As the world faces multiple crises, lessons from humanity’s past can potentially suggest ways to decrease disruptions and increase societal resilience. From 1200 to 1100 BCE, several advanced societies in the Eastern Mediterranean suffered dramatic collapse. Though the causes of the Late Bronze Age Collapse are still debated, contributing factors may include a “perfect storm” of multiple stressors: social and economic upheaval, earthquake clusters, climate change, and others. We examined how collapse might have propagated through the societies’ connections by modeling the Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age trade and socio-political networks. Our model shows that the Late Bronze Age societies made a robust network, where any single node’s collapse was insufficient to catalyze the regional collapse that historically transpired. However, modeled scenarios indicate that some paired node disruptions could cause cascading failure within the network. Subsequently, a holistic understanding of the region’s network incentive structures and feedback loops can help societies anticipate compounding risk conditions that might lead to widespread collapse and allow them to take appropriate actions to mitigate or adapt societal dependencies. Such network analyses may be able to provide insight as to how we can prevent a collapse of socio-political, economic and trade networks similar to what occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Though such data-intensive analytics were unavailable to these Bronze Age regions, modern society may be able to leverage historical lessons in order to foster improved robustness and resilience to compounding threats. Our work shows that civilization collapses are preventable; we are not necessarily destined to collapse.

中文翻译：

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文明注定要崩溃吗？地中海青铜时代的教训

当世界面临多重危机时，人类过去的经验教训可能会提出减少破坏和增强社会复原力的方法。从公元前 1200 年到公元前 1100 年，东地中海的几个先进社会遭受了戏剧性的崩溃。尽管青铜时代晚期崩溃的原因仍然存在争议，但促成因素可能包括多种压力因素的“完美风暴”：社会和经济动荡、地震群、气候变化等。我们通过对东地中海青铜时代晚期的贸易和社会政治网络进行建模，研究了崩溃是如何通过社会联系传播的。我们的模型表明，青铜时代晚期的社会建立了一个强大的网络，其中任何单个节点的崩溃都不足以催化历史上发生的区域崩溃。然而，建模场景表明，某些配对节点中断可能会导致网络内的级联故障。随后，对该地区网络激励结构和反馈循环的全面了解可以帮助社会预测可能导致广泛崩溃的复杂风险状况，并允许他们采取适当行动来减轻或适应社会依赖性。这种网络分析或许能够为我们如何防止社会政治、经济和贸易网络崩溃（类似于青铜时代晚期发生的情况）提供见解。尽管这些青铜时代地区无法进行此类数据密集型分析，但现代社会也许能够利用历史教训来提高应对复杂威胁的稳健性和弹性。我们的工作表明文明崩溃是可以预防的；我们不一定注定会崩溃。