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bugake 7 hours ago [-]
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.
shin_lao 2 hours ago [-]
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 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.
somenameforme 6 hours ago [-]
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.
flohofwoe 5 hours ago [-]
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.
beloch 5 hours ago [-]
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.
meerita 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe you should read the accounts of the Spanish and Portuguese that narrated the facts. The accounts are not pro-spanish.
beloch 3 hours ago [-]
Townsend includes those, but also draws upon Nahuatl accounts written shortly after the conquest. Those sources haven't been paid enough attention.
meerita 3 hours ago [-]
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.
flohofwoe 2 hours ago [-]
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."
meerita 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
boringg 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cassepipe 3 hours ago [-]
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
half of them died of diseases brought by the spanish...
shaky-carrousel 6 hours ago [-]
The Spanish, the French, the English, the Portuguese...
justinator 6 hours ago [-]
More like 95%.
psychoslave 3 hours ago [-]
Wasn't it like the biggest factor was they benefited from biohazard weapons they didn't know they were carrying?
inglor_cz 1 hours ago [-]
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.
CSMastermind 6 hours ago [-]
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.
weberer 2 hours ago [-]
Instead of vagueposting, why don't you tell us which points that you think are true or false?
amelius 3 hours ago [-]
The real reason is of course that the Spaniards took all the jobs of the Aztecs.
5 hours ago [-]
cassepipe 3 hours ago [-]
Could you post a bit more about what constitutes in your eyes blatant misinformation ?
dainank 6 hours ago [-]
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.
453yuh46 2 hours ago [-]
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.
somenameforme 6 hours ago [-]
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.
poulpy123 4 hours ago [-]
An army is more than the number of men around. Losing 99% of the population (or even much less) is instant collapse.
narrator 5 hours ago [-]
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.
flohofwoe 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dbspin 4 hours ago [-]
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).
flohofwoe 3 hours ago [-]
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.
43 minutes ago [-]
jacquesm 3 hours ago [-]
Artillery and cavalry against unarmed peasants is slaughter, not battle.
jrimbault 5 hours ago [-]
If that's 500 fighting men, that's actually a sizeable army. Especially with no supply train.
ionwake 3 hours ago [-]
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
general_reveal 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
poulpy123 4 hours ago [-]
Now you have to explain why an alliance of tens of thousands was formed to support a few thousand foreigners.
dbspin 4 hours ago [-]
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.
AlanYx 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
flohofwoe 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dragandj 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe the Aztecs were seen as bloodthirsty oppressors, and the Spanish as a chance to liberate from the yoke of Aztec empire?
llm_nerd 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
spwa4 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dragandj 3 hours ago [-]
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?
poulpy123 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Insanity 2 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
cobbzilla 11 hours ago [-]
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.
beloch 8 hours ago [-]
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.
bugake 7 hours ago [-]
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.
kees99 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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-...
imtringued 4 hours ago [-]
>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.
glouwbug 11 hours ago [-]
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
masklinn 9 hours ago [-]
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.
lh712 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Mainan_Tagonist 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Cam here to link this. Such a great podcast series.
db48x 3 hours ago [-]
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.
smcg 30 minutes ago [-]
Okay then, who did the Egyptians fight during the Battle of the Delta during the reign of Ramesses III?
pluc 3 hours ago [-]
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."
cobbzilla 10 hours ago [-]
you may not be far off; iirc evidence suggests a mix of cultures, like the invaders picked up other peoples along the way
kombookcha 8 hours ago [-]
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.
JohnMakin 9 hours ago [-]
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.
brnt 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
otabdeveloper4 5 hours ago [-]
Well, so was the USA. Seems like wealth inequality is not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
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.
christkv 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Ekaros 5 hours ago [-]
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.
throw839303084 9 hours ago [-]
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.
cobbzilla 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Bayart 6 hours ago [-]
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.
tliltocatl 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cucumber3732842 28 minutes ago [-]
>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.
d0mine 9 hours ago [-]
Current inequality is greater, not talking what AI wealth distribution will look like.
throwawayk7h 9 hours ago [-]
inequality is vastly greater. But median living conditions are exponentially greater.
cobbzilla 9 hours ago [-]
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.
NamlchakKhandro 6 hours ago [-]
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?
mschuster91 8 hours ago [-]
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.
zenithirl 2 hours ago [-]
It's absolutely stunning what modern media has done to some people.
jychang 2 hours ago [-]
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".
otabdeveloper4 5 hours ago [-]
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.
literalAardvark 4 hours ago [-]
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.
nobodywillobsrv 7 hours ago [-]
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.
dcminter 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
> 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?)
robotomir 19 minutes ago [-]
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."
PowerElectronix 21 minutes ago [-]
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?
netcan 4 hours ago [-]
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.
21asdffdsa12 4 hours ago [-]
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.
pfdietz 3 hours ago [-]
They couldn't have had aluminum, but if they magically had they could have made aluminum bronze.
randomImmigrant 14 hours ago [-]
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.
GMoromisato 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jillesvangurp 3 hours ago [-]
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.
The_Blade 14 hours ago [-]
> 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)
falaki 13 hours ago [-]
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.
bee_rider 12 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
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?
poulpy123 3 hours ago [-]
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
yxhuvud 9 hours ago [-]
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.
stymaar 6 hours ago [-]
Sea-ready boats were always scarcer and more expensive than weapons in the first place.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rusticpenn 6 hours ago [-]
But IVC had already crashed some 600 years before the bronze age collapse and the populations had migrated to other regions.
bandrami 10 hours ago [-]
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
pfdietz 3 hours ago [-]
I think a local process involving drought is more plausible.
cubefox 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pyeri 9 hours ago [-]
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.
erklik 4 hours ago [-]
... 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.
austin-cheney 8 hours ago [-]
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.
453yuh46 1 hours ago [-]
>>>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.
Jean-Papoulos 7 hours ago [-]
>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.
rocqua 2 hours ago [-]
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.
lampeli 1 hours ago [-]
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
1970-01-01 2 hours ago [-]
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.
GMoromisato 14 hours ago [-]
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?
The_Blade 13 hours ago [-]
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.
The_Blade 11 hours ago [-]
my favorite details? this is like someone claiming to discover The Calculus in 1732 and conveniently forgetting to mention Newton or Leibniz
kqr 9 hours ago [-]
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.)
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
mkl 6 hours ago [-]
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".
Tangent, Works In Progress is one of the best online magazines. Stripe supporting it exhibits so many second-order effects.
falaki 15 hours ago [-]
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.
falaki 15 hours ago [-]
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.
falaki 13 hours ago [-]
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.
pfdietz 12 hours ago [-]
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.
imadierich 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tootie 14 hours ago [-]
Why are you just summarizing part of the post and not even the most important part?
falaki 13 hours ago [-]
This is part of an essay I am working on the nature of technological waves. I will publish on my personal blog.
Mainan_Tagonist 6 hours ago [-]
I will be curious to read it once published.
The_Blade 11 hours ago [-]
because he is a charlatan who doesn't like being called out for being unoriginal
that the article or the top post here doesn't cite him is unforgivable
pfdietz 11 hours ago [-]
Cline talks about, and dismisses, the theory that iron caused the LBA collapse. The timing doesn't work.
The_Blade 11 hours ago [-]
that is why this post is looney tunes
falaki 13 hours ago [-]
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.
The_Blade 11 hours ago [-]
> 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
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.
falaki 13 hours ago [-]
No AI has been touching my text :)
NKosmatos 6 hours ago [-]
Excellent read and very explanatory… on a funny side, too bad we didn’t see anything about alien technology (joking) ;-)
gagan2020 4 hours ago [-]
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
ericmay 16 hours ago [-]
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?
rawgabbit 16 hours ago [-]
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.
ericmay 15 hours ago [-]
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.
bryanlarsen 15 hours ago [-]
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.
ericmay 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cucumber3732842 15 hours ago [-]
>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.
dragandj 3 hours ago [-]
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.
15 hours ago [-]
noncoml 16 hours ago [-]
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.
bryanlarsen 15 hours ago [-]
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.
noncoml 15 hours ago [-]
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.
bryanlarsen 12 hours ago [-]
Fair. I used "pure iron" when I meant "not steel".
ericmay 15 hours ago [-]
Are you suggesting that you disagree with the author's thesis and that iron wasn't a contributing factor or the major one?
jeltz 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the timeline just does not make sense. It makes more sense the other way round that the collapse made iron more appealing.
noncoml 15 hours ago [-]
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.
silverFork 1 days ago [-]
Interesting : "some also alluded to the idea that iron had democratized violence"
delichon 16 hours ago [-]
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.
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.)
mr_toad 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
15 hours ago [-]
yathern 16 hours ago [-]
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.
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]
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.
wintorez 2 hours ago [-]
Iron. Next!
jmyeet 16 hours ago [-]
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.
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?
MisterMunchkin 5 hours ago [-]
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.
bell-cot 6 hours ago [-]
Dr. Bret Devereaux's (ancient/classical history professor) summary of the collapse, FWIW -
I was going to post this! It's a great article. I'm glad someone else saw it too.
The_Blade 14 hours ago [-]
Eric Cline
1177 BC
anovikov 9 hours ago [-]
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.
klrefg 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
anovikov 3 hours ago [-]
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.
klrefg 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nobodywillobsrv 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
moffkalast 4 hours ago [-]
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.
nephihaha 4 hours ago [-]
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.
gaigalas 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Transformanshen 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Beijinger 10 hours ago [-]
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.
BurningFrog 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cubefox 3 hours ago [-]
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.
lefty2 16 hours ago [-]
Interesting fact, you only could come third in the Olympics during the bronze age
bryanlarsen 16 hours ago [-]
Gold has been used for 40,000+ years and silver started being smelted at about the same time as bronze.
lefty2 15 hours ago [-]
woosh
cjiwndowndkwd 15 hours ago [-]
I mean the joke would be good if it made sense which it kinda doesn’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Malinche
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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...)
"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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Sounds like luck (and if luck, why is it cohesive?) or a GOD wanted a certain outcome.
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.
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.
Which is both likely true and morally against what we currently seem to believe.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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
Them essentially being refugees / displaced and looking for a new place, not them being spawned on the map like a cheap rts scenario.
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.
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
"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."
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.
Russia was like this till 1861! And arguably practically for much longer so, perhaps still.
Sea People had completely different style od fighting, they were runners who harrased and eventually outflank chariots.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The Architect had to tell Neo, that we'd been through this Seven times already.
Think yourself Neo?
And make no mistake, Trump and Erdogan want this power for themselves.
Even (gasp!) Putler's Russia has laws and police, I've heard.
"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.
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.
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.
.. what?
(is this some reference to the extremely confusing base incident that may or may not have just been diesel thieves?)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
this is definitely not possible in the bronze age or any other age for that matter from what we know of history.
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.
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.
That was centuries before. Volcanic winter(s) for sure occurred, but they would be distant memory if anything by the time of the collapse.
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.
"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.
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
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
> 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
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_H._Cline
that the article or the top post here doesn't cite him is unforgivable
have you? i don't understand what you are bringing to the table. any real scientist discusses the shoulders they stood upon
I routinely see people dismiss everything as AI without any explanation as to why.
New Invention -> Aggregate -> integrate -> distribute -> baseline then back to New Invention
This could lead to supply chain collapses and such. Maybe just general destabilization and raids and such sort of collapsed the larger empires. But at the same time, those larger empires would also have had access to iron, so why couldn't they by matter of numerical superiority, access to greater resources, tactics and military organization, and more simply, overwhelm smaller armies or bands utilizing the same technology and restore order or at least defend themselves?
I just started reading Conrad Black's historical series and in the Egyptian chapter and also the Assyria/Babylonia chapter he references the historical accounts where time and time again Egyptian forces led by the pharaoh would march into the broader Middle East to restore order. Why couldn't they continue to do that?
I'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.
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.
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.
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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.
Carbonization was invented/discovered after the Bronze Age collapse, slowly over hundreds of years, exactly because they didn’t have access to bronze anymore.
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.
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.
https://x.com/s8mb/status/2103126253012226363
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.
"Quantity has a quality all its own"
1: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxi2veZE2Uvm0VQUbAjGROCQoILO8...
[0]: https://www.sciencealert.com/bronze-age-artefacts-have-meteo...
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.
[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...
”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.
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?
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.
https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...
1177 BC
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting thesis, but I dont buy it. BTW, regarding the timing, I think Julian Jaynes would have a different thesis.
Edit: To the downvoters, please ask your favorite LLM.