Bronze Age

2019-02-19T14:04:16Z

2600:1006:B16E:7A99:3592:6A5F:BE28:B8C: /* The appeal of the Bronze Age */

The '''Bronze Age''' is a period usually marked out by the development of Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin and a period in which human civilization really got going. In the late [[Stone Age]] basic agriculture had been worked out and a few farming communities had emerged. By the Bronze Age these had developed into fairly substantial and sophisticated societies with a high degree of specialization and stratification, complex governments, laws in place of customs and widespread trade networks reaching for thousands of kilometers. Writing and mathematics were developed as tools of governments and were used to build large scale projects. At this time cities grew into the tens of thousands, first as independent city states and latter as empires.

Beyond these early centers of civilization newer agrarian societies would emerge and rise while nomadic pastoral peoples would develop along their own lines and would trade and fight with the more developed civilizations who saw them as [[Barbarians]].

Technically the Bronze Age was preceded by the '''Copper Age''' in which the basics of metalworking were worked out and first applied and which developments were made, but for sake of simplicity on this site it's getting lumped in with the Bronze Age. Bronze Smelting began around 5,700 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and China about the same time and would spread from those two points. Generally speaking, the Bronze Age ended in the Fertile Crescent region after the Bronze Age collapse, in which several old civilizations fell or were devastated as ferrous metallurgy began to catch on. When civilization recovered and rebuilt, [[Classical Period|new ones rose in their place]]. In China the end of the Bronze Age was more gradual and less dramatic. Several Native American civilizations (such as the Incas and the Aztecs) would reach a Bronze Age level of development before the arrival of more advanced Europeans.
== Notes ==
* [[Money]] did not really exist back then. Peasants would give each other gifts and would do stuff for each other as they could (you give me some pots and I'll fix your roof when I can), governments paid people wages of food and goods and merchants haggled various goods with local officials, regular people and each other as they went. There were a few things that merchants preferred to deal with which were easier to deal with (bolts of cloth, ingots of metal, cowrie shells) but it was still an informal matter. This would vanish latter, and China, Greece, Egypt and Philistines had all established currency a hundreds of years before 1000 B.C. (possibly earlier).
* Many of the more developed Bronze Age societies had many aspects of society organized by the government. The government told peasants what to grow, collected taxes of food and similar from them, took them to central warehouses, gave artisans wages of stuff for making tools and weapons which they would use to pay people and distribute to people who needed them. All of which managed by castes of scribes and nobles. Basically think of the [[Imperial Tithe]] minus most of the Grimdark.
== The appeal of the Bronze Age ==
The Bronze Age is the earliest period that we have accounts of, even if they are incomplete. In this time that the earliest forms of civilization are gradually taking shape. To the eye of the romantic, priest-kings reign over populations of devoted followers who demand that their legacy be set in stone with great monuments and by fire and blood as they clash. Ranks of spearmen and bowmen march into battle led by charioteers which clash on burning sands with the winners taking the losers as spoils of war. The heroes might be favored faithful servants to their city and their king and the new world that is rising or barbarian warriors seeking glory, freedom and plunder.

If we want to get more fantastic, this period has produced complex mythologies with pantheons of squabbling gods and epic tales such as the story of Gilgamesh and the Trojan Wars. All of which are ripe material for a fantasy writer to mine. This is the time period for the [[Sword and Sorcery]] genre, as most of the myths that we know of from the classical period take place in this epoch. This gives the Bronze Age an air of mystique and grand adventure, where larger-than-life heroes fought against monsters and gods. Something that’s generally not possible with the even earlier Stone Age as the culture of that time period is too primitive to tell such grandiose stories, and where survival is really all that’s possible.

== Bronze Age inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
* [[Conan the Barbarian]]
* [[Tomb Kings]]

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{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Stone Age

2019-02-19T13:29:00Z

2600:1006:B16E:7A99:3592:6A5F:BE28:B8C: /* The appeal of The Stone Age */

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The longest period of human civilization, the '''Stone Age''' is the period from the emergence of humans to about 7,000 years ago. Said period is when early humans wandered the landscape hunting and gathering food using and latter making tools of materials such as wood, stone and bone.

== Sub periods ==
* ''Paleolithic'': Basically everything from the discovery of fire to about 20,000 years ago. It includes a wide variety of things from primitive hominids with sharp rocks and pointy sticks to anatomically modern H. Sapiens Sapiens with tents, sewn clothes and multi-part hatchets who made elaborate cave paintings.
* ''Mesolithic'': Roughly about 20,000 to 12,000 years ago. Things begin to get more complicated, tools get more sophisticated and specialized. Items such as bows and arrows and (in Asia) pottery shows up. Dogs and humans team up.
* ''Neolithic'': About 12,000 to 7,000 years ago people began to farm, slowly at first by weeding out patches of food plants as they went through and seeding areas with food plants and catching pliable animals, penning them and feeding them before slaughter, killing the uppity ones first. They begin building permanent structures and eventually settle down and build small villages, then towns and eventually small cities. Some specialize and hone their crafts. Eventually someone works out how to smelt Copper, thus bringing the Stone Age to a close.
Note: these end dates are of a first past the post nature. The Stone Age did not end for everyone the second someone [[Bronze Age|started making copper tools]]. Technically there are a few Stone Age peoples around today in odd corners of the world.
== The appeal of The Stone Age ==
This is a time when the world was not yet man's dominion. Humanity was just another species struggling to get by wandering the world, scraping up what they could from the land where they were not always on top of the food chain. It was also a time in which men walked alongside megafauna such as Mammoths, Ground Sloths, Woolly Rhinos, Short Nosed Bears and Saber Toothed Cats. It even includes people dealing with other species of human such as Neanderthals. If the idea of someone wandering a great empty wilderness of stark beauty and primal terror with real monsters getting by with only their wits and a few things they can cobble together from the wilderness interests you, the Stone Age is the place to set your games.

More fantastic versions of the Stone Age include Dinosaurs. This can fall into the fantasy trip of “The Lost World,” which brings both Stone Age civilization and dinosaurs into modern times, albeit in a very hard-to-reach part of the world (such as deep beneath the Earth) where travelers are forced to adapt to the savage and primal conditions they find themselves in.

== Stone Age inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
...fill me in...

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

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Bronze Age

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