A global economy held together by interdependence — possibly to a fault. A changing climate causing worldwide disaster. And a warlike people seeking to wreak havoc throughout civilization.

It sounds like modern times, but the description above applies to the period known as the Late Bronze Age, around 3,200 years ago. In his new book, archaeologist Eric H. Cline introduces us to a past world with eerie resonance for modern times.

The sort of globalization at play today was pioneered over three millennia ago, as societies embarked on free and plentiful trade, strongly influencing each other’s cultures.

But after 300 years of vibrant economic growth and cultural and technological advancement, the entire civilized world collapsed in a matter of decades due to factors strongly paralleled today. It was the first example that “political uncertainties on one side of the world can drastically affect the economies of regions thousands of miles away.”

In the second millennium BC, the civilized world consisted of a collection of societies from “Greece and Italy in the west to Egypt, Canaan and Mesopotamia in the east.”

Over the past century, archaeologists have found vast evidence of vibrant trading of goods and personnel between kingdoms of the time.

In the 1930s, archaeologists found more than 20,000 clay tablets from Mari, a kingdom located in what is now Syria, including an extensive list of gifts traded with other kingdoms, and proof that “kings requested the services of physicians, artisans, weavers, musicians and singers from one another.”

Such was the economic interdependence that evidence has even been found of an ancient embargo — previously thought to be a modern invention — by way of a Hittite treaty declaring that no ship shall embark for Mycenae, located in Greece.

Egypt, the great power of the Late Bronze Age, was especially desired as a trading partner due to their gold, which was so plentiful that rulers of other lands would write to the pharaohs forcefully requesting it, noting that for Egypt, “gold is as plentiful as dirt.”

But while society thrived for centuries, the years surrounding 1177 BC (a representative date, as the decline occurred over several decades) saw them all fall, including the elimination of their cultures, technologies and languages.

For much of the 20th century, this wide scale destruction was blamed on a mysterious group known as the Sea Peoples.

It’s not known where they came from — possible places of origin include Sicily or Cyprus — although they are said to have been comprised of six sects, one of them being the Philistines of the Bible. They are said to have traveled the lands in waves for decades, conquering and enveloping all in their path.

According to notes from Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III, the Sea Peoples attacked Egypt twice — in 1207 BC, and again 30 years later, around 1177 BC. They also savaged the other major empires, including “the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites [and] the Cypriots.”

Ramses noted that the Sea Peoples brought the other empires down, and while the Egyptians ultimately won both of their battles, the second left them decimated, putting an end to centuries of Egyptian superiority.

“In the end,” writes Cline, “it was as if civilization itself had been wiped away in much of this region,” and “many, if not all, of the advances of the previous centuries vanished.”

It is now believed that the Sea People migrations might have been caused by droughts spurred on by a changing climate that then caused widespread famine, leading to migrations not unlike our own in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, but covering a wider swath of land and causing more violent results.

In the end, the fall of this civilization had a perfect storm of causes that led to “the fragmentation of the global economy and the breakdown of the interconnections upon which each civilization was dependent.”

It took centuries for some of the areas to be redeveloped. The area of “the Mycenaean kingdom of Pylos [in Greece] remained . . . severely depopulated for nearly a millennium.”

The civilization that eventually followed, the Iron Age, was marked by smaller scale trading and the rise of the entrepreneurial merchant, creating an economy of decentralization — the origin of privatization, perhaps — as opposed to global interconnectedness. This era also led to the development of the alphabet and democracy.

Cline notes that “there has never been a civilization in the history of the world that hasn’t collapsed eventually,” and that “the reasons are frequently the same.”

However stark a bellwether this represents for us, we can at least take comfort in knowing that should our society collapse, chances are good that something fascinating will emerge in its place.

“It is a cycle that the world has seen time and time again,” writes Cline. “The rise and fall of empires, followed by the rise of new empires, which eventually fall and are replaced in turn . . . [It’s] a repeated cadence of birth, growth and evolution, decay or destruction, and ultimately renewal in a new form.”