The city was never reoccupied as a significant center, marking the final end of the Hittite imperial tradition.

This pattern of destruction across such a wide geographic area within a relatively short time period is extraordinary.

Nothing comparable had happened in the eastern Mediterranean since the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age thousands of years earlier, and nothing comparable would happen again until the Greek and Roman conquests of the first millennium BCE — and even those were conquests that built on existing civilizations rather than destroying them.

However — and this is crucial — not all destruction layers at Bronze Age sites date to exactly the same time, and not all of them can be attributed to the Sea Peoples.