By Roberta Attanasio About 3,200 years ago, many Bronze Age civilizations were thriving on the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean. “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.” Within a relatively short period of time, however, these civilizations collapsed almost simultaneously. What…