57 Fun Facts About The Bronze Age

Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper together with which other metal?

Tin. Around a tenth of the mix is enough to make copper far harder, but tin ore is scarce, so the mines of Cornwall ended up supplying bronze-smiths across much of Europe.

In the three-age system, the Bronze Age sits between which two other ages?

Stone and Iron. The ages are stages rather than fixed dates: Britain's Bronze Age began only around 2000 BC, about a thousand years after the Old World's first.

Which Danish curator developed the three-age system while arranging a Copenhagen museum's antiquities?

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. He dated objects by noting which kinds were found buried together, which gave prehistory its first evidence-based order.

Which weapon was a Bronze Age invention, unknown to earlier hunters and warriors?

The sword. It grew out of the dagger as smiths learned to cast ever longer blades in copper and bronze, and it stayed the leading hand weapon for thousands of years.

Before the classic recipe took hold, many early bronzes hardened copper with which poisonous element?

Arsenic. It occurs naturally in some copper ores, so the first such alloys may have been accidents; later smiths may have picked the right ores by the garlic smell they gave off when heated.

Why did iron, much commoner than copper, come into common use only after bronze?

It needs far hotter furnaces. Copper melts at about 1,085 °C but pure iron only near 1,540 °C, so early smiths could never pour iron and instead hammered it out of a glowing, spongy lump.

Which region is usually credited as first into the Bronze Age, with the rise of Sumer?

West Asia and the Near East. Sumer's river plain had almost no metal of its own, so every ingot had to be traded in from distant mountains, making it a land of merchants from the start.

Which stepped temple towers, like the one built at Ur around 2100 BC, crowned Bronze Age Mesopotamian cities?

Ziggurats. Each was a solid mass of mud brick with no rooms inside, and the great one at Babylon is popularly linked with the Bible's Tower of Babel.

Which region's archaeology has no Bronze Age, using stages such as Formative and Classic instead?

The Americas. Metalworking reached Mexico and the Maya late, between about AD 600 and 900, and then mostly for bells and ornaments, long after their great stone cities had risen.

Egypt's Late Bronze Age, when its empire reached its peak, is known as which period?

The New Kingdom. It began when the princes of Thebes drove out the Hyksos, foreign rulers of the Delta; their successors then pushed Egyptian power far up the Nile and deep into the Levant.

The Hittites ruled an empire across Anatolia and northern Syria from which capital city?

Hattusa. An earlier king had razed the city and laid a curse on anyone who resettled it; the Hittite ruler who moved in anyway took the name Hattusili, 'the one from Hattusa'.

Which pharaoh fought the Hittites at Kadesh around 1274 BC, then had the battle carved on his temples as a triumph?

Ramesses II. Surprised by a Hittite chariot charge, he rallied his army to scrape a draw and never did take Kadesh, yet his reliefs show a great victory.

A replica of the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty hangs at which organisation's headquarters?

The United Nations. Sealed some fifteen years after the two empires fought at Kadesh, the pact pledged lasting peace and mutual help, and it is often called the oldest known peace treaty.

The Amarna letters, diplomatic correspondence of 14th-century BC Egypt, are unusual because they are written in which script?

Cuneiform. Babylonian was the shared diplomatic language of the day, so even the pharaoh's scribes wrote to foreign courts in its wedge-shaped script, pressed into clay tablets.

The Bronze Age Minoan civilization, builders of the palace of Knossos, was centred on which island?

Crete. The label Minoan is modern: the excavator Arthur Evans popularised it in honour of Minos, the island's legendary king and keeper of the Minotaur.

The Mycenaean Greeks adapted a Minoan script into which system, the first record of the Greek language?

Linear B. It was cracked in 1952 by Michael Ventris, an architect and amateur code-breaker, who showed that the palace tablets recorded an early form of Greek.

Which archaeologist found the so-called 'Mask of Agamemnon' at Mycenae in 1876?

Heinrich Schliemann. He was sure he had found Homer's king, but the mask was made in the 16th century BC, some three centuries before any plausible Trojan War.

Thera, whose Bronze Age eruption is sometimes blamed for weakening the Minoans, is better known today as which island?

Santorini. The island is the surviving rim of the exploded volcano, its cliffs ringing a sea-filled crater, and the ash that buried the town of Akrotiri kept its houses and wall paintings intact.

Which Mediterranean island, a major copper supplier since the Bronze Age, gave the metal its name?

Cyprus. The Romans called the metal 'aes Cyprium', metal of Cyprus, a phrase later worn down to 'cuprum', which is why copper's chemical symbol is Cu.

The Late Bronze Age collapse of about 1200 BC plunged which land into a 'Dark Age' that lasted for centuries?

Greece. Its palaces burned and the art of writing vanished there for centuries, until the Greeks borrowed a new alphabet from the Phoenicians.

Which Babylonian king of the Bronze Age had 282 laws carved on a tall stone pillar?

Hammurabi. Six centuries later an invader carried the pillar off as loot to Susa, in what is now Iran, where a French expedition dug it up in 1901; it now stands in the Louvre.

Which mysterious raiders, shown fighting Egypt in the temple reliefs at Medinet Habu, are often blamed for the Late Bronze Age collapse?

The Sea Peoples. The name is a modern coinage, and nearly everything known about them comes from the Egyptian side, so who they were and where they came from is still disputed.

Which king of Uruk is the hero of a Bronze Age Mesopotamian epic about a failed search for eternal life?

Gilgamesh. Shaken by the death of his friend Enkidu, he travels to the ends of the earth to question the one man who survived a great flood sent by the gods.

The Uluburun shipwreck, a late-14th-century BC merchant vessel, was found off the coast of which modern country?

Turkey. In 1982 a local sponge diver told archaeologists of 'metal biscuits with ears' on the seabed; they were copper ingots, and raising the cargo took more than 22,000 dives.

A scarab found in the Uluburun shipwreck bears the name of which Egyptian queen?

Nefertiti. The scarab helps to date the wreck: the ship cannot have gone down before she became queen, in the middle of the 14th century BC.

The Nebra sky disc, the oldest known concrete depiction of the cosmos, was found in 1999 in which country?

Germany. Two men with a metal detector dug it up illegally and sold it; after passing between dealers in stolen goods, it was seized by police in a sting in Basel in 2002.

The cluster of seven stars on the Nebra sky disc is generally interpreted as which star group?

The Pleiades. The disc's other stars seem to have been spaced so that no constellation forms, leaving this one cluster to stand out; ancient farmers timed ploughing and harvest by its rising and setting.

Tutankhamun was buried with an iron dagger when smelted iron was still very rare; where did its metal come from?

A meteorite. The blade's high nickel and cobalt content matches iron meteorites, and Egyptian texts of the next century use a word for the metal that translates as 'iron of the sky'.

The Bronze Age Trundholm sun chariot turned up in 1902 when what kind of land was first ploughed?

A former bog. The horse-drawn sun disc is gilded on one face only, thought to show the bright sun crossing the sky by day and its dark side on the return journey by night.

Late Bronze Age Central Europe was dominated by which people, named for their cremation burials?

The Urnfield culture. Its people buried the ashes of their dead in urns in flat cemeteries, and they seem to have lived with war: settlements were fortified and some warriors wore armour of beaten bronze.

The Sardinian Nuragic civilisation is named for what?

Its distinctive stone towers. Thousands of these cone-shaped nuraghi still stand, a kind of building found nowhere else in the world, and the tower has become the emblem of Sardinia.

Ancient DNA links the Yamnaya herders of the Bronze Age steppe to the spread of which language family?

Indo-European. Their descendants are thought to have carried its parent tongue west across Europe and east toward India, which is why English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi are distant cousins.

The oldest spoke-wheeled chariots yet found lay in 4,000-year-old steppe graves beside which mountains?

The Urals. Light and fast, the chariot is thought to have spread south from the steppe, and it went on to transform the armies of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Tooth enamel shows that the 'Amesbury Archer', buried near Stonehenge about 2300 BC, grew up in which mountain region?

The Alps. The chemistry of his teeth, fixed in childhood, shows he was an immigrant, and a metalworker's stone in his grave hints that he may have brought the new craft with him.

The Amesbury Archer, buried near Stonehenge around 2300 BC, was found with the earliest known examples of what in England?

Gold objects. The two little hair ornaments lay among about 100 items, ten times the usual number for such a grave, which is why the press crowned him the 'King of Stonehenge'.

Great Orme, where Bronze Age miners dug miles of copper tunnels, lies in which part of Britain?

Wales. The miners worked with stone hammers and tools of animal bone, and the tunnels came to light only in 1987, during a scheme to landscape the site.

Must Farm, a Bronze Age stilt village in the English fens preserved by a sudden fire, is nicknamed Britain's what?

Pompeii. The houses burned within a year of being built and dropped into the river below, where the silt sealed in their contents, among them Britain's most complete Bronze Age wheel.

How did burial practice change in Britain between the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age?

From communal tombs to individual barrows. Single graves, often furnished with a drinking beaker and personal treasures, suggest that society now marked out one person's rank instead of honouring the ancestors as a group.

The Bronze Age on the Indian subcontinent began around 3300 BC with which culture's rise?

The Indus Valley Harappans. Their planned cities had baked-brick houses and elaborate drains, yet their script has never been deciphered, so even the language they spoke is unknown.

Which dynasty, the earliest in China confirmed by archaeology, ruled during the country's early Bronze Age?

The Shang. Their last capital, near modern Anyang, yielded the oracle bones: questions to the spirits scratched on bone and shell, which are the oldest surviving Chinese writing.

Which material gives its name to the 'lost' casting method Bronze Age smiths used for intricate objects?

Wax. A wax model was packed in clay and heated until the wax ran out, then molten bronze was poured into the hollow it left; sculptors still cast this way today.

Chinese oracle bones were usually made from turtle shells or the shoulder blades of which animal?

Oxen. A diviner carved a question into the bone, pressed a hot rod against it until it cracked, and read the answer in the pattern of the cracks.

A gold treasure some 6,500 years old, often called the world's oldest, was found at Varna in which Black Sea country?

Bulgaria. An excavator driver digging a trench for electric cables hit the cemetery by accident in 1972; its Copper Age graves held about six kilograms of gold ornaments.

Which pre-Columbian civilisation made tools and weapons of bronze?

The Inca. They never smelted iron, so their star-headed maces of copper and bronze met Spanish steel armour that none of their weapons could pierce.

Around 2600 BC Egyptians set up a copper-smelting outpost at Buhen, in which ancient land along the Nile in modern Sudan?

Nubia. The Egyptians stayed at Buhen for generations, and excavators in 1962 uncovered what they described as a copper factory there, ringed by a rough stone wall.

Which deep-blue stone from the mountains of Afghanistan was prized across the Bronze Age world, as far away as Egypt?

Lapis lazuli. It travelled thousands of kilometres to frame the eyes of Tutankhamun's funeral mask, and long afterwards, ground to powder, it gave painters the pigment ultramarine.

Which epic poem by Homer is set in the Bronze Age, during the long siege of the city of Troy?

The Iliad. It stops before Troy falls: the poem follows only the war's final weeks and the rage of Achilles, and the trick that finally takes the city is told in other works.

Bronze and rice farming reached Japan in which era, after the long Jōmon age?

Yayoi. With iron on hand for working tools, bronze became largely a metal of ceremony: richly decorated bells called dōtaku were cast for rituals, thought to be prayers for good harvests.

The Korean peninsula has the world's densest concentration of which Bronze Age tombs, built from huge stone slabs?

Dolmens. Megaliths are usually linked with western Europe, yet tens of thousands of these tombs survive in Korea, more than in any other country.

Ban Chiang, called by UNESCO the most important prehistoric settlement yet found in Southeast Asia, is in which country?

Thailand. Its red-painted pots had been surfacing in the village for years before a visiting foreign student brought them to archaeologists' attention in 1966.

The great bronze drums of the Dong Son culture were made around which delta in northern Vietnam?

The Red River. The Dong Son who cast the drums, some a metre tall, were sailors and rice farmers too, and they are credited with first turning the delta into a great rice-growing region.

Which animals are carved above the monumental gateway to the Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae?

Lions. The citadel's walls are built of blocks so huge that ancient writers credited them to the Cyclopes, giants of myth, which is why such stonework is still called Cyclopean.

Which Bronze Age pharaoh raised the sun disc above Egypt's other gods and built it a new capital?

Akhenaten. Born Amenhotep, he renamed himself after his sun god and had other gods' names erased from temples, but after his death the old religion was restored.

The US National Gallery of Art ends China's Bronze Age in 771 BC, when which dynasty lost its western capital?

The Zhou. In 771 BC their king was killed and the capital sacked, so the court moved east to Luoyang, where later Zhou kings reigned with little real power.

Rock carvings and the shape of stone burial monuments suggest what played a big role in Nordic Bronze Age life?

Shipping. The region had to import all its bronze, and it left thousands of carvings of crewed boats and graves ringed with standing stones in the outline of a hull.

Ninkasi, praised in a Bronze Age Sumerian hymn of about 1800 BC, was the goddess of which drink?

Beer. Her hymn describes the brewing in verse, and Sumerians often drank the result through straws from large jars.

Which prized material from northern Europe's shores reached the royal graves of Mycenae during the Bronze Age?

Amber. Scandinavia had no bronze of its own and imported all of it, exporting this fossil resin in return along routes later known as the Amber Road.