How did the first civilizations move into the Bronze Age and why did the Bronze divide people into rich and poor?

4600 years ago, Egypt. Glittering with copper plates on rich robes, the leaders led the Badarian tribes into a decisive battle with the army of the city of Tinis. It’s time to show the arrogant upstarts of the Scorpio king that the free Nile is stronger than their stone walls!

But the stone spears and bone arrows of the Badarians bounced off the sparkling Egyptian armor. And the brass axes could not cut through the strange metal on them. King Scorpio defeated the army of leaders and conquered Badaria. This is how Africa first became acquainted with bronze.

After all, it was not so easy to discover than it seems to us. Of course, soft copper did not suit the growing kings. From their fathers, they remembered how the discovery of copper magnified the city and the dynasty. If copper helped this way, then here it is, a simple way to dominate others. They demanded a new breakthrough from the metallurgists. And they melted everything they found in the earth in a furnace, trying to combine it with copper.

But bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper and tin do not occur together; tin is far from copper, often hundreds, thousands of kilometers from it. And it is great luck that someone melted copper with a scarce tin and got bronze. So the Bronze Age began and, unlike the Copper Age, it came to the peoples unevenly due to the inaccessibility of tin.

The civilizations of Ancient Egypt, China, Sumer and others, having received bronze, advanced hundreds of years and destroyed the peoples of the Stone-Copper Age, rapidly expanding their territory. 6,500 years ago, bronze appeared in Mesopotamia, Asia and Ancient Egypt, only 8,000 years later in South America. And for example Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia, Eurasia and North America did not discover bronze at all.

The advantage of bronze is that it is harder than copper, while being more flexible and tough at the same time. Bronze made it possible to create perfect weapons and armor, even to pour out entire chariots like in China or Egypt. The civilizations of the Bronze Age were able to create sturdy heavy tools and build wonders of the world with bronze, which does not take time. Such as the pyramid of Cheops.

Bronze was obtained by combining copper with arsenic, antimony or tin, and it resisted time and corrosion well, allowing the kings to create strategic reserves of bronze. Only now stone weapons and tools have finally become a thing of the past.

The Bronze Age lasted from 6500 to 1300 years ago, and in Europe it ended only during the time of Rome. The remoteness of tin from copper has led to several important results. The global trade of civilizations began, the owners of tin became richer and bought up territories. And those in need of tin started wars, trying to subdue them.

The first great kingdoms in history appeared — Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Crete and Athens. The mixing of metals gave rise to new alloys, such as copper and zinc gave people brass. But war for tin is not the best solution, especially when the army is weak. The shortage of tin will lead the first civilizations to the invention of a new crushing metal in world history. And more on that next time.