The Bronze Age: Metallurgy’s Massive Impact on Man

Deep in the Fertile Crescent, the ancient Sumerians may have been the first people to smelt tin with copper, which for the first time in human history forged the much harder and more durable metal known as Bronze, and while the technology would spread throughout human civilizations at differing times in history, the advancement ushered in the Bronze Age of early man.

Early Bronze Age Civilizations

Greece was one of the earliest civilizations to embrace the Bronze Age before 3000 B.C., while the British Isles and China came aboard around 1900 and 1600 B.C. respectively. The Bronze Age also marked the rise of city-states and kingdoms government by centralized rulers, such as the Mesopotamian cities of Eridu and Uruk in current-day Iraq, and while the Mesopotamians pioneered the use of levees and irrigation canals, Bronze Age Sumerians invented cuneiform script, which was used in the poem the Epic of Gilgamesh, which followed the travels of a Sumerian king who battled monsters and went on quests for the secrets of eternal life.

After the Babylonians rose to power around 1900 B.C., Amorite King Hammurabi created the earliest and most complete set of laws known as the Code of Hammurabi, which helped the city of Babylon overtake the Sumerian City of Ur as the Fertile Crescent’s most powerful city-state.

Thanks to the metallurgical improvements in bronze weaponry, the nearby Assyrians expanded their territory through battles with the Ancient Egyptians and the Hittite Empire of present-day Turkey, while in China, chariots, weapons and ships were built in bronze, using piece-mold casting instead of the lost-wax method employed by most Bronze Age civilizations. The Bronze Age in Greece ushered in the Cycladic civilization around 3200 B.C., followed by the Minoan civilization several hundred years later on the island of Crete, which established the first advanced civilization in Europe.

End of the Bronze Age Era

While the Bronze Age ended quite suddenly around 1200 B.C. in the Middle East, North African and Mediterranean Europe, historians remain divided over the cause, although they do agree that the end of the Bronze Age came about in a sudden, culturally disruptive and violent manner, leading to the widespread abandonment of ancient cities, the loss of long-established trade routes and an overwhelming decline in literacy.

Archaeological evidence points to a 150-year period of severe droughts in the eastern Mediterranean from 1250 to 1100 B.C., which triggered a domino effect of famines, sociopolitical instability and invasions by tribes in search of food and arable land, but what historians do agree on, is that the Bronze Age ended with man’s discovery of an even stronger metal, called iron.