Practice question · Multiple choice
The Bronze Age collapse is often blamed on a single cause, drought, invaders, earthquakes. Why does the evidence resist that?
Hints
- Ask what a network does with a shock in one node.
- Each single-cause theory explains some sites and not others. What does that pattern suggest?
Show the answer
C. Because each proposed cause has counter-examples
Why
Each candidate explains part of the map and none explains it all, while a tightly coupled trade system converts a local failure into a general one. The lesson generalises uncomfortably, the same interconnection that made the Late Bronze Age prosperous is what made it fragile.
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 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?
- Order the unravelling.