Bronze Age

The world in 1200 BC

11 powers on the map

The first great bureaucracies are born along the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow River. Cuneiform writing, hieroglyphs, Linear A/B, Chinese ideograms. Bronze metallurgy, wheels, plows. The Near Eastern 'world-system' collapses around 1177 BC amid invasions by the Sea Peoples and droughts.