Almost nine years ago at a Long Now (home page) talk in San Francisco - introduced by none other than Stewart Brand (Wikipedia) of Whole Earth Catalog fame - Eric Cline, an Antiquities historian at Washington University, proposed this: the 3200-1200 BC Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean and Middle East - from Sardania to the Tigris-Euphrates - was an early microcosm of interconnected societies that gradually expanded and flourished, until their relatively sudden collapse: paraphrasing "13c. BC was very different from 11c. 'dark ages'"; only Egyptian kingdoms survived and at a much reduced state. What caused this sudden collapse, and what lessons can be learned from it for today?