Aegean Bronze Age
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Bronze objects were then exported far and wide, and supported the trade. Isotopic analysis of the tin in some Mediterranean bronze objects indicates it came from as far away as Great Britain.
Knowledge of navigation was well developed at this time, and reached a peak of skill not exceeded until a method was discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) to determine longitude around 1750.
The Minoan civilization appears to have coordinated and defended its bronze-age trade.
One crucial lack in this period was that modern methods of accounting were not available. Numerous authorities believe that ancient empires were prone to misvalue staples in favor of luxuries , and thereby perish by famines created by uneconomic trading .
How the bronze age ended in this region is still being studied. There is evidence that Mycenaean administration of the regional trade empire followed the decline of Minoan primacy. Evidence also exists that supports the assumption that several Minoan client-states lost large portions of their respective populations to extreme famines and/or pestilence, which in turn would indicate that the trade network may have failed at some point, preventing the trade that would have previously relieved such famines and prevented some forms of illness (by nutrition). It is also known that the bread-basket of the Minoan empire, the area north of the Black Sea, also suddenly lost significant portions of its population, and thus probably some degree of cultivation in this era.
Recent research has discredited the theory that exhaustion of the Cypriot forests caused the end of the bronze trade. The Cypriot forests are known to have existed into later times, and experiments have shown that charcoal production on the scale necessary for the bronze production of the late bronze age would have exhausted them in less than fifty years.
One theory says that as iron tools became more common, the main justification of the tin trade ended, and that trade network ceased to function as it once did. The individual colonies of the Minoan empire then suffered drought, famine, war, or some combination of these three factors, and thus they had no access to the far-flung resources of an empire by which they could easily recover.
Another family of theories looks to the volcanic explosion of Thera, which occurred shortly before the end of the bronze age. Thera is about 40 miles north of Crete, which was at the time the capital of the Minoan empire. Some authorities speculate that a tsunami from Thera destroyed Cretan cities. Others say that perhaps a tsunami destroyed the Cretan navy in its home harbor, which then lost crucial battles with the Mycenaean navy, so that a former colony took over the empire.
Yet another theory looks to the possible loss of Cretan expertise in administering the Empire. If this expertise was concentrated in Crete, and simply became discredited by military failure, then the Mycenaeans may have made crucial political and commercial mistakes when administering their empire. Each of these theories is persuasive, and aspects of all of them may have some validity in describing the end of the bronze age in this region.
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| Source: | Wikipedia |
| Link to article: | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age |