Bronze Age Civilizations:

• Aim: to discuss the formations of the Bronze Age societies in Mesopotamia

• After millennia of hunting-gathering and subsistence horticultural life, new
technologies (copper and bronze smelting technologies), economic and
political changes (permanent surplus to support a class of artisans) occurred
as responses to the worst contradictions in the Neolithic economy (demand to
intensify surplus production)
• these technological, and economic changes redefined human material
relationships (the emergence of an elite class) and political roles (chiefdoms
as proto-state institutions), and new social institutions (the emergence of
cities and urban life)
• These transformations were so great that Gordon Childe termed it the ‘urban
revolution’—We shall examine these transformations in the context of
Mesopotamian Bronze Age Civilization
Understanding the concept ‘Bronze Age’:

• We shall briefly try to understand the following concepts:

• a) Bronze Age,
• b) Urban Revolution c)
• Civilization,
• d) State
•Core Reading 1: Gordon Childe, “The Bronze Age”, Past and Present,
No. 12 (Nov. 1957), pp. 2-15
•Additional Reading: Gordon Childe, The Bronze Age (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1930) Chapter 1: ‘The Implications of the
Bronze Age’, (pp. 1-27).
“Bronze Age”
•Bronze Age” here means not so much a period of sidereal tie as a
technological stage in which metal--actually copper more often than the
alloy of copper and tin
•first came to be used regularly for the principal cutting tools and
weapons to replace or supplement the earlier equipment of stone, bone
and wood…But Bronze Age means much more than a technological
stage.”
Bronze Metallurgy in the Old World:
• As a material for tools, metal offers two kinds of advantages over
stone, bone or wood:
• a) tougher and more durable
• b) malleable and fusible, it can yield new kinds of genera of tools
• the development of the ability to alloy tin and copper to make bronze
came into existence during the last two millennia BC
•As Gordon Childe conceptualizes:
• “The story of human culture has long been divided conventionally into
three main volumes according to the material generally employed for
the principal cutting implements. At first our forerunners could only
make knives and axes by chipping or grinding stone, bone or ivory. The
period when such tools were alone in use is termed the Stone Age and
constitutes the first volume…The second volume opens when man has
learned that certain kinds of stone may be compelled by heating under
suitable conditions to yield a substance which, while hot, can be
modelled or even run into a mould, but on cooling retains its shape and
becomes harder and more durable than stone and takes as good an edge.
• This epoch is termed the Bronze Age—not very happily, since the first
metal used industrially to any extent was copper; only by an accident
in the areas where archaeology was first extensively studied—
Denmark, England, and France—was the copper already mixed with
tin in the majority of early metal tools. The Bronze Age comes to an
end when methods have been devised for extracting economically and
working efficiently the much commoner metal, iron, which then
replaces copper and its alloys in the manufacture of the crucial
implements.” (Gordon Childe, Bronze Age, p. 1)
The Implications of the Bronze Tool-Technology:

•“the development of the ability to make bronze and the demand for it
as a material for tools and ornaments was the trigger for a number of
changes in the organization of human society on a scale comparable to
the onset of sedentism and agriculture several millennia earlier.” (Peter
Bogucki, The Origins of Humans Society, p. 270)
a) Bronze give men more efficient means of production and implements
of destruction-
b) Locating ores--Beginning of smelting-the reduction by heating with
charcoal (carbon)
The Implications of the Bronze Tool-Technology:

• The economic consequence of the regular use of copper, still more of bronze in
industry was the initiation of organized international trade
• Copper is far from a common element; its ores are mostly found in rough
mountainous or desert country, never in the fertile alluvial valleys
• If the farmers demanded metal tools, they had to import the raw material from
outside the village territory
• The development of internal and foreign commerce required a certain amount of
political stability
• this can be considered as the economic foundations of the early states
The Implications of the Bronze Tool-Technology:

• Moreover, trade must go hand in hand with improvement in the means

of communication (roads, etc.,)
• The wheeled vehicles and the sailing boats appear in the Ancient
world after the introduction of metal
• The same commercial needs must at least have given an impulse to the
development of writing and seal-cutting
• Letters and contracts dealing with trade bulk largely in any collection
of Babylonian documents
The Implications of the Bronze Tool-Technology:

• The demand for a regular supply of copper or bronze evoked a novel element
in society, a new population of full-time specialists who did not catch or grow
their own food, but relied for sustenance on food produced by others.
• Metal-workers to-day are generally full-time specialists and presumably
preserve the status of their prehistoric ancestors
• Moreover to maintain a regular supply of metal at least a core of full-time
specialists would be needed to mine and smelt the ores and bun the necessary
charcoal in the remote metalliferous mountains or deserts and to transport the
metal to the farming villages.
• A Bronze Age presuppose a mechanism for the regular extraction and
distribution of metal—in a world, a metallurgical industry—staffed at least in
part by full-time specialists.