The letters from Ugarit — the great Syrian trading city that was destroyed around 1185 BCE — include desperate messages describing famine conditions in the years before the city’s fall.

In one letter, the king of Ugarit writes to the king of Cyprus describing starvation in Anatolia so severe that “the situation is very serious” and requesting emergency grain shipments.

Other letters describe military threats and the impossibility of responding to multiple simultaneous crises.

Earthquakes have also been proposed as a factor.

The eastern Mediterranean is seismically active, and archaeological evidence at several Bronze Age sites shows damage consistent with earthquake activity during the late thirteenth century BCE.

While earthquakes alone could not explain the broad pattern of the collapse, they may have contributed to the weakening of specific centers.