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The Late Bronze Age collapse was a period of widespread societal collapse that occurred from 1200 BC to 1150 BC as societal disarray, natural disasters, and waves of invasions led to the collapse of the Mycenaean Greek and Hittite Anatolian civilizations and nearly destroyed New Kingdom Egypt. Rebellions and desertions in Hittite Empire coincided with the abandonment of Mycenaean Greece's cities and the contracting of Egypt's Levantine provinces, indicating a violent collapse of the Late Bronze Age.

Drought and crop failures caused famine across the eastern Mediterranean world, while the depletion of eastern tin mines halted the construction of bronze weapons. Social unrest among the starving Greeks, coupled with the Dorian invasions and pirate attacks from the west, caused a societal collapse in that region, and several Mycenaeans took to the sea and used piracy as a form of sustenance. The Greek Pelasgians (Peleset), Teucerians (Tjeker), Achaeans (Ekwesh), Waksioi (Weshesh) and Danaans (Denyen) and the Sicels (Shekelesh), Sardinians (Sherden), and Lycians (Lukka) formed the Sea Peoples, who invaded Lower Egypt and Anatolia; the Kaskians of the Black Sea coast of northern Anatolia invaded Hatti and destroyed the Hittite capital of Hattusa in 1200 BC. In 1203 BC, the Egyptians decisively defeated the first of the Sea Peoples' invasions at the Battle of Perire, and the Egyptians also defeated the invaders at the naval Battle of the Delta in 1175 BC and in Canaan at the Battle of Djahy that same year. The Egyptians resettled the defeated Sea Peoples in "Philistia" (a reference of "Peleset"), where they build structures nearly identical to those found in their native Mycenae. This Philistine culture assimilated into that of the neighboring Semitic peoples, and it was as Semites that they appeared in the Old Testament. At the same time, Ramesses III fought off Nubian invasions from the south.

In Anatolia, the Middle Assyrian Empire took over large parts of the Hittite Empire as well as Babylon and had little contact with coastal raiders, while small Anatolian kingdoms would persist until Lydia conquered them. The result of the Late Bronze Age collapse was the Dark Ages in Greece (during which Greek history went unrecorded), the fragmentation of Anatolia into small feuding kingdoms, and the survival of Egypt.

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