Venkatesh Rao is a consultant and a blogger at Forbes and at Information Week.
Here is his map of his website, ribbonfarm, and its surroundings:
From ribbonfarm:
...The big value to studying world history is that no matter how much you know or think you know, one new fact can completely rewire your perspectives. The biggest such surprise for me was understanding the real story (or as real as history ever gets) of how iron came to displace bronze, and what truly happened in the shift between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
What comes to mind when you think “bronze?” Hand-crafted artifacts, right?
What about iron? Big, modern, steel mills and skyscrapers, right? Iron metallurgy is obviously the more advanced and sophisticated industry in our time.
The Iron Age displaced the Bronze Age sometime in the late second millennium BC. The way the story is usually told, iron was what powered the rise of the obscure barbarian-nomads known as the Aryans throughout the ancient world.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this was a sudden event based on iron being suddenly discovered and turning out to be a “superior” material for weaponry, and the advantage accidentally happening to fall to the barbarian-nomads rather than the civilization centers.
Far from it.
Here’s the real (or “less wrong”) story in outline.
The Clue in the Tin
You see iron and bronze co-existed for a long time. Iron is a plentiful element, and can be found in relatively pure forms in meteorites (think of meteorites as the starter kits for iron metallurgy). Visit a geological museum sometime to see for yourself (I grew up in a steel town).
It is hard to smelt and work, but basically once you figure out some rudimentary metallurgy and can generate sufficiently high temperatures to work it, you can handle iron, at least in crude, brittle and easily rusted forms. Not quite steel, but then who cares about rust and extreme hardness if the objective is to split open the skull of another guy in the next 10 seconds.
Bronze on the other hand is a very difficult material to handle. There have been two forms in antiquity. The earlier Bronze Age was dominated by what is known as arsenical bronze. That’s copper alloyed with arsenic to make it harder. That’s not very different from iron. Copper is much scarcer and less widely-distributed of course, but it does occur all over the place. And fortunately, when you do find it, copper usually has trace arsenic contamination in its natural form. So you are starting with all the raw material you need.
The later Bronze Age though, relied on a much better material: tin bronze. Now this is where the story gets interesting. Tin is an extremely rare element. It only occurs in usable concentrations in a few isolated locations worldwide.Tomorrow we'll be back with "The Mother of All Disruptions".
In fact known sources during the Bronze Age were in places like England, France, the Czech Republic and the Malay peninsula. Deep in barbarian-nomad lands of the time. As far as we can tell, tin was first mined somewhere in the Czech Republic around 2500 BC, and the practice spread to places like Britain and France by about 2000.
Notice something about that list? They are very far from the major Bronze Age urban civilizations around the Nile, in the Middle East and in the Indus Valley, of 4000-2000 BC or so....MORE
