Pollen Study Points to Culprit in Bronze Era Mystery TEL AVIV - More than 3,200 years ago, life was abuzz in and around what is now this modern-day Israeli metropolis on the shimmering Mediterranean shore. To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all. Yet within 150 years, according to experts, the old world lay in ruins. Experts have long pondered the cause of the crisis that led to the Late Bronze Age collapse of civilization, and now believe that by studying grains of fossilized pollen they have uncovered the cause. In a study published Monday in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, researchers say it was drought that led to the collapse in the ancient southern Levant. Theories have included patterns of warfare, plagues and earthquakes. But while climate change has long been considered a prime factor, only recently have advances in science given researchers the chance to pinpoint the cause and make the case. The journal of The Institute of Archaeology reports that an unusually high-resolution analysis of pollen grains taken from sediment beneath the Sea of Galilee and the western shore of the Dead Sea, backed up by a robust chronology of radiocarbon dating, have pinpointed the period of crisis to the years 1250 to 1100 B.C. Unlike studies examining longer-term processes that may require a pollen analysis of strata 500 years apart, this pollen count was done at intervals of 40 years - the highest resolution yet in this region, said Prof. Israel Finkelstein of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. He added that the uniqueness of the study also lay in the combination of precise science and archaeological and historical analysis, offering the fullest picture yet of the collapse of civilization in this area at the end of the Bronze Age. Egypt is gone. Forever," said Professor Finkelstein. It never got back to that level of prosperity again. The first recorded hint of trouble in the north came in the mid-13th century, according to the study, when a Hittite queen wrote to Ramses II, saying, "I have no grain in my lands." Several years ago, Professor Finkelstein and Prof. Steve Weiner of Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science received a grant from the European Research Council to conduct research aimed at reconstructing ancient Israel. The project consists of 10 tracks including ancient DNA and molecular archaeology - an effort to identify what 3,000-year-old ceramic vessels might have contained. For the climate change part of the project, Professor Finkelstein joined forces with Dafna Langgut, a palynologist - or pollen researcher - at Tel Aviv University, and Professor Thomas Litt of the Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology at the University of Bonn in Germany. Recent studies of pollen grains conducted by experts in southeast Anatolia, Cyprus, along the northern coast of Syria and the Nile Delta came up with similar results, though with less control over the chronology, indicating that the crisis was regional. Dr. Langgut described in an interview how the team extracted about 60 feet of cores of gray muddy sediment from the center of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, passing through 1,000 feet of water and drilling 65 feet into the lake bed, covering the last 9,000 years. At Wadi Zeelim in the southern Judean Desert, on the western margins of the Dead Sea, the team manually extracted eight cores of sediment, each about 20 inches long. "We carried them on our backs," Dr. Langgut said.