The 13th century BC witnessed the zenith of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean civilizations which declined at the end of the Bronze Age, ∼3200 years ago. Weakening of this ancient flourishing Mediterranean world shifted the political and economic centres of gravity away from the Levant towards Classical Greece and Rome, and led, in the long term, to the emergence of the modern western civilizations. Textual evidence from cuneiform tablets and Egyptian reliefs from the New Kingdom relate that seafaring tribes, the Sea Peoples, were the final catalyst that put the fall of cities and states in motion. However, the lack of a stratified radiocarbon-based archaeology for the Sea People event has led to a floating historical chronology derived from a variety of sources spanning dispersed areas. Here, we report a stratified radiocarbon-based archaeology with anchor points in ancient epigraphic-literary sources, Hittite-Levantine-Egyptian kings and astronomical observations to precisely date the Sea People event. By confronting historical and science-based archaeology, we establish an absolute age range of 1192–1190 BC for terminal destructions and cultural collapse in the northern Levant. This radiocarbon-based archaeology has far-reaching implications for the wider Mediterranean, where an elaborate network of international relations and commercial activities are intertwined with the history of civilizations.

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Can climate affect societies? This question, of both past and present importance, is encapsulated by the major socioeconomic crisis that affected the Mediterranean 3200 yr ago. The demise of the core civilizations of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age (Dark Ages) is still controversial because it raises the question of climate-change impacts on ancient societies. Although evidence for this climate shift has gradually gained currency, recent attempts to quantify its magnitude remain equivocal. Here we focus on the northern Levant (coastal Syria) where the economic, political, and cultural changes were particularly acute. We quantify past climate changes and find that mean annual temperatures attained anomalies of − 2.3 ± 0.3 °C to − 4.8 ± 0.4 °C compared to present-day conditions. Rainfall regimes displayed an important shift in seasonality, with a 40% decrease in winter precipitation. A 300 yr period of dry and cool climate started ∼3200 yr ago and was coeval with deep social changes in the eastern Mediterranean. These “Little Ice Age”–type conditions affected harvests, leading to severe food shortages that probably aggravated the sociopolitical tensions. This crisis highlights the fragility of societies, both past and present, to major climate-change episodes and their broader consequences.

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