The collapse of the Hittite Empire is usually associated with the gradual decline of the Eastern Mediterranean trade networks and the resulting collapse of major Late Bronze Age cities in the Levantine coast, Anatolia and the Aegean.
It is understood to have culminated in the final (apparently peaceful) abandonment of Hattusa (modern Bogazkoy), the Hittite capital, in around 1180-1175 BCE.
Following this collapse of large cities and the Hittite state, the Early Iron Age in northern Mesopotamia would see a dispersal of settlements and ruralization, with the appearance of large numbers of hamlets, villages, and farmsteads.
Syro-Hittite states emerge in the process of such major landscape transformation, in the form of regional states with new political structure and cultural affiliations.
Some scholars have associated the collapse of Late Bronze age palace economies with the so-called invasion of "sea peoples", attested in Egyptian texts at the time.
Having found no reliable support from archaeological evidence, archaeologists and ancient historians now largely believe that the movement of the "sea-peoples" was probably a result and not the cause of the collapse, involving unrelated populations around the Mediterranean who were dislocated by the declining exchange network.
Carchemish recovers to continue to be the capital of an important "Neo-Hittite" kingdom in the Iron Age, and important trade center.
Although Ramesses III states in an inscription dating to his Eighth Year from his Medinet Habu mortuary temple that Carchemish had been destroyed by the Sea Peoples, the city has evidently survived the onslaught of the Sea Peoples.
King Kuzi-Tesup I is attested in power here and is the son of Talmi-Tesup who had been a contemporary of the last surviving Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II.
He and his successors will continue to rule a small empire stretching from Southeast Asia Minor to Northern Syria and the West Bend of the Euphrates under the title of 'Great Kings.'
