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during this era that might have been related to an outbreak of disease.

      The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse often ride together, though, and just as famine and pestilence are interconnected with each other, they are often also linked with war.

       Suspect #5: Internecine Warfare

      We’ve already discussed violence in different forms leading to the problems in the Bronze Age. From sea peoples to revolutionaries to the Trojan War, there was no shortage of bloody outbreaks as the era came to its close. How is one to make a distinction between the “normal” level of violence and something system threatening? Was there anything about the end of the Bronze Age in a military sense that was different or stood out? Yes, there was: Assyria.

      Assyria would become the first of the great empires of the next era, the Iron Age.[44] It was in the later Bronze Age that this Semitic-speaking superpower-to-be began to alter the map of the Near East in ways that could easily upset the region’s geopolitical equilibrium. The Assyrian state, located in modern northern Iraq, and centered on several already ancient cities,[45] had an extensive history and had long been a part of regional power struggles. By about the 1390s BCE, Assyria was about to go on another multigenerational historical winning streak, and much of this would come at the expense of neighboring states in the region.

      After falling under the domination of another powerful state in the region (Mittani) in about the 1450s BCE, the Assyrians wrested back their independence after a couple of generations, and then began to take their former overlords apart piece by piece. Leading an increasingly fearsome and effective fighting force, aggressive and energetic Assyrian kings like Ashur-uballit I, Tukulti-Ninurta I, and Tiglath-Pileser I expanded the boundaries of their kingdom and added to its resources.

      Assyria’s increasing might eventually began to alarm the other great powers. The Hittites, especially, were right in the crosshairs. The Hittite Empire’s territory formed a key international crossroads in the Bronze Age, a potentially indispensable link in the structure of economic, diplomatic, and military interconnectivity that supported that version of an international system. If something damaged the Hittite state, many others in that system could have felt the effects.

      Sometime around 1237 BCE, the Hittites were defeated by the Assyrians at the Battle of Nihriya. The resulting loss of territory meant ceding important resource outlets to the Assyrians.[46] There’s a sort of death spiral that can be created in war when a state’s treasury is drained by extended conflict, when manpower is decimated by battlefield defeats, and when possession of the resources that are indispensable for recovering from those losses is lost to the enemy. The year 1237 is right around the start of the traditional era when the Bronze Age seemingly began to come under severe strain, so if we are trying to correlate dates with ripple effects, we can see that the extension of Assyrian power corresponds with some of the large geopolitical changes quite well.

      War can be a net positive or negative to a combatant power.[47] War (and the resulting conquests) has often benefited the state doing the conquering. In this case, it might have benefited Assyria.

      And while it goes without saying that wars are bad for those who lose them, in many circumstances, wars can be a negative for all involved. By the last year of the First World War, for example, all the nations that had begun the war four years before had been ground down by it. The economies that were paying for the costs of the conflict were in shambles. The damage the war caused to the global system meant that the conflict was harmful even to nations that were not a part of the fight.[48]

      The subsequent negative effects of that early twentieth-century war involved many of the same factors we’ve targeted in our discussion of the end of the Bronze Age. By 1918, due to the conflict, Europe was experiencing famine and pestilence to go along with its war and death. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were running rampant through some of the most advanced societies in the early twentieth century—an eventuality that was made possible only because the war opened the door to it. It’s not hard to imagine, then, how a multigenerational and eventually losing struggle with another great power may have challenged the Hittite state.

      Assyria’s wars of expansion during this era were in the military history foreground and are hard to miss. But in the background were lots of conflicts that didn’t involve the great powers fighting their peers at all (which doesn’t mean they weren’t potentially important, or possibly fatal, should a great power have been defeated). Lots of “barbarian” peoples and tribes, for example, nibbled at the fringes of the great states, always seemingly ready to exploit weakness or take advantage of opportunities. In the case of the Hittites, their local troublesome “barbarians” were people like the Phrygians and a lesser-known people known as the Kaska (or Gasga). The Kaska are portrayed by the Hittite sources as aggressive wild tribesmen who had sacked and burned the Hittite capital in the past. Some historians think that, as the Hittite state got weaker, its ability to resist these peoples declined. If major conflicts with other powerful states like Assyria weakened the Hittites, it may have made them less able to fend off their traditional “barbarian” neighbors. And, just to tie it all together, if those barbarian neighbors were starving due to a famine caused by arid conditions and poor harvests, does that explain why the Hittites might have had to fend them off in the first place?

      If one credits the Assyrians with a large amount of responsibility for bringing down the state of Mittani,[49] and then possibly mortally wounding the Hittites, that would amount to a great deal of political and military change occurring around the thirteenth century BCE. And this might have been enough to spark a chain reaction that disrupted a whole system.

       Suspects #6 and #7: Systems Collapse, Multiple Causes

      We live in a world of complex systems—economic, cultural, social, administrative-bureaucratic. Many things must function together to make an interconnected system work, and a breakdown anywhere can mean a breakdown everywhere. For that reason, most systems have some flexibility and redundancy built into them to deal with stresses, breakdowns, and unforeseen circumstances—in short, they are made to be resilient. But when these backup systems become overwhelmed, the cascading nature of a problem can ripple throughout the entire system like an economic version of a communicable disease. So in a Bronze Age trading network that reached from Spain to Iran and from northern Italy to Nubia, a disruption of something like Mediterranean commerce could affect all those regions.

      And while the loss of things like luxury products and the money generated from trading activity would have had an enormous effect, it’s important to remember that food constituted one of the major categories of goods being shipped in the late Bronze Age. The Egyptians were sending food to multiple places (including the Hittite lands) via ship to alleviate starvation. If those ships were unable to reach their destinations, it wasn’t a question of loss of income or a lowering of living standards, it was a potential famine.

      When people don’t have food, under certain circumstances all law and order and societal controls can break down. Plagues can cause the same problems if they’re bad enough. Anarchy, revolution, and civil war can sometimes do to a society what outside invaders can’t manage. All it can take is too little food or too much disease.

      There are other scenarios that can lead to the same outcome. Mass migration in a short time (for example, the Libyan and sea peoples’ “invasions” of Egypt) can disrupt norms and break down culture and amicable coexistence. Insufficient military defense can leave a population and its food supplies open to predation by other armed groups.

      Some experts have suggested that the Bronze Age system was somewhat fragile or brittle. Undergirded by highly centralized, very bureaucratic states, with a small rich elite presiding over large numbers of peons,[50] such a system might have been vulnerable to all sorts of rebellion and social upheaval. Think of an ancient version of the French Revolution, for example. If such destabilization were sparked by a system’s inability to deliver food to a starving population, what’s ultimately to blame: The famine, or the brittle, inequitable social system? If the sea peoples’ piracy helped destroy the maritime trading system, does the damage come from the piracy or the

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