Akkad

//////////////////////







Sargon of Akkad gradually conquered the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers around 2300 BC. The Akkadians spoke a Semitic language, like theAmorites. Sargon, according to Sumerian literature, was born to an Akkadian high priestess and a poor father, maybe a gardener. His mother abandoned him by putting him in a basket woven out of reeds and letting it float away down the river (like Moses a thousand years later). But Sargon was rescued, made friends with the goddess Ishtar, and was brought up in the king's court.  When Sargon grew up, he built When West Asian smiths first began to make bronze, about 3500 BC, it was very expensive. 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. Still, they 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 leatherand wood armor soldiers had worn before. Everybody wanted it for war. By 3000 BC, Central Asians andHarappans in India were using bronze. 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.   But soon Chinese and West Asianartists 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.

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

When bronze gets old, and the air touches it, itcorrodes (like iron rusting) and turns green, like these Etruscangreaves (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