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- Hacker News
- This is a thesis and it's not a new one.
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...
by jmyeet - Most of what I know about life in the bronze age comes from The Wise-Woman's Dog[1], a slightly fantastical game that leans into what life was like for regular people at the time. It's made by someone who researches that sort of thing for a living, and is full of interesting footnotes too.
It's a fun experience and a useful way to make a place and a time really feel alive.
(Not strictly on topic but having played it really lends texture to TFA and other comments posted here.)
by kqr - Great article and great food for thought. It does sound reasonable that a democratization of the means of violence tends to stir up conflict and makes it impossible for a single faction to dominate everyone else.
The peace through dialogue that comes afterwards (democracy, rights, etc) also sounds familiar seeing what happened after the cold war and the great wars.
It also begs the question will the modern state and international allegiances go the way of the hittites if the means of violence/control trickle down to the general population?
- So... He's saying ironworking caused the collapse, or prevented recovery. age
That is interesting, but it requires evidence of sudden wide scale production in the 12th century or earlier.
The conventional take is that ironworking developed gradually because tin/bronze became unavailable. The know evidence of iron working is gradual. Rare pockets gradually becoming more common over centuries. ities, states and empires actually come back as ironworking grown. Slag and reurbanization track one another.
Also interesting that Egypt survived and did not do "iron age." They were sitting on vast hordes of tin and bronze. Bronze can be remolded. They were also less trade dependent. Egypt exported gold, grain & textiles. They imported tin, copper and slaves.
Personally, I suspect that it could have been "financial crisis." Debt cycles and their consequences appear heavily in late bronze age sources. The Ugarit archive. The armana letters etc.
Earlier scholars took this theory too far in the 60s and forced it into ideological moulds.
But... I find it hard to ignore direct* accounts of people in that time. People were becoming endebted, debt bonded... and growing hordes of "outlaws" form to eacape. These institutions were apparently international. There are international treaties dealing with them.
I also don't discount "axial age" hypothesese. A "death of god" paradigm, perhaps related to Zoroaster (elam), akhenatan (Egypt), etc.
by netcan - In TFA it is stated that before bronze (i.e. copper-tin alloy) copper was used for tools.
This is not true, because pure copper has always been too soft to be used in any tool. Pure copper was used for some purposes, but never for tools that had to be strong and hard, e.g. for knives.
Before bronze, for several millennia tools were made from alloys of copper and arsenic or antimony (3 metals, lead, copper and gold have been known for many millennia before other metals became known, like tin, silver and meteoritic iron). Neither of arsenic and antimony was known in pure form, so unlike the bronze made by mixing metallic copper with metallic tin, the copper-arsenic or copper-antimony alloys were made by mixing the sulfide minerals of copper and arsenic or antimony (which are all found together where sulfide minerals are mined), before smelting the metallic copper alloy from the minerals (which for sulfide minerals is done by first roasting the sulfides into oxides, to drive the sulfur away, then reducing the oxides with charcoal).
by adrian_b - 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.
- Eric Cline makes a good case that the Bronze Age empires were organized around a “palace economy”, where only certain people (royals & their pals) were even allowed to trade. In some places the sovereign literally owned all the land and people on it.
One can imagine that a series of bad seasons, natural disasters, invasions & other stressors would open a window for revolt.
Yes tin was a factor, yes the “Sea Peoples” were a factor. But you don’t get the wholesale overthrow of so many empires without the common people being at least somewhat welcoming of the invaders (when not happily assisting them!) in throwing off centuries of elite oppression.
by cobbzilla - The text wrongly claims that the Spanish defeated the Aztecs because of their iron weapons. Actually, the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, so their weapons alone were irrelevant in the battle. The Spanish had alliances with Indigenous peoples who opposed the Aztec Empire, giving them a much larger army. That defeated the Aztecs.by bugake