A room guide in the BM sticks in my mind, but not in much detail. By the late Bronze Age in the Levant, cities had developed and prospered on trade. However, with a collapse of power in Egypt, this trade ceased and the entire area went into a profound recession. Cities could no longer support their populations, and people were dispersed. Many died.
Looking further into it, there was a widespread disintegration of Eastern Mediterranean civilization at the end of the late Bronze Age (late thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C.), which has also been blamed on the irruption of new peoples into this area, and on climatic change affecting agricultural output.
The combination of concepts – trade decline, recession, climate change, was familiar, and the vulnerability of cities, of the specialised lives they require, is underlined.
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