Original subtitles

NARRATOR: There once was a flourishing world

in the eastern Mediterranean.

Thriving cities dominated the landscape.

Culture and the arts were at their peak.

Trade in gold and luxury goods prospered.

We can't even imagine how much trade,

exchange of goods and ideas was going on.

It was really a very rich time.

This was all a little over 3,000 years ago.

And then, almost overnight,

nearly all these cities ceased to exist.

MAN: What happened at the end of the Bronze Age?

This is one of the greatest mysteries

that continue to trouble us.

It is one of the most challenging events in the history of mankind.

Something catastrophic, something unimaginable.

It looks like history switched off the lights.

Now some of the world's greatest archaeologists and historians

are working together to try to figure out what happened

MAN: The analytic toolbox that we have in archaeology nowadays

has revolutionised our understanding of the past.

And they're uncovering a shocking truth -

WE could be facing a similar fate today.

The collapse of the Bronze Age and the immediate aftermath

is far more relevant to today

than many people might think.

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 Turkey and northern Syria.

To the west, in mainland Greece,

the Mycenaean civilisation thrived

and had also spread into Crete.

And in the south,

under the rule of the great pharaoh Ramses II,

Egypt ruled an empire that stretched from Southern Syria to Sudan.

Ships criss-crossed the Mediterranean,

linking these wealthy nations

with an extensive network of trade routes.

MAN: 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.

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

more or less disappeared.

So complete was the collapse

that even the art of writing,

which had linked these centres of civilisation,

was also largely forgotten.

One by one, each civilisation 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 Professor of Ancient History

at the George Washington University.

And he's 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.

He thinks the place to start unravelling the mystery

is in Greece.

This is Mycenae.

It's my favourite 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.

The mythical images of the Mycenaeans and the Trojan War

have been immortalised on countless Greek vases.

The Mycenaeans were clearly great warriors.

But they were also brilliant engineers.

Their architecture is characterised by massive stone structures

that the later ancient Greeks

believed must have been built by the one-eyed giants cyclops,

as only they would have had 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 attacked?

Round about 1250 BC,

they were obviously afraid of being attacked by someone.

We don't know whom.

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's destroyed.

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 all this happened more than 3,000 years ago,

there are clues as to who the assailants could have been,

and those clues can be found far from Greece...

..in Luxor, Egypt.

At Ramses III's mortuary temple,

there is 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.

This enormous wall is covered with these depictions

showing Ramses fighting against these terrifying Sea Peoples.

And there are 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."

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 Turkey and Syria,

and the Canaanites in Israel and Palestine.

Only he was able to repel them, he claimed.

They were extraordinarily strong, devastating people

that pillaged, rape, looted

and devastated the entire eastern Mediterranean.

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 destroyed by the enigmatic Sea People?

Nestled in the foothills of rural Turkey

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 II.

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 defences.

The city walls were over 8km in length,

and more than 10m 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 be brought down by some invaders from the sea.

Hattusa was very much like a castle -

a very heavily fortified and very heavily defended edifice

on top of a mountain -

seemingly impenetrable up here.

If we look at the scale of these walls

and sort of appreciate where we are

in relation to the rest of the landscape -

I mean, we are looking down for 20 or 30 miles in every direction.

Little remains today,

but Hattusa was an impressive and unusual city

built on a series of terraces.

So, we're walking through the Lion Gate,

the imposing flanking lions

that are the protective presence at this gateway

but also a real projection of power.

Within the city walls,

the mudbrick buildings were monumental

and almost exclusively state-focused.

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 all the temples.

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 mudbricks

dating to the end of the Bronze Age.

Wow, these are most probably Hittite burned mudbricks.

These are the bricks, the reddish ones,

and here, for example, is one fallen down.

And here is, for example, also one clearly visible.

Wow, that's really great. Mamma mia.

Whoo! Wow.

The palace seems to have been razed to the ground.

But how could such a well-fortified city,

250km 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.

We simply would have almost no idea about the Hittite state and empire

without the information that is recorded in these tablets.

Legal texts, 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.

Hattusa was destroyed,

and the Hittites vanish 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?

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 extending across the known world.

One of the largest and richest capitals of the Near East,

Ugarit was a busy and prosperous metropolis.

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.

But it too was destroyed at much the same time.

And among the rubble,

archaeologists have found explicit written evidence about what happened.

The western edge of the city was occupied by a large palace,

and here they found hundreds of tablets

covering almost all aspects of the life of Ugarit,

leading up to 1200 BC the date everything stopped -

including the days of its destruction.

And these cuneiform tablets point the finger of blame

firmly back at the so-called Sea People.

Yoram Cohen is an expert in Bronze Age literature.

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."

The King is desperate to save himself and his people,

but unfortunately his cry for help seems to have come too late.

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!"

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 many kilometres 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?

DR BACHHUBER: Once the same people who had invested in these networks,

once these networks begin to unravel,

once they begin to dissolve,

we can imagine the same people being left exposed.

They had become dependent, perhaps overdependent,

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.

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 Turkey,

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, very elaborate luxury goods...

..gold jewellery, 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.

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 someONE,

lost a lot of money when this ship went down.

But the impact would have gone far beyond the cargo's monetary value.

Because this vessel was also carrying an enormous shipment

of the most important raw materials of all -

the metals needed to make bronze.

The cargo of the Uluburun ship included 11 tons of bronze.

That is a lot of bronze.

That would have furnished an entire city, perhaps even an army.

So, this is an enormous shipment of metal.

This would have been a tragic event.

And it would have had enormous consequences,

socially, politically, economically, of course.

Bronze was something they all relied on,

and would have 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 have been a great loss.

But imagine if we were talking not about one ship,

but all the ships -

if trade collapsed,

and the Bronze Age cities suddenly had no bronze.

Would they have been able to survive?

PROF. CLINE: 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.

Here at Butser Ancient Farm in the UK,

metalworking expert Fergus Milton

demonstrates how it would have been made,

and why, for Bronze Age cities,

regular supplies of both copper and tin were essential.

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 they'll combine to make bronze.

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 routes 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.

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 have been heavily invested in these networks,

ensuring regular bronze supplies for his armies,

for farming, for the sort of basic machinery of these economies.

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 900 degrees Celsius -

to combine the tin and copper.

He then pours this molten alloy into a mould.

So, we've broken open the mould 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.

But to make their tools and weapons

they needed their supplies of copper and tin.

Without these,

Bronze Age civilisations would have found it impossible to continue.

And 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.

Because while it's difficult to obtain the materials for bronze,

iron ore is found everywhere.

And any tribe that succeeded in making iron

would have 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 1500 degrees Celsius -

and the invention of special furnaces.

And the process didn't just require leaps in technology.

So, this is what we're after.

And you might see that it's still got lots of slag attached.

The next phase would be to consolidate that down,

to keep hammering it very gently

to make sure all of the iron comes together

and expel all the rest of that slag.

It was a really labour-intensive process -

lots and lots of effort, lots of people-power,

lots of fuel, lots of materials,

and exhausting! (LAUGHS)

You really gain a massive appreciation

for the amount of effort that goes into, for example,

making something like this.

So, this is an iron sword.

You're looking at several more days work to reach a finished item.

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,

eastern Mediterranean.

The end of it was not the result of a technology,

of a superior technology of fighting or 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 artefacts,

at least for 100 years after the collapse.

Whoever the attackers were, they too were using bronze weapons.

PROF. CLINE: There's no way that new iron weapons

contributed to the collapse of the Bronze Age civilisations.

In fact, it's much more likely it was the other way around.

It's been suggested that, perhaps as 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.

It was only many years after the Bronze Age collapsed

that iron tools and weapons started to appear.

The Sea People were not tribes from the north - or anywhere else -

armed with new, superior weapons.

So we're still left with the big question -

who were these invaders?

And might they be only part of the answer

as to what happened at the end of the Bronze Age.

A very different clue as to who they might have been

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 Katalymata.

To come here to this natural terrace hanging on the cliff

requires very tiring climbing the scree,

and then one must find the right place from the scree

to move to the cliff.

Anyone trying to access the site

then faces a treacherous traverse along a narrow ledge,

and a difficult climb up the steep cliff face.

So, it is tiring. It is dangerous.

It is, I would say, a very uncomfortable way to get here.

Despite its perilous location,

he estimates that there were once 10-12 houses here.

Which means that, unbelievably,

about 50-70 people were living on this small clifftop.

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.

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, grain, and pulses...

..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

to 1200 BC.

These people were scared of other people.

And we have to understand that the conflict between people,

that is something written in the human history.

One group of people is hiding,

is trying to save their life,

against another group of people who want to rob them,

who want to kidnap them, who want to kill them.

Over 30 other refuge sites have now been found in Crete,

including the much bigger village of Karphi.

We are here on the altitude of 1140m,

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.

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 Karphi that gives us our biggest clue.

Whoever these attackers were,

they were not their immediate neighbours.

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.

Yet evidence suggests

the invaders may not have been coming from too far away.

I think that these are just the local people.

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 move to other kind of activity.

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 disparate group of sea raiders or pirates

would be capable of reaping so much destruction around 1200 BC

that entire civilisations 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 III'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 that have 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 really ragtag group of people

who have come together to fight against the Egyptians,

and, of course, also the rest of the Mediterranean world.

The Sea People do indeed appear to have been a disparate group.

But what is most intriguing

is that when you look closely,

they are not always depicted as an army of terrifying raiders.

Generally, we think of the Sea People as a huge invasion,

going all over the place.

But 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 ox carts with women and children and goods.

So it's almost as if they're trying to settle.

It seems these people were coming not only to attack,

but to put down roots.

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 Tehenu and a few others.

So, the Egyptians really did document who their enemies were.

Historians have been able to identify some of these tribes.

But tracing their geographic origins has proved more difficult.

Until now.

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.

The Philistines are one of the so-called Sea Peoples.

The Philistines were seen as 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.

But recent advances in DNA analysis

have allowed scientists to extract and analyse DNA

from ancient skeletons found in a number of Canaanite sites.

And the results are providing a more nuanced picture

of what happened

The DNA studies show that the Philistines

were not from one place.

They seem to have come from all kinds of different places,

and, in addition to that,

they seem to have integrated with the local people.

So, it was a mixed...

You can call it an entangled culture,

or, if you want, a Mediterranean salad -

not a Greek salad, a Mediterranean salad.

And all this came together to form this new culture

that we call the Philistine culture.

The Sea People seem 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 tried to explain what might have happened

to cause the collapse of all these Bronze Age civilisations

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 in search of 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 those things?

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.

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.

Both writers talk about how devastating droughts

can lead to famine, social and political disruption,

and, eventually, the fall of civilisations.

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 of knowing if this is what happened?

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.

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,

"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."

He is boasting about sending relief aid to the Hittites.

And they were not the only ones pleading for his help.

PROF. COHEN: 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 a letter which was recently published.

"In the land of Ugarit there is severe hunger.

"May my Lord..." That is to 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."

People in Ugarit were clearly suffering too.

And yet another letter refers to a famine

ravaging the city of nearby Emar in inland Syria

at the time that it was destroyed in 1185 BC.

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."

One thing is evident from all this correspondence -

there appears to have been a major famine in the Mediterranean

around 1200 BC.

But drought and famine were not unique

to the final years of the Bronze Age.

Is there any 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 astonishing.

Deep in the heart of Jerusalem

lies a cavern more than 200m across known as Atarot 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.

Stalagmites are made of calcite

that is deposited by water dripping from the ceiling.

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 cut in the middle,

so we can open it and see what it is made of.

And what we can see here - it's pretty heavy -

that these are like the growth rings of the stalagmite.

The centre of the stalagmite is the beginning

when this stalagmite was a baby stalagmite.

The youngest part of the stalagmite is actually the external part.

By analysing 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 of the Iron Age

there was no growth in the stalagmite.

From that we can understand this period was a drought period.

It's apparent that at the end of the Bronze Age,

around 1200 BC and in the years afterwards,

annual precipitation was exceptionally low.

And the evidence is not just in the caves.

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 reconstruct

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 suggest there was a dramatic fall in crop cultivation

at just this time.

We were able to count, for each sample,

hundreds of pollen grains.

What is unique about pollen

that each plant produces its own unique pollen form.

So, it serves like its identity card or its fingerprint.

And in addition,

pollen is the most durable organic substance in nature.

So it can be preserved for hundreds of thousands of years.

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.

Based on the pollen assemblages

we were able to reveal that these very dry conditions

lasted for about 150 years, starting at 1250 BC.

It is a situation that is difficult to handle.

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 BC, 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 they were reaching old age before dying.

So, the meaning is that they kept the animals for a long time.

And usually the meaning of this

is that they use these animals to plough.

So this is important.

It's not only animals for consumption.

These cows were being used to plough 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,

hinting that there is an expansion of agriculture,

and especially expansion of cereal agricultural.

I'm speaking about dry farming.

That is to say, mainly wheat and barley.

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 and cope with the crisis.

And there was something else interesting about the cattle.

We carried out ancient DNA studies,

and we noticed that there is something peculiar.

First of all, of the 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 Bronze Age.

So, they were also breeding hardier 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 breadbasket 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 a core

to study the evolution of the Nile's ancient environments

and its waterscapes.

They can analyse the pollen and other finds

in the layers of sediment,

such as fossils or freshwater 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 during the Bronze Age,

what the climate was like,

what human societies were doing in this area

and how they were affected by climate change.

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 significant decline

in Nile levels and Nile discharge

spanning more than 6,500km

from the source of the Nile at Lake Victoria

right down to the Nile delta.

This period lasted for around 300 years.

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 long period of drought

that we could describe as being a megadrought,

and would have significantly affected Bronze Age societies.

A drought lasting a year or two, or even 10 years,

doesn't necessarily mean that a society will fall.

But a mega-drought lasting more than 100 years

simply does not allow the inhabitants any respite.

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 BC

that led to the chaos at that time?

It seems there could still be a missing piece of the puzzle,

some sudden event

that caused people to flee.

One obvious possibility is a volcanic eruption.

The Mediterranean has many volcanoes,

and the eruption of the island of Santorini in 1640 BC

is known to have caused an earlier decline

in the Minoan civilisation.

But 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.

When we came here, we thought it was a large field.

It was, indeed, a large field,

preceded by these two colossal statues.

Nobody - except very specialised people -

knew that beyond the Memnon

there were the ruins of a very, very large temple.

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.

(MAN CALLS, ALL RESPOND)

It's been a herculean task.

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In the process of all the reconstruction,

Hourig has been working with a team

from the Armenian Institute of Geological Sciences

to try and 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.

These huge blocks are displaced

with respect each other.

You see, vertically and horizontally

we have a displacement.

But here we have another thing,

much more important.

When we have earthquake, we have a passing wave.

It's like waves in the water.

What we see here, all these blocks tilted a few degrees to the south,

like this.

Here we see all these blocks

tilted a few degrees to the north, like this.

And you see this row of blocks,

again, they are 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.

To try and pinpoint 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 thin archaeological layer.

And after the earthquake happened,

we have, like, plume injection of sandy layer, OK?

It destroyed archaeological layer,

you see some fraction of archaeological layer here.

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...

Radiocarbon dating of the pottery

indicated that this destruction occurred around 1200 BC.

But the date was vague.

The style of the pottery itself, however,

was more precise.

So, this is one of the pots we found under the fallen colossi.

And these are sherds.

This pot, we showed it to a specialist in pottery,

who said it's 1200 BC, within a few years.

A massive earthquake seems to have happened in 1200 BC.

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?

While the Armenian geologists were in Egypt,

they sought permission to look at several other nearby temples.

These included the famous Ramesseum,

where Ramses II's giant head

lies broken on the ground.

And nearby Karnak,

where they found extensive earthquake damage,

including another fallen statue of Ramses.

They concluded that many other temples in Luxor

had been damaged in the same earthquake in 1200 BC.

And if this earthquake

might have been a trigger for the collapse which followed,

it was important to know exactly how widespread it was.

To determine the extent,

Hourig and Ara travelled 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 one metre between its two halves.

We are in the middle of an open crack.

These were three persons seated near each other

and now they are split.

It is fantastic to see this statue split in two part

and displaced during this shock.

You can be sure that it is earthquake.

Based on the direction of the cracks,

Ara and Hourig think this could have been the same earthquake

that destroyed Kom el-Hetan,

the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III,

and the other sites in Luxor.

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 new formed crack -

crack formed after carving this wall.

And because we have a small step, we have a small shift,

the blocks shifted with respect to each other.

And such a thing, in geology, we call also 'fault'.

It is a micro fault. We have a shift here.

We can't explain this without shaking.

I see. A clear demonstration, yeah.

They find similar cracks throughout the temple.

The earthquake even seems to have brought down the upper half

of one of the seated Colossi of Ramses II.

It is obvious that the monument hit by earthquake.

There is earthquake input of this collapse, it is sure.

Maybe this earthquake,

an earthquake that we discovered in the site of Kom el-Hetan,

it's the same, it is probable.

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 BC.

So, could these earthquakes have been even more widespread, beyond Egypt?

Might they have played a role in what happened in Greece?

In Mycenae, excavators have now found evidence

of earthquake destruction -

collapsed buildings, even crushed bodies.

In this doorway was found a skeleton of a 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 is not the only body that we have here,

from the earthquake that hit the site.

There is another house a couple of hundred metres 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.

And bodies have also been found by excavators at other Greek sites.

Anthropologist Marilena Chovalopoulou

has been studying some of the remains.

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 BC.

Here we have an example of a skeleton

who was found at Kadmeia.

It belonged to a young woman, 20-25 years old.

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 vault

is believed to have been the fatal one.

This fracture is thought to have been caused by a falling roof beam.

Here we have another skeleton that belongs to a young woman as well.

We are 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 her cranial vault as well.

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.

I think this is destroyed by an earthquake

at the end of the late Bronze Age, 1200 BC,

and 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.

Eric thinks it would have been possible

for a storm of earthquakes over a period of 50 years,

from about 1225 to 1175 BC,

to cause such devastating destruction across the eastern Mediterranean

that society would have found it very difficult to recover.

There's something 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.

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'.

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 round to Cyprus.

There's another one that goes across the top of Turkey.

It's the North Anatolian Fault line.

And, of course, we've got the Dead Sea Fault

that comes up forming the Dead Sea and Lake Tiberius.

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 faut zone.

So, we have here, I think,

between 1225 to 1175 BC,

we have an earthquake storm in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean

and that may tell us why a lot of these sites are destroyed.

Such an earthquake storm

would undoubtedly have devastated many cities

and left others vulnerable to attack.

Right 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.

PROF. IKRAM: When there are these collapses of civilisation

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 the very old dying off,

as well as this affecting other members of society.

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 texts 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 were 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 leave at the expense of the state,

which has led some scholars to think

that maybe this was the first example of quarantine.

It 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.

So, do we at last have the answer to what happened

to end the Bronze Age civilisations 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 throughout the Mediterranean.

In the last days of Mycenae, about 1200 BC,

the city is destroyed.

Who did it? Big question.

Is it invaders from outside?

Is it an internal uprising?

Are the 99% rising up against the 1%?

The system they had in place

may have been susceptible to such things.

You have the king at the top, the wanax,

and then you have a stratified society

taking advantage of the lower classes.

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.

DR BACHHUBER: The local resentment, I think,

would have been a large factor in this.

Now, we can imagine you're toiling away in 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's religious in nature,

within the walls of Hattusa.

So there would have been a real social divide

between the haves and have-nots, let's say,

ripe for some sort of uprising.

An internal rebellion may well have been the knock-out 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 labour strike in recorded history.

PROF. IKRAM: 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.

The strike ended up going on for months

and marked the beginning of Egypt's decline in power and influence.

This is all tied in to why there was so much chaos

during this time period.

Because, of course, if you're busy being pillaged,

you don't have time for people to raise crops

and carry out agriculture.

And also, if you're fighting,

you need to supply your army.

And so you can't supply the rest of your country.

So, really, there was a lot of knock-on effects

with the battles with the Sea People

and possibly also other things going on,

with climate changing and low Niles being present,

which means that the Egyptians did not have

the usual huge stockpile of grain

that they would have in normal times.

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.

PROF. CLINE: 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.

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.

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 civilisations 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 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.

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 civilisations

collapsing like dominoes.

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 civilisations we know today.

1200 BC was undoubtedly a pivotal point in history.

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.

Perhaps the past is more relevant than we might like to think.

PROF. FINKELSTEIN: Climate was a prime mover in the process.

Climate was the centrepiece 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.

PROF. IKRAM: 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.

PROF. CLINE: 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, then, 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?

Uncovering the story of the Bronze Age collapse

has shown how the survival of any civilisation

may mean learning to deal with the threats before it's too late.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2023