Bronze Age
Topic: Bronze Age Civilisations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China · NCERT: Class 9, Ch 4 "Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation"; Class 11, Ch 1 "Writing and City Life"
Meaning
The Bronze Age is the stage of history when bronze became the key material for tools and weapons. Bronze is an alloy (a metal mixture) of copper and tin. Bronze tools allowed exact carpentry, drilling beads, carving stone seals and cutting shell. So bronze was the defining material of the first cities. Copper and tin often had to come from far away, which pushed people to trade over long distances. The four early river civilisations (Harappan, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Chinese) all belong to this age.
Example
The earliest cities of Mesopotamia, such as Uruk, date to the Bronze Age, c. 3000 BCE. Mesopotamian spear-tips were made of bronze. The trading town of Mari got its copper by Euphrates boat from 'Alashiya' (Cyprus).
Don't confuse with
- Iron Age: a later stage, when iron replaced bronze. In Mesopotamia the Assyrian empire of 720–610 BCE was an iron-age state, and in China iron had spread widely by 600 BCE.