Bronze Age Collapse: Can Math Help Us Avoid the Next Black Swan?

Transforming historical analysis from vibes-based storytelling into a predictive science.

It's a hot day in Ugarit, 1192 BCE. The Mediterranean sun is setting blood-red through a haze of smoke, and some poor scribe is having the worst day in history. Our scribe – the Bronze Age equivalent of the professional-managerial class – is etching what will turn out to be one of the last clay tablets ever written in his civilization: "Our cities are burned. The enemy ships are coming. This is the end."

The Mediterranean world indeed burned. Mighty civilizations that had stood for centuries collapsed in a cascade of destruction. The Mycenaeans, those pretentious palace-dwelling predecessors to classical Greece, abandoned their little administrative LARP.  Trade networks that had connected societies from Afghanistan to Spain fell apart. The Hittite Empire, after serving girlboss energy for centuries, quietly logged off. Even Egypt, history's most insufferable nepo baby with its four-thousand-year legacy, finally entered its