Are civilizations destined to collapse? Lessons from the Mediterranean Bronze Age

Abstract

As the world faces multiple crises, lessons from humanity’s past can potentially suggest ways to decrease disruptions and increase societal resilience. From 1200 to 1100 BCE, several advanced societies in the Eastern Mediterranean suffered dramatic collapse. Though the causes of the Late Bronze Age Collapse are still debated, contributing factors may include a “perfect storm” of multiple stressors: social and economic upheaval, earthquake clusters, climate change, and others. We examined how collapse might have propagated through the societies’ connections by modeling the Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age trade and socio-political networks. Our model shows that the Late Bronze Age societies made a robust network, where any single node’s collapse was insufficient to catalyze the regional collapse that historically transpired. However, modeled scenarios indicate that some paired node disruptions could cause cascading failure within the network. Subsequently, a holistic understanding of the region’s network incentive structures and feedback loops can help societies anticipate compounding risk conditions that might lead to widespread collapse and allow them to take appropriate actions to mitigate or adapt societal dependencies. Such network analyses may be able to provide insight as to how we can prevent a collapse of socio-political, economic and trade networks similar to what occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Though such data-intensive analytics were unavailable to these Bronze Age regions, modern society may be able to leverage historical lessons in order to foster improved robustness and resilience to compounding threats. Our work shows that civilization collapses are preventable; we are not necessarily destined to collapse.