The players

Overall
- Long-distance commerce (aided by the food surplus and the navigable Nile)
- Strong military with a hereditary caste of warrior-charioteers
- Complex social & political mechanisms
  - centralized bureaucracies
  - developed religion
  - mega-constructions (palaces, pyramids)
- The level of wealth (and tools) was unrivaled until the Classical Period
Egypt
- Most fertile places in the ancient world – due to the regular flooding of the Nile
- A lot of Gold (from the conquered Nubian kingdom of Kush)
Hittites (Anatolia)
- Bronze monopoly:
  - the only truly major source of copper in the Near East (Cyprus)
  - the only tin production in the region (no major tin mines there, but Hittites imported the metal was imported via Assyria and Europe)
Assyrians
- No ports on the Mediterranean coast, so they antagonized Hittites and Egyptian tributary states
Mycenaeans (proto-Greeks)
- Seafarers, instrumental in vast trading network
- “Industrial center” of the Bronze Age World
  - “cyclopean fotrifications” & palaces serving as manufacturing centers and political hubs
  - “builders of great roads”
  - “spectacular artist – even Egyptians would hire or emulate them”

The Highs and the Weaknesses

Reliance on bronze (tin+copper) forced major players to trade hard to get the components
- Interconnected and globalized systems of trade were required to run the empires
“The chariot was the king of warfare”: expensive, difficult to use, and costs a small fortune to maintain (kind of like a medieval knight).
- The hereditary warrior class (nobles) is hard to replace if a bunch of them die at once
- Expensive to train and maintain their equipment
Incredibly organized and centralized government
- “Every piece of grain, every bar of bronze, was tallied by the central government. Farmers were told what to plant where to plant and where.“ The toppling of that upper leaves the state headless
- Agriculture heavily depended on sophisticated irrigation – massive public works projects. More efficient yield, but hard to maintain.
  - Efficient farming leeches out the nutrients from the soil
- Everything relies on writing – and scribes (like the fighting nobles) are expensive and do not produce food by themselves

Sea People
- Most records are from Egypt – and about how it could withstand the “sea people” while others could not (might be propaganda)
  - either people from outside the core empires, enticed by their weakening
  - unpaid mercenaries or revolting people from within the empires
  - first iron-bearers – but there are no signs of mass-produced iron weapons
People weren’t rebuilding after natural disasters and rather built new settlements away from the water