Period· The columns of time

Bronze Age

3,275 BCE → 1,175 BCE

The Bronze Age, from 5,300 to 3,200 years ago, is defined by the use of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin.

Period defined by the use of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. The two metals coming from distinct and often distant deposits, bronze metallurgy presupposes long-distance supply circuits, which makes distance a determining economic factor.

What the evidence shows

Pure copper is a soft metal whose edge deforms in use. The addition of about a tenth of tin hardens it considerably and lowers its melting point, which improves casting and the filling of moulds. Bronze thus constitutes the first material whose properties are set by a determined composition. The scale of the installations required is documented: at Khirbat Hamra Ifdan, in southern Jordan, excavation has uncovered the largest metallurgical workshop known in the Near East for the Early Bronze Age, a period running from about 3600 to 2000 BCE, and lead isotope analysis of the objects from it allows the corresponding exchange networks to be reconstructed. The first cities, writing and state administrations appear in the same centuries and in the same regions, an economy transporting heavy materials over long distances presupposing accounting, routes and an authority guaranteeing them.

Bounds and conventions

The designation describes a technique, whose diffusion follows its own rhythm. Bronze working reaches south-western China and mainland South-East Asia only in the eleventh or tenth century BCE, two thousand years after the Near East. The band therefore applies a Near Eastern chronology to regions that do not follow it.

West Eurasian convention, dated on its first occurrence in the Near East. The Americas, Oceania and much of Africa have no Bronze Age.