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The Bronze Age comes alive with dazzling 3D animations of the first global trading empires. Explore how bronze transformed scattered settlements into urban societies linked by trade, writing, and power. Across the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean, this series reveals how new technologies and expanding networks reshaped daily life, diplomacy, and warfare. Stay with it to see why such sophisticated civilizations ultimately fell apart. This edtion has three episodes together as single special.
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00:025,000 anos atrás, uma simples inovação transformou o mundo antigo.
00:08Uma que foi tão versátil e tão valorável, que gerou wealth em um nível global,
00:15que criou internacional, e ushou em o crescimento da civilização.
00:21Para a civilização, você precisa de três coisas.
00:24Você precisa de cidades e towns,
00:27irrigação e água, e você precisa de um tipo de novo invenção.
00:31E turns out que em 3,000 B.C.,
00:33o novo invenção é o bronze.
00:35E isso começa a um novo novo age.
00:48A Bronze Age
00:48Throughout the ancient world,
00:49the Bronze Age arose in different places at different times.
00:55From roughly 2,000 B.C. in China,
01:00to 3300 B.C. in parts of the Near East,
01:04it's an era defined by the widespread use of bronze,
01:08created through a mixture of copper and tin.
01:12Well, the new technology of bronze,
01:13we don't really know what prompted it.
01:16If you've got what we call native copper,
01:19it's copper with arsenic in it.
01:21And if you heat it up, it actually does make bronze.
01:24The problem is if you heat up something with arsenic in it,
01:27you're not going to live very long.
01:29So they quickly figured out that if you replace the arsenic with tin,
01:33in a ratio of 90% copper to 10% tin,
01:36that you will get bronze and you won't die while making it.
01:41Bronze was more durable than any other metal,
01:44and more useful than gold or silver.
01:47The ancients could use it to make agricultural tools,
01:51hunting spears, and daggers.
01:53They also created ornamental grave goods,
01:57drinking vessels, jewelry, and weapons for war.
02:01So prior to the Bronze Age in the Neolithic period,
02:05people's wealth was in agricultural produce,
02:09textiles, pottery, that kind of thing.
02:12And those can be transferred and hoarded to an extent,
02:15but they kind of go bad after a while.
02:17Clothes rip, cattle die.
02:20Metal is a new kind of wealth that was not seen before.
02:23Metal is a wealth that can be displayed, it can be used,
02:27but its value doesn't go down when it is worn.
02:30It can be melted again and made into something else.
02:34The Bronze Age is a moment where people are starting to use
02:39this combination of tin and copper on a more regular basis,
02:42and that's what sort of historically has given us
02:45the name of the Bronze Age,
02:47but it is more specifically and more importantly
02:51a moment where connections are being made between societies
02:56on a much broader scale, reaching across the sea,
02:59reaching across land.
03:01Diplomacy, as we think of it now,
03:03really has its roots in the Bronze Age.
03:07In the region that includes the Mediterranean,
03:11the Aegean, Mesopotamia and Egypt,
03:13the Bronze Age arrived around 3,000 BC and lasted nearly 2,000 years.
03:20Bronze and other metals helped to fuel the rise of the first true cities.
03:26These centers of power were ruled by a group of elites,
03:31royal families, wealthy landowners, merchants, and temple managers.
03:40In the early Bronze Age, settlements weren't much larger
03:43than about two and a half acres in today's measurement,
03:47probably groups of around 150, 200 people.
03:51Then towards the Middle Bronze Age you get what some archaeologists have called big men,
03:58people controlling the surplus, storing it, extracting taxation from people.
04:04And then in the Late Bronze Age you get people moving into much larger cities,
04:07like Nosos and Mycenae at their height probably had around 12,000, 17,000 people,
04:13which is around a mid-sized city today.
04:17So by the time we get to the Late Bronze Age,
04:19we're in relatively sophisticated civilizations.
04:23I mean, not on the level of today, of course, with the technology,
04:27but at places like Knossos and Crete where you've got the Minoans,
04:31they've got a sewer system, they've got running water,
04:35and they've got international trade around the Mediterranean.
04:39So they're actually quite sophisticated considering it's 3,000 years ago.
04:45During the Bronze Age, the population of Egypt's ancient capital, Thebes, swelled to 80,000 people.
04:52And in Mesopotamia, a region that developed along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
04:58the city of Uruk had an equal number of inhabitants at the height of its power.
05:03Perhaps it would be more apt to call it something like the Urban Age,
05:08the period when urban societies first emerged anywhere in the world as far as we know.
05:15You have economic specialization where people are not just all food producers,
05:21but actually have different specialized professions or jobs and so forth.
05:26That's part of this phenomenon.
05:29When human societies become not just people of relatively equal social status,
05:34but rather you have an elite and you have a middle class and you have a lower class and you
05:39have slaves,
05:40all that, that's also part of this phenomenon.
05:44To keep these highly stratified societies running efficiently,
05:48new systems were developed.
05:50Large-scale farming and manufacturing,
05:52organized religion,
05:54government administration,
05:56law and taxation.
05:59They've got laws, they've got jurisprudence,
06:02they've got all sorts of things that we would, you know, associate with today.
06:05So for example, around 1800 BC, we've got Hammurabi, king of Babylon.
06:10In things like Hammurabi's law code, we've got regulations that really hit home today.
06:19Divorce, marriage, runaway slaves upon occasion, what to do in the case of debt, for example.
06:26So we've got society as we know it.
06:31During the Bronze Age, many new technologies and inventions were created to meet the needs of these increasingly complex societies,
06:39including the earliest writing systems.
06:42Writing developed first probably in the Sumerian cities of southern Iraq, southern Mesopotamia.
06:50Although in Egypt, writing developed about the same time independently, but there was interaction between the Sumerians and the Egyptians.
07:02Basically, all of these civilizations that developed these urban-based complex societies developed writing for the elites to control and
07:15to administer the complex transactions that were taking place.
07:20So initially, a lot of writing had to do with products that are coming into the palace or the temple,
07:30products going out, keeping track of the tax revenue coming in, keeping track of the produce going out.
07:38So this is an initial purpose for writing.
07:43Mesopotamian writing started actually as what you might call a logographic system, where each character stood for a word.
07:53So if you wanted to represent the word water, you'd have a symbol that stood for water.
07:59Now very often these symbols were also pictographic, meaning it was a picture of the actual object being represented.
08:07But not every character was pictographic.
08:10The character for sheep is a circle with a cross in the middle.
08:14And it's not a picture of a sheep.
08:16So they just, somehow, they came up with this symbol.
08:19But the point was that the word sheep got its own character.
08:24This logographic system worked in the early Bronze Age.
08:27But with nearly a thousand characters, memorizing all of them proved too inefficient.
08:33Over time, a new system developed into what's known as cuneiform.
08:40Cuneiform comes from the Latin.
08:42It means wedge-shaped.
08:43But think about a bird stepping in ink and walking across the page.
08:47That's kind of what you've got.
08:48Except that it's made with reeds being pushed into wet clay.
08:53And the tablets are small, kind of pillow-shaped.
08:56So instead of a curvy line for the sign for water, you would just have two wedges making a straight
09:04line.
09:05There's a sign for fish, but it gets turned into a set of wedges.
09:09And you'd never have known that originally it was making the shape of a fish.
09:14In Egypt, one of the pictographic writing systems survived and eventually developed into Egyptian hieroglyphics.
09:22When we look at cuneiform versus Egyptian hieroglyphic, we see a real difference.
09:29And that is that with cuneiform, it began as administrative use.
09:33So it was really meant for writing on tablets, so very small sort of media.
09:39Whereas with Egyptian hieroglyphic, a very different purpose from the very beginning.
09:44That kind of writing was meant for monumental sculpture, monumental paintings.
09:50So the actual writing had to be large, and because it accompanied these artworks, it had to be artful.
09:58So what we see in Egypt is a long development of hieroglyphic writing as an art form.
10:08In Egypt and Mesopotamia, large central institutions, such as the palace and temple, evolved into highly sophisticated administrative centers.
10:19The Bronze Age elites who ruled these institutions were acquiring a surplus of food and other goods from the rest
10:26of the population,
10:27while employing huge numbers of people to help run their cities.
10:32Raw materials were also coming into city centers through extensive trade networks.
10:38Writing allowed civilizations to prosper with better record keeping, stronger taxation, and greater communication over long distances.
10:47Letters, contracts, and other important texts were written with the help of an elite class of professional scribes.
10:54To be trained as a scribe, you had to go through rather rigorous years of schooling.
11:01And there are texts both from Mesopotamia and Egypt that talk about what it was like to go to school
11:06to learn how to read and write.
11:08And it wasn't fun.
11:09It was usually reserved for boys.
11:12Occasionally, you know of girls, women who could read and write.
11:15It wasn't that common.
11:16And in general, it does seem to have been limited to a small number of people.
11:20And I suppose they had a pretty good lifestyle compared to most people.
11:26In the Egyptian texts, they talk about these texts that are advertisements for a scribal way of life.
11:33And they talk about how horrible it is to be a farmer, how dangerous it is to be a soldier.
11:38Be a scribe.
11:39You'll do really well.
11:41You know, it's like, I guess, the equivalent of like telling your kid to be a doctor.
11:44There's job security and you'll get paid pretty well.
11:48So there would have been resident scribes at these palaces.
11:51And they are responsible for very, very important diplomatic relationships.
12:00And in the same way that you can imagine a translator at the UN today has an incredible load.
12:05These scribes also had incredible weight on them to be able to kind of handle the finesses of correspondence between
12:14very important people in the world at that time.
12:17The scribes recorded the yearly histories for the kings and rulers.
12:22They recounted celebrations, campaigns, and conquests.
12:26They also drafted letters from one ruler to another.
12:30A lot of the letters start out with,
12:33Say to Amenhotep, king of Egypt, thus says to Shraddha, king of.
12:40And what is happening is the scribe, one scribe is telling the other scribe to read this out loud.
12:46Because the king can't read.
12:48Sometimes, on a couple of them, we have a handwritten ink inscription from one scribe to another.
12:55Hey Joe, it's Phil. How's the wife and kids?
12:58By the way, when you read this out loud, please emphasize the third line down.
13:02You know, look forward to hearing from you again.
13:04And so we've got these private messages that the kings never knew.
13:09Now, it doesn't happen that often, but just enough to instill the humanity in these dry and dusty documents.
13:16In the Aegean, where the Minoans flourished during the Middle Bronze Age,
13:21a large number of scribes and bureaucrats helped run the day-to-day operations of the palace.
13:27Writing also played an important role in Minoans' ritual life and their extensive system of trade.
13:34Cretan Hieroglyphic develops on Crete.
13:36And then, probably just a little bit later, we have Linear A developing.
13:41A very exciting name for what it seems to be essentially a cursive version of Cretan Hieroglyphic.
13:46And these are active in different parts of the island.
13:50Now, neither of these scripts have been deciphered.
13:54To the north of Crete, the Mycenaean culture rose on the mainland of Greece toward the end of the Middle
14:00Bronze Age
14:01and into the Late Bronze Age.
14:03The Mycenaeans adapted the Minoan Linear A system to create Linear B, which is now known to record an early
14:12form of Greek.
14:13Unlike Linear A, Linear B has been deciphered.
14:18We now can read Linear B documents.
14:20So, we have the wages that are being given to different workers within the palace.
14:25We have record of dedications that are being made at different shrines, etc.
14:31So, they are not very exciting just by themselves.
14:35But they can be opened up to really help us understand how the Mycenaean palace system, how it worked.
14:42And that has been incredibly useful.
14:45One of the most interesting accounts in the Linear B archives is this account of a priestess who is arguing
14:53with the Damos, the city.
14:55And the city says, you owe us the produce of your agricultural land.
15:01You need to give that to the palace.
15:04And Eritah says, no, that land belongs to the god.
15:08You have absolutely no right to tax me. I'm not paying.
15:10So, we have in the Linear B records evidence of a conflict between the religious sphere and the political sphere.
15:20And an evidence of a woman kind of stepping up and asserting her power.
15:25Linear B was used by the Mycenaeans for just 200 years, mainly for administration.
15:31Other forms of writing, such as poetry or literature, never developed.
15:37That's because Mycenae, along with many of the Mediterranean and Near East palace societies,
15:43largely disappeared after a violent and mysterious collapse that began around 1190 BC.
15:50There are mentions in Egyptian texts of the sea people. We don't know who these people are.
15:56There is mention in the Linear B texts of sending men to the coast to kind of keep an eye.
16:02But we don't know if this was standard practice or if they were in a state of alarm.
16:06The fires that destroyed the palaces baked the Linear B tablets, which were on wet clay,
16:10and which otherwise would probably have been discarded after the necessary record keeping had happened.
16:15So, they give us this snapshot of life right at the very end. And we don't really see a state
16:20of alarm.
16:23What appeared to be once thriving palaces and city-states were completely destroyed.
16:29And with the collapse, the need for writing and record keeping disappeared as well.
16:34And this brings in what we call, from hindsight, the Dark Ages.
16:41This is a moment where we do not have written texts to refer to.
16:44Now, there was a great deal going on during the Dark Ages.
16:47It's just that the lights are turned out on one of our principal ways of accessing these past societies,
16:54which is decipherable texts.
16:57In the Aegean, writing wasn't seen for another 400 years,
17:01until the Greeks made contact with the Phoenicians.
17:05From the Phoenician alphabet, they developed the Greek alphabet.
17:09Eventually, alphabetic writing spread to all of Europe and beyond.
17:14What was once the domain of scribes and other elites during the Bronze Age
17:18finally became accessible to the common man.
17:26The Bronze Age produced the world's first consumer societies.
17:31Ancient civilizations with a thoroughly modern obsession.
17:35The pursuit of luxury goods.
17:38We have gold, we have ebony, we have ostrich eggs
17:41that are moving between the elite of the different societies of this period
17:48throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, between the palaces, between the kings.
17:52To meet the demand, merchants and middlemen traveled by land and sea,
17:57creating a highly connected ancient world.
18:01One where distant cultures made contact and international trade first began,
18:07generating extraordinary wealth at a whole new level.
18:21Throughout the early Bronze Age, most people lived in small settlements scattered around the Mediterranean and Near East.
18:28But as the Middle Bronze Age advanced and populations increased,
18:33connections began to form between royal houses and urban centers.
18:37We start to see the development of communities that are at a whole different scale,
18:44at a regional scale, at what we can call an international scale.
18:47In fertile capitals like Thebes in Egypt and Uruk in Mesopotamia,
18:53an abundance of food created a rich class of landowning elites
18:57who were eager to trade their surplus for stones, metals and raw materials from other lands.
19:03With the growth of cities and the growth of hierarchical society,
19:08there came to be an elite that wanted to advertise its status
19:12and also wanted to decorate the palaces and the temples.
19:17And to do that, you needed things like copper and precious stones and precious woods and things like that.
19:25So Mesopotamia was the great market for raw materials.
19:29And indeed, when Mesopotamia became urbanized, they seemed to have sent out expeditions far into Iran and Anatolia,
19:37specifically looking for the raw materials and setting up little trading posts in order to acquire these raw materials.
19:44And from there, that's where it all took off and these networks became all the more robust through the centuries.
19:53To the west of Mesopotamia, where the cultures of the Aegean and Mediterranean rim developed,
20:00the terrain made it more difficult to move goods by land.
20:04So the ancients took to the sea for long-distance travel.
20:09Revolutionary innovations marked a booming era of maritime trade.
20:13One of the most important was the sail.
20:19The sail was probably first used in the fourth millennium, perhaps in southern Mesopotamia.
20:25By about 2000 BC, it's found its way to Crete, probably via Egypt,
20:31where we know that there were sailing ships by about 3200 BC,
20:36because we have representations of them in Egypt.
20:39So innovations in maritime travel really brought these areas together.
20:44And this is also the time when we see the emergence of the first superpowers in the world, Egypt and
20:50Mesopotamia.
20:51So they are traveling on the seas and they are engaged in trade.
20:55The people in the Aegean, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, are plugging into these networks.
21:01And that's facilitated by the sail.
21:06Now they can actually travel to these places and they get plugged in.
21:11As civilizations became increasingly sophisticated during the Middle to Late Bronze Age,
21:17their need for raw materials drove a thriving trade in metals
21:21and developed interconnected relationships never seen before in the ancient world.
21:26We know that during the Bronze Age, Cyprus, the name itself actually comes from the word for copper.
21:34We know that Cyprus is one of the largest sources of copper in the eastern Mediterranean.
21:40So in the mountain ranges, in the foothills of the mountain ranges, that's where we find copper sources.
21:45In other places in the Aegean, there's some copper farther to the east in Mesopotamia, also in Anatolia.
21:52So copper could be found.
21:54The real problem was tin.
21:56Tin is very rare and the sources of tin are nowhere near the Mediterranean.
22:01There are a few disputed sources in Anatolia, but it seems that the tin was coming mainly from well to
22:07the east,
22:08near Afghanistan, Central Asia.
22:10In the west, it could come from Spain and even farther from Britain.
22:15And whether they were exploiting those sources in the Bronze Age, we're not sure.
22:22As these regional trade networks flourished, they fueled an even wider exchange of goods from foreign lands.
22:30Everything from women and wine to ivory, precious gems, and artwork.
22:38Copper and tin were traded as pillow-shaped ingots and may have been used as a form of currency.
22:44This expansion in trade created a ripple effect of economic and cultural influences across the region.
22:52Some of these ideas about writing, about religion, are moving around or being passed by, you can imagine,
22:58merchants who are telling stories as they're landing at a harbor.
23:03The figures that are behind the scenes, not necessarily the king sitting on his throne,
23:07but the people who actually make up the activities of social life.
23:12The craftspeople, the peasants, the merchants, the traders.
23:15They're interacting and they're creating this kind of social network and interaction that really sees the changes at the Bronze
23:23Age.
23:25The Minoan civilization arose on the Greek island of Crete during the Middle Bronze Age
23:30and flourished for over a thousand years.
23:34Named after the mythic king Minus, the Minoans are considered Europe's first advanced civilization.
23:41By 2000 B.C., they began building a string of palaces on the island.
23:47Their capital, Adnossus, was a hub of commercial and cultural activity.
23:53The Minoans, during the Middle Minoan period to the early-late Minoan period,
24:00kind of monopolized trade in the area.
24:02They had the biggest ships.
24:03They controlled the flow of people and goods from several centers.
24:09And they were trading with the Sierra Palestinians.
24:11They were trading with the Hittites, the Cycladic Islanders, the Egyptians.
24:15They were even trading as far west as southern Italy and north to the Balkans.
24:19So there was quite a large network.
24:22There is this idea that there was a Minoan thalastocracy, a kind of rule of the sea.
24:27That the Minoans as incredible sea persons were able to rule the entire eastern Mediterranean.
24:34I think more and more we've worked away from that idea.
24:37What we do know is that culturally Minoan Crete had a very big impact on areas beyond its shores.
24:45We see this, for example, in the spread of wall paintings throughout the Cycladic Islands
24:49and again into the northern Aegean, even to coastal Anatolia.
24:53So a very distinctive style of Minoan wall painting is showing up in these places.
24:58We also find it throughout the Levant and also in northern Egypt.
25:04In exchange for copper, tin, gold, ivory, silver and precious stones,
25:12the Minoans traded olive oil, wine, food and textiles.
25:17They may have also been the first to develop the so-called purple trade, centuries before the Phoenicians.
25:26People in the Aegean became aware of the fact that certain types of sea molluscs, the murex,
25:32has a gland that creates an incredible purple dye.
25:37Early excavations on Crete and in the Aegean would turn up shells and people did not exactly know what to
25:44make of this.
25:45We now could kind of go back to these early excavation reports
25:48and understand them very likely as being processing sites for this purple dye made from the murex.
25:56And there have been some very interesting recent finds of this dye actually being used,
26:01essentially creating a color in paint.
26:04The world was being colored by this purple in various different places,
26:07not only in cloth but also in the walls and doubtlessly in other places too.
26:13The Minoans enjoyed relative peace and prosperity through much of their reign as grand masters of trade.
26:20But by the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, Minoan society began to decline.
26:28A major volcanic eruption on nearby Thera or some other natural disaster may have contributed to their fall.
26:38Over time, the Mycenaeans, a group of early Greeks from the mainland, moved in and took over trade in the
26:45region.
26:48The Mycenaeans, once they supersede the Minoans, circa 1450 BC or so,
26:56they don't seem to have as strong a connection with Egypt.
27:00And so they are oriented into the east, more to the Hittites and the Cypriots.
27:06But the Mycenaeans also have a strong interest in southern Italy and Sicily, more so than the Minoans.
27:13So they're developing contacts with places on the southern Italian coast and Sicily looking for different kinds of products.
27:22We know that the Mycenaeans were trading with southern Italy, with the Balkans.
27:27We have Balkan amber in Mycenae.
27:29We know that they continued to trade with Cyprus.
27:31They continued to get copper ore from the places that the Minoans did.
27:34We can actually trace the source of copper by lead isotope analysis
27:39because veins of metal in the earth typically possess the same sort of signature.
27:44And the sources of copper continue into the Mycenaean.
27:48They continue to kind of extract at a high level and higher and higher.
27:53As the demand for copper grew, so too did the quest for more luxury goods.
27:59This, in turn, fueled the demand for stronger ships capable of carrying heavier cargo.
28:04Initially, most shipbuilders used twine to join the planks of wood together, but these craft were too fragile for the
28:13open sea.
28:14Eventually, a new technique was developed in the late Bronze Age using mortise and tenon joints to connect planks,
28:21creating stronger boats that helped expand trade beyond rivers into the open sea.
28:27The earliest evidence of this major advance in ship construction was discovered off the southwest coast of Turkey in 1982
28:35in an area called Uluberun.
28:40The ship was nearly 50 feet long and carried more than 20 tons of cargo from at least seven different
28:47cultures.
28:49The Uluberun shipwreck is unique in so many ways.
28:53We have only a few actual wrecks from the Bronze Age.
28:57And this is so unique because, first of all, the preservation.
29:01We have a kind of moment frozen in time.
29:06Everything that went down with the ship was meant to be with the ship.
29:09And so we can study that particular moment and we can study the range of objects, the range of products
29:15that are being shipped around the Mediterranean at about 1300 BC.
29:21And this is really extraordinary.
29:25We have these large ingots of copper, for example.
29:29We have beautiful ingots of glass.
29:31Glass would have been used and then would have been sent throughout the eastern Mediterranean and then turned into different
29:38types of objects by craftspeople in the different societies.
29:43Among the more than 18,000 artifacts was a cache of exotic objects.
29:50Ebony from Egypt.
29:52Elephant tusks and hippopotamus teeth.
29:56Ostrich eggshells and Baltic amber beads from northern Europe.
30:00The ship was likely a mixed enterprise.
30:03A trade ship that sold raw material and goods from port to port while transporting a special cargo of elite
30:10goods.
30:13During the late Bronze Age, royal gift-giving was a vital part of international trade and critical to ancient diplomacy.
30:22To maintain good relations, the ruling elite of the day traded what they had for what they coveted most.
30:31They really treasured gold just like we do.
30:34And indeed there are texts from the late Bronze Age where the kings are writing to each other and saying,
30:41the king of Babylonian writes to the king of Egypt, I know that gold is like dust in your country,
30:45why aren't you sending me more gold?
30:47The inherent shiny beauty, sun-like beauty of gold was just as impressive to them as it is to us.
30:56By the late Bronze Age, the trade networks that brought great wealth to the ruling elites were being disrupted.
31:04Scholars believe that climate change in the Aegean may have been a factor.
31:08A series of intense droughts could have dramatically affected agriculture and led to great social unrest and upheaval.
31:16Ultimately what we end up seeing is the destruction of palace after palace very widely throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
31:23And I think the scope of that suggests two things.
31:27One, that the climate very possibly is playing a role.
31:30That this is, you know, the climate is something that can cause such a widespread synchronous event.
31:36But also these are societies that are very interconnected.
31:38And so we can see that the livelihood of one is going to affect the livelihood of another.
31:46Much like the global financial meltdown in 2008, the disruption caused a ripple effect across the region.
31:55The flow of luxury goods and raw materials for the ruling elites eventually ceased altogether.
32:00The vibrant trading networks forged in the ancient world would not be seen again for centuries.
32:08But they set the stage for a remarkable expansion of international trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange that continues to this
32:18day.
32:24During the Bronze Age, metal making fueled specialized industries and ignited the demand for new innovations.
32:33Tools for farming and hunting.
32:35Objects for religious rituals and elite burials.
32:40Weapons for war.
32:43Weapons show up in the archaeological record and proliferate pretty much all at once.
32:47So they learned the technique for making weapons and everyone wanted to get in on the fun.
32:52Competition and conquest ushered in a new age of organized warfare.
32:58With professional armies that sought to expand empires, defend territory, and defeat their enemies.
33:17It's not known exactly where or when bronze making first began.
33:22But it revolutionized the way tools and weapons were made.
33:26And the new technology spread quickly throughout the ancient world.
33:31Bronze is so important because it's such a versatile material.
33:35So when it was discovered that one could alloy copper with tin to make bronze, it was a great improvement.
33:42Because copper is really soft and it doesn't make a good working edge for a tool or a weapon.
33:49But when allied with tin, it becomes harder and more durable.
33:52And it keeps a sharper edge.
33:54Therefore, the tools are better.
33:56The weapons are better.
33:57Bronze Age tools and weapons were often interchangeable and consisted of axes, swords, daggers, and spears.
34:11In the early Bronze Age, warfare was localized.
34:14Small groups of men attacked nearby settlements for land, resources, and women.
34:22But as the wealth and size of settlements grew, and societies became more urbanized, warfare spread.
34:31By the middle of the third millennium BC, the earliest professional standing armies were organized to defend communities in southern
34:39Mesopotamia.
34:41The normal political situation in southern Mesopotamia was that of the city-state.
34:45And each important city had its own political area that it controlled.
34:51And they were very competitive, they fought with one another, sometimes they conquered one another.
34:55And there would be these ambitious rulers like Sargon around 2300 who tried to unify all of them.
35:01And for a while that worked, and then it would fall apart again and they'd go back to their city
35:04-states again.
35:06The Sumerians were the first to use body armor and helmets in battle.
35:11They're credited with the invention of the sickle sword and the earliest known chariots.
35:17The Sumerians executed well-disciplined formations in battle and launched the first missile troops using men armed with javelins.
35:27Their military techniques and weapons were quickly adopted around the region, giving other ancient adversaries a greater advantage.
35:37New innovations and new technology usually do give you an edge, whether it's in war or society or elsewhere.
35:44And so we do see these new adoptions.
35:48For instance, there's a group called the Hyksos that come in and they invade Egypt in about 1720 BC.
35:55Don't quite know where they come from, but it's probably the region that today we would call Israel, Lebanon, Syria.
36:01And they come in and they take over Egypt because they have a new type of chariot.
36:06And they have a new type of bow, a composite bow.
36:09This particular bow, made out of composite materials, could shoot probably twice as far as a regular bow.
36:16So with these new types of chariots and the new type of bow, the Hyksos overrun and take over Egypt.
36:21And they rule it until about 1550 BC.
36:24By that point, the Egyptians have adopted that chariot and the composite bow in return,
36:30and they're able then to kick the people back out again.
36:34By the Late Bronze Age, Egypt was a military powerhouse.
36:38It turned from a relatively peaceful kingdom, protected by the natural boundaries of the Nile River and Mediterranean Sea,
36:46to a leading Bronze Age empire.
36:49A rich warrior class joined the military as charioteers.
36:54Army divisions numbered 5,000 strong, launching fierce battles to conquer their enemies.
37:01We have from Egypt, from the town of Amarna,
37:06a cache of over 300 letters written in Akkadian in cuneiform.
37:12And these letters detail the relationships between not only the pharaoh in Egypt,
37:18but the different rulers of small city kingdoms and large powerhouses like Babylon and Assyria and Mesopotamia.
37:25In the letters, the openings will begin by saying,
37:29Brother, how are you? How is your wife? How are your chariots?
37:32The chariots are very, very important.
37:34And if you look at the art from this time, coming from various different societies,
37:39you see the chariot very heavily stressed.
37:43And these chariots seem to have been a sort of international symbol of power and prestige at the time.
37:51As Bronze Age empires grew, so too did their need to control land and resources.
37:58There are the great powers like Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, and especially the Hittites.
38:04So you've got the Egyptians fight the Hittites, Hittites fight the Assyrians, and so on.
38:12And there are winners and losers in the battles and the wars.
38:15In the Aegean, the Mycenaeans emerged as a powerful warrior-based society.
38:21Their militaristic culture produced great wealth for their elites.
38:26The Mycenaeans are best known for their famous attack on the ancient city of Troy.
38:32According to legend, after a fierce ten-year battle, the great Mycenaean king Agamemnon finally conquered Troy.
38:41The Trojan War became the basis for Homer's Iliad, written some 400 years after the end of the Mycenaean era.
38:50We don't know if the Mycenaeans saw themselves as an independent nation in the way we would think of a
38:56nation.
38:56They might have saw themselves as inhabitants of a particular city, for instance,
38:59or the speakers of a certain language, or the worshipper of a certain god, rather than someone in a nation.
39:06But, having said that, they were kind of teetering between fighting with each other and kind of getting along.
39:14It probably was a kind of uneasy alliance, and they probably came together to fight off external invaders,
39:20but when there was no one invading them, they probably were at each other's throats.
39:26The Mycenaeans celebrated their victories in their artwork, and buried their prized weapons in tombs along with their dead.
39:35They had spears, they had short swords, they had these figure eight shields made of wood draped with cowhide.
39:42They had boar's tusk helmets.
39:45Hunting of boar was a very potent symbol of Mycenaean male power.
39:48We know that they possessed horses. There are horses and chariots in fresco paintings, and illustrated on weapons themselves.
39:57The chariot is certainly part of the picture, but because of the terrain in Greece being so rugged,
40:04it's not very hospitable for chariots.
40:08And therefore, we don't really think that chariots were a major part of warfare in a practical sense.
40:15The chariots were, however, a very strong, symbolic element of the elite.
40:22So elites depicted themselves in chariots.
40:25And of course, this is something that they extracted from the east, from places like Egypt,
40:30where chariots were actually practical tools of warfare.
40:36The elites of the Late Bronze Age may have possessed powerful weapons and controlled large armies,
40:42but it wasn't enough to save their empires.
40:47In the end, their greatest enemy was an unexpected one that led to the collapse of the ancient world.
40:55I would argue that the collapse of the Late Bronze Age was so calamitous and so catastrophic
41:02that its similarity would not be seen again until Rome collapsed, which is 1,500 years later.
41:10In the Late Bronze Age, you have these large kingdoms that dominated the whole region.
41:15It wasn't an era of city-states so much anymore like the early Bronze Age was.
41:20The Late Bronze Age already, you have large regional states, even nation-states, you could call them.
41:26These nation-states were highly sophisticated and urbanized,
41:30bolstered by a thriving international trade network and the spoils of war.
41:35Yet they were vulnerable to numerous threats.
41:40None of these societies were really built to last a long time.
41:45They had kind of inherent fragilities and weaknesses that would sooner or later come to tell on them.
41:52No one knows exactly why Bronze Age civilizations collapsed the way they did.
41:57But their highly stratified societies may have been a factor.
42:02One theory points to a growing inequality between the ruling elites and their dependents.
42:09Over taxation, poverty and oppression sparked internal dissent.
42:15People began to flee their kingdoms, seeking refuge in other lands and causing unrest throughout the region.
42:22They were clearly posing a problem to the rulers, to the settled society, the elites of the Late Bronze Age.
42:30Sometimes there's treaties between the different kings of the Late Bronze Age
42:34and the treaties include clauses about fugitives.
42:37How if a fugitive from your kingdom comes into mine, then I am liable to send them back to you.
42:43So clearly there's a problem that these rulers are dealing with people that are running away all the time.
42:51Another theory adds climate change to the mix.
42:55During the end of the Late Bronze Age, there is increasing evidence that the climate was much drier and drought
43:02became a persistent issue.
43:05Agriculture in Greece is something which is always a struggle in terms of rainfall and would have been potentially precarious.
43:13And one of the suggestions that scholars are kind of working with now is that if they were to have
43:19several bad seasons in a row during one of these dry spells,
43:23I mean think of a moment like the Dust Bowl here in the States, what you end up having is
43:29the basis of these societies.
43:31You know, what we all cannot do without food starts to become a scarce resource.
43:40If you didn't have the same supplies of water that you were used to, you couldn't produce the same amount
43:45of crops
43:45and sustain the same numbers of people, particularly all those people that weren't food producers themselves,
43:51all these elites and the specialists that are working for the elites.
43:55And if the agriculture is failing, then that whole system of all these parasitical people that are living off of
44:04the actual farmers and herders and so forth,
44:07that's all going to fall apart if they can't be fed.
44:11While drought and famine may have helped topple these Bronze Age societies,
44:15it's possible the land itself created even more instability.
44:20There's evidence that powerful earthquakes once rocked the region.
44:26Mainland Greece and the islands are a site of high seismic activity.
44:30They're right on a fault line and so there are frequent earthquakes.
44:34The palaces were producing large quantities of olive oil and large quantities of wine
44:39and storing them in these giant pithos jars as tall as you or I, full of oil.
44:45And you combine that with lamps that would have been inside, like candles burning, earthquake, and these large drums of
44:52oil,
44:52and you get this recipe for disaster.
44:55By the end of the 13th century BC, it was clear that many of the ruling elites were hitting a
45:01crisis point.
45:03We see in text that people are writing letters back and forth to one another.
45:07So for example, we hear evidence that there are groups that are attacking Cyprus.
45:12We also hear this from various different places along the Levantine coast and from Egypt itself.
45:18So this is the so-called Sea Peoples.
45:21No one knows exactly where the Sea People came from or why they were attacking cities and settlements along the
45:29coasts.
45:31Some believe they may have been refugees or disaffected people fleeing from hardship in their own homelands.
45:39We have examples of letters going back and forth.
45:43Letters from the Hittite king to the king of Ugarit saying,
45:47you've got to let that shipment of grain get through.
45:50The people need it.
45:51They are starving.
45:52A letter from the king of Ugarit to the king of Alashia.
45:56I can't help you.
45:58All of my troops are in the Hittite realm and I'm being attacked.
46:03So I'm left here vulnerable.
46:05So it's very clear that there were disruptions, there were people moving around, perhaps the so-called Sea Peoples of
46:14disaffected people moving around and attacking the coastal areas.
46:19Little is known about the mysterious Sea Peoples, a name given to groups of invaders who raided coastal towns and
46:27cities throughout the Mediterranean for nearly a hundred years.
46:31They're mentioned in ancient Egyptian texts, attacking in two separate waves about 30 years apart.
46:39They talk about these people coming from the north.
46:41They talk about them coming from overseas.
46:44And they actually give us the names of the groups.
46:46They talk about the Shardana and the Shekilesh and the Weshesh and the Esh.
46:51The wonderful names, the Denyan and the Peleset.
46:55Who are these people?
46:56The Shardana sounds a lot like Sardinia, doesn't it?
47:00But we don't know for sure if it is.
47:02Same with the Shekilesh.
47:03It sounds a lot like Sicily.
47:05So people have suggested that's where they came from.
47:07It's really only the Peleset that we think we know.
47:09They're probably the Philistines.
47:11And the Philistines are mentioned in the Bible as coming from Crete.
47:14So that might actually work.
47:15But, you know, again, we don't know that much about them.
47:20External invasions, internal unrest, climate change, and natural disasters.
47:27Scholars now believe it was a perfect storm of conditions that rocked the ancient world at the end of the
47:33Bronze Age.
47:36Geographically, the collapse goes all the way from Italy in the west to Iraq and Afghanistan in the east.
47:44And it goes from Turkey in the north to Egypt in the south.
47:48From the western to the eastern Mediterranean, all that collapses.
47:52It would be Italy, Greece, and the Middle East as we look at it today.
47:57All that went down. It went down hard.
48:00In less than 200 years, many of the great civilizations of the Bronze Age were in ruins.
48:07Their central economies collapsed.
48:09The elites died off.
48:11The art of writing was lost.
48:13And the great architecture disappeared.
48:16And with it all came the end of the vibrant international trade network that had long sustained the region.
48:24Think about America's dependence on oil from the Middle East.
48:28The equivalent back then would have been this dependence on tin.
48:32Tin's only coming from Afghanistan.
48:33You cut the supply roots to the tin, and everybody's in big trouble.
48:38And I think that's probably what happens at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
48:42But in the end, these trade routes were cut.
48:44Suddenly you don't have tin, which means you don't have bronze, which means you either collapse or you adapt.
48:50Some collapsed, some adapted.
48:53For the next 300 years, the region plunged into what's known as the world's first Dark Ages,
49:00where fragmented, localized cultures lived more simply and freely,
49:05without the structure of a complex, organized, interconnected society.
49:12For decades, we have treated the time after the collapse as the Dark Ages.
49:18This mainly suggests that we, archaeologically, have kind of a moment of darkness.
49:25Because some of the means that we have of getting at these societies, text being a major one, disappear.
49:32That doesn't mean that life ceased.
49:34Because what we lose is kind of the grandeur that archaeologists and that all of us love.
49:40You know, palaces with wall paintings covering their walls, gold and ivory being imported.
49:45The industries that might have been connected to the palaces and to kind of the jockeying for social status linked
49:53to palace life.
49:54That is what seems to diminish.
49:56But that does not mean that culture and society somehow, you know, just disappeared.
50:03I've argued that actually the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age, while it was horrific for them,
50:10was not the end of the world for us, because out of that the beginnings of Western civilization were born.
50:17The rise and fall of empires and ages.
50:21It's an ancient, yet familiar story, and a cautionary tale for our own age.
50:28Can we take any lessons from the failures of the Bronze Age?
50:33We could, if the powers that be paid attention to the archaeologists and the historians of the Bronze Age.
50:39I mean, we like to think, those of us who study those societies, that we're actually learning something that we
50:45can profit from.
50:46As we look at life in the Bronze Age, as it became more and more complex,
50:52the kind of technological innovations brought in their terrain problems.
50:59As they developed the ability to create metal for better implements, better tools, they were also made into tools of
51:07destruction.
51:08So as we become more complex, and as we develop technologies, we can see that every technology that has a
51:17good purpose also has a kind of evil use.
51:21And so this is something that they began to learn already in the Bronze Age, and of course, we know
51:28this today very well.
51:30As our societies become more advanced, and we develop more complex technologies,
51:36we face similar vulnerabilities and potential upheavals.
51:43The lessons of the Bronze Age may be well worth paying closer attention to, with an even greater urgency.
51:50We'll see.
51:51We'll see.
51:52We'll see.
51:53We'll see.
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