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Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
In our first article from Issue 27, Patrick Fitzsimmons explains what really ended the Bronze Age.
Over three thousand years ago, on a plain beside the Orontes River in Syria, two great armies clashed in what may at the time have been the most colossal battle ever seen: the Battle of Kadesh. The two combatants, the Egyptians and the Hittites, together put forward tens of thousands of soldiers and over five thousand chariots, making the number of combatants comparable to some smaller First World War battles, and quite likely bigger than Agincourt, Hastings, and Yorktown. It was also the first battle whose events can be reconstructed in detail, as Pharaoh Ramesses II afterwards commissioned elaborate stone reliefs depicting the battle as a monumental victory, which remain in temples dotted across modern Egypt to this day.
The Egyptians and the Hittites were two of several great powers then dominant in the eastern Mediterranean. Others were the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and Mycenaean Greeks. All were bureaucratically complex societies, in some cases controlling territories of hundreds of miles, capable of mobilizing armies, extracting taxes, and completing ambitious infrastructural projects. But just a few centuries after the Battle of Kadesh, all had vanished or dwindled to a fraction of their former power.
The Bronze Age collapse – as this sudden disappearance of regional powers is known – is one of the great mysteries of ancient history. The usual explanation points to a series of catastrophes around 1200 BC: droughts, mysterious invaders called the Sea Peoples, famines, and internal revolts. But such explanations are insufficient as catastrophes like these often create political upheaval without permanently ending civilizations. The question is not why the Bronze Age empires fell, but why, after they fell, nothing like them returned for centuries. Why did it suddenly become so hard, seemingly, to build and sustain an empire?
If you go to see Ramesses’s stone reliefs today, your tour guide might tell you that both sides at the Battle of Kadesh wielded bronze weapons, common for imperial armies of the time. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and the tin in those bronze weapons would have had to have traveled thousands of miles from distant mines, perhaps in modern Afghanistan or in Western Europe. The difficulty involved in mining and transporting tin is one reason that access to bronze weaponry remained concentrated in military and elite institutions. The average citizen still largely relied on tools made of copper, stone, bone, or wood. But just a few centuries after Kadesh, ordinary Hittite and Egyptian farmers had access to a new material: iron.
Because iron could be produced locally, imperial centers no longer had such a strong advantage over their subject peoples. The invention of iron weaponry meant the political equilibrium was forever changed.
Today, we live in an era where access to the tools of violence has been exceptionally concentrated, allowing superpowers far larger than those of the late Bronze Age to reign largely unchallenged. But as military technology evolves, another age of upheaval may be approaching.
The invention of bronze had already displaced an earlier metal: copper. The Copper Age began around 5000 BC and ran until around 3000 BC, when bronze weapons began appearing in the archaeological record. Copper was accessible enough and easy enough to work that it allowed early proto-states to reliably arm their warriors with something better than stone weaponry, which often chips or breaks under impact. Copper is a soft metal, hence its use in pipes and wiring today. But it generally won’t break, and though it does bend easily it can also be bent back into shape. This marginal benefit was enough to give groups with copper weapons a significant advantage.
Copper-wielding groups pushed into surrounding communities who used stone tools, beginning a process of prehistoric political consolidation. W