Editing Bronze Age (section)

==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 in which were easier to deal with (bolts of cloth, ingots of metal, cowrie shells) but it was still an informal matter. This would vanish later, and China, Greece, Egypt and Philistines had all established currency a hundreds of years before 1000 B.C. (possibly earlier). That said, the earliest forms of money were contrived as aides to accounting by bronze age bureaucrats, since shifting large amounts of grain about from hold to hold is hard work with a Shekel being pegged at a bushel of barley.
**despite the general lack of money there was a lot of trade, Often at great distance. To make bronze you need copper (common) and tin which is pretty rare actually. Most of the tin used in the Mediterranean is believed to be from England of all places. In fact the World's oldest customer complaint, a clay table addressed to "Ea-nasir" regarding some poor quality copper dates to 1750 BCE, right in the middle of the Bronze Age.
* The shift to agriculture meant that humans started needing supplemental dietary salt to live, as well as to preserve meat.  [[Dune|Salt trade]] with areas able to mine or harvest it in useful quantities would become the first major form of commerce between empires.
* Pastoral Peoples emerged during this time. They had herds of livestock which they moved around with for food and fiber, sometimes engaging in a bit of agriculture on the side. Since they were always on the move, they lived light with stuff they could transport and they often played an important role in trade between city states. Often there would be clashes with Pastoral people and Agrarian nomads. Though they would decline as more areas turned to agriculture would often be the case until fairly recently (like 1500 years ago). The Mongols were the last great Hurrah! of pastorals.
* 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.
* Chariots!  Animal domestication lead to animals that could pull carts, which were then weaponized. In places where flat land was plentiful, it was very hard to engage in a combat against a wheeled cart that was shooting arrows at you, and even harder if there was a full formation of the things. Cart, animals, trained soldiers, and weapons got expensive in a hurry, especially for chariots which need two animals. As such they were replaced by cavalry once we bred horses to be big enough to take a human rider by it self, drastically reducing the price and support resources.
* A lot of what we think of as being part of the Classical Era has its roots in the Bronze Age. For example, the Egyptians have an extremely long history that stretches from the dawn of civilization to the rise of the Hellenic empire, much, much later. And the most famous Greek stories we know of by Homer, were written prior to the Classical age in what we know as “Archaic Greece,” and he was talking about a Greece even older than that that was effectively lost to its own Dark Ages. Much of what we know about this time period comes to us indirectly from the oral traditions of classical poets and historians, especially if the writing system of those societies became lost.