The Bronze World

The age that followed the first cities takes its name from a metal, and the metal tells the story better than any king. Bronze, harder and far more useful than the copper it replaced, is an alloy, and to make it you must combine copper with a much rarer ingredient: tin. And tin, in the ancient Near East where bronze became the basis of power, was almost nowhere to be found locally. It had to come from far away, from a scatter of distant sources hundreds or even thousands of miles off, carried along the trade routes of the last chapter that now stitched the whole known world together. Sit with the implication, because it shaped everything: the very metal that armed a Bronze Age army and adorned a Bronze Age palace could not be obtained at all without reaching across the horizon to bargain with strangers. Civilization, from its second act onward, was built on connection, and could not step back from it.

And so, across the second millennium BCE, there arose something genuinely new under the sun: not a single empire but an interconnected system of nations, a true international order. There was Egypt of the pharaohs, ancient even then. There were the Hittites, a genuine superpower of massed chariots and hard-nosed diplomacy, ruling from their fortress capital of Hattusa in the Anatolian highlands. There were Babylon and Assyria in Mesopotamia, Kassite and warlike by turns. On the Greek mainland rose the Mycenaeans, the warrior culture of the great Lion Gate and the shaft-graves heaped with golden masks, the people later Greeks would remember as the heroes of the Trojan War. And on the island of Crete flourished perhaps the most beguiling of them all, the Minoans: a seafaring people who built sprawling, brightly frescoed palaces at Knossos with running water, flush drainage, and grand ceremonial staircases, who worshipped in ways that involved leaping over the horns of charging bulls, who left us the enduring legend of a labyrinth and a bull-headed man at its heart, who seem to have grown rich not by conquest but by trade across the wine-dark sea, and whose script, which we call Linear A, joins the Indus and Elamite scripts of the last chapters in the ranks of the founding writings we still cannot read. These were not sealed and separate kingdoms glaring at one another across the dark. They knew each other intimately.

We know just how intimately because their diplomatic mail survived, by pure luck, in a fire. In the ruined Egyptian capital of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, archaeologists uncovered a cache of clay tablets, the Amarna Letters, that are nothing less than the private correspondence of the Bronze Age great powers: kings addressing one another as "brother," haggling over shipments of gold and the terms of marriage alliances, complaining bitterly of slights and delayed gifts, requesting skilled physicians on loan, and pledging mutual friendship, all in a shared diplomatic language, Akkadian, that functioned as the age's international tongue from the Nile to Anatolia. And two of those royal correspondents, the Egyptian Ramesses the Second and the king of the Hittites, having fought their armies to an exhausted and bloody draw at the Battle of Kadesh, later did something that still resonates: they negotiated and signed a formal, written peace treaty, and copies survive from both sides, in Egyptian on a temple wall and in Akkadian on baked clay. It is the earliest surviving peace treaty between nations in human history, and a reproduction of its text hangs today at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, a gift from one age of fragile international order to another. More than three thousand years ago, humanity had already built a cosmopolitan world of commerce, embassy, and treaty, and had already learned the hard lesson that such a world runs on trust exactly as much as it runs on tin.

That world was inventive in spirit as well as in trade, and one experiment in it is worth pausing on because it planted a seed that would reshape everything. The pharaoh Akhenaten, in whose ruined city the letters were found, attempted something almost unthinkable for his time: he swept away Egypt's vast and ancient throng of gods and decreed the worship of one deity alone, the radiant disk of the Sun, the Aten, in what may be the first genuine experiment with monotheism in the recorded human story. He built a whole new capital to it, closed the old temples, and redirected a civilization's entire spiritual life toward a single divine principle. It failed utterly. After his death his priests and successors erased his heresy, tore down his city, and hacked his name from the monuments, trying to unmake him from history. But the idea had been spoken aloud in the world for the first time, the idea of one God above all others and beside no others, and ideas, once spoken, have a way of returning. This one would return with tremendous force.

And it was in this connected world that people kept telling, in ever grander and more cosmic form, the old story this book has been quietly tracking through the dark. The Babylonians, in their great creation epic the Enuma Elish, told how their champion god Marduk did battle with Tiamat, the vast primordial dragon of the salt chaos-waters, and slew her, and split her enormous serpentine body in two to make the dome of the sky above and the earth below, so that in their telling the entire ordered cosmos was carved from the corpse of a great serpent of the deep. And here is the thing that should stop us: far across an entire unbridgeable ocean, in Mesoamerica, peoples who could not conceivably have heard a single syllable of any of this were beginning to carve, as their own supreme divinity, a serpent, Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake, bringer of maize and calendar and writing, giver of civilization itself, a knowledge-serpent set at the very origin of the world. The serpent simply will not leave the frame of this book. On opposite sides of the planet, with no possible contact, the human imagination keeps reaching for the snake and setting it at the beginning of things, at the making of the world and the source of what we know. We are marking these appearances deliberately as we pass them, letting them accumulate, because when we finally stop to face the pattern head-on, the sheer weight of its independent recurrences is the whole of the puzzle.

For all its splendor, its embassies and its frescoes and its golden masks, the Bronze World carried a hidden weakness, and it was the same one written into its founding metal. It was exquisitely, and increasingly, interdependent. Every palace relied on distant trade for the tin without which there was no bronze, on far-off partners for the luxuries that signaled its status, on the smooth and continuous working of the whole vast web for its own security and wealth. Cut enough of the threads at once, and every node in the network would starve together. The system had grown magnificent, cosmopolitan, and rich beyond anything the world had seen. It had also grown, without anyone quite deciding it should, into a single tightly coupled machine. And a single tightly coupled machine can suffer a single, total, cascading failure. Around the year 1200 BCE, it did exactly that.