Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a period usually marked out by the development of Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin and a period in which human civilization really got going. In the late Stone Age basic agriculture had been worked out and a few farming communities had emerged, small permanent and semi-perminant villages and towns with a few workshops and storehouses surrounded by farmsteads. By the Bronze Age these had developed into fairly substantial and sophisticated societies with a high degree of specialization and stratification, complex governments, laws in place of customs and widespread trade networks reaching for thousands of kilometers. Writing and mathematics were developed as tools of governments and were used to build large scale projects. At this time cities' populations grew into the tens of thousands, first as independent city states and later as empires.
Beyond these early centers of civilization newer if smaller scale agrarian societies would emerge and rise while nomadic pastoral peoples would develop along their own lines and would trade and fight with both the growing city states, the small scale farming clans and the remaining hunter/gatherers. The more developed civilizations soon came to see them as Barbarians.
Technically the Bronze Age was preceded by the Copper Age in which the basics of metalworking were worked out and first applied and which developments in other areas were made such as construction and ceramics, but for sake of simplicity on this site it's getting lumped in with the Bronze Age. Copper smelting began 8,000 years ago. Bronze Smelting began around 5,700 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and China about the same time and would spread from those two points although in 2013 tin bronze foil was discovered in the Balkans and dated to 4650 BCE indicating that bronze may have been discovered independently in a much wider area. It should also be noted that Bronze took some time to fully replace copper to tool use.
Generally speaking, the Bronze Age ended in the Fertile Crescent region after the Bronze Age collapse, in which several old civilizations fell or were devastated as ferrous metallurgy began to catch on. When civilization recovered and rebuilt, new ones rose in their place. In China the end of the Bronze Age was more gradual and less dramatic, iron working showed up and superseded Bronze without too much fuss between 900 BCE to 500 BCE. Several Native American civilizations (such as the Incas and the Aztecs) would reach a Bronze Age level of development before the arrival of more advanced Europeans. Their development was hampered by a lack of large domestic mammals suitable for draft purposes or riding (and the lack of Poxes from those animals would cause an accidental genocide as the colonial forces, on top of already destroying the Aztecs (with local help as the Aztecs were arguably the biggest assholes in the Americas. Turns out human sacrifice of prisoners makes one resented) pretty much unwittingly committed the largest act of biological warfare in history). The Andeans had llamas, which was better than nothing but was no horse or ox.
The Fertile Crescent[edit]
The Earliest agrarian societies on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea and what is now Iraq, which saw the emergence of the first and the most successful bronze age civilizations.
Mesopotamia[edit]
Located in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, Mesopotamia is often called the Birthplace of Civilization. It was the site of the first agrarian communities in the neolithic period and latter saw the emergence of city states as we would understand them. Numerous cities would rise along the banks of these rivers, using it for transport and more importantly irrigation. This was a place with little rain and the rivers were rather unreliable. To make it productive, a lot of channels and ditches were required and you'd also want reserves of food set aside in granaries and water in reservoirs. Doing so was both labor intensive and required a lot of coordination. That said, properly managed it could support cities with tens of thousands of people. Possibly more than a hundred thousand.
There were numerous city states in Mesopotamia, which would wax and wane in power. In particular there was Uruk, Akkad and most famous Babylon. Power would shift between Priest Kings to more military monarchs. In particular, this gave rise to the notion of The Rule of Law with legal codes such as that of Hammurabi, which was set in stone in steles in public places for all to see. While it was rather brutal ("An Eye for an Eye") it laid out the notion that there is one set of laws for everyone, even (in theory at least) to the King. It was filled with double and triple standards of course, but it was certainly better than the near literal no standards from before.
There were several cultures which neighbored Mesopotamia. To the east in what was now Iran there various bronze age cultures emerging shortly after Mesopotamia and following it's lead. It was home to overland trade-routes with India. To the west in what is now Turkey was a set of similar cultures, most notable of which were the Hittites that rose towards the end of the Bronze Age.
Egypt[edit]
Ancient Egypt is probably the most famous archetypal Bronze Age civilization. Modern Egyptology started with Napoleon, who took an interest in the pyramids such and hired artists, reporters and scholars to study the ruins (most notably finding the Rosetta Stone that let them decode their written language) and report back to France and has been going strong ever since. It helps that Egypt is a very desiccated place and we have a lot of records buried in the sand.
Like Mesopotamia, Egypt is based around a river which ran through a desert. Unlike Mesopotamia, the River was easy to work with. Between May and August the Nile would flood. Once it receded, the flood plain was both wet and fertile from freshly deposited sediment. In practical terms this meant that Egyptian Agriculture was on easy mode. High yields with little work and during inundation people had a lot of free time on their hands, which they often spent building Pyramids. There was little point for Egypt in making war; all the surrounding lands were barren desert, and most of their neighbors depended on trade with Egypt for food anyway. This meant the Pharaohs could easily afford enough men, horses, and chariots to keep anyone else from getting ideas (at least until the Greeks and Romans showed up).
A really outstanding fact about Egypt is that it was remarkably stable. From roughly 3150 BCE to 525 BCE Egypt existed as a political entity without much internal societal upheaval. There were periods of disruption and instability, but they were always fairly brief with people returning to the status quo with Pharaohs, priesthoods, nomearchs and so forth. Similarly there was a lot of continuity of culture. A few new technologies were introduced (Bronzeworking and chariots) but the overall impact on people's day to day lives was highly limited. It's easy to identify what dynasty an Imperial Chinese porcelain plate was made in based on it's style or what century a picture of a medieval knight was made in based on his armor. In contrast you would be hard pressed to find the stylistic difference between an Egyptian statue of a Pharaoh from 2600 BCE and one from 26 BCE of Caesar. Hell, Augustus's Pharaonic statues from around 10 CE look barely different from Narmer's palettes from around 3000 BCE.
Canaan/Israel[edit]
Of particular note because of how much of the legends and histories of this particular region has shaped Western culture and fantasy, Canaan/Israel is probably the second-most famous Bronze Age civilization after Egypt. While debate continues as to whether the legends passed down in the Hebrew Bible date from the Bronze or Iron Age, it is nonetheless some of the earliest documented history, if such a term be applicable, of the Fertile Crescent available to modern audiences. Modern conceptions of angels, sin, sacrifices, and other theological practices as well as the ideas of ancient progenitor bloodlines and the manner of Bronze Age customs, especially before the archeological renaissance of the 1800s, can be traced to the ancient Isrealite/Canaanite culture and lore.
East Asia[edit]
The first use of bronze in China is dated at around 3100-2700 BCE although more concrete delineation is a bit difficult due to aforementioned smooth transition to the Iron Age and bronze being in continuous use since it was seen as a fancy material alongside jade. Chinese historians roughly equate early Bronze Age with the Shang Dynasty and late Bronze Age with Zhou Dynasty. In terms of cultural and social sophistication it was basically ˝China-lite˝ as the various elements that will come to define China were just getting started though as the picture on the left shows they were as advanced as the Egyptians and Sumerians.
Korea had begun using bronze by 1000-800 BCE which they adopted from the neighbouring Liaoning and Manchu cultures though they developed their unique style and culture. The Bronze Age in Korea corresponds generally with the Mumun period during which their societies progressed from isolated villages of pit-houses in the classical part to sprawling settlements numbering hundreds of houses secured by several ditch enclosures along with megalithic burial sites. During the late Mumun there was apparently an increase of conflict as the amount of settlements decreased and many transformed into hilltop forts with even more elaborate ditches, at this time iron also started entering use as well.
Japanese Bronze Age corresponds roughly to the Yayoi period at around 300 BCE when it was brought by settlers from Korea to northern Kyushu and then spread out north-west. This period was also marked by a complex interplay of migrants from the Korean peninsula and the more native Yomon - the former being displaced by the more chinese-like northerners, there is however little evidence of conflict and the two cultures apparently merged and bolstered Japan with new tech and culture (sounds kinda familiar, hmmm...).
Europe[edit]
Being relatively close to the Fertile Crescent and consisting largely of peninsulas reachable by maritime travelers, Europe was able to profit from the Bronze Age developments relatively early on. The period started with the Aegean Bronze Age in 3200 BC and spanned the entire 2nd millennium BC lasting until ~800 BC in central Europe. It is worth noting however that the Balkan area (centering on modern Romania, Serbia and northern Croatia) was likely doing metalworking on it's own as far back as 3700 BC, further adding to the proliferation of copper and bronze throughout Europe.
The two most well known and developed European Bronze Age civilizations are the Myceneans and Minoans, both situated in the Aegean region of south-west Europe. The Myceneans were essentially proto-Greeks with a sophisticated society that utilized stone and metals in everyday life. The city of Mycenae had a reasonably complex layout with a palace, graveyard and impressive cyclopean walls. Conversely the Minoans were their own thing and even more advanced that their mainland cousins, constructing vast palatial complexes that featured four-story buildings, sewer systems and architecture that circulated air and kept the interiors cool during the summer. However, due to the lack of major river systems and suitable climate, along with fairly hilly geography, southeastern Europe could not develop vast civilizations like those found in wide river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt, having to contend itself with somewhat limited agriculture focused on valleys surrounded by mountains which limited the carrying capacity of land and thus the size of polities there.
Elsewhere in Europe, the situation becomes more interesting but also more muddled by the mists of time. Recent archaeological research has shown that central, western and parts of northern Europe were by the time of the Bronze Age home of a number of fairly sophisticated cultures that were capable of producing artifacts of great beauty and complexity such as Tumulus, Unetice, Terramare and Apenine culture, to name a few. Unfortunately they could not move from culture to civilization stage since a great limiting factor in this regard was the aforementioned absence of fertile river valleys that offered relatively constant and secure stream of water around which vast agricultural areas could be organized. The only such place in Europe would have been the Po river valley but the area was thick with forests and marshes which inhibited agriculture, not to mention harsher weather and as one would go north, these factors would become increasingly more prevalent. This absence of large-scale agriculture may have had a silver lining of a sorts, as the absence of large and organized societies led to the development of a more tribal and democratic societies based around chiefs elected/supported by their cadre of warriors who could depose them in moots if the head honcho was not to their liking. Millenia later these systems would make their way into the crumbling Roman Empire and indirectly give rise to the eventual modern European democracy along with a more direct inspiration taken from the Greeks.
Another issue facing modern archaeology and hindering our knowledge about Copper and Bronze Age Europeans is the fact that a large portion of buildings were made out of wood which rotted as the centuries rolled by, leaving only the foundation holes in the ground as some clue as to the size and shape of the structure. Thus, the vast parts of central and northern Europe were dotted with villages and small towns made of wood, mud and a bit of stone that nevertheless had a respectable amount of culture and even trade which for instance brought amber from as far north as modern Denmark and Kaliningrad. Thankfully - since earth and a bit of stone were also used and usually for funerary structures which would also contain the largest amount of artifacts we have evidence of fortresses and even towns like Arkaim, Hünenburg or Los Millares while artificial hill-tombs called Tumuli represent Europe's equivalent of Pyramids and Kofun.
Americas[edit]
Agriculture started up a bit latter in the Americas than in Eurasia or Africa starting with Squash in Mexico and Potatoes in the Andes 10,000 years ago and taking until about 6,000 years ago to come into it's own as new cultivars were domesticated. By 2000 BCE Gold Smelting had begun in the Andes followed by copper smelting by 1100 BCE and limited bronze-working was under way by 500 BCE. In Mexico, metalworking had begun by 800 CE with copper and gold, but even with limited metallurgy both regions did produce sophisticated civilizations which had evolved along their own courses in isolation from Eurasia.
In the rainforests of the Yucatan Peninsula, the Maya people gradually rose and really came into their own around 250 CE. They were not a single nation, but a collection of city states, some of which would make alliances or conquer their neighbors from time to time. But despite their lack of beasts of burden or metal tools, the Maya did build some sizeable cities with large pyramidal monuments, raincathers and worked out a system of writing and some fairly advanced mathematics and astronomy. Unfortunately they went into decline around 900, never quite collapsing but they were definitely diminished. Exactly why this happens is unknown and disputed, though a new power would rise to the West.
Around 1250 or so, a bunch of people called the Aztecs moved south. As the story goes, these migrants were looking for a place to settle following a prophecy that they'd find it when the say an eagle eating a snake on a prickly pair cactus. Eventually they found the sign, on a small island in the middle of a lake. Despite everything they built their city of Tenochtitlan in that lake along with a bunch of farms on reed mats. By 1428 the Aztecs got into some alliances and went a conquering, becoming an Empire. They were a Feudal Society with lords and hereditary warrior classes and they could field vast armies which they used to extract tribute from their rivals, including captives to either work as slaves or be sacrificed. Their city never really died; ancient Tenochtitlan today sits at the very center of Mexico City, and many colonial era buildings were built from Aztec ruins.
To the South, things went in their own unique way. See the Andes are the second tallest mountains on earth and so even though they straddle the equator it can still get cold up there in the thin mountain air. It also varies a lot with Rain-forests, glaciers, cool peaks, grassland, scrubland and desert all packed up real tight. There were a bunch of cultures rising and falling and generally doing their own thing. One these was the Kingdom of Cusco, ruled by a dynasty that claimed to be the children of the Sun God Inti. In 1438 got a new leader called Pachacuti (Reformer of the World) who pulled off a successful Great Crusade, forging Tawantinsuyu ("The Four Parts Combined") or more commonly known as the Inca Empire.
The Inca Empire was freaking huge, covering 2,000,000 km² linked together by a vast network of roads and way stations. If you bordered them, the Inca would offer you gifts and promise you that you'd keep your old position of power and get access to stored wealth of the Empire in exchange for having to contribute to Tawantisuyu. If you refuse the Inca would send forty thousand men with maces, bows and spears to murderize you and put someone better in charge. Most people went with the former. They did not have a system of writing but they did have something roughly similar for keeping records called a Quipu, basically a set of strings with a code of knots tied into them.
Unfortunately for the Maya, Aztecs and the Incas, First Contact with Europeans was disastrous. Diseases ravaged their population, soldiers with horses, guns and steel armor and weapons could best their armies with obsidian swords and bronze star-head maces and they caused a lot of political instability and exploited it to dominate.
Notes[edit]
- Money did not really exist back then. Peasants would give each other gifts and would do stuff for each other as they could (you give me some pots and I'll fix your roof when I can), governments paid people wages of food and goods and merchants haggled various goods with local officials, regular people and each other as they went. There were a few things that merchants preferred to deal in which were easier to deal with (bolts of cloth, ingots of metal, cowrie shells) but it was still an informal matter. This would vanish later, and China, Greece, Egypt and Philistines had all established currency a hundreds of years before 1000 B.C. (possibly earlier). That said, the earliest forms of money were contrived as aides to accounting by bronze age bureaucrats, since shifting large amounts of grain about from hold to hold is hard work with a Shekel being pegged at a bushel of barley.
- despite the general lack of money there was a lot of trade, Often at great distance. To make bronze you need copper (common) and tin which is pretty rare actually. Most of the tin used in the Mediterranean is believed to be from England of all places. In fact the World's oldest customer complaint, a clay table addressed to "Ea-nasir" regarding some poor quality copper dates to 1750 BCE, right in the middle of the Bronze Age.
- The shift to agriculture meant that humans started needing supplemental dietary salt to live, as well as to preserve meat. Salt trade with areas able to mine or harvest it in useful quantities would become the first major form of commerce between empires.
- Pastoral Peoples emerged during this time. They had herds of livestock which they moved around with for food and fiber, sometimes engaging in a bit of agriculture on the side. Since they were always on the move, they lived light with stuff they could transport and they often played an important role in trade between city states. Often there would be clashes with Pastoral people and Agrarian nomads. Though they would decline as more areas turned to agriculture would often be the case until fairly recently (like 1500 years ago). The Mongols were the last great Hurrah! of pastorals.
- Many of the more developed Bronze Age societies had many aspects of society organized by the government. The government told peasants what to grow, collected taxes of food and similar from them, took them to central warehouses, gave artisans wages of stuff for making tools and weapons which they would use to pay people and distribute to people who needed them. All of which managed by castes of scribes and nobles. Basically think of the Imperial Tithe minus most of the Grimdark.
- Chariots! Animal domestication lead to animals that could pull carts, which were then weaponized. In places where flat land was plentiful, it was very hard to engage in a combat against a wheeled cart that was shooting arrows at you, and even harder if there was a full formation of the things. Cart, animals, trained soldiers, and weapons got expensive in a hurry, especially for chariots which need two animals. As such they were replaced by cavalry once we bred horses to be big enough to take a human rider by it self, drastically reducing the price and support resources.
- A lot of what we think of as being part of the Classical Era has its roots in the Bronze Age. For example, the Egyptians have an extremely long history that stretches from the dawn of civilization to the rise of the Hellenic empire, much, much later. And the most famous Greek stories we know of by Homer, were written prior to the Classical age in what we know as “Archaic Greece,” and he was talking about a Greece even older than that that was effectively lost to its own Dark Ages. Much of what we know about this time period comes to us indirectly from the oral traditions of classical poets and historians, especially if the writing system of those societies became lost.
The appeal of the Bronze Age[edit]
The Bronze Age is the earliest period that we have accounts of, even if they are scant, fragmentary and incomplete. It is in this time that the earliest forms of civilization are gradually taking shape, and we know more of the shapes it took in those formative years than about the specifics of any particular band or tribe of stone age people. From big things like the Codes of Hammurabi to the fact that some fellow in Mesopotamia around 5,200 years ago was named Iry-Hor.
To the eye of the romantic, priest-kings reign over populations of devoted followers who demand that their legacy be set in stone with great monuments and by fire and blood as they clash for power and prominence. Ranks of spearmen and bowmen march into battle led by charioteers which clash on burning sands with the winners taking the losers as spoils of war. The heroes might be favored faithful servants to their city and their king and the new world that is rising or barbarian warriors seeking glory, freedom and plunder on the frontiers. Their deeds to be remembered in epic poetry, or inscribed into clay tablets by scribes.
If we want to get more fantastic, this period has produced complex mythologies with pantheons of squabbling gods and epic tales such as the story of Gilgamesh and the Trojan Wars. All of which are ripe material for a fantasy writer to mine. This is the time period for the Sword and Sorcery genre, as most of the myths that we know of from the classical period take place in this epoch. This gives the Bronze Age an air of mystique and grand adventure, where larger-than-life heroes fought against monsters and gods. Something that’s generally not possible with the even earlier Stone Age as the culture of that time period is too primitive to tell such grandiose stories, and where survival is really all that’s possible.
In addition to the above, the Bronze Age is also one of the main influences that gave us the "Lost Ancient Ruins"-trope. We have only very vague ideas of why the Bronze Age ended, and what followed was a long, barbaric time where things regressed hard. Unlike the fall of the Roman Empire and many of the Chinese Dynasties, the Bronze Age gives off this sense of complete mystery; who were these ancient people? How come they dissappeared, and how could they have been so advanced? In popular fiction culture, those lost civilizations are often eventually revealed to have been decadent priesthoods who built insanely huge monuments and made outstanding crafts (relics and macguffins our heroes and villains can fight over), but had some large flaw that was their downfall. Apart from the relics of incredible power, the Bronze Age has all these features.
The people of the bronze age had a very tangible relationship with their deities, constructing temples and shrines on scales seemingly beyond the means available to them... and begging the question whether forces beyond the knowledge of history played a part. Fantasies of aliens visiting Earth in the distant past and being received as gods by primitive humans are lent an air of credulity by the enormity of the monuments the ancient empires left behind. Not the part where all pyramids look the same though. The only thing that lends credulity towards is the fact that that is simply the best way to lay down a huge structure without concrete or steel.
In the Bronze Age, a rough template for a social order for agrarian societies would be outlined. There would be city states and kingdoms who's population would be divided up into various largely hereditary classes of kings, nobles, priests, scribes, warriors, artisans, merchants, peasants and slaves. Most of whom were rural supporting a few urban centers, wealth was mostly calculated in terms of food and agricultural productivity, most people never travel more than 20km from the place of their birth, work would be done mostly by hand with some applications of animal power and a few instances of utilizing wind and running water (boats with sails and traveling down river). While there would be exceptions, significant changes within these parameters and a lot of variations on the theme, this set up would predominate until the Industrial Revolution.
Bronze Age inspired Games, Factions and Settings[edit]
- Conan the Barbarian
- Tomb Kings
- Stargate
- Mythic Vistas - This series of splatbooks by Green Ronin started with "Testament", a fairly beefy splatbook centered around Bronze Age Historical Fantasy using the "Biblical Era" as its starting region.
| Historical Time Periods | |
|---|---|
| Deep Time: | Prehistory |
| Premodern: | Stone Age - Bronze Age - Classical Period - Dark Age - High Middle Ages - Renaissance |
| Modern: | Age of Enlightenment - Industrial Revolution - The World Wars - The Cold War - Post-Cold War |