Climate change may have toppled Hittite Empire: study

Three years of extreme drought may have brought about the collapse of the mighty Hittite Empire around 1200 BC, researchers have said, linking the plight of the fallen civilisation to the modern world's climate crisis.

The Hittites dominated Anatolia in modern-day Turkey for nearly 500 years, even rivalling the power of the Egyptian Empire for a period.

They were one of several influential ancient civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East which were all toppled or severely weakened at around the same time, bringing the curtain down on the Bronze Age.

The Hittites mysteriously abandoned their capital and religious centre Hattusa around 1200 BC, when the royal line died out and written historical documents dried up.

The empire's centuries-old political and cultural structures ended "quite rapidly," Sturt Manning, an archaeologist at Cornell University in the United States and lead author of a new study, told AFP.

There are several theories for what was behind the "Late Bronze Age collapse", including attacks from naval raiders called the "Sea Peoples", epidemics and famines -- as well as a 300-year change to a drier, cooler climate.