Weapons of mass decentralization

Over three thousand years ago, on a plain beside the Orontes River in Syria, two great armies clashed in what may at the time have been the most colossal battle ever seen: the Battle of Kadesh. The two combatants, the Egyptians and the Hittites, together put forward tens of thousands of soldiers and over five thousand chariots, making the number of combatants comparable to some smaller First World War battles, and quite likely bigger than Agincourt, Hastings, and Yorktown. It was also the first battle whose events can be reconstructed in detail, as Pharaoh Ramesses II afterwards commissioned elaborate stone reliefs depicting the battle as a monumental victory, which remain in temples dotted across modern Egypt to this day.

The Egyptians and the Hittites were two of several great powers then dominant in the eastern Mediterranean. Others were the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and Mycenaean Greeks. All were bureaucratically complex societies, in some cases controlling territories of hundreds of miles, capable of mobilizing armies, extracting taxes, and completing ambitious infrastructural projects. But just a few centuries after the Battle of Kadesh, all had vanished or dwindled to a fraction of their former power.

The Bronze Age collapse – as this sudden disappearance of regional powers is known – is one of the great mysteries of ancient history. The usual explanation points to a series of catastrophes around 1200 BC: droughts, mysterious invaders called the Sea Peoples, famines, and internal revolts. But such explanations are insufficient as catastrophes like these often create political upheaval without permanently ending civilizations. The question is not why the Bronze Age empires fell, but why, after they fell, nothing like them returned for centuries. Why did it suddenly become so hard, seemingly, to build and sustain an empire?

If you go to see Ramesses’s stone reliefs today, your tour guide might tell you that both sides at the Battle of Kadesh wielded bronze weapons, common for imperial armies of the time. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and the tin in those bronze weapons would have had to have traveled thousands of miles from distant mines, perhaps in modern Afghanistan or in Western Europe. The difficulty involved in mining and transporting tin is one reason that access to bronze weaponry remained concentrated in military and elite institutions. The average citizen still largely relied on tools made of copper, stone, bone, or wood. But just a few centuries after Kadesh, ordinary Hittite and Egyptian farmers had access to a new material: iron.

Because iron could be produced locally, imperial centers no longer had such a strong advantage over their subject peoples. The invention of iron weaponry meant the political equilibrium was forever changed.

Today, we live in an era where access to the tools of violence has been exceptionally concentrated, allowing superpowers far larger than those of the late Bronze Age to reign largely unchallenged. But as military technology evolves, another age of upheaval may be approaching.

Scissors beat rock

The invention of bronze had already displaced an earlier metal: copper. The Copper Age began around 5000 BC and ran until around 3000 BC, when bronze weapons began appearing in the archaeological record. Copper was accessible enough and easy enough to work that it allowed early proto-states to reliably arm their warriors with something better than stone weaponry, which often chips or breaks under impact. Copper is a soft metal, hence its use in pipes and wiring today. But it generally won’t break, and though it does bend easily it can also be bent back into shape. This marginal benefit was enough to give groups with copper weapons a significant advantage.

Copper-wielding groups pushed into surrounding communities who used stone tools, beginning a process of prehistoric political consolidation. We see an increase in the number of fortified settlements, rising inequality in the grave goods with which people were buried, suggesting deepening hierarchies, and complex smelting sites as far as sixty miles away from where copper was mined, suggesting increased economic specialization.

Copper weapons were eventually made obsolete by the invention of bronze, made by combining copper and tin. Bronze is harder and stiffer, and will hold a sword’s edge for longer, which gave bronze-wielding groups a strong military advantage.

The spread of bronze preceded a wave of imperial conquest across the eastern Mediterranean. The Annals of Hattusili I, a cuneiform tablet found in the 1950s, details the expansion of the Hittite empire from its core in central Turkey to the Aegean Sea in the west and the Euphrates in the east during the 1600s BC. While the tablet is royal propaganda, the Hittites evidently viewed their history as one of conquest over surrounding groups: the tablet boasts of foreign cities sacked and burned, with weeds sown on the sites where they once stood. Egypt also saw its territory grow to incorporate large parts of Nubia and the Levant at around this time. These military successes would not have been possible without bronze.

Copper had come with a growth in social complexity and political consolidation as the metal required knowhow and social organization to mine, transport, anneal and smelt, and gave groups employing it an edge over stone users. Bronze entrenched this advantage due to a single geological fact: while copper had been somewhat rare, the tin required to transform it into bronze was even rarer.

The major tin deposits accessible to Bronze Age peoples from 3000–1200 BC were in modern Afghanistan, France, Iberia, and Cornwall, in southwest England. Distinctive chemical features of individual deposits mean we can track just how far tin mined in these places spread. Tin with trace levels of indium, particular to the Cornish deposits, has been found in shipwrecks near Israel and southern France, showing that Cornish tin traveled for thousands of miles. Smaller deposits existed in Turkey, the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and Iran.

The city-state of Mari in modern-day Syria acted as a tin hub, importing the metal from sources in the east and shipping it west up the Euphrates River. Texts from the eighteenth century BC record that Mari’s tin traveled over five hundred miles from a kingdom called Elam, which was itself another thousand miles from the Afghan mines that were its likely source. In addition to the distance and the difficult terrain, an ancient trader would have to worry about roaming bandits and aggressive foreign states along the way. Tin was extremely difficult for Bronze Age people to get hold of, making bronze weapons expensive.

This had a profound political consequence: elites had a major advantage in accessing the tools of violence. While smaller city-states could also get their hands on bronze, larger and more complex empires could do so more reliably. It was easier for them to obtain supplies, secure trade links, create stockpiles and replace losses. A Bronze Age king could field and sustain an army that smaller forces simply could not match. Peripheral communities at the edges of empires might resist for a while, but maintaining a seriously competitive army over time required state capacity that smaller forces generally lacked.

The Bronze Age collapse

At the time of the Battle of Kadesh, the eastern Mediterranean and Near East were filled with competing great powers: the Hittites had conquered most of Anatolia, the Egyptians controlled an area that stretched down into Sudan, the Assyrians and Babylonians vied for dominance in Mesopotamia, and southern Greece was ruled by a constellation of principalities including Mycenae, Pylos, and Thebes. These were advanced, bureaucratically organized societies that extracted labor, taxes and tribute from subjects and surrounding peoples.

Around 1200 BC, the system broke down. The archaeological record shows the imprint of bursts of violence before great empires disappeared. Greek palaces show ‘destruction layers’, archaeological evidence of burning, from a short period around this time. Similar scorch marks and scattered bones have been unearthed at Troy in a layer contemporary with the end of the Bronze Age.

In Greece, the kingdoms that had ruled the mainland collapsed so completely that the ensuing centuries were termed the Greek Dark Ages. The Hittite Empire, which had matched Egypt at Kadesh, virtually vanished. A centuries-long record of clay tablets detailing the culture’s laws, rituals, and literature abruptly stops at around 1200 BC. Egypt itself survived, but shrank, losing its Levantine territories and never recovering its former reach or imperial power. Similarly, Assyria contracted back to its inland imperial capital, and Babylonia, shaken by the collapse of the 440-year-old Kassite ruling dynasty, barely managed to limp on.

The resulting power vacuum set the stage for new empires to emerge, but that did not happen. Something was preventing the reconsolidation of small polities into vast empires. The causes of the Bronze Age collapse are still debated by historians: a series of severe droughts; the sudden appearance of mysterious Sea Peoples, who raided along the Mediterranean coast; the disruption of the tin trade routes; internal revolts; or possibly all of these at once. But there is another unifying factor that could have prevented the resurgence of empires: iron.

The blooming of iron

Iron itself was not a new discovery. Bronze Age people had encountered the metal when it fell to Earth in meteorites, but they largely lacked the ability to mine and extract it for themselves. Objects made of meteoric iron were luxury items: they have been found in royal tombs, including Tutankhamun’s, and are referenced in religious texts as ‘metal of the sky’. 

This changed towards the end of the second millennium BC, when people discovered how to extract iron from deposits in the ground and work it into tools and weapons. The problem is that iron requires much higher temperatures to melt than the metals used so far. Tin melts at 232 degrees Celsius, easy to reach in normal fires. Copper melts at 1,085 Celsius, achievable with a basic clay or stone furnace. Iron requires 1,538 degrees Celsius, which was impossible with the technology of the time. But Iron Age metallurgists found a way around this problem: the bloomery.

Bloomeries are a type of furnace that use bellows to push in extra air (and thus oxygen), creating a hotter fire that could reach 1,200–1,300 Celsius. This wasn’t hot enough to melt iron, but it didn’t need to be. The key was that the impurities in the iron ore would be drawn off, leaving pure iron. Ancient metallurgists were working with ores of iron oxide. A bloomery burned charcoal to create carbon monoxide, which drew oxygen out of the iron oxide; other impurities melted down into a liquid runoff, some of which could drain out of the resulting chunks of softened iron. These chunks would then be removed from the fire and, while still slightly softened, hammered to push out remaining impurities and weld the iron into a denser mass, leaving usable metal that could be reheated and worked into different shapes.

We don’t know for sure where this technique was invented. One possible origin is in India, where we find iron and bloomery byproducts in deposits with radiocarbon dates from around 1400 BC or even earlier. Another possibility is modern Georgia, where we find evidence of copper workshops experimenting with new methods of metal production. Quite likely there were several independent origins of the new method, similar to the multiple origins of bronze metallurgy or agriculture. The method reached modern-day Iran, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean over the next few hundred years, but it would take a millennium to reach the western Mediterranean at the same level of production.

The advantage of the previous technological leap, from copper to bronze, was that bronze is a stronger, stiffer, tougher metal superior in battle. Iron is different: it is not a better material than bronze. Good bronze is both harder than iron and more predictable. It also has the advantage of a lower melting point, meaning a broken bronze sword can be melted and recycled into a new one. So why did iron become dominant?

Abundance mindset

While the tin needed to make bronze could be found only in a few deposits in far-flung corners of the known world, iron is the fourth most abundant element in Earth’s crust. Many iron ores are also easy to spot on the surface of the ground. Goethite has recognizable black-brown color; limonite is a variant of goethite with a yellow tinge (when mixed with sand and clay it is known as ‘yellow ocher’, giving its name to the color); and hematite is a reddish-brown variant that leaves a rusty red streak when marked against a surface. An ancient miner could easily identify deposits as long as they knew what to look for.

Transporting tin required a trader willing to assume the cost and risks of a journey, but the average Iron Age smith could find sources much closer to home. One analysis of Iron Age artifacts in Denmark found that the iron was derived from ‘bog iron’ ores that were abundant in local wetlands, smelted with charcoal from local forests.

This new technology had momentous political implications. Since iron could be smelted locally, previously peripheral communities could arm themselves with weapons that were, for practical purposes, comparable to the weapons of the elite in the empire’s core. In contrast to bronze, iron democratized violence.

The effects of iron were so stark that ancient writers in the subsequent centuries began separating human history into the bronze and iron eras. Hesiod described the age of iron as a time of suffering and strife, where no man knew a day or night free of toil or pain. Herodotus writes in his Histories that working iron was ‘the woe lying upon woe, since iron had been invented to the detriment of mankind.’ These writers associated iron with war and decline; some also alluded to the idea that iron had democratized violence. The Hebrew Bible records that the Philistines attempted to limit access to smiths as they were worried others could easily make iron weapons. Lucretius describes the Bronze Age as a time when ‘naked men gave way to well-armed foes’ but said that iron made ‘the odds of war equal as they had not been before’. With the advent of iron, the cost of warfare fell: a king could not keep others from accessing a military technology found in local soils.

The end of empire

On maps of the eastern Mediterranean before and after the spread of iron, the difference is stark. There are no early Iron Age empires as large as their Bronze Age predecessors. The collapse of the Hittite Empire left a political vacuum in modern Turkey and Syria, but instead of another empire emerging in its place, we see a patchwork of smaller states, none of which approach the same levels of dominance and organization for centuries. A similar story can be told in mainland Greece, and in the parts of the Levant previously occupied by Egypt.

The archaeological record allows us to compare rates of violence before and after iron. A recent study looked at skeletal remains from the Middle East across several millennia. By looking at fracture patterns, researchers can infer whether skeletal damage was sustained while someone was alive, or after they were already dead and buried (for instance, damage caused by animals or by physical weathering). Researchers can also make inferences from factors such as the angle of fractures and where they are located. In the case of skull trauma, for instance, fractures caused by violence usually occur above where a hat would rest on your head. Once the skeletons are dated, we can track the trend of weapon-inflicted injuries over time. Compared with the Middle Bronze Age, before the invention of iron, skeletons from the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age show more signs of violence.

Databases of battles, made with evidence from archaeological sites and historical records, allow a comparison of the amount of warfare before and after the adoption of iron. My study based on these databases finds a sharp rise in the number of battles in the century after regions adopted iron compared with the one before. Whether this increase is caused by iron or if the databases represent a complete sample is up for debate. 

Ancient records allow us to build timelines of rulers of Babylon, Assyria, and Athens across the Bronze and Iron Ages. These aren’t perfect datasets (in the case of the Athenian records, they are clearly only semi-historical: known historical figures appear alongside mythological entities such as Cecrops I, recorded as a half-man, half-serpent king in the sixteenth century BC). But insofar as we can rely on them, they show a clear change after iron is introduced. The average length of reigns across the sample of Assyria, Babylon, and Athens taken together falls 29 percent, and Babylon sees almost twice the number of kings in the centuries after iron adoption. These frequent changes suggest growing political instability resulting from a profound shift in the balance of power.

The iron revolution and its consequences

History has seen the ebb and flow of centralized and decentralized technologies of warfare ever since. Castles allowed barons of medieval Europe to subjugate the peasantry while also contending with their kings, until the gunpowder revolution eventually made castle walls obsolete. Gunpowder led to firearms, which strengthened states while they were new, scarce, and expensive, but then became cheap and easily accessible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shifting power to peripheral groups of soldiers and rebels. On the world stage, nuclear weapons have massively increased the costs of one country invading another; for a small state, achieving nuclear status can be a powerful equalizer. With each development, the balance of power shifts.

To understand the political consequences of new technologies, we need to understand how they shape power. Some technologies, like castles, change the offense-defense bias – whether it is easier to attack or defend. Others, like iron, change who has access to weaponry. A clear modern-day parallel is drones, which have been transformative in the Russia–Ukraine war and are reportedly responsible for up to 80 percent of recent casualties in that conflict as of 2026. A drone costing just a few hundred dollars can threaten a tank, artillery gun, or command post worth many times more. Drone combat has lowered war’s cost of entry and could make it easier for small guerrilla groups to challenge dominant powers.

Another parallel can perhaps be seen in AI. Access to AI is decentralized in that many individuals can use it, to potentially destructive effect. However, AI providers have the capacity to concentrate power. Access can be cut off, centralizing the use of AI in the hands of the companies that own it and whomever they choose to allow access, similar to the advantage enjoyed by Bronze Age kings who controlled stores of tin.

Iron and its consequences laid the foundation for new institutions that underpin our modern lives. Greek democracy, Phoenician commerce and writing, and the Abrahamic religions all developed within the new political environment of the Iron Age. The world was changed not by an apocalyptic event, but by the products of small village forges, which meant the violence potential that had been concentrated in palaces was distributed to the lowest farmer, ending the equilibrium that had sustained imperial lineages for a thousand years. The next millennia will be similarly shaped by the military technology of today.