The Bronze Age
The era of bronze metallurgy across Eurasia, c. 3300 – 1200 BCE
Also known as: Bronze-Age period, Bronze-age civilizations
The Bronze Age is the technological-civilizational substrate of the earliest known civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aegean (Minoan), the Levant (Canaanite), Anatolia (Hittite), and the Sinic world. Quigley dates its opening to roughly 3300 BCE, with 'the invention of writing and of bronze making' which 'marked the shift, at almost the same time, from the prehistoric to the historic period and from the Chalcolithic (or Copper-Stone Age) to the Bronze Age' (EoC 161). The Bronze Age closes around 1200 BCE with the Iron Age invasions that 'ended Cretan civilization forever' (EoC 191).
Quigley's chronology and threshold events
Quigley uses 3300 BCE as the conventional opening of the Bronze Age, identifying it with two near-simultaneous inventions: writing and bronze metallurgy. 'About 3300 B.C. ...the invention of writing and of bronze making marked the shift, at almost the same time, from the prehistoric to the historic period and from the Chalcolithic (or Copper-Stone Age) to the Bronze Age' (EoC 161). The Bronze Age proper unfolds in two major sub-phases: an early period of urbanization in the alluvial valleys (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus, Yellow River) from 3300 to roughly 2000 BCE, and a second period — the period of the great chariot-and-warrior empires — from roughly 2000 to 1200 BCE. The closing of the Bronze Age is the Iron Age invasion horizon of c. 1200 BCE, which Quigley treats as one of the great civilizational watersheds of world history: the moment at which the Bronze Age civilizational complex collapses and is replaced by a quite different Iron Age order.
Bronze Age rivalries and warrior peoples
In Weapons Systems and Political Stability Quigley devotes substantial chapters to the Bronze Age as a phase of military and political history. His chapter outline names 'Bronze Age Rivalries, 2000 to 1000 B.C.' (WSPS 5) as a defined unit. He identifies a 'second offensive phase' in his cycle of military history 'associated with the spread of bronze weapons and the rise of the great Bronze Age empires of the middle of the second millennium B.C., say about 1700–1300' (WSPS 71). A 'third phase of shock dominance in the West' belongs to 'the spread of the Bronze Age warrior peoples' (WSPS 70). Quigley sees the Bronze Age, militarily, as an offensive era — the chariot, the composite bow, and bronze armor giving mobile warrior aristocracies the decisive advantage over settled cultivators. This is the technological substrate of Quigley's larger weapons-systems theory: that the political form of a society is closely shaped by the dominant weapons system and by which side (offense or defense) currently holds the advantage.
The Bronze Age civilizations
Quigley treats the Bronze Age as the institutional context for the formation of several distinct civilizations: Mesopotamian (the Sumerian, Akkadian, Old Babylonian, and Assyrian sequence), Egyptian, Canaanite, Hittite, Minoan-Cretan, Indus Valley, and early Sinic. In The Evolution of Civilizations he uses these as comparative cases for the seven-stage cycle, treating Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations as exemplars of the model whose data is best documented. Bronze Age civilizations share a distinctive economic form — large-scale temple-and-palace redistribution centered on irrigation and grain agriculture — and a distinctive political form — sacred kingship — that the Iron Age successor civilizations would substantially transform. The 'sandwichlike appearance of western Asia' (EoC 161), with mountain pastoralists pressing on alluvial-valley agriculturalists, defines the political ecology of the period.
Within Quigley's analytical framework
The Bronze Age does not sit inside Quigley's seven-stage cycle as a single civilizational entity — it is a technological era spanning multiple parallel civilizations at different points in their own cycles. Mesopotamian civilization, for instance, traverses Mixture, Gestation, Expansion, Conflict, Universal Empire, and Decay within the Bronze Age envelope; Egyptian civilization is on a different but partially overlapping curve. Quigley uses the Bronze Age primarily as a comparative test bed for his instrument-of-expansion theory: each Bronze Age civilization had its own characteristic instrument (Mesopotamian temple administration; Egyptian Pharaonic state; Canaanite commercial capitalism; etc.), and the differential trajectories of the civilizations track the differential institutionalization of those instruments. The Bronze Age is therefore methodologically central to Quigley's project: it is the period in which the seven-stage pattern can be observed running in parallel across multiple test cases.
Cited in
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 4 Quigley
Bronze Age Invasions, 3000-1000 B.C....................................... 199
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 161 Quigley
By 3300 B.C., the invention of writing and of bronze making marked the shift, at almost the same time, from the prehistoric to the historic period and from the Chalcolithic (or Copper-Stone Age) to the Bronze Age.
- weapons-systems-political-stability · p. 5 Quigley
Bronze Age Rivalries, 2000 to 1000 B.C. 147
- weapons-systems-political-stability · p. 70 Quigley
A third phase of shock dominance in the West from the spread of the Bronze Age warrior peoples to the spread of the crossbow, the longbow, and firearms.
- weapons-systems-political-stability · p. 71 Quigley
A second offensive phase is associated with the spread of bronze weapons and the rise of the great Bronze Age empires of the middle of the second millennium B.C., say about 1700-1300.