Eric Cline’s 1177 BC (2014, 2021) introduced the world of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean and its “collapse” to a very wide audience. More than a book about collapse, though, Cline painted a vivid picture of the region as a lively, interconnected world of kingdoms and empires, engaged in trade, diplomacy, and warfare. It has done an excellent job of popularizing the period and bringing good archaeological and historical research into the mainstream.Whilst sticking to a multicausal stance on “the collapse” in the book and Forum essay here, Cline observes that there is growing evidence for climate change ca. 1200 BC, which suggests that drought or megadrought was a key factor in collapse, as was proposed originally by R. Carpenter (1966). This climate change has been linked with a series of large and violent migrations, into the Balkans, Greece and Anatolia, and from Greece and the Aegean east to Cyprus and the Levant, traditionally associated with “the Sea Peoples.” I have expressed some skepticism about these two aspects of the now prominent climate-collapse-migration narrative before (as have others) but am grateful to have the opportunity to respond to Eric’s essay in this Forum with my own views (see for example: Middleton 2015, 2018, 2020b; Knapp and Manning 2016 and Knapp 2021 and references therein).The evidence for climate change or “megadrought” ca. 1200 BC may seem compelling as more papers are published providing paleoclimatic proxy evidence from different regions of the eastern Mediterranean, as Cline suggests. From my perspective, however, the paleoclimatic data is still spread too thinly across the eastern Mediterranean to draw convincing conclusions about wider and local conditions; and for those already wanting to suggest an eastern Mediterranean climate event, or a 3.2 kya BP megadrought, what we do have is not without its problems and inconsistencies, for example, the conflicting conclusions about onset date and duration. Can the limited evidence be drawn upon to suggest a pan–eastern Mediterranean mega climate event? Can we expect climate conditions to have been the same everywhere—across every microregion?Some of the evidence, in any case, contradicts the narrative. For example, in their recent study of a stalagmite from a cave near the Pylos palace in Messenia, Greece, Finné and colleagues (2017) concluded that “the new paleoclimate evidence from the Greek mainland does not support a clear chronological synchronism between the destruction of the Mycenaean Palace at Pylos and drier conditions”—rather, conditions were wetter before the collapse and drier after. If their reconstruction is broadly correct, we ought to conclude that we have at least one collapse before and without climate change or megadrought—one prior to which the Linear B texts still record the palace’s disbursements of grain.What we really need in order to move forward on the climate issue is substantial, highly resolved data with a wide chronological spread on a microregional scale—multiple datasets not only for Greece but for each region within Greece, both palace state and non-palatial areas; we need the same for every other part of the eastern Mediterranean. With significantly more data, errors and uncertainties could be ironed out and a much more convincing high-resolution picture of climate history created for both local areas and the wider region. After that, the impact of climate on LBA and early Iron Age societies could be more convincingly debated. As yet, a clear picture does not exist.The climate claim supposedly dovetails with and explains Hittite and Ugaritic textual evidence for famine and crisis—drought is seen as the cause of these. Certainly, a number of texts of various kinds refer to grain shortages and shipments, sometimes of very large amounts of grain being moved about the far eastern Mediterranean. A Hittite prince, Heshmi-Sharrumma was involved in overseeing imports from Egypt, but in the mid-thirteenth century, as we know—much earlier than the Hittite collapse and not necessarily connected to it (Bryce 2005: 322). The texts are often interpreted as describing an increasingly serious crisis, worsening over time from the mid-thirteenth century (Mazzoni 2020: 212; Singer 1999: 717). It is not clear, though, that this should be how the texts are to be characterized as a whole. Was the Hittite prince involved at this point because it was a “life or death” crisis or because the transfer of (this) grain was something primarily of concern to the ruling elites of Egypt and Hatti? Shortages and shipments, in themselves, do not prove there was increasing aridification, a widespread and long-term megadrought, or even a general famine in Anatolia and the east ca. 1200 BC. Famine and shortages were commonplace and are a well-known consequence of warfare and civil conflict, and for this we have plenty of convincing evidence.Such issues and circumstances as are mentioned in the texts we happen to have, famines, shortages, and raids by enemies on ships, may have been perfectly usual and may reflect independent events rather than a single worsening environmental and human crisis across the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. In a recent chapter on whether “decline” can be seen in the Hittite texts, Miller (2020: 240) notes that only one text referring to shortages is datable to the later empire period. He identifies a tendency to categorize as late all texts that might indicate “trouble” and to assume they throw light on the subsequent collapse—a circular argument. In his view, there is no indication in the Hittite tablets of “decline.” Knapp and Manning (2016: 118–23) have also queried the dating and characterization of the “crisis” texts. Halayqa (2011) points out that Ugarit may have been less than honest about its own resources in international correspondence. Diplomatic correspondence is as much about dissimulation as honest exchange of information, such as when Alashiya claimed to be unable to supply pharaoh with a good amount of copper because of a plague (EA 35).Another problem in the narrative is the migration part, now blamed on climate change, which caused a domino-effect of migrations east and south to Egypt. Cline expresses support for Yasur-Landau’s (2010) migration hypothesis—that thousands of Mycenaean or Aegean people fled east and over several generations of movement morphed into the Philistines of the Sea Peoples texts, who settled in Canaan (compare Middleton 2015 and Knapp 2021). The supposed movement has often been characterized as a violent invasion that imposed a new “Aegean” material culture. The Sea Peoples inscriptions from Ramesses III’s temple at Medinet Habu narrate a violent rampage of Sea Peoples, who supposedly destroyed the Hittites, Alashiya, and others.Most scholars, however, doubt that the Hittite Empire fell to any Sea Peoples, as the Medinet Habu text claims—nor the city of Hattusa, which was already abandoned (Lehmann 2017: 245; Schachner 2020). The text also claims that the Sea Peoples destroyed Arzawa and Carchemish, the first of which no longer existed at the time and the second of which was not destroyed but continued as a Neo-Hittite kingdom. This suggests that the composers did not know or did not care what was really happening overseas—their purpose was to create a message about pharaoh for the gods, a message about defeating an invincible enemy; it was not creating a record of historical facts. In addition, they do not mention the destruction of Ugarit (which has its own evidence for seaborne enemies), mainland Greece, or Crete either as having been destroyed or as being points of origin for migrants, despite available toponyms and ethnic representations of these lands.Destructive migrations around the eastern Mediterranean have been proposed since the nineteenth century (Alaura 2020). Some of the recent and widely known publications that support this climate-collapse-migration model, for example by Kaniewski and colleagues (2015), are direct descendants of these; they put bold arrows purporting to show population movements on maps, where peoples appear in blank space and erupt forth into new areas, destroying and bringing culture change. But, despite their confident assertions of what happened, the maps are deeply problematic and misleading; they and the thinking behind them are unfortunate remnants of the days when everything in history was “explained” by folk movements and migrations (Middleton 2015). Neither the textual nor archaeological evidence prove that these happened.As for the DNA evidence—the Late Bronze Age and other periods of Mediterranean history were characterized by a level of normal mobility in which people from one place could end up in another for a variety of reasons (Middleton 2018). Constant mobility is a more appropriate context in which to understand the period than periodic population movements, mass migrations, or invasions.A final point to make here seems like a basic flaw in the entire climate-collapse-migration hypothesis—which is the question of why anybody would be migrating into areas of drought, famine, and upheaval—which is precisely what the narrative proposes for Anatolia, Ugarit, and the Levant. The evidence for the climate-collapse-migration narrative overall is largely circumstantial and when pressed in any area seems weak.The archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean shows many destruction events and the textual sources do mention conflict. Suppiluliuma II was fighting around his kingdom, even at sea by Cyprus, in the style of many of his predecessors. It may be that this time, the Hittite king lost and the kingdom fell apart—the main powers now being Tarhuntassa, ruled by another branch of the Hittite royal family and Carchemish with yet another branch (Lehmann 2017: 245). Some seaborne enemies were present in Cyprus and Ugarit, which were attacked, as was Egypt—but again was this a crisis or just the usual? The texts and the archaeology suggest the latter. Banditry, raiding, and piracy, as well as interstate and non-interstate warfare, were recurrent features of eastern Mediterranean life in the second millennium BC and later. Mycenaean Greeks may have been active as mercenaries as far away as Egypt, in one form or another (Egyptian armor found at Kanakia and Salamis and representations of Mycenaean warriors on an Egyptian papyrus). Some of the so-called Sea Peoples had been around since the fourteenth century BC. It is possibly true, perhaps even likely that some of the protagonists, enemies on ships, might have been the same in events in different places ca. 1200 BC, but even if they were, this too would not prove the narrative as it is now generally presented.Part of the problem in understanding what happened ca. 1200 BC, and in characterizing the period, as I see it, is that we have, in modern times, created “the collapse.” It has become an indispensable part of the periodization and characterization of Greek and eastern Mediterranean history. Faced with diverse evidence for destructions, changes in settlement patters and material culture across a wide geographical spread, which seem roughly contemporaneous, we have constructed a single historical event of tremendous historical importance—an apocalyptic and interconnected end of the eastern Mediterranean world. The Medinet Habu texts have a lot to answer for. Once “a collapse” has been created, it then becomes a clearly defined event to be easily and neatly explained. This has happened in several examples of collapse, for example that of the classic Maya.1Rather than run together the fate of the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and give it a straightforward but ultimately unsatisfying explanation, it can be helpful to step back and look again more closely at local situations around the eastern Mediterranean, to decouple aspects of “the collapse” narrative and dial down the volume on the problematic areas of climate and climatic determinism and mass migrations, which get in the way of a more balanced and nuanced discussion of primarily human social and political life as a driver of change.Several recent works on the archaeology of early Greece, including the end of the Late Bronze Age, have contributed to our understanding of what was happening in the Mycenaean world, around and on either side of ca. 1200 BC (Knodell 2021; Lemos and Kotsonas 2020; Middleton 2020a). What we see is a picture characterized by diversity at all times. Palaces develop in a few places but disappear over a period of decades. In those postpalatial areas there were different trajectories in terms of settlement patterns. The Argolid looks different to Messenia, for example. But much of Late Bronze Age Greece was never palatial prior to 1200 BC anyway; regions such as Achaea, Corinthia, East Lokris, Phokis, and Malis, as well as the Aegean islands, continued without collapse. These areas again differ among themselves. Arena (2020), for example, suggests a direct continuity from early to late Mycenaean in Achaea while Balomenou (2020) concludes that there was a “gradual and tranquil” process of change in the Corinthia. In the Euboean Gulf region, sites formerly peripheral to central-Greek palace control became relatively more important, a trend that continued through into Geometric times (Knodell 2021). Kramer-Hajos (2020) comments that the palatial collapses may have had a positive impact on these regions. A focus on states and their demise, part of our implicit bias toward a particular form of social organization, only tells part of the story of the years ca. 1200 BC.Considering the regional pattern of change and continuity in Greece after ca. 1200 BC, what we find is that a picture of climate change (or invasion) and collapse does not really fit the evidence. A three-century megadrought would have impacted all areas, not just the ones with palaces. We could argue that palace states were less flexible to climate change, but that is special pleading—as are claims that they were operating at full capacity or overpopulated.I have argued that the interrelations between states as they developed would have been characterized by alliance, competition, and diplomacy, including intermarriage, a constantly changing political and military situation (Middleton 2020b). I suggest that Mycenaean states, in their struggle to grow and survive, sought to dominate (in order not to be eclipsed by) other states. A possible explanation for “the collapse” in the Peloponnese, then, is conflict between the Mycenae/Tiryns state and the Pylos state. Arguably, the architectural similarities between the palaces (and the shift in Pylos from a more “Minoan”-style earlier palace to a more Argolic megaron palace) suggest a unified or allied authority at some point in the thirteenth century. The total disappearance of palace authority and organization from Pylos suggests the rejection of this style of governance. Pylos (or a faction therein), though, may have “won,” not lost. In the Argolid, the architectural changes most visible at Tiryns suggest ideological change in the physical articulation of rule and image of power. In a context of warfare and conflict, the palatial system may have been rejected by elites and or the population at large. Knodell (2021: 84) has proposed a similar conflict-and-popular-rejection narrative for central Greece, the Orchomenos/Gla and Thebes kingdoms. Climate and bad-weather years could have caused additional problems, but warfare would have been sufficient to impact agricultural production, affect manpower and daily life, perhaps increasing general dissatisfaction with the palaces.The clearest conclusion is that whilst palatial regions collapsed and contracted significantly, non-palatial regions or regions where palatial or central power may have been less or different did not. The most straightforward explanation is one of local conflict between states, perhaps with the involvement of local non-state actors.If the pattern in Greece alone is a varied one, that played out over decades and probably had most to do with nearby rivals and local politics, how does this impact on “the collapse” of the eastern Mediterranean? Firstly, we should question whether what happened in Greece had anything to do with what happened to the Hittites, Ugarit, Cyprus, or the Sea Peoples’ failed attack on Egypt. The Hittite Empire had its own regular set of troubles, which could have brought about collapse long before 1200 BC. Combinations of plague, drought, hostile neighbors, and issues with the transfer of royal power had almost seen it fragment before. The troubles there ca. 1200 BC seem to have stemmed directly from the earlier coup of Hattusili III, which created competing “legitimate” royal lines, splitting the state. This competition, along with the Hittite rulers’ internecine wars with their subject peoples undoubtedly destabilized or rather kept the eastern Mediterranean unstable, but it is unlikely to have had anything to do with Greece.Whilst the eastern Mediterranean of 1150 BC looked very different in some ways to that of 1250 BC, this is not really surprising—the Mediterranean of 1350 or 1450 BC looked different too. After 1200 BC there was a great deal of continuity in material and nonmaterial culture and in interconnections within and around the region—even the Hittites were succeeded by the Neo-Hittites (Gilan 2015; Middleton 2021). One large and a handful of small states had gone, but this was nothing new; in other areas, life continued. “The collapse” was not an apocalyptic regional disaster but is made up of fairly normal events in each place—attacks, destructions, shortages . . . As tempting as it is to create a grand narrative for the eastern Mediterranean, the interrelation of events into one single eastern Mediterranean collapse ca. 1200 BC is not obvious or necessary—and it should be questioned. When things are admitted to be more complex and messy “on the ground,” simple and plausible-sounding narratives become much less satisfying, and we can make progress.I think Cline is right that on an eastern Mediterranean level we must think of multiple causes for state collapses (remembering that non-states did not collapse), primarily causes that involved the decisions and actions of people and the outcome, sometimes chance, of historically contingent events. We should be thinking of different suites of causes for the collapse of different states, which it may be helpful to see in the first instance as local events. But we also have to remember that there were “collapses” earlier—on Minoan Crete, of Arzawa in Anatolia, Mitanni, and polities in Late Bronze Age Greece—Iklaina, Knossos, and perhaps the Ayios Vasileios state; there were many existential threats to small kingdoms, as mentioned in the Amarna letters and Hittite texts. Rather than stability followed by collapse, there is a constant flow of change in the eastern Mediterranean—as in later times. And if there are lessons to be learned from this history, as surely there are, it is that the less complex non-state communities can often outlast extractive, coercive, unequal, and hierarchical states. I think that is something to consider in today’s world.