I thought this was a cool fact about the Bronze Age: "According to a new study, it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites".[0]
It's true that when iron was first smelted and the first steel was made, it was structurally different to the Bronze economy. Iron is abundant and local. It doesn't require the same trade network (of copper and tin).
I'm surprised this article doesn't mention the Uluburun shipwreck [1]. It's archeologically important because it provides primary evidence of how extensive Bronze age trade networks were.
At best the author is theorizing not why the Bronze age collapse happened but why the empires and trade networks of that era didn't come back. But that's a different question.
We also have direct primary evidence from this time of the Sea Peoples [2]. To this day nobody really knows where they came from or why. Many modern scholars believe they may have been refugees themselves, possibly from natural disasters or droughts.
The most likely explanation for all this is that there was no single factor. All of these things likely contributed. It's still unclear why the collapse was so extensive and relatively sudden. That's not really satisfying but we've had fragile systems before that have collapsed suddenly and violently. Look at the outbreak of World War One as one major example.
One of my favorite phrases here is Outside Context Problem [3], which originates from the Iain M. Banks Culture novel Excession (love this book). It pretty accurately describes the collapses that happened in the Americas in the colonial era.
Fun article. I think that there is a lot of interesting information here that would help explain what we saw with the Bronze Age Collapse, though I would submit that this is just another of the multiple factors that led to the collapse. Maybe a drought occurs, folks turn to iron weapons, and then take over another town or village for their resources, and so on.
This could lead to supply chain collapses and such. Maybe just general destabilization and raids and such sort of collapsed the larger empires. But at the same time, those larger empires would also have had access to iron, so why couldn't they by matter of numerical superiority, access to greater resources, tactics and military organization, and more simply overwhelm smaller armies or bands utilizing the same technology and restore order or at least defend themselves?
It could be the Bronze Age empires were based on violence and coercion. When the small polities had the means to defend themselves, the empires fell apart.
Well all of civilization and society is based on violence and coercion to some extent. I'm not sure that small tribes polities were any less violent than larger empires, and I'd generally have a bias that larger empires were more peaceful per-capita because if you are the king war is tiresome and threatening. Better to be at peace.
I'm also not sure about your suggestion. Yes small polities had the means to defend themselves, but the pharaoh's army is much larger and you're definitely going to die if he shows up and you fight back. So why wouldn't the pharaoh have shown up to put down a rebellion? Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
I'm just not sure that this democratization of violence is the answer. Though it may be a key contributor. Curious about your thoughts or others. Incredibly fascinating topic.
Well, just hypothetically, let's say that there's enough iron to outfit a small group, but not a large one. That means that a small group could have a technological edge, and therefore that the losses become too much for the large group to want to initiate the confrontation with them.
Of course, that leads to questions like "Why does the small group wind up with the good weapons? Why doesn't the large group get them, even if there aren't enough for all of them?"
But maybe the iron smelting isn't happening in downtown Memphis. Maybe it's happening out in the hinterland somewhere, and so the locals have a chance to grab all the output.
>Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
And when all those rebellions cost the Pharaoh 3x what they used to to put down you're forced to be a lot more diplomatic. Less extraction under threat of violence means worse negotiating position for the next one. It's a cycle.
And for every full scale armies meeting in the field type rebellion there's a lot of "sir a second village has lynched the tax men" which compel you to dispense policing forces, etc, etc.
Just because you "can" do something in moderation doesn't mean it's a sustainable way to run your empire at scale.
You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes. And you can't just "supervise" them with your loyal people because this is pre-industrial and there do not exist sufficient surpluses to feed those nonproductive mouths.
Not to mention that even people who could barely read (and maintain efficient long-distance communications and even barely understand the concept of a standard) were in extremely short supply.
> You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes.
There is a superstition in the Middle Ages that blacksmiths should not be killed, in the context of battles. Blacksmiths were an absolutely essential part of the support of an army, but his skills and tools were just as useful to the winning side. Minus his skills, his tools were just surplus, heavy items.
Other army support crew like washerwomen, stable boys, and even prostitutes were of course much easier to replace.
Because pure iron, with no carbonization, is useless as a material for tools or weapons.
Carbonization was invented/discovered after the Bronze Age collapse, slowly over hundreds of years, exactly because they didn’t have access to bronze anymore.
Despite being "useless", almost all early iron age weapons were iron, not steel nor bronze. They generally knew about steel, but could not control the carbonization well enough to outfit the whole army with it. Steel did not become widespread until the Roman era.
Really great channel! I love the "down to earth" history format it provides.
I think there is that huge misunderstanding that people were much different a hundred, a thousand or two thousand years ago, when it's mostly different language, technology. The politics part feels very contemporary.
Eg. soldiers singing rude songs during campaigns or celebrating coming home. Or during Saturnalia some people getting shitfaced all night, while others complaining about these "idiots".
Or politicians trying to make shady deals, or having their own agenda, putting their own people in place. Or talking about food/money for the poorer population (yes, there was free government food for the poor even 2k years ago!) or making bad decisions like giving veterans free land to grow crop on, and people realizing just because they are good soldiers doesn't mean they are great farmers.
Or that obsession of calling every war just and defensive, even when the main goal is expand the empire and being hailed as "imperator".
Or the fact that many actually found the coliseum pretty brutal just like parts of the Triumph (parade after conqueror new land) being upset and demanding to spare various people.
Also love the context that is often added, like whose perspective something is based on and where historians disagree.
Great channel for everyone that cannot stand that whole "Ave, Caesar" style talk or making everything sound grand instead of real.
Really wished history was taught that way in school. Right now it almost feels like anti-history. Instead of events it feels like the thing that's important are names and dates, which (most of the time) is the least important. At least in my opinion "learning from history" doesn't mean getting to know names and dates.
Haha yeah it's always fun to see how absolutely nothing has changed in the past few thousand years when it comes to politics.
I think my favorite part is how Caesar got obsessed with making a new calendar as a secret pet project and we're still using that exact setup today with only two or three minor patches. I kinda would've preferred the Egyptian 10 month 30 day setup with an extra week of vacation though ngl.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of giving soldiers land to farm on. It was normally in conquered territories, so it meant that you had men in those territories who had military experience and were ostensibly loyal. Not just a reward, but pragmatism.
Long before the so-called “iron age” started, humans knew of iron. There are iron artifacts from the 4th millennium BCE. Humans were fascinated by these small pieces of iron, which were found in meteorites and cherished and valued them. However, usable iron was rare and extremely sought after to the extent that we know it was more valuable than gold or silver. How did humans invent the first technique to produce metallic Iron from ore?
The story of Iron starts with the production of Bronze. Bronze is an alloy of 90% copper. Depending on what constitutes the other 10% we get different types of bronze. The most common type which kick started the bronze age around 3500 BCE in western Asia is tin bronze. Unlike copper ore, tin is hard to find but a small amount of it can significantly improve the quality of copper and make it usable and strong. Ancient smelters produced bronze by melting the natural copper ore mixed with tin ore in simple kilns. The resulting bronze was the primary metal used in tools and arts for more than 2500 years.
Iron is a common impurity in copper ores. We also know that iron ore can, and was, used as a flux in the process of smelting copper. In simple terms, a flux agent is a chemical that attracts oxygen to itself and protects the primary product, which is copper, from oxidizing in high temperatures. Therefore, across the ancient world, bronze smelters had been encountering molten iron when they raised the kiln temperature high enough. However, they discarded the resulting metal because its copper impurity made it too soft and inferior to bronze.
Around 1,200 BCE the collapse of bronze age civilizations in the near east due to a “perfect storm” of drought, famine, disease, immigration and war affected trade routes that brought tin ore to the western Asia. During this time of bronze shortage some smelters seem to have resorted to using the lower quality iron for tool making. They had observed that adding carbon to iron makes it much harder but prone to breaking. We have evidence of iron tools built with layers of soft and hard iron to achieve desired outcomes. Over time iron smelters experimented with different amounts of carbon impurity and achieved desired levels of hardness and strength.
Some high-level observations about the story of Iron are helpful. First, Iron smelting was discovered independently in different parts of the world, but everywhere it was an evolution of the bronze smelting process. Second, the process took several centuries to evolve. The first iron pieces were considered bad bronze and discarded. When tin became rare the producers gradually increased the quality of the bad bronze. In all likelihood for centuries they did not recognize iron as a new metal but rather an improved “bad bronze” . The final notable observation of the story is who these inventors were. They were not the learned people of the ancient world. Rather they were artisans and laborers working in difficult conditions.
The primary conclusion of the article are based on two fundamental assumptions:
1. Iron weapons did not exist before the "Bronze Age collapse." That is not borne by the evidence. Iron weapons came from the same centers and communities that used to produce bronze weapons. If these weapon makers were restricted to supply to power centers during the Bronze Age, why were they not restricted during the Iron Age?
2. Wide distribution of iron weaponry prevented formation of great powers after the "collapse". If true why and how were Assyrians and Persians able to build such large empires long after iron weapons were wide spread? Weapon distribution cannot be the primary explanation for why great powers did not form after 1200BC.
What iron did, or at least was associated with, was a change in military tactics and organization that made the expensive chariot-based forces of the centralized states less workable. But undoubtedly the LBA collapse had other factors, like severe prolonged droughts (which are attested in the archaeological evidence).
This proposed change in tactics happened before iron weapons became widespread, though. Iron should I think be seen as a cope for a world in which long distance trade in tin had shut down.
I have read Cline's work. He is not the original source of the ideas on bronze to iron transition. This is a very well studied topic in archeological metallurgy.
> I have read Cline's work. He is not the original source of the ideas on bronze to iron transition. This is a very well studied topic in archeological metallurgy.
Well, doesn’t the Harappan civilization make a mess out of all this? Tin was nearby, and there’s evidence of bronze artifacts in all kinds of houses across the cities, and in general less evidence of hierarchical power, and certainly nothing like the concentration you see in other Bronze Age civilizations. We don’t have the civilization surviving as is to the Iron Age, because it depopulated before iron smelting became common. But it’s odd to make the claim bronze had to lead to stratified societies. Clearly, not always.
The claim (as I understand it) is that power was centralized because tin was rare--i.e., had to be imported via sophisticated trade routes, which presumably could be controlled by the state.
In an area where tin is abundant, individuals could easily forge their own bronze weapons, thus making it harder for the state to have a monopoly on high-tech weapons.
So I think the Harappan actually reinforce the theory.
Bronze and iron weren't limited for military usage. Basically from an economical point of view, the scarcity of bronze limited the size of economies and armies.
Once people started using iron instead of bronze, the first use was probably creating tools used for farming, food production, and other important things: Axes, hoes, spades, etc. And they did not just substitute bronze tools but because iron was cheaper, they probably created more of them, and new tools. And it also enabled things like nails and other construction material.
So, the economy and power structures shifted as tools enabled more economic output. By the time steel became good enough for weaponry, the bronze age was effectively already a thing of the past as the economy would have shifted to using iron for most tools long before.
And then later of course, having cheap and good enough steel weaponry enabled the creation of larger armies too. So towards the end of the Iron age, you get e.g. the Romans creating huge legions that were simply not economically feasible in the bronze age. And given that hand to hand combat was basically the way people waged wars, the ones with the bigger armies would tend to win.
I would be careful with using the "state" word in this context. The first real "states" around the Mediterranean were arguably Rome and Egypt, but even then, every (militarily or economically) subjugated city or province could have local ruling structures tied to families or individuals. Even in Rome itself, specific families were often "bigger than the state", directly controlling people and resources without answering to anyone in practice.
The concept of "state" is very modern, we tend to retrofit it over the past, but it's often wrong. There have always been rulers, and families, competing interests and identities; which typically produced inconsistent and fragmented governance over most territories, until very recently.
I agree. The author is stretching several assumptions to get to his conclusions. The sub-title suggests he has solved the "Bronze Age collapse" riddle but his statement can simply be considered one of many factors already pointed out in the literature -- not the main reason.
I’m ignorant of the geology there, but Wikipedia says copper was available. If you are saying they had unusually easy access to tin, then they sort of had the ability to make bronze without the long-range trade. Is that right?
That would seem to support the theory in a way. If they could make bronze “in their back yard,” the same way that everyone else could make iron in the Iron Age, they would be sort of living in their own proto-iron-age, right? (In the sense that access to metallurgy was democratized). So if anything, it would provide some pretty strong support of the link between democratized metallurgy and more disperse power.
The author also doesn’t really even attempt to explain why the Sea Peoples hypothesis, one pretty well substantiated by a lot of independent evidence, and one which the current consensus theory among experts, is wrong. Is there a prior post we’re supposed to be familiar with?
It doesn't need to be wrong - democratising violence mean people with boats are more likely to have weapons and ability to attack you. Or the ability to disrupt trade, for that matter.
> ships that can transport an army over a long distance on sea
This isn’t what the Sea Peoples built. It isn’t even what the Romans built. Most Mediterranean cultures lacked the navigational and ship-building expertise to let the shore out of sight. That doesn’t mean they didn’t need skill. But it was less skill than needed for metallurgy, in part because the latter’s inputs are dearer.
I'm starting to doubt you've ever been on a ship on sea. Being in side of the shore is going to be of little comfort if your makeshift raft capsizes because of the waves.
Making a boat that can carry multiple people on sea without sinking when the weather goes a little sour (which can happen in less than an hour in the Mediterranean) is a very hard thing to do. And if you know how to do that you'll never have any shortage of metal or other goods in the first place because you end up being the one who trade them for profit.
I'm not convinced by the author (although I don't know enough to be sure of anything), but despite the title, he is not talking about why the bronze age collapsed but about why the bronze age empires where not replaced by the same kind of empires
I think the argument is the Indus Valley civilization was dependent on international trade with the autocracies further west and collapsed when that network broke down
The generally agreed epoch of Mahabharata war (and also the start of kali yuga or iron age) among Vedic astrologers is about 3102 BC which places the epic deep into the Bronze age territory. Historians generally reject this epoch as it creates the dark age problem (over 2000 years of unexplained historical gap between that war and 500 BC when figures like Bimbisara, Buddha and Ajata Satru start appearing). Their epoch is in the range of 800-2000 BC depending on who you ask.
Having said that, there is nothing to make the bronze age epoch impossible. There is nothing in the epic which may not have been possible in the bronze age based on what we already know about history.
... The Mahabarta also says a woman was pregnant for 2 years after which she birthed a lifeless mass of flesh, cut it into 100 pieces, put it in ghee in jars, and incubated them into a 100 sons and 1 daughter...
this is definitely not possible in the bronze age or any other age for that matter from what we know of history.
> Tin was nearby, and there’s evidence of bronze artifacts in all kinds of houses across the cities, and in general less evidence of hierarchical power, and certainly nothing like the concentration you see in other Bronze Age civilizations.
It seems you didn't read the article carefully. The author says that bronze age empires derived their power from the scarcity of tin, which they could obtain via trade routes, but was hard to get hold of for smaller rulers. In your example this scarcity doesn't hold because tin happened to be nearby. So your example is perfectly compatible with his theory.
This was a fascinating article, and the theory that the availability of iron prevented big empires seems to make sense. But then I don't get how later big empires (e.g., Athenian Empire and eventually Roman Empire) formed. What changed that allowed big empires to form even in the presence of iron?
in theory, a delicate ecosystem built around Bronze collapsed. to make weak sauce Iron work you had to be a) very desperate and b) very clever. which scales for those who figure it out
the post in question doesn't even mention Ugarit. or Arsenic. i am genuinely pissed off at the original tome being passed off as genuine discourse:
The author in question is clearly not a charlatan. That they might have omitted discussing some of your favourite details in an overview article is not a sign of quackery.
We will likely never know the exact causes because there is a certain fog that hovers that period of history.
In my opinion, whatever caused that fog (confusion, conflicted or coded accounts, apocalyptic and prophetic writings) *IS* what caused the collapse.
Technology likely plays a role, but as a catalyst to a sociological phenomena. The industrial revolution did something similar (lots of new philosophy with somehow apocalyptic or prophetic undertones, albeit in a different style; war and depression in the following decades; confusion and a fog in history). We're still not over that, and it's only barely visible because we live inside this particular fog, but it's likely to confuse future historians a lot. I see AI as belonging to the same wave.
Eric Cline makes a good case that the Bronze Age empires were organized around a “palace economy”, where only certain people (royals & their pals) were even allowed to trade. In some places the sovereign literally owned all the land and people on it.
One can imagine that a series of bad seasons, natural disasters, invasions & other stressors would open a window for revolt.
Yes tin was a factor, yes the “Sea Peoples” were a factor. But you don’t get the wholesale overthrow of so many empires without the common people being at least somewhat welcoming of the invaders (when not happily assisting them!) in throwing off centuries of elite oppression.
I wonder if the sea people were just displaced-farmers-turned-raiders that created some open loop feedback that in turn spawned more sea people in self defence or self survival.
The mythological idea of them just appearing out of nowhere is nice too. Makes it feel aligned with something like the pyramids having no explanation
Yes, I think so. I remember Eric Cline mentioning this hypothesis in a lecture or a podcast about a decade ago.
Sea people as refugees displaced by drought, famine, war or just a general societal collapse.
In any case, the temporal coincidence of the bronze age collapse and the wide-spread adoption of iron working, which was inferior to bronze at first but more readily accessible, is fascinating*. I am not sure if we have a full picture of the role of that change yet. (Was it just a consequence of the collapse of trade and tin imports, or did it cause the destruction of the bronze age empires in the first place, or just prevent their return, or was it more complicated?)
(*) I do not mean the superficial tautology of "iron age" following the "bronze age" but the fact that the bronze age, in this region, ended in a societal collapse.
The Fall of Civilizations Podcast (nice one) had an episode on this topic.
According to it, the sea peoples could instead be vast numbers of western europeans fleeing the outcome of a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, which would have triggered crop failures and mass starvation in western and northern europe.
A significant portion of the survivors would have fled en masse to the richer eastern Mediterranean empires, thereby causing their downfall.
They probably never existed in the first place. Most of the evidence for the “Sea People” story is extremely tenuous. Those maps you’ve seen with lots of cities burnt down? Bogus. Often it is really just one burnt down building in a village or town that looks like it might date to approximately the right century. The maps also cherry–pick the data by showing all the towns that they count as burned down wile ignoring the far larger population that were not, and by obscuring the fact that these fires were spread out over such a long period of time.
I don't know where you're getting your facts, but according to Fall of Civilizations, it's not just one burnt down building, we're talking of a layer of ash, charred wood and burned material throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.
"The archeological evidence is quite clear: at some point between the year 1200 and the year 1100 BC, right at the end of the period we call the Bronze Age, a wave of destruction washed across the entire region. It wiped whole civilizations off the map and left nothing in its wake."
Yes, that’s the exaggerated tale that everyone knows.
In “Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age” <https://www.lockwoodpress.com/product-page/the-fall-of-the-b...> Jesse Millek examines 153 sites claimed to have been destroyed and found that 61% never happened, happened during a different time period, or had a different cause.
Even without buying the whole book you can download the appendix where he summarizes the results. A few notable entries:
Shiqmona: The possibly destroyed public building dates to the fourteenth century BCE. No end of the Late Branze Age destruction was uncovered.
Tell Irbid: C14 dates derived from short-lived samples places the destruction event between 1395–1260 BCE.
Krisa: There is only a statement that the site was destroyed with no published evidence of destruction in any structure.
Iria: Some burnt material in a pit was assumed to be a destruction. There was no damage visible to the buildings.
Athens: The Houses on the North slope were not houses at all. It was refuse that was dumped on the stairs.
Ayios Stephanos: Burning was uncovered in one room from Trench Beta 11. No other damage was recorded.
Amman Airport Structure: Evidence of burning in Room VII can be attributed to the hearth in that room.
Pefkakia: Adrimi-Sismani repeatedly cited a destruction, even though the excavators clearly stated the site was abandoned.
Tell el-‘Ajjul: Bell simply placed it on a map as destroyed with no citations. There was no settlement ca. 1200 BCE.
Obviously nobody knows. Whoever wrote those inscriptions apparently didn’t either. Even taking them at face value, however, the evidence that these “Sea People” systematically attacked all of civilization is extremely tenuous. There probably never was a power capable of kicking over all of the anthills and destroying civilization without leaving any other archeological evidence of their existence.
I've never heard that the Sea People were a cohesive force, attacking all of Bronze civilization in anything like a coordinated attack.
Waves of invaders can take many generations to wear down the native forces. They don't need to be allied in any formal sense, either. See for example: Saxons turning Britain Anglo-Saxon.
I am saying that even if these battles did take place, there is no evidence that “the Sea Peoples” fought any other battles anywhere else at all. The story of a wave of violence sweeping around the entire Mediterranean and ending all of the civilizations there is largely fabricated.
Furthermore, just because these inscriptions didn’t give the raiders a specific name doesn’t mean that they were from an unknown civilization.
My above post was factual/historical so I’m leaving my moral judgements here in a separate post.
I believe the Bronze Age collapse was a good and necessary thing for humanity. It was required to get out of the local stable point that post-Neolithic society had evolved and settled into.
By the 12 century BCE the noble kings that Marduk and Maat would have smiled upon had long been replaced by the same flavor of sociopaths that lurk the halls of our major governments today.
But these Bronze Age despots had a LOCK on the economy that today’s crony capitalists could only dream of. And they had a lock on the culture too, mostly via the state religion.
BUT: years of bad harvests, disasters and bad omens become increasingly hard to explain. Higher taxes and worse service from the state. No protection from invaders.
Do you revolt? Join the invaders?
No living soul, not even your oldest relatives, can remember time before the empire. No one knows what comes next, so you don’t do this high risk thing unless life really sucks. But people did, because life really sucked.
Proposition: The Bronze Age collapse is to be celebrated as a triumph of the people over the most unequal societies that have ever existed.
In the absolute you’re right. In the relative, far from right.
If Mr T could literally order anyone murdered at will with absolute impunity, you might have a case. As of today, he’s having legal difficulties flying people out of the country. A Ramses II does not exist, and thankfully cannot exist, in today’s world.
There absolutely exist dictators that can kill people at their whims. The CCP comes to mind, so do Iran, North Korea and Hamas, but especially Putin's Russia where even being filthy rich does not protect you from falling out of windows.
And make no mistake, Trump and Erdogan want this power for themselves.
Meh. I think you underestimate the psychological difference between Putin level "I can kill you if you step out of line by pushing you out a window" vs ancient king level of "I can kill you at will because I am a god".
Regardless of whether this is true or not you have basically described the UK and how people think about a Russian invasion.
You already have elites siding against their own people and tyrannically collecting taxes and giving it to their Mercenary base.
It isn't hard to imagine a benevolent Sea People offering to free the locals from their despotic elite.
The Bronze Age would not have had the same migration structures obviously but one might imagine it happening locally.
What is funny is that a lot of these explanations of what happened seem to fly in the face of what people find is possible to ascribe to situations now.
That's handwaving the mass-suffering caused by systemic collapse. I have a few issues with this. The first one is dialectic, you can't posit that since the following state reached a place you're fine with later on, the process that led to it was necessary. That's thinking backwards. You don't know that it wouldn't have reached a better or equal state without collapse.
The following ones are ethical and philosophical. My own standing is that :
- Individuals can't be treated as fungible or dispensable, even when thinking in macro states. That opens the door for extreme suffering and simplistic thinking.
- On longer scales, stability wins. Collapse should be treated as a hard failure, not a mechanic.
The impression that I get from this comment is the idea that society and culture moves "forward," whatever that means, and therefore stability is holding back society. Sure, there's short-term pain in collapse, but what rises from the ashes will be better than before.
This is absolutely not the case. It's more than likely that whatever rises out of the *hellscape* of a societal collapse will be worse than what was there before.
The collapse of Rome did not lead to a better Rome. It was hundreds of years of suffering and death. In fact, the stability of Rome is what allowed for it to reach its peak over hundreds of years - something that was undeniably good for its citizens.
As opposed to slow burn suffering caused by living under a poor exploitative system? Say nothing of the opportunity cost...
It's not like bronze age societies had invented peaceful power transitions between fundamentally opposed factions. Whatever state they were stuck in they were there until a regime change, if you're lucky that'll only kill a few people at the top. But most societies aren't that lucky.
>- On longer scales, stability wins. Collapse should be treated as a hard failure, not a mechanic.
Japan was stable for a hell of a long time. Not hard to imagine had they been located somewhere slightly different in the world they'd have wound up slaves to some random European power. Stability works until you get into a local maximum you can't get out of A lot of those local maximums you are not getting out of except over the dead bodies of whoever benefits from them (see also: US civil war), if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you get subjugated by someone else.
It's a nice idea, but couldn't it also be explained easily by the invaders enslaving or killing most of the population? Existing structural decline and instability makes this a lot easier to do for an invading force.
Historia Civilis had video that military of all states were organized around "superweapon" chariots. Battles were basically sports events, where elites measured their xyz.
Sea People had completely different style od fighting, they were runners who harrased and eventually outflank chariots.
Cline has argued for systems collapse. i.e. It wasn't any one thing that caused the collapse, but several things in conjunction. Others argue differently. e.g. James Lacey, who comes at things from a perspective of military strategy and economics, has argued that the systems collapse model really underestimates how much war can accomplish all on its own. He's of the opinion that, whoever the sea peoples were, they caused the collapse.
This article doesn't really wade into that dispute, but instead focuses on why new empires didn't rise once old ones collapsed. Iron smelting originated before the collapse, but didn't really spread at first. Bronze age iron was probably really awful stuff, and soldiers tended to be conservative when it came to technology. They wanted weapons they could trust, and that was copper or bronze. As long as the great empires persisted and the trade of tin and copper continued, nobody was forced to use Iron, so nobody was motivated to get good at producing quality iron weapons.
Then whatever caused the collapse happened, and the ingredients for making bronze became difficult or impossible to get. It was iron or back to copper and stone. So, peopled adopted Iron and that gave smiths the chance to improve iron smelting techniques. During the bronze age, a would-be empire just had to get their hands on a decent amount of bronze and they could steamroll everybody they came across because they all had copper or stone weapons. After iron technology spread, it was iron vs iron. Would be empires got hung up fighting their well-armed neighbours and the snowball couldn't get rolling. The few empires that were left, such as Egypt, contracted. They no longer had a technological advantage once those they formerly ruled adopted iron.
Primitive iron was inferior to bronze and harder to produce. It was weak, malleable, and rapidly rusted. It only became practical once people learned to make a primitive steel by adding charcoal. This is why it took a long time for iron to replace bronze.
Chattel slavery and the Russian serf system were very different. Notably, the plantation owners weren't themselves bound into feudal service to an emperor, they got to have a "modern" relationship with a state.
Er, no. 19th century USA was a pretty advanced (technologically and culturally) civilization and yet with an extremely backward system of feudalism even by bronze age standards.
Seems political progress is not so important after all.
The Sea Peoples seemed more like slow erosion on top of all the other issues. Egypt was able to resist the Sea Peoples but other empires were to weak to handle the constant issues. It feels a bit like the fall of the Western Roman Empire which was erosion of stability, what it meant to be roman and military might until it collapsed.
Egypt might have had significant geographical advantage. Nile is just a single corridor to defend and fend off with significant depth. Invasions are simpler to handle when your entire land is in essence single continuous chokepoint.
It's other way around! Iron age did not result in Bronze Age collapse, it was caused by it.
Iron has been known for a long time before the collapse, and widely accessible. It was little used because iron at that era was an inferior, substitute material (and is a pain in the ass to make because it involves first producing charcoal to achieve high temperatures). It only became stronger and comparably durable to bronze around 2nd century BC, in late Roman Republic. But the Collapse made long-distance transportation of inputs for bronze production impossible because centralised governments one could depend on for predictable rules and security, vanished. It forced people to turn to then-inferior iron, and start using and eventually, improving it, but it still remained inferior to bronze even in Classic Greece.
> but it still remained inferior to bronze even in Classic Greece.
The Greeks clearly had access to bronze from the archaic period and used large amounts of it to manufacture armor. Yet they still used iron for swords and spear points. This would indicate that iron was already superior to bronze for quite a few use cases.
Iron was mostly perfected by Romans through their conquests as they collected and systemised iron processing tech of the nations they conquered, which all entered Iron Age by then. By the times of early Roman Empire, high quality iron spread around enough to make bronze obsolete.
IIRC there were significant improvements in the early and mid “dark ages” and mass produced Roman steel was generally quite poor by medieval standards.
I think the main benefit of bronze and it still existed in Roman times is that you can cast it instead of forging. It took almost two thousand years to figure out how to make steel cuirasses that resembled the bronze ones Greeks used before the classical period. Of steel chainmail or scale armor was already superior anyway.
It is debatable on which of those materials could in fact be called "steel", many of them were not. But indeed, deliberately carburised iron - that is, steel, appeared in Greece around 800BC and became a comparatively common and in general worthwhile material by the Classic Period.
Most of what I know about life in the bronze age comes from The Wise-Woman's Dog[1], a slightly fantastical game that leans into what life was like for regular people at the time. It's made by someone who researches that sort of thing for a living, and is full of interesting footnotes too.
It's a fun experience and a useful way to make a place and a time really feel alive.
(Not strictly on topic but having played it really lends texture to TFA and other comments posted here.)
The cycles of centralized control and distributed control.
Centralization creates an emergence of a mighty creature that feeds on its subjects. Distributed control kills that creature and restores natural randomness.
Software, e-commerce, supply chains and payment rails created some of these centralized mighty creatures. AI might start an Iron age for some of these bronze monsters, causing their extinction.
Peasants always have more survival instincts than palaces. They will find the next equalizer force, fulfilling their nature-mandated duty of restoring the randomness and equilibrium.
The Bronze Age collapsed for many reasons but the event that really kicked things off was the explosion of Santorini. The empires that died were not quickly replaced because after extensive famines and invasions they were replaced by different people with different social objectives.
The same thing happened later in Europe when Germanic and Asian tribes displaced the Roman and Celtic tribes of Western Europe.
This is only challenging to understand if you falsely believe civilization and technological advancement to be socially preferable. Historically that is not the case. Civilization tends to emerge not of preference but out of unwanted necessity to regulate resource production/distribution.
>>>The same thing happened later in Europe when Germanic and Asian tribes displaced the Roman and Celtic tribes of Western Europe.
If you are referring to Hungarians as Asian people, then by majority their genetics is very local - very local, that they are similar to rest of Slavics around them. The same applies to Western Europeans that were as you have stated "displaced by Germanic" - even in UK it is a mix of local population, when the migratory Germanic population % is high, thought nothing to do with Roman Empire, as it was rather internal migration withing Danish Kingdom(long long long time after Rome was gone) that was spanned across Northern Europe, and included England as one of their lands - for that reason we have dna from Estonia(Eastland in Danish) appearing in those ancient English lineages...
However, Dark Ages that followed invasions of German people in Rome, where concrete recipe and other modern technologies were lost and forgotten is more relatable to what happened in Bronze Age Collapse. You simply do not need any of that knowledge when busy of looting.
Also, looting of villas in Rome was technically not done by foreigners, but rather by disgruntled employers that were hired to guard Rome(Goths) - the fact that Rome gave rights for Goths to loot border provinces(as a a payment, because they lacked money to pay them) that they were guarding(and where they were settled) seems stupid(because we see results of that), but also we can read about local servants joining in destruction of villas of their rulers during final days of Rome.
So, just like then, also now in the case of societal collapse of modern civilization you have to be afraid that you will be robbed mainly from locals, though "foreign" robbers already are better at that, showing extreme proficiency at doing exactly that today.
They're referring to the Huns, not the Hungarians. They're two completely different groups. The Huns invaded in the 5th Century AD, and the Hungarians invaded in the 9th Century AD.
Both groups came from Asia. The reason why the Hungarians seem "local" now is that they've intermarried with local people for so long. But the language they speak is not Indo-European. It's actually related to language spoken in Siberia.
The text wrongly claims that the Spanish defeated the Aztecs because of their iron weapons. Actually, the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, so their weapons alone were irrelevant in the battle. The Spanish had alliances with Indigenous peoples who opposed the Aztec Empire, giving them a much larger army. That defeated the Aztecs.
Diseases were affecting both Aztecs and their enemies. Also, while USA did not had to fight "peaceful" and well developed farmer societies in Northern American plains, organized Comanche raiders that came from north and subjugated whatever was spared by plagues were a headache for colonists for couple of centuries.
What most of the comments along with article writer are missing - it was not just technology, that Spanish used, but organization structure and command of professional military forces - that is one of the reason why 1000s of peasants were incapable to fight against couple of men in armor, as they lacked coordination - that would be the same as pitting street kids against a swat team, even if they were given the same weapons.
The same applies to Aztecs that had different POV and mindset against battle-hardened professional European soldiers - when you read how Aztec demise unfolded, in some of it you have to question what they were thinking, but that is mostly because of our modern bias, that has not much knowledge of their beliefs on how they viewed world around them.
Also, not more important fact - now, just like then, not all people were interested to be involved in war, and a peace agreement for them was even better than being part of alliance(and the choices here are to die for foreign Aztecs as one of them) and join fight. And those who already hated Aztecs to the guts, also had plenty of motivation to see all of that empire burn.
PS. People who are mentioning bunch of foreigners are clueless about European history - whole European FEUDALISM political system was born out of bunch of foreign raiders, that we know today as vikings and their descendants, that carved up Europe and limited their in-fighting with rules and brought unified force against those that challenged them. Europeans had pretty much the same scenario before repeated on native Americans and many times.
One and the same. The Spanish were seen as gods, in part because of appearance and in part because of armaments. It's not like if a random cadre of natives, with comparable levels of tech, wandered down to South America that they'd have been able to form alliances willing to go thrust themselves into battle, on their behalf, against the establishment of the time.
On top of being what enabled them to form alliences, it also begs another question. If it was primarily these masses that overwhelmed the Aztecs (and I don't disagree) then what need did they have of outsiders, let alone letting them act as rulers? It was the perception of alien levels of weaponry and technology that both gave the locals the morale they needed, and justified the Spaniards being deemed leaders.
The idea that the Spaniards were gods didn't hold very long The Aztecs even sent body parts of defeated Spanish soldiers (and their horses) for the propaganda effect to display in cities and villages (see: they are not gods they bleed and die like everybody else).
In the end the defeat of the Aztecs was decided just as much by politics as by violence.
People sometimes needs a push to get onboard an idea. When you have been inside a system for along time it is difficult to see to what extreme is not just and how very possible it is the change it. Looking at you USA.
« It was the perception of alien levels of weaponry and technology that both gave the locals the morale they needed »
Now that really epitomizes the (horrible) Usanian mindset and way of “thinking” (regardless of whether or not that's where you're actually from).
What if the Indios were actually interested in listening to what the Spaniards had to say? They said there is no need for human sacrifice – because there is a god that doesn't require sacrifice, having settled that once and for all by sacrifying his own son.
The world would be in a much better state if there were any (or more) real Christians in the USA instead of the materialist sects that pose as such (or even as sth else) and bring the unfortunate “blessings” of their “culture” over the globe.
> On top of being what enabled them to form alliances, it also begs another question. If it was primarily these masses that overwhelmed the Aztecs (and I don't disagree) then what need did they have of outsiders
You presuppose they needed the outsiders. The Aztec empire was not some ancient, unwavering fact of life which the native mesoamericans could not conceive of changing. It only lasted 100 years. It is entirely possible that the rebellion was going to happen anyways in the next few years or decades and the arrival of the Spanish was just the butterfly flapping its wings that happened to trigger it at that moment.
> justified the Spaniards being deemed leaders.
The native allies of the conquistadors installed the Spanish to replace the Aztecs in exchange for a lower tax rate and increased independence. They did not accept spanish leadership, they just preferred empowering a neutral third party than any particular longstanding rival. Spanish domination came later after smallpox decimated the native population and intermarriages with the pre-existing elite meant there was no native power structure left to stand up to them.
The misinformation about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs is one of the most depressing things imaginable.
The historical record is completely clear and we have first hand accounts, primary sources, from the people present. It's all readily available and anyone interest can easily verify it.
And yet, even in the comments responding to yours, people confidently state just blatantly untrue things.
- Gunpowder and steel had essentially nothing to do with Cortez's victory.
- The Aztecs did not see the Spaniards as Gods
- Smallpox played a role at the very end but had little to do with Cortez's victory.
- They leave out the primary reason Cortez won (his ability to build a coalition of native people who hated the Aztecs).
- They leave out the secondary reason Cortez won (superior European battle tactics).
- They ignore the fact that there were Europeans fighting on both sides (a delegation was sent from Cuba to stop Cortez; they were the ones that actually brought the smallpox not Cortez).
The post I'm replying to is correct: Spanish technology (steel, gunpowder) had very little to do with Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs.
The idea that the Aztecs took the Spanish for gods and specifically that Moctezuma mistook Cortez's for the returning god Quetzalcoatl is fiction. We actually know the exact book that it came from.
Smallpox did play a role but it was brought by the slaves of Europeans sent to _stop_ Cortez nearly two years after he started fighting the Aztecs. By the time smallpox killed Moctezuma's successor, Cortez's victory was already assured. The disease was not the key to his victory; it was more that it prevented insurgency after the conquest.
Also worth noting that if your theory was that Cortez won because of the gun powder or steel that is hard to square because by the time the two forces clashed the Aztecs had more of it then he did given the rival European forces trying to stop him.
Cortez won primarily because he had an army with a nucleus of veterans from the Italian wars that applied the lessons of the Reconquista.
The technology that let him win was European tactics and political manuevering not anything physical they brought with them.
> The idea that the Aztecs took the Spanish for gods and specifically that Moctezuma mistook Cortez's for the returning god Quetzalcoatl is fiction. We actually know the exact book that it came from.
This is a bit of an overcorrection to the post-conquest myth about Quetzcoatl (which doesn't show up in pre-contact sources).
This stems from the word "Teotl" which subjugated tribes started calling the Spaniards when they began to openly defy the Aztecs. The translation is complicated, as the word means both "the magical force underlying the world" (our closest word is mana) and "magical creatures" (which in Western mythological terms includes deities, demons, devils, saints, angels, kobolds, elves, etc.) with the implication that they have some power over the world.
This word was translated to Deos by the Spaniards, as their mythology was very strongly influenced by Christianity (modern mythology is similar this but with the extensive expansion that Tolkien popularized), and this was the natural word they would use. Plus it makes them look good at home to be able to say "these people were so primitive they thought us gods" - so mistranslation serves them well.
But there certainly was a larger-than-life view of them due to the immense technology difference and sheer audacity of the expedition. Just not to the extent that the colonial sources from the West wanted everyone to believe.
Camilla Townsend's "Fifth Sun" was a really interesting read in that it brought together a lot of sources of the conquest to tell a more detailed story than I had probably heard before.
When the Spanish showed up, the Aztec's enemies didn't immediately line up to join the anti-Mexica alliance, as some people tend to think. The Spanish weren't seen as gods and worshipped. Pestilence would be a factor later on, but in early days the natives they met were quite healthy. The Spanish weren't seen as foreigners from across the sea or anything special because that wasn't really a concept for the natives. The Spanish were just another funny looking tribe from over the horizon that had showed up to fight for space, much like the Aztec's once had.
The Spanish initially had to fight hostile tribes on their own. There were battles where they had to fight through the night, while they were injured, and against incredible odds. The Spanish, especially the ones from Extremadura, were widely regarded by contemporary Europeans as some of the very best soldiers on the continent. Only after they'd done some hard fighting were they seen as having a chance against the Mexica and worth making alliances with.
So, yes, the Spanish won allies who helped them fight the Mexica, but they needed their guns, steel, and horses to win those allies.
There's no mystery here. The Aztecs ruled brutally over dozens of other indigenous groups, they practised slavery and human sacrifice. When the Spanish showed impressive military equipment and the implication (when reinforcements arrived, albeit in small numbers) that they represented a powerful external military force, ancestral opponents who'd been subjugated by the Aztec empire were quick to throw in their lot.
It wasn't just the captive slaves and human sacrifice either (though that was a big deal), the Aztecs imposed crushing economic tribute burdens on subjugated city-states, and when payments fell short, they'd go in and raid. Tribute wasn't just gold and tradeable goods, it was also food, and the Aztecs didn't care if they drove a place into famine.
There were also rival indigenous states (Tlaxcala, etc.) that were never conquered by the Aztecs but had been trapped in continuous low-intensity war with them for years.
Though it is worth saying the Aztecs weren't universally despised. Some regional dynasties were allies. Some of those were also unpopular.
You have to make the evil claim: that the Spanish invaders were seen as a better alternative to the indigenous Aztecs by at least a decent majority of the population (and then, later, the Inca) (maybe this even explains the final end of the Maya)
Which is both likely true and morally against what we currently seem to believe.
Was there a concept of "ingenuousness" for the natives? Even the Aztecs were relative newcomers to the area. They came from the north and enslaved the area. Why prefer their terror to the unknown future with the new people that appeared?
Maybe I should not have used the word foreigner, but my comment/question is not why did they prefer ally with the spanish on a moral point of view but why did they believe the spanish were strong enough to be followed against the aztecs if not for their military superiority.
I don't think there's a single and simple answer. One thing that Cortez managed to do was "demystify" the mighty Aztecs in the eyes of the people conquered and supressed by the Aztecs.
There was unrest and violence in the region long before Cortez arrived on the scene, when he did he was the external catalyst to ignite the powder keg. When reading accounts of the conquest, information gathering, political scheming and negotiations were often more "decisive" than the actual fighting.
Divide and conquer is as old as time. Any major power usually got there by unsavoury means, making a lot of enemies along the way. The same thing happened in the US and Canada, where tribes that had fought for centuries -- quite contrary to the noble tropes, it wasn't some big love-in, and the continent was littered with raping, pillaging, slavery, and so on -- so they were more than happy to faction off to opposing sides if it gave them more of an ability to exterminate their nemesis.
I just found out this [1] book review today about the Aztec society today and my takeway is that the Aztecs were a highly militaristic death cult. Almost all men were warriors educated for war at young age and competing with each other to get as most captives as possibles because this is what gives you status.
It doesn't mention the spanish conquest but I wouldn't be surprised if all those tribes living under Aztec rule needed a little morale boost and seeing a bunch of guys with iron weapons and armor who wanted to do away with the aztecs surely helped with that
I second this recommendation, with the caveat that it contains a much higher degree of horror than almost anything I've ever read, including accounts of Nazi death camps.
I read that same review a couple of weeks ago and it made a deep impression. It's one thing to know "the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice", and another to be confronted with the scale, sadism and calculation with which it was practiced.
You are right. I should have made that warning. This is not for the faint of heart.
"If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it
[...]
No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings"
« accounts of Nazi death camps » — Have you read any that contain actual horrors that you can believe in? If so which ones?
« Aztecs … human sacrifice » — Yes, here, too, the story has been shaped by a certain leyenda negra that Spain's enemies concocted, when in fact the Spaniards set an end to an absurd indigenous slaughter system, allegedly necessary as part of literally everyday life to make the Sun rise every morning.
Humanized sci-fi version would be “Logan's Run” (1967/76), read this reference as “curiously meandering” (dang):
Huh? Sounds like a string of events that they didn’t engineer. I mean, did they engineer the spread of Christianity to the New World? They’d need a confluence of disease, tech, and a safe boat ride to achieve it. We’ve all had experience with Product Development, so I ask, how the heck could any of this been engineered?
Sounds like luck (and if luck, why is it cohesive?) or a GOD wanted a certain outcome.
Their weapons were certainly not irrelevant. They had other capabilities to their weapons - much did the aztecs. And they also took down the empire with a decapitation strike while being hosted as a guest, with their weapons.
I think the opium war were also won due to weapon advantages. The British cannons could be fired from further away, they could handle larger charges of gunpowder than the Chinese. Another advantage of metallurgy. Today's jet engines are largely the same thing. Maybe the troops were also more battle hardened.
Also, the introduction of foreign pathogens which killed of many of the native population.
Usually a single explanation isn’t sufficient, but and it’s likely a combination of disease, better weapons, cultural differences (attitudes towards war and one another), alliances as you mentioned, etc.
Small Spanish forces could defeat much larger Aztec forces, particularly in open terrain where cavalry, steel weapons, and armor were effective. Alliances played a role, but better weaponry and warfare isn't just an anecdote. Spanish military strength helped make those alliances attractive.
I think it's hard to overstate just how categorical a difference in organizational and social doctrine the Spanish were away from the Aztecs. Everything from tactics to logistics train to how the soldiers are motivated. Look at the European wars of colonizing Africa in the 19th century if you want to see how that plays out when they meet in the field.
Like put the Black Prince up against Alexander and even Alexander has a uphill battle. Now take away Alexander's cavalry and give the Black Prince primitive firearms. Unless Alexander gets the jump on him or finds a way to make the meeting of forces otherwise highly unequal, that battle is probably only going one way, and that's for forces of comparable motivation levels.
The numbers disparity only gets you so far Ancient empires generally lack the social sophistication to motivate soldiers to the degree that more modern societies do. Those Aztec conscripts who have been "voluntold" into service by their communities at best are not going to fight to the bloody end. They do not consider themselves citizens of "The Aztec Empire". They are not going to march to their near certain deaths for the benefit of the empire like they're some red army machine gun squad piling into a rowboat to cross the Volga in 1941. They can not even have the mental framework for that because a pre-industrial society does not run enough surplus for the state to do the things it must to create that.
> Exaggerating a bit, but I'm fairly sure the Spanish speech was: "if you kill the other guys with your much better weapons, you will reach El Dorado"
And they basically did. Not a singular city of gold, perhaps, but the Spanish looted tens of billions of $$ worth silver and gold from Central/South America between 1492 and 1550. Which is all the more impressive given how little European manpower it took and how low their relative incomes would've been at the time.
... where gold is "gold and cochineal". The red dye brought back to Spain was much higher in value than the gold!
Ironically, Europe already had cochineal, but they foraged the source (parasitic beetles), while the bronze-age Aztecs had the brilliant idea to farm them on planted oak forests.
It was probably more like "I have committed treason and burned the ships we arrived on, the only way any of us are getting out of here alive is if we bring back so much gold they can't be angry"
The dude was beyond in over his head, but considering that they "weren't in Kansas anymore" that probably helped him. Trying to run a by the book campaign as a conquering general ought to according to the practices of the time likely would've got them all killed at one of the several dozen points where that was the likely outcome but didn't happen.
I am not sure I am entirely convinced by how you make your point but I think I agree. Here is how I would make the case for it:
The Spaniards had armor and combat formation. Having basic protection and having men march next to you closely must make you quite confident.
On the other hand Aztec fighting style seems to be "Go berserk and attract enemies to you so you can harm them to take them as captive so you can sacrifice them later for prestige". You are actually competing with your fellow warriors to show how brave you are". It seems the culture has optimized for not taking into account fear of death.
That might be a big advantage against other tribes that have the same level of tech than you but haven't bet the farm on militaristic culture but it probably breaks down pretty quickly on armies who rely on "confidence in the collective" rather than individual prestige and have somewhat of a tech edge
Where are you getting the "go berserk" part? All of what I've read about the Aztec military is that it was highly hierarchical and organized, having special noble (pipiltin) officer schools (the calmecacs[1] where they learned of war and ruling, and the commoner (macehuali) class also having mandatory military training in the telpochcalli[2]. Also, from what I've read in the True History Of The Conquest of New Spain by conquistador Bernal
Diaz del Castillo, who participated in it, is that they generally ditched their metal armors rather quickly due to the heat, and instead adopting the indigenous cotton armors, they also mostly adopted indigenous ranged weapons, keeping only their swords and horses by the end of the Conquest. Bernal emphasizes the scale of the armies a lot in his book, and the indigenous allied city-states are incredibly important, specially the siege of Tenochtitlan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmecac
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%93lpochcalli
"This same zero-sum competition extended to the Mexica army, which as soon as battle was joined became not an army but a swirling melee of individual glory-seekers. The purpose of the Mexica warrior was not the victory of the group, but competition with his peers, and the way to win the competition was to secure captives for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli. This singular fact drove almost everything about Mexica combat strategy, or the lack thereof. Great warriors wore towering feather headdresses to attract opponents so that they could be disabled and sacrificed. The Mexica had projectile weapons, but specifically designed them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization. The Mexica wielded long, shallow obsidian blades and flint-studded clubs that were designed to incapacitate by cutting a hamstring or crushing a knee, rather than to kill. The only way to advance as a Mexica warrior was to sacrifice more captives than your peers,8 and the incentives of the system shaped everything else."
Also notable is how much Spain's military strength was built up during the
Reconquista, where Spain's militaries expelled the Arab occupation of the Iberian Peninsula over hundreds of years. (The Arabs themselves having been incredibly successful conquerors since the 7th century.) Columbus sailed to the new world under the Spanish flag the same year the Spanish recaptured Grenada, the last Arab outpost in Spain.
Steel armor was definitely a huge advantage and the Indians soon learned that the only two reliable ways to defeat armored soldiers were to drown them or to throw large stones at them if they ventured into a narrow valley. Neither was usually available.
"the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, so their weapons alone were irrelevant in the battle"
Irrelevant? Tell this to Atahualpa Inca, who, during the second big Spanish conquest, was taken alive by a group of mere 168 Spanish soldiers, unsupported by any local warriors, while having at least several thousand guards with him. Force ratio of 40 or 50 to 1 ultimately made no difference.
TL;DR - native alliances were important, but Spanish armor made them nearly invincible against native weapons, their military tactics were superior, and cavalry were extremely overpowered against armies made up only of footsoldiers. Weaponry and tech were certainly not irrelevant.
I read Bernal Diaz's book about the conquest of Mexico and in it he says that formations of Aztec warriors would break when a conquistador would charge into formations on an armored horse. They thought the horse and rider was one sort of monster. It was also a combination of a bunch of things they had never seen before: steel weapons, armor, the power and mobility of a trained war horse.
I don't think they could have taken control of the Aztec empire without allies and a lot of political intrigue. I think a good modern analogy was how the US quickly took over Afghanistan after 911. You could say we did it with a small group of special forces and a lot of air power. But really it is more like there were already (warlord) factions ready to strike at the Taliban who knew they could win with air support and everything that would come after. For the Aztecs, the role of the cavalry was like those B52 strikes.
Why then couldn't the indigenous peoples form their own alliance against the Aztecs before the Spanish arrived? It's not like the Spanish had an advantage in communication.
I think a journey with multiple agents to collect information would give you a more complete picture on data points.
Ask for DNA and what is known.
Climate records and what is known.
Town losses and movements. In some places inhabitants seemingly moved way way up the mountains all of a sudden. This is usually associated with conflict or tidal waves.
Migration evidence.
And any other disease or food shocks.
One must also be careful to understand the data observation process and to justify any belief that the collapse is not merely absence of observations.
> Alexander, originally from the Greek Ἀλέξανδρος (Aléxandros), from αλέξειν aléxein meaning "to ward off, keep off, turn away, defend, protect" and ἀνδρός andrós, genitive of ἀνήρ anḗr meaning "man".
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 91.2 ms ] thread[0]: https://www.sciencealert.com/bronze-age-artefacts-have-meteo...
It's true that when iron was first smelted and the first steel was made, it was structurally different to the Bronze economy. Iron is abundant and local. It doesn't require the same trade network (of copper and tin).
I'm surprised this article doesn't mention the Uluburun shipwreck [1]. It's archeologically important because it provides primary evidence of how extensive Bronze age trade networks were.
At best the author is theorizing not why the Bronze age collapse happened but why the empires and trade networks of that era didn't come back. But that's a different question.
We also have direct primary evidence from this time of the Sea Peoples [2]. To this day nobody really knows where they came from or why. Many modern scholars believe they may have been refugees themselves, possibly from natural disasters or droughts.
The most likely explanation for all this is that there was no single factor. All of these things likely contributed. It's still unclear why the collapse was so extensive and relatively sudden. That's not really satisfying but we've had fragile systems before that have collapsed suddenly and violently. Look at the outbreak of World War One as one major example.
One of my favorite phrases here is Outside Context Problem [3], which originates from the Iain M. Banks Culture novel Excession (love this book). It pretty accurately describes the collapses that happened in the Americas in the colonial era.
[1]: https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/case-studies/a9360-lost...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples
[3]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutsideContextPr...
”Tin with trace levels of indium, particular to the Cornish deposits, has been found in shipwrecks near Israel and southern France”
Thanks for the direct link though. It’s very interesting.
This could lead to supply chain collapses and such. Maybe just general destabilization and raids and such sort of collapsed the larger empires. But at the same time, those larger empires would also have had access to iron, so why couldn't they by matter of numerical superiority, access to greater resources, tactics and military organization, and more simply overwhelm smaller armies or bands utilizing the same technology and restore order or at least defend themselves?
I'm also not sure about your suggestion. Yes small polities had the means to defend themselves, but the pharaoh's army is much larger and you're definitely going to die if he shows up and you fight back. So why wouldn't the pharaoh have shown up to put down a rebellion? Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
I'm just not sure that this democratization of violence is the answer. Though it may be a key contributor. Curious about your thoughts or others. Incredibly fascinating topic.
Of course, that leads to questions like "Why does the small group wind up with the good weapons? Why doesn't the large group get them, even if there aren't enough for all of them?"
But maybe the iron smelting isn't happening in downtown Memphis. Maybe it's happening out in the hinterland somewhere, and so the locals have a chance to grab all the output.
And when all those rebellions cost the Pharaoh 3x what they used to to put down you're forced to be a lot more diplomatic. Less extraction under threat of violence means worse negotiating position for the next one. It's a cycle.
And for every full scale armies meeting in the field type rebellion there's a lot of "sir a second village has lynched the tax men" which compel you to dispense policing forces, etc, etc.
Just because you "can" do something in moderation doesn't mean it's a sustainable way to run your empire at scale.
You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes. And you can't just "supervise" them with your loyal people because this is pre-industrial and there do not exist sufficient surpluses to feed those nonproductive mouths.
There is a superstition in the Middle Ages that blacksmiths should not be killed, in the context of battles. Blacksmiths were an absolutely essential part of the support of an army, but his skills and tools were just as useful to the winning side. Minus his skills, his tools were just surplus, heavy items.
Other army support crew like washerwomen, stable boys, and even prostitutes were of course much easier to replace.
Carbonization was invented/discovered after the Bronze Age collapse, slowly over hundreds of years, exactly because they didn’t have access to bronze anymore.
Iron was already known to civilization during Bronze Age, but they didn’t know how to make it hard. Hence Bronze was preferred.
After, and because, of the Bronze Age collapse they started funding out how to make iron useful.
Think about it, why did the humans in Americas never went through Iron Age? Because they never had a Bronze Age collapse.
Also you are talking about Iron Age. Which came after and as a consequence of the Bronze Age.
Pure iron is utterly useless as a weapon. Look it up.
I think there is that huge misunderstanding that people were much different a hundred, a thousand or two thousand years ago, when it's mostly different language, technology. The politics part feels very contemporary.
Eg. soldiers singing rude songs during campaigns or celebrating coming home. Or during Saturnalia some people getting shitfaced all night, while others complaining about these "idiots".
Or politicians trying to make shady deals, or having their own agenda, putting their own people in place. Or talking about food/money for the poorer population (yes, there was free government food for the poor even 2k years ago!) or making bad decisions like giving veterans free land to grow crop on, and people realizing just because they are good soldiers doesn't mean they are great farmers.
Or that obsession of calling every war just and defensive, even when the main goal is expand the empire and being hailed as "imperator".
Or the fact that many actually found the coliseum pretty brutal just like parts of the Triumph (parade after conqueror new land) being upset and demanding to spare various people.
Also love the context that is often added, like whose perspective something is based on and where historians disagree.
Great channel for everyone that cannot stand that whole "Ave, Caesar" style talk or making everything sound grand instead of real.
Really wished history was taught that way in school. Right now it almost feels like anti-history. Instead of events it feels like the thing that's important are names and dates, which (most of the time) is the least important. At least in my opinion "learning from history" doesn't mean getting to know names and dates.
I think my favorite part is how Caesar got obsessed with making a new calendar as a secret pet project and we're still using that exact setup today with only two or three minor patches. I kinda would've preferred the Egyptian 10 month 30 day setup with an extra week of vacation though ngl.
The story of Iron starts with the production of Bronze. Bronze is an alloy of 90% copper. Depending on what constitutes the other 10% we get different types of bronze. The most common type which kick started the bronze age around 3500 BCE in western Asia is tin bronze. Unlike copper ore, tin is hard to find but a small amount of it can significantly improve the quality of copper and make it usable and strong. Ancient smelters produced bronze by melting the natural copper ore mixed with tin ore in simple kilns. The resulting bronze was the primary metal used in tools and arts for more than 2500 years.
Iron is a common impurity in copper ores. We also know that iron ore can, and was, used as a flux in the process of smelting copper. In simple terms, a flux agent is a chemical that attracts oxygen to itself and protects the primary product, which is copper, from oxidizing in high temperatures. Therefore, across the ancient world, bronze smelters had been encountering molten iron when they raised the kiln temperature high enough. However, they discarded the resulting metal because its copper impurity made it too soft and inferior to bronze.
Around 1,200 BCE the collapse of bronze age civilizations in the near east due to a “perfect storm” of drought, famine, disease, immigration and war affected trade routes that brought tin ore to the western Asia. During this time of bronze shortage some smelters seem to have resorted to using the lower quality iron for tool making. They had observed that adding carbon to iron makes it much harder but prone to breaking. We have evidence of iron tools built with layers of soft and hard iron to achieve desired outcomes. Over time iron smelters experimented with different amounts of carbon impurity and achieved desired levels of hardness and strength.
1. Iron weapons did not exist before the "Bronze Age collapse." That is not borne by the evidence. Iron weapons came from the same centers and communities that used to produce bronze weapons. If these weapon makers were restricted to supply to power centers during the Bronze Age, why were they not restricted during the Iron Age?
2. Wide distribution of iron weaponry prevented formation of great powers after the "collapse". If true why and how were Assyrians and Persians able to build such large empires long after iron weapons were wide spread? Weapon distribution cannot be the primary explanation for why great powers did not form after 1200BC.
This proposed change in tactics happened before iron weapons became widespread, though. Iron should I think be seen as a cope for a world in which long distance trade in tin had shut down.
I routinely see people dismiss everything as AI without any explanation as to why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_H._Cline
that the article or the top post here doesn't cite him is unforgivable
neither are you
1: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxi2veZE2Uvm0VQUbAjGROCQoILO8...
In an area where tin is abundant, individuals could easily forge their own bronze weapons, thus making it harder for the state to have a monopoly on high-tech weapons.
So I think the Harappan actually reinforce the theory.
yes, kiln-roasted Linear B in Mycenaean palaces... built on a giant fault line (literally as well as figuratively)
Civ VII 2.0 should bring back Sid's palaces in monolith data centers like The Machine / Samaritan (note: i am only halfway through season 4)
Once people started using iron instead of bronze, the first use was probably creating tools used for farming, food production, and other important things: Axes, hoes, spades, etc. And they did not just substitute bronze tools but because iron was cheaper, they probably created more of them, and new tools. And it also enabled things like nails and other construction material.
So, the economy and power structures shifted as tools enabled more economic output. By the time steel became good enough for weaponry, the bronze age was effectively already a thing of the past as the economy would have shifted to using iron for most tools long before.
And then later of course, having cheap and good enough steel weaponry enabled the creation of larger armies too. So towards the end of the Iron age, you get e.g. the Romans creating huge legions that were simply not economically feasible in the bronze age. And given that hand to hand combat was basically the way people waged wars, the ones with the bigger armies would tend to win.
The concept of "state" is very modern, we tend to retrofit it over the past, but it's often wrong. There have always been rulers, and families, competing interests and identities; which typically produced inconsistent and fragmented governance over most territories, until very recently.
Many Bronze Age empires had complex centralized bureaucracies and are generally considered states.
That would seem to support the theory in a way. If they could make bronze “in their back yard,” the same way that everyone else could make iron in the Iron Age, they would be sort of living in their own proto-iron-age, right? (In the sense that access to metallurgy was democratized). So if anything, it would provide some pretty strong support of the link between democratized metallurgy and more disperse power.
Coast-hugging boats can be made from wood with some skill. Weapons in that era requires metal in some part. That required a lot of skill.
This isn’t what the Sea Peoples built. It isn’t even what the Romans built. Most Mediterranean cultures lacked the navigational and ship-building expertise to let the shore out of sight. That doesn’t mean they didn’t need skill. But it was less skill than needed for metallurgy, in part because the latter’s inputs are dearer.
Making a boat that can carry multiple people on sea without sinking when the weather goes a little sour (which can happen in less than an hour in the Mediterranean) is a very hard thing to do. And if you know how to do that you'll never have any shortage of metal or other goods in the first place because you end up being the one who trade them for profit.
Having said that, there is nothing to make the bronze age epoch impossible. There is nothing in the epic which may not have been possible in the bronze age based on what we already know about history.
this is definitely not possible in the bronze age or any other age for that matter from what we know of history.
It seems you didn't read the article carefully. The author says that bronze age empires derived their power from the scarcity of tin, which they could obtain via trade routes, but was hard to get hold of for smaller rulers. In your example this scarcity doesn't hold because tin happened to be nearby. So your example is perfectly compatible with his theory.
the post in question doesn't even mention Ugarit. or Arsenic. i am genuinely pissed off at the original tome being passed off as genuine discourse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit
just pure charlatanry
Whatever it is you are actually alluding to, you've omitted several steps in communicating your anger.
1177 BC
In my opinion, whatever caused that fog (confusion, conflicted or coded accounts, apocalyptic and prophetic writings) *IS* what caused the collapse.
Technology likely plays a role, but as a catalyst to a sociological phenomena. The industrial revolution did something similar (lots of new philosophy with somehow apocalyptic or prophetic undertones, albeit in a different style; war and depression in the following decades; confusion and a fog in history). We're still not over that, and it's only barely visible because we live inside this particular fog, but it's likely to confuse future historians a lot. I see AI as belonging to the same wave.
One can imagine that a series of bad seasons, natural disasters, invasions & other stressors would open a window for revolt.
Yes tin was a factor, yes the “Sea Peoples” were a factor. But you don’t get the wholesale overthrow of so many empires without the common people being at least somewhat welcoming of the invaders (when not happily assisting them!) in throwing off centuries of elite oppression.
The mythological idea of them just appearing out of nowhere is nice too. Makes it feel aligned with something like the pyramids having no explanation
Them essentially being refugees / displaced and looking for a new place, not them being spawned on the map like a cheap rts scenario.
Sea people as refugees displaced by drought, famine, war or just a general societal collapse.
In any case, the temporal coincidence of the bronze age collapse and the wide-spread adoption of iron working, which was inferior to bronze at first but more readily accessible, is fascinating*. I am not sure if we have a full picture of the role of that change yet. (Was it just a consequence of the collapse of trade and tin imports, or did it cause the destruction of the bronze age empires in the first place, or just prevent their return, or was it more complicated?)
(*) I do not mean the superficial tautology of "iron age" following the "bronze age" but the fact that the bronze age, in this region, ended in a societal collapse.
According to it, the sea peoples could instead be vast numbers of western europeans fleeing the outcome of a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, which would have triggered crop failures and mass starvation in western and northern europe.
A significant portion of the survivors would have fled en masse to the richer eastern Mediterranean empires, thereby causing their downfall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B965f8AcNbw
"The archeological evidence is quite clear: at some point between the year 1200 and the year 1100 BC, right at the end of the period we call the Bronze Age, a wave of destruction washed across the entire region. It wiped whole civilizations off the map and left nothing in its wake."
In “Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age” <https://www.lockwoodpress.com/product-page/the-fall-of-the-b...> Jesse Millek examines 153 sites claimed to have been destroyed and found that 61% never happened, happened during a different time period, or had a different cause.
Even without buying the whole book you can download the appendix where he summarizes the results. A few notable entries:
Shiqmona: The possibly destroyed public building dates to the fourteenth century BCE. No end of the Late Branze Age destruction was uncovered.
Tell Irbid: C14 dates derived from short-lived samples places the destruction event between 1395–1260 BCE.
Krisa: There is only a statement that the site was destroyed with no published evidence of destruction in any structure.
Iria: Some burnt material in a pit was assumed to be a destruction. There was no damage visible to the buildings.
Athens: The Houses on the North slope were not houses at all. It was refuse that was dumped on the stairs.
Ayios Stephanos: Burning was uncovered in one room from Trench Beta 11. No other damage was recorded.
Amman Airport Structure: Evidence of burning in Room VII can be attributed to the hearth in that room.
Pefkakia: Adrimi-Sismani repeatedly cited a destruction, even though the excavators clearly stated the site was abandoned.
Tell el-‘Ajjul: Bell simply placed it on a map as destroyed with no citations. There was no settlement ca. 1200 BCE.
Waves of invaders can take many generations to wear down the native forces. They don't need to be allied in any formal sense, either. See for example: Saxons turning Britain Anglo-Saxon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923712
Furthermore, just because these inscriptions didn’t give the raiders a specific name doesn’t mean that they were from an unknown civilization.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923712
I believe the Bronze Age collapse was a good and necessary thing for humanity. It was required to get out of the local stable point that post-Neolithic society had evolved and settled into.
By the 12 century BCE the noble kings that Marduk and Maat would have smiled upon had long been replaced by the same flavor of sociopaths that lurk the halls of our major governments today.
But these Bronze Age despots had a LOCK on the economy that today’s crony capitalists could only dream of. And they had a lock on the culture too, mostly via the state religion.
BUT: years of bad harvests, disasters and bad omens become increasingly hard to explain. Higher taxes and worse service from the state. No protection from invaders.
Do you revolt? Join the invaders?
No living soul, not even your oldest relatives, can remember time before the empire. No one knows what comes next, so you don’t do this high risk thing unless life really sucks. But people did, because life really sucked.
Proposition: The Bronze Age collapse is to be celebrated as a triumph of the people over the most unequal societies that have ever existed.
If Mr T could literally order anyone murdered at will with absolute impunity, you might have a case. As of today, he’s having legal difficulties flying people out of the country. A Ramses II does not exist, and thankfully cannot exist, in today’s world.
And make no mistake, Trump and Erdogan want this power for themselves.
Even (gasp!) Putler's Russia has laws and police, I've heard.
"protect power" is always in there, but in modern democratic style states there are some extra details that greatly limit the abuse of said power.
The Architect had to tell Neo, that we'd been through this Seven times already.
Think yourself Neo?
You already have elites siding against their own people and tyrannically collecting taxes and giving it to their Mercenary base.
It isn't hard to imagine a benevolent Sea People offering to free the locals from their despotic elite.
The Bronze Age would not have had the same migration structures obviously but one might imagine it happening locally.
What is funny is that a lot of these explanations of what happened seem to fly in the face of what people find is possible to ascribe to situations now.
.. what?
The following ones are ethical and philosophical. My own standing is that :
- Individuals can't be treated as fungible or dispensable, even when thinking in macro states. That opens the door for extreme suffering and simplistic thinking.
- On longer scales, stability wins. Collapse should be treated as a hard failure, not a mechanic.
Stability sucks. Instability sucks even more when you are in the middle of it, but it is transient. Stability is forever, until it suddenly isn't.
This is absolutely not the case. It's more than likely that whatever rises out of the *hellscape* of a societal collapse will be worse than what was there before.
The collapse of Rome did not lead to a better Rome. It was hundreds of years of suffering and death. In fact, the stability of Rome is what allowed for it to reach its peak over hundreds of years - something that was undeniably good for its citizens.
Rome was unstable far longer than it was stable.
> undeniably good for its citizens.
Maybe for some very small percentage of citizens, especially when citizenship was extended to everyone in the empire.
When you look at data around economics what you find instead is that good times create good times.
you want stability, but not stasis. you hella do not want punctuated equilibriums
As opposed to slow burn suffering caused by living under a poor exploitative system? Say nothing of the opportunity cost...
It's not like bronze age societies had invented peaceful power transitions between fundamentally opposed factions. Whatever state they were stuck in they were there until a regime change, if you're lucky that'll only kill a few people at the top. But most societies aren't that lucky.
>- On longer scales, stability wins. Collapse should be treated as a hard failure, not a mechanic.
Japan was stable for a hell of a long time. Not hard to imagine had they been located somewhere slightly different in the world they'd have wound up slaves to some random European power. Stability works until you get into a local maximum you can't get out of A lot of those local maximums you are not getting out of except over the dead bodies of whoever benefits from them (see also: US civil war), if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you get subjugated by someone else.
Sea People had completely different style od fighting, they were runners who harrased and eventually outflank chariots.
This article doesn't really wade into that dispute, but instead focuses on why new empires didn't rise once old ones collapsed. Iron smelting originated before the collapse, but didn't really spread at first. Bronze age iron was probably really awful stuff, and soldiers tended to be conservative when it came to technology. They wanted weapons they could trust, and that was copper or bronze. As long as the great empires persisted and the trade of tin and copper continued, nobody was forced to use Iron, so nobody was motivated to get good at producing quality iron weapons.
Then whatever caused the collapse happened, and the ingredients for making bronze became difficult or impossible to get. It was iron or back to copper and stone. So, peopled adopted Iron and that gave smiths the chance to improve iron smelting techniques. During the bronze age, a would-be empire just had to get their hands on a decent amount of bronze and they could steamroll everybody they came across because they all had copper or stone weapons. After iron technology spread, it was iron vs iron. Would be empires got hung up fighting their well-armed neighbours and the snowball couldn't get rolling. The few empires that were left, such as Egypt, contracted. They no longer had a technological advantage once those they formerly ruled adopted iron.
Alexander had an iron sword. Julius had an iron sword.
The problem with iron is that it is very hard to make. Requires lots of fuel, labour and technology.
Russia was like this till 1861! And arguably practically for much longer so, perhaps still.
Er, no. 19th century USA was a pretty advanced (technologically and culturally) civilization and yet with an extremely backward system of feudalism even by bronze age standards.
Seems political progress is not so important after all.
Interesting thesis, but I dont buy it. BTW, regarding the timing, I think Julian Jaynes would have a different thesis.
The Greeks clearly had access to bronze from the archaic period and used large amounts of it to manufacture armor. Yet they still used iron for swords and spear points. This would indicate that iron was already superior to bronze for quite a few use cases.
Iron was mostly perfected by Romans through their conquests as they collected and systemised iron processing tech of the nations they conquered, which all entered Iron Age by then. By the times of early Roman Empire, high quality iron spread around enough to make bronze obsolete.
I think the main benefit of bronze and it still existed in Roman times is that you can cast it instead of forging. It took almost two thousand years to figure out how to make steel cuirasses that resembled the bronze ones Greeks used before the classical period. Of steel chainmail or scale armor was already superior anyway.
It's a fun experience and a useful way to make a place and a time really feel alive.
(Not strictly on topic but having played it really lends texture to TFA and other comments posted here.)
[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
Centralization creates an emergence of a mighty creature that feeds on its subjects. Distributed control kills that creature and restores natural randomness.
Software, e-commerce, supply chains and payment rails created some of these centralized mighty creatures. AI might start an Iron age for some of these bronze monsters, causing their extinction.
Peasants always have more survival instincts than palaces. They will find the next equalizer force, fulfilling their nature-mandated duty of restoring the randomness and equilibrium.
The same thing happened later in Europe when Germanic and Asian tribes displaced the Roman and Celtic tribes of Western Europe.
This is only challenging to understand if you falsely believe civilization and technological advancement to be socially preferable. Historically that is not the case. Civilization tends to emerge not of preference but out of unwanted necessity to regulate resource production/distribution.
That was centuries before. Volcanic winter(s) for sure occurred, but they would be distant memory if anything by the time of the collapse.
If you are referring to Hungarians as Asian people, then by majority their genetics is very local - very local, that they are similar to rest of Slavics around them. The same applies to Western Europeans that were as you have stated "displaced by Germanic" - even in UK it is a mix of local population, when the migratory Germanic population % is high, thought nothing to do with Roman Empire, as it was rather internal migration withing Danish Kingdom(long long long time after Rome was gone) that was spanned across Northern Europe, and included England as one of their lands - for that reason we have dna from Estonia(Eastland in Danish) appearing in those ancient English lineages...
However, Dark Ages that followed invasions of German people in Rome, where concrete recipe and other modern technologies were lost and forgotten is more relatable to what happened in Bronze Age Collapse. You simply do not need any of that knowledge when busy of looting. Also, looting of villas in Rome was technically not done by foreigners, but rather by disgruntled employers that were hired to guard Rome(Goths) - the fact that Rome gave rights for Goths to loot border provinces(as a a payment, because they lacked money to pay them) that they were guarding(and where they were settled) seems stupid(because we see results of that), but also we can read about local servants joining in destruction of villas of their rulers during final days of Rome. So, just like then, also now in the case of societal collapse of modern civilization you have to be afraid that you will be robbed mainly from locals, though "foreign" robbers already are better at that, showing extreme proficiency at doing exactly that today.
Both groups came from Asia. The reason why the Hungarians seem "local" now is that they've intermarried with local people for so long. But the language they speak is not Indo-European. It's actually related to language spoken in Siberia.
- European diseases
- superior weaponry
- alliances with local Aztec enemies
The first wave of smallpox killed 5-8 million and is by far one of the greatest factors.
What most of the comments along with article writer are missing - it was not just technology, that Spanish used, but organization structure and command of professional military forces - that is one of the reason why 1000s of peasants were incapable to fight against couple of men in armor, as they lacked coordination - that would be the same as pitting street kids against a swat team, even if they were given the same weapons.
The same applies to Aztecs that had different POV and mindset against battle-hardened professional European soldiers - when you read how Aztec demise unfolded, in some of it you have to question what they were thinking, but that is mostly because of our modern bias, that has not much knowledge of their beliefs on how they viewed world around them.
Also, not more important fact - now, just like then, not all people were interested to be involved in war, and a peace agreement for them was even better than being part of alliance(and the choices here are to die for foreign Aztecs as one of them) and join fight. And those who already hated Aztecs to the guts, also had plenty of motivation to see all of that empire burn.
PS. People who are mentioning bunch of foreigners are clueless about European history - whole European FEUDALISM political system was born out of bunch of foreign raiders, that we know today as vikings and their descendants, that carved up Europe and limited their in-fighting with rules and brought unified force against those that challenged them. Europeans had pretty much the same scenario before repeated on native Americans and many times.
On top of being what enabled them to form alliences, it also begs another question. If it was primarily these masses that overwhelmed the Aztecs (and I don't disagree) then what need did they have of outsiders, let alone letting them act as rulers? It was the perception of alien levels of weaponry and technology that both gave the locals the morale they needed, and justified the Spaniards being deemed leaders.
In the end the defeat of the Aztecs was decided just as much by politics as by violence.
People sometimes needs a push to get onboard an idea. When you have been inside a system for along time it is difficult to see to what extreme is not just and how very possible it is the change it. Looking at you USA.
Now that really epitomizes the (horrible) Usanian mindset and way of “thinking” (regardless of whether or not that's where you're actually from).
What if the Indios were actually interested in listening to what the Spaniards had to say? They said there is no need for human sacrifice – because there is a god that doesn't require sacrifice, having settled that once and for all by sacrifying his own son.
The world would be in a much better state if there were any (or more) real Christians in the USA instead of the materialist sects that pose as such (or even as sth else) and bring the unfortunate “blessings” of their “culture” over the globe.
What is a usanian?
Sometimes people simply use words because of a generally accepted dictionary meaning. Like you are doing to read this.
It's the equivalent of calling a white guy a honkey in 2026 - cringe and not going to get the reaction you hope for unless doing it comedically.
You presuppose they needed the outsiders. The Aztec empire was not some ancient, unwavering fact of life which the native mesoamericans could not conceive of changing. It only lasted 100 years. It is entirely possible that the rebellion was going to happen anyways in the next few years or decades and the arrival of the Spanish was just the butterfly flapping its wings that happened to trigger it at that moment.
> justified the Spaniards being deemed leaders.
The native allies of the conquistadors installed the Spanish to replace the Aztecs in exchange for a lower tax rate and increased independence. They did not accept spanish leadership, they just preferred empowering a neutral third party than any particular longstanding rival. Spanish domination came later after smallpox decimated the native population and intermarriages with the pre-existing elite meant there was no native power structure left to stand up to them.
The historical record is completely clear and we have first hand accounts, primary sources, from the people present. It's all readily available and anyone interest can easily verify it.
And yet, even in the comments responding to yours, people confidently state just blatantly untrue things.
- Gunpowder and steel had essentially nothing to do with Cortez's victory.
- The Aztecs did not see the Spaniards as Gods
- Smallpox played a role at the very end but had little to do with Cortez's victory.
- They leave out the primary reason Cortez won (his ability to build a coalition of native people who hated the Aztecs).
- They leave out the secondary reason Cortez won (superior European battle tactics).
- They ignore the fact that there were Europeans fighting on both sides (a delegation was sent from Cuba to stop Cortez; they were the ones that actually brought the smallpox not Cortez).
The idea that the Aztecs took the Spanish for gods and specifically that Moctezuma mistook Cortez's for the returning god Quetzalcoatl is fiction. We actually know the exact book that it came from.
Smallpox did play a role but it was brought by the slaves of Europeans sent to _stop_ Cortez nearly two years after he started fighting the Aztecs. By the time smallpox killed Moctezuma's successor, Cortez's victory was already assured. The disease was not the key to his victory; it was more that it prevented insurgency after the conquest.
Also worth noting that if your theory was that Cortez won because of the gun powder or steel that is hard to square because by the time the two forces clashed the Aztecs had more of it then he did given the rival European forces trying to stop him.
Cortez won primarily because he had an army with a nucleus of veterans from the Italian wars that applied the lessons of the Reconquista.
The technology that let him win was European tactics and political manuevering not anything physical they brought with them.
This is a bit of an overcorrection to the post-conquest myth about Quetzcoatl (which doesn't show up in pre-contact sources).
This stems from the word "Teotl" which subjugated tribes started calling the Spaniards when they began to openly defy the Aztecs. The translation is complicated, as the word means both "the magical force underlying the world" (our closest word is mana) and "magical creatures" (which in Western mythological terms includes deities, demons, devils, saints, angels, kobolds, elves, etc.) with the implication that they have some power over the world.
This word was translated to Deos by the Spaniards, as their mythology was very strongly influenced by Christianity (modern mythology is similar this but with the extensive expansion that Tolkien popularized), and this was the natural word they would use. Plus it makes them look good at home to be able to say "these people were so primitive they thought us gods" - so mistranslation serves them well.
But there certainly was a larger-than-life view of them due to the immense technology difference and sheer audacity of the expedition. Just not to the extent that the colonial sources from the West wanted everyone to believe.
When the Spanish showed up, the Aztec's enemies didn't immediately line up to join the anti-Mexica alliance, as some people tend to think. The Spanish weren't seen as gods and worshipped. Pestilence would be a factor later on, but in early days the natives they met were quite healthy. The Spanish weren't seen as foreigners from across the sea or anything special because that wasn't really a concept for the natives. The Spanish were just another funny looking tribe from over the horizon that had showed up to fight for space, much like the Aztec's once had.
The Spanish initially had to fight hostile tribes on their own. There were battles where they had to fight through the night, while they were injured, and against incredible odds. The Spanish, especially the ones from Extremadura, were widely regarded by contemporary Europeans as some of the very best soldiers on the continent. Only after they'd done some hard fighting were they seen as having a chance against the Mexica and worth making alliances with.
So, yes, the Spanish won allies who helped them fight the Mexica, but they needed their guns, steel, and horses to win those allies.
There were also rival indigenous states (Tlaxcala, etc.) that were never conquered by the Aztecs but had been trapped in continuous low-intensity war with them for years.
Though it is worth saying the Aztecs weren't universally despised. Some regional dynasties were allies. Some of those were also unpopular.
Which is both likely true and morally against what we currently seem to believe.
There was unrest and violence in the region long before Cortez arrived on the scene, when he did he was the external catalyst to ignite the powder keg. When reading accounts of the conquest, information gathering, political scheming and negotiations were often more "decisive" than the actual fighting.
It doesn't mention the spanish conquest but I wouldn't be surprised if all those tribes living under Aztec rule needed a little morale boost and seeing a bunch of guys with iron weapons and armor who wanted to do away with the aztecs surely helped with that
[1](https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-aztecs-by-inga-clendinne...)
I read that same review a couple of weeks ago and it made a deep impression. It's one thing to know "the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice", and another to be confronted with the scale, sadism and calculation with which it was practiced.
"If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it
[...]
No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings"
« Aztecs … human sacrifice » — Yes, here, too, the story has been shaped by a certain leyenda negra that Spain's enemies concocted, when in fact the Spaniards set an end to an absurd indigenous slaughter system, allegedly necessary as part of literally everyday life to make the Sun rise every morning.
Humanized sci-fi version would be “Logan's Run” (1967/76), read this reference as “curiously meandering” (dang):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run_(film)
"Starbucks-and-airport-lounges class" is a good phrase. I'm gonna use that one.
Sounds like luck (and if luck, why is it cohesive?) or a GOD wanted a certain outcome.
Usually a single explanation isn’t sufficient, but and it’s likely a combination of disease, better weapons, cultural differences (attitudes towards war and one another), alliances as you mentioned, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Malinche
Like put the Black Prince up against Alexander and even Alexander has a uphill battle. Now take away Alexander's cavalry and give the Black Prince primitive firearms. Unless Alexander gets the jump on him or finds a way to make the meeting of forces otherwise highly unequal, that battle is probably only going one way, and that's for forces of comparable motivation levels.
The numbers disparity only gets you so far Ancient empires generally lack the social sophistication to motivate soldiers to the degree that more modern societies do. Those Aztec conscripts who have been "voluntold" into service by their communities at best are not going to fight to the bloody end. They do not consider themselves citizens of "The Aztec Empire". They are not going to march to their near certain deaths for the benefit of the empire like they're some red army machine gun squad piling into a rowboat to cross the Volga in 1941. They can not even have the mental framework for that because a pre-industrial society does not run enough surplus for the state to do the things it must to create that.
Exaggerating a bit, but I'm fairly sure the Spanish speech was: "if you kill the other guys with your much better weapons, you will reach El Dorado".
And they basically did. Not a singular city of gold, perhaps, but the Spanish looted tens of billions of $$ worth silver and gold from Central/South America between 1492 and 1550. Which is all the more impressive given how little European manpower it took and how low their relative incomes would've been at the time.
Ironically, Europe already had cochineal, but they foraged the source (parasitic beetles), while the bronze-age Aztecs had the brilliant idea to farm them on planted oak forests.
The dude was beyond in over his head, but considering that they "weren't in Kansas anymore" that probably helped him. Trying to run a by the book campaign as a conquering general ought to according to the practices of the time likely would've got them all killed at one of the several dozen points where that was the likely outcome but didn't happen.
The Spaniards had armor and combat formation. Having basic protection and having men march next to you closely must make you quite confident.
On the other hand Aztec fighting style seems to be "Go berserk and attract enemies to you so you can harm them to take them as captive so you can sacrifice them later for prestige". You are actually competing with your fellow warriors to show how brave you are". It seems the culture has optimized for not taking into account fear of death.
That might be a big advantage against other tribes that have the same level of tech than you but haven't bet the farm on militaristic culture but it probably breaks down pretty quickly on armies who rely on "confidence in the collective" rather than individual prestige and have somewhat of a tech edge
"This same zero-sum competition extended to the Mexica army, which as soon as battle was joined became not an army but a swirling melee of individual glory-seekers. The purpose of the Mexica warrior was not the victory of the group, but competition with his peers, and the way to win the competition was to secure captives for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli. This singular fact drove almost everything about Mexica combat strategy, or the lack thereof. Great warriors wore towering feather headdresses to attract opponents so that they could be disabled and sacrificed. The Mexica had projectile weapons, but specifically designed them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization. The Mexica wielded long, shallow obsidian blades and flint-studded clubs that were designed to incapacitate by cutting a hamstring or crushing a knee, rather than to kill. The only way to advance as a Mexica warrior was to sacrifice more captives than your peers,8 and the incentives of the system shaped everything else."
"the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, so their weapons alone were irrelevant in the battle"
Irrelevant? Tell this to Atahualpa Inca, who, during the second big Spanish conquest, was taken alive by a group of mere 168 Spanish soldiers, unsupported by any local warriors, while having at least several thousand guards with him. Force ratio of 40 or 50 to 1 ultimately made no difference.
TL;DR - native alliances were important, but Spanish armor made them nearly invincible against native weapons, their military tactics were superior, and cavalry were extremely overpowered against armies made up only of footsoldiers. Weaponry and tech were certainly not irrelevant.
I don't think they could have taken control of the Aztec empire without allies and a lot of political intrigue. I think a good modern analogy was how the US quickly took over Afghanistan after 911. You could say we did it with a small group of special forces and a lot of air power. But really it is more like there were already (warlord) factions ready to strike at the Taliban who knew they could win with air support and everything that would come after. For the Aztecs, the role of the cavalry was like those B52 strikes.
Oh, those foolish savages! They're so dumb!
Good thing we know what they thought as they died, so we don't have to guess with self-congratulatory scorn as our guiding self-check.
Ask for DNA and what is known.
Climate records and what is known.
Town losses and movements. In some places inhabitants seemingly moved way way up the mountains all of a sudden. This is usually associated with conflict or tidal waves.
Migration evidence.
And any other disease or food shocks.
One must also be careful to understand the data observation process and to justify any belief that the collapse is not merely absence of observations.
> Alexander, originally from the Greek Ἀλέξανδρος (Aléxandros), from αλέξειν aléxein meaning "to ward off, keep off, turn away, defend, protect" and ἀνδρός andrós, genitive of ἀνήρ anḗr meaning "man".
> Meaning "Defender, protector of man"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander
https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...