Yeah, I don't think people quite get how fucking wild the Bronze-age Collapse was. it's one of those things the "Ancient Aliens" conspiracy theorist types would run with if it was more well known.
Basically, the Eastern Mediterranean was full of well developed empires and city states with complex trade, diplomatic, and cultural relations from the Aegean to Egypt. We're talking shit you wouldn't see until the Phoenicians. Then, in around 1200 BCE, it all fucking collapsed and nobody is 100% sure why. Pandemics, drought, Volcanic eruptions, there was a coalition (?) of people known as the "Sea people" who raided and destroyed a lot of these places but not only do we not know where these people came from, it's believed they were merely caused by something else. Basically, in 1200 BCE, all of civilization in the Eastern Med collapsed and only Egypt survived.
Like I don't think I can stress how wild this all is:
The Hittites were an Indo-European speaking empire in Anatolia (modern day Turkiye). We figured out their language when a linguist was reading their (beforehand undeciphered) language written in cuneiform when he was fish slapped by reading what appeared to be the English word "Water" in the text and then something akin to the German "essen". This fucking civilization is mentioned in the Bible at one point was on equal terms with the fucking Egyptians. They completely collapsed in the Bronze Age Collapse.
Cyprus was a fairly powerful player because they had Copper (major ingredient in bronze). Thing is we don't know if they were one polity, a confederation of polities, or some weird shit in between due to the diplomatic correspondence we got from them. Not even sure the people who got the bronze from them fully understood them. Anyway there were city states on the Island and continued for a short while but then collapsed.
The Greeks lost writing during the Bronze Age Collapse. No seriously. The Greeks had writing and lost it. Their writing system is known as Linear B and preserves a view into the Greek world that is so different. Like Poseidon was head honcho, Dionysus was there and not some "god that returned" figure and Aphrodite was missing from the list of the pantheon. She seems to have returned before Homer wrote the Iliad (which was composed in the Greek Dark Ages and we think was a memory about what happened right after/during the collapse) but yeah, the fucking Greeks lost writing.
Ugarit was a city state located in modern day Syria and was a nexus of trade for the Levant, imagine a Bronze age Singapore. it was completely abandoned in the Bronze age collapse and we literally have the final letters sent to Egypt begging for help as the Sea people were sighted. Everyone basically fled the city and the city was destroyed and never rebuilt. I want you to imagine if a city like New York or Singapore was abandoned and then destroyed and left to become a mound in the landscape. That's basically what happened with Ugarit and the city states in the Levant in 1200 BCE.
Just to drive it home, you know post-post apocalyptic worlds where civilization was destroyed long ago but a new civilisation is living in the ruins of the old (like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). Yeah, that fucking happened in the Bronze age. Legends like the Minotaur, the Iliad and the Odyssey are all fucking echos of that. There's echos of it in the Bible. There are hills in the landscape that are the remains of powerful cities that had collapsed so totally they basically become landscape features. We basically uncovered all this when we translated Hieroglyphs and Cuneiform and Linear B.
The Eastern Med had an Apocalypse and it turned into our legends.
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