Eras
The Ancient Near East and Bronze Age World
Also Known As The Bronze Age
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The Ancient Near East and Bronze Age world covers the roughly two thousand years, from about 3200 to 1200 BCE, in which the first cities, states, writing systems and empires arose in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean. It takes its name from bronze, an alloy of copper and tin that was the era's dominant material for tools and weapons, and whose trade networks linked civilizations from Britain to Afghanistan. Sumerian city states, Egypt under the pharaohs, the Hittite empire in Anatolia, Babylon under Hammurabi, and Mycenaean Greece all flourished within this period, developing law codes, monumental architecture, organized religion and long distance diplomacy conducted partly in cuneiform, a shared diplomatic script. The era ends with the Bronze Age Collapse, a still debated wave of destructions, migrations and state failures around 1200 to 1150 BCE that brought down or badly weakened almost every major power of the eastern Mediterranean within a few decades.
Facts
Disputed
Start YearMarked conventionally by the earliest Sumerian cuneiform writing, around 3200 BCE, the same regional boundary that closes prehistory. Historians disagree on whether the boundary belongs at the invention of writing or at the emergence of the first true cities somewhat earlier. End YearThe Bronze Age Collapse unfolded over decades rather than a single year, roughly 1200 to 1150 BCE, and its causes, including drought, invasion by the so called Sea Peoples, internal revolt and the breakdown of trade networks, remain actively debated among historians and archaeologists. Geographic ScopeCentered on Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean, including Mycenaean Greece. The periodization does not describe East Asia, South Asia or the Americas, each of which had its own, differently timed Bronze Age or none at all; China's Bronze Age, for instance, is conventionally dated centuries later and organized around the Shang and early Zhou dynasties rather than this era's own boundary events. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. The Cambridge Ancient History
Cambridge University Press
1. The Cambridge Ancient History
Cambridge University PressVol. I-II, The Ancient Near East
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Wikipedia
WikipediaSucceeded By: The Iron Age, Iron Age, succession from the Bronze AgeQuote, Succeeded By: The Iron Age, Iron Age, succession from the Bronze Age
The Iron Age (c. 1200 BC - c. 550 BC) is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Copper Age and Bronze Age.
Dissenting Readings (2 dissenting readings)
End Year
Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014) argues that treating circa 1200 BCE as a single dateable endpoint overstates the precision of the evidence. Cline holds that no single cause, including the Sea Peoples invasions traditionally credited with ending the Bronze Age world, explains the collapse, but rather a cascading systems failure across decades: earthquakes, drought, famine, internal revolt and the severing of the interdependent trade networks that had sustained Egypt, the Hittites, Mycenae, Cyprus and the Levantine states together. On this reading, the Bronze Age world did not end in a year so much as unravel over a generation.
A dissenting reading, from Eric Cline and the systems-collapse schoolEric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Cline, 2014), Princeton University Press, 2014
Description
Historian Robert Drews argues the Bronze Age Collapse is best explained by a revolution in warfare rather than a multi-causal combination of factors: the sudden, widespread adoption of massed infantry using new weapons and armor overwhelmed the chariot-based militaries of the palace states, a single dominant mechanism rather than the climate-and-systems-collapse synthesis (associated with Eric Cline and others) that the entity description above summarizes as the current near-consensus.
A dissenting reading, from Robert DrewsWikipedia: Late Bronze Age Collapse, Wikipedia
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