Around the year 1200 BC, the most connected world that had ever existed came apart. From the palaces of Mycenae to the harbors of the Levant, from the Hittite capital in the Anatolian highlands to the grain barges of the Nile, a web of kingdoms had spent three centuries learning to depend on one another for tin and copper, grain and gold, marriage alliances and mutual defense. Within two generations, most of it was gone. Cities burned, scripts were forgotten, and the survivors remembered the age they had lost as a vanished dream of heroes.

For two hundred years, historians have hunted for the one great catastrophe that must have caused it: the invaders, the earthquake, the drought, the plague. They have never found it, and this book argues that the failure of the hunt is the most important clue we have. Complex worlds do not usually die from a single blow. They die from a swarm of ordinary blows arriving from every direction, faster than the system can heal, along the very connections that made it strong, across a threshold from which merely removing the pressure does not bring it back. The last straw, when such a world falls, is characteristically small.

THE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE tells the story of that fall as a piece of gripping human history and as a mirror. It walks the burning streets of Ugarit and reads the last letter its king ever sent; it weighs the modern revisionists who show that many famous destructions never happened at all; and it turns, at the end, to our own tightly wired, just-in-time, climate-stressed civilization, and asks the only question that matters: having learned how the first global world went offline, can we keep ours running?