The Bronze Age

The story

A lucky recipe

Copper had been a great step forward, but it had a flaw: it is soft. A copper axe bends, a blade goes blunt at once. The craftsmen of the Copper Age had been looking for ways to improve it for some time, and some discovered that by adding a little arsenic, a poisonous mineral, the metal became harder. Then someone, perhaps in Anatolia or Mesopotamia, tried mixing a second metal, tin, into the molten copper. The mixture, which is called an alloy, was much better than the two ingredients separately: harder, easier to pour into moulds, with a lovely golden colour when new. Its name is bronze. The classic recipe is about nine parts copper to one of tin.

Bronze could be melted and cast in moulds, even very complicated ones; when an object broke, it could be melted down again and reused. With bronze people made axes, daggers, swords, spearheads, mirrors, needles, pins, bells, statues. A good blade could be sharpened again many times. It was the best material humanity had ever had.

When it begins

The Bronze Age does not begin at the same moment everywhere. In the Near East it is made to begin by convention around 3300 BC, in Mesopotamia and Anatolia; but in some areas tin bronze spread only later, after 3000 BC. In central and southern Europe, Italy included, it begins around 2300 BC, while in Scandinavia it arrives later still. The end depends on the arrival of iron, between about 1200 and 800 BC, depending on the place.

The period was very long, more than two thousand years in Europe. In this time the first great civilisations in history appeared, which the following cards talk about: Sumerians, Egyptians, the Indus Valley, China, the Minoans. But the Bronze Age is not only that of the great empires: in Italy, for example, it is the time of the stilt villages on the lakes, of the Terramare villages in the Po Plain and, in Sardinia, of the nuraghi.

The problem of tin

There was an obstacle: tin is rare. Copper is found in many countries, but tin is concentrated in very few places. The most important mines of antiquity were in Cornwall, in south-western England, in the Ore Mountains between Germany and Bohemia, in Spain and Brittany, and in the east in central Asia, between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. People living in the Near East had to have tin brought from thousands of kilometres away.

So the great trade networks of the Bronze Age arose. Caravans of donkeys carried tin from Assur, in Mesopotamia, to the Assyrian merchants who traded in Anatolia, at Kültepe, around 1900 BC: thousands of clay tablets with their accounts have survived. At sea, a ship wrecked at Uluburun, on the coast of Turkey, around 1320 BC, was carrying about ten tonnes of copper in ingots shaped like an ox-hide and one tonne of tin, together with glass, ivory, precious woods and jewellery. The cargo alone tells how important this trade was, and how rich in exchanges the civilisation of the time was.

Weapons, work, wealth

Bronze changed warfare. Swords, which had actually been made earlier, with arsenical copper (the oldest known, from about 3300 BC, were found at Arslantepe in Turkey by the Italian archaeologists of the Sapienza University of Rome), became long, strong weapons in bronze. Work changed too: saw, axe, chisel and awl made of bronze made it possible to build better boats, houses and carts. Farmers had more effective sickles.

Because metals were precious, those who controlled them became powerful. In Bronze Age graves chiefs appear buried with weapons, ornaments and gold objects. Society was becoming more unequal, with elites of warriors and specialised craftsmen. A famous treasure is the Nebra sky disc in Germany, a bronze disc inlaid with gold that shows the Sun, Moon and stars, about 3,600 years old.