Veeky Forums, tell me about Bronze Age Warfare. Or more specifically, how Bronze Age societies dealt with the advancement of iron.
I'm planning a setting for a campaign where the BBEG is leading an army that's fighting a coalition of the civilized realms through his innovations of cheap iron weaponry, recursive bows, meritocratic chain of command, and a Romanesque logistics system.
The other realms are standard Bronze Age Warfare- chariots, skirmishers, bronze shields, slingers, nobility led armies.
Historically, how did Bronze age societies adapt to changing conditions on the battlefield?
>how Bronze Age societies dealt with the advancement of iron By crumbling down into one giant dark age shitstorm, that's how.
Read on the Bronze Age collapse. It's pretty good stuff.
Jason Evans
Can bronze weapons and armor coexist with traditional D&D-style iron and steel armor and weapons?
Levi Sanders
I would think so. Bronze isn't to my knowledge that much more fragile than iron.
Carson Jones
Okay folks, listen up:
A bronze sword can pierce even steel. I'm serious. The thing is having the right alloy. The best bronze alloy surpasses some steels, but not all of them. youtube.com/watch?v=Uz_CBcxzOFk&feature=youtu.be
Mature bronze alloys are better than early irons, but require tin and copper together. The easiness of iron ore everywhere, quantity over quality, is what really made iron dominate. More ideas about Bronze Age stuff below.
Bronze is better than iron for weapons, but it is much more expensive. Bronze armor is heavy and expensive, but iron armor is harder to make.
The Bronze Age collapse came about for various complex reasons, but the presence of iron isn't one of them, late bronze age societies were well aware of the existence of iron.
Also, bronze age armies were pretty large, particularly when compared to the armies from the Dark Age that followed the collapse. It took about 500 or so years until society recovered enough to once again have large empires and large armies, at least in the Near East.
In general: Bronze Age collapse wasn't because iron became dominant, iron became dominant because of the vacuum left by the Bronze Age collapse. This is of course a vast simplification, since real history is much more complex.
The commonly accepted reasons for the Bronze Age Collapse are climate change together with natural disasters which resulted in vast migrations. It is generally accepted that the various invaders like the Dorians weren't really raiding barbarian hordes but more like immigrants that pushed out and replaced a weakened local culture.
Luis Flores
After a quick skim it looks okay, but a lot of it is Greek (as in, post dark age) and not Mycenaean. Which is understandable since a lot of what we know about Mycenaean culture is filtered through the lens of Homer and his contemporaries.
Jace Green
>Historically, how did Bronze age societies adapt to changing conditions on the battlefield? Usually by getting conquered by armies with new technology and then making use of that technology for themselves. A good example of this is Egypt, a lot of their technology (compound bows, bronze weapons, chariots) comes from external conquerors.
Austin Rodriguez
The Mycenaean period was a lot more feudal than later Greek periods. You didn't have the weighty democratic political structures and citizen armies, it was a lot more like medieval Europe with its lords and heroes leading companion warriors into battle, without the deep packed phalanx formations. There was a greater emphasis on skirmishing and raiding in their warfare. A good comparison is Celtic Ireland in how a great deal of warfare was handled, less organized battle lines and more camps raiding each other. Pitch battles still happened, but they weren't the norm, and they had no where near the numbers of later eras.
Levi Gutierrez
This is true, but it is also important to keep in mind that the Mycenaeans are not a good representation of the rest of the Mediterranean civilizations. Other cultures like the Hittites, Egypt or the Mesopotamian civilizations were more centralized and fielded large, organized armies and had some early forms of bureaucracy and government organizations needed to run an empire (even if they weren't empires themselves yet).
Easton Lee
Well, I did put >Greek Fantasy Tips and Resources to make that clear. But those are the parts I speciafically meant to link: 1/2
"The End of the Bronze Age. In this video, the foundation Luwian Studies presents a comprehensive and plausible scenario of what might have happened." youtu.be/oz5uFA9IWJ8 (4:54 resume) youtu.be/1DNyA90f_aw (49:00 full)
THE GREEK AGE OF BRONZE Weapons and warfare in the late Helladic time 1600-1100 BC salimbeti.com/micenei/ Also contains information on the Sea Peoples.
>Historically correct story about the Trojan War, uniting all the fragments and accounts. This is one of my favourite comic books. Own all the trades.
Noah Lee
2/2 >The Bronze Age collapse and the subsequent dark age is an almost unbelievable but real apocalyptic event. There are good theories, but much remains unexplained. The Sea Peoples, who were they? Where did they came from? These raiders of horned helmets and swift ships (quite the viking stereotype) are a blank in the history of the world. One known thing is that they razed all known civilizations, except for the phoenicians. These prodigal sailors and worshippers of Dagon were untouched and even prospered afterwards. "Sea People" being respectful to worshippers of "Dagon", need I say more?
navistory.com/pages/antiquity.php >A particularly rich and long era in naval matters, although rather limited in its study towards the Mediterranean. It began rouhly 1000 to 5000 years after the ice age. This period extends over the Bronze Age (3500 BC) and continues through the Iron Age (1200 BC) opening the classical era (500 BC).
Daniel Carter
I wonder where the idea for gryphons came from. Unlike a lot of other fantastical beasts, the way Greeks wrote about them was surprisingly naturalistic, and they didn't give them many, if any, fantastical qualities or origin. The tiger was written about with more of a sense of myth.
Cooper Davis
Dark Sun pretty much treated iron weapons as the equivalent of having a +2 magic weapon so I think you can change a bit here and there.
Josiah Taylor
>youtu.be/1DNyA90f_aw (49:00 full) I think it is important to note that Dr. Zangger theories are outside of the mainstream thinking and that his sources are pretty weak, a lot of his information comes from source written way after the fact (sometimes as far as the middle ages). Take everything he says with a large grain of salt.
Not that it matters for a fantasy game, since a crackpot scientist can provide good inspiration, sometimes even better than actual history. Like that Ancient Aliens guy or the "Troy was in England" guy.
Kayden Rogers
I think it has to do with the fact that they were all over the palaces and art of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans, which the early Greeks tended to believe were built by the gods or cyclopes.
Owen Rodriguez
I hope he finishes it one day.
That is beyond my knowledge to say. Can you expand this?
I agree with what you say, but that's honestly the first crackpot hypothesis that seems to merit at least further study to me. Better than the one above for example.
Carson Gutierrez
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Luke Howard
>seems to merit at least further study to me Yeah, this is true. Dr. Zangger at least did his research and seems reasonable about it, the only problem with him is that his sources are weak and he relies too much on written records.
His theories are not so outlandish and they are at least logical, so I can see it being true, but I'm not ready to go and say that anything he says is true right now.
Minoan mirrors, on the other hand, seem perfect for a low magic, fantasy Mediterranean world campaign.
Joshua Carter
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Jaxson Campbell
Exactly.
Tyler Bell
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Levi Mitchell
Just adding, contrary to popular belief mainland Europe wasn't as backward and dark as people tend to make it out to be. What we don't have from them is writing, but as sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle shows there were clearly large societies capable of fielding decently sized armies in the area. This means there has to be a similar level of government control seen in the near east to have put together the logistics to make the battle at the river possible.
Unofrtunately there's no way to know if these people actually had a system of writing because none survived. What I personally feel is likely is that these people wrote on wood if they wrote at all and that's why nothing has survived. A clay tablet will survive indefinitely, as will stone, provided they're not shoved under water. A wood "tablet" won't.
John Fisher
OP here, thanks user!
Dominic Clark
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Samuel Myers
"Most warriors either need or have only a large shield, helmet, cloak against rain and cold (taken off during the fight), sandals, javelins, spear and/or sword. Having that, you may be a topless amazon for all I care. Javelineers, archers and slingers usually have even less. Adding quilted armor and greaves may be enough to classify you as "heavy infantry", and with good reason: youtu.be/AQDr13TyLJ8 . Speaking of armor or lack thereof..."
Hmm, this doesn't seem to bode well against fighting an iron based army that can better equip itself with at least basic cuirasses, scale armor, chainmail and so on for its troops.
Jack Jackson
Well yeah, armies tend to have trouble against other armies that are 1000 years more advanced than they, technologically.
Julian Jones
Incidentally, this gives me the idea of having Bronze Age Humans fighting Late Middle Age/Early Renaissance era Dwarves.
Benjamin Sullivan
You're welcome.
In pitched battles, yeah. You can use the "tin+copper sources together" afterwards to level the playing field.
But largely unarmoured armies did give romans some beatings, see the Cimbri.
Ian Jones
Adding on to this, would be interesting for this setting to have the various races having different technologies levels?
Something like:
>Humans are Bronze Age >Orcs are Copper Age; rudimentary pastoralism and agriculture >Elves are Aztec tier Stone Age but with mass produced obsidian >Dwarves are Late Middle Ages >Goblins and Ogres are still Stone Age >Etc
Bentley Hill
Well yeah, there is evidence of trade routes going pretty far north. Similarly there's evidence of northern slaves being traded south.
I think Europe gets such a bad reputation because they didn't leave as many clearly visible permanent buildings, and what they did leave looks really primitive. This is probably mostly due to different building materials (wood as opposed to clay bricks and stone) and a harsher climate (to buildings, not necessarily to people).
They certainly weren't stuck in the Neolithic while the Near East was in the Late Bronze Age. On the other hand, while I wouldn't say they were less advanced, I think it's fair to say that their society was organized differently enough that they didn't have huge cities or enormous water management projects like Mesopotamia did, mostly because they didn't need to.
But in the end, something did force mass migrations of "barbarian" peoples from the north, either climate change or some form of internal unrest.
Personally, I dislike settings where there is a large technological discrepancy between civilizations sharing a certain geographic area. Isolation is the only believable reason for large technological discrepancies, since technology tends to spread regardless of how much people don't want it to, either through copying (just knowing that something is possible is a large step towards doing it), through conquest, or through trade. Even African bush hunters run in sneakers and carry plastic water jugs these days.
I also dislike settings where races are monocultures, particularly during the Bronze Age, since that was an era that was characterized by extensive trade networks and cosmopolitan societies, as well as frequent migrations and conquests.
Besides, there's enough variety in bronze age cultures to make things interesting.
Andrew Diaz
Read the comic Bronze age, it has a good idea about that and it's in the Iliade, with Historical acurate armor and weapons. It's alos a very well done comic in it's own right.
Xavier Torres
Hmm, thats fair criticism.
Elijah Butler
>bbeg
bleh
Lucas Perez
Technological gaps work with different races if there is a strong racial bias against them along with closed societies. In these ages many foreign entities are confined to certain quarters of a city and can't move beyond that.
African bush hunters these days having sneakers and carrying plastic water jugs is a result of modern material and manufacturing along with mass communications.
Colton Gray
Except for the question of why those who have better tech hasn't yet conquered those who do not.
And if we have, for example, a few high tech of race A living secluded here and there within race B, lacking the number to get anywhere even with their tech, then there's a golden opportunity for an enterprising nobleman of the latter race to buy some tech and found an empire.
Cultural barriers and whatnot can buy us some time here, but it doesn't seem like anything that could approach a stable system. One guy looks past the taboos and quickly everyone has to iron up or perish.
Charles Martin
Now you just need a long and contrived reason why the other races still exist if dwarves are that far ahead.
