The specific causes are still debated, but the effects were catastrophic: great cities burned, empires dissolved, trade networks collapsed, populations displaced.

The elaborate interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age — with its international diplomacy, its sophisticated administrative systems, its global trade in luxury goods — simply ceased to exist.

In the midst of this catastrophe, people moved.

Some, like the Peleset who became the Philistines, moved far enough that they established new communities in a new land and maintained a distinct cultural identity for centuries.

Others were absorbed more quickly into the populations among which they settled.