival?
Just before the collapse,
trade around the Mediterranean was thriving.
This is vividly illustrated in the remains of an ancient shipwreck,
known as the Uluburun.
Discovered off the coast of Turkiye
this ship is thought to have been heading for Rhodes or Crete.
And the luxury items contained in its cargo illuminate the interconnected world
the Bronze Age people inhabited.
These are high-value, uh, very elaborate, um, luxury goods.
Gold jewelry, um, gold chalices,
faience rhytons,
rhytons are a type of drinking vessel.
You get a sense now of the decadence of this time period
and of the palatial elites who inhabited these palaces
and who were delivering these types of objects across the Eastern Mediterranean.
[narrator] They were exporting luxury goods to each other
and importing raw materials from distant lands.
Glass ingots,
ostrich eggs,
amber,
and unworked elephant and hippopotamus tusks.
Some city or some one
lost a fortune when this ship went down.
But the impact would've gone far beyond the cargo's monetary value
because this value was also carrying an enormous shipment
of the most important raw materials of all.
The metals needed to make bronze.
[man] The cargo of the Uluburun ship
included 11 tons of bronze.
That is a lot of bronze
that would've furnished an entire city or perhaps even an army
so this a... an enormous
shipment of metal.
This would've been a tragic, uh, event,
and it would've had enormous consequences
socially, politically, economically, of course.
[narrator] Bronze was something they all relied on
and would've been the main driver of all economic activity
during the Bronze Age.
We might compare it to fossil fuels today.
Losing the Uluburun ship would've been a great loss,
but imagine if we were talking not about one ship
but all the ships.
If trade collapsed
and the city suddenly had no bronze
would they have been able to survive?
How long would we last today
if we had no oil or gas?
Trade networks in the Bronze Age
had developed as a result of the need for this crucial metal.
[Eric] Bronze was the metal
whether it was for tools or for weapons or whatever.
And so, you know, it gave the name to this period.
It's incredibly important. But to make bronze
you need tin and you need copper.
10% tin to 90% copper and you've got yourself
some bronze.
If you don't have tin you can use arsenic.
But I don't recommend that. You'll be dead pretty soon.
[narrator] Here at Butser Ancient Farm in the UK
metalworking expert Fergus Milton demonstrates how it would've been made.
And why for Bronze Age cities
regular supplies of both copper and tin were essential.
[Fergus] So here are pieces of copper metal.
Different shapes of copper.
And we'll pack them all into the crucible.
Which we're then going to heat.
And here's some tin metal.
We'll heat and then combine
to make bronze.
[narrator] Copper was relatively easy to find.
Cyprus had it in abundance
and became a major source.
But tin was a rare metal
and it was transported from the limits of the known world.
The trade route stretched all over the Mediterranean and beyond.
Some tin came from Cornwall in Britain.
Some from Spain and Sardinia.
And some from southeastern Turkey.
But the vast majority came from Afghanistan.
The elites of this wider region
had become dependent on the production, exchange and consumption of bronze.
The Hittite king who lived in this palace, for example,
would've been heavily invested in his networks ensuring
regular bronze supplies for his armies
for farming, for this, sort of,
basic m... machinery of these economies.
[narrator] By this time, they had mastered
the relatively simple technology for making bronze.
All they needed were animal skin bellows and an open furnace.
With these Fergus is able to reach the temperature required,
around 1600 degrees Fahrenheit
to combine the tin and copper.
He then pours this molten alloy into a mold.
So we've broken open the mold now,
and we've got a beautiful bronze axe,
using the copper and the tin.
A lot of work
but a beautiful item that will last for thousands of years.
[narrator] But to make their tools and weapons they needed their supplies.
Without these,
Bronze Age civilizations would've found it impossible to continue.
Might the difficulty of obtaining the raw materials for bronze
even point to an answer as to who the Sea People were?
Could they be the inventors of a new super metal?
Some historians have suggested that around 1200 BC,
certain people, perhaps tribes from the north
mastered the technology needed
to produce iron.
While it's difficult to obtain the materials for bronze,
iron ore is found everywhere.
And any tribe that succeeded in making iron
would've been able to create stronger, sharper and more durable weapons,
allowing them to sweep south
leaving much of the Bronze Age world in ruins.
The production of iron, however, is significantly more complex than bronze.
It requires much higher temperatures.
Over 2700 degrees Fahrenheit
and the invention of special furnaces.
[woman exhales]
[blows]
[narrator] Could the tribes who first managed to make iron
be the Sea People?
This suggestion seems a convincing possibility,
but is there any evidence?
Are there any signs of iron weapons left behind in the ruins?
Kostas Paschalidis,
curator of antiquities at the Archaeological Museum in Athens
thinks not.
This is completely wrong
when it comes to
the late Bronze Age, the eastern Mediterranean.
The end of it was not the result
of, uh, a technology...
um, of a... of a superior technology
of... of fighting, of warfare.
It has nothing to do with that.
The archaeological narrative is based on facts.
On finds, on what we have in the ground.
The material culture.
Therefore, talking about what we have found,
we don't see any iron artifact
at least for 100 years after the Collapse.
[narrator] Whoever the attackers were
they too, were using bronze weapons.
[Eric] There's no way that
new iron weapons contributed to the collapse of the Bronze Age civilization.
In fact, it's much more likely that it was the other way around.
It's been suggested that,
perhaps, it was part of the collapse and
the supply chain issues,
that people couldn't get tin anymore.
Or maybe even copper was a little hard to get a hold of.
In which case, they did turn to iron as a substitute.
[narrator] The Sea People were not tribes from the north
or anywhere else
armed with a new super weapon.
So, we are still left with the big question,
who were the Sea People?
And might they be only part of the answer
as to what happened at the end of the Bronze Age?
As it turns out,
solving the mystery begins high in the mountains of Crete.
The Sea People were not the creators of iron super weapons,
but a very different clue as to who they might have been
and what role they played in bringing down the greatest empires of the day
comes from the Greek island of Crete.
Archaeologist Krzysztof Nowicki,
has spent the last few decades searching the island for Bronze Age sites.
And he's had to go high into the mountains to find them.
One of his most spectacular discoveries,
is the almost inaccessible
Katalimata.
To come here, to these natural terraces
hanging on the cliff
requires very tiring climbing the street
and then, one must find the right place
where from the street to move to the cliff.
[narrator] Anyone trying to access the site
then faces a treacherous traverse
along a narrow ledge,
and a difficult climb up the steep cliff face.
[Krzysztof] So, it's just tiring.
It is dangerous.
It is, uh, I will say a very uncomfortable way to get here.
[narrator] Despite it's perilous location
he estimates that there were once ten to twelve houses here.
Which means, that unbelievably
about 50 to 70 people were living on this small clifftop.
[Krzysztof] To live here, to build houses here,
to have your families here
means that you had to be terrified, really terrified.
Once you are here,
you feel really secure, you feel safe.
[narrator] So when were these people here?
And what were they afraid of?
Among the ruins of the houses
Krzysztof has found fragments of jars
used for storing essentials such as water and grain.
All of which would have had to be carried up from the lowlands.
Crucially, they also allow him to date the time of this occupation.
The 1200 BC.
[Krzysztof] These people are scared of other people.
And we have to understand that the conflict between people
uh, that that is something written in the human history.
One group of people is hiding,
is trying to, uh, save their life
against other group of people
who want to rob them,
who want to kidnap them, who want to kill them.
[narrator] Over 30 other refuge sites have now been found in Crete,
including the much bigger village
of Karfi.
[Krzysztof] We are, uh, here on the altitude of 1,140 meters.
And we don't know any village
situated so high.
About 120 houses, 150...
Altogether 600 to 1000 people we can estimate
living in this village.
[narrator] It is clear that at the end of the Bronze Age
a large number of the native population of Crete
had fled to almost inaccessible communities on the mountaintops.
But it's the layout of Karfi
that gives us our biggest clue.
Whoever these attackers were
they were not their immediate neighbors.
[Krzysztof] These were not internal conflicts. Why?
Because many of these sites are defensible only on one side.
The side which is from the direction of the sea.
And they are very easily accessible from the interior.
[narrator] Yet evidence suggests
the invaders may not have been coming from too far away.
[Krzysztof] I think these were just the local people.
Uh, local Aegean, Anatolian, Italian people
who were involved in sea activity.
Many of them were probably warriors
who were also very active
on the islands, on the coastal areas.
They found out that they were unemployed.
So, they had to take the action in their hands.
Then they were, you know, the pirates.
They simply moved to other kind of activity.
[narrator] So, is this the answer?
Were the Sea People actually just out of work warriors
who had resorted to piracy as their city-states collapsed?
It's hard to believe that a desperate group of sea raiders or pirates
would be capable of reaping so much destruction across the Mediterranean.
That entire civilizations vanished without a trace.
Yet another indication
that there has to be more to this story.
Time to look again at the original source
for the narrative about the Sea People.
Ramses the third's mortuary temple.
Could the enemy depicted in these engravings
be the same attackers that we find in Crete?
If we make the effort to interpret these weathered reliefs
we can meet these invaders face-to-face.
What's great is you can see that there's a huge variety of people,
because you get these ones with these amazing headdresses
coming out and others
sort of, horns coming out of their headdress.
But just by the physiognomy, by their faces,
by their hairstyles, by their clothing
you can tell that this is a real ragtag group of people
who have come together to fight against the Egyptians
and of course, also, the rest of the Mediterranean world.
[narrator] The Sea People do indeed appear to have been a desperate group.
But what is most intriguing
is that when you look closely
they are not always depicted as an army of terrifying raiders.
[Salima] There are some reliefs here
that might give us a different idea.
And that is because we've got images
of these people coming in oxcarts
with women and children and goods.
[narrator] It seems these people were arriving not only to attack
but to settle.
In another part of the temple
it's been revealed that the Egyptians do actually name some of them.
We have the Shekelesh, the Sherden,
the Tetnu and a few others.
So, the Egyptians really did document who their enemies were.
[narrator] Historians have been able to identify some of these tribes
but tracing their geographic origins has proved more difficult
until now.
Pioneering DNA analysis
is finally revealing some answers.
[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] New DNA work in Israel is finally allowing us
to determine where, at least some of the Sea People were coming from.
Aren Maeir is directing the work at Tell es-Safi
where it is recorded that the Philistines had come from the sea and settled.
[Aren] The Philistines are one of the so-called Sea Peoples.
The Philistines were seen as a...
a rather monolithic culture.
Probably, originally, from somewhere in Bronze Age Greece
in the Mycenaean culture
who migrated either by ship or by land,
destroyed the Canaanite cities
and founded new cities and a new culture
which was, for the most part, a Mycenaean culture.
[narrator] But recent advances in DNA analysis
have allowed scientists to extract and analyze DNA
from ancient skeletons found in a number of Canaanite sites.
And the results are providing a more nuanced picture
of what happened.
[Aren] The, uh, DNA studies show that the Philistines were not from one place.
and also, they seem to have, uh, integrated
with the local people.
So, it was a mixed...
Uh, it's... you can call it a entangled culture or
if you want, a Mediterranean salad.
Uh, not a Greek salad, a Mediterranean salad.
Uh, and all this came together to form this new culture
that we call the Philistine culture.
[narrator] The Sea People seemed to have come from a number of different places.
And they weren't always hostile.
Some were raiders,
some were settlers.
Is it possible the Sea People were a result of the Bronze Age Collapse
rather than the cause?
For the archaeologists it was back to square one
as they try to explain what might have happened
to cause the collapse of all these civilizations
within a few decades.
The Sea People had perhaps diverted attention from the true culprit.
And were actually the victims of some kind of disaster,
fleeing to find new homelands.
But if so...
What were they escaping?
Some of the possibilities are famine,
drought, climate change,
disease, earthquakes,
volcanoes,
or could it have been all of those things?
[narrator] Maybe the answer was always right in front of us.
In the writings of those who lived
far closer in time to the events in question.
So we do have some mentions from ancient authors like Herodotus
and Aristotle
that there may have been climate change about this time.
Uh, Herodotus actually mentions
a drought in Lydia that may have had the
Etruscans moving over to Italy.
But that means that they were aware
that something might have happened back then.
[narrator] Both writers talk about
how devastating droughts can lead to famine,
social and political disruption
and eventually, the fall of civilizations.
So could climate change be the answer?
The widespread failure of crops
would explain the collapse of thriving communities,
and could have led to mass migration.
The Sea People might have been starving families
fleeing across the Mediterranean.
But is there any way to know for sure?
When you look closely at the surviving texts
in the years around 1200 BC,
you discover that at that time
as well as the Sea People,
there was another common preoccupation
across the Eastern Mediterranean empires.
The need for grain.
[Salima] Here, in Karnak Temple,
King Merneptah,
who was the son of Ramses II
took a whole wall to record his battle triumphs,
and part of his reign.
And he writes,
um, "It is in order to vivify the Hittite lands
that I had ships of grain sent to them.
Behold, the gods love me,
which is why they have given me such nourishment."
[narrator] He is boasting about sending relief aid to the Hittites.
And they were not the only ones
pleading for his help.
[Yoram] For many years,
scholars really didn't know what happened
at the end of the late Bronze Age.
There were many suggestions, but not one clear answer.
Now, we have that answer
in the letter which was recently published.
"In the land of Ugarit, there is severe hunger.
May my Lord..."
That is so say, the Egyptian pharaoh.
"May my Lord save the land of Ugarit.
And may the King give grain to save my life,
to save the citizens of the land of Ugarit."
[narrator] People in Ugarit were clearly suffering, too.
And another letter refers to a famine
ravaging the city of nearby Emar in inland Syria
at the time that it was laid waste.
in 1185 B.C.
[Yoram] The sender writes to one of his family members
telling him how desperate the situation was
at that time.
"There is famine in our house.
We will all die of hunger.
If you do not quickly arrive here,
we ourselves will die of hunger.
You will not see a living soul from your land."
[narrator] One thing is evident from all this correspondence.
There appears to have been a major famine
in the Mediterranean around 1200 B.C.
But drought and famine were not unique
to the final years of the Bronze Age.
Is there evidence that this drought was worse
than any other before?
A great deal of research has been done
in the last few years.
And the findings are astounding.
Deep in the heart of Jerusalem
lies a cavern more than 200 yards across,
known as Atara Cave.
Those that venture down there
are rewarded with an amazing view
of stalactites and other cave formations.
Yoav Negev,
head of the Israeli caving association
is fascinated by these formations.
Not only for their beauty,
but also their importance as a source of information.
[camera shutter clicks]
Stalagmites are made of calcite
that is, uh,
deposited by, uh, water dripping from the ceiling.
[narrator] When it rains,
water enters the cave
and dissolves the limestone surrounding it,
resulting in the deposition of calcite on the cave floor.
This process forms layers in the stalagmite,
with each layer representing a different time period.
This stalagmite is-- is cut in the middle
So we can...
open it and see...
uh, what is it made it of.
And what we can see here is-- pretty heavy.
That-- these are like the growth rings
of the stalagmite.
The center of the stalagmite,
is the beginning of when this stalagmite was,
uh, a baby stalagmite.
The youngest part of the stalagmite,
is actually the-- the external part.
[narrator] By analyzing the isotopic composition
and thickness of these growth rings,
scientists can determine
how much rain fell during that time period.
A large ring, for example,
would indicate a period of high precipitation.
In this way,
teams across the Eastern Mediterranean,
have managed to put together a 150,000 year record of rainfall.
And the results are illuminating.
Those isotopes show that in that period
between the late Bronze Age
and the beginning the of Iron Age,
there was no growth in the stalagmite.
From that we can understand,
this period was a drought period.
[narrator] It's apparent that at the end of Bronze Age,
around 1200 B.C.,
and in the years afterwards,
annual precipitation was exceptionally low.
Could it be they were caught in the grip of a mega-drought?
A force of nature beyond their control.
[narrator] Stalagmites in Israel
indicate that annual rainfall at the end of Bronze Age
was exceptionally low.
And this work is backed up by studies on mud cores
undertaken by research teams
all over the Eastern Mediterranean.
These cores reveal the levels of pollen in the air
at the time the mud was laid down.
So researchers can re-construct
past vegetation and climatic conditions.
In Israel,
archaeobotanist Dafna Langgut has been studying some cores
taken from beneath the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea.
Which suggests there was a dramatic fall in crop cultivation
at just this time.
[Dafna] We were able to count for each sample
hundreds of pollen grains.
What is unique about pollen,
that each plant produce its own unique pollen form,
so it sounds like it's identical,
its fingerprint.
And in addition,
pollen is the most durable organic substance in nature.
So it can preserved for hundreds of thousands of years.
[narrator] By measuring the quantity
of the radioactive isotope Carbon-14 in the sediment,
they are able to date each sample
and determine the types of vegetation
that existed during a particular period.
And what they identified in the late Bronze Age
were low percentages of tree pollen
such as oaks, pistachio, and olives
together with high ratios of herbs and small shrubs.
This means that at that time,
drier climate conditions existed in that area.
[Dafna] Based on the pollen's images,
we were able to reveal that this...
very dry conditions lasted for about 150 years
starting at 1250 B.C.
It is situation that is difficult to handle.
[narrator] It would undoubtedly have had a devastating effect
on the population of the region.
Intrigued by all these new discoveries,
archaeologist Israel Finkelstein
began studying the cattle that were present in this area
as well as the crops that were growing in that period.
This is Megiddo.
A critical junction of trading routes in the Bronze Age.
And in 1200 B.C.,
this whole area known as Canaan,
was part of the Egyptian empire.
Remarkably, it seems that the Egyptians
were introducing new farming methods here
to cope with the drought.
When Israel examined the cattle bones discovered on site,
he observed that not only was there an increase
in the number of cows in this period,
but that they were reaching old age before dying.
So the meaning is that they kept the animals
for a long time
And usually the meaning, uh, uh,
of this is that they used these animals to plow.
So this, uh, is important.
It's not only animals for consumption.
These cows were being used to plow crops
rather than for meat.
What's more,
he also noticed an increase in the number of sickle blades
used for cutting crops.
There is also growth in sickle blades,
uh, hinting that there is an expansion of agriculture.
And especially expansion of cereal agriculture.
I was thinking about dry farming.
That is to say mainly, uh, wheat and barley.
[narrator] Dry farming relies on natural rainfall to water crops.
And both wheat and barley can survive
with little or no irrigation.
So it seems the Egyptians in charge here
were increasing the production of these grains
in order to try to cope with the crisis.
And there was something else interesting about the cattle.
[Israel] We carried out ancient DNA study,
and we noticed that there is something peculiar.
First of all, of introduction of cattle
probably from Egypt, the zebu.
And secondly,
breeding of the local cattle with the zebu.
And the zebu cattle is a strong animal
which is more resilient to extreme climate,
to extreme conditions.
And we think that this was done on purpose
in the late [indistinct].
[narrator] So they were also breeding heartier cows.
If they had the time to do that,
it suggests this must have been a very long drought.
What we might now call "climate change."
What's extraordinary is that
it seems that the Egyptians may have been trying to increase grain production
around the more fertile parts of their empire.
Because they were also experiencing drought at home.
Often referred to as "the bread basket of the ancient world",
Egypt was known for its regular and reliable flooding of the Nile.
But new research conducted in the Nile valley,
suggests that Egypt too was suffering.
Research scientist Nick Marriner and his team
have been working across all the countries affected by the drought.
Including Egypt.
We're using an auger to take, uh, a core
to study the evolution
of the Nile's ancient environments
and its waterscapes.
[narrator] They can analyze the pollen and other finds in the layers of sediment.
Such as fossils or fresh water shells
to understand how the climate varied in ancient times.
So we can use this core to go back thousands of years
to see what was happening, uh, during the Bronze Age.
What the climate was like,
what human societies were doing, uh, in this area
and how they were affected by climate change.
[narrator] Their results suggest that
not only was Egypt suffering from drought at this time,
but that it lasted even longer than proposed
by the researchers in Israel.
We have evidence for, uh, significant decline
in our levels.
And our discharge is spanning more than 6,500 kilometers
from the sources of the Nile at Lake Victoria
right down to the Nile delta.
This period lasted for around, uh, 300 years.
[narrator] This drop in the Nile
appears to have started during the reign of Ramses III.
The pharaoh who fought the sea people.
This is an exceptionally, uh, long period of drought
that we could, uh, describe as being a mega-drought.
And would've significantly affected, uh, Bronze Age societies.
[narrator] A drought lasting a year or two,
or even ten years,
doesn't necessarily mean that a society will fall.
But a mega-drought lasting more than a 100 years,
simply does not allow the inhabitants any relief.
When the drought finally ends,
some of the affected societies may have survived.
But others may no longer exist,
despite all their efforts to deal with it.
A remarkable story seems to be coming together.
A huge devastating drought
caused many different people to take to the sea
in search of new lands.
Sometimes destroying the cities
of the existing inhabitants.
The result was a widespread collapse.
But the drought lasted 300 years.
Was there a specific event that occurred suddenly around 1200 B.C.
that lead to the chaos at that time?
It seems there could still be a missing piece of the puzzle.
Some sudden terrifying event
that caused people to flee for their lives.
[narrator] If a sudden event was the catalyst
for the collapse of the Bronze Age,
then one possibility is a volcanic eruption.
[distant explosion]
[narrator] The Mediterranean has many volcanoes.
And the eruption of the island Santorini in 1640 B.C.,
is known to have caused an earlier decline
in the Minoan civilization.
Yet there is nothing to suggest
that Santorini exploded again.
But recently,
archaeologists in Egypt stumbled on some stunning new evidence
for one more factor
in the events that overcame the people of the Bronze Age.
Until a few years ago,
the famous Colossi of Memnon were all that remained
of the largest temple ever built in ancient Egypt.
The Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III.
[Hourig] When we came here,
we thought it was a large field.
It was indeed a large field
preceded by these two colossal statues.
Nobody,
or except very specialized people
knew that beyond the Memnon,
there was a vast and they were the ruins of a very, very large temple.
[narrator] This temple known as Kom el-Hetan,
was the pinnacle of construction
in Egypt's new kingdom.
But at some point in history,
the building was completely destroyed by an earthquake.
All except the famous colossi of Amenhotep III,
which had once flanked the main gate.
Over the last few decades,
archaeologist Hourig Sourouzian
has been attempting to resurrect this temple,
excavating and re-erecting whatever stonework is left.
[men speaking other language]
[narrator] It has been a Herculean task.
-[man speaking other language] -[all chanting]
[men speaking other language]
[all cheering]
[narrator] In the process of all the re-construction,
Hourig has been working with a team
from the Armenian institute of geological sciences
to try to establish when exactly
this destructive earthquake occurred.
Leading the team, is Ara Avagyan.
He has found clear evidence of a massive earthquake
throughout the site.
When we have earthquake,
we have a passing wave.
It likes wave in the water.
What we see here,
all this block,
tiled few degree to the south, like this.
Here.
We see all this block tilted few degree...
to the north, like this.
And you see this row of blocks?
Again, they're tilted to the south.
So we have some kind of wave here.
And in some places,
we have a manmade mortar folded like this.
Exactly the same...
wave, you see?
The wave like this.
Like this.
So...
such a deformation
can be explained only by earthquake.
[narrator] To try to pin point the date of the earthquake,
Ara has been looking for evidence of liquefaction.
This can occur when soil is shaken in a large earthquake
and begins to behave like a liquid,
leading to extensive damage to any structures built there.
So here we have a very beautiful manifestation of liquefaction.
We have a-- a thin archaeological layer.
And after the earthquake happened,
we have like plume injection of sandy layer.
Okay?
It destroyed archaeological layer.
You see some fraction of archaeological layer here.
[narrator] The team found several examples of this liquefaction layer.
Evidence of a massive earthquake.
And in these layers,
they found shards of pottery.
It is pottery, it is pottery,
it is pottery, it is pottery, it is pottery.
This, this.
[narrator] Radio carbon dating of the pottery
indicated that this destruction occurred around 1200 B.C.
But the date was vague.
The style of the pottery itself however,
was more precise.
So this is, uh,
one of the pots we found under the, uh, fallen colossi.
And, uh, these are, uh, shards.
This pot, we showed it to a specialist in pottery,
who said the 1200 B.C.,
within a few years.
[narrator] A massive earthquake seems to have happened
in 1200 B.C.
And shortly afterwards,
Ramses III was fighting the sea people.
Could there be a link?
Was this earthquake the trigger for the events which followed,
and the widespread collapse of the known world?
If so,
it was important to know
exactly how widespread the earthquake was.
To determine the extent,
Hourig and Ara traveled throughout Egypt,
looking for evidence of earthquakes
and attempting to date them.
The damage in a funerary chapel
at Gebel el-Silsila is particularly striking.
Here, a statue of three seated figures
has been split
with a separation of three feet
between its two halves.
We are in the middle
of, uh, open crack.
[gasps] This is where three person seated, uh,
near each other, and now they are split.
It is fantastic to see
these statues split in two parts.
And displaced during this shock.
I can be sure that it is earthquake.
[narrator] Based on the direction of the cracks,
Ara and Hourig think this could have
been the same earthquake that shattered Kom el-Hettan.
Might its effects have been felt even further afield.
They travel to Abu Simbel in the south to investigate.
Commissioned by Ramses II,
this iconic rock-cut temple is considered to be
one of the most impressive remaining examples
of ancient Egyptian architecture and engineering.
Although this entire temple was raised
when the Aswan Dam was built,
it was preserved exactly as it was.
Complete with any damage.
And it doesn't take them long to find a suspicious crack.
It is a new-formed crack.
-Mmm-hmm. -A crack formed
-after carving this wall. -Yes.
And, uh, because we have a small step,
-a small shift... -[Ara] Yes.
The blocks are shifted with respect to each other.
And such it is,
in geology, we call also, faults.
-It's a micro fault. -Yeah.
We have a shift here.
We can't expect this
-without checking. -[Ara] I see.
-Clear demonstration, yeah. -Yes. Yeah.
[narrator] They find similar cracks throughout the temple.
The earthquake even seems to have brought down
the upper half of one of the seeded colossi
of Ramses II.
It is obvious that the monument,
-it's by earthquake. -Yes.
[Hourig] There is earthquake input of this collapse.
-[Ara] Mmm-hmm. -[Hourig] It is shown.
Maybe this earthquake and earthquake
that we discovered in the site of, uh, Kom el-Hettan,
it's, uh, it's same, it is probable.
[narrator] So far, from Abu Simbel to Saqqara,
the length of Egypt,
they have found evidence of a massive earthquake.
Or perhaps a series of earthquakes
at much the same time.
Egypt, it seems, was flattened in 1200 B.C.
So could these earthquakes
have been even more widespread beyond Egypt?
Could they have caused so much destruction,
the Bronze Age civilizations collapsed?
[narrator] Could earthquakes have caused destruction
beyond Egypt so great,
they heralded the end of the Bronze Age?
In Mycenae, excavators have now found evidence
that earthquakes contributed to the destruction.
Collapsed buildings. Even crushed bodies.
The end of this doorway was found
on the skeleton of the woman who was killed
when the house collapsed around her.
In fact, these photographs show
that she was struck by a rock that shattered her skull.
She was pretty much killed instantly.
She's not the only body that we have here.
There's another house a couple hundred meters away,
where an entire family was crushed
when their house came down around them.
So, in addition to everything else
that might have happened,
invaders, famine, drought,
we have to factor in earthquakes as well.
[narrator] And bodies have also been found
by excavators at other Greek sites.
Anthropologist, Maria-Eleni Chovalopoulou,
has been studying some of the remains.
[Maria-Eleni] In the last few decades,
several anthropologists
unearthed at least 16 skeletons
who they believe died from earthquakes
that took place in Greece
around 1200 B.C.
Here, we have an example of a skeleton
who was found at Cadmea.
Belonged to a young woman,
and she was believed to have died
during an earthquake that took place at that time.
She had several injuries to her skull,
but this one over here that you can see,
in the middle of her cranial wall,
is believed to have been the fatal one.
[narrator] This fracture is thought to have been caused
by a falling roof beam.
[Maria-Eleni] Here, we have another skeleton
that belongs to a young woman as well.
We're not sure whether she
died during an earthquake or not,
but she also had injuries to her skull,
and a very similar fracture
in the middle of the cranial wall as well.
[narrator] There can be no doubt
that Greece suffered from earthquakes
around this time.
And Eric believes that in some cases,
they may have been responsible
for the destruction of entire cities.
Including the site of Tiryns.
[Eric] I think was destroyed by an earthquake.
At the end of the late Bronze Age, 1200 B.C.,
life essentially comes to an end,
there are some survivors
there are people living in the lower city,
but for all intents and purposes,
life comes to an end here.
[narrator] Eric thinks it would have been possible
for a storm of earthquakes
over a period of 50 years.
From about 1225 to 1175 B.C.
To cause such devastating destruction
across the Eastern Mediterranean,
that society would have found it very difficult to recover.
[Eric] There are some things that are known
as earthquake sequences,
or earthquake storms.
And this is simply, when you have an earthquake,
and it doesn't release the pressure,
all of the pressure in the fault zone,
you'll have another earthquake soon thereafter.
Maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe a year.
But there will be another earthquake.
And if that earthquake
does not release the rest of the pressure,
you'll have another earthquake.
And another, and another.
In fact, usually,
we need to unzip the fault line, as we say,
and that can take up to 50 years
and a number of earthquakes.
And then the sequence starts all over again.
[narrator] The Mediterranean is full of fault zones.
As the recent earthquakes
in Turkey and Syria have shown.
And the Bronze Age world
may well have been a victim of this unzipping.
[Eric] If we take a look at the map here,
there are active fault zones everywhere.
We've got one coming down the side of Greece and Crete,
coming around the Cyprus.
There's another one that goes across the top of Turkey,
it's The North Anatolian fault line.
And of course, we got the Dead Sea Fault that comes up,
forming the Dead Sea and the Lake Tiberias.
Now, if we superimpose a map
of all the sites that are destroyed
at the end of the late Bronze Age,
we can see that many of them
are right next to an active fault zone.
So, we have here, I think,
between about 1225 to 1175 B.C.,
we have an earthquake storm
in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean.
And that may, um, tell us
why a lot of these sites are destroyed.
[narrator] Such an earthquake storm
would undoubtedly have devastated many cities,
and left others vulnerable to attack.
Across ancient sites in the Eastern Mediterranean,
what is clearly earthquake damage is visible.
Coming in the middle of a devastating drought,
it's easy to see how this earthquake storm
could have triggered the widespread collapse
of the whole interconnected system of the Bronze Age.
Causing people, the sea people,
to set out in their thousands
in search of new homes.
So, was the earthquake storm the final link
in a disastrous chain of events
that led to the collapse of the Bronze Age world?
Even today, earthquakes are frequently followed
by the spread of disease,
as water supplies and drains are destroyed.
And disease may well have been an additional factor
in the disruption.
[Salima] When there are these collapses of civilization,
it is more than possible
that disease plays a role in it.
Sometimes, it is sort of, the catalyst.
But more often than not,
when there are so many things going on,
particularly problems in terms of food,
you have populations that are more vulnerable
to any kind of disease that might be around.
And so, you will have the young and very old
dying off, as well as this affecting
other members of society.
[narrator] The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us
just how devastating its effects can be,
and how vulnerable we are in an interconnected world.
Just as they were then.
Diseases are often hard to identify
in the archaeological record.
But research suggests that at least 10
could have been implicated in the Bronze Age collapse.
Including smallpox, typhoid and malaria.
This is the tomb of Ramses V,
and his death reveals that smallpox was in Egypt
shortly after these events.
King Ramses V had little pustules
all over his face, we know from his mummy.
And then, when we carried out tests,
we found out he actually died of smallpox.
We have several tests that talk about
how he was not buried immediately upon his death,
but, in fact, 16 months later.
And this is a very odd thing, because generally,
within 70 days of your death,
you are supposed to be buried.
We also know that several tombs
were being cut for other relatives,
suggesting that everyone died at the same time unexpectedly.
And also, the workers who had cut these tombs
were given a whole month's lead
at the expense of the state.
Which has led some scholars to think
that maybe this was the first example of quarantine.
[narrator] It's sounds suspiciously
like they were facing a widespread epidemic.
Smallpox doesn't just appear as a single case.
And if the pharaoh and his family had it,
we can assume it was sweeping through the population,
rich and poor alike.
Without vaccines or antibiotics,
the spread of infectious diseases
would have been disastrous.
According to experts,
there is nothing like a severe plague
to deliver a fatal blow to an empire.
It seems an answer as to why the Bronze Age collapsed
is finally emerging from the shadows.
[narrator] Do we at last have the answer to what happened
to end the Bronze Age civilization so abruptly?
All these interconnected societies
were first laid low by a period of megadrought
that caused widespread famine and migration of people.
And were then finished off by an earthquake storm,
followed by an epidemic of infectious disease.
Faced with such a series of disasters,
the leaders of the day would have been unable
to provide for their populations,
and social and political collapse
might easily have ensued.
The sea people may not, in fact, have been
the only ones attacking cities.
[Eric] In the last days of Mycenae, about 1200 B.C.,
the city is destroyed.
Who did it? Big question.
Is it invaders from outside?
Is it an internal uprising?
You have the king at the top,
and then you have a stratified society
taking advantage of the lower classes.
Are the 99 percent rising up against the one percent?
[narrator] It's possible that Mycenae's eventual destruction
was not the result of an external invasion,
but rather caused by internal conflicts
within the city.
This political collapse
could also explain the riddle of what happened at Hattusa,
and other cities too.
[Christoph] Local resentment, I think,
would have been a large factor in this.
Now, we can imagine, you're toiling away in the fields,
you're sending your agricultural production
to the palace,
you are not invited or included
to any of the fun and festivity.
Even if it is religious in nature,
uh, within the walls of Hattusa.
So, there would have been a real social divide
between the has and have-nots.
Ripe for some sort of uprising.
[narrator] An internal rebellion may well have been
the knockout blow responsible
for the Hittite state collapsing,
and vanishing from history.
And though Egypt survived,
evidence of political and social unrest
can even be found here.
Following Ramses III's victory over the sea people,
we find the first labor strike in recorded history.
[Salima] The reign of Ramses III
was not just marked
by the chaos with the sea peoples,
but, in fact, it was when we had
the first sit-in strike in history,
when all of the workers who were working
in the Valley of the Kings had not been paid by the king.
So they put down their tools,
marched off, and had a sit-in at the temple.
And they kept doing this until they finally got paid.
[narrator] This near-complete social and political collapse
would likely have increased the flood of different people
who were forced to flee
in search of somewhere new to live.
[Eric] Each group may have been moving or leaving
or invading for a different reason.
Some may have been invaders.
Some may have been migrants, some may have been refugees.
[narrator] As these victims of a string of disasters
crossed the Mediterranean,
they were seen as invading sea people.
But it's clear that at least
some of them were not warriors,
they were families.
Refugees seeking a better life in a new land.
[Eric] I would say
that the equivalent in the modern era
would be the refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria,
and moving over to Greece and such.
After years of research, theories and mystery,
we finally appear to have a solution
as to what caused the collapse of the great civilizations
of the Bronze Age.
But it's perhaps wrong to think of the answer
as a string of disasters,
one thing after another.
I think that's too simple,
it's too simplistic.
Life, as we know it, is much more messy.
And so, I don't think I see this as a linear progression,
I see it more as overlapping.
I think it's just this whole smorgasbord
if you will, of, um, catastrophic events.
What I see this as, is a perfect storm.
It is a perfect storm
of catastrophes, of calamities.
And that's what leads to the collapse.
[narrator] Perhaps the inhabitants
could have survived one disaster,
such as an earthquake or a drought.
But they could not endure the combined effects
of multiple catastrophes all occurring together.
Climate change causing drought and famine,
earthquakes and disease,
migrations and war,
internal rebellions,
and the collapse of their supply chains.
It was all too much to bear at once,
and led to the interconnected civilizations
collapsing like dominos.
What followed has been called a dark age.
For a while, diplomatic and trade relations
were nearly non-existent.
And art, architecture, and general quality of life,
all suffered in comparison with the Bronze Age.
But of course, it wasn't the end of everything.
In fact, it was the catalyst for a new age.
An age in which iron replaced bronze
as the metal of choice.
It was a period of transformation and development,
which, in time, gave rise
to the civilizations we know today.
1200 B.C. was undoubtedly a pivotal point in history.
[Eric] The thing that has me worried
and losing sleep at night
is a lot of the factors that I see that contributed
to the collapse of the late Bronze Age,
are around again today.
You can just tick off the boxes, you know.
Climate change, yes. Earthquakes, yes.
Invaders, yes. Drought, famine, migration,
I mean, they're all there.
We are, I think, ripe for a catastrophe.
Right, especially today, we've got, you know,
Covid's been rampaging around the world,
we've got supply chain issues,
I mean, every time I turn on the news,
I'm like, it's deja vu all over again.
This is the late Bronze Age collapse.
[narrator] Perhaps the past is more relevant
than we might like to think.
[Israel] Climate was a prime mover in the process.
Climate was the centerpiece in the whole thing.
Of course, it brought about other processes.
People moving, destruction of cities,
collapse of empires, and so on.
But the beginning was the climate.
[Salima] History is very cyclical,
so maybe we will wind up
repeating what happened at the end of the Bronze Age.
Or maybe we can do something to stop it.
I think, instead of just talking about
doing things about climate change,
if we actually do it, then we might stand a chance.
[Eric] Most societies in the history of humankind
have collapsed.
And it would be hubristic to think
that we're not going to.
I definitely think it's not a matter of if we collapse,
but when we collapse.
And when we do that, what are we prepared to do?
Either to try and stop it before it happens
or afterward.
How are we going to be resilient?
How are we going to get back up?
[narrator] Uncovering the story
of the Bronze Age collapse
has shown how the survival of any civilization
may mean learning to deal with the threats
before it's too late.