Lecture Access

This lecture will be available to view until 6 April 2026

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OVERVIEW

Watch on Demand | Online Lectures


During the Late Bronze Age, influential and interconnected societies flourished across the eastern Mediterranean, such as Egypt’s New Kingdom, the Hittite Empire, Assyria, and the Mycenaean palace cultures of Greece. 

These civilisations were linked through diplomacy, trade, and elite exchange networks, a world later reflected in the heroic stories preserved in Homeric epic.

Between the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC, this interconnected system unravelled with remarkable speed. Palace centres in Greece were destroyed or abandoned, the Hittite Empire vanished, and long-standing political structures across the region collapsed. The causes of this widespread disruption remain contested, with scholars debating the roles of climate stress, seismic activity, internal instability, and external incursions.

In this first part of a two-part lecture series, Dr Eireann Marshall examines the evidence for collapse and considers how its aftermath reshaped the Mediterranean, with the emergence of new seafaring groups, shifts in settlement patterns, and the spread of ironworking technologies that marked the transition into the Iron Age.

LECTURER

Biography

Eireann is an Honorary Research Associate and Associate Lecturer with The Open University. Raised in the Veneto and educated at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the Universities of Birmingham and Exeter, she brings a rich international perspective to classical civilisation. With extensive experience as a lecturer and tour leader across Italy, Tunisia, Sicily and beyond including Venice, Pompeii and Ravenna – Eireann is bilingual in English and Italian, and combines scholarly rigour with engaging storytelling. Her lectures for Academy Travel invite listeners to explore the ancient world not just as history but as a living dialogue between past and present – bringing monuments, art and ideas vividly to life.

Dr Eireann Marshall

Classicist & Historian