Why the Bronze Age Collapsed(worksinprogress.news) |
Why the Bronze Age Collapsed(worksinprogress.news) |
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 discarded the resulting metal because its copper impurity made it too soft and inferior to bronze.
Around 1,200 BCE the collapse of bronze age civilizations in the near east due to a “perfect storm” of drought, famine, disease, immigration and war affected trade routes that brought tin ore to the western Asia. During this time of bronze shortage some smelters seem to have resorted to using the lower quality iron for tool making. They had observed that adding carbon to iron makes it much harder but prone to breaking. We have evidence of iron tools built with layers of soft and hard iron to achieve desired outcomes. Over time iron smelters experimented with different amounts of carbon impurity and achieved desired levels of hardness and strength.
1: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxi2veZE2Uvm0VQUbAjGROCQoILO8...
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?
[0]: https://www.sciencealert.com/bronze-age-artefacts-have-meteo...
Bronze is harder and more corrosion resistant, but forged iron (and especially iron that has been reforged) has a higher yield strength and is lighter, allowing longer lighter weapons. Compare the profile of bronze age and iron age swords in any museum and you can see that the bronze blades are shorter and wider that the iron weapons, and they would be considerably heavier.
"Quantity has a quality all its own"
It's true that when iron was first smelted and the first steel was made, it was structurally different to the Bronze economy. Iron is abundant and local. It doesn't require the same trade network (of copper and tin).
I'm surprised this article doesn't mention the Uluburun shipwreck [1]. It's archeologically important because it provides primary evidence of how extensive Bronze age trade networks were.
At best the author is theorizing not why the Bronze age collapse happened but why the empires and trade networks of that era didn't come back. But that's a different question.
We also have direct primary evidence from this time of the Sea Peoples [2]. To this day nobody really knows where they came from or why. Many modern scholars believe they may have been refugees themselves, possibly from natural disasters or droughts.
The most likely explanation for all this is that there was no single factor. All of these things likely contributed. It's still unclear why the collapse was so extensive and relatively sudden. That's not really satisfying but we've had fragile systems before that have collapsed suddenly and violently. Look at the outbreak of World War One as one major example.
One of my favorite phrases here is Outside Context Problem [3], which originates from the Iain M. Banks Culture novel Excession (love this book). It pretty accurately describes the collapses that happened in the Americas in the colonial era.
[1]: https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/case-studies/a9360-lost...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples
[3]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutsideContextPr...
”Tin with trace levels of indium, particular to the Cornish deposits, has been found in shipwrecks near Israel and southern France”
Thanks for the direct link though. It’s very interesting.
I'm also not sure about your suggestion. Yes small polities had the means to defend themselves, but the pharaoh's army is much larger and you're definitely going to die if he shows up and you fight back. So why wouldn't the pharaoh have shown up to put down a rebellion? Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
I'm just not sure that this democratization of violence is the answer. Though it may be a key contributor. Curious about your thoughts or others. Incredibly fascinating topic.
Carbonization was invented/discovered after the Bronze Age collapse, slowly over hundreds of years, exactly because they didn’t have access to bronze anymore.
And yes, the common people might have been better off under larger empires than under smaller ones, but who has ever cared about the common people? The upper class were probably more "I'd rather be the king of a small kingdom than bend my knee to an emperor."
Bronze age empires were large -- if the pharaoh couldn't trust his subordinates he could only be in one place at a time.
And when all those rebellions cost the Pharaoh 3x what they used to to put down you're forced to be a lot more diplomatic. Less extraction under threat of violence means worse negotiating position for the next one. It's a cycle.
And for every full scale armies meeting in the field type rebellion there's a lot of "sir a second village has lynched the tax men" which compel you to dispense policing forces, etc, etc.
Just because you "can" do something in moderation doesn't mean it's a sustainable way to run your empire at scale.
You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes. And you can't just "supervise" them with your loyal people because this is pre-industrial and there do not exist sufficient surpluses to feed those nonproductive mouths.
Of course, that leads to questions like "Why does the small group wind up with the good weapons? Why doesn't the large group get them, even if there aren't enough for all of them?"
But maybe the iron smelting isn't happening in downtown Memphis. Maybe it's happening out in the hinterland somewhere, and so the locals have a chance to grab all the output.