Early human history is usually studied in three periods: the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. Historians periodize early human history in this way because tools made of hard materials like metal and stone are often the only remnants from these ancient societies.

It varies by region, but this periodization is most accurate when we are talking about Afro-Eurasia. The Iron Age lasted roughly from BCE to BCE. We're used to iron now, but iron-making technology was a major innovation, and it took thousands of years for people to figure it out.

To make bronze, you combine tin and copper, melting them at about degrees Celsius. Early humans could do this in a pottery furnace. Iron needs a furnace that can handle 1, degrees Celsius—way too hot for a pottery furnace.

A big advantage with iron was that you only need one metal, which is much easier to get than copper or tin. Photograph of Neolithic stone tools, which look like jagged rocks. Stone tools, Neolithic, Hungarian, c. By Bjoertvedt, CC BY-Sa 4.

The timing of the first iron-smelting technologies is significant. Several major states in the Eastern Mediterranean began to collapse around BCE, the Late Bronze Age. Egyptian, Greek, and Hittite cultures all faced a crisis. Several different factors caused this collapse, including earthquakes, droughts, and invasion by a mysterious group known as "Sea Peoples.

In the wake of ecological catastrophe and invasion, iron reshaped regional power dynamics, trade networks, natural environments, and human social orders from the Mediterranean to China. Swords into ploughshares: Iron reshapes power dynamics. When we talk about the Iron Age, we usually picture swords, but that's not really what made iron technology so powerful.

Sure, iron weapons are stronger than bronze, but the real advantage is that iron is easier to make. It all comes down to the chemical composition of the Earth. Iron is the most abundant metal on our planet, so it's easy to get your hands on. Photo of a blackened bronze sword.

Bronze Age Sword, Eastern Zhou Dynasty, China, c. By British Museum, public domain. The copper and tin needed to make bronze are hard to find, and not always found in the same area. States using bronze technology to outfit their armies were dependent on trade to obtain one or both metals. When war or a large-scale disaster like the Late Bronze Age collapse disrupted trade, they couldn't make weapons and tools.

Meanwhile, societies that solved the high-temperature furnace problem were able to grow much stronger as the Iron Age began. Suddenly they could make more tools and weapons faster and cheaper.

More ore: Iron reshapes trade networks. Ancient Eurasia was interconnected and interdependent during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Wars and trade connected the Eastern Mediterranean to Western India and the lands in between.

Armies and merchants brought bronze and iron technologies along these trade networks over several centuries. Communities in world zones outside these networks, such as the Americas and the Pacific Ocean, were left out of the Iron Age transformations.

These zones would not use iron technology until the sixteenth century CE. Photograph of tools that may have been used to prepare the soil. Two are rounded and one is straight and dagger-shaped. Iron Age Farming Tool.

Map shows the region ruled by the Hittite Empire. The Hittite Empire, approximate extent of the maximum area of the Hittite rule light green and the Hittite rule ca. By Ikonact, CC BY-SA 3. The earliest evidence of extensive iron smelting comes from the Hittites, who ruled an empire in Anatolia from around BCE to BCE.

Iron smelting technology gradually spread from Anatolia and Mesopotamia across Eurasia. By around BCE, Indian farmers needed more rice paddies to feed the growing number of people in new cities.

So they used iron tools to clear the forests around the subcontinent's great rivers to make room for rice. By BCE, people in China adopted iron smelting technology, innovating iron production by developing larger, even hotter furnaces capable of melting iron to a more liquid state.

That meant it could be poured into molds, a method known as cast iron. This type of metal was too brittle for weapons, but it was excellent for making cheap iron plows, tools, pots, and art.

An abundance of cast iron tools allowed Chinese farmers to increase and intensify agricultural production. More food led to rapid population increases in China, just as iron technology had done in Mesopotamia and India.

There is evidence to suggest that iron-smelting technology developed independently in sub-Saharan Africa around the same time that the Hittites began working with the metal. But it was iron that allowed them to clear African forests and spread their agricultural societies across a region larger than the United States.

Turning trees into swords: Iron reshapes the environment. simple farming societies. state societies. Ancient Near East — BC Bronze Age collapse — BC Anatolia , Caucasus , Levant Europe Aegean — BC Italy — BC Balkans BC — AD Eastern Europe — BC Central Europe — 50 BC Great Britain BC — AD Northern Europe BC — AD Western Europe BC — 1 AD South Asia — BC Southeast Asia — BC Vietnam BC — AD Thailand c.

Related topics. Iron Age metallurgy Archaeometallurgical slag. Further information: Iron Age Europe. Collins Dictionary. Retrieved 5 June The History Files. Retrieved 18 March Retrieved 13 March Retrieved 31 May Retrieved 20 April The Heritage Site.

Retrieved 9 April Lists of political entities by century. Current list of sovereign states. Classical Late Antiquity Middle. As it happens, there are iron deposits in Greece but its use was not yet known by the Mycenaeans.

They thus learned to cultivate olives to make olive oil and grapes to make wine, two products in great demand all over the ancient world that were profitable enough to sustain seagoing trade.

It is also likely that the difficult conditions in Greece helped lead the Mycenaeans to be so warlike, as they raided each other and their neighbors in search of greater wealth and opportunity. The Mycenaeans were a society that glorified noble warfare. As war is depicted in the Iliad , battles consisted of the elite noble warriors of each side squaring off against each other and fighting one-on-one, with the rank-and-file of poorer soldiers providing support but usually not engaging in actual combat.

In turn, Mycenaean ruins and tombs make it abundantly clear that most Mycenaeans were dirt-poor farmers working with primitive tools, lorded over by bronze-wielding lords who demanded labor and wealth.

Foreign trade was in service to providing luxury goods to this elite social class, a class that was never politically united but instead shared a common culture of warrior-kings and their armed retinues.

Some beautiful artifacts and amazing myths and poems have survived from this civilization, but it was also one of the most predatory civilizations we know about from ancient history.

The Bronze Age at its height witnessed several large empires and peoples in regular contact with one another through both trade and war. Certain Mesopotamian languages, especially Akkadian, became international languages of diplomacy, allowing travelers and merchants to communicate wherever they went.

Even the warlike and relatively unsophisticated Mycenaeans played a role on the periphery of this ongoing network of exchange.

That said, most of the states involved in this network fell into ruin between — BCE. The great empires collapsed, a collapse that it took about years to recover from, with new empires arising in the aftermath.

There is still no definitive explanation for why this collapse occurred, not least because the states that had been keeping records stopped doing so as their bureaucracies disintegrated. The surviving evidence seems to indicate that some combination of events — some caused by humans and some environmental — probably combined to spell the end to the Bronze Age.

Around BCE, two of the victims of the collapse, the New Kingdom of Egypt and the Hittite Empire, left clear indications in their records that drought had undermined their grain stores and their social stability. In recent years archaeologists have presented strong scientific evidence that the climate of the entire region became warmer and more arid, supporting the idea of a series of debilitating droughts.

Even the greatest of the Bronze Age empires existed in a state of relative precarity, relying on regular harvests in order to not just feed their population, but sustain the governments, armies, and building projects of their states as a whole.

Thus, environmental disaster could have played a key role in undermining the political stability of whole regions at the time. Even earlier, starting in BCE, there are indications that a series of invasions swept through the entire eastern Mediterranean region.

In the following decades, other groups that remain impossible to identify precisely appear to have sacked the Mycenaean palace complexes and various cities across the Near East.

While Assyria in northern Mesopotamia survived the collapse, it lost its territories in the south to Elan, a warlike kingdom based in present-day southern Iran. The identity of the foreign invaders is not clear from the scant surviving record.

It is thus easy to imagine a confluence of environmental disaster, foreign invasion, and peasant rebellion ultimately destroying the Bronze Age states. What is clear is that the invasions took place over the course of decades — from roughly to BCE — and that they must have played a major role in the collapse of the Bronze Age political and economic system.

While the precise details are impossible to pin down, the above map depicts likely invasion routes during the Bronze Age Collapse. More important than those details is the result: the fall of almost all of the Bronze Age kingdoms and empires.

For roughly years, from BCE to BCE, the networks of trade and diplomacy considered above were either disrupted or destroyed completely. Egypt recovered and new dynasties of pharaohs were sometimes able to recapture some of the glory of the past Egyptian kingdoms in their building projects and the power of their armies, but in the long run Egypt proved vulnerable to foreign invasion from that point on.

The Hittite Empire never recovered in Anatolia, while in Mesopotamia the most noteworthy survivor of the collapse — the Assyrian state — went on to become the greatest power the region had yet seen. The decline of the Bronze Age led to the beginning of the Iron Age.

Bronze was dependent on functioning trade networks: tin was only available in large quantities from mines in what is today Afghanistan, so the collapse of long-distance trade made bronze impossible to manufacture.

Iron, however, is a useful metal by itself without the need of alloys although early forms of steel — iron alloyed with carbon, which is readily available everywhere — were around almost from the start of the Iron Age itself. Without copper and tin available, some innovative smiths figured out that it was possible, through a complicated process of forging, to create iron implements that were hard and durable.

Iron was available in various places throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean regions, so it did not require long-distance trade as bronze had. The Iron Age thus began around BCE, right as the Bronze Age ended. One cautionary note in discussing this shift: iron was very difficult to work with compared to bronze, and its use spread slowly.

For example, while iron use became increasingly common starting in about BCE, the later Egyptian kingdoms did not use large amounts of iron tools until the seventh century BCE, a full five centuries after the Iron Age itself began. Once trade networks recovered, bronze weapons were still the norm in societies that used iron tools in other ways for many centuries.

They re-established trade routes and initiated a new phase of Middle Eastern politics that eventually led to the largest empires the world had yet seen. The region of Canaan, which corresponds with modern Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon, had long been a site of prosperity and innovation.

Merchants from Canaan traded throughout the Middle East, its craftsmen were renowned for their work, and it was even a group of Canaanites — the Hyksos — who briefly ruled Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period.

Along with their neighbors the Hebrews, the most significant of the ancient Canaanites were the Phoenicians, whose cities politically independent but united in culture and language were centered in present-day Lebanon.

The Phoenicians were not a particularly warlike people. Instead, they are remembered for being travelers and merchants, particularly by sea. They traveled farther than any other ancient people; sometime around BCE, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, a Phoenician expedition even sailed around Africa over the course of three years if that actually happened, it was an achievement that would not be accomplished again for almost 2, years.

The Phoenicians established colonies all over the shores Mediterranean, where they provided anchors in a new international trade network that eventually replaced the one destroyed with the fall of the Bronze Age.

Likewise, Phoenician cities served as the crossroads of trade for goods that originated as far away as England metals were mined in England and shipped all the way to the Near East via overland routes. The most prominent Phoenician city was Carthage in North Africa, which centuries later would become the great rival of the Roman Republic.

Phoenician trade was not, however, the most important legacy of their society. Instead, of their various accomplishments, none was to have a more lasting influence than that of their writing system.

As early as BCE, building on the work of earlier Canaanites, the Phoenicians developed a syllabic alphabet that formed the basis of Greek and Roman writing much later. A syllabic alphabet has characters that represent sounds, rather than characters that represent things or concepts.

These alphabets are much smaller and less complex than symbolic ones. It is possible for a non-specialist to learn to read and write using a syllabic alphabet much more quickly than using a symbolic one like Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese characters. Thus, in societies like that of the Phoenicians, there was no need for a scribal class, since even normal merchants could become literate.

Ultimately, the Greeks and then the Romans adopted Phoenician writing, and the alphabets used in most European languages in the present is a direct descendant of the Phoenician one as a result.

The Phoenician mastery of sailing and the use of the syllabic alphabet were both boons to trade. Another was a practice — the use of currency — originating in the remnants of the Hittite lands.

Lydia, a kingdom in western Anatolia, controlled significant sources of gold giving rise to the Greek legend of King Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold. In roughly BCE, the Lydians came up with the idea of using lumps of gold and silver that had a standard weight.

Soon, they formalized the system by stamping marks into the lumps to create the first true albeit crude coins, called staters. Currency revolutionized ancient economics, greatly increasing the ability of merchants to travel far afield and buy foreign goods, because they no longer had to travel with huge amounts of goods with them to trade.

It also made tax collection more efficient, strengthening ancient kingdoms and empires. While the Phoenicians played a major role in jumpstarting long-distance trade after the collapse of the Bronze Age, they did not create a strong united state.

Important non-precious husi style metal finds include Iron tools found at the tomb at Guwei-cun of the 4th century BC.

The techniques used in Lingnan are a combination of bivalve moulds of distinct southern tradition and the incorporation of piece mould technology from the Zhongyuan. The products of the combination of these two periods are bells, vessels, weapons and ornaments, and the sophisticated cast.

An Iron Age culture of the Tibetan Plateau has tentatively been associated with the Zhang Zhung culture described in early Tibetan writings. In Japan, iron items, such as tools, weapons, and decorative objects, are postulated to have entered Japan during the late Yayoi period c.

Distinguishing characteristics of the Yayoi period include the appearance of new pottery styles and the start of intensive rice agriculture in paddy fields. Yayoi culture flourished in a geographic area from southern Kyūshū to northern Honshū.

The Kofun and the subsequent Asuka periods are sometimes referred to collectively as the Yamato period ; The word kofun is Japanese for the type of burial mounds dating from that era. Iron objects were introduced to the Korean peninsula through trade with chiefdoms and state-level societies in the Yellow Sea area in the 4th century BC, just at the end of the Warring States Period but prior to the beginning of the Western Han Dynasty.

The time that iron production begins is the same time that complex chiefdoms of Proto-historic Korea emerged. The complex chiefdoms were the precursors of early states such as Silla , Baekje , Goguryeo , and Gaya [53] [55] Iron ingots were an important mortuary item and indicated the wealth or prestige of the deceased in this period.

The earliest evidence of iron smelting predates the emergence of the Iron Age proper by several centuries. Archaeological sites in India, such as Malhar, Dadupur, Raja Nala Ka Tila, Lahuradewa, Kosambi and Jhusi , Allahabad in present-day Uttar Pradesh show iron implements in the period — BC.

The extensive use of iron smelting is from Malhar and its surrounding area. This site is assumed as the center for smelted bloomer iron to this area due to its location in the Karamnasa River and Ganga River. This site shows agricultural technology as iron implements sickles, nails, clamps, spearheads, etc.

The beginning of the 1st millennium BC saw extensive developments in iron metallurgy in India. Technological advancement and mastery of iron metallurgy were achieved during this period of peaceful settlements.

One ironworking centre in East India has been dated to the first millennium BC. In this system, high-purity wrought iron, charcoal, and glass were mixed in a crucible and heated until the iron melted and absorbed the carbon. The protohistoric Early Iron Age in Sri Lanka lasted from BC to BC.

Radiocarbon evidence has been collected from Anuradhapura and Aligala shelter in Sigiriya. The name "Ko Veta" is engraved in Brahmi script on a seal buried with the skeleton and is assigned by the excavators to the 3rd century BC. Ko, meaning "King" in Tamil, is comparable to such names as Ko Atan and Ko Putivira occurring in contemporary Brahmi inscriptions in south India.

The earliest undisputed deciphered epigraphy found in the Indian subcontinent are the Edicts of Ashoka of the 3rd century BCE, in the Brahmi script. Several inscriptions were thought to be pre-Ashokan by earlier scholars; these include the Piprahwa relic casket inscription, the Badli pillar inscription , the Bhattiprolu relic casket inscription, the Sohgaura copper plate inscription , the Mahasthangarh Brahmi inscription, the Eran coin legend, the Taxila coin legends, and the inscription on the silver coins of Sophytes.

However, more recent scholars have dated them to later periods. Archaeology in Thailand at sites Ban Don Ta Phet and Khao Sam Kaeo yielding metallic, stone, and glass artifacts stylistically associated with the Indian subcontinent suggest Indianization of Southeast Asia beginning in the 4th to 2nd centuries BC during the late Iron Age.

In Philippines and Vietnam , the Sa Huynh culture showed evidence of an extensive trade network. Sa Huynh beads were made from glass, carnelian, agate, olivine, zircon, gold and garnet; most of these materials were not local to the region and were most likely imported.

Han-Dynasty-style bronze mirrors were also found in Sa Huynh sites. Conversely, Sa Huynh produced ear ornaments have been found in archaeological sites in Central Thailand, as well as the Orchid Island. Early evidence for iron technology in Sub-Saharan Africa can be found at sites such as KM2 and KM3 in northwest Tanzania and parts of Nigeria and the Central African Republic.

Nubia was one of the relatively few places in Africa to have a sustained Bronze Age along with Egypt and much of the rest of North Africa. Archaeometallurgical scientific knowledge and technological development originated in numerous centers of Africa; the centers of origin were located in West Africa , Central Africa , and East Africa ; consequently, as these origin centers are located within inner Africa, these archaeometallurgical developments are thus native African technologies.

Very early copper and bronze working sites in Niger may date to as early as BC. There is also evidence of iron metallurgy in Termit, Niger from around this period.

Though there is some uncertainty, some archaeologists believe that iron metallurgy was developed independently in sub-Saharan West Africa, separately from Eurasia and neighboring parts of North and Northeast Africa. Archaeological sites containing iron smelting furnaces and slag have also been excavated at sites in the Nsukka region of southeast Nigeria in what is now Igboland : dating to BC at the site of Lejja Eze-Uzomaka [6] [5] and to BC and at the site of Opi Holl Iron and copper working in Sub-Saharan Africa spread south and east from Central Africa in conjunction with the Bantu expansion , from the Cameroon region to the African Great Lakes in the 3rd century BC, reaching the Cape around AD.

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LIV, In Breunig, P ed. Nok: African Sculpture in Archaeological Context. Frankfurt, Germany: Africa Magna. Journal of World Prehistory. doi : S2CID University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Retrieved 12 December Journal of Archaeological Science. Bibcode : JArSc.. History Flame. Retrieved 15 January McClellan III; Harold Dorn Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction Archived 23 November at the Wayback Machine.

JHU Press. Anatolian Archaeological Studies. Tokyo: Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology. Mediterranean Archaeology.

CiteSeerX Miller and N. A scholar of Old Kingdom texts with the Harvard Society of Fellows, Almansa-Villatoro had agreed to show me the tombs of Saqqara , about 15 miles south of Cairo.

This burial place belonged to Unas , the last ruler of the 5th dynasty from the 24th century B. The passages on the walls, called spells by Egyptologists, were intended to guide the deceased king through the perils of the afterlife. They are the oldest such writings, collectively known as the Pyramid Texts.

It would be roughly a thousand years before humans learned to reliably smelt iron. But there is another source of the metal: meteorites.

Within the past decade, studies of artifacts have confirmed that some civilizations used iron from meteorites to craft objects before smelted iron was available. In a cemetery on the Nile called Gerzeh , dated to about 5, years ago, archaeologists discovered nine beads made of meteoritic metal.

Ancient jewelry and weapons made from this rare material have also cropped up in other parts of the world: beads in North America , axes in China , and a dagger in Turkey.

In the tomb of Unas, however, the funerary texts tell of metal in the sky, suggesting Egyptians may have not only recognized the phenomenon of falling iron but also incorporated it into their mystical beliefs. Almansa-Villatoro broke down the semantics of the sentence for me.

This line describes the journey of Unas into the divine realm of the sky. The exact meaning is obscure, but Almansa-Villatoro argues the passage reflects a belief that the sky is a great water-filled iron basin from which rain and metal sometimes fall.

To reach the afterlife, the Pyramid Texts tell us, the king must sail across this celestial domain. The texts, which also appear in the tombs of later rulers, include other equally abstruse references. To split the iron egg of the sky is to return to the womb to be reborn.

Rock and metal have pummeled Earth since its earliest days, mostly fragments of planetary bodies pulverized in collisions.

Every year, roughly 17, meteorites weighing more than 50 grams reach Earth. Most are primarily stone, but about 4 percent are iron-nickel alloys distinct from terrestrial iron.

They usually land unnoticed, with people witnessing only about five of these falling objects a year. The first dated account of a possible meteorite fall appears in the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans. Aristotle, Plutarch, and Pliny the Elder, among others, wrote about a stone landing in or B.

in what is now Turkey. Plutarch also recounts a Roman military engagement in the first century B. that may have been interrupted by a meteorite. After carbon-dating the container, they concluded the stone likely fell as described. In Europe, though, until the beginning of the 19th century, most scientists had been skeptical that meteorites were a real phenomenon.

In April German scientist Ernst Chladni published a book that compiled reports of stones and iron dropping from the sky —an endeavor that earned him ridicule. Then the cosmos intervened. In June a hail of rocks was seen by witnesses outside of Siena, Italy. The next year a pound stone fell in Wold Cottage, England.

The impacts prompted English chemist Edward C. Howard also measured high nickel content in three iron meteorites and one stony-iron meteorite, revealing the metal was distinct from that smelted from ore. With that, scientific interest in meteorites grew.

English naturalist James Sowerby amassed a collection in his personal museum, including the Wold Cottage meteorite. He was so infatuated with them that he used a piece of an iron one found in South Africa to have a sword forged for Tsar Alexander I of Russia to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon in Whether or not they knew it came from the sky, ancient peoples valued meteoritic iron.

Copper, silver, and gold exist in metallic form, available to be mined and worked, but on Earth, iron is almost always bound up with other elements, such as oxygen, in minerals called ores. The oldest known objects fashioned from space metal were ornaments, such as the Gerzeh beads, some of which were strung along with gold and gemstones, including lapis lazuli, carnelian, and agate.

The knife has a gold hilt with stone and glass inlays, a pommel of rock crystal, and a gold sheath with elaborate designs. In China, a knife and a pole weapon with a dagger-ax called a ge, both with meteoritic iron blades , were found in the tombs of two men, possibly brothers, who ruled the Guo state in the eighth or ninth century B.

The weapons were probably ceremonial, like those with jade blades from this time, says Kunlong Chen, a professor at the University of Science and Technology Beijing. Similar objects—a ge and a broadax with meteoritic iron blades—were acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in , reportedly from Henan Province, where there are Zhou dynasty sites.

The broadax was likely made during the earlier Shang dynasty and may have been passed down as a cherished possession.

These types of weapons were used around the time the Zhou state overthrew the Shang rulers and instituted the Mandate of Heaven, the philosophy that the king ruled by divine decree.

Did these rulers know the weapons were made of celestial metal? No contemporary references to meteorites have been discovered, but Chinese texts refer to eclipses and comets. In North America, dozens of beads, earspools, small blades, and other objects of meteoritic iron have been discovered within the burial mounds of the Hopewell , a widespread network of cultures that traded exotic materials.

Many of these objects were found at various sites in Ohio, but 22 tubular beads once strung together with shells were found in a grave dated to about B. near what is now Havana, Illinois. A team of researchers determined that the Havana beads were made from iron from a meteorite shower that struck some miles north , near what is now Anoka, Minnesota.

Lydia, a kingdom in western Anatolia, controlled significant sources of gold giving rise to the Greek legend of King Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold. In roughly BCE, the Lydians came up with the idea of using lumps of gold and silver that had a standard weight.

Soon, they formalized the system by stamping marks into the lumps to create the first true albeit crude coins, called staters. Currency revolutionized ancient economics, greatly increasing the ability of merchants to travel far afield and buy foreign goods, because they no longer had to travel with huge amounts of goods with them to trade.

It also made tax collection more efficient, strengthening ancient kingdoms and empires. While the Phoenicians played a major role in jumpstarting long-distance trade after the collapse of the Bronze Age, they did not create a strong united state.

Such a state emerged farther east, however: alone of the major states of the Bronze Age, the Assyrian kingdom in northern Mesopotamia survived. Probably because of their extreme focus on militarism, the Assyrians were able to hold on to their core cities while the states around them collapsed. During the Iron Age, the Assyrians became the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.

The Assyrians were the first empire in world history to systematically conquer almost all of their neighbors using a powerful standing army and go on to control the conquered territory for hundreds of years. They represented the pinnacle of military power and bureaucratic organization of all of the civilizations considered thus far.

Note: historians of the ancient world distinguish between the Bronze Age and Iron Age Assyrian kingdoms by referring to the latter as the Neo-Assyrians. The Neo-Assyrians were direct descendants of their Bronze Age predecessors, however, so for the sake of simplicity this chapter will refer to both as the Assyrians.

The Assyrians were shaped by their environment. Their region in northern Mesopotamia, Ashur, has no natural borders, and thus they needed a strong military to survive; they were constantly forced to fight other civilized peoples from the west and south, and barbarians from the north.

The Assyrians held that their patron god, a god of war also called Ashur, demanded the subservience of other peoples and their respective gods. Thus, their conquests were justified by their religious beliefs as well as a straightforward desire for dominance.

Eventually, they dispatched annual military expeditions and organized conscription, fielding large standing armies of native Assyrian soldiers who marched out every year to conquer more territory.

The period of political breakdown in Mesopotamia following the collapse of the Bronze Age ended in about BCE when the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II began a series of wars to conquer Mesopotamia and Canaan.

Over the next century, the Neo- Assyrians became the mightiest empire yet seen in the Middle East. They combined terror tactics with various technological and organizational innovations. They would deport whole towns or even small cities when they defied the will of the Assyrian kings, resettling conquered peoples as indentured workers far from their homelands.

They tortured and mutilated defeated enemies, even skinning them alive, when faced with any threat of resistance or rebellion. The formerly-independent Phoenician city-states within the Assyrian zone of control surrendered, paid tribute, and deferred to Assyrian officials rather than face their wrath in battle.

The Assyrians were the most effective military force of the ancient world up to that point. They outfitted their large armies with well-made iron weapons they appear to be the first major kingdom to manufacture iron weapons in large numbers.

They invented a messenger service to maintain lines of communication and control, with messengers on horseback and waystations to replace tired horses, so that they could communicate across their empire.

All of their conquered territories were obliged to provide annual tributes of wealth in precious metals and trade goods which funded the state and the military. The Assyrians introduced two innovations in military technology and organization that were of critical importance: a permanent cavalry, the first of any state in the world, and a large standing army of trained infantry.

The Assyrians adopted horse archery from the barbarians they fought from the north, which along with swords and short lances wielded from horseback made chariots permanently obsolete. The major focus of Assyrian taxation and bureaucracy was to keep the army funded and trained, which allowed them to completely dominate their neighbors for well over a century.

By the time of the reign of Assyrian king Tiglath-Pilezer III r. Their conquests culminated in BCE when king Esarhaddon r. This is the first time in history that both of the founding river valleys of ancient civilization, those of the Nile and of Mesopotamia, were under the control of a single political entity.

The expansion of the Assyrian Empire, originating from northern Mesopotamia. The style of Assyrian rule ensured the hatred of conquered peoples. They demanded constant tribute and taxation and funneled luxury goods back to their main cities. They did not try to set up sustainable economies or assimilate conquered peoples into a shared culture, instead skimming off the top of the entire range of conquered lands.

Their style of rule is well known because their kings built huge monuments to themselves in which they boasted about the lands they conquered and the tribute they exacted along the way. While their subjects experienced Assyrian rule as militarily-enforced tyranny, Assyrian kings were proud of the cultural and intellectual heritage of Mesopotamia and supported learning and scholarship.

The one conquered city in their empire that was allowed a significant degree of autonomy was Babylon, out of respect for its role as a center of Mesopotamian culture. Assyrian scribes collected and copied the learning and literature of the entire Middle East.

Sometime after BCE, the king Asshurbanipal ordered the collection of all of the texts of all of his kingdom, including the ones from conquered lands, and he went on to create a massive library to house them. Parts of this library survived and provide one of the most important sources of information that scholars have on the beliefs, languages, and literature of the ancient Middle East.

The Assyrians finally fell in BCE, overthrown by a series of rebellions. Their control of Egypt lasted barely two generations, brought to an end when the puppet pharaoh put in place by the Assyrians rebelled and drove them from Egypt.

Shortly thereafter, a Babylonian king, Nabopolassar, led a rebellion that finally succeeded in sacking Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. The Babylonians were allied with clans of horse-riding warriors in Persia called the Medes, and between them the Assyrian state was destroyed completely.

The Neo-Babylonians adopted some of the terror tactics of the Assyrians; they, too, deported conquered enemies as servants and slaves. Where they differed, however, was in their focus on trade. They built new roads and canals and encouraged long-distance trade throughout their lands.

They were often at war with Egypt, which also tried to take advantage of the fall of the Assyrians to seize new land, but even when the two powers were at war Egyptian merchants were still welcome throughout the Neo-Babylonian empire.

A combination of flourishing trade and high taxes led to huge wealth for the king and court, and among other things led to the construction of noteworthy works of monumental architecture to decorate their capital.

The Babylonians inherited the scientific traditions of ancient Mesopotamia, becoming the greatest astronomers and mathematicians yet seen, able to predict eclipses and keep highly detailed calendars.

In the end, however, they were the last of the great ancient Mesopotamian empires that existed independently.

Less than years after their successful rebellion against the Assyrians, they were conquered by what became the greatest empire in the ancient world to date: the Persians, described in a following chapter.

Western Civilization: A Concise History Copyright © by Christopher Brooks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4. Skip to content The Bronze Age is a term used to describe a period in the ancient world from about BCE to BCE.

The Bronze Age States There were four major regions along the shores of, or near to, the eastern Mediterranean that hosted the major states of the Bronze Age: Greece, Anatolia, Canaan and Mesopotamia, and Egypt.

The Collapse of the Bronze Age The Bronze Age at its height witnessed several large empires and peoples in regular contact with one another through both trade and war. The Iron Age The decline of the Bronze Age led to the beginning of the Iron Age. Iron Age Cultures and States The region of Canaan, which corresponds with modern Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon, had long been a site of prosperity and innovation.

Empires of the Iron Age While the Phoenicians played a major role in jumpstarting long-distance trade after the collapse of the Bronze Age, they did not create a strong united state.

Previous: Chapter 2: Egypt. Next: The Hebrews.