What if We Could Live for a Million Years?

First of all, our spirit bodies which holds all the data anyway, will exist until the end of the universe which is interesting to consider.

The problem is our third tier matter bodies.  We know that we can likely restore our bodies to prime condition with the advent of the MedBed.  We may well be able to do this several times at least if not over and over again.  Yet living in the third tier means active engagement.  One may ultimately have enough and want to revert to the spirit form.

Also accidents do happen as well.

What if We Could Live for a Million Years?

Vastly extended life spans would bring dazzling opportunities—and daunting risks

By Avi Loeb on August 16, 2020

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-if-we-could-live-for-a-million-years/

Recently, scientists discovered bacteria that had been buried beneath the ocean floor for more than a hundred million years and was still alive. What would change if we could live for even just a million years? Two thoughts immediately come to mind. First, tenure in academia would have to be capped. Universities would have to limit faculty appointments to a century at most in order to refresh their talent pool and mitigate old-fashioned education and research dogmas. Second, a birthday cake cannot hold a million candles. Instead, the number of birthday candles could reflect the logarithm of our age. For a thousand-year-old, that would mean three candles. 

Past generations used to say that even though we cannot postpone natural death, we can control how we live. They also believed that there is “nothing new under the sun.” Both statements are inaccurate from our current perspective. With advances in bioscience and technology, one can imagine a post-COVID-19 future when most diseases are cured and our life span will increase substantially.

If that happens, how would our goals change, and how would this shape our lives? Given the luxury of pursuing longer-term plans, we could accomplish more ambitious tasks. We could decide to care more about our planetary environment and interpersonal cooperation, since pollution or hostilities carry long-term dangers. An extended life experience could make us wiser and more risk-averse since there is much more at stake. It would make little sense to send young soldiers to wars, or initiate wars in the first place.

But even with shrewd strategies, survival is by no means guaranteed. For example, the known correlation between brain size and body weight did not make dinosaurs smart enough to deflect the asteroid that killed them. Accidents are inevitable, and treatment centers will continuously be busy repairing nonfatal damages due to routine mishaps.

Increasing our fertility period in proportion to our life span will bring the risk of overpopulating Earth. With the current birth rate per person, the number of million-year-old people could increase to the untenable level of a hundred trillion. Moderating that would require a public policy that limits the birth rate to the desired level. Alternatively, travel ports could launch people into space to balance the birth rate and maintain a terrestrial population suitable for the available supply of food and energy.

The good news is that over a lifetime as long as a million years, space travel can take us to the nearest stars using existing chemical rockets. It would take merely 100,000 years to arrive at the habitable planet around Proxima Centauri with a space vehicle that travels at the speed of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. For passengers who live a million years, such a trip would appear just like the decade-long journey of New Horizons to Pluto within our current life span. Of course, the spacecraft will have to provide an enduring ecosystem and comfortable living conditions over this long journey. And the passengers will have to maintain a stable mindset for their journey’s goal and not lose faith, like a fisherman who, after a long hiatus without finding any fish, asks whether “the real purpose of fishing is catching fish.”

But in a million years, the nearest star to us will not be Proxima Centauri, and so we might have other targets in mind. In fact, the night sky will change as new stars move in and out from the vicinity of the sun. During this period, the Milky Way will exhibit tens of thousands of bright supernovae and other transients that will light up in the dark like cosmic fireworks. The nearest of those events could pose a threat to Earth's biosphere.

Since our current technologies advance exponentially on a timescale of several years, our future habitat on Earth will look entirely different a million years from now. What does a mature technological civilization look like after such a long time? Can it survive the destructive forces that its technologies unleash? One way to find out is to search for technosignatures of alien civilizations, dead or alive. Inevitably, all forms of life eventually disappear. The universe cools as it expands, and all stars will die 10 trillion years from now. In the distant future, everything will freeze; there will be no energy left to support life. 

The nearer-term future, though, need not be so bleak. The immediate benefit of prolonging life is to keep loved ones alive for more time. The endpoint is inevitable, but as the Greek philosopher Epicurus noted in his Letter to Menoeceus, death should not be feared because we never meet it, since “when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.” Troublemakers will also live longer and be confined in prison for improper behavior. Those whose freedom was inhibited by society always saw this as a silver lining: death brings the ultimate freedom from all societal chains. Unfortunately, this freedom arrives too late to do anything with it, as it is characterized in perpetuity by the acronym and slogan of the old British car Iris: “It Runs in Silence.” Like academic tenure, life sentences in prison should therefore be capped to a much shorter period than a million years.

The million-year timescale is an arbitrary choice, comparable to the entire period that has elapsed since our ancestral Homo erectus species emerged in Africa. It is conveniently shorter than the ages of the universe, the sun or the Earth. In principle, one could imagine a life that lasts a billion years, during which stars turn on and off in the sky just like light bulbs. Against the backdrop of that long-term perspective, our current concerns about the world would seem as naive as the first thought in the head of a newborn baby.

Arctic Volcanic Multiplier

Piecing together the effect of volcanic activity on the global climate, I recently recognized an oversight. It is that there must be an order of magnitude difference between the impact of an equatorial blast and an Alaskan blast. More importantly, while an equatorial blast has good prospects of affecting the whole globe, an Alaskan blast is going to be limited to the northern portion of the northern hemisphere. This rather obviously coincides with the details of the little ice age.

That also explains the savage impact on climate of the 1159bc Hekla blast that suppressed temperatures for a full generation throughout Northern Europe. It only had to be a much too normal one to three cubic mile event that kept cooking at a smaller scale for a few years to do its job as advertised.

This also makes explaining the Little Ice Age much simpler. Instead of two or three close together, we now need a major volcano that keeps cooking over fifty or more years in the Alaska Russian volcanic arc. Ash and aerosols need to feed into the Arctic weather gyre where escape is difficult and protracted over time. This will induce sharply lower temperatures that then impact Europe.

There is a very good chance that it is a single specific volcano. I say that because there is erratic evidence of a several century long cycle that could easily coincide with the active phase of one volcano. The good news is that we have three or four centuries of good weather before it is heard from again. The bad news is that there are plenty of other volcanoes thinking about it.

Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines impacted our climate for perhaps three years and reduced temperatures by a significant amount. Had it been in Alaska, its effect could well have been multiplied by an order of magnitude and have surely ravaged Europe.

We need to identify an aerosol rich volcano able to charge up the Arctic atmospheric gyre easily and perhaps monitor it if that is not already happening. The known suspects have not been that significant but that only means that the main event is apparently dormant.

This comfortably explains the episodes of radical cooling that have typically occurred in the Northern Hemisphere and cannot be explained as Global in origin or by the more benign Pacific Decadal Oscillation. A three or four degree drop caused by a volcano explains ice on the Rhine, or even the Nile. Fortunately these events are not particularly long lasting most of the time and recovery is pretty predictable. A farmer will have one year of crop failure to deal with before he adjusts to the tougher conditions with more robust crops and we learn to like oatmeal.

By the output been trapped in a small area of the globe, the volcano’s effect on climate is hugely magnified. It fortunately still disperses fairly quickly. The only reason that this is as yet not fully understood is that we have not had the chance to watch it unfold as we watched Mt St. Helens and Mt Pinatubo unfold. We are sure to get the chance.

And yes, let us warm up the earth with reforesting the Sahara. The climate was much better back in the Bronze Age.

Bronze Age Collapse

I have posted extensively on the collapse caused by the 1159 BC Hekla blast and tsunami that destroyed the city of Atlantis at Gibraltar. This entry from Wikipedia gather together the known fallout from this single event as is known by today’s scholarship.

Of course, this scholarship continues to ignore the clear evidence of a huge copper trade between the Americas and the Old world. Bronze manufacturing required strong local sponsorship in the form of the palace economies described herein. These factories were the sub factories of a global copper trade that passed through the Atlanteans.

I suspect that the Atlantean fleet of perhaps a real ten thousand ships like they love to claim in Homer was making itself felt along the Egyptian coast in the years prior to the Hekla blast. They had unity and a system of confederate palace states. Recall that these were not particularly large cities so much a palace household and retainers. The surrounding population surely benefited and was certainly ruled by this caste of merchant princes who traded value for value. That all ended abruptly with the loss of the copper trade. These palaces were all then overthrown.

More critically, the surviving populations in Europe faced a twenty year collapse of their livelihoods and those that could took ship and joined in a sea borne migration into the Eastern Mediterranean. This was likely expressed as colonization including Gaza, Athens and Carthage, where already established factories were in position to absorb the refugees. We may never develop the details, but the advent of a surplus of desperate pirates surely explains the swift collapse of the many isolated trade palaces.

The other putative possibilities of causation are simply insufficient and were all easily handled in the course of business as usual. An influx of the desperate from the north was another matter and these guys were the original pro0viders of the best weapons. Is it any surprise that they were able to make the Egyptian state accommodate them? And recall that this was the single largest and strongest state in front of them.

Imagine a group of refugees landing in New Jersey and forcing the USA to make room for them? Pretty good trick even at a three thousand year remove.

This entry also confirms that iron was not seriously used until the loss of the copper trade. This clearly implies that the copper trade and its control was the road to wealth. Bronze made excellent weapons that were not likely surpassed by iron for centuries. They were simple to cast and work harden in the forge whereas iron needed to be laboriously converted into steel in very small batches.

In fact steel making did not change at all right into the industrial age which is why cannons were first made from bronze, then cast iron and then, very late in the day from steel. What this means is that had copper been available, the use of bronze would certainly have continued centuries more.

This item gives a really good snapshot of the time and place and is very consistent with the implied conjectures.

Bronze Age collapse --- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bronze Age collapse is the name given by those historians who see the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, as violent, sudden and culturally disruptive, expressed by the collapse of palace economies of the Aegean and Anatolia, which were replaced after a hiatus by the isolated village cultures of the Dark Ages period of history of the Ancient Near East. The Bronze Age collapse may be seen in the context of a technological history that saw the slow, comparatively continuous spread of iron-working technology in the region, beginning with precocious iron-working in what is now Romania in the 13th and 12th centuries.[1] The cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria, and the Egyptian Empire in Syria and Canaan, bringing the scission of long-distance trade contacts and sudden eclipse of literacy, occurred between 1206 and 1150 BCE. In the first phase of this period, almost every city between Troy and Gaza was violently destroyed, and often left unoccupied thereafter (for example, Hattusas, Mycenae, Ugarit).

The gradual end of the Dark Age that ensued saw the rise of settled Neo-Hittite Aramaean kingdoms of the mid-10th century BCE, and the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Regional evidence

Anatolia

Main article: Downfall of the Hittite Empire
Every site important during the preceding Late Bronze Age shows a destruction layer, and it appears that here civilization did not recover to the same level as that of the Hittites for another thousand years. Hattusas, the Hittite capital, was burned and abandoned, and never reoccupied. Karaoglan was burned and the corpses left unburied. Troy was destroyed at least twice, before being abandoned until Roman times.

Cyprus

The catastrophe separates Late Cypriot II (LCII) from the LCIII period, with the sacking and burning of the sites of Enkomi, Kition, and Sinda, may have occurred twice, before being abandoned. A number of sites, though not destroyed, were also abandoned. Kokkinokremos was a short-lived settlement, where the presence of various caches concealed by smiths suggests that none ever returned to reclaim the treasures, suggesting they were killed or enslaved.

Syria

Syrian sites previously showed evidence of trade links with Egypt and the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age. Evidence at Ugarit shows that the destruction there occurred after the reign of Merenptah, and even the fall of Chancellor Bay. Letters on clay tablets found baked in the conflagration of the destruction of the city speak of attack from the sea, and a letter from Alashiya (Cyprus) speaks of cities already being destroyed from attackers who came by sea. It also speaks of the Ugarit fleet being absent, patrolling the coast.

Levant

Egyptian evidence shows that from the reign of Horemheb, wandering Shasu were more problematic. Ramesses II campaigned against them, pursuing them as far as Moab, where he established a fortress, after the near collapse at the Battle of Kadesh. These Shasu were problematic, particularly when during the reign of Merneptah, they threatened the "Way of Horus" north from Gaza. Evidence shows that Deir Alla (Succoth) was destroyed after the reign of Queen Twosret. The destroyed site of Lachish was briefly reoccupied by squatters and an Egyptian garrison, during the reign of Ramesses III. All centres along the sea route, now being called Via Maris, from Gaza north were destroyed, and evidence shows Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Akko, and Jaffa were burned and not reoccupied for up to thirty years. Inland Hazor, Bethel, Beit Shemesh, Eglon, Debir, and other sites were destroyed. Refugees escaping the collapse of coastal centres may have fused with incoming nomadic and Anatolian elements to begin the growth of terraced hillside hamlets in the highlands region, that was associated with the later development of the state of Israel.

Greece

None of the Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age survived, with destruction being heaviest at palaces and fortified sites. Up to 90% of small sites in the Peloponnese were abandoned, suggesting a major depopulation. The End Bronze Age collapse marked the start of what has been called the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted for more than 400 years. Other cities, like Athens, continued to be occupied, but with a more local sphere of influence, limited evidence of trade and an impoverished culture, from which it took centuries to recover.

Mesopotamia

The cities of Norsuntepe, Emar and Carchemish were destroyed, and the Assyrians narrowly escaped an invasion by Mushki tribes during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I. With the spread of Ahhlamu or Aramaeans, control of the Babylonian and Assyrian regions extended barely beyond the city limits. Babylon was sacked by the Elamites under Shutruk-Nahhunte, and lost control of the Diyala valley.

Egypt

Main article: Third Intermediate Period of Egypt

After apparently surviving for a while, the Egyptian Empire collapsed in the mid twelfth century BCE (during the reign of Ramesses VI). Previously the Merneptah Stele spoke of attacks from Lybians, with associated people of Ekwesh, Shekelesh, Lukka, Shardana and Tursha or Teresh, and a Canaanite revolt, in the cities of Ashkelon, Yenoam and the people of Israel. A second attack during the reign of Ramesses III involved Peleset, Tjeker, Shardana and Denyen.

Conclusion

Robert Drews describes the collapse as "the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire".[2] A number of people have spoken of the cultural memories of the disaster as stories of a "lost golden age". Hesiod for example spoke of Ages of Gold, Silver and Bronze, separated from the modern harsh cruel world of the Age of Iron by the Age of Heroes.

Nature and causes of destruction

As part of the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age Dark Ages, it was a period associated with the collapse of central authorities, a general depopulation, particularly of highly urban areas, the loss of literacy in Anatolia and the Aegean, and its restriction elsewhere, the disappearance of established patterns of long-distance international trade, increasingly vicious intra-elite struggles for power, and reduced options for the elite if not for the general mass of population.

There are various theories put forward to explain the situation of collapse, many of them compatible with each other.

Earthquakes

Amos Nur shows how earthquakes tend to occur in "sequences" or "storms" where a major earthquake above 6.5 on the Richter magnitude scale can in later months or years set off second or subsequent earthquakes along the weakened fault line. He shows that when a map of earthquake occurrence is superimposed on a map of the sites destroyed in the Late Bronze Age, there is a very close correspondence. [3]

Migrations and raids

Further information: Sea peoples, Mushki, Aramaeans, and Ancient Iranian peoples

Ekrem Akurgal, Gustav Lehmann and Fritz Schachermeyer, following the views of Gaston Maspero have argued on the basis of the wide spread findings of Naue II-type swords coming from South Eastern Europe, and Egyptian records of "northerners from all the lands"[4]

The Ugarit correspondence draws attention to such groups as the mysterious Sea Peoples. Equally, translation of the preserved Linear B documents in the Aegean, just before the collapse, demonstrates a rise in piracy and slave raiding, particularly coming from Anatolia. Egyptian fortresses along the Libyan coast, constructed and maintained after the reign of Ramesses II were constructed to reduce raiding.

Ironworking

Leonard R. Palmer suggested that iron, whilst inferior to bronze weapons, was in more plentiful supply and so allowed larger armies of iron users to overwhelm the smaller armies of bronze-using maryannu chariotry.[5] This argument has been weakened of late with the finding that the shift to iron occurred after the collapse, not before. It now seems that the disruption of long distance trade, an aspect of "systems collapse", cut easy supplies of tin, making bronze impossible to make. Older implements were recycled and then iron substitutes were used.

On the other hand, technology cannot be so quickly dismissed as a factor. The invention of the technology of metallurgy is not generally regarded as a Paradigm Shift, in a class with the technologies of agriculture, city-building, industry and electronics. Yet metalworking had a profound impact on the course of mankind's development. Warfare on the scale with which we are familiar today was not possible when sharpened sticks and flint points and blades were the only weapons available. The first bronze swords and armor were surely regarded as "weapons of mass destruction" by the last inhabitants of stone age cities because of the carnage they made possible.

Still, the very nature of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, forces at least a grudging equilbrium on man's violent nature. Deposits of copper ore and tin ore almost never occur in the same region. In order to make bronze, two cities a fair distance apart must maintain peaceful relations and trade raw materials with each other.

Iron metallurgy destroyed this equilibrium. Only one ore is required to make iron artifacts, and deposits of it are abundant. The only trick to smelting iron is the creation of hitherto unimaginably high temperatures, because the melting point of iron is hundreds of degrees higher than that of copper and tin. But once that information became well known, there was nothing to stop even the most uncivilized of the remaining Neolithic tribes from arming their warriors, proclaiming themselves "kingdoms," and attacking the cities. Even worse, the cities were no longer dependent on each other for complementary ores, and had no more reason to maintain peaceful relations.

The Iron Age may not have been the cause of the collapse of civilization in its first place of origin, but it is difficult to dismiss iron as a possible reason for its slow recovery.

Drought

Barry Weiss [6], using the Palmer Drought Index for 35 Greek, Turkish, and Middle Eastern weather stations, showed that a drought of the kinds that persisted from January 1972 would have affected all of the sites associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse. Drought could have easily precipitated or hastened socio-economic problems and led to wars. More recently Brian Fagan, has shown how the diversion of mid-winter storms from the Atlantic were diverted to travel north of the Pyrenees and the Alps, bringing wetter conditions to Central Europe, but drought to the Eastern Mediterranean, was associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse[7]

General systems collapse

Main article: Societal collapse

A general systems collapse has been put forward as an explanation for the reversals in culture that occurred between the Urnfield culture of the 12-13th centuries BCE and the rise of the Celtic Hallstatt culture in the 9th and 10th centuries.[8] This theory may, however, simply beg the question as to whether this collapse was the cause of or the effect of the Bronze Age collapse being discussed. General Systems Collapse theories have been pioneered by Joseph Tainter[9] who shows how social declines in return to complexity leads often to collapse to simpler forms of society.

In the specific context of the Middle East a variety of factors - including population rise, soil degradation, drought, cast bronze weapon and iron production technologies - conceivably could have combined to push the relative price of weaponry compared to arable land to a level that ultimately proved to be beyond the control of traditional warrior aristocracies.

Changes in warfare

Robert Drews argues[10] that the appearance of massed infantry, using newly developed weapons and armor, such as cast rather than forged spearheads and long swords, a revolutionizing cut-and-thrust weapon,[11] and javelins, the appearance of bronze foundries itself suggesting "that mass production of bronze artifacts was suddenly important in the Aegean". Homer uses "spears" as a virtual synonym for "warrior" suggesting the continued importance of the spear in combat. Such new weaponry, furnished to a proto-hoplite model who were able to withstand attacks of massed chariotry, destabilized states that were based upon the use of chariots by the ruling class and precipitated an abrupt social collapse when raiders and/or infantry mercenaries were able to conquer, loot, and burn the cities.[12][1][2](-5-)

References

^ See A. Stoia and the other essays in M.L. Stig Sørensen and R. Thomas, eds., The Bronze Age—Iron Age Transition in Europe (Oxford) 1989, and T.H. Wertime and J.D. Muhly, The Coming of the Age of Iron (New Haven) 1980.
^ Drew 1993:1 quotes Fernand Braudel's assessment that the Eastern Mediterranean cultures returned almost to a starting-point ("plan zéro"), "L'Aube", in Braudel, F. (Ed) (1977), La Mediterranee: l'espace et l'histoire (Paris)
^ Nur, Amos and Cline, Eric; (2000) "Poseidon's Horses: Plate Tectonics and Earthquake Storms in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean", Journ. of Archael. Sc. No 27 pps.43-63 - http://srb.stanford.edu/nur/EndBronzeage.pdf
^ Robbins, Manuel (2001) Collapse of the Bronze Age: the story of Greece, Troy, Israel, Egypt and Peoples of the Sea" (Authors Choice Press)
^ Palmer, Leonard R (1962) Mycenaeans and Minoans: Aegean Prehistory in the Light of the Linear B Tablets. (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1962)
^ Weiss, Barry: (1982) "The decline of Late Bronze Age civilization as a possible response to climatic change" in Climatic Change ISSN 0165-0009 (Paper) 1573-1480 (Online), Volume 4, Number 2, June 1982, pps 173 - 198
^ Fagan, Brian M. (2003), "The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Basic Books)
^ http://www.iol.ie/~edmo/linktoprehistory.html - a page about the history of Castlemagner, on the web page of the local historical society
^ Tainter, Joseph (1976)"The Collapse of Complex Societies" (Cambridge University Press)
^ Drews pp192ff.
^ The Naue Type II sword, introduced from the eastern Alps and Carpathians ca 1200, quickly established itself and became the only sword in use during the eleventh century; iron was substituted for bronze without essential redesign (Drews 1993:194.
^ Drews, R. (1993) The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. (Princeton 1993).
Oliver Dickinson, The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: Continuity and Change Between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries BC Routledge (2007), ISBN 978-0415135900.

Bronze Age Disaporia

Those who have followed my postings for some time know that I am interested in mapping the extent of Bronze Age global trade. Where are we at?

The fully mature Bronze Age ended with the 1159 BCE blast that smashed Northern Europe back into a herding culture and ended the sea trade centered on the city state of Atlantis. This mature phase had lasted for at least a millennia and had been preceded by a millennia long expansion of the technology.

The core technology is believed to have originated in Mesopotamia, but I am rather skeptical about that. We have an excellent locale in the Mekong highlands where both metals were richly available literally across the river from each other.

Another issue that I think is under appreciated is the use of copper likely had a very long history that is not visible in the archeological record. The reason for this invisibility is that it represented a convenient medium of exchange and was way too valuable to bury with the dead or even lose track of. Besides that raw copper does rot away pretty well in a few hundred years in any environment that permits water movement.

Think how sharply our understanding of European copper age improved with the recovery of Oetzi with his handy copper axe head and palette of choice stone tools and weapons. This alone ended most of the controversy over the lifeways of the copper age. Scholars have been afraid to use their imaginations and common sense in describing these worlds when all the real evidence simply rots away.

I cannot prove that the natives of New Guinea have been using hardened wood arrows for thousands of years. But the real question needs to be why where they not? A friend of mine has such a bow and arrow set acquired there in the highlands.

The bow is too obvious an invention to not have been made just as soon as someone figured out how to make a bowstring, a much more difficult trick.

The production of copper from a fairly rich ore has been known since antiquity. It takes heat, but not extreme heat and is well within the range produced by charcoal to produce a quality product.

To emphasize this point, the method used by prospectors to evaluate a copper ore in the field was to crush a charge of the ore with some flux in a steel pipe (or pottery retort?) and stick it in the camp fire. This would roast off the sulphur and produce a crude copper slag separation. It is hardly efficient but great for qualifying an ore.

It is pretty obvious that an ancient campfire set with a ring of ore would generate obvious beads of copper in the ash. And just how much of a clue do you need? Again the question needs to be why were they not using copper?

The point that has to be made is that copper is useful and a convenience but not a replacement for an obsidian weapon. It was currency. And that is why so little is found in the archeological record. Just how many present day coins would you find if you chose to dig up a present day graveyard? I have no doubt that outside local barter, copper and then bronze was the principal currency. Homer speaks first of the number of bronze tripods captured. If there ever was an unnecessary luxury usage that is it. Yet it kept your wealth conveniently traveling with you.

Bronze Age culture was rich and palace centered. There is no sense in Europe of a centralized state as in Mesopotamia. There is a sense of a sea borne commonwealth that traded actively with the Americas and there is a sense of advanced antique Indian cultures responding to the influence of these contacts.

We can say that this global trading phenomenon brought about by the necessities of the advent of a bronze based economy, spread a common advanced concept of religion and palace ruler ship around the world. That any of this happened in true isolation is nonsense and reflects only the difficulty in finding actual proof in a background of local artifacts.

What did not particularly happen throughout the Bronze Age was actual colonization. The best recent comparable was the colonization of West Africa. It simply never happened. The only modest attempt appears to have been in New England and it was swiftly overwhelmed and/or absorbed when the trade ended in 1159 BCE.

For a thousand years at least, the sea peoples lived a robust healthy live that allowed them to rove the Atlantic littoral to its fullest. The evidence fully supports that even while it has been studiously ignored. Once again, they could, they should and they did it in far greater strength than I or anyone else originally thought. Once again lack of specific evidence is not evidence of lack and here we have a mountain of specific evidence in every likely prospective location and a few unlikely ones.

I would love to have a European dig come up with an occurrence of maize preferably in southwest Spain just to make that point.

Bronze Sword Manufacture

I plucked this copy from the site of a craftsman who is making Bronze Age swords using the methods as best reconstructed. We learn something very important. It is that Bronze swords are and were superior to Iron Age swords for a thousand years or so. There was no good reason to switch except in terms of availability.

That means that a long accepted idea that the transition represented technical progress is rubbish. It represented nothing of the kind. What the transition represented was a dramatic loss of supply of top quality copper.

As I have already posted, the primary supply came by the end of the Bronze Age from the native copper mines of Lake Superior. Ample evidence supports mining activity there coincident with the thousand year history of the European Bronze Age that removed at least 5,000,000 pounds of copper. That suggests that the shipping rate toward the end perhaps approached several tons per year. That is volume that is completely believable for the time.

That it then reached Atlantis at the Straits of Gibraltar and was there alloyed with tin from Britain and forged into trade goods is mere mercantile sense. This also meant that all the shipping and skilled artisans concentrated there making it all completely vulnerable to the Hekla Tsunami in 1159 BCE. Not only the head but the arms and legs of this Bronze Age civilization was cleanly wiped out and unable to start over.

The copper supply from Lake Superior was unique inasmuch as it was in the form of native copper without the problem of sulphides and their related metals. It was also in the form of high grade ores which is unusual for copper. A typical grade would be around a hundred pounds to the ton. A good sulphide ore is usually around twenty pounds to the ton and includes iron and other base metals.

My conjecture is that the copper route was up the Hudson River to the Mohawk River and then transitioning over to the east end of Lake Ontario into the portage route through the Canadian Shield to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. Archeological sites follow this route and include so called controversial sites in the Hudson Valley and a major site at Peterborough in Ontario.

Several tons of copper is well within the haulage capacity of a canoe based transport system.

The rest of the route would be directly to Isle de Royal in Lake Superior which was one of the major Bronze Age mining locales with hundreds of mining pits. I discuss this more extensively in my manuscript Paradigms Shift. I obviously need to add an addendum on the crucial role of the not so legendary Atlantis.

The original difficulty that everyone had with Plato’s tale of Atlantis was that no one could understand a reason for such a civilization to even exist. Egypt and Mesopotamia is obvious. The agricultural surpluses of the Atlantic coast were surely minimal and founded on cattle culture. This was not conducive to the building of Bronze Age cities.

That objection is clearly moot and Rainer Kuhne has shown us the actual location of the city itself. Once excavated, we will surely find plenty of evidence of the Bronze trade.









http://www.bronze-age-craft.com/swords_for_sale.htm

Apart from the design, the three qualities that you would look for in a bronze sword are, weight, balance and alloy, the level of skill Bronze age sword makers achieved with clay casting technology is stunning, and the fact that no one can match them today, is even more humbling.

WeightBronze swords rarely exceeded 800 grams, if it is over 1 kilo it is way to heavy "(it's a lemon"). Due to the difficulty of casting swords in sand, most foundries will cast on the heavy side, and although the end results would look good in a glass case, they bare no comparison to a genuine Bronze Age weapon.

BalanceIt is interesting that if you were to look at the balance point on bronze age swords, its much nearer the handle than you would expect, the blades taper evenly toward the point, and are not end heavy.

AlloyThe alloys used in the bronze age for swords, on average, vary from 8% to 12% tin and in later swords the lead content varies 1% to 5% depending on the tin content. My personal feelings are that the hardness of sword alloys could not exceed the hardness of the tools used in the process of edge hardening.All bronze age sword edges were hardened and sharpened at the same time, the edges were forged down to a thin, hard wafer. The work is so neat, its not easy to understand how they achieved it.

Over the past couple of years I have had some interesting interactions with archaeologists researching bronze swords. Subsequently I have come to the conclusion that we only see bronze swords in drawings in one dimension, and have little understanding of their weight, balance and how they were used.The first thing we would all say, when a bronze age sword was paced in are hands is, "it's so small", and they were small! It is only by the end of the bronze age that swords were getting any thing like the size we imagine, so 67cm would be a very big sword, and would probably weigh around 700 grams.

"What’s so good about, my swords?"

I hear you ask. I cast my swords vertically in very hot stone moulds. This means I can cast swords at the right weight, it also means I get a better structure to the bronze. As the casting method is nearer the bronze age method, I use a 12% tin/copper alloy which is at the top end for tin content for a bronze age sword. This casts well and gives a nice stiff blade. I mix all my own alloys and never use soft silicon bronzes.

Hardened Edges

One of the most beautiful things about the bronze age swords are the recasso edges, which are forged in. All my swords come with hardened edges, done in the (forged in) bronze age method. The forging is quite time consuming and I believe I am the only person able to do this at the moment. I cast all my blade as near to a sensible weight for bronze age sword as possible, and tuning a mould might take me many days and up to nine castings until I am happy.

In recent television programme for the BBC, one of my bronze swords was repeatedly stuck against a reproduction of an early iron sword, in a test to show the advantages of iron over bronze. Even though both myself and Hector Cole (the iron sword maker) had advised the programme makers the that the bronze sword would do better than expected, they were very surprised. The bronze sword was more than a match for the iron, both blades received heavy damage. The ability of bronze to rapidly work harden under impact, and the lack of carbon in early iron swords must have created a bit of a technological stand off around 700bc. At this time the art of the bronze caster was at its height and iron working was in its infancy.

In my work as a bronze sword maker i try to catch the essence of sword making in the bronze age and get as close as possible to the originals.

Mediterranean Upheaval after 1159 BCE

Something that I was not aware of is that the cataclysm of 1159 BCE focused on Hekla was apparently contemporaneous with destructive earthquakes throughout the Mediterranean basin. If they all happened on the same day, then we are talking about an extraordinary event in world history that is scary.

That they happened close in time is quite apparent, but the lack of recognition of this in the written records of Egypt suggests instead that they happened over a somewhat longer time period. It seems likely though that the initial event was the Hekla event itself, possibly triggered by an event associated with the Mid Atlantic ridge itself. It seems reasonable that a major displacement would have shaken the Mediterranean Basin causing major after shocks for years to come.

This also handily explains the sequential demise of the Sea People maritime culture probably based in Atlantis by Gibraltar as previously posted. The Mycenaean culture was a likely tributary culture paying tribute and relying on Atlantean support for trade and military backup. Once this ended in 1159 BCE, the raison d’être of the palace cultures of Mycenae ended, forcing the abandonment of these structures.

It is reasonable to presume such fortresses existed throughout the Mediterranean but were likely much more modest in most cases. These were trade stations that justified their presence by trade to the local population. Remember that the currency of the Atlantean culture was bronze and that this needed central distribution and far flung shipping. A little bit like the British empire of later days.

In any event, the archeological record shows that major quakes ravaged Anatolia and the Levantine Coast and a lot more besides. It is as if every likely fault let go and knocked down the adjacent cities.

This does not mean that civilization ended however, although the disruption certainly created security problems and let lose barbarian tribes and the like. It is just that our own experience informs us that the survivors can rebuild completely inside of a generation while completely replacing human loses.

What was lost was the maritime sea empire that supplied huge amounts of bronze into this market. Atlantis itself was not rebuilt and its population base on the Atlantic coast was decimated by a collapse of the harvest thanks to Hekla. This is all shown in the tree ring evidence.

Thereafter, the Iron Age emerged in Anatolia under the Hittites and was likely accelerated by this event. Iron had been worked long before this but had not become common place at all.

Once iron took over from bronze as the metal of choice, there existed a huge surplus of bronze in the various state coffers which likely took centuries to dissipate. If you do not believe me, a reading of the building of Solomon’s temple will make the point.

The First Dark Age

I recently caught up on some of my reading by working through the archived discussion led by Jerry Pournelle on the subject of Velikovsky and his enthusiasms. Central to this is an active reconstruction of Bronze Age society and its abrupt cessation. We have dated its ending in 1159 BCE driven by the massive eruption of Hekla in earlier posts. The attached item is still quite fuzzy of time and place.

I had proposed the existence of a fully developed palace based society distributed throughout the ancient world and also including a subsidiary presence in the Americas. A large seaborne trade existed to support this society. Writing and record keeping was complex and restricted to a handful. This was true even in Mesopotamia.
The evidence strongly supports the above proposition and also leads to the very natural conclusion that the evidence to date represents but a fraction of that which will be found. It was way too easy and way too appealing to establish a new trade and husbandry center in any open valley to which sea access was available.

The millennia old civilization led by the city state of Atlantis and trading with the states of Egypt and the Middle East and Brazil and Maya land and the Mississippi was palace controlled. This was necessary in light of the need to organize access to copper and tin through the sea lanes. Bronze was money in the Bronze Age and most certainly not lost willingly, let alone buried for us to find. We get a taste of the political and economic strength of this civilization through reading the remaining ancient sources such as Homer and the Bible.

The 1159 BCE collapse did not end the Bronze Age which continued on as the preferred economic system in China and elsewhere. It did however leave a huge surplus of bronze above ground that was not in immediate need of replenishment. This cutting off of fresh supply certainly encouraged the adoption of low quality iron at a local level to produce plows and hoes. Long distance sources of copper disappeared from the market with the collapse of the sea trade at this time.

Since bronze was the currency of the palace system their economic basis collapsed at this time and never really recovered in the same form. The Iron Age needed access only to the local bog to produce a viable product. It was pretty lousy metal but it improved over time and it was produced at the village level, rather than at the state treasury. Even when better ores became available they were plentiful unlike high quality copper ores.

What is often forgotten is that the archeological evidence supports a very long lived Bronze Age world of at least two thousand years that simultaneously organized agriculture that was immensely stable. It was also predecessed by an assortment of equally long lived antique stone based agricultural societies. Political stability was the norm in this world. Dynasties might last a few generations but for most their families and villages survived for centuries.

The principal reason for this is the limited mobility of the warfare practice of the day. That only changed in the last two thousand years with the advent of the riding horse.

THE FIRST DARK AGE

At some point I will do a short introductory essay; the important point is that sometime in the Bronze Ages, a thriving civilization with writing and the ability to build large walled cities and the beginnings of a market economy -- there were traders who were not merely raiders -- collapsed so thoroughly that it became legendary. The walls of Tiryns were so large and imposing that the people who lived in the region thought they were built by giants: by the Cyclopes, and they were called Cyclopean Walls by people who probably counted the actual builders among their ancestors.

Writing was lost and had to be reinvented. Much technology was lost.

It is a time that bequeaths us many legends, from the Trojan War to the legends of the House of Atreus, and Pelops, and Theseus, and Minos, Achilles and Odysseus, Talos and the stone god who rose from the sea, Jason and the Argonauts, all of which seem to reflect real events, embellished, of course, but real all the same. It was a time when the Maryannu and the Battle Ax people roamed the land, and the Peoples of the Sea invaded Egypt and came to Palestine where, as Philistines, they gave the region its name and passed into history as giants whose champion was a bronze armored hero named Goliath.

In the Bible it is an age in which there was no king in Israel, and each man did as he thought right in his own heart. And so it was through the world.

But that Dark Age came after a rich civilization with writing and commerce and technology: what killed that civilization? Theories run from barbarian invasions (the return of the Dorians) to earthquakes, to astronomical disasters, to volcanoes. It may have been all of these. If the issue is settled once and for all, that has happened very recently indeed: it certainly was no more than speculation last year...