Innholdsfortegnelse for Bronze Age i Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is often seen as an age of mystery and magic, but it’s also the age in which civilisation as we know it began. The discovery of bronze created something much more complex than an alloy of copper and tin: it created the technologies and trade networks needed to acquire and process those raw materials. It tamed horses, built sailing ships and wheeled vehicles to transport goods, brought people together in larger communities, and built walls and social structures around them; it created systems of writing so that they could keep tallies of trade and write letters to each other across bigger distances than many people had ever travelled before. The story of the Bronze Age is the story of how our world began, and you can discover…

Archaeologists will tell you that in their world “Context is king.” Where an artefact is found and the items found alongside it are often just as important as the physical object itself. The relationships between finds can tell us a great deal about the past. One of the first to think about archaeology in this way was Christian Jürgensen Thomsen – father of the Bronze Age. CURATING THE PAST People have always been fascinated by the past. The Roman statesman Cicero went looking for the lost and forgotten tomb of the mathematician Archimedes in 75 BCE while in the 2nd century CE Pausanias wrote ten books describing Greece and the ancient sites that could be found there. His work was used as a guide for hundreds of years for those…

Like Hesiod, other Greek writers saw the metaphorical value of metals in describing humanity. In Plato’s Republic he explains that to get people to take their proper place in society, and be content there, they must be told a noble lie about their origins. In the Republic, people will be told they were formed from soil by the gods and into each of them was placed a soul made from Gold, Silver, or Bronze. The Golden-souled are those destined to rule over all other people. They will be what Plato called Philosopher Kings and spend their time in contemplation as well as being forced to wield the ruling power in their society. The Silver souls are the auxiliaries who make up the warrior caste of the Republic. Given a valuable…

The massive technological innovations of the Bronze Age didn’t arise in a vacuum. It can be tempting to think of the inception of metalworking as a sudden jolt that shook Stone Age society to its core, but it was in fact the next stage in a process that had begun centuries beforehand. The anthropological three-age system is divided into a trinity of evolving technologies, starting with the flint tools of our earliest modern-human ancestors and progressing to the use of bronze and then iron. But the ‘Stone Age’ itself is something of a broad term, and the primitive cavemen of the popular imagination are nothing like the (sometimes surprisingly sophisticated) people who actually lived in it. For a start, there were several eras within the Stone Age, encompassing many centuries.…

If you want to make bronze then the first things you need are the raw ingredients of copper and tin. Copper is a fairly commonplace metal that should prove no difficulty to find, but tin is a fair rarer commodity. Major sources of tin in the ancient world were few and far between. For a bronze maker in Mesopotamia the deposits of tin in Cornwall or Yunan might as well have been on the Moon. If you wanted to make bronze, however, you had to find some way of bringing the tin to you. The Bronze Age peoples developed networks of trade that reached across continents and drove innovations to speed up the transfer of goods. THE TIN TRADE The earliest Bronze Age items appear to be objects designed to…

Under the beating sun of Turkey, just north-east of the modern day city of Kayseri, lies the ancient site of Kültepe. Here, a huge tel rises out of the earth, towering over an Assyrian town which lies below. This site was an important middle Bronze Age trading colony in the Near East during the second millennium BCE. Famous for the sheer number of cuneiform tablets discovered within its walls, it is the site where the earliest examples of the Hittite language have been found to date, and the first evidence of any Indo-European language discovered in the world. Such tablets were preserved after a fire engulfed the city in around 1836 BCE, preserving a glimpse into everyday life within these households as a snapshot in time with the ensuing destruction.…

Creating weapons from bronze was a huge advance in weapons technology. Casting allowed metalworkers to create swords, daggers, and arrowheads in a variety of shapes. Bronze armour, although particularly heavy, would offer almost complete protection. The major drawbacks with bronze are that it requires tin to create, and does not hold a sharp edge. With the development of iron smelting (~1300 BCE in the Near East), bronze weapons fell into disuse. Yet archaeologists have discovered iron tools and weapons from periods well before iron could be mined. These Bronze Age iron artefacts range from daggers from 2500 BCE in Turkey, to axe heads from 1400 BCE found in both Ugarit and China. Where did Bronze Age people get iron from? The answer is from space, though not from aliens. Iron…

In 2004 two metal-detectorists uncovered a collection of objects when walking the recently ploughed fields of Burton, Wrexham, in north-eastern Wales. Said to contain items unparalleled in Britain, the artefacts are thought to date to the middle Bronze Age, around 1300-1150 BCE. The Burton Hoard itself is comprised of bronze tools and gold jewellery. While most of the items were hidden inside a ceramic pot, a chisel and two hatchets were buried alongside. It is debated whether these items belonged to a rich family or an individual, or might be gathered together as part of trading activities. Some suggest the careful burial indicate that it might represent a ritual offering, or dedication to a dead loved one, yet buried separately from their body. The two palstaves show extensive wear, possibly…

THE RINGS Four rings were found, made of layers of gold and etched with scenes depicting typically Minoan motifs. One shows a leaping bull, another depicts a woman offering a bull’s horn to a goddess who is seated on a throne and holding a mirror. Then there are five finely-dressed women at a seaside shrine, while the fourth shows a woman holding a staff with two birds on either side. The Cretan artistry provided excellent evidence for cultural exchange. SEAL STONES Archaeologists discovered more than 50 seal stones (a sort of amulet) in the grave around the warrior’s skeleton. These seal stones were adorned with Minoan-style carvings that were depicting various things such as goddesses, lions, bulls, reeds and altars. It is thought that they were originally made in Crete.…

While the Indus Valley toys are not the oldest, they are one of the largest collections in existence and provide detailed information about what life was like for Bronze Age children, and about the history of play as a whole. The Indus Valley civilisation was an advanced Bronze Age culture prevalent in Southern Asia. Toys from the Indus Valley collection are hand-modelled from terracotta, with many of these hailing from Harappa, an important fortified city in Punjab, Pakistan. Experts believe that they are miniature replicas that depict everyday activities and items, reminiscent of the Playmobil sets that children use today. Dating to 2500 BCE, the collection includes brightly painted items from wheeled ram and zebu figurines, a bovine-like model with moving parts, a pot-bellied animal puppet with moving arms and…

The Indus Valley civilisation developed an intricate writing script, depicting hundreds of logographic visual symbols: dots, lines, geometric shapes, humans and animal forms. There seem to have been between 300 and 700 symbols, half of which were basic, with many compounds – indicating that it may have been a logosyllabic script, where each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single letter. Written from right to left, in rows from the top down, the endemic script adorned seals and trade goods, perhaps conveying ownership information, a protective invocation, or a dedication. It was also imposed on wooden signage, either for administrative purposes, to identify houses or to bless travellers. Across the Indus Valley, it appears that the rules of language, sentence structure and grammar were homogenous. Though various attempts have…

In the Old Kingdom before it and the New Kingdom that followed, the pharaoh’s rule was absolute. Priests, nobles and even the queen herself could act, with consent, on the king’s behalf, but for the most part, the pharaoh answered to no one but the gods. However, that definitive rule came under threat when the Old Kingdom crumbled and splintered into two separate realms. With two dynasties now vying for power, the normal authoritative structure of the kingdom was in ruins. Prior to the rise of the pharaohs, the entire country was divided into small administrative colonies known as nomes. Each nome had an appointed leader, or nomarch, and it was these independent city-states that the first pharaoh had to unite in order to establish Egypt as a single nation.…

The Late Neolithic Aegean was a simple place, a series of small, isolated communities scattered between Greece and Anatolia. Farmers lived peaceful lives, harvesting what barley and wheat they could, fishing in the Aegean and rearing domesticated animals. Dwellings were built of stone and tools were basic, fashioned of rock and bone, with cutting instruments forged from the black volcanic glass, obsidian. Society was egalitarian, ruled over by temporary leaders. However, everything changed around 3000 BCE with the arrival of bronze tools, and weapons, most likely from Anatolia or Mesopotamia to the east. The early Bronze Age coincided with the arrival of Indo-European invaders, who at first laid waste to the Aegean before coupling with the indigenous populace, bringing with them an early version of the Greek language. In this…

First settled in the Early Palaeolithic, by the Neolithic era, the northwest coast of Syria was littered with farming villages. In the early Bronze Age, the village of Ras Shamra had developed its own metallurgical culture, producing bronze spearheads, daggers, flat axes, needles and jewellery. After being briefly abandoned at the end of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire, it flourished again with the arrival of various nomads, such as the Amorites. By the 2nd millennium BCE, the village, some seven miles north of Latakia, blossomed into a port city, the heart of the most powerful Canaanite kingdom, Ugarit. Its strategic location at the nexus between the Egyptians, Assyrians, Hittites and Mesopotamians allowed the city to flourish financially, and culturally, as a trade hub at the…

Set like a jewel amid the irrigated fields that fed its (for the time) large population, the outlines of the town that Sarianidi called Margush and theorised was the capital of the BMAC can still be seen at the site of Gonur Tepe in Turkmenistan. Fortified behind walls and dominated by a ‘qila’ citadel (the word is Persian for ‘fort’, and the buildings are common to ancient Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, India, Pakistan and even parts of Israel), this proto-city could have supported a population of thousands. Its streets were lined with adobe mudbrick houses, each containing several comfortable, reasonably spacious rooms apiece – the inhabitants certainly weren’t crowded into low-quality, small homes. They had a water supply fed by a reservoir and not one but two sewage systems…

As the Bronze Age swept across the globe like a picnic blanket in a hurricane, the way in which each civilisation reacted to the era varied. The events of the Bronze Age period around Britain, Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal – also known as the Atlantic Bronze Age – were certainly no different. Though the cultures were strewn across thousands of miles of land (and sea), trends within the walls of this cultural complex were often very similar. A practice that became popular during the Atlantic Bronze Age was ritual hoard burials, which were exactly as they sound. Through digging up old Bronze Age sites, modern historians have discovered ancient people liked to bury large hoards of metal, including weapons, coins, jewellery and more, under the ground. The hoards were…

The Far East followed the rest of the world into the great Bronze Age with the start of the Shang dynasty, which saw a growth and maturity of a civilisation like no other. The phrase ‘Early Bronze Age’ is not often used in the context of China, with the time being almost synonymous with the Shang dynasty period of Chinese prehistory, dating from around 1600 to 1000 BCE. Likewise, the ‘Later Bronze Age’ is believed to be the equivalent of the country’s Zhou dynasty period, which last from 1000 to 300 BCE and ate into what was dubbed the ‘Iron Age’ from the 5th century BCE. Though the period encouraged a shift in organised labour force and skilful handiwork all over the world, the relics that have since been discovered…

Bronze Age is a loaded term. Many are happy to use it as an insult to call something backwards. Yet the more we study it the more remarkable the Bronze Age seems as a moment of transition and of startling innovation. Bronze is definitely not a loser’s metal. There is no global consensus as to when the Bronze Age occurred. Bronze, an alloy of copper with arsenic or tin, was first produced in large quantities around 3300 BCE in Mesopotamia. In Britain, on the other hand, bronze only became a common material around 2100 BCE. When talking about the Bronze Age we must be aware that it happened in different place and at different times. Also, no one at the time realised they were living in the age of bronze;…

Some found CJ Thomsen’s three-age system of prehistory to be too neat. They mockingly asked him why he did not include a Glass Age in his theory. Thomsen had a ready answer for his detractors – glass was found alongside artefacts from the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. When Thomsen grouped together his finds by where they were found, he discovered that glass beads were found with stone, bronze, and iron tools. Glass bowls, however, were only found alongside iron discoveries and offered further confirmation that the Iron Age occurred after the Bronze as bowls are much more difficult to manufacture. Glass was likely discovered in Mesopotamia around 3600 BCE, with small beads being the first objects made. These glass beads were transported into areas, such as northern Europe, which…

In the 16th century it was common for people to find ‘thunderstones’ left behind after lighting strikes. These stones were often axe or arrow-shaped with fine cutting edges. Those interested in natural philosophy collected them and were in no doubt that these thunderstones were simply the natural by-product of a storm. Today we know them to be tools crafted by ancient people. They resemble arrowheads because they are arrowheads. To get to our modern understanding of the past required a new way of conceiving the world. THE BIRTH OF ARCHAEOLOGY It was contact with peoples in the New World who still used stone arrowheads that allowed Europeans to identify thunderstones correctly for the first time. Broadened horizons of knowledge began to piece together much of the evidence available at the…

The Copper Age saw the first smelting and casting of metal tools. The bright gleam of copper and its ability to be shaped at need would have made it one of the wonders of the age. Yet for all its brilliance there is a flaw in copper – it flashes prettily but bends and deforms easily. You would have a hard time hammering a copper nail into wood. Something harder was needed if metal was to become truly useful. With smelting already invented, all that was needed was for people to learn to mix different kinds of metals together to make alloys. The Bronze Age was to be the age of the alloy. INVENTING BRONZE It can seem counter-intuitive, but alloying two metals together that are both soft can create…

The Greek historian Herodotus wrote in the 5th century BCE that “I cannot speak with certainty, however, about the marginal regions which lie toward the west, in Europe… Nor am I certain of the existence of the Cassiterides Islands, from which we get our tin… In any case, the far edges of the world are the source of the tin and amber that come to us.” He knew that tin was not native to the Greek world but only had the vaguest idea of where it did come from. That Cornwall in Britain has a large supply of tin has led to speculation that it was visited by traders thousands of years ago. Tin mining in Britain has been dated to around 2000 BCE. The Nebra Sky Disk found in…

“Ascend and walk about on the wall of Uruk, inspect the corner-stone, and examine its brick-work, whether its wall is not made of burned brick…” The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the walls of the city of Uruk as one of Gilgamesh’s greatest achievements. Written in ~2100 BCE, it shows how important defending cities and towns had become. One person up on a wall is able to keep many warriors below at bay. For many centuries the thick walls of cities was more than a match for any army outside. Sieges began as simple exercises in holding an enemy captive in their own town and starving them out. This takes a lot of time, and requires the attacking army to put a lot of resources into the effort. The word ‘siege’…

Much of archaeology is guess-work – educated guess-work, but still based on interpretation of often cryptic physical remains. While statues, homes and tools can all be evocative, they are silent relics of a history that will always be closed to us to some extent. With the rise of the Sumerian city-states and civilisation as we know it, however, we are granted our first chance to engage with the Bronze Age directly because they wrote down what they experienced. A HISTORY OF SUMER It is impossible to say when the first people moved into the area that would later be caller Sumer, the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is modern-day Iraq. Evidence of habitation at al-Ubaid has given the time before the rise of the Sumerian city-states…

As the speakers of Proto-Indo-European spread east and west, the words they had for wagon and wheel changed as speech communities became sundered from one another. However, significant similarities remained. For example, in Old English, the word for wheel was ‘hweohl’. In Old Norse it was ‘hvel’, while in Middle Dutch it was ‘wiel’. In ancient Greek, the word for wheel was ‘kuklos’, while in Old Indic it was ‘cakra’, and in Avestan Iranian it was ‘caxtra’. Latin had ‘rota’, while Old Irish possessed ‘roth’, and Old High German had ‘rad’. Various daughter languages also shared cognate words for ‘axle’, the part of a wagon around which the wheels spin (Latin ‘axis’ and Old English ‘eax’) and for the ‘thill’, the harness pole by which a wagon was pulled by…

Lasting from the 16th to 11th century BCE, the New Kingdom saw ancient Egypt transformed. Its kings and queens both looked ahead at the promising future of the realm and back in the hope of emulating the monarchs of the past. The empire was expanded by the swords of warrior kings, while the realm itself was rebuilt from the ground up by a new economic prosperity. This was ancient Egypt at its peak, as reflected in the resultant creative boom. The New Kingdom was preceded by another fracture known as the Second Intermediate Period. Towards the start of the 16th century BCE, a small warrior tribe known as the Hyksos had begun settling in the fertile land of the Delta (a group of rivers and tributaries that led into the…

In Homer’s literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Trojan War is an epoch defining event that marks the twilight of an era in which gods and superhumans mix, and heroes duel to the death. While some characters wield iron, most brandish armour and weapons of bronze. Given that the Aegean’s first iron blades were imported from the east around 1200 BCE, Homer’s Trojan War is most likely set during the Late Bronze Age. The ancient bard describes bronze in magnificent detail in his works, and is clearly in reverence of its marvellous properties. One scene describes King Agamemnon dressing in a suit of “gleaming bronze”, before picking up two bronze-tipped spears. Homer writes: “The glare flashed off their brazen points and pierced the high skies – and awestruck at…

When the Hittite Old Kingdom controlled central and eastern Anatolia, the kingdoms of the west joined forces to form the Assuwa federation. The Hittites invaded Assuwa in around 1430 BCE, and waged war on their western foe for three decades before finally emerging victorious. Having dismantled the alliance, they deported the Assuwan king and his son to the Hittite capital, along with 10,000 soldiers, 600 horses and numerous chariots. The emergence of the Mitanni to the east created a grave and constant existential threat to the Hittites, once again relieving pressure on the west. In the Hittites’ absence, a local leader called Uhha-Ziti brought together the region’s leading powers to create the kingdom of Arzawa. Centred around the capital of Apasa, perhaps better known today as Ephesus in modern Turkey,…

When the 5,000-strong army of Sargon of Akkad managed to conquer the Sumerian city of Uruk – once the biggest in the world, with a population ten times larger than the army that faced it – it was a milestone moment in world history. The balance of power between the kingdoms of Akkad and Sumer had shifted, allowing Sargon to capture 34 more Sumerian cities and his Sumerian fellow monarch, Lugal-Zage-Si. In conquering his neighbour to create a multi-ethnic territory ruled by a central government, Sargon had created the world’s first empire in what is mostly modern-day Iraq. Sargon the Great’s rise to power was spectacular. Originally a cupbearer to the king of Kish, he was subsequently appointed to the position of gardener, which gave him the vital responsibility of…

Copper can be found in Sweden and Norway but not in Denmark (to this day Denmark’s mines are located in Greenland, which had not yet been settled during the Nordic Bronze Age), but tin is much harder to come by. So where did the Bronze Age Scandinavians get it? Many bronze objects from the Nordic Bronze Age are weapon-tools – axes, blades, arrowheads and the like – which could have been used for hunting and harvest as well as for warfare. The form of many of them suggests that agricultural and hunting use were more likely, although it’s probable that they were used in skirmishes between homesteads too. Very few of these artefacts have been subject to scientific testing to determine the source of the tin used in their manufacture.…

The great monument known as Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in England, was originally constructed during the Neolithic, or ‘New Stone Age’, an era that lasted from roughly 4000 to 1700 BCE. The structure of standing stones remained in use during the subsequent Bronze Age. In Britain, the Wessex culture followed the Bell Beaker culture, and lasted from about 2100 to 1500 BCE. The people of the Wessex culture made Stonehenge their own. Wessex chieftains had sufficient power to remodel the structure in the late archaeological phase known as Stonehenge III. The double circle of bluestones that had previously been on the site were taken away. Sarsen stones were added, along with the four Station Stones and the Slaughter Stone. The aforementioned bluestones were later put back, and are still found…

Trade Evidence exists of obsidian being traded in the Neolithic. Widespread exchange of natural and precious goods created complex trade webs that spurred innovation and brought scarce materials, such as tin, into new areas. Before 5th millennium BCE DEFINING MOMENT Bronze 5th millennium BCE The first attempts to create a more durable metal than copper involved alloying it with arsenic, making arsenic bronze. Copper often exists naturally with arsenic in ores and so its discovery may have been accidental. As trade developed with areas containing tin, it was used instead to create bronze. The difficulties of sourcing tin and finding the correct ratio of copper to tin show a great amount of sophistication. Bronze was used to first create high status items like axes, daggers, and decorative items. As the…

It is not only modern archaeologists who look back on the Bronze Age with wonder. The ancient Greeks who saw the towering walls and heavy blocks of Mycenaean monuments could not believe they were built by men at all. For them these were the remains of structures erected by the Cyclopes of legend. To reconstruct their past they relied on mythology to make sense of the fragmentary remains and artefacts they found. Still, sometimes they came remarkably close to the truth. THE DESCENT OF MAN One of the earliest extant works of Greek literature is Hesiod’s Works and Days. This poem, probably written around 700 BCE, gives a vivid view into what life was like in early Greece. Addressed to Hesiod’s layabout brother, the poem describes many aspects of farming.…

One of the first people we know who took an interest in archaeology was King Nabonidus of the Neo-Babylonian empire. In his attempts to rebuild temples he had them excavated and their foundations examined to try to determine who first built them and when. The temple of the Sun god was first erected by King Naram-Sin, he discovered, and Nabonidus dated his reign to 3,200 years before his own. We now know that this dating was off nearly 1000 years but it was still impressive for the time. In China around 1000 CE Confucian scholars looked to the past to ensure state religious practices were performed correctly. Others at the time thought that the best reason to study antiquities was to learn from them as their ancestors had achieved things…

In the autumn of 1902, a Danish farmer ploughed his fields for the first time; what he found astounded archaeologists for decades to come. The Trundholm Sun Chariot, a sculpture from the Nordic Bronze Age, was unlike anything seen before. Strangely, the sun chariot did not appear with any other items to give clues to its use or meaning, but little by little archaeologists began to piece together its mystical function, and the symbolism that came with it. While some experts still can’t agree on an exact date since the discovery was made before pollen dating existed, the Nationalmuseet places its origin at around 1400 BCE, the Nordic Bronze Age. The piece is made up of a number of parts: a horse figure that sits on a rod attaching it…

Bush Barrow lies in Normanton Down, an early Bronze Age round barrow cemetery in Wiltshire, England. This landscape was an important focus of ritual and ceremony during the British Bronze Age as a whole, from 2000 to 700 BCE, and is part of the Stonehenge ceremonial landscape – thus listed within the UNESCO World Heritage Site. When William Cunnington, a wool merchant financed by Richard Colt Hoare, excavated the site in 1808, he unearthed the richly furnished grave of a man who was six feet tall, who would have towered over his contemporaries in life. Many suggest that this man might have been an important warrior chieftain within the region at the time. The erection of the tall sarsen stone trilithons at Stonehenge predate the burial by around 550 years,…

Humans are, and always have been, inventive in the tools they create to harm one another. A history of humanity could easily be constructed from an examination of the weapons we use. The earliest weapons were constructed from wood and stone, and predate modern humans. We can’t know anything about their creation, but through the rise of civilisations and writing we can trace their development. UP CLOSE All early weapons’ effectiveness depended on the strength on their user. As civilisations appeared, more efficient ways of using that strength were invented. In close combat, blades were the weapons of choice. With the development of metallurgy, daggers, swords, and arrowheads achieved new levels of sophistication. The first major advance in metal weaponry was the development of bronze. This alloy of copper and…

CHARIOTS First appearing in Mesopotamia, the first chariots were pulled by onagers (wild asses). Slow and unwieldy but useful in supporting the infantry, they developed over centuries into deadly machines that dominated the field of battle. ~2500 BCE DEFINING MOMENT Composite bow Pre-14th century BC The simple – or self – bow consists of just a piece of wood under tension. By laminating layers of horn, wood, and sinew together, the bow can withstand more force and shoot arrows with more power at greater distances. The increased strength allows bows to be made much smaller than simple bows while maintaining the energy delivered to the arrow. A smaller bow is easier to carry into battle, but also gives soldiers mounted on chariots or horses the ability to shoot on the…

The Nebra Sky Disk is an artefact whose discovery was steeped in controversy. Initially labelled a fake due to its startling artistic style, unlike anything else known from the German Bronze Age, this bronze disk is now considered one of the most important archaeological finds of the entire 20th century. Thought to be the earliest existing depiction of the night sky to date, many have tried to decipher its symbols. Some suggest the inlaid gold patterns show the heavens: a crescent Moon, stars, and either full Moon or Sun. The gold crescent is often seen to be a solar barge, while one curved gold edge is thought to be the horizon. While its true purpose is unknown, some say it is a work of art, though many argue it holds…

For every period of greatness and monumental achievement in Ancient Egypt’s history, there is a stretch of time where governments crumbled, territories divided and the nation fell into a dark lull. As the royal hold on the country fell apart towards the end of the Old Kingdom, Egypt was plunged into an era of uncertainty that is referred to as the First Intermediate Period. To make matters worse, the power of the pharaoh was splintered when two rival dynasties began vying for power – the Tenth Dynasty (based in Herakleopolis, the principal city of Lower Egypt) and the 11th Dynasty (centralised in Thebes, Upper Egypt). This period of conflict and dissention lasted for 125 years, until the reign of Theban pharaoh Mentuhotep II. Ascending to the Upper Egypt throne in…

The people of Anatolia began experimenting with metal as far back as 10,500 BCE, using chunks of malachite to create pigments and ornaments, before going on to mine and cold-work copper into tools in the 8th millennium. However, Anatolian metallurgy truly took off in the 7th millennium, with the advent of smelting, heating and hammering natively sourced copper into beads and decorative objects. Meanwhile, in the late Chalcolithic southern Levant, people began crafting goods in gold and electrum. Utilising lost-wax casting, they used simple open moulds to produce axes, chisels and awls from unalloyed copper, while crafting alloys by combining arsenic-rich copper ore with those abundant in nickel or antimony. Early attempts at smelting were inefficient, producing viscous metal, which left much of the produce stuck in the slag. By…

Advancements in technology have meant that scientists have been able to gather more evidence about life during the Bronze Age over the last decade than ever before. In the past, common pitfalls in ancient DNA analysis included huge costs, the high risk of contaminating the historical samples with the modern DNA of those handling them, and the inconsistent preservation of ancient DNA in burial sites. As well as examining enamel from the teeth of skeletal remains found in Beaker burial sites, Professor Ron Pinhasi and his colleagues have since discovered that the petrous bone, which contains the inner ear, naturally preserves DNA astonishingly well. Due to its location within the cranium, the bone is often completely protected from contamination that would usually be picked up from burial conditions. After using…

If any civilisation had an excuse to feel hard done by over the major upheavals of the Bronze Age, it would be the Nordic cultures of Scandinavia. From around 2700 BCE these Sun-worshipping pastoralists enjoyed a warm climate comparable to that of modern-day Britain, France and Germany. This climatic era is known as the Minoan Warm Period because it coincides with the rise of the iconic Aegean civilisation of the same name, but the Minoans weren’t the only Bronze Age culture enjoying gentle weather and the abundant food and attendant rise in living standards that often accompanies it. The Greeks may have thought that the world had devolved from a mythical golden age, but the people of the Nordic Bronze Age could be forgiven for believing that they lived in…

The Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean today loom large in modern consciousness, and are rightly famous. Elsewhere in Europe, beyond the sunny Aegean Sea, however, lay other cultures that flourished during the Bronze Age. In the far west of the continent, there were the peoples of the so-called megalithic cultures who had built the massive stone structures that dotted the landscape, especially Stonehenge and the standing stones of Carnac in Brittany. They would be joined by newcomers from the east who would profoundly change the way that ancient Europeans lived. The European Bronze Age began about 3200 BCE when bronze, an alloy of copper (90 per cent) and tin (ten per cent), and tougher than either, became the main material used in weapons and tools. The…

Something has gone terribly wrong. The city had once been a bustling metropolis where thousands of people had traded, worshipped and celebrated together. Now the marketplace is a smouldering ruin. Stout buildings have collapsed. Under the piles of stones are the bodies of women and children. Embedded in the city walls are bronze arrowheads. The fire that is raging will deposit a layer of ash over one metre deep across the entire site, where it will remain until archaeologists excavate the city 3,000 years later. The above could have been written about any of dozens of population centres across the western Mediterranean in the years 1200-1150 BCE. In that time cities would be abandoned, many never to be resettled. This was the Late Bronze Age Collapse – and what caused…

In 1998, Professor Mike Baillie published a paper suggesting that the Bronze Age Collapse could have been caused by fragments of a comet striking the Earth. By examining ancient trees and studying their growth rings, he was able to reveal periods in which the trees had grown poorly. With a period of low growth around 1159 BCE suggesting a clear climatic catastrophe, it would be possible to link all the effects of a depressed ecosystem such as crop failure and drought to the fall of a number of Bronze Age societies. While it would be possible for volcanoes to launch enough dust into the atmosphere to cool the planet, another possibility is that a meteor or comet strike did the same thing. Records from the Shang dynasty in China around…