Which statement best expresses the writer's main argument?

The collapse came less from invaders than from a connected system with no backup (The writer rejects the single-villain reading and restates the claim in the last line: interdependence without a spare part.)

What does the passage say stopped in Greece?

the writing of the script used for palace accounts (The first paragraph ends with exactly this detail: the script for palace accounts stopped being written.)

Why does the writer mention that tin came from sources hundreds of miles away?

To show that ordinary tools depended on trade routes that could break (The detail supports the claim about fragility: everyday blades and ploughs relied on supply lines nobody controlled.)

In the last sentence, 'interdependence' refers to

a condition in which each part relies on the others (The passage has shown kingdoms and tools relying on distant partners, so interdependence names that mutual reliance, which failed when the links broke.)

When The Palaces Went Quiet: Level 5 Reading Comprehension Questions

Around 1200 BC the eastern Mediterranean held a set of kingdoms that knew one another well. Egyptian, Hittite, Mycenaean and Levantine courts exchanged letters, gifts, brides and complaints in a shared diplomatic language. Within roughly two generations most of that world was gone. Palaces burned, cities emptied, and in Greece the script used for palace accounts stopped being written at all.

The temptation is to look for a single villain, and the surviving texts offer one: raiders from the sea. But raiders had come before without ending anything. What made this period fragile was the system itself. Bronze demands copper and tin, and tin arrived from sources hundreds of miles away, so every blade and plough in the region rested on long supply lines that no single king controlled. Drought, earthquake, revolt and raiding each strained those lines; together they cut them, and palaces that existed to gather and redistribute imported goods had nothing left to hand out.

What followed was not silence. Smaller settlements survived, alphabetic writing spread among traders who had no palace to serve, and iron, whose ore is common almost everywhere, slowly replaced the metal that had required an empire to obtain.

Read closely, the collapse is less a story about invaders than about interdependence without a spare part.

Comprehension questions