The Chinese begin around 1300 BCE to…

The military success of the Hittites has been attributed to their monopoly in iron production and to their use of the chariot.

Nevertheless, the Hittites will be destroyed in the early twelfth century BCE, and no great military power will occupy Mesopotamia until the ninth century BCE.

A confluence of events, apparently caused mainly by local factors, brings about the downfall of all the major cultures of the Near East and Middle during the Late Bronze Age.

The collapse of the palace systems and the movements of populations does not yet have a completely satisfactory explanation.

The earlier incidents of decay have undoubtedly influenced the collapse that comes later to some extent, but other factors are usually the primary causes.

Possible causes include a combination of factors such as climatic change and drought, harvest failure, starvation, epidemic, civic unrest, and resentment of palace taxes.

Other contributing factors may be the breaking off of trade with the east after the clash of the Hittites and Egyptians at the Battle of Kadesh earlier in the thirteenth century, the presence of roving piratical bands of both local peoples and immigrants around the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean (known in the Egyptian records as the Peoples of the Sea) who were hired as temporary allies by several states, and general frictions caused by universally failing economies and alliances.

In any case, the stable states of the wealthy later Bronze Age, which had been bound by commercial exchanges and political alliances, gradually or swiftly collapse into near chaos.

The Sea Peoples is the term used for a confederacy of seafaring raiders of the second millennium BCE who sail into the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, cause political unrest, and attempt to enter or control Egyptian territory during the late nineteenth dynasty, and especially during Year Eight of Ramesses III of the Twentieth dynasty.

The arrival of the Sea Peoples, around 1200 BCE, marks the end of the Bronze Age in the region and brings about new development of warfare, inaugurating the so-called Greek Dark Ages, which will prevail for nearly four centuries.

The Sea Peoples are held responsible for the destruction of old powers such as the Hittite Empire.

Because the invasions result in an abrupt break in ancient Near Eastern records, the precise extent and origin of the upheavals remain uncertain.

Principal but one-sided evidence for the Sea Peoples is based on Egyptian texts and illustrations; other important information comes from Hittite sources and from archaeological data.

The Egyptians wage two wars against the Sea Peoples: the first, in the fifth year of King Merneptah (reigned 1236 BCE to 1123 BCE), which would be 1231; the second, in the reign of Ramesses III (who reigned from about 1198 BCE to about 1166 BCE).

Tentative identifications of the Sea Peoples listed in Egyptian documents are as follows: Ekwesh, a group of Bronze Age Greeks (Achaeans; Ahhiyawa in Hittite texts); Teresh, Tyrrhenians (Tyrsenoi), known to later Greeks as sailors and pirates from Anatolia, ancestors of the Etruscans; Luka, a coastal people of western Anatolia, also known from Hittite sources (their name survives in classical Lycia on the southwest coast of Anatolia); Sherden, probably Sardinians (the Sherden, whose origins perhaps lay in Syria, acted as mercenaries of the Egyptians in the Battle of Kadesh, 1299 BCE); Shekelesh, probably identical with the Sicilian tribe later called Siculi; Peleset, generally believed to refer to the Philistines, who perhaps came from Crete and were the only major tribe of the Sea Peoples to settle permanently in Palestine.

Further identifications of other Sea Peoples mentioned in the documents are much more uncertain.

Iron objects, known from the Bronze Age across the Eastern Mediterranean, occur only sporadically and are statistically insignificant compared to the quantity of bronze objects during this time.

The early Hittites are known to have bartered iron for silver, at a rate of forty times the iron's weight, with Assyria.

Iron smelting—the extraction of usable metal from oxidized iron ores—is more difficult than tin and copper smelting.

While these metals and their alloys can be cold-worked or melted in relatively simple furnaces (such as the kilns used for pottery) and cast into molds, smelted iron requires hot-working and can be melted only in specially designed furnaces.

It is therefore not surprising that humans only mastered the technology of smelted iron after several millennia of bronze metallurgy.

The place and time for the discovery of iron smelting is not known, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing metal extracted from nickel-containing ores from hot-worked meteoritic iron.

The archaeological evidence seems to point to the Middle East area, during the Bronze Age in the third millennium BCE.

The Hittites, who appear to be the first to understand the production of iron from its ores and regard it highly in their society, begin sometime between 1500 and 1200 BCE to smelt native iron oxide together with charcoal at high temperatures to transform the resultant iron sponge, through repeated hammering, into wrought iron.

Sometime during this age, Anatolian metallurgists, probably under Hittite auspices, apparently discover that they can greatly harden the rather soft wrought iron by heating it in charcoal.

Wrought iron, which represents the "iron" that is referred to throughout western history, will soon replace bronze as the most useful known metal because of its greater hardness and wider availability.

However, iron artifacts remain a rarity until the twelfth century BCE.

The Hittites retaliate against the Egypt-Mitanni entente by occupying Syria, thus separating the allies so that Egypt is unable to aid Mitanni when the Hittites invade it from the west.

Hittite inroads in Syrian territory include the capture of the powerful city-state of Carchemish.

The Hittite king, in addition to his role as the chief ruler, military leader, and supreme judge, is also the earthly deputy of the storm god; upon dying, he himself becomes a god. (Although the religion of the Hittites is only incompletely known, it can be characterized as a tolerant polytheism that includes not only indigenous Anatolian deities but also Syrian and Hurrian divinities.)

Hittite society is essentially feudal and agrarian; the common people are freemen, artisans, or slaves.

Anatolia is rich in metals, especially silver and iron.

The Hittites in the empire period develop iron-working technology, helping to initiate the Iron Age.

Hittite prosperity largely depends on their control of trade routes and natural resources, specifically metals.

The Hittites, having regained control in Anatolia, now gain dominion over Mesopotamia, causing tensions to flare among the neighboring Assyrians, Hurrians, and Egyptians.

The Hittites, who are renowned charioteers, have developed a new chariot design that has lighter wheels, with four spokes rather than eight, and which holds three warriors instead of two.

It can hold three warriors as the wheel is placed in the middle of the chariot and not at the back as in the Egyptian chariots.