Practice question · Put in order
Order the unravelling.
- The Late Bronze Age network peaks: kings write to each other as "brother"
- Linear B is forgotten; Greece enters four centuries of illiteracy
- Palaces burn from Anatolia to Greece; Ugarit falls
- Hittite letters beg Egypt for emergency grain
- A long drought sets in; harvests fail across the region
- Displaced peoples move by land and sea with their households
Hints
- The climatic stress comes before the population movements.
- That ordering makes the newcomers an effect rather than a cause.
Show the answer
- The Late Bronze Age network peaks: kings write to each other as "brother"
- A long drought sets in; harvests fail across the region
- Hittite letters beg Egypt for emergency grain
- Displaced peoples move by land and sea with their households
- Palaces burn from Anatolia to Greece; Ugarit falls
- Linear B is forgotten; Greece enters four centuries of illiteracy
Why
Read as a sequence and the causation becomes visible: the drought comes before the migrations, which means the "invaders" arrive as an effect of the crisis, not its origin.
Practise The Bronze Age Collapse
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on The Bronze Age Collapse
- After the Mycenaean palaces burned, Linear B was forgotten. Roughly how many years were the Greeks illiterate?
- What actually happened in the eastern Mediterranean around 1200–1150 BCE?
- After the Bronze Age collapse, writing disappeared from Greece for roughly four centuries. Why would a script…
- Drought, famine, earthquakes and trade disruption are all attested around 1200 BCE. Why do historians treat…
- The Bronze Age collapse is often blamed on a single cause, drought, invaders, earthquakes. Why does the…
- The Sea Peoples are now generally regarded as the single cause of the Bronze Age collapse.
- Why did interconnection make the Late Bronze Age world fragile rather than resilient?
- Complete the account of the Ugarit tablet.
- Sort each factor: a plausible stressor in the collapse, or a misreading of it?