The Late Bronze Age Collapse (circa 1200–1150 BCE) marks a period of profound political and economic breakdown across the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia. Highly interconnected palace-based societies, dependent on centralized administration, long-distance trade, and elite control, proved vulnerable when these systems faltered. The Mycenaean palatial states disintegrated (circa 1200–1150 BCE), the Hittite Empire collapsed with the abandonment or destruction of Hattusa (circa 1200 BCE), and Kassite Babylonia lost dynastic control following Elamite invasions (circa 1155 BCE). Even New Kingdom Egypt (circa 1550–1070 BCE), though it repelled major external threats under Ramesses III (reign circa 1186–1155 BCE), entered a period of internal crisis and imperial retrenchment.

Rather than a single cause, the collapse resulted from a convergence of long-term structural pressures. Paleoclimatic evidence points to prolonged aridification (circa 1250–1100 BCE), undermining agricultural surplus and state revenues. This environmental stress coincided with internal political instability, disruption of interregional trade networks (notably in copper and tin), and the weakening of redistributive palace economies. Within this context, population movements and maritime raids, traditionally grouped under the term Sea Peoples, intensified instability across coastal regions (circa 1200–1175 BCE), contributing to the destruction of cities such as Ugarit (circa 1190 BCE). The collapse did not signal civilizational extinction but rather a transition: centralized Bronze Age systems gave way to more localized Iron Age societies, reshaping the political and cultural landscape of the ancient world.