Bronze Age
Explore the Bronze Age — the era when metal tools, writing, and urban civilizations transformed the ancient world from roughly 3300 to 1200 BCE.
The Bronze Age (c. 3300–1200 BCE) marked a revolutionary period in human history when the discovery of bronze — an alloy of copper and tin — transformed warfare, agriculture, trade, and social organization. The ability to cast metal tools and weapons created new sources of power and new forms of inequality. Those who controlled the copper and tin trade controlled the most strategically important resource of the age.
The Bronze Age saw the rise of the world's first great civilizations: Sumerian city-states, the Egyptian Old and Middle Kingdoms, the Indus Valley Civilization, Shang Dynasty China, Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire, and many others. These societies shared certain features — writing systems, monumental architecture, complex social hierarchies, long-distance trade — while developing dramatically different cultural traditions.
The Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1200 BCE) produced an especially interconnected world. Trade networks linked Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Aegean, and the eastern Mediterranean in a web of diplomatic and commercial exchange. When this system collapsed around 1200 BCE in the mysterious Bronze Age Collapse, it brought down multiple civilizations simultaneously — a testament to both the achievements and the fragility of Bronze Age interconnection.
Lessons covering this topic
Browse all lessons →Mesopotamia
Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria — civilization between two rivers.
Ancient Egypt
Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms — Ma'at and pharaonic rule.
The Indus Valley
Harappa, Mohenjo-daro — urban planning and the mystery of decline.
Shang & Early Zhou China
Oracle bones, bronze casting, and the Mandate of Heaven.
Bronze Age Trade & Collapse
The interconnected Bronze Age world and its dramatic end around 1200 BCE.
Comparing Political Systems
City-states, kingdoms, and theocracies — patterns of early governance.