Bronze Age

The world in 1600 BC

9 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.