Bronze Age

Bronze Age is the middle division of the three-age system archaeologists use to order early history, named for the copper-tin alloy that defined its metalwork. In the ancient Near East it runs roughly 3300 to 1200 BC. It is a modern label rather than one any ancient writer used, and it does not begin or end at the same moment everywhere, which is why it is often the most honest way to refer to the era when a particular region is not in view.

Etymology and Biblical Usage

The three-age system - Stone, Bronze, Iron - was set out by the Danish antiquarian Christian Jurgensen Thomsen in the 1830s as a way of arranging museum collections, and it survives because the sequence holds. Bronze is copper alloyed with roughly a tenth part tin, harder than copper alone and able to hold an edge; because tin is scarce in the Near East, working it required long-distance trade, which is part of what makes the period look the way it does. The Old Testament never speaks of a bronze age, but it speaks of bronze constantly: Tubal-Cain forges tools of bronze and iron (Genesis 4:22), Moses raises the bronze serpent (Numbers 21:9), the tabernacle has its bronze altar and basin, and Goliath goes to battle in a bronze helmet and coat of mail (1 Samuel 17:5-6).

Historical Context

Metallurgy and the societies built on it spread unevenly, so the boundaries were drawn region by region and do not line up. In the Levant the Early Bronze Age opens around 3500 BC and is divided finely, through Early Bronze IV and Middle Bronze II to Late Bronze I and Late Bronze II. In Anatolia the Early Bronze Age begins nearer 3000 BC, followed by the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Egypt and Mesopotamia are conventionally divided by dynasty and political era instead of by metal, which is why an Egyptologist rarely says Egyptian Bronze Age at all: the same centuries are the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom, or the Early Dynastic, Akkadian, Old Babylonian and Kassite periods. On the Iranian plateau they are the Old and Middle Elamite phases.

Distinctions & Relationships

The threefold Early, Middle and Late subdivision is standard, though the dates attached to each differ by region and by scholar. The Levant is cut finer than most because it has been excavated more intensively and because its pottery sequence is well understood. The period closes with the Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC, a wave of destructions and disruptions across the eastern Mediterranean in which the Hittite empire fell, Egyptian power in Canaan receded, and the Sea Peoples appear in Egyptian records. What follows is the Iron Age, named for a metal that was already known but only now became common.

Theological Significance

For Old Testament study the Bronze Age is the world the earliest narratives inhabit. The patriarchal accounts are most often set against a Middle Bronze background, and the long-running debates over the date of the Exodus and the character of the settlement in Canaan turn on how Late Bronze evidence is read. Neither question is settled here, and the era label does not settle them: it describes the material world the text moves through, not the events the text reports.