Bronze age

The Bronze Age
Was a period characterized by the use of Copper and its alloy Bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands betweenthe Stone Age and Iron Age. The term Stone Age implies the inability to smelt any ore, the term Bronze Age implies the inability to smelt Iron Ore and the term Iron Age implies the ability tomanufacture artifacts in any of the three types of hard material. Their arrangement in the archaeological chronology reflects the difficulty of manufacture in the history of technology.
During the past fewcenturies of detailed, scientific study of the Bronze Age, it became clear that on the whole the use of copper or bronze was only the most stable and therefore the most diagnostic part of a cluster offeatures marking the period. In addition to the creation of bronze from raw materials and the widespread use of bronze tools and weapons, the period continued development of pictogramic or ideogramicsymbols and proto-writing and other features of urban civilization.
The Bronze Age is the 2nd principal period of the three-age system as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen forclassifying and studying ancient societies. A region could be in the Bronze Age either by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere.Copper/tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact that there were no tin bronzes in western Asia before the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, but insome parts of the world, a Copper Age served as a transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Although the Iron Age generally followed the Bronze age, in some areas such as sub-Saharan Africa, theIron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic from outside the region.
A difference between some of the Bronze Age cultures was the development of the first writings. In Egypt (hieroglyphs), the Near...