“Bronze Age Men" Know Little about Bronze Age Men
“Bronze Age Men" Know Little about Bronze Age Men
Revealing the pseudo-history of the Bronze Age Mindset.
In the Stone Age, humans took shards of, well, stone, whatever pieces were available, and fashioned tools and weapons. It is something this 21st-century person could readily understand. But somewhere around 3,500 BCE, humanity figured out how to combine the metals of tin and copper to create bronze, something far superior to stone. How they figured out that combining two metals would create a powerful new alloy is fascinating. Bronze tools and weapons could withstand more use and abuse than stone ones and were less likely to break or chip. Bronze is also a lot easier to shape and mold than stone. This means that bronze tools and weapons could be made in a greater variety of shapes, sizes, and designs than stone ones.
We can make several inferences about Bronze Age people based on historical records and archeology. Yet, like much of history, facts can be cherry-picked or warped to fit a particular narrative. In this case, a book called Bronze Age Mindset by Costin Vlad Alamariu, who goes by the sobriquet Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP for short. I know—weird. And though I have researched thousands of years of history and over a hundred cultures, I will not seek an explanation for the pervert part of his name. There are some mysteries better left undiscovered.
In his book, BAP argues that modern society should take after Ancient Greece, “when beauty, strength, and courage were prized above all else.” In particular, BAP prizes the classical conception of masculinity and wants modern men to emulate it. In Alamariu’s telling, the Bronze Age man had something moderns have lost: confidence in instincts and strength, knowledge in his blood. This is the book’s descriptor from Amazon: “BAP shows how the Bronze Age mindset can set you free from this iron prison and help you embark on the path of power.” Actually, the Iron Age superseded the Bronze one, so to use Bronze to escape an Iron Prison would be problematic, but let’s not allow poorly employed metaphors to distract.
A quote from Bronze Age Mindset: “Animals walk around in a state of permanent religious intoxication. This is the natural condition of the mind and intellect, the moment-to-moment perception, of man as well.” If you are screwing up your face in puzzlement, you are not alone. I think Alamariu is trying to suggest that we live in ignorance, sort of shadows on the wall of the cave thing, though I doubt BAP has read much Plato. Mostly I think it is pablum but a Pablum Age has yet to rear its ugly head, unless one is attending a three-day Turning Point USA conference, which might be the equivalent.
Rosie Gray, in a July 2023 article for Politico, with a rather ungainly, overly wordy title, “How Bronze Age Pervert Built an Online Following and Injected Anti-Democracy, Pro-Men Ideas Into the GOP,” notes the rise (or the 2nd rise?) of the Bronze Age man in her description of the book:
“It is a curious mix of philosophical analysis, polemic, and lifestyle advice, all in the service of the argument that embracing one’s authentic masculine virtue is the only way to conquer ‘lower types of mankind’ and root out the worst parts of democracy. (A sampling: ‘It goes without saying that you must lift weights’; women’s liberation infected society with a ‘terminal disease’; readers should prepare for impending — and in BAP’s view, desirable — military rule in Western countries.)”
-Rosie Gray, How Bronze Age Pervert Built an Online Following, etc.
Not that BAP, or a fellow uber-masculine type like Andrew Tate, for that matter, would understand the nuance of terminology, but the Bronze Age can mean many different times, places, and cultures. In the Middle East, the Bronze Age occurred between 3,330 BCE and 1,200 BCE. Yet, there are geographical distinctions. The Bronze Age in China began later, around 2000 BCE, and ended around 771 BCE, a period that started with the Erlitou culture and ended abruptly with the disintegration of Western Zhou rule. Bronze Age people were in modern-day France, the Urals, Africa, and the Middle East.
Yet, there are some key similarities flowing through these examples. Most Bronze Age people were not chiseled warriors glorying in combat. They were farmers. One of the critical aspects of the Bronze Age was to take the agricultural revolution that began around 14,000 BCE and build on it with new planting, irrigation, and harvesting techniques. It was during the Bronze Age that the full flower of civilization bloomed. Because a group of farmers could create a surplus, others could now become full-time builders, traders, artisans, and (horror) bureaucrats.
Another key about the Bronze Age is that the center of society, then as now, was the family, albeit with a few different twists. An article for Arkeonews, a newsletter devoted to the science of archeology, discusses that most men were allowed only one wife in the Urals. At the same time, a select few enjoyed the company of multiple women.
“Researchers discovered that the oldest of six brothers had the luxury of a second wife after analyzing the genomes of 32 ancient relatives who were all interred in the same burial mound. Yet this only applied to the oldest. The other brothers showed no signs of polygamy and probably lived monogamously with far fewer children.”
-Oguz Kayra, Arkeonews
In other words, a typical family unit. In Bronze Age Mesopotamia, not to be confused with the later imperial period, Ekhart Frahm, an expert on the 1,000-year history of Assyria, states,
“Families tended to be small. A husband would generally live in his private residence with his wife and children, sometimes a few enslaved people, and occasionally his parents. They were farmers who worked land owned by their families.”
-Ekhart Frahm, Family Matters
Yet clearly, BAP did not cast his gaze worldwide but specifically talked about Greece. Do our 21st-century Bronze Age men mean the Minoan civilization on Crete, the Mycenaean civilization on mainland Greece, or the Cycladic culture on the Cyclades Islands?
Let’s help out and assume that since the Mycenaeans represented the “age of Heroes,” eternalized in Homer’s epics, this is what BAP was idealizing. Consider these tough guys from the Iliad: the imperious commander-in-chief “king of Men” Agamemnon, the “swift-footed” war hero Achilles, Hector, breaker of horses, and Ajax the Great. Now we are talking!
Except for a few issues. Arguably, the most he-mannish of Homer’s heroes was Achilles. But he spends part of the book brooding in his tent because Agamemnon took a woman from him. For me, Achilles does not come across as macho, but what Thomas Cahill, in his Sailing the Wine Dark Sea, labeled a “bully boy” or “man child.” Cahill writes, “For most of the poem’s twenty-four books, Achilles sits in his tent in a rage, deliberating whether to remain on the sidelines or to abandon the Greeks altogether.”
If the book has an actual masculine presence, it is the family man, Hector. The Trojan prince is devoted to his wife and son, fights a war on the part of his father to make up for his brother’s stupidity, and goes to fight Achilles, knowing he will probably lose. Who is the real man? The guy brooding in his tent because someone took away his female slave, or the guy who, in defense of his country and family, takes on the bully with the odds stacked against him. Hector was the true Bronze Age hero, and had he been real, I doubt he would have worried about lifting weights to impress the girls.
Again, this is Homer’s take. When people imagine themselves in historical times, they never seem to envision serving in the 90% cohort who spent their days performing back-breaking toil sowing seeds, tending crops, and bringing in harvests. Or the 4% chiseling on rock or smelting Bronze, again unending toil, or avoiding pirates to make port and trade. No, moderns most often imagine they are in the 1% ruling class, which, up until the 18th century CE, really meant to whom you were born.
The real Myceneans were strictly hierarchical, valued family lineage, and awarded higher social status to those involved with religious or military activities and palatial administration. The lower classes contained craftsmen and artisans who worked for or provided goods and services. Then there were the farmers and, as was the case with almost every society up to (again) the 18th century, slaves. Yes, there was a group of Myceneans that were warriors, but a vastly greater number grew the food, fetched the water, built the buildings, and forged the bronze weapons. These people would also serve in the army, but I doubt it was their first choice.
BAP is correct about men having more power than women, as was the case in the Stone, Iron, Steel, Industrial, and pretty much every age until, again, the 18th century (funny how that time period keeps popping up). Patriarchy, like slavery, was not unique to pre-1000 BCE.
The real Bronze Age Mindset? Survival. As Eric H. Cline has documented in his remarkable 1177 BC.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, the end of the Bronze Age involved drought, famine, invasions, and the collapse of five significant civilizations:
“But what factor, or combinati.on of factors, may have caused the famine(s) in the Eastern Mediterranean during these decades remains uncertain. Elements that might be considered include war and plagues of insects, but climate change accompanied by drought is more likely to have turned a once-verdant land into an arid semidesert.”
-Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
We are a society that, through classical liberalism and capitalism, has been, for the most part, freed from worrying about these things. A society that has dispensed with slavery and, because intellectual contributions matter more than physical ones, enjoys greater equality. So free, in fact, that men can fantasize about being part of a warrior class and getting loads of chicks instead of worrying that too much rain, or too little, might mean starvation.
Finally, I would question what these modern Bronze Agers know about war. I doubt there is a statistic, but I would like to know the service rates and ratios regarding the BAP follower base. Now, I did not serve either but subsequently do not hold myself up as belonging to a caste of Bronze Age warriors.
In one of the greatest lines of TV fiction, on the Game of Thrones series, the intimidating Tywin Lannister tells his grandson, King Joffrey, “Any man who must say I am the king is no true king.” It’s funny how that applies to a host of life’s roles. And no man who goes around saying that the best time and place was Bronze Age Mycenae is no true Bronze Age man.
AD Tippet is the founder and Publisher of the Conservative Historian. Aves has conducted extensive research in Political, Religious, Social, and Educational history across all eras and geographies. He has been writing and podcasting for over 12 years. In 2020, he published his first book, The Conservative Historian. He has degrees in history, education, and an MBA. @BelAves
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“Finally, I would question what these modern Bronze Agers know about war. I doubt there is a statistic, but I would like to know the service rates and ratios regarding the BAP follower base.”
I wonder how many of them even lift weights. I’m guessing it’s 50%. Some of his followers on Twitter strike me as terminally online.