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What is bronze? A man's head in bronze, with a beard: the metal is reddish-brown, the same as a penny

What is bronze? this is the bronze head of an Akkadian king (ca. 2300 BC)

What is bronze? Copper and tin

Bronze smiths make bronze by melting two different metals and mixing them. The two metals are copper and tin. Copper, by itself, is too soft to make tools of. (Have you ever had a copper bracelet? It dents every time you knock your hand on a door). Tin is too brittle: it breaks too easily.

What is copper?
More about metals
Bronze Age timeline
West Asian inventions
All our West Asia articles

But if you mix a little tin into the copper, it becomes bronze, which is much harder and at the same time less brittle. It is more useful for tools and also better for making statues. (Early on, people tried mixing copper with other things like lead and arsenic, but tin works best.)

Greaves (leg armor) from ancient Greece

History of bronze: bronze greaves (leg armor) from ancient Greece

West Asian bronze

When West Asian smiths first began to make bronze, about 3500 BC, it was very expensive. Copper is common, but tin is very rare and was hard to get. Mostly people used bronze for weapons and armor. You could make a much better sword out of bronze than out of stone or wood. Bronze swords were lighter and sharper.

What is tin?
Why do people fight wars?

Bronze spreads to Europe, North Africa, and East Asia

Still, bronze swords weren’t strong enough to cut with the side of the blade: you had to use bronze swords mainly to stab people, or your sword would break. Bronze armor was stronger and lighter than the leather and wood armor soldiers had worn before. Everybody wanted bronze for war.

More about leather
Who were the Indo-Europeans?
Who were the Hyksos?

By 3000 BC, Central Asians and Harappans in India were using bronze, and by 2500 BC they were making bronze in the Aegean islands. Around 2000 BC, Indo-Europeans spread the use of bronze to Europe and China. The Hyksos encouraged Africans in Egypt and Sudan to use more bronze around 1700 BC.
sculpture of two bronze figures sitting together holding hands

Get your own bronze sculpture!

Lost-wax casting bronze statues

But soon Chinese and West Asian artists also began to use bronze to make bronze statues. As with the weapons, bronze is lighter than stone, and you can make statues in different poses with bronze than you can with stone. To get these bronze statues, the artists invented lost-wax casting.

What is lost-wax casting?
Where does wax come from?

Bronze spreads to West Africa

By 900 AD, Ife and Hausa people in West Africa were also using bronze alongside of iron. But after that, when new people in the Caribbean or the Pueblos or Brazil learned how to work metal, they went straight to using iron, and nobody used much bronze anymore.

More about iron and steel
Science in early Africa

Bronze corrodes and turns green

When bronze gets old, and the air touches it, it corrodes (like iron rusting) and turns green, like these Etruscan greaves (leg armor). Once bronze got old and corroded, people usually sold it to a bronze-smith to melt down and recycle into new bronze things – that’s why we don’t have very much ancient bronze.

So what is bronze? Did you find out what you wanted to know about the history of bronze? Let us know in the comments!

Learn by Doing – make a copper bracelet
More about iron

Bibliography and further reading about the history of bronze:

Iron
Silver
What is metal?
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