I asked a question on a different reddit a year ago I just reread about what happened to Egypt, basically I was asking what happened to take Egypt from being some great civilization around the Pyramid time and how it could go to it's current state as a relatively unimportant nation to global politics (though one comment disputed both of those claims).
One person wrote the following "
[Did it collapse due to an epic war you never heard about?] Kind of, actually!
The Bronze Age Collapse in roughly 1200 BC saw the end of several of the world's "superpowers", whose governments had apparently lasted for thousands of years. Exactly how it happened is a total mystery though, since the destruction was so complete. Enormous trade routes and incredible governments vanished. A mysterious foreign nation(s), the "Sea Peoples" ravaged the lands. Nothing was rebuilt for centuries, and apparent survivors of the incident relocated to hidden spots in the mountains and valleys.
Egypt did a little better than most though, becoming more "fragmented" than "razed to the ground"."
And I wanted to know if three was anything more we know. Come to think of it seems like Greece and Egypt and Persia all seem to stop being part of the human story around the same time; with Roman empire separating the classical era from the dark ages. Do we know any more?
We actually have quite a lot of theories about how the Bronze Age collapsed. Sure, the “Sea People” were part of it, but it was more mass migration than organized military operations or planned marauding campaigns. I would give a full-length answer, but it’s so complicated you might do well reading one of the many books on it, of which I would recommend “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” by Eric Cline. Also, the last chapters of the book “Kingdom of the Hittites” by Trevor Bryce is good, although, it does, of course, cover more specifically the Bronze Age collapse in relation to Anatolia.