Period· The columns of time
Bronze Age
3,275 BCE → 1,175 BCE
An alloy nobody can make alone. Copper comes from one region, tin from another, usually far away, and the metal exists only where the two are brought together. This is therefore the age in which distance becomes an economic fact.
What the evidence shows
The archaeology shows the scale this demanded. At Khirbat Hamra Ifdan, in southern Jordan, excavation uncovered the largest metal manufactory known in the ancient Near East for the Early Bronze Age, a period running from about 3600 to 2000 BCE, and lead isotope analysis of the finds helps identify the trade networks it supplied. Cities, writing and organised states appear in the same centuries and largely in the same places, and the overlap is not hard to explain: an economy that must move heavy goods over long distances needs accounts, roads, and someone to guarantee both.
Bounds and conventions
The name describes a technique, and techniques travel at their own speed. Bronze working reaches southwestern China and mainland Southeast Asia only in the eleventh or tenth century BCE, two thousand years after the Near East. This band is therefore a Near Eastern chronology stretched across a world that did not follow it, and the further one goes from the eastern Mediterranean the less it means.
A west Eurasian convention, dated on its first occurrence in south-west Asia. The Americas, Oceania and much of Africa have no Bronze Age.