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.
Within five years as many as 15 million people – an estimated 80% of the population – were wiped out in an epidemic the locals named “cocoliztli”. The word means pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language.
This book came up so many times in school, always as some way to say Eurasians never had any inherent advantages. It's not that I think they do, it's just that I'm wary of people trying to reach a conclusion only because it's politically correct.
unless you plan to read a dozen academic books about a variety of topics, i dont really think there is a better option for a popular audience that will answer the question
"why were Eurasians able to so easily take over the Americas" than this book.
In the battle of Frankenhausen, Germany, 1525, German peasants went up against armored soldiers and the casualties were 5000 peasants dead vs 6 armored soldiers. The technological advantage before modern firearms for formal armies was enormous, even in Europe, even without the help of imported European diseases.
Aztec warriors were not European peasants though . They were highly skilled and well equipped. They didn't have steel blades (except what they captured from the invaders), but their obsidian "swords" were not that much worse in the hands of a skilled fighter. Plus the European handguns were not that reliable and accurate yet to be all that useful except for showing off. If the first shot missed (assuming it didn't misfire) there was no time for another. And guns need a steady supply of powder and bullets, which Cortez didn't have most of the time since he was also at odds with the governor of Cuba.
There's also plenty of accounts from the early days of Cortez' invasion where the Spaniards had a very hard time against the indigenous warriors even when the Spaniards were not largely outnumbered.
The Aztecs lacked horses and attack dogs. The Spanish by contrast had perfected combat with both. Both proved decisive over and over again. You're correct in asserting that guns weren't decisive - although initially he noise and visual display of firearms were a significant factor in confusing and frightening the Aztecs (especially the common people and subjugated indigenous groups).
I think the horses proved useful in some situations (at least to scare the people who had never seen riders), but then the number of horses was somewhere between a dozen at the start and never more than a hundred. And from what I've been reading their use in battle was often hit and miss because the cavalery often didn't have enough room to be effective.
Numbers like that are almost always the same story. I wasn't familiar with that exact battle [1] but it also matches the pattern. It's not like the peasants actually took on the soldiers, but rather you had some peasants inexplicably leave a town, and organize themselves within a circling of wagons, a 'wagon fort'. That wagon fort was then fully encircled, and 'ambushed' starting with artillery.
The peasants immediately broke and fled, which is where you get the crazy ratios from - fleeing armies are extremely vulnerable and near harmless. Had they fought, they likely would have inflicted far greater casualties on the military forces. However given there were roughly comparable peasant and military forces, the outcome was not in question, so it would have been suicide. Of course so was fleeing.
Diseases were affecting both Aztecs and their enemies. Also, while USA did not had to fight "peaceful" and well developed farmer societies in Northern American plains, organized Comanche raiders that came from north and subjugated whatever was spared by plagues were a headache for colonists for couple of centuries.
What most of the comments along with article writer are missing - it was not just technology, that Spanish used, but organization structure and command of professional military forces - that is one of the reason why 1000s of peasants were incapable to fight against couple of men in armor, as they lacked coordination - that would be the same as pitting street kids against a swat team, even if they were given the same weapons.
The same applies to Aztecs that had different POV and mindset against battle-hardened professional European soldiers - when you read how Aztec demise unfolded, in some of it you have to question what they were thinking, but that is mostly because of our modern bias, that has not much knowledge of their beliefs on how they viewed world around them.
Also, not more important fact - now, just like then, not all people were interested to be involved in war, and a peace agreement for them was even better than being part of alliance(and the choices here are to die for foreign Aztecs as one of them) and join fight. And those who already hated Aztecs to the guts, also had plenty of motivation to see all of that empire burn.
PS. People who are mentioning bunch of foreigners are clueless about European history - whole European FEUDALISM political system was born out of bunch of foreign raiders, that we know today as vikings and their descendants, that carved up Europe and limited their in-fighting with rules and brought unified force against those that challenged them. Europeans had pretty much the same scenario before repeated on native Americans and many times.
One and the same. The Spanish were seen as gods, in part because of appearance and in part because of armaments. It's not like if a random cadre of people, with comparable levels of tech as the Aztecs, wandered down to South America that they'd have been able to form alliances willing to go thrust themselves into battle, on their behalf, against the establishment of the time.
On top of being what enabled them to form alliances, it also begs another question. If it was primarily these masses that overwhelmed the Aztecs (and I don't disagree) then what need did they have of outsiders, let alone letting them act as rulers? It was the perception of alien levels of weaponry and technology that both gave the locals the morale they needed, and justified the Spaniards being deemed leaders.
The idea that the Spaniards were gods didn't hold very long. The Aztecs even sent body parts of captured and killed Spanish soldiers (and their horses) to display in cities and villages for the propaganda effect (see: they are not gods they bleed and die like everybody else).
In the end the defeat of the Aztecs was decided just as much by politics as by violence.
Also it's not like Cortez won every battle, they were even catastrophically defeated in the "night of tears". Coming back from that defeat wouldn't have been possible without indigenous allies and their thousands of skilled and well-equipped warriors fighting on Cortez' side against the Aztecs even after Cortez was driven out of Tenochtitlan (and not to mention logistic support which was probably even more important).
People sometimes needs a push to get onboard an idea. When you have been inside a system for along time it is difficult to see to what extreme is not just and how very possible it is the change it. Looking at you USA.
« It was the perception of alien levels of weaponry and technology that both gave the locals the morale they needed »
Now that really epitomizes the (horrible) Usanian mindset and way of “thinking” (regardless of whether or not that's where you're actually from).
What if the Indios were actually interested in listening to what the Spaniards had to say? They said there is no need for human sacrifice – because there is a god that doesn't require sacrifice, having settled that once and for all by sacrifying his own son.
The world would be in a much better state if there were any (or more) real Christians in the USA instead of the materialist sects that pose as such (or even as sth else) and bring the unfortunate “blessings” of their “culture” over the globe.
The misinformation about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs is one of the most depressing things imaginable.
The historical record is completely clear and we have first hand accounts, primary sources, from the people present. It's all readily available and anyone interest can easily verify it.
And yet, even in the comments responding to yours, people confidently state just blatantly untrue things.
- Gunpowder and steel had essentially nothing to do with Cortez's victory.
- The Aztecs did not see the Spaniards as Gods
- Smallpox played a role at the very end but had little to do with Cortez's victory.
- They leave out the primary reason Cortez won (his ability to build a coalition of native people who hated the Aztecs).
- They leave out the secondary reason Cortez won (superior European battle tactics).
- They ignore the fact that there were Europeans fighting on both sides (a delegation was sent from Cuba to stop Cortez; they were the ones that actually brought the smallpox not Cortez).
The post I'm replying to is correct: Spanish technology (steel, gunpowder) had very little to do with Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs.
The idea that the Aztecs took the Spanish for gods and specifically that Moctezuma mistook Cortez's for the returning god Quetzalcoatl is fiction. We actually know the exact book that it came from.
Smallpox did play a role but it was brought by the slaves of Europeans sent to _stop_ Cortez nearly two years after he started fighting the Aztecs. By the time smallpox killed Moctezuma's successor, Cortez's victory was already assured. The disease was not the key to his victory; it was more that it prevented insurgency after the conquest.
Also worth noting that if your theory was that Cortez won because of the gun powder or steel that is hard to square because by the time the two forces clashed the Aztecs had more of it then he did given the rival European forces trying to stop him.
Cortez won primarily because he had an army with a nucleus of veterans from the Italian wars that applied the lessons of the Reconquista.
The technology that let him win was European tactics and political manuevering not anything physical they brought with them.
Camilla Townsend's "Fifth Sun" was a really interesting read in that it brought together a lot of sources of the conquest to tell a more detailed story than I had probably heard before.
When the Spanish showed up, the Aztec's enemies didn't immediately line up to join the anti-Mexica alliance, as some people tend to think. The Spanish weren't seen as gods and worshipped. Pestilence would be a factor later on, but in early days the natives they met were quite healthy. The Spanish weren't seen as foreigners from across the sea or anything special because that wasn't really a concept for the natives. The Spanish were just another funny looking tribe from over the horizon that had showed up to fight for space, much like the Aztec's once had.
The Spanish initially had to fight hostile tribes on their own. There were battles where they had to fight through the night, while they were injured, and against incredible odds. The Spanish, especially the ones from Extremadura, were widely regarded by contemporary Europeans as some of the very best soldiers on the continent. Only after they'd done some hard fighting were they seen as having a chance against the Mexica and worth making alliances with.
So, yes, the Spanish won allies who helped them fight the Mexica, but they needed their guns, steel, and horses to win those allies.
Including is not the same as reading the whole source. Authors love cherry pick. Better to read the whole thing from the actors who were there: Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Orellana, etc.
Bernal Diaz' account is definitely recommended reading. But you'll have to read between the lines when he's talking about Cortez (there's a bit of "good Czar, bad boyars" going on).
What's interesting is how highly he speaks of his indigenous allies and even opponents, there's not a hint of disrespect (well, minus the Aztec practice of human sacrifices of course), he praises the skill, courage and discipline of the warriors, the craftmanship of their weapons and armor, and he's full of awe and wonder when they first arrive in Tenochtitlan:
"Among us were soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, including Constantinople, all over Italy, and Rome, and they said that they had never seen a plaza so well laid out, so orderly, so large, and so full of people."
The good thing about the accounts, it's their biased views about Spain were clear. That's why I like them. There was no unified feeling, and they were enemies in many cases. That's why the accounts offer a better view.
There's no mystery here. The Aztecs ruled brutally over dozens of other indigenous groups, they practised slavery and human sacrifice. When the Spanish showed impressive military equipment and the implication (when reinforcements arrived, albeit in small numbers) that they represented a powerful external military force, ancestral opponents who'd been subjugated by the Aztec empire were quick to throw in their lot.
It wasn't just the captive slaves and human sacrifice either (though that was a big deal), the Aztecs imposed crushing economic tribute burdens on subjugated city-states, and when payments fell short, they'd go in and raid. Tribute wasn't just gold and tradeable goods, it was also food, and the Aztecs didn't care if they drove a place into famine.
There were also rival indigenous states (Tlaxcala, etc.) that were never conquered by the Aztecs but had been trapped in continuous low-intensity war with them for years.
Though it is worth saying the Aztecs weren't universally despised. Some regional dynasties were allies. Some of those were also unpopular.
You have to make the evil claim: that the Spanish invaders were seen as a better alternative to the indigenous Aztecs by at least a decent majority of the population (and then, later, the Inca) (maybe this even explains the final end of the Maya)
Which is both likely true and morally against what we currently seem to believe.
Was there a concept of "ingenuousness" for the natives? Even the Aztecs were relative newcomers to the area. They came from the north and enslaved the area. Why prefer their terror to the unknown future with the new people that appeared?
Maybe I should not have used the word foreigner, but my comment/question is not why did they prefer ally with the spanish on a moral point of view but why did they believe the spanish were strong enough to be followed against the aztecs if not for their military superiority.
I don't think there's a single and simple answer. One thing that Cortez managed to do was "demystify" the mighty Aztecs in the eyes of the people conquered and supressed by the Aztecs.
There was unrest and violence in the region long before Cortez arrived on the scene, when he did he was the external catalyst to ignite the powder keg. When reading accounts of the conquest, information gathering, political scheming and negotiations were often more "decisive" than the actual fighting.
Divide and conquer is as old as time. Any major power usually got there by unsavoury means, making a lot of enemies along the way. The same thing happened in the US and Canada, where tribes that had fought for centuries -- quite contrary to the noble tropes, it wasn't some big love-in, and the continent was littered with raping, pillaging, slavery, and so on -- so they were more than happy to faction off to opposing sides if it gave them more of an ability to exterminate their nemesis.
I just found out this [1] book review today about the Aztec society today and my takeway is that the Aztecs were a highly militaristic death cult. Almost all men were warriors educated for war at young age and competing with each other to get as most captives as possibles because this is what gives you status.
It doesn't mention the spanish conquest but I wouldn't be surprised if all those tribes living under Aztec rule needed a little morale boost and seeing a bunch of guys with iron weapons and armor who wanted to do away with the aztecs surely helped with that
I second this recommendation, with the caveat that it contains a much higher degree of horror than almost anything I've ever read, including accounts of Nazi death camps.
I read that same review a couple of weeks ago and it made a deep impression. It's one thing to know "the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice", and another to be confronted with the scale, sadism and calculation with which it was practiced.
You are right. I should have made that warning. This is not for the faint of heart.
"If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it
[...]
No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings"
Huh? Sounds like a string of events that they didn’t engineer. I mean, did they engineer the spread of Christianity to the New World? They’d need a confluence of disease, tech, and a safe boat ride to achieve it. We’ve all had experience with Product Development, so I ask, how the heck could any of this been engineered?
Sounds like luck (and if luck, why is it cohesive?) or a GOD wanted a certain outcome.
Their weapons were certainly not irrelevant. They had other capabilities to their weapons - much did the aztecs. And they also took down the empire with a decapitation strike while being hosted as a guest, with their weapons.
I think the opium war were also won due to weapon advantages. The British cannons could be fired from further away, they could handle larger charges of gunpowder than the Chinese. Another advantage of metallurgy. Today's jet engines are largely the same thing. Maybe the troops were also more battle hardened.
Also, the introduction of foreign pathogens which killed of many of the native population.
Usually a single explanation isn’t sufficient, but and it’s likely a combination of disease, better weapons, cultural differences (attitudes towards war and one another), alliances as you mentioned, etc.
Small Spanish forces could defeat much larger Aztec forces, particularly in open terrain where cavalry, steel weapons, and armor were effective. Alliances played a role, but better weaponry and warfare isn't just an anecdote. Spanish military strength helped make those alliances attractive.
I think it's hard to overstate just how categorical a difference in organizational and social doctrine the Spanish were away from the Aztecs. Everything from tactics to logistics train to how the soldiers are motivated. Look at the European wars of colonizing Africa in the 19th century if you want to see how that plays out when they meet in the field.
Like put the Black Prince up against Alexander and even Alexander has a uphill battle. Now take away Alexander's cavalry and give the Black Prince primitive firearms. Unless Alexander gets the jump on him or finds a way to make the meeting of forces otherwise highly unequal, that battle is probably only going one way, and that's for forces of comparable motivation levels.
The numbers disparity only gets you so far ancient empires generally lack the social sophistication to motivate soldiers (especially when recruited from their possessions/allies) to the degree that more modern societies do. Those Aztec conscripts who have been "voluntold" into service by their communities at best are not going to fight to the bloody end. They do not consider themselves citizens of "The Aztec Empire". They are not going to march to their near certain deaths for the benefit of the empire like they're some Red Army machine gun squad piling into a rowboat to cross the Volga in 1941. They can not even have the mental framework for that because a pre-industrial society does not run enough surplus for the state to do the things it must to create that in more than a "kings guard" sized force.
Edit:
For a comparison point, the Romans are "a level up" from a lot (but not all) of the societies match up with and they just mop the floor with them. And consequently, anyone who doesn't get subjugated right off the bat winds up looking a lot like the Romans socially and militarily because that's what it takes to compete with them. The Aztecs are competing with borderline stone age societies. They are essentially a bronze age society that's mastered the art of subjugating stone age societies. Spain is half a dozen or so levels up from that. So while the outcome wasn't guaranteed it shouldn't really surprise anyone that the kind of force that Spain can project across an ocean and beat what the Aztecs can field in their own back yard.
> Exaggerating a bit, but I'm fairly sure the Spanish speech was: "if you kill the other guys with your much better weapons, you will reach El Dorado"
And they basically did. Not a singular city of gold, perhaps, but the Spanish looted tens of billions of $$ worth silver and gold from Central/South America between 1492 and 1550. Which is all the more impressive given how little European manpower it took and how low their relative incomes would've been at the time.
... where gold is "gold and cochineal". The red dye brought back to Spain was much higher in value than the gold!
Ironically, Europe already had cochineal, but they foraged the source (parasitic beetles), while the bronze-age Aztecs had the brilliant idea to farm them on planted oak forests.
It was probably more like "I have committed treason and burned the ships we arrived on, the only way any of us are getting out of here alive is if we bring back so much gold they can't be angry"
The dude was beyond in over his head but somehow pulled it off.
I am not sure I am entirely convinced by how you make your point but I think I agree. Here is how I would make the case for it:
The Spaniards had armor and combat formation. Having basic protection and having men march next to you closely must make you quite confident.
On the other hand Aztec fighting style seems to be "Go berserk and attract enemies to you so you can harm them to take them as captive so you can sacrifice them later for prestige". You are actually competing with your fellow warriors to show how brave you are". It seems the culture has optimized for not taking into account fear of death.
That might be a big advantage against other tribes that have the same level of tech than you but haven't bet the farm on militaristic culture but it probably breaks down pretty quickly on armies who rely on "confidence in the collective" rather than individual prestige and have somewhat of a tech edge
Where are you getting the "go berserk" part? All of what I've read about the Aztec military is that it was highly hierarchical and organized, having special noble (pipiltin) officer schools (the calmecacs[1] where they learned of war and ruling, and the commoner (macehuali) class also having mandatory military training in the telpochcalli[2]. Also, from what I've read in the True History Of The Conquest of New Spain by conquistador Bernal
Diaz del Castillo, who participated in it, is that they generally ditched their metal armors rather quickly due to the heat, and instead adopting the indigenous cotton armors, they also mostly adopted indigenous ranged weapons, keeping only their swords and horses by the end of the Conquest. Bernal emphasizes the scale of the armies a lot in his book, and the indigenous allied city-states are incredibly important, specially the siege of Tenochtitlan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmecac
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%93lpochcalli
"This same zero-sum competition extended to the Mexica army, which as soon as battle was joined became not an army but a swirling melee of individual glory-seekers. The purpose of the Mexica warrior was not the victory of the group, but competition with his peers, and the way to win the competition was to secure captives for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli. This singular fact drove almost everything about Mexica combat strategy, or the lack thereof. Great warriors wore towering feather headdresses to attract opponents so that they could be disabled and sacrificed. The Mexica had projectile weapons, but specifically designed them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization. The Mexica wielded long, shallow obsidian blades and flint-studded clubs that were designed to incapacitate by cutting a hamstring or crushing a knee, rather than to kill. The only way to advance as a Mexica warrior was to sacrifice more captives than your peers,8 and the incentives of the system shaped everything else."
After some more reading, it seems indeed that this Inda Clendinnen book from 1991 may be lackluster on how the aztecs actually behaved on the field
Steel armor was definitely a huge advantage and the Indians soon learned that the only two reliable ways to defeat armored soldiers were to drown them or to throw large stones at them if they ventured into a narrow valley. Neither was usually available.
"the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, so their weapons alone were irrelevant in the battle"
Irrelevant? Tell this to Atahualpa Inca, who, during the second big Spanish conquest, was taken alive by a group of mere 168 Spanish soldiers, unsupported by any local warriors, while having at least several thousand guards with him. Force ratio of 40 or 50 to 1 ultimately made no difference.
TL;DR - native alliances were important, but Spanish armor made them nearly invincible against native weapons, their military tactics were superior, and cavalry were extremely overpowered against armies made up only of footsoldiers. Weaponry and tech were certainly not irrelevant.
I read Bernal Diaz's book about the conquest of Mexico and in it he says that formations of Aztec warriors would break when a conquistador would charge into formations on an armored horse. They thought the horse and rider was one sort of monster. It was also a combination of a bunch of things they had never seen before: steel weapons, armor, the power and mobility of a trained war horse.
I don't think they could have taken control of the Aztec empire without allies and a lot of political intrigue. I think a good modern analogy was how the US quickly took over Afghanistan after 911. You could say we did it with a small group of special forces and a lot of air power. But really it is more like there were already (warlord) factions ready to strike at the Taliban who knew they could win with air support and everything that would come after. For the Aztecs, the role of the cavalry was like those B52 strikes.
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).
The article doesn't mean copper alloy tools though, it means copper tools, including weapons. At least that's how I read this:
"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."
why do you think the article doesn't mean copper alloy?
The only use of the word 'pure' is right before iron.
it's pretty common to refer to Otzi's axe as a 'copper axe', right in the wiki page: "Ötzi's copper axe was of particular interest.". but it's 99.7% copper. It contains other materials
I really dont understand jumping from 'copper tools' to 'pure copper tools'. Otzi's axe was maybe both an example of his mastery of the profession and a useful tool (it shows signs of use and rework).
Because it said the copper tools can bend easily and be bent back into shape. The copper alloy wouldn't be so soft. And Otzi's axe wasn't an alloy, ie an intentional mix of materials, it's just that copper naturally occurs with slight impurities.
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.
I wonder if the sea people were just displaced-farmers-turned-raiders that created some open loop feedback that in turn spawned more sea people in self defence or self survival.
The mythological idea of them just appearing out of nowhere is nice too. Makes it feel aligned with something like the pyramids having no explanation
This would (at least in part) mirror the dynamic during another major period of collapse and upheaval - the migration period. Displaced people trying to survive by raiding or squatting on new territory, thus displacing more people and collapsing complex networks of trade which were sustaining large local populations, thus displacing more people etc etc.
Similarly to the end of the bronze age, it was also a period in which shifts in climate stressed social structures. A runaway dynamic of lots of desperate people on the move is not great for stability, and if everyone is already experiencing some scarcity, then that's all the more vulnerable.
Yes, I think so. I remember Eric Cline mentioning this hypothesis in a lecture or a podcast about a decade ago.
Sea people as refugees displaced by drought, famine, war or just a general societal collapse.
In any case, the temporal coincidence of the bronze age collapse and the wide-spread adoption of iron working, which was inferior to bronze at first but more readily accessible, is fascinating*. I am not sure if we have a full picture of the role of that change yet. (Was it just a consequence of the collapse of trade and tin imports, or did it cause the destruction of the bronze age empires in the first place, or just prevent their return, or was it more complicated?)
(*) I do not mean the superficial tautology of "iron age" following the "bronze age" but the fact that the bronze age, in this region, ended in a societal collapse.
The Fall of Civilizations Podcast (nice one) had an episode on this topic.
According to it, the sea peoples could instead be vast numbers of western europeans fleeing the outcome of a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, which would have triggered crop failures and mass starvation in western and northern europe.
A significant portion of the survivors would have fled en masse to the richer eastern Mediterranean empires, thereby causing their downfall.
They probably never existed in the first place. Most of the evidence for the “Sea People” story is extremely tenuous. Those maps you’ve seen with lots of cities burnt down? Bogus. Often it is really just one burnt down building in a village or town that looks like it might date to approximately the right century. The maps also cherry–pick the data by showing all the towns that they count as burned down wile ignoring the far larger population that were not, and by obscuring the fact that these fires were spread out over such a long period of time.
I don't know where you're getting your facts, but according to Fall of Civilizations, it's not just one burnt down building, we're talking of a layer of ash, charred wood and burned material throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.
"The archeological evidence is quite clear: at some point between the year 1200 and the year 1100 BC, right at the end of the period we call the Bronze Age, a wave of destruction washed across the entire region. It wiped whole civilizations off the map and left nothing in its wake."
Yes, that’s the exaggerated tale that everyone knows.
In “Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age” <https://www.lockwoodpress.com/product-page/the-fall-of-the-b...> Jesse Millek examines 153 sites claimed to have been destroyed and found that 61% never happened, happened during a different time period, or had a different cause.
Even without buying the whole book you can download the appendix where he summarizes the results. A few notable entries:
Shiqmona: The possibly destroyed public building dates to the fourteenth century BCE. No end of the Late Branze Age destruction was uncovered.
Tell Irbid: C14 dates derived from short-lived samples places the destruction event between 1395–1260 BCE.
Krisa: There is only a statement that the site was destroyed with no published evidence of destruction in any structure.
Iria: Some burnt material in a pit was assumed to be a destruction. There was no damage visible to the buildings.
Athens: The Houses on the North slope were not houses at all. It was refuse that was dumped on the stairs.
Ayios Stephanos: Burning was uncovered in one room from Trench Beta 11. No other damage was recorded.
Amman Airport Structure: Evidence of burning in Room VII can be attributed to the hearth in that room.
Pefkakia: Adrimi-Sismani repeatedly cited a destruction, even though the excavators clearly stated the site was abandoned.
Tell el-‘Ajjul: Bell simply placed it on a map as destroyed with no citations. There was no settlement ca. 1200 BCE.
Obviously nobody knows. Whoever wrote those inscriptions apparently didn’t either. Even taking them at face value, however, the evidence that these “Sea People” systematically attacked all of civilization is extremely tenuous. There probably never was a power capable of kicking over all of the anthills and destroying civilization without leaving any other archeological evidence of their existence.
I've never heard that the Sea People were a cohesive force, attacking all of Bronze civilization in anything like a coordinated attack.
Waves of invaders can take many generations to wear down the native forces. They don't need to be allied in any formal sense, either. See for example: Saxons turning Britain Anglo-Saxon.
I am saying that even if these battles did take place, there is no evidence that “the Sea Peoples” fought any other battles anywhere else at all. The story of a wave of violence sweeping around the entire Mediterranean and ending all of the civilizations there is largely fabricated.
Furthermore, just because these inscriptions didn’t give the raiders a specific name doesn’t mean that they were from an unknown civilization.
My above post was factual/historical so I’m leaving my moral judgements here in a separate post.
I believe the Bronze Age collapse was a good and necessary thing for humanity. It was required to get out of the local stable point that post-Neolithic society had evolved and settled into.
By the 12 century BCE the noble kings that Marduk and Maat would have smiled upon had long been replaced by the same flavor of sociopaths that lurk the halls of our major governments today.
But these Bronze Age despots had a LOCK on the economy that today’s crony capitalists could only dream of. And they had a lock on the culture too, mostly via the state religion.
BUT: years of bad harvests, disasters and bad omens become increasingly hard to explain. Higher taxes and worse service from the state. No protection from invaders.
Do you revolt? Join the invaders?
No living soul, not even your oldest relatives, can remember time before the empire. No one knows what comes next, so you don’t do this high risk thing unless life really sucks. But people did, because life really sucked.
Proposition: The Bronze Age collapse is to be celebrated as a triumph of the people over the most unequal societies that have ever existed.
In the absolute you’re right. In the relative, far from right.
If Mr T could literally order anyone murdered at will with absolute impunity, you might have a case. As of today, he’s having legal difficulties flying people out of the country. A Ramses II does not exist, and thankfully cannot exist, in today’s world.
Just like the Cambrian explosion only happened once, and could only happen once, so did this transition.
It was an awakening of the people that is difficult to imagine today: everything you’ve been told, everything your parents and grandparents have told you, might be flat-out wrong. You’ve never known any other system. You owe your life to the state, so you’re told, to bring glory to the gods. But life sucks a lot lately, and you’re not buying the party line any more. Your neighbors are grumbling too.
It was the first world-scale transition of state order, and it happened because the elites had amassed so much absolute power they’d been corrupted absolutely.
Not even totalitarian dictators of the modern era have had the kind of power these royals had.
There absolutely exist dictators that can kill people at their whims. The CCP comes to mind, so do Iran, North Korea and Hamas, but especially Putin's Russia where even being filthy rich does not protect you from falling out of windows.
And make no mistake, Trump and Erdogan want this power for themselves.
Meh. I think you underestimate the psychological difference between Putin level "I can kill you if you step out of line by pushing you out a window" vs ancient king level of "I can kill you at will because I am a god".
Regardless of whether this is true or not you have basically described the UK and how people think about a Russian invasion.
You already have elites siding against their own people and tyrannically collecting taxes and giving it to their Mercenary base.
It isn't hard to imagine a benevolent Sea People offering to free the locals from their despotic elite.
The Bronze Age would not have had the same migration structures obviously but one might imagine it happening locally.
What is funny is that a lot of these explanations of what happened seem to fly in the face of what people find is possible to ascribe to situations now.
> the UK and how people think about a Russian invasion.
That is a very Thought Bubble perspective. It's not a mainstream view of any kind in the UK. The Man on the Clapham Omnibus is not in favour of a Russian invasion, nor is he expecting one. Nor is his mate in the pub.
That's handwaving the mass-suffering caused by systemic collapse. I have a few issues with this. The first one is dialectic, you can't posit that since the following state reached a place you're fine with later on, the process that led to it was necessary. That's thinking backwards. You don't know that it wouldn't have reached a better or equal state without collapse.
The following ones are ethical and philosophical. My own standing is that :
- Individuals can't be treated as fungible or dispensable, even when thinking in macro states. That opens the door for extreme suffering and simplistic thinking.
- On longer scales, stability wins. Collapse should be treated as a hard failure, not a mechanic.
The impression that I get from this comment is the idea that society and culture moves "forward," whatever that means, and therefore stability is holding back society. Sure, there's short-term pain in collapse, but what rises from the ashes will be better than before.
This is absolutely not the case. It's more than likely that whatever rises out of the *hellscape* of a societal collapse will be worse than what was there before.
The collapse of Rome did not lead to a better Rome. It was hundreds of years of suffering and death. In fact, the stability of Rome is what allowed for it to reach its peak over hundreds of years - something that was undeniably good for its citizens.
As opposed to slow burn suffering caused by living under a poor exploitative system? Say nothing of the opportunity cost...
It's not like bronze age societies had invented peaceful power transitions between fundamentally opposed factions. Whatever state they were stuck in they were there until a regime change, if you're lucky that'll only kill a few people at the top. But most societies aren't that lucky.
>- On longer scales, stability wins. Collapse should be treated as a hard failure, not a mechanic.
Japan was stable for a hell of a long time. Not hard to imagine had they been located somewhere slightly different in the world they'd have wound up slaves to some random European power. Stability works until you get into a local maximum you can't get out of A lot of those local maximums you are not getting out of except over the dead bodies of whoever benefits from them (see also: US civil war), if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you get subjugated by someone else.
It's a nice idea, but couldn't it also be explained easily by the invaders enslaving or killing most of the population? Existing structural decline and instability makes this a lot easier to do for an invading force.
Historia Civilis had video that military of all states were organized around "superweapon" chariots. Battles were basically sports events, where elites measured their xyz.
Sea People had completely different style od fighting, they were runners who harrased and eventually outflank chariots.
Cline has argued for systems collapse. i.e. It wasn't any one thing that caused the collapse, but several things in conjunction. Others argue differently. e.g. James Lacey, who comes at things from a perspective of military strategy and economics, has argued that the systems collapse model really underestimates how much war can accomplish all on its own. He's of the opinion that, whoever the sea peoples were, they caused the collapse.
This article doesn't really wade into that dispute, but instead focuses on why new empires didn't rise once old ones collapsed. Iron smelting originated before the collapse, but didn't really spread at first. Bronze age iron was probably really awful stuff, and soldiers tended to be conservative when it came to technology. They wanted weapons they could trust, and that was copper or bronze. As long as the great empires persisted and the trade of tin and copper continued, nobody was forced to use Iron, so nobody was motivated to get good at producing quality iron weapons.
Then whatever caused the collapse happened, and the ingredients for making bronze became difficult or impossible to get. It was iron or back to copper and stone. So, peopled adopted Iron and that gave smiths the chance to improve iron smelting techniques. During the bronze age, a would-be empire just had to get their hands on a decent amount of bronze and they could steamroll everybody they came across because they all had copper or stone weapons. After iron technology spread, it was iron vs iron. Would be empires got hung up fighting their well-armed neighbours and the snowball couldn't get rolling. The few empires that were left, such as Egypt, contracted. They no longer had a technological advantage once those they formerly ruled adopted iron.
Primitive iron was inferior to bronze and harder to produce. It was weak, malleable, and rapidly rusted. It only became practical once people learned to make a primitive steel by adding charcoal. This is why it took a long time for iron to replace bronze.
That stuff is choke-full of carbon and silica, and is brittle as hell. To get it malleable (which is actually desirable in a weapon, so it wouldn't just snap in use), there is a separate process to decrease carbon content:
No, it's not backwards. The modern steelmaking process starts with iron that has too much carbon content that has to be removed; the premodern process was the other way round. See A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry's excellent series explaining premodern iron and steel production: https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
>Isn't that backwards? Surely "primitive iron" was closer to what we call pig iron nowadays.
You're under the illusion that the west used kilns to melt iron into a liquid that they poured into a crucible during the Bronze Age. That's actually an ancient Chinese technique that was adopted long after the western Bronze Age ended and it does indeed create pig iron. But the west only adopted pig iron as an intermediate process for making steel starting in the middle ages.
Back then you just put the crushed (via hammer) iron ore and coal into a clay kiln (a bloomery). Because these furnaces couldn't reach the melting point of pure iron, the metal never liquefied. Then at the end you basically had mostly slag with some small iron pearls inside (a bloom). You had to hammer the slag off the iron under heat. Hence primitive wrought iron came first and because it had low carbon it was highly malleable.
The technique that was used to make primitive steel was very simple. In fact, it is basically the same process as was used to get the iron out of the ore. You make a steel tool with malleable wrought iron, pack it with powdered charcoal and seal them both inside of clay. You then heat up a kiln and the carbon diffuses into the outer surface of the iron. This process is known as case hardening.
Also you just linked an article that just told you everything I just wrote from memory:
>While the bloomery process produced wrought iron directly from ore, cast iron or pig iron were the starting materials used in the finery forge and puddling furnace. Pig iron and cast iron have higher carbon content than wrought iron, but have a lower melting point than iron or steel. Cast and especially pig iron have excess slag which must be at least partially removed to produce quality wrought iron. At foundries it was common to blend scrap wrought iron with cast iron to improve the physical properties of castings.
Yeah, so bloomeries produce wrought iron directly hence wrought iron came first.
Chattel slavery and the Russian serf system were very different. Notably, the plantation owners weren't themselves bound into feudal service to an emperor, they got to have a "modern" relationship with a state.
The Sea Peoples seemed more like slow erosion on top of all the other issues. Egypt was able to resist the Sea Peoples but other empires were to weak to handle the constant issues. It feels a bit like the fall of the Western Roman Empire which was erosion of stability, what it meant to be roman and military might until it collapsed.
Egypt might have had significant geographical advantage. Nile is just a single corridor to defend and fend off with significant depth. Invasions are simpler to handle when your entire land is in essence single continuous chokepoint.
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?
The problem is that ironworking doesn't actually precede the bronze age collapse archeologically. Ironworking has mysterious and archaic origins... but it doesn't proliferate untill all those empires are fallen and forgotten.
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.</i>
There would be a tipping point though. Where mining the ingredients for bronze would become economically nonviable- after that the mining infrastructure collapses hard and fast. And with it the mining towns would empty out and the still bronze relying cultures would destabilize in waves of "cheap" bronze, expensive ingredients.
The mining infrastructure didn't collapse. But tin was traded over very large distances,mostly from outside of that civilization's brotherhood of great kings (the rabbu surru system).
Iron bloomeries (via slag finds) appear in the record sporadically. It starts before the collapse, and may have very archaic uknown origins. But... they become common as recovery happens.
So... Causation seems to be backwards. Bronze production mostly ends. Iron working starts gradually expanding in the absence of bronze.
Also... The "superior weapons" angle isn't very strong. Bronze and early iron were not in a different league.
Iron just has more potential for scale, because the material itself is abundant. It requires a lot of labour and fuel, but if you can scale those you can scale ironworking. Eventually iron surpasses bronze and steel is vastly superior... but this takes many centuries.
He's absolutely not saying iron caused the collapse, only that it prevented the recovery.
> The causes of the Bronze Age collapse are still debated by historians: a series of severe droughts; the sudden appearance of mysterious Sea Peoples, who raided along the Mediterranean coast; the disruption of the tin trade routes; internal revolts; or possibly all of these at once. But there is another unifying factor that could have prevented the resurgence of empires: iron.
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.
The Nature article is not about 2000 BC but 2000 BP, i.e. before present, with the oldest site around 2300 before present, i.e. around 300 BC.
So these are old sites of iron production, but not as old as the first production of iron in the Anatolia-Caucasus region, from where it spread in Europe, West Asia and North Africa.
In Egypt, some ancient objects made of meteoritic iron have been found, which precede by a few millennia the discovery of how to extract iron from minerals.
Another of your links points to a book "Metals in Past Societies" which is supposed to contain information about sites really older than 2000 BCE, but I am skeptical about the dating until I read the book, because the book is less recent than the 2024 article from Nature, which ignores those sites that are claimed to be older.
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.
The claim (as I understand it) is that power was centralized because tin was rare--i.e., had to be imported via sophisticated trade routes, which presumably could be controlled by the state.
In an area where tin is abundant, individuals could easily forge their own bronze weapons, thus making it harder for the state to have a monopoly on high-tech weapons.
So I think the Harappan actually reinforce the theory.
Bronze and iron weren't limited for military usage. Basically from an economical point of view, the scarcity of bronze limited the size of economies and armies.
Once people started using iron instead of bronze, the first use was probably creating tools used for farming, food production, and other important things: Axes, hoes, spades, etc. And they did not just substitute bronze tools but because iron was cheaper, they probably created more of them, and new tools. And it also enabled things like nails and other construction material.
So, the economy and power structures shifted as tools enabled more economic output. By the time steel became good enough for weaponry, the bronze age was effectively already a thing of the past as the economy would have shifted to using iron for most tools long before.
And then later of course, having cheap and good enough steel weaponry enabled the creation of larger armies too. So towards the end of the Iron age, you get e.g. the Romans creating huge legions that were simply not economically feasible in the bronze age. And given that hand to hand combat was basically the way people waged wars, the ones with the bigger armies would tend to win.
I would be careful with using the "state" word in this context. The first real "states" around the Mediterranean were arguably Rome and Egypt, but even then, every (militarily or economically) subjugated city or province could have local ruling structures tied to families or individuals. Even in Rome itself, specific families were often "bigger than the state", directly controlling people and resources without answering to anyone in practice. This is particularly true in terms of weapons: more often than not, the top rulers would actually borrow weapons produced for, and owned by, specific families and individuals.
The concept of "state" is very modern, we tend to retrofit it over the past, but it's often wrong. There have always been rulers, and families, competing interests and identities; which typically produced inconsistent and fragmented governance over most territories, until very recently.
I agree. The author is stretching several assumptions to get to his conclusions. The sub-title suggests he has solved the "Bronze Age collapse" riddle but his statement can simply be considered one of many factors already pointed out in the literature -- not the main reason.
I’m ignorant of the geology there, but Wikipedia says copper was available. If you are saying they had unusually easy access to tin, then they sort of had the ability to make bronze without the long-range trade. Is that right?
That would seem to support the theory in a way. If they could make bronze “in their back yard,” the same way that everyone else could make iron in the Iron Age, they would be sort of living in their own proto-iron-age, right? (In the sense that access to metallurgy was democratized). So if anything, it would provide some pretty strong support of the link between democratized metallurgy and more disperse power.
The author also doesn’t really even attempt to explain why the Sea Peoples hypothesis, one pretty well substantiated by a lot of independent evidence, and one which the current consensus theory among experts, is wrong. Is there a prior post we’re supposed to be familiar with?
It doesn't need to be wrong - democratising violence mean people with boats are more likely to have weapons and ability to attack you. Or the ability to disrupt trade, for that matter.
> ships that can transport an army over a long distance on sea
This isn’t what the Sea Peoples built. It isn’t even what the Romans built. Most Mediterranean cultures lacked the navigational and ship-building expertise to let the shore out of sight. That doesn’t mean they didn’t need skill. But it was less skill than needed for metallurgy, in part because the latter’s inputs are dearer.
I'm honestly starting to doubt you've ever been on a ship at sea. Being in sight of the shore is going to be of little comfort if your makeshift raft capsizes because of the waves.
Making a boat that can carry multiple people on sea without sinking when the weather goes a little sour (which can happen in less than an hour in the Mediterranean) is a very hard thing to do. And if you know how to do that you'll never have any shortage of metal or other goods in the first place because you end up being the one who trade them for profit.
I'm not convinced by the author (although I don't know enough to be sure of anything), but despite the title, he is not talking about why the bronze age collapsed but about why the bronze age empires where not replaced by the same kind of empires
I think the argument is the Indus Valley civilization was dependent on international trade with the autocracies further west and collapsed when that network broke down
The generally agreed epoch of Mahabharata war (and also the start of kali yuga or iron age) among Vedic astrologers is about 3102 BC which places the epic deep into the Bronze age territory. Historians generally reject this epoch as it creates the dark age problem (over 2000 years of unexplained historical gap between that war and 500 BC when figures like Bimbisara, Buddha and Ajata Satru start appearing). Their epoch is in the range of 800-2000 BC depending on who you ask.
Having said that, there is nothing to make the bronze age epoch impossible. There is nothing in the epic which may not have been possible in the bronze age based on what we already know about history.
... The Mahabarta also says a woman was pregnant for 2 years after which she birthed a lifeless mass of flesh, cut it into 100 pieces, put it in ghee in jars, and incubated them into a 100 sons and 1 daughter...
this is definitely not possible in the bronze age or any other age for that matter from what we know of history.
> 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.
It seems you didn't read the article carefully. The author says that bronze age empires derived their power from the scarcity of tin, which they could obtain via trade routes, but was hard to get hold of for smaller rulers. In your example this scarcity doesn't hold because tin happened to be nearby. So your example is perfectly compatible with his theory.
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.
>>>The same thing happened later in Europe when Germanic and Asian tribes displaced the Roman and Celtic tribes of Western Europe.
If you are referring to Hungarians as Asian people, then by majority their genetics is very local - very local, that they are similar to rest of Slavics around them. The same applies to Western Europeans that were as you have stated "displaced by Germanic" - even in UK it is a mix of local population, when the migratory Germanic population % is high, thought nothing to do with Roman Empire, as it was rather internal migration withing Danish Kingdom(long long long time after Rome was gone) that was spanned across Northern Europe, and included England as one of their lands - for that reason we have dna from Estonia(Eastland in Danish) appearing in those ancient English lineages...
However, Dark Ages that followed invasions of German people in Rome, where concrete recipe and other modern technologies were lost and forgotten is more relatable to what happened in Bronze Age Collapse. You simply do not need any of that knowledge when busy of looting.
Also, looting of villas in Rome was technically not done by foreigners, but rather by disgruntled employers that were hired to guard Rome(Goths) - the fact that Rome gave rights for Goths to loot border provinces(as a a payment, because they lacked money to pay them) that they were guarding(and where they were settled) seems stupid(because we see results of that), but also we can read about local servants joining in destruction of villas of their rulers during final days of Rome.
So, just like then, also now in the case of societal collapse of modern civilization you have to be afraid that you will be robbed mainly from locals, though "foreign" robbers already are better at that, showing extreme proficiency at doing exactly that today.
They're referring to the Huns, not the Hungarians. They're two completely different groups. The Huns invaded in the 5th Century AD, and the Hungarians invaded in the 9th Century AD.
Both groups came from Asia. The reason why the Hungarians seem "local" now is that they've intermarried with local people for so long. But the language they speak is not Indo-European. It's actually related to language spoken in Siberia.
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?
in theory, a delicate ecosystem built around Bronze collapsed. to make weak sauce Iron work you had to be a) very desperate and b) very clever. which scales for those who figure it out
the post in question doesn't even mention Ugarit. or Arsenic. i am genuinely pissed off at the original tome being passed off as genuine discourse:
The author in question is clearly not a charlatan. That they might have omitted discussing some of your favourite details in an overview article is not a sign of quackery.
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."
"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.
the roman empire was a long time after the bronze age collapse. It succeeded a long list of empires (assyrian, persian, macedonian, hellenic etc), and it only collapsed in the west. also the arab empires preceded charlemagne's
That analysis skips quite a few empires both before and after the Roman empire. Also, at least for the Romans the bureaucracy arguably came after the empire was already well established.
The claim is that bronze enabled complex, highly centralized states because it was rare (due to a dearth of tin). So only the connected/rich could afford it, and they used it to build empires/kingdoms/etc.
Iron wasn't superior to bronze (in the fact the article claims it was worse), but it was good enough and widespread. All you needed was a furnace with bellows, charcoal, and an iron source (which were everywhere). Since everyone had access to iron, no one person/group had an edge over the others and this prevented highly centralized polities from being established.
so economically speaking it was cheaper to mass produce iron weapons.. I would have assumed a first mover advantage. It would be surprising if iron tech sprung up everywhere at the same time. And sure smaller groups could do it, but some groups would do it better,faster, cheaper (paretto principle). They should have had a material advantage me thinks. Since its cheaper you could arm more people perhaps. Lastly, the current powers could have also adopted iron and armed larger armies.
The problem is if I learn how you make iron weapons and then escape (or any other spy scenario) I can make iron weapons anywhere and teach my friends. Even a second mover can get an advantage.
Bronze it wouldn't matter because I can't get the raw materials anywhere, and so I can't create an army to oppose you.
Did you read the article? The argument was that tin doesn't occur in many places, so only the powerful even had access to bronze, which was a far superior material, which made it easy to subjugate the vast majority with no access to any material which could rival bronze. Whereas iron is abundant, so everyone has access to it, making it difficult to subjugate other people, because they could fight back.
Because other people learned to make iron weapons and fought back.
Bronze weapon technology had a moat because it required scarce, imported resources. Even if they learned the techniques, most people couldn't make them.
The resources for iron weaponry were readily available; they just needed to learn the techniques.
>> 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.
_______________
[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.
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.
Tin was far more scarce than iron. Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones, just easier to source and make. This guy makes a case that iron weapons caused the Bronze Age Collapse.
Your twitter link is a summary of the linked article - from the editor-in-chief - in case someone else sees "this guy" and assumes it would be a different take than the one in the featured article.
Don't confuse iron weapons with steel. Steel was much better than bronze, but they didn't know how to make steel and so examples were rare. (probably not unknown, making iron weapons does produce a small amount of steel and if you're careful you can separate that out and after a thousand or so iron swords you can make one steel sword. I've seen it suggested that this is where the stories of a legendary weapon comes from - probably not something we could ever know for sure.)
Bronze is harder and more corrosion resistant, but forged iron (and especially iron that has been reforged) has a higher yield strength and is lighter, allowing longer lighter weapons. Compare the profile of bronze age and iron age swords in any museum and you can see that the bronze blades are shorter and wider that the iron weapons, and they would be considerably heavier.
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?
It could be the Bronze Age empires were based on violence and coercion. When the small polities had the means to defend themselves, the empires fell apart.
Well all of civilization and society is based on violence and coercion to some extent. I'm not sure that small tribes polities were any less violent than larger empires, and I'd generally have a bias that larger empires were more peaceful per-capita because if you are the king war is tiresome and threatening. Better to be at peace.
I'm also not sure about your suggestion. Yes small polities had the means to defend themselves, but the pharaoh's army is much larger and you're definitely going to die if he shows up and you fight back. So why wouldn't the pharaoh have shown up to put down a rebellion? Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
I'm just not sure that this democratization of violence is the answer. Though it may be a key contributor. Curious about your thoughts or others. Incredibly fascinating topic.
Have you read about the Assyrians? Those early empires were nasty.
And yes, the common people might have been better off under larger empires than under smaller ones, but who has ever cared about the common people? The upper class were probably more "I'd rather be the king of a small kingdom than bend my knee to an emperor."
Bronze age empires were large -- if the pharaoh couldn't trust his subordinates he could only be in one place at a time.
> Have you read about the Assyrians? Those early empires were nasty.
Barely. My knowledge of ancient empires and peoples before the Greeks is rudimentary at best, and that may be a charitable description.
The more I've learned and read the more I've forgotten and the more I've learned I don't know. But I do read about these kinds of dynasties, civilizations, empires, and peoples and it is endlessly fascinating.
As I have become a little bit older and well traveled I keep coming back to the Normans. What they built and the effect they have had on civilization development in Europe and beyond is amazing! I've seen it in France, but the Bayeux Tapestry is, in my mind, one of the premier cultural artifacts of all of civilization (I'm not doing to disagree with anyone who suggests otherwise, feel free to :) ) and it would have been great to see it while it temporarily resides at the British Museum but alas work and life here in the United States takes precedence.
One of the most violent and brutal conducts in times of war was the Assyrian practice of ripping open pregnant women in order to expose their fetus. In his article, “‘Ripping Open Pregnant Women’ in Light of an Assyrian Analogue,” Mordechai Cogan quotes an Assyrian poem, probably dated to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I.
>Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
And when all those rebellions cost the Pharaoh 3x what they used to to put down you're forced to be a lot more diplomatic. Less extraction under threat of violence means smaller army means worse negotiating position for the next one. It's a cycle.
And for every full scale armies meeting in the field type rebellion there's a lot of "sir a second village has lynched the tax men" which compel you to dispense policing forces, etc, etc.
Just because you "can" do something in moderation doesn't mean it's a sustainable way to run your empire at scale.
You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes. And you can't just "supervise" them with your loyal people because this is pre-industrial and there do not exist sufficient surpluses to feed those nonproductive mouths.
Not to mention that even people who could barely read (and maintain efficient long-distance communications and even barely understand the concept of a standard) were in extremely short supply.
> You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes.
There is a superstition in the Middle Ages that blacksmiths should not be killed, in the context of battles. Blacksmiths were an absolutely essential part of the support of an army, but his skills and tools were just as useful to the winning side. Minus his skills, his tools were just surplus, heavy items.
Other army support crew like washerwomen, stable boys, and even prostitutes were of course much easier to replace.
Because pure iron, with no carbonization, is useless as a material for tools or weapons.
Carbonization was invented/discovered after the Bronze Age collapse, slowly over hundreds of years, exactly because they didn’t have access to bronze anymore.
Despite being "useless", almost all early iron age weapons were iron, not steel nor bronze. They generally knew about steel, but could not control the carbonization well enough to outfit the whole army with it. Steel did not become widespread until the Roman era.
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]
> Alexander, originally from the Greek Ἀλέξανδρος (Aléxandros), from αλέξειν aléxein meaning "to ward off, keep off, turn away, defend, protect" and ἀνδρός andrós, genitive of ἀνήρ anḗr meaning "man".
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.
Some high-level observations about the story of Iron are helpful. First, Iron smelting was discovered independently in different parts of the world, but everywhere it was an evolution of the bronze smelting process. Second, the process took several centuries to evolve. The first iron pieces were considered bad bronze and discarded. When tin became rare the producers gradually increased the quality of the bad bronze. In all likelihood for centuries they did not recognize iron as a new metal but rather an improved “bad bronze” . The final notable observation of the story is who these inventors were. They were not the learned people of the ancient world. Rather they were artisans and laborers working in difficult conditions.
The primary conclusion of the article are based on two fundamental assumptions:
1. Iron weapons did not exist before the "Bronze Age collapse." That is not borne by the evidence. Iron weapons came from the same centers and communities that used to produce bronze weapons. If these weapon makers were restricted to supply to power centers during the Bronze Age, why were they not restricted during the Iron Age?
2. Wide distribution of iron weaponry prevented formation of great powers after the "collapse". If true why and how were Assyrians and Persians able to build such large empires long after iron weapons were wide spread? Weapon distribution cannot be the primary explanation for why great powers did not form after 1200BC.
What iron did, or at least was associated with, was a change in military tactics and organization that made the expensive chariot-based forces of the centralized states less workable. But undoubtedly the LBA collapse had other factors, like severe prolonged droughts (which are attested in the archaeological evidence).
This proposed change in tactics happened before iron weapons became widespread, though. Iron should I think be seen as a cope for a world in which long distance trade in tin had shut down.
I have read Cline's work. He is not the original source of the ideas on bronze to iron transition. This is a very well studied topic in archeological metallurgy.
> I have read Cline's work. He is not the original source of the ideas on bronze to iron transition. This is a very well studied topic in archeological metallurgy.
have you? i don't understand what you are bringing to the table. any real scientist discusses the shoulders they stood upon
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.
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.
Some of the "Sea Peoples" didn't even travel by sea.
It's slightly funny and scary in our current year of 2026 we now have a lot of destabilizing factors along with uncontrolled immigration happening.... history might repeat?
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.
> but it still remained inferior to bronze even in Classic Greece.
The Greeks clearly had access to bronze from the archaic period and used large amounts of it to manufacture armor. Yet they still used iron for swords and spear points. This would indicate that iron was already superior to bronze for quite a few use cases.
Iron was mostly perfected by Romans through their conquests as they collected and systemised iron processing tech of the nations they conquered, which all entered Iron Age by then. By the times of early Roman Empire, high quality iron spread around enough to make bronze obsolete.
IIRC there were significant improvements in the early and mid “dark ages” and mass produced Roman steel was generally quite poor by medieval standards.
I think the main benefit of bronze and it still existed in Roman times is that you can cast it instead of forging. It took almost two thousand years to figure out how to make steel cuirasses that resembled the bronze ones Greeks used before the classical period. Of steel chainmail or scale armor was already superior anyway.
Really great channel! I love the "down to earth" history format it provides.
I think there is that huge misunderstanding that people were much different a hundred, a thousand or two thousand years ago, when it's mostly different language, technology. The politics part feels very contemporary.
Eg. soldiers singing rude songs during campaigns or celebrating coming home. Or during Saturnalia some people getting shitfaced all night, while others complaining about these "idiots".
Or politicians trying to make shady deals, or having their own agenda, putting their own people in place. Or talking about food/money for the poorer population (yes, there was free government food for the poor even 2k years ago!) or making bad decisions like giving veterans free land to grow crop on, and people realizing just because they are good soldiers doesn't mean they are great farmers.
Or that obsession of calling every war just and defensive, even when the main goal is expand the empire and being hailed as "imperator".
Or the fact that many actually found the coliseum pretty brutal just like parts of the Triumph (parade after conqueror new land) being upset and demanding to spare various people.
Also love the context that is often added, like whose perspective something is based on and where historians disagree.
Great channel for everyone that cannot stand that whole "Ave, Caesar" style talk or making everything sound grand instead of real.
Really wished history was taught that way in school. Right now it almost feels like anti-history. Instead of events it feels like the thing that's important are names and dates, which (most of the time) is the least important. At least in my opinion "learning from history" doesn't mean getting to know names and dates.
Haha yeah it's always fun to see how absolutely nothing has changed in the past few thousand years when it comes to politics.
I think my favorite part is how Caesar got obsessed with making a new calendar as a secret pet project and we're still using that exact setup today with only two or three minor patches. I kinda would've preferred the Egyptian 10 month 30 day setup with an extra week of vacation though ngl.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of giving soldiers land to farm on. It was normally in conquered territories, so it meant that you had men in those territories who had military experience and were ostensibly loyal. Not just a reward, but pragmatism.
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.
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.
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.
half of them died of diseases brought by the spanish...
More like 95%.
Not sure why the downvotes? The number was really that high and this is the basic reason the Aztecs were defeated:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/16/mexico-500-yea...
Within five years as many as 15 million people – an estimated 80% of the population – were wiped out in an epidemic the locals named “cocoliztli”. The word means pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language.
The Spanish, the French, the English, the Portuguese...
It seems to be just a quirk of fortune that it wasn't the other way around. That is that Europe wasn't decimated by American deceases.
> quirk of fortune
im not exactly sure what this means, but if you are interested you should read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
the reason it happened this way is because the Americas had very few domesticated animals and we get most of our diseases from animals.
>you should read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
That book has some many errors in it I actually suggest you don't read it.
This book came up so many times in school, always as some way to say Eurasians never had any inherent advantages. It's not that I think they do, it's just that I'm wary of people trying to reach a conclusion only because it's politically correct.
Eurasians had massive inherent advantages. Thats the entire point of the book. its just that the advantages werent "they are genetically superior."
unless you plan to read a dozen academic books about a variety of topics, i dont really think there is a better option for a popular audience that will answer the question
"why were Eurasians able to so easily take over the Americas" than this book.
This is blatant misinformation. Three things led to defeat:
- European diseases
- superior weaponry
- alliances with local Aztec enemies
The first wave of smallpox killed 5-8 million and is by far one of the greatest factors.
Cortez had around 500 men. Even if you get rid of 99% of the local population, which they didn't, they'd have been outnumbered in to an absurd degree.
In the battle of Frankenhausen, Germany, 1525, German peasants went up against armored soldiers and the casualties were 5000 peasants dead vs 6 armored soldiers. The technological advantage before modern firearms for formal armies was enormous, even in Europe, even without the help of imported European diseases.
Aztec warriors were not European peasants though . They were highly skilled and well equipped. They didn't have steel blades (except what they captured from the invaders), but their obsidian "swords" were not that much worse in the hands of a skilled fighter. Plus the European handguns were not that reliable and accurate yet to be all that useful except for showing off. If the first shot missed (assuming it didn't misfire) there was no time for another. And guns need a steady supply of powder and bullets, which Cortez didn't have most of the time since he was also at odds with the governor of Cuba.
There's also plenty of accounts from the early days of Cortez' invasion where the Spaniards had a very hard time against the indigenous warriors even when the Spaniards were not largely outnumbered.
The Aztecs lacked horses and attack dogs. The Spanish by contrast had perfected combat with both. Both proved decisive over and over again. You're correct in asserting that guns weren't decisive - although initially he noise and visual display of firearms were a significant factor in confusing and frightening the Aztecs (especially the common people and subjugated indigenous groups).
I think the horses proved useful in some situations (at least to scare the people who had never seen riders), but then the number of horses was somewhere between a dozen at the start and never more than a hundred. And from what I've been reading their use in battle was often hit and miss because the cavalery often didn't have enough room to be effective.
It's not just the blades, it's the steel armor. Aztecs had cotton armor designed to snag the obsidian teeth.
Artillery and cavalry against unarmed peasants is slaughter, not battle.
Numbers like that are almost always the same story. I wasn't familiar with that exact battle [1] but it also matches the pattern. It's not like the peasants actually took on the soldiers, but rather you had some peasants inexplicably leave a town, and organize themselves within a circling of wagons, a 'wagon fort'. That wagon fort was then fully encircled, and 'ambushed' starting with artillery.
The peasants immediately broke and fled, which is where you get the crazy ratios from - fleeing armies are extremely vulnerable and near harmless. Had they fought, they likely would have inflicted far greater casualties on the military forces. However given there were roughly comparable peasant and military forces, the outcome was not in question, so it would have been suicide. Of course so was fleeing.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Frankenhausen
If that's 500 fighting men, that's actually a sizeable army. Especially with no supply train.
An army is more than the number of men around. Losing 99% of the population (or even much less) is instant collapse.
Diseases were affecting both Aztecs and their enemies. Also, while USA did not had to fight "peaceful" and well developed farmer societies in Northern American plains, organized Comanche raiders that came from north and subjugated whatever was spared by plagues were a headache for colonists for couple of centuries.
What most of the comments along with article writer are missing - it was not just technology, that Spanish used, but organization structure and command of professional military forces - that is one of the reason why 1000s of peasants were incapable to fight against couple of men in armor, as they lacked coordination - that would be the same as pitting street kids against a swat team, even if they were given the same weapons.
The same applies to Aztecs that had different POV and mindset against battle-hardened professional European soldiers - when you read how Aztec demise unfolded, in some of it you have to question what they were thinking, but that is mostly because of our modern bias, that has not much knowledge of their beliefs on how they viewed world around them.
Also, not more important fact - now, just like then, not all people were interested to be involved in war, and a peace agreement for them was even better than being part of alliance(and the choices here are to die for foreign Aztecs as one of them) and join fight. And those who already hated Aztecs to the guts, also had plenty of motivation to see all of that empire burn.
PS. People who are mentioning bunch of foreigners are clueless about European history - whole European FEUDALISM political system was born out of bunch of foreign raiders, that we know today as vikings and their descendants, that carved up Europe and limited their in-fighting with rules and brought unified force against those that challenged them. Europeans had pretty much the same scenario before repeated on native Americans and many times.
One and the same. The Spanish were seen as gods, in part because of appearance and in part because of armaments. It's not like if a random cadre of people, with comparable levels of tech as the Aztecs, wandered down to South America that they'd have been able to form alliances willing to go thrust themselves into battle, on their behalf, against the establishment of the time.
On top of being what enabled them to form alliances, it also begs another question. If it was primarily these masses that overwhelmed the Aztecs (and I don't disagree) then what need did they have of outsiders, let alone letting them act as rulers? It was the perception of alien levels of weaponry and technology that both gave the locals the morale they needed, and justified the Spaniards being deemed leaders.
The idea that the Spaniards were gods didn't hold very long. The Aztecs even sent body parts of captured and killed Spanish soldiers (and their horses) to display in cities and villages for the propaganda effect (see: they are not gods they bleed and die like everybody else).
In the end the defeat of the Aztecs was decided just as much by politics as by violence.
Also it's not like Cortez won every battle, they were even catastrophically defeated in the "night of tears". Coming back from that defeat wouldn't have been possible without indigenous allies and their thousands of skilled and well-equipped warriors fighting on Cortez' side against the Aztecs even after Cortez was driven out of Tenochtitlan (and not to mention logistic support which was probably even more important).
> what need did they have of outsiders
People sometimes needs a push to get onboard an idea. When you have been inside a system for along time it is difficult to see to what extreme is not just and how very possible it is the change it. Looking at you USA.
The anecdote that the Aztecs viewed the Spanish as gods is ahistorical. https://daily.jstor.org/the-mexica-didnt-believe-the-conquis...
« It was the perception of alien levels of weaponry and technology that both gave the locals the morale they needed »
Now that really epitomizes the (horrible) Usanian mindset and way of “thinking” (regardless of whether or not that's where you're actually from).
What if the Indios were actually interested in listening to what the Spaniards had to say? They said there is no need for human sacrifice – because there is a god that doesn't require sacrifice, having settled that once and for all by sacrifying his own son.
The world would be in a much better state if there were any (or more) real Christians in the USA instead of the materialist sects that pose as such (or even as sth else) and bring the unfortunate “blessings” of their “culture” over the globe.
> Usanian mindset
What is a usanian?
American, from the US of A. I would assume derogatory.
What (dumb) people from not the USA call Americans because "something something you don't own the continents"?
It's the equivalent of calling a white guy a honkey in 2026 - cringe and not going to get the reaction you hope for unless doing it comedically.
The misinformation about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs is one of the most depressing things imaginable.
The historical record is completely clear and we have first hand accounts, primary sources, from the people present. It's all readily available and anyone interest can easily verify it.
And yet, even in the comments responding to yours, people confidently state just blatantly untrue things.
The real reason is of course that the Spaniards took all the jobs of the Aztecs.
Only the jobs the Aztecs didn't want
Could you post a bit more about what constitutes in your eyes blatant misinformation ?
I replied elsewhere but:
- Gunpowder and steel had essentially nothing to do with Cortez's victory.
- The Aztecs did not see the Spaniards as Gods
- Smallpox played a role at the very end but had little to do with Cortez's victory.
- They leave out the primary reason Cortez won (his ability to build a coalition of native people who hated the Aztecs).
- They leave out the secondary reason Cortez won (superior European battle tactics).
- They ignore the fact that there were Europeans fighting on both sides (a delegation was sent from Cuba to stop Cortez; they were the ones that actually brought the smallpox not Cortez).
Instead of vagueposting, why don't you tell us which points that you think are true or false?
The post I'm replying to is correct: Spanish technology (steel, gunpowder) had very little to do with Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs.
The idea that the Aztecs took the Spanish for gods and specifically that Moctezuma mistook Cortez's for the returning god Quetzalcoatl is fiction. We actually know the exact book that it came from.
Smallpox did play a role but it was brought by the slaves of Europeans sent to _stop_ Cortez nearly two years after he started fighting the Aztecs. By the time smallpox killed Moctezuma's successor, Cortez's victory was already assured. The disease was not the key to his victory; it was more that it prevented insurgency after the conquest.
Also worth noting that if your theory was that Cortez won because of the gun powder or steel that is hard to square because by the time the two forces clashed the Aztecs had more of it then he did given the rival European forces trying to stop him.
Cortez won primarily because he had an army with a nucleus of veterans from the Italian wars that applied the lessons of the Reconquista.
The technology that let him win was European tactics and political manuevering not anything physical they brought with them.
Camilla Townsend's "Fifth Sun" was a really interesting read in that it brought together a lot of sources of the conquest to tell a more detailed story than I had probably heard before.
When the Spanish showed up, the Aztec's enemies didn't immediately line up to join the anti-Mexica alliance, as some people tend to think. The Spanish weren't seen as gods and worshipped. Pestilence would be a factor later on, but in early days the natives they met were quite healthy. The Spanish weren't seen as foreigners from across the sea or anything special because that wasn't really a concept for the natives. The Spanish were just another funny looking tribe from over the horizon that had showed up to fight for space, much like the Aztec's once had.
The Spanish initially had to fight hostile tribes on their own. There were battles where they had to fight through the night, while they were injured, and against incredible odds. The Spanish, especially the ones from Extremadura, were widely regarded by contemporary Europeans as some of the very best soldiers on the continent. Only after they'd done some hard fighting were they seen as having a chance against the Mexica and worth making alliances with.
So, yes, the Spanish won allies who helped them fight the Mexica, but they needed their guns, steel, and horses to win those allies.
Maybe you should read the accounts of the Spanish and Portuguese that narrated the facts. The accounts are not pro-spanish.
Townsend includes those, but also draws upon Nahuatl accounts written shortly after the conquest. Those sources haven't been paid enough attention.
Including is not the same as reading the whole source. Authors love cherry pick. Better to read the whole thing from the actors who were there: Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Orellana, etc.
Bernal Diaz' account is definitely recommended reading. But you'll have to read between the lines when he's talking about Cortez (there's a bit of "good Czar, bad boyars" going on).
What's interesting is how highly he speaks of his indigenous allies and even opponents, there's not a hint of disrespect (well, minus the Aztec practice of human sacrifices of course), he praises the skill, courage and discipline of the warriors, the craftmanship of their weapons and armor, and he's full of awe and wonder when they first arrive in Tenochtitlan:
"Among us were soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, including Constantinople, all over Italy, and Rome, and they said that they had never seen a plaza so well laid out, so orderly, so large, and so full of people."
The good thing about the accounts, it's their biased views about Spain were clear. That's why I like them. There was no unified feeling, and they were enemies in many cases. That's why the accounts offer a better view.
Cortes lost a few fingers if I remember from the Tlaxcala (anti-Mexica). Kind of a turn of events for them to become his allies.
Now you have to explain why an alliance of tens of thousands was formed to support a few thousand foreigners.
There's no mystery here. The Aztecs ruled brutally over dozens of other indigenous groups, they practised slavery and human sacrifice. When the Spanish showed impressive military equipment and the implication (when reinforcements arrived, albeit in small numbers) that they represented a powerful external military force, ancestral opponents who'd been subjugated by the Aztec empire were quick to throw in their lot.
It wasn't just the captive slaves and human sacrifice either (though that was a big deal), the Aztecs imposed crushing economic tribute burdens on subjugated city-states, and when payments fell short, they'd go in and raid. Tribute wasn't just gold and tradeable goods, it was also food, and the Aztecs didn't care if they drove a place into famine.
There were also rival indigenous states (Tlaxcala, etc.) that were never conquered by the Aztecs but had been trapped in continuous low-intensity war with them for years.
Though it is worth saying the Aztecs weren't universally despised. Some regional dynasties were allies. Some of those were also unpopular.
You have to make the evil claim: that the Spanish invaders were seen as a better alternative to the indigenous Aztecs by at least a decent majority of the population (and then, later, the Inca) (maybe this even explains the final end of the Maya)
Which is both likely true and morally against what we currently seem to believe.
Was there a concept of "ingenuousness" for the natives? Even the Aztecs were relative newcomers to the area. They came from the north and enslaved the area. Why prefer their terror to the unknown future with the new people that appeared?
Maybe I should not have used the word foreigner, but my comment/question is not why did they prefer ally with the spanish on a moral point of view but why did they believe the spanish were strong enough to be followed against the aztecs if not for their military superiority.
I don't think there's a single and simple answer. One thing that Cortez managed to do was "demystify" the mighty Aztecs in the eyes of the people conquered and supressed by the Aztecs.
There was unrest and violence in the region long before Cortez arrived on the scene, when he did he was the external catalyst to ignite the powder keg. When reading accounts of the conquest, information gathering, political scheming and negotiations were often more "decisive" than the actual fighting.
Maybe the Aztecs were seen as bloodthirsty oppressors, and the Spanish as a chance to liberate from the yoke of Aztec empire?
Divide and conquer is as old as time. Any major power usually got there by unsavoury means, making a lot of enemies along the way. The same thing happened in the US and Canada, where tribes that had fought for centuries -- quite contrary to the noble tropes, it wasn't some big love-in, and the continent was littered with raping, pillaging, slavery, and so on -- so they were more than happy to faction off to opposing sides if it gave them more of an ability to exterminate their nemesis.
I just found out this [1] book review today about the Aztec society today and my takeway is that the Aztecs were a highly militaristic death cult. Almost all men were warriors educated for war at young age and competing with each other to get as most captives as possibles because this is what gives you status.
It doesn't mention the spanish conquest but I wouldn't be surprised if all those tribes living under Aztec rule needed a little morale boost and seeing a bunch of guys with iron weapons and armor who wanted to do away with the aztecs surely helped with that
[1](https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-aztecs-by-inga-clendinne...)
I second this recommendation, with the caveat that it contains a much higher degree of horror than almost anything I've ever read, including accounts of Nazi death camps.
I read that same review a couple of weeks ago and it made a deep impression. It's one thing to know "the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice", and another to be confronted with the scale, sadism and calculation with which it was practiced.
You are right. I should have made that warning. This is not for the faint of heart.
"If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it
[...]
No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings"
>[1](https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-aztecs-by-inga-clendinne...)
"Starbucks-and-airport-lounges class" is a good phrase. I'm gonna use that one.
Wasn't it like the biggest factor was they benefited from biohazard weapons they didn't know they were carrying?
HNers don’t know what being a goth with a bunch of horses and some bros who’ve pissed of a king can do when they lock in
confused why I got downvoted dont people know their history? paste my comment into LLM it might explain some history
Huh? Sounds like a string of events that they didn’t engineer. I mean, did they engineer the spread of Christianity to the New World? They’d need a confluence of disease, tech, and a safe boat ride to achieve it. We’ve all had experience with Product Development, so I ask, how the heck could any of this been engineered?
Sounds like luck (and if luck, why is it cohesive?) or a GOD wanted a certain outcome.
Their weapons were certainly not irrelevant. They had other capabilities to their weapons - much did the aztecs. And they also took down the empire with a decapitation strike while being hosted as a guest, with their weapons.
I think the opium war were also won due to weapon advantages. The British cannons could be fired from further away, they could handle larger charges of gunpowder than the Chinese. Another advantage of metallurgy. Today's jet engines are largely the same thing. Maybe the troops were also more battle hardened.
Also, the introduction of foreign pathogens which killed of many of the native population.
Usually a single explanation isn’t sufficient, but and it’s likely a combination of disease, better weapons, cultural differences (attitudes towards war and one another), alliances as you mentioned, etc.
Small Spanish forces could defeat much larger Aztec forces, particularly in open terrain where cavalry, steel weapons, and armor were effective. Alliances played a role, but better weaponry and warfare isn't just an anecdote. Spanish military strength helped make those alliances attractive.
Lets not forget La Malinche.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Malinche
Open borders!
I think it's hard to overstate just how categorical a difference in organizational and social doctrine the Spanish were away from the Aztecs. Everything from tactics to logistics train to how the soldiers are motivated. Look at the European wars of colonizing Africa in the 19th century if you want to see how that plays out when they meet in the field.
Like put the Black Prince up against Alexander and even Alexander has a uphill battle. Now take away Alexander's cavalry and give the Black Prince primitive firearms. Unless Alexander gets the jump on him or finds a way to make the meeting of forces otherwise highly unequal, that battle is probably only going one way, and that's for forces of comparable motivation levels.
The numbers disparity only gets you so far ancient empires generally lack the social sophistication to motivate soldiers (especially when recruited from their possessions/allies) to the degree that more modern societies do. Those Aztec conscripts who have been "voluntold" into service by their communities at best are not going to fight to the bloody end. They do not consider themselves citizens of "The Aztec Empire". They are not going to march to their near certain deaths for the benefit of the empire like they're some Red Army machine gun squad piling into a rowboat to cross the Volga in 1941. They can not even have the mental framework for that because a pre-industrial society does not run enough surplus for the state to do the things it must to create that in more than a "kings guard" sized force.
Edit: For a comparison point, the Romans are "a level up" from a lot (but not all) of the societies match up with and they just mop the floor with them. And consequently, anyone who doesn't get subjugated right off the bat winds up looking a lot like the Romans socially and militarily because that's what it takes to compete with them. The Aztecs are competing with borderline stone age societies. They are essentially a bronze age society that's mastered the art of subjugating stone age societies. Spain is half a dozen or so levels up from that. So while the outcome wasn't guaranteed it shouldn't really surprise anyone that the kind of force that Spain can project across an ocean and beat what the Aztecs can field in their own back yard.
> to how the soldiers are motivated
Exaggerating a bit, but I'm fairly sure the Spanish speech was: "if you kill the other guys with your much better weapons, you will reach El Dorado".
> Exaggerating a bit, but I'm fairly sure the Spanish speech was: "if you kill the other guys with your much better weapons, you will reach El Dorado"
And they basically did. Not a singular city of gold, perhaps, but the Spanish looted tens of billions of $$ worth silver and gold from Central/South America between 1492 and 1550. Which is all the more impressive given how little European manpower it took and how low their relative incomes would've been at the time.
... where gold is "gold and cochineal". The red dye brought back to Spain was much higher in value than the gold!
Ironically, Europe already had cochineal, but they foraged the source (parasitic beetles), while the bronze-age Aztecs had the brilliant idea to farm them on planted oak forests.
"you will reach El Dorado" is profoundly different than "I will reach El Dorado"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aguirre,_the_Wrath_of_God
It was probably more like "I have committed treason and burned the ships we arrived on, the only way any of us are getting out of here alive is if we bring back so much gold they can't be angry"
The dude was beyond in over his head but somehow pulled it off.
I am not sure I am entirely convinced by how you make your point but I think I agree. Here is how I would make the case for it:
The Spaniards had armor and combat formation. Having basic protection and having men march next to you closely must make you quite confident.
On the other hand Aztec fighting style seems to be "Go berserk and attract enemies to you so you can harm them to take them as captive so you can sacrifice them later for prestige". You are actually competing with your fellow warriors to show how brave you are". It seems the culture has optimized for not taking into account fear of death.
That might be a big advantage against other tribes that have the same level of tech than you but haven't bet the farm on militaristic culture but it probably breaks down pretty quickly on armies who rely on "confidence in the collective" rather than individual prestige and have somewhat of a tech edge
Where are you getting the "go berserk" part? All of what I've read about the Aztec military is that it was highly hierarchical and organized, having special noble (pipiltin) officer schools (the calmecacs[1] where they learned of war and ruling, and the commoner (macehuali) class also having mandatory military training in the telpochcalli[2]. Also, from what I've read in the True History Of The Conquest of New Spain by conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who participated in it, is that they generally ditched their metal armors rather quickly due to the heat, and instead adopting the indigenous cotton armors, they also mostly adopted indigenous ranged weapons, keeping only their swords and horses by the end of the Conquest. Bernal emphasizes the scale of the armies a lot in his book, and the indigenous allied city-states are incredibly important, specially the siege of Tenochtitlan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmecac [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%93lpochcalli
That's the difference between first-hand evidence and vibe-based feelings/arguments.
I am definitely not an expert. This is from [this book review](https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-aztecs-by-inga-clendinne...):
"This same zero-sum competition extended to the Mexica army, which as soon as battle was joined became not an army but a swirling melee of individual glory-seekers. The purpose of the Mexica warrior was not the victory of the group, but competition with his peers, and the way to win the competition was to secure captives for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli. This singular fact drove almost everything about Mexica combat strategy, or the lack thereof. Great warriors wore towering feather headdresses to attract opponents so that they could be disabled and sacrificed. The Mexica had projectile weapons, but specifically designed them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization. The Mexica wielded long, shallow obsidian blades and flint-studded clubs that were designed to incapacitate by cutting a hamstring or crushing a knee, rather than to kill. The only way to advance as a Mexica warrior was to sacrifice more captives than your peers,8 and the incentives of the system shaped everything else."
After some more reading, it seems indeed that this Inda Clendinnen book from 1991 may be lackluster on how the aztecs actually behaved on the field
The Spanish gave their indigenous allies steel weapons too, right? It's even in the picture in the article.
Steel armor was definitely a huge advantage and the Indians soon learned that the only two reliable ways to defeat armored soldiers were to drown them or to throw large stones at them if they ventured into a narrow valley. Neither was usually available.
"the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, so their weapons alone were irrelevant in the battle"
Irrelevant? Tell this to Atahualpa Inca, who, during the second big Spanish conquest, was taken alive by a group of mere 168 Spanish soldiers, unsupported by any local warriors, while having at least several thousand guards with him. Force ratio of 40 or 50 to 1 ultimately made no difference.
I highly recommend this (long) book review discussing the conquistadors: https://mattlakeman.org/2025/03/24/conquest-of-the-incas/
TL;DR - native alliances were important, but Spanish armor made them nearly invincible against native weapons, their military tactics were superior, and cavalry were extremely overpowered against armies made up only of footsoldiers. Weaponry and tech were certainly not irrelevant.
The Spanish also brought with them diseases that the Aztecs (or any new world peoples ) had no immunity to.
But that would kill their allies more if anything
It did, it devastated them, along with everyone else who was native to the region.
I read Bernal Diaz's book about the conquest of Mexico and in it he says that formations of Aztec warriors would break when a conquistador would charge into formations on an armored horse. They thought the horse and rider was one sort of monster. It was also a combination of a bunch of things they had never seen before: steel weapons, armor, the power and mobility of a trained war horse.
I don't think they could have taken control of the Aztec empire without allies and a lot of political intrigue. I think a good modern analogy was how the US quickly took over Afghanistan after 911. You could say we did it with a small group of special forces and a lot of air power. But really it is more like there were already (warlord) factions ready to strike at the Taliban who knew they could win with air support and everything that would come after. For the Aztecs, the role of the cavalry was like those B52 strikes.
Why then couldn't the indigenous peoples form their own alliance against the Aztecs before the Spanish arrived?
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).
>In TFA it is stated that before bronze (i.e. copper-tin alloy) copper was used for tools.
> Before bronze, for several millennia tools were made from alloys of copper and arsenic or antimony
So do you have an actual point, or just a pedantic nit to pick over the author using "copper tools" as short-hand for "copper alloy tools"?
HN at its finest
The article doesn't mean copper alloy tools though, it means copper tools, including weapons. At least that's how I read this:
"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."
But I think the article is right.
why do you think the article doesn't mean copper alloy?
The only use of the word 'pure' is right before iron.
it's pretty common to refer to Otzi's axe as a 'copper axe', right in the wiki page: "Ötzi's copper axe was of particular interest.". but it's 99.7% copper. It contains other materials
I really dont understand jumping from 'copper tools' to 'pure copper tools'. Otzi's axe was maybe both an example of his mastery of the profession and a useful tool (it shows signs of use and rework).
Because it said the copper tools can bend easily and be bent back into shape. The copper alloy wouldn't be so soft. And Otzi's axe wasn't an alloy, ie an intentional mix of materials, it's just that copper naturally occurs with slight impurities.
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.
I wonder if the sea people were just displaced-farmers-turned-raiders that created some open loop feedback that in turn spawned more sea people in self defence or self survival.
The mythological idea of them just appearing out of nowhere is nice too. Makes it feel aligned with something like the pyramids having no explanation
you may not be far off; iirc evidence suggests a mix of cultures, like the invaders picked up other peoples along the way
This would (at least in part) mirror the dynamic during another major period of collapse and upheaval - the migration period. Displaced people trying to survive by raiding or squatting on new territory, thus displacing more people and collapsing complex networks of trade which were sustaining large local populations, thus displacing more people etc etc.
Similarly to the end of the bronze age, it was also a period in which shifts in climate stressed social structures. A runaway dynamic of lots of desperate people on the move is not great for stability, and if everyone is already experiencing some scarcity, then that's all the more vulnerable.
And if you think that climate change is going to destroy the ability of large regions to feed themselves, then you're looking at the future.
Hasn’t that been the primary hypothesis for a while?
Them essentially being refugees / displaced and looking for a new place, not them being spawned on the map like a cheap rts scenario.
Yes, I think so. I remember Eric Cline mentioning this hypothesis in a lecture or a podcast about a decade ago.
Sea people as refugees displaced by drought, famine, war or just a general societal collapse.
In any case, the temporal coincidence of the bronze age collapse and the wide-spread adoption of iron working, which was inferior to bronze at first but more readily accessible, is fascinating*. I am not sure if we have a full picture of the role of that change yet. (Was it just a consequence of the collapse of trade and tin imports, or did it cause the destruction of the bronze age empires in the first place, or just prevent their return, or was it more complicated?)
(*) I do not mean the superficial tautology of "iron age" following the "bronze age" but the fact that the bronze age, in this region, ended in a societal collapse.
The Fall of Civilizations Podcast (nice one) had an episode on this topic.
According to it, the sea peoples could instead be vast numbers of western europeans fleeing the outcome of a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, which would have triggered crop failures and mass starvation in western and northern europe.
A significant portion of the survivors would have fled en masse to the richer eastern Mediterranean empires, thereby causing their downfall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B965f8AcNbw
Cam here to link this. Such a great podcast series.
They probably never existed in the first place. Most of the evidence for the “Sea People” story is extremely tenuous. Those maps you’ve seen with lots of cities burnt down? Bogus. Often it is really just one burnt down building in a village or town that looks like it might date to approximately the right century. The maps also cherry–pick the data by showing all the towns that they count as burned down wile ignoring the far larger population that were not, and by obscuring the fact that these fires were spread out over such a long period of time.
I don't know where you're getting your facts, but according to Fall of Civilizations, it's not just one burnt down building, we're talking of a layer of ash, charred wood and burned material throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.
"The archeological evidence is quite clear: at some point between the year 1200 and the year 1100 BC, right at the end of the period we call the Bronze Age, a wave of destruction washed across the entire region. It wiped whole civilizations off the map and left nothing in its wake."
Yes, that’s the exaggerated tale that everyone knows.
In “Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age” <https://www.lockwoodpress.com/product-page/the-fall-of-the-b...> Jesse Millek examines 153 sites claimed to have been destroyed and found that 61% never happened, happened during a different time period, or had a different cause.
Even without buying the whole book you can download the appendix where he summarizes the results. A few notable entries:
Shiqmona: The possibly destroyed public building dates to the fourteenth century BCE. No end of the Late Branze Age destruction was uncovered.
Tell Irbid: C14 dates derived from short-lived samples places the destruction event between 1395–1260 BCE.
Krisa: There is only a statement that the site was destroyed with no published evidence of destruction in any structure.
Iria: Some burnt material in a pit was assumed to be a destruction. There was no damage visible to the buildings.
Athens: The Houses on the North slope were not houses at all. It was refuse that was dumped on the stairs.
Ayios Stephanos: Burning was uncovered in one room from Trench Beta 11. No other damage was recorded.
Amman Airport Structure: Evidence of burning in Room VII can be attributed to the hearth in that room.
Pefkakia: Adrimi-Sismani repeatedly cited a destruction, even though the excavators clearly stated the site was abandoned.
Tell el-‘Ajjul: Bell simply placed it on a map as destroyed with no citations. There was no settlement ca. 1200 BCE.
Okay then, who did the Egyptians fight during the Battle of the Delta during the reign of Ramesses III?
Obviously nobody knows. Whoever wrote those inscriptions apparently didn’t either. Even taking them at face value, however, the evidence that these “Sea People” systematically attacked all of civilization is extremely tenuous. There probably never was a power capable of kicking over all of the anthills and destroying civilization without leaving any other archeological evidence of their existence.
I've never heard that the Sea People were a cohesive force, attacking all of Bronze civilization in anything like a coordinated attack.
Waves of invaders can take many generations to wear down the native forces. They don't need to be allied in any formal sense, either. See for example: Saxons turning Britain Anglo-Saxon.
There’s no evidence of that either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923712
Well they were a people, who came from somewhere! Are you really saying that these battles didn't happen?
I am saying that even if these battles did take place, there is no evidence that “the Sea Peoples” fought any other battles anywhere else at all. The story of a wave of violence sweeping around the entire Mediterranean and ending all of the civilizations there is largely fabricated.
Furthermore, just because these inscriptions didn’t give the raiders a specific name doesn’t mean that they were from an unknown civilization.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923712
My above post was factual/historical so I’m leaving my moral judgements here in a separate post.
I believe the Bronze Age collapse was a good and necessary thing for humanity. It was required to get out of the local stable point that post-Neolithic society had evolved and settled into.
By the 12 century BCE the noble kings that Marduk and Maat would have smiled upon had long been replaced by the same flavor of sociopaths that lurk the halls of our major governments today.
But these Bronze Age despots had a LOCK on the economy that today’s crony capitalists could only dream of. And they had a lock on the culture too, mostly via the state religion.
BUT: years of bad harvests, disasters and bad omens become increasingly hard to explain. Higher taxes and worse service from the state. No protection from invaders.
Do you revolt? Join the invaders?
No living soul, not even your oldest relatives, can remember time before the empire. No one knows what comes next, so you don’t do this high risk thing unless life really sucks. But people did, because life really sucked.
Proposition: The Bronze Age collapse is to be celebrated as a triumph of the people over the most unequal societies that have ever existed.
Current inequality is greater, not talking what AI wealth distribution will look like.
inequality is vastly greater. But median living conditions are exponentially greater.
In the absolute you’re right. In the relative, far from right.
If Mr T could literally order anyone murdered at will with absolute impunity, you might have a case. As of today, he’s having legal difficulties flying people out of the country. A Ramses II does not exist, and thankfully cannot exist, in today’s world.
Just like the Cambrian explosion only happened once, and could only happen once, so did this transition.
It was an awakening of the people that is difficult to imagine today: everything you’ve been told, everything your parents and grandparents have told you, might be flat-out wrong. You’ve never known any other system. You owe your life to the state, so you’re told, to bring glory to the gods. But life sucks a lot lately, and you’re not buying the party line any more. Your neighbors are grumbling too.
It was the first world-scale transition of state order, and it happened because the elites had amassed so much absolute power they’d been corrupted absolutely.
Not even totalitarian dictators of the modern era have had the kind of power these royals had.
There absolutely exist dictators that can kill people at their whims. The CCP comes to mind, so do Iran, North Korea and Hamas, but especially Putin's Russia where even being filthy rich does not protect you from falling out of windows.
And make no mistake, Trump and Erdogan want this power for themselves.
Pretty sure they actually have laws 'n shiet in China and North Korea.
Even (gasp!) Putler's Russia has laws and police, I've heard.
They had laws in the bronze age too. The difference is in what those laws protect.
"protect power" is always in there, but in modern democratic style states there are some extra details that greatly limit the abuse of said power.
Meh. I think you underestimate the psychological difference between Putin level "I can kill you if you step out of line by pushing you out a window" vs ancient king level of "I can kill you at will because I am a god".
It's absolutely stunning what modern media has done to some people.
Bold of you to assume it was the first.
The Architect had to tell Neo, that we'd been through this Seven times already.
Think yourself Neo?
Regardless of whether this is true or not you have basically described the UK and how people think about a Russian invasion.
You already have elites siding against their own people and tyrannically collecting taxes and giving it to their Mercenary base.
It isn't hard to imagine a benevolent Sea People offering to free the locals from their despotic elite.
The Bronze Age would not have had the same migration structures obviously but one might imagine it happening locally.
What is funny is that a lot of these explanations of what happened seem to fly in the face of what people find is possible to ascribe to situations now.
> the UK and how people think about a Russian invasion.
That is a very Thought Bubble perspective. It's not a mainstream view of any kind in the UK. The Man on the Clapham Omnibus is not in favour of a Russian invasion, nor is he expecting one. Nor is his mate in the pub.
But I bet he would rant about immigrants who don't affect him at all.
> have basically described the UK and how people think about a Russian invasion.
.. what?
(is this some reference to the extremely confusing base incident that may or may not have just been diesel thieves?)
That's handwaving the mass-suffering caused by systemic collapse. I have a few issues with this. The first one is dialectic, you can't posit that since the following state reached a place you're fine with later on, the process that led to it was necessary. That's thinking backwards. You don't know that it wouldn't have reached a better or equal state without collapse.
The following ones are ethical and philosophical. My own standing is that :
- Individuals can't be treated as fungible or dispensable, even when thinking in macro states. That opens the door for extreme suffering and simplistic thinking.
- On longer scales, stability wins. Collapse should be treated as a hard failure, not a mechanic.
> stability wins
Stability sucks. Instability sucks even more when you are in the middle of it, but it is transient. Stability is forever, until it suddenly isn't.
The impression that I get from this comment is the idea that society and culture moves "forward," whatever that means, and therefore stability is holding back society. Sure, there's short-term pain in collapse, but what rises from the ashes will be better than before.
This is absolutely not the case. It's more than likely that whatever rises out of the *hellscape* of a societal collapse will be worse than what was there before.
The collapse of Rome did not lead to a better Rome. It was hundreds of years of suffering and death. In fact, the stability of Rome is what allowed for it to reach its peak over hundreds of years - something that was undeniably good for its citizens.
some folks say that to have good times, you must have bad times; bad times create good times.
When you look at data around economics what you find instead is that good times create good times.
you want stability, but not stasis. you hella do not want punctuated equilibriums
Instability doesn't have to be transient. Society can remain unstable for a really long time.
>mass-suffering caused by systemic collapse
As opposed to slow burn suffering caused by living under a poor exploitative system? Say nothing of the opportunity cost...
It's not like bronze age societies had invented peaceful power transitions between fundamentally opposed factions. Whatever state they were stuck in they were there until a regime change, if you're lucky that'll only kill a few people at the top. But most societies aren't that lucky.
>- On longer scales, stability wins. Collapse should be treated as a hard failure, not a mechanic.
Japan was stable for a hell of a long time. Not hard to imagine had they been located somewhere slightly different in the world they'd have wound up slaves to some random European power. Stability works until you get into a local maximum you can't get out of A lot of those local maximums you are not getting out of except over the dead bodies of whoever benefits from them (see also: US civil war), if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you get subjugated by someone else.
It's a nice idea, but couldn't it also be explained easily by the invaders enslaving or killing most of the population? Existing structural decline and instability makes this a lot easier to do for an invading force.
Historia Civilis had video that military of all states were organized around "superweapon" chariots. Battles were basically sports events, where elites measured their xyz.
Sea People had completely different style od fighting, they were runners who harrased and eventually outflank chariots.
Cline has argued for systems collapse. i.e. It wasn't any one thing that caused the collapse, but several things in conjunction. Others argue differently. e.g. James Lacey, who comes at things from a perspective of military strategy and economics, has argued that the systems collapse model really underestimates how much war can accomplish all on its own. He's of the opinion that, whoever the sea peoples were, they caused the collapse.
This article doesn't really wade into that dispute, but instead focuses on why new empires didn't rise once old ones collapsed. Iron smelting originated before the collapse, but didn't really spread at first. Bronze age iron was probably really awful stuff, and soldiers tended to be conservative when it came to technology. They wanted weapons they could trust, and that was copper or bronze. As long as the great empires persisted and the trade of tin and copper continued, nobody was forced to use Iron, so nobody was motivated to get good at producing quality iron weapons.
Then whatever caused the collapse happened, and the ingredients for making bronze became difficult or impossible to get. It was iron or back to copper and stone. So, peopled adopted Iron and that gave smiths the chance to improve iron smelting techniques. During the bronze age, a would-be empire just had to get their hands on a decent amount of bronze and they could steamroll everybody they came across because they all had copper or stone weapons. After iron technology spread, it was iron vs iron. Would be empires got hung up fighting their well-armed neighbours and the snowball couldn't get rolling. The few empires that were left, such as Egypt, contracted. They no longer had a technological advantage once those they formerly ruled adopted iron.
Primitive iron was inferior to bronze and harder to produce. It was weak, malleable, and rapidly rusted. It only became practical once people learned to make a primitive steel by adding charcoal. This is why it took a long time for iron to replace bronze.
> Primitive iron was (...) malleable
> primitive steel [made] by adding charcoal.
Isn't that backwards? Surely "primitive iron" was closer to what we call pig iron nowadays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron
That stuff is choke-full of carbon and silica, and is brittle as hell. To get it malleable (which is actually desirable in a weapon, so it wouldn't just snap in use), there is a separate process to decrease carbon content:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrought_iron#Terminology
No, it's not backwards. The modern steelmaking process starts with iron that has too much carbon content that has to be removed; the premodern process was the other way round. See A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry's excellent series explaining premodern iron and steel production: https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
>Isn't that backwards? Surely "primitive iron" was closer to what we call pig iron nowadays.
You're under the illusion that the west used kilns to melt iron into a liquid that they poured into a crucible during the Bronze Age. That's actually an ancient Chinese technique that was adopted long after the western Bronze Age ended and it does indeed create pig iron. But the west only adopted pig iron as an intermediate process for making steel starting in the middle ages.
Back then you just put the crushed (via hammer) iron ore and coal into a clay kiln (a bloomery). Because these furnaces couldn't reach the melting point of pure iron, the metal never liquefied. Then at the end you basically had mostly slag with some small iron pearls inside (a bloom). You had to hammer the slag off the iron under heat. Hence primitive wrought iron came first and because it had low carbon it was highly malleable.
The technique that was used to make primitive steel was very simple. In fact, it is basically the same process as was used to get the iron out of the ore. You make a steel tool with malleable wrought iron, pack it with powdered charcoal and seal them both inside of clay. You then heat up a kiln and the carbon diffuses into the outer surface of the iron. This process is known as case hardening.
Also you just linked an article that just told you everything I just wrote from memory:
>While the bloomery process produced wrought iron directly from ore, cast iron or pig iron were the starting materials used in the finery forge and puddling furnace. Pig iron and cast iron have higher carbon content than wrought iron, but have a lower melting point than iron or steel. Cast and especially pig iron have excess slag which must be at least partially removed to produce quality wrought iron. At foundries it was common to blend scrap wrought iron with cast iron to improve the physical properties of castings.
Yeah, so bloomeries produce wrought iron directly hence wrought iron came first.
Primitive steel only becomes common in the middle ages... 2000 years later.
Alexander had an iron sword. Julius had an iron sword.
The problem with iron is that it is very hard to make. Requires lots of fuel, labour and technology.
> In some places the sovereign literally owned all the land and people on it.
Russia was like this till 1861! And arguably practically for much longer so, perhaps still.
Well, so was the USA. Seems like wealth inequality is not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Chattel slavery and the Russian serf system were very different. Notably, the plantation owners weren't themselves bound into feudal service to an emperor, they got to have a "modern" relationship with a state.
Ah, OG whataboutism!
The Sea Peoples seemed more like slow erosion on top of all the other issues. Egypt was able to resist the Sea Peoples but other empires were to weak to handle the constant issues. It feels a bit like the fall of the Western Roman Empire which was erosion of stability, what it meant to be roman and military might until it collapsed.
Egypt might have had significant geographical advantage. Nile is just a single corridor to defend and fend off with significant depth. Invasions are simpler to handle when your entire land is in essence single continuous chokepoint.
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?
The problem is that ironworking doesn't actually precede the bronze age collapse archeologically. Ironworking has mysterious and archaic origins... but it doesn't proliferate untill all those empires are fallen and forgotten.
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.</i>
There would be a tipping point though. Where mining the ingredients for bronze would become economically nonviable- after that the mining infrastructure collapses hard and fast. And with it the mining towns would empty out and the still bronze relying cultures would destabilize in waves of "cheap" bronze, expensive ingredients.
They couldn't have had aluminum, but if they magically had they could have made aluminum bronze.
The mining infrastructure didn't collapse. But tin was traded over very large distances,mostly from outside of that civilization's brotherhood of great kings (the rabbu surru system).
Iron bloomeries (via slag finds) appear in the record sporadically. It starts before the collapse, and may have very archaic uknown origins. But... they become common as recovery happens.
So... Causation seems to be backwards. Bronze production mostly ends. Iron working starts gradually expanding in the absence of bronze.
Also... The "superior weapons" angle isn't very strong. Bronze and early iron were not in a different league.
Iron just has more potential for scale, because the material itself is abundant. It requires a lot of labour and fuel, but if you can scale those you can scale ironworking. Eventually iron surpasses bronze and steel is vastly superior... but this takes many centuries.
He's absolutely not saying iron caused the collapse, only that it prevented the recovery.
> The causes of the Bronze Age collapse are still debated by historians: a series of severe droughts; the sudden appearance of mysterious Sea Peoples, who raided along the Mediterranean coast; the disruption of the tin trade routes; internal revolts; or possibly all of these at once. But there is another unifying factor that could have prevented the resurgence of empires: iron.
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...
The Nature article is not about 2000 BC but 2000 BP, i.e. before present, with the oldest site around 2300 before present, i.e. around 300 BC.
So these are old sites of iron production, but not as old as the first production of iron in the Anatolia-Caucasus region, from where it spread in Europe, West Asia and North Africa.
In Egypt, some ancient objects made of meteoritic iron have been found, which precede by a few millennia the discovery of how to extract iron from minerals.
Another of your links points to a book "Metals in Past Societies" which is supposed to contain information about sites really older than 2000 BCE, but I am skeptical about the dating until I read the book, because the book is less recent than the 2024 article from Nature, which ignores those sites that are claimed to be older.
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.
The claim (as I understand it) is that power was centralized because tin was rare--i.e., had to be imported via sophisticated trade routes, which presumably could be controlled by the state.
In an area where tin is abundant, individuals could easily forge their own bronze weapons, thus making it harder for the state to have a monopoly on high-tech weapons.
So I think the Harappan actually reinforce the theory.
> which presumably could be controlled by the state.
yes, kiln-roasted Linear B in Mycenaean palaces... built on a giant fault line (literally as well as figuratively)
Civ VII 2.0 should bring back Sid's palaces in monolith data centers like The Machine / Samaritan (note: i am only halfway through season 4)
Bronze and iron weren't limited for military usage. Basically from an economical point of view, the scarcity of bronze limited the size of economies and armies.
Once people started using iron instead of bronze, the first use was probably creating tools used for farming, food production, and other important things: Axes, hoes, spades, etc. And they did not just substitute bronze tools but because iron was cheaper, they probably created more of them, and new tools. And it also enabled things like nails and other construction material.
So, the economy and power structures shifted as tools enabled more economic output. By the time steel became good enough for weaponry, the bronze age was effectively already a thing of the past as the economy would have shifted to using iron for most tools long before.
And then later of course, having cheap and good enough steel weaponry enabled the creation of larger armies too. So towards the end of the Iron age, you get e.g. the Romans creating huge legions that were simply not economically feasible in the bronze age. And given that hand to hand combat was basically the way people waged wars, the ones with the bigger armies would tend to win.
I would be careful with using the "state" word in this context. The first real "states" around the Mediterranean were arguably Rome and Egypt, but even then, every (militarily or economically) subjugated city or province could have local ruling structures tied to families or individuals. Even in Rome itself, specific families were often "bigger than the state", directly controlling people and resources without answering to anyone in practice. This is particularly true in terms of weapons: more often than not, the top rulers would actually borrow weapons produced for, and owned by, specific families and individuals.
The concept of "state" is very modern, we tend to retrofit it over the past, but it's often wrong. There have always been rulers, and families, competing interests and identities; which typically produced inconsistent and fragmented governance over most territories, until very recently.
I think that's only correct when looking at the time period immediately before Rome.
Many Bronze Age empires had complex centralized bureaucracies and are generally considered states.
I agree. The author is stretching several assumptions to get to his conclusions. The sub-title suggests he has solved the "Bronze Age collapse" riddle but his statement can simply be considered one of many factors already pointed out in the literature -- not the main reason.
I’m ignorant of the geology there, but Wikipedia says copper was available. If you are saying they had unusually easy access to tin, then they sort of had the ability to make bronze without the long-range trade. Is that right?
That would seem to support the theory in a way. If they could make bronze “in their back yard,” the same way that everyone else could make iron in the Iron Age, they would be sort of living in their own proto-iron-age, right? (In the sense that access to metallurgy was democratized). So if anything, it would provide some pretty strong support of the link between democratized metallurgy and more disperse power.
The author also doesn’t really even attempt to explain why the Sea Peoples hypothesis, one pretty well substantiated by a lot of independent evidence, and one which the current consensus theory among experts, is wrong. Is there a prior post we’re supposed to be familiar with?
It doesn't need to be wrong - democratising violence mean people with boats are more likely to have weapons and ability to attack you. Or the ability to disrupt trade, for that matter.
Sea-ready boats were always scarcer and more expensive than weapons in the first place.
> Sea-ready boats were always scarcer and more expensive than weapons in the first place
Coast-hugging boats can be made from wood with some skill. Weapons in that era requires metal in some part. That required a lot of skill.
I think you slightly underestimate how much work and expertise it is to build ships that can transport an army over a long distance on sea.
> ships that can transport an army over a long distance on sea
This isn’t what the Sea Peoples built. It isn’t even what the Romans built. Most Mediterranean cultures lacked the navigational and ship-building expertise to let the shore out of sight. That doesn’t mean they didn’t need skill. But it was less skill than needed for metallurgy, in part because the latter’s inputs are dearer.
I'm honestly starting to doubt you've ever been on a ship at sea. Being in sight of the shore is going to be of little comfort if your makeshift raft capsizes because of the waves.
Making a boat that can carry multiple people on sea without sinking when the weather goes a little sour (which can happen in less than an hour in the Mediterranean) is a very hard thing to do. And if you know how to do that you'll never have any shortage of metal or other goods in the first place because you end up being the one who trade them for profit.
I'm not convinced by the author (although I don't know enough to be sure of anything), but despite the title, he is not talking about why the bronze age collapsed but about why the bronze age empires where not replaced by the same kind of empires
I think the argument is the Indus Valley civilization was dependent on international trade with the autocracies further west and collapsed when that network broke down
I think a local process involving drought is more plausible.
I don't understand your chronology. The LBAC was c.1200 BCE, while the Harappan collapse was c.1900 BCE IIRC.
The generally agreed epoch of Mahabharata war (and also the start of kali yuga or iron age) among Vedic astrologers is about 3102 BC which places the epic deep into the Bronze age territory. Historians generally reject this epoch as it creates the dark age problem (over 2000 years of unexplained historical gap between that war and 500 BC when figures like Bimbisara, Buddha and Ajata Satru start appearing). Their epoch is in the range of 800-2000 BC depending on who you ask.
Having said that, there is nothing to make the bronze age epoch impossible. There is nothing in the epic which may not have been possible in the bronze age based on what we already know about history.
... The Mahabarta also says a woman was pregnant for 2 years after which she birthed a lifeless mass of flesh, cut it into 100 pieces, put it in ghee in jars, and incubated them into a 100 sons and 1 daughter...
this is definitely not possible in the bronze age or any other age for that matter from what we know of history.
But IVC had already crashed some 600 years before the bronze age collapse and the populations had migrated to other regions.
> 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.
It seems you didn't read the article carefully. The author says that bronze age empires derived their power from the scarcity of tin, which they could obtain via trade routes, but was hard to get hold of for smaller rulers. In your example this scarcity doesn't hold because tin happened to be nearby. So your example is perfectly compatible with his theory.
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.)
[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
This is a really fascinating game, thank you for posting!
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.
>the event that really kicked things off was the explosion of Santorini
That was centuries before. Volcanic winter(s) for sure occurred, but they would be distant memory if anything by the time of the collapse.
>>>The same thing happened later in Europe when Germanic and Asian tribes displaced the Roman and Celtic tribes of Western Europe.
If you are referring to Hungarians as Asian people, then by majority their genetics is very local - very local, that they are similar to rest of Slavics around them. The same applies to Western Europeans that were as you have stated "displaced by Germanic" - even in UK it is a mix of local population, when the migratory Germanic population % is high, thought nothing to do with Roman Empire, as it was rather internal migration withing Danish Kingdom(long long long time after Rome was gone) that was spanned across Northern Europe, and included England as one of their lands - for that reason we have dna from Estonia(Eastland in Danish) appearing in those ancient English lineages...
However, Dark Ages that followed invasions of German people in Rome, where concrete recipe and other modern technologies were lost and forgotten is more relatable to what happened in Bronze Age Collapse. You simply do not need any of that knowledge when busy of looting. Also, looting of villas in Rome was technically not done by foreigners, but rather by disgruntled employers that were hired to guard Rome(Goths) - the fact that Rome gave rights for Goths to loot border provinces(as a a payment, because they lacked money to pay them) that they were guarding(and where they were settled) seems stupid(because we see results of that), but also we can read about local servants joining in destruction of villas of their rulers during final days of Rome. So, just like then, also now in the case of societal collapse of modern civilization you have to be afraid that you will be robbed mainly from locals, though "foreign" robbers already are better at that, showing extreme proficiency at doing exactly that today.
They're referring to the Huns, not the Hungarians. They're two completely different groups. The Huns invaded in the 5th Century AD, and the Hungarians invaded in the 9th Century AD.
Both groups came from Asia. The reason why the Hungarians seem "local" now is that they've intermarried with local people for so long. But the language they speak is not Indo-European. It's actually related to language spoken in Siberia.
Santorini may have helped cause the Minoan collapse, not the LBAC which occurred c.400 years later.
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?
in theory, a delicate ecosystem built around Bronze collapsed. to make weak sauce Iron work you had to be a) very desperate and b) very clever. which scales for those who figure it out
the post in question doesn't even mention Ugarit. or Arsenic. i am genuinely pissed off at the original tome being passed off as genuine discourse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit
just pure charlatanry
The author in question is clearly not a charlatan. That they might have omitted discussing some of your favourite details in an overview article is not a sign of quackery.
my favorite details? this is like someone claiming to discover The Calculus in 1732 and conveniently forgetting to mention Newton or Leibniz
You are equating a writing system with a societal collapse?
Whatever it is you are actually alluding to, you've omitted several steps in communicating your anger.
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.
the roman empire was a long time after the bronze age collapse. It succeeded a long list of empires (assyrian, persian, macedonian, hellenic etc), and it only collapsed in the west. also the arab empires preceded charlemagne's
That analysis skips quite a few empires both before and after the Roman empire. Also, at least for the Romans the bureaucracy arguably came after the empire was already well established.
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.
The claim is that bronze enabled complex, highly centralized states because it was rare (due to a dearth of tin). So only the connected/rich could afford it, and they used it to build empires/kingdoms/etc.
Iron wasn't superior to bronze (in the fact the article claims it was worse), but it was good enough and widespread. All you needed was a furnace with bellows, charcoal, and an iron source (which were everywhere). Since everyone had access to iron, no one person/group had an edge over the others and this prevented highly centralized polities from being established.
so economically speaking it was cheaper to mass produce iron weapons.. I would have assumed a first mover advantage. It would be surprising if iron tech sprung up everywhere at the same time. And sure smaller groups could do it, but some groups would do it better,faster, cheaper (paretto principle). They should have had a material advantage me thinks. Since its cheaper you could arm more people perhaps. Lastly, the current powers could have also adopted iron and armed larger armies.
The problem is if I learn how you make iron weapons and then escape (or any other spy scenario) I can make iron weapons anywhere and teach my friends. Even a second mover can get an advantage.
Bronze it wouldn't matter because I can't get the raw materials anywhere, and so I can't create an army to oppose you.
Did you read the article? The argument was that tin doesn't occur in many places, so only the powerful even had access to bronze, which was a far superior material, which made it easy to subjugate the vast majority with no access to any material which could rival bronze. Whereas iron is abundant, so everyone has access to it, making it difficult to subjugate other people, because they could fight back.
Because other people learned to make iron weapons and fought back.
Bronze weapon technology had a moat because it required scarce, imported resources. Even if they learned the techniques, most people couldn't make them.
The resources for iron weaponry were readily available; they just needed to learn the techniques.
If only someone had written a whole article about this very angle, and posted it atop this thread...
>> 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.
_______________
[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.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana
Interesting : "some also alluded to the idea that iron had democratized violence"
Tin was far more scarce than iron. Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones, just easier to source and make. This guy makes a case that iron weapons caused the Bronze Age Collapse.
https://x.com/s8mb/status/2103126253012226363
Your twitter link is a summary of the linked article - from the editor-in-chief - in case someone else sees "this guy" and assumes it would be a different take than the one in the featured article.
Don't confuse iron weapons with steel. Steel was much better than bronze, but they didn't know how to make steel and so examples were rare. (probably not unknown, making iron weapons does produce a small amount of steel and if you're careful you can separate that out and after a thousand or so iron swords you can make one steel sword. I've seen it suggested that this is where the stories of a legendary weapon comes from - probably not something we could ever know for sure.)
> Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones
Bronze is harder and more corrosion resistant, but forged iron (and especially iron that has been reforged) has a higher yield strength and is lighter, allowing longer lighter weapons. Compare the profile of bronze age and iron age swords in any museum and you can see that the bronze blades are shorter and wider that the iron weapons, and they would be considerably heavier.
>Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones
"Quantity has a quality all its own"
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?
It could be the Bronze Age empires were based on violence and coercion. When the small polities had the means to defend themselves, the empires fell apart.
Well all of civilization and society is based on violence and coercion to some extent. I'm not sure that small tribes polities were any less violent than larger empires, and I'd generally have a bias that larger empires were more peaceful per-capita because if you are the king war is tiresome and threatening. Better to be at peace.
I'm also not sure about your suggestion. Yes small polities had the means to defend themselves, but the pharaoh's army is much larger and you're definitely going to die if he shows up and you fight back. So why wouldn't the pharaoh have shown up to put down a rebellion? Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
I'm just not sure that this democratization of violence is the answer. Though it may be a key contributor. Curious about your thoughts or others. Incredibly fascinating topic.
Have you read about the Assyrians? Those early empires were nasty.
And yes, the common people might have been better off under larger empires than under smaller ones, but who has ever cared about the common people? The upper class were probably more "I'd rather be the king of a small kingdom than bend my knee to an emperor."
Bronze age empires were large -- if the pharaoh couldn't trust his subordinates he could only be in one place at a time.
> Have you read about the Assyrians? Those early empires were nasty.
Barely. My knowledge of ancient empires and peoples before the Greeks is rudimentary at best, and that may be a charitable description.
The more I've learned and read the more I've forgotten and the more I've learned I don't know. But I do read about these kinds of dynasties, civilizations, empires, and peoples and it is endlessly fascinating.
As I have become a little bit older and well traveled I keep coming back to the Normans. What they built and the effect they have had on civilization development in Europe and beyond is amazing! I've seen it in France, but the Bayeux Tapestry is, in my mind, one of the premier cultural artifacts of all of civilization (I'm not doing to disagree with anyone who suggests otherwise, feel free to :) ) and it would have been great to see it while it temporarily resides at the British Museum but alas work and life here in the United States takes precedence.
https://claudemariottini.com/2014/06/19/ripping-open-pregnan...
Quote
>Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
And when all those rebellions cost the Pharaoh 3x what they used to to put down you're forced to be a lot more diplomatic. Less extraction under threat of violence means smaller army means worse negotiating position for the next one. It's a cycle.
And for every full scale armies meeting in the field type rebellion there's a lot of "sir a second village has lynched the tax men" which compel you to dispense policing forces, etc, etc.
Just because you "can" do something in moderation doesn't mean it's a sustainable way to run your empire at scale.
You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes. And you can't just "supervise" them with your loyal people because this is pre-industrial and there do not exist sufficient surpluses to feed those nonproductive mouths.
Not to mention that even people who could barely read (and maintain efficient long-distance communications and even barely understand the concept of a standard) were in extremely short supply.
> You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes.
There is a superstition in the Middle Ages that blacksmiths should not be killed, in the context of battles. Blacksmiths were an absolutely essential part of the support of an army, but his skills and tools were just as useful to the winning side. Minus his skills, his tools were just surplus, heavy items.
Other army support crew like washerwomen, stable boys, and even prostitutes were of course much easier to replace.
Because pure iron, with no carbonization, is useless as a material for tools or weapons.
Carbonization was invented/discovered after the Bronze Age collapse, slowly over hundreds of years, exactly because they didn’t have access to bronze anymore.
Are you suggesting that you disagree with the author's thesis and that iron wasn't a contributing factor or the major one?
Yeah, the timeline just does not make sense. It makes more sense the other way round that the collapse made iron more appealing.
Yes. Iron wasn’t a contributing factor.
Iron was already known to civilization during Bronze Age, but they didn’t know how to make it hard. Hence Bronze was preferred.
After, and because, of the Bronze Age collapse they started funding out how to make iron useful.
Think about it, why did the humans in Americas never went through Iron Age? Because they never had a Bronze Age collapse.
Despite being "useless", almost all early iron age weapons were iron, not steel nor bronze. They generally knew about steel, but could not control the carbonization well enough to outfit the whole army with it. Steel did not become widespread until the Roman era.
Nope. It wasn’t pure iron. It was lightly carbonized iron.
Also you are talking about Iron Age. Which came after and as a consequence of the Bronze Age.
Pure iron is utterly useless as a weapon. Look it up.
Fair. I used "pure iron" when I meant "not steel".
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
Citation? Wikipedia has a clear Greek etymology:
> Alexander, originally from the Greek Ἀλέξανδρος (Aléxandros), from αλέξειν aléxein meaning "to ward off, keep off, turn away, defend, protect" and ἀνδρός andrós, genitive of ἀνήρ anḗr meaning "man".
> Meaning "Defender, protector of man"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaksandu ok, might have got it wrong, but there names in the Hittite clay tables which are also in the Iliad
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.
Some high-level observations about the story of Iron are helpful. First, Iron smelting was discovered independently in different parts of the world, but everywhere it was an evolution of the bronze smelting process. Second, the process took several centuries to evolve. The first iron pieces were considered bad bronze and discarded. When tin became rare the producers gradually increased the quality of the bad bronze. In all likelihood for centuries they did not recognize iron as a new metal but rather an improved “bad bronze” . The final notable observation of the story is who these inventors were. They were not the learned people of the ancient world. Rather they were artisans and laborers working in difficult conditions.
The primary conclusion of the article are based on two fundamental assumptions:
1. Iron weapons did not exist before the "Bronze Age collapse." That is not borne by the evidence. Iron weapons came from the same centers and communities that used to produce bronze weapons. If these weapon makers were restricted to supply to power centers during the Bronze Age, why were they not restricted during the Iron Age?
2. Wide distribution of iron weaponry prevented formation of great powers after the "collapse". If true why and how were Assyrians and Persians able to build such large empires long after iron weapons were wide spread? Weapon distribution cannot be the primary explanation for why great powers did not form after 1200BC.
What iron did, or at least was associated with, was a change in military tactics and organization that made the expensive chariot-based forces of the centralized states less workable. But undoubtedly the LBA collapse had other factors, like severe prolonged droughts (which are attested in the archaeological evidence).
This proposed change in tactics happened before iron weapons became widespread, though. Iron should I think be seen as a cope for a world in which long distance trade in tin had shut down.
Where do I like and subscribe
No need since it came from an AI.
Pangram does not think so, for what that's worth: https://www.pangram.com/history/f3388245-bc5b-4fa9-992f-6467...
Why do you say that? I'm genuinely curious.
It seems to be a common knee-jerk reaction these days.
I routinely see people dismiss everything as AI without any explanation as to why.
No AI has been touching my text :)
Eric Cline, specifically 1177 BC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_H._Cline
that the article or the top post here doesn't cite him is unforgivable
I have read Cline's work. He is not the original source of the ideas on bronze to iron transition. This is a very well studied topic in archeological metallurgy.
> I have read Cline's work. He is not the original source of the ideas on bronze to iron transition. This is a very well studied topic in archeological metallurgy.
have you? i don't understand what you are bringing to the table. any real scientist discusses the shoulders they stood upon
Cline talks about, and dismisses, the theory that iron caused the LBA collapse. The timing doesn't work.
that is why this post is looney tunes
Why are you just summarizing part of the post and not even the most important part?
This is part of an essay I am working on the nature of technological waves. I will publish on my personal blog.
I will be curious to read it once published.
THAT is your reason for inaccurately summarizing the article?
because he is a charlatan who doesn't like being called out for being unoriginal
The Iron Age includes 4th century BCE
Millennium and century are different.
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...
The Uluburun is actually mentioned, but obliquely in passing:
”Tin with trace levels of indium, particular to the Cornish deposits, has been found in shipwrecks near Israel and southern France”
Thanks for the direct link though. It’s very interesting.
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 was going to post this! It's a great article. I'm glad someone else saw it too.
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.
So who were these mysterious Sea Peoples?
Raiders, refugees, bandits, people fleeing from other collapsed societies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples
Some of the "Sea Peoples" didn't even travel by sea.
It's slightly funny and scary in our current year of 2026 we now have a lot of destabilizing factors along with uncontrolled immigration happening.... history might repeat?
"History is written by the victors" apparently not
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.
> but it still remained inferior to bronze even in Classic Greece.
The Greeks clearly had access to bronze from the archaic period and used large amounts of it to manufacture armor. Yet they still used iron for swords and spear points. This would indicate that iron was already superior to bronze for quite a few use cases.
Yes it was stronger but fragile and less durable.
Iron was mostly perfected by Romans through their conquests as they collected and systemised iron processing tech of the nations they conquered, which all entered Iron Age by then. By the times of early Roman Empire, high quality iron spread around enough to make bronze obsolete.
IIRC there were significant improvements in the early and mid “dark ages” and mass produced Roman steel was generally quite poor by medieval standards.
I think the main benefit of bronze and it still existed in Roman times is that you can cast it instead of forging. It took almost two thousand years to figure out how to make steel cuirasses that resembled the bronze ones Greeks used before the classical period. Of steel chainmail or scale armor was already superior anyway.
Iron. Next!
Reminds me of this classic from Historia Civilis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq4G-7v-_xI
Really great channel! I love the "down to earth" history format it provides.
I think there is that huge misunderstanding that people were much different a hundred, a thousand or two thousand years ago, when it's mostly different language, technology. The politics part feels very contemporary.
Eg. soldiers singing rude songs during campaigns or celebrating coming home. Or during Saturnalia some people getting shitfaced all night, while others complaining about these "idiots".
Or politicians trying to make shady deals, or having their own agenda, putting their own people in place. Or talking about food/money for the poorer population (yes, there was free government food for the poor even 2k years ago!) or making bad decisions like giving veterans free land to grow crop on, and people realizing just because they are good soldiers doesn't mean they are great farmers.
Or that obsession of calling every war just and defensive, even when the main goal is expand the empire and being hailed as "imperator".
Or the fact that many actually found the coliseum pretty brutal just like parts of the Triumph (parade after conqueror new land) being upset and demanding to spare various people.
Also love the context that is often added, like whose perspective something is based on and where historians disagree.
Great channel for everyone that cannot stand that whole "Ave, Caesar" style talk or making everything sound grand instead of real.
Really wished history was taught that way in school. Right now it almost feels like anti-history. Instead of events it feels like the thing that's important are names and dates, which (most of the time) is the least important. At least in my opinion "learning from history" doesn't mean getting to know names and dates.
Haha yeah it's always fun to see how absolutely nothing has changed in the past few thousand years when it comes to politics.
I think my favorite part is how Caesar got obsessed with making a new calendar as a secret pet project and we're still using that exact setup today with only two or three minor patches. I kinda would've preferred the Egyptian 10 month 30 day setup with an extra week of vacation though ngl.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of giving soldiers land to farm on. It was normally in conquered territories, so it meant that you had men in those territories who had military experience and were ostensibly loyal. Not just a reward, but pragmatism.
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.
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.
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
Gold has been used for 40,000+ years and silver started being smelted at about the same time as bronze.
woosh
I mean the joke would be good if it made sense which it kinda doesn’t.
what about the Irony Age
Yeah but there was no gold age