The Real Reason the Bronze Age Collapsed
Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
The Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC wiped out the Hittites, Mycenaeans, and other great powers, and no comparable empires returned for centuries. Patrick Fitzsimmons argues that the usual suspects—drought, Sea Peoples, famine—don't explain why recovery was so slow. The real culprit: iron. Once ordinary farmers could make weapons locally, the imperial monopoly on violence vanished, and the political equilibrium shifted forever.
The question is not why the Bronze Age empires fell, but why, after they fell, nothing like them returned for centuries.
- falaki
Long before the so-called “iron age” started, humans knew of iron. There are iron artifacts from the 4th millennium BCE. Humans were fascinated by these small pieces of iron, which were found in meteorites and cherished and valued them. However, usable iron was rare and extremely sought after to the extent that we know it was more valuable than gold or silver. How did humans invent the first technique to produce metallic Iron from ore?
The story of Iron starts with the production of Bronze. Bronze is an alloy of 90% copper. Depending on what constitutes the other 10% we get different types of bronze. The most common type which kick started the bronze age around 3500 BCE in western Asia is tin bronze. Unlike copper ore, tin is hard to find but a small amount of it can significantly improve the quality of copper and make it usable and strong. Ancient smelters produced bronze by melting the natural copper ore mixed with tin ore in simple kilns. The resulting bronze was the primary metal used in tools and arts for more than 2500 years.
Iron is a common impurity in copper ores. We also know that iron ore can, and was, used as a flux in the process of smelting copper. In simple terms, a flux agent is a chemical that attracts oxygen to itself and protects the primary product, which is copper, from oxidizing in high temperatures. Therefore, across the ancient world, bronze smelters had been encountering molten iron when they raised the kiln temperature high enough. However, they dis […]
- randomImmigrant
Well, doesn’t the Harappan civilization make a mess out of all this? Tin was nearby, and there’s evidence of bronze artifacts in all kinds of houses across the cities, and in general less evidence of hierarchical power, and certainly nothing like the concentration you see in other Bronze Age civilizations. We don’t have the civilization surviving as is to the Iron Age, because it depopulated before iron smelting became common. But it’s odd to make the claim bronze had to lead to stratified societies. Clearly, not always.
- ericmay
Fun article. I think that there is a lot of interesting information here that would help explain what we saw with the Bronze Age Collapse, though I would submit that this is just another of the multiple factors that led to the collapse. Maybe a drought occurs, folks turn to iron weapons, and then take over another town or village for their resources, and so on.
This could lead to supply chain collapses and such. Maybe just general destabilization and raids and such sort of collapsed the larger empires. But at the same time, those larger empires would also have had access to iron, so why couldn't they by matter of numerical superiority, access to greater resources, tactics and military organization, and more simply, overwhelm smaller armies or bands utilizing the same technology and restore order or at least defend themselves?
I just started reading Conrad Black's historical series and in the Egyptian chapter and also the Assyria/Babylonia chapter he references the historical accounts where time and time again Egyptian forces led by the pharaoh would march into the broader Middle East to restore order. Why couldn't they continue to do that?
- sourdecor
I thought this was a cool fact about the Bronze Age: "According to a new study, it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites".[0]
[0]: https://www.sciencealert.com/bronze-age-artefacts-have-meteo...
- silverFork
Interesting : "some also alluded to the idea that iron had democratized violence"