I think it might be the first recorded case of a corporate tax break that we know of!

EHC: This is an excellent question, but we don’t know the answer for certain. I think the origin for some of them was the region of Sicily, Sardinia, and southern Italy (some of the groups are called the Shekelesh and the Shardana, which sound similar), but others most likely joined in along the way, as they moved from west to east across the Mediterranean. Consequently, there may have been others from what is present-day Greece and Turkey among the Sea Peoples as well.

It would be difficult to survive if all, or most, of the above calamities came at the same time or nearly so, as they seem to have done especially between about 1225 BC and 1175 BC. And that, I think, is why the Late Bronze Age civilizations came crashing down — they were not able to weather the ‘perfect storm’ of nearly simultaneous catastrophes, with each amplifying and multiplying the effects of the previous ones, piling on misfortune after misfortune until the entire system broke down. And then what we see is a systems collapse, as empires and kingdoms that had flourished for centuries all came to an end, followed by the world’s first Dark Age stretching from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia.

why were earlier generations of scholars so keen to find a single explanation for the decline of Bronze Age civilizations?

I told him that what I really wanted to write was a book about what collapsed, because the Late Bronze Age and the cultures and civilizations that were thriving in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean between about 1700 and 1200 BC have always fascinated me