## Why the Bronze Age collapsed ### Historians like to blame drought, famine and invaders. But this can’t explain why the empires never came back. In our first article from Issue 27, Patrick Fitzsimmons explains what really ended the Bronze Age. Over three thousand years ago, on a plain beside the Orontes River in Syria, two great armies clashed in what may at the time have been the most colossal battle ever seen: the Battle of Kadesh. The two combatants, the Egyptians and the Hittites, together put forward tens of thousands of soldiers and over five thousand chariots, making the number of…