alt Hacker NewsWhy the Bronze Age Collapsed
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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).
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.
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.
There is account of the iron discovery in sub Saharan Africa about 2,000 BC[0][1][2]
If we grant, purely as a thought experiment, that a community in sub-Saharan Africa had developed reliable iron metallurgy around 2000 BC, it would be a reminder of how technology advancements shouldn't be taken for granted.
What social, ecological and economic circumstances allowed an invention to arise but prevented it from becoming a continuously expanding technological tradition.
Why didn't that discovery become part of a self-sustaining technological system? It could have led to a very different Africa and world today.
- [0] https://journals.udsm.ac.tz/index.php/sap/article/view/2710?...
- [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-024-01383-2?utm_sourc...
- [2] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-023-09545-6?utm_source=chatgp...
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.
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.)
I don't understand the article's premise that iron kept kingdoms fragmented. Even larger empires arose during the iron age than what existed in the bronze age. Maybe I'm missing some other advancement that brought back centralization.
The Bronze Age collapsed for many reasons but the event that really kicked things off was the explosion of Santorini. The empires that died were not quickly replaced because after extensive famines and invasions they were replaced by different people with different social objectives.
The same thing happened later in Europe when Germanic and Asian tribes displaced the Roman and Celtic tribes of Western Europe.
This is only challenging to understand if you falsely believe civilization and technological advancement to be socially preferable. Historically that is not the case. Civilization tends to emerge not of preference but out of unwanted necessity to regulate resource production/distribution.
This was a fascinating article, and the theory that the availability of iron prevented big empires seems to make sense. But then I don't get how later big empires (e.g., Athenian Empire and eventually Roman Empire) formed. What changed that allowed big empires to form even in the presence of iron?
One of the questions today is whether frontier models, in the hand of frontier labs, and capable of extracting rent (and extracting intelligence from customer-provided signals) will be able to predominate over locally run models of indeterminate provenance.
My personal theory is not that iron ended the Bronze Age, because archaeological evidence seems to show that iron became significant after the Bronze Age collapse. Instead, what if bronze accumulated to the point where more people could afford a metal weapon? Then some other event started the series of escalations and population movements. Unlike iron, bronze accumulates and is recyclable. "The blade itself incites to violence."
The relevant bit
"Access can be cut off, centralizing the use of AI in the hands of the companies that own it and whomever they choose to allow access, similar to the advantage enjoyed by Bronze Age kings who controlled stores of tin."
Open models directly contradict that. Anyone can "put evil AI" into pretty much anything at this point. Access is really just access to foundry chips. The modern day tin access is silicon, not AI.
After the Bronze age collapse, the Roman Empire rose. Once that collapsed it also took a very long time before another big empire arose (with perhaps a brief exception under Charlemagne).
It seems instead that the process of building a bureaucracy that can support an empire is tough. And that the conditions left behind after an empire collapses are particularly tough to re-consolidate under another empire.
Why didnt the people who mastered iron just conquer and continue civilization? Like we see with every other case where there is a tech advantage.
>> These are excerpts from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a sixteenth-century manuscript painted by the Tlaxcalans, longtime rivals of the Aztecs, to record the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. The Mesoamericans fought with weapons made from obsidian, a hard, jet-black stone that was very sharp but brittle. They were brutally outmatched by a European military armed with steel swords, gunpowder, and horses. Image credit: New Mexico History Museum.
I wonder if this is still a widely accepted view among historians and archeologists, that Cortés' men "brutally outmatched" the Aztecs. I have the feeling that a more nuanced image has emerged in more recent years, taking into account, for example, the alliance of the Spaniards to the above-mentioned Tlaxcalans and other Mesoamerican people who hated the Aztecs a lot more than they cared to hate the Spaniards, and who saw the Spaniards as a useful ally in their feud with Tenochtitlan [1] so that when the Spaniards fought the Aztecs, they had several thousands of Tlaxcallans and other allies on their side, enough to match the numbers of the Aztecs, but who are omitted from the telling of the story[2]. Smallpox also played a huge role in depopulating the region, including the cities of the Spaniards' allies. Then there was the way that the Mexicans and their enemies traditionally fought: primarily, not so much to kill but to take prisoners to sacrifice later, much unlike the Spaniards who were all business.
Additionally the superiority of the arms of the Spaniards (not just iron but also black powder and horses) was tested in La Noche Triste: The Sad Night [3], an event in which the Spaniards were savagely attacked and driven out of Tenochtitlan in an urban battle that resulted in many Spanish casualties, including the loss of all their artillery and many of their horses by the same Aztecs whom the Spaniards' superior military technology dominated in open field battles.
And let's not forget the Battle of Isandlwana [4]: 20,000 Zulu warriors, armed mainly with assegai spears and cowhide shields massacred 1500 British soldiers equipped with rifles and even a couple cannon and rocket batteries. Morale of the story: there is a lot more that goes into the killing of men than who has the bigger weapons: another lesson repeated throughout history.
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[1] A pattern that repeats throughout history, e.g. the Middle Eastern states in the middle ages very quickly formed alliances with the Crusader states and the Westerners were fully integrated into local politics, and wars.
[2] Similar to how e.g. the ~2700 other Greeks that fought with Leonida's 300 Spartans are also often forgotten: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae#Greek_ar.... Not that it made a difference given the Persian numbers.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Noche_Triste
Many years ago I read Bernal Diaz Del Castillo's *The True History of the Conquest of Mexico": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_verdadera_de_la_conqu.... A beautiful book in which I learned all of the above. I seem to remember Castillo himself attributed the military dominance of the Spaniards to their modern equipment and horses. My impression that this narrative is perhaps not fully accurate comes from other sources- here and there.
Interesting : "some also alluded to the idea that iron had democratized violence"
Fun article. I think that there is a lot of interesting information here that would help explain what we saw with the Bronze Age Collapse, though I would submit that this is just another of the multiple factors that led to the collapse. Maybe a drought occurs, folks turn to iron weapons, and then take over another town or village for their resources, and so on.
This could lead to supply chain collapses and such. Maybe just general destabilization and raids and such sort of collapsed the larger empires. But at the same time, those larger empires would also have had access to iron, so why couldn't they by matter of numerical superiority, access to greater resources, tactics and military organization, and more simply, overwhelm smaller armies or bands utilizing the same technology and restore order or at least defend themselves?
I just started reading Conrad Black's historical series and in the Egyptian chapter and also the Assyria/Babylonia chapter he references the historical accounts where time and time again Egyptian forces led by the pharaoh would march into the broader Middle East to restore order. Why couldn't they continue to do that?
I thought this was a cool fact about the Bronze Age: "According to a new study, it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites".[0]
[0]: https://www.sciencealert.com/bronze-age-artefacts-have-meteo...
just a side note: it appears that for example "Alexander" is a Hittite name, and other names which appear in the Iliad seem to be of Hittite origin
Reminds me of this awesome quote from Ramses III after driving back the Sea Peoples[1]
1: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxi2veZE2Uvm0VQUbAjGROCQoILO8...
Tangent, Works In Progress is one of the best online magazines. Stripe supporting it exhibits so many second-order effects.
Long before the so-called “iron age” started, humans knew of iron. There are iron artifacts from the 4th millennium BCE. Humans were fascinated by these small pieces of iron, which were found in meteorites and cherished and valued them. However, usable iron was rare and extremely sought after to the extent that we know it was more valuable than gold or silver. How did humans invent the first technique to produce metallic Iron from ore?
The story of Iron starts with the production of Bronze. Bronze is an alloy of 90% copper. Depending on what constitutes the other 10% we get different types of bronze. The most common type which kick started the bronze age around 3500 BCE in western Asia is tin bronze. Unlike copper ore, tin is hard to find but a small amount of it can significantly improve the quality of copper and make it usable and strong. Ancient smelters produced bronze by melting the natural copper ore mixed with tin ore in simple kilns. The resulting bronze was the primary metal used in tools and arts for more than 2500 years.
Iron is a common impurity in copper ores. We also know that iron ore can, and was, used as a flux in the process of smelting copper. In simple terms, a flux agent is a chemical that attracts oxygen to itself and protects the primary product, which is copper, from oxidizing in high temperatures. Therefore, across the ancient world, bronze smelters had been encountering molten iron when they raised the kiln temperature high enough. However, they discarded the resulting metal because its copper impurity made it too soft and inferior to bronze.
Around 1,200 BCE the collapse of bronze age civilizations in the near east due to a “perfect storm” of drought, famine, disease, immigration and war affected trade routes that brought tin ore to the western Asia. During this time of bronze shortage some smelters seem to have resorted to using the lower quality iron for tool making. They had observed that adding carbon to iron makes it much harder but prone to breaking. We have evidence of iron tools built with layers of soft and hard iron to achieve desired outcomes. Over time iron smelters experimented with different amounts of carbon impurity and achieved desired levels of hardness and strength.
Excellent read and very explanatory… on a funny side, too bad we didn’t see anything about alien technology (joking) ;-)
I thought about this general pattern in many places including historical Ages. I have general pipeline for this,
New Invention -> Aggregate -> integrate -> distribute -> baseline then back to New Invention
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196618871-1177-b-c very nice book about this time
drones are the Iron Age of our time.
hell drones are such a major deterrent even more than nukes.
we literally just seen the US blockade of Iran be pushed deep into Iran coz the US feared drone damage to their expensive ships. Iran leveled out US bases in the Middle East using drones.
The cycles of centralized control and distributed control.
Centralization creates an emergence of a mighty creature that feeds on its subjects. Distributed control kills that creature and restores natural randomness.
Software, e-commerce, supply chains and payment rails created some of these centralized mighty creatures. AI might start an Iron age for some of these bronze monsters, causing their extinction.
Peasants always have more survival instincts than palaces. They will find the next equalizer force, fulfilling their nature-mandated duty of restoring the randomness and equilibrium.
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...
Dr. Bret Devereaux's (ancient/classical history professor) summary of the collapse, FWIW -
https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...
I find it funny that historians assume someone is made up just because art depicts them as serpent-like.
It would be like finding memes of trump and saying he must have been a mythical god, because he was depicted flying or shooting lightning or whatever.
Maybe the artists just thought he was a treacherous cunt, so they depicted him as a serpent in their memes.
Eric Cline
1177 BC
It's other way around! Iron age did not result in Bronze Age collapse, it was caused by it. Iron has been known for a long time before the collapse, and widely accessible. It was little used because iron at that era was an inferior, substitute material (and is a pain in the ass to make because it involves first producing charcoal to achieve high temperatures). It only became stronger and comparably durable to bronze around 2nd century BC, in late Roman Republic. But the Collapse made long-distance transportation of inputs for bronze production impossible because centralised governments one could depend on for predictable rules and security, vanished. It forced people to turn to then-inferior iron, and start using and eventually, improving it, but it still remained inferior to bronze even in Classic Greece.
Iron. Next!
Reminds me of this classic from Historia Civilis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq4G-7v-_xI
This narrative has been around for a long time in one form or the other. In its pure form, it's arguing that the form of human society is downstream from military technology.
The earliest mention I'm aware of is "the old oligarch," who claimed that Athenian democracy was justified by the fact that Athens was a naval power. Since every able male could man an oar, wider sufferage made sense. He contrasts this to Sparta's less democratic structure and its military, which was supposedly based on its few elite hoplites (helms/greaves/shield/spears were expensive).
You could compare this idea (military tech shapes society) to the Marxist claim that societies are shaped by economic forces. Both claims have some truth to them, but reality is more complicated. In particular, human societies today are less violent and founded on mutual consent/social contract moreso than on violence. Therefore, I would expect new military technologies to have limited disruptive effects within states and more between states. We'll see!
I think a journey with multiple agents to collect information would give you a more complete picture on data points.
Ask for DNA and what is known.
Climate records and what is known.
Town losses and movements. In some places inhabitants seemingly moved way way up the mountains all of a sudden. This is usually associated with conflict or tidal waves.
Migration evidence.
And any other disease or food shocks.
One must also be careful to understand the data observation process and to justify any belief that the collapse is not merely absence of observations.
We will likely never know the exact causes because there is a certain fog that hovers that period of history.
In my opinion, whatever caused that fog (confusion, conflicted or coded accounts, apocalyptic and prophetic writings) *IS* what caused the collapse.
Technology likely plays a role, but as a catalyst to a sociological phenomena. The industrial revolution did something similar (lots of new philosophy with somehow apocalyptic or prophetic undertones, albeit in a different style; war and depression in the following decades; confusion and a fog in history). We're still not over that, and it's only barely visible because we live inside this particular fog, but it's likely to confuse future historians a lot. I see AI as belonging to the same wave.
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TLDR: Bronze was expensive and not local; iron was cheap and local.
Interesting thesis, but I dont buy it. BTW, regarding the timing, I think Julian Jaynes would have a different thesis.
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This was was an interesting article with a (for a layman) convincing theory to explain the bronze age collapse. But then I gave the article to several LLMs and they think the theory has severe flaws and is overall not convincing at all.
Edit: To the downvoters, please ask your favorite LLM.
Interesting fact, you only could come third in the Olympics during the bronze age
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.