Bronze Age

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bronze Age is the name archaeologists give to a phase in the development of material culture, defined by a single recipe: copper, melted and alloyed with tin, arsenic, or other metals. A civilisation earns the label if it smelted its own copper and made that alloy, or if it traded for bronze from somewhere that did. It sits in the middle of the three-age system, after the Stone Age and before the Iron Age. By 3000 BC, much of the Old World had crossed into it. But the period refuses to behave neatly. It began at wildly different moments in different places, so every region carries its own clock. The oldest-known bronze comes from a culture in the North Caucasus, yet a disputed foil from Serbia may push the story back further still. Why did a metal so common in one sense remain so rare and expensive? Why did some farmers keep using stone tools while elites cast bronze for ritual and war? And what unwound this world at the end, when famine, eruption, and the arrival of mysterious sea-borne peoples converged?

• 2. The Chemistry Of An Age

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  Bronze gave its civilisations a real technological edge because it was harder and more durable than the other metals then available. The chemistry explains why it arrived when it did. Tin melts at 232 C and copper at a moderate 1085 C, both within reach of Neolithic pottery kilns. Those kilns date to 6000 BC and could already produce at least 900 C. Iron sat out of reach. Though terrestrial iron is naturally abundant, smelting it demands 1250 C, and it is harder to work, so it stayed uncommon until the end of the 2nd millennium BC. Tin was the bottleneck. Copper is very common, but tin occurs in relatively few places, which kept bronze rare and costly across many regions. The earliest tin deposits were likely alluvial, perhaps worked by the same panning methods used for gold in placer deposits. Tin bronze also demanded systematic technique. Tin had to be mined, mainly as the ore cassiterite, smelted separately, then added to hot copper. Not every society took the same recipe. The Maykop culture of the North Caucasus discovered bronze independently as early as the mid-4th millennium BC, but theirs was only arsenical bronze, made without the tin that would define the alloy elsewhere.

• 3. Cradles Of Writing

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  Bronze Age cultures were the first to develop writing, and that single fact reshapes how the period ends. In Mesopotamia, scribes used cuneiform; in Egypt, hieroglyphs. According to the archaeological evidence, these were the earliest practical writing systems. Within a given region, whichever came first, the arrival of the Iron Age or the development of writing, usually marks where the Bronze Age stops and history replaces prehistory. The Near East entered the Bronze Age first, with the rise of Sumer in the mid-4th millennium BC. The achievements stacked up fast. These societies practised intensive year-round agriculture, invented the potter's wheel, built centralised governments as hereditary monarchies, and wrote down law codes. They developed city-states, nation-states, and empires, embarked on advanced architecture, and introduced social stratification, slavery, and organised warfare. They laid foundations for astronomy, mathematics, and astrology. Not everywhere followed this template. In the archaeology of the Americas a five-period system is used instead, with no Bronze Age at all, even though some cultures there smelted copper and bronze. And on the Australian continent, no metalworking has been found before European settlement in 1788.

• 4. Empires Of The Near East

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  The Hittite Empire was established during the 18th century BC at Hattusa in northern Anatolia. At its 14th-century height, it stretched across central Anatolia, into southwestern Syria as far as Ugarit, and up into upper Mesopotamia. After 1180 BC it fell apart, amid turmoil conjectured to be linked to the sudden arrival of the Sea Peoples, splintering into Neo-Hittite city-states that lingered into the 8th century BC. Egypt kept its own rhythm. Its Bronze Age began in the Protodynastic Period around 3150 BC, and around 3100 BC the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt moved the capital from Abydos to Memphis under an Egyptian god-king. Memphis became the largest city of its time. The First Intermediate Period, often called a dark period, ran roughly from 2181 to 2055 BC, splitting rule between Heracleopolis and Thebes until Theban kings reconquered the north. Far to the east lay Elam, a pre-Iranian civilisation centred first in Anshan, then in Susa in the Khuzestan lowlands. Its culture played a role in both the Gutian Empire and the later Achaemenid dynasty. The name Israel first appears around 1209 BC, at the close of the Late Bronze Age, on the Merneptah Stele raised by the pharaoh Merneptah.

• 5. The Eastern Frontier

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  In China, the earliest bronze artefacts come from the Majiayao culture site, dated 3100 to 2700 BC. There is no agreed convention delimiting a Chinese Bronze Age, and some argue it never properly ended, since there was no recognisable transition to iron. Chinese ritual bronzes are highly decorated, often with the taotie motif of stylised animal faces. The large sacrificial tripods called dings, and the cast inscriptions on many bronzes, form the bulk of surviving early Chinese writing. The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, also called the Oxus civilisation, flourished around 2400 in present-day northern Afghanistan and neighbouring lands. Its sites were discovered and named by the Soviet archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi in 1976. The Altai Mountains gave rise to a cultural enigma called the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon. Around 2000 BC, conjectured climate change there may have triggered a rapid migration across a frontier of some 4000 miles, in just five to six generations, carrying the same metalworking from Finland to Thailand. Korea entered the Bronze Age around 1000 to 800 BC. There, bronze daggers lent prestige and authority, and were buried with high-status individuals in megalithic graves at south-coastal sites such as Igeum-dong.

• 6. Europe's Many Bronzes

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  The oldest golden artefacts in the world are dated between 4600 and 4200 BC, found in the Necropolis of Varna in Bulgaria. Radivojevic and colleagues reported in 2013 a tin bronze foil from Pločnik dated to around 4650 BC, arguing early tin bronze developed independently in Europe some 1500 years before the Near East. The Dabene Treasure near Karlovo, unearthed from 2004 to 2007, held 20,000 gold items, including a dagger of gold and platinum. In Great Britain the Bronze Age ran from about 2100 to 750 BC. Tooth enamel isotope research on bodies near Stonehenge shows at least some migrants came from the area of present-day Switzerland. Devon and Cornwall were major tin sources for much of western Europe, while one copper mine at Great Orme in North Wales reached a depth of 70 metres. The greatest quantities of bronze objects in England came from East Cambridgeshire, including the 6,500-piece Isleham Hoard. The Northern Bronze Age in Scandinavia, around 1700 to 500 BC, left rich objects of wool, wood, and imported metal. Thousands of its rock carvings depict ships, most probably sewn plank-built canoes for warfare, fishing, and trade. On the steppe, the Sintashta culture holds the earliest known chariots, found in its burials.

• 7. How The World Unraveled

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  At the end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean, the trade network that held everything together appears to have failed. The Aegean Bronze Age had begun around 3200 BC with a far-ranging network that imported tin and charcoal to Cyprus, where copper was mined and alloyed into bronze for export. Isotopic analysis of tin in some Mediterranean artefacts suggests origins in Bronze Age Britain. The Minoan civilisation, based at Knossos on Crete, coordinated and defended this trade. When the network broke, Minoan client states lost much of their population to famine and pestilence, with no distant resources left to relieve them. Several explanations compete. One blames the exhaustion of the Cypriot forests; experiments show that charcoal production on the scale needed for late Bronze Age bronze would have stripped them in under 50 years. Another notes that as iron tools spread, the justification for the tin trade ended. The Thera eruption, around 1600 BC and 110 km north of Crete, looms over the debate. A tsunami may have destroyed the Cretan navy in its home harbour, leaving Crete vulnerable, so that around 1450 BC its cities burned and Mycenaeans conquered Knossos. The Mycenaean Greeks first enter the historical record a few decades after the eruption, around 1600 BC, beginning a steady encroachment that would later reach Troy around 1250 BC.