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NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY, vol.83, no.1, pp.16-29, 2020 (AHCI)
The sudden fall of the Hittite Empire at the turn of the thirteenth century BCE is a major case study for political disruptions in the history of the Mediterranean, and it resulted in the profound transformation of central Anatolia, the former Hittite core territory.(1) This disruption affected the whole eastern Mediterranean, but nowhere was hit as severely as Hittite Anatolia. Hittite political legacy survived only at the eastern borderlands of the empire-the Upper Euphrates, Malatya, and Karkemis-and only to the tenth century in northern Syria and south of the Taurus Mountains (fig. 1; Weeden 2013). As for central Anatolia, scholars generally concur that a degree of political complexity was reintroduced only in the eighth century BCE. Famine, mass migrations, and conflicts have been considered the main driving factors behind the sudden decrease in settlement occupation after the fall of the empire.