I've heard theories that extensive famine, disease, and drought lead to violent massive migrations of people from either South-Eastern Europe, the Western Mediterranean, the Black Sea region, Anatolia, or maybe a combination of those four. Since these foreign tribes and ethnic groups were literally fleeing for their lives from ecological collapse, they had no qualms about violently invading the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean to take food, land, or whatever else they needed.
Would someone here be able to give a clearer picture as to how advanced society could deteriorate so rapidly and so violently? Should it be considered more of a watershed moment than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, in your opinion?
Any books you could recommend on this time period would be appreciated.
For those who wish to be brought up-to-snuff with some Wikis: Late Bronze Age collapse, aka "Greek Dark Ages"
Edit: Can't count for my life.
We should probably put together a FAQ section on this at some point. Here are some of the more useful threads on the subject:
Also relevant is this AMA by Eric Cline in /r/IAmA:
I'd say these two points emerge as the most important ones to take away:
Though the Bronze Age collapse was widespread, it was not as widespread as popular opinion would have it. It's really only about Greece and the Hittites. The Mycenaean palace culture in Greece, and the Hittite Empire (which at the time included some important southern ports like Cyprus and Ugarit), collapsed rapidly and pretty much simultaneously. But the Assyrian Empire was unaffected; and though people often like to link the activities of "Sea Peoples" in Egypt to the Mycenaean/Hittite collapse, unlike them Egypt emphatically did not collapse, and there's nothing to link the "Sea Peoples" to any events outside Egypt (except that some of them seem to have settled in Canaan after their wars against Egypt).
We don't know what did happen to the Mycenaean and Hittite administrations, but it was certainly a combination of factors. We do not know what exactly went into that combination. Climate/drought and changing military/political practices are leading candidates, but it is very likely that there is more to it than that.
Be a little bit careful reading Cline's AMA: the title of his book links together events in Greece, Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt for PR reasons, to make the topic a bit more sensational, but if you actually read it you'll find that most of what he has to say is negative (yes the Sea Peoples are interesting; no there's no evidence to link them to the Hittite collapse). The evidence and argumentation in the book are pretty solid, but the blurb is totally misleading.