> On 12 Nov 2011, at 05:09, orlanthumathi wrote:
> > So now look at Glorantha, it doesn't look like the Iron Age. Even the big empires don't see iron as a cheap and transformable metal. It's rare and used for very specific things. It looks like a super bronze age. With specialist artisans fashioning weapons from unusual metals.
>David Dunham <david_at_...> wrote:
> I usually picture Glorantha as being roughly Iron Age, only with the metal being Gloranthan bronze. Not an exact analogy, of course, but overall that seems to be where technology is.
I was going to write a blog post about this, but seeing as it comes up here.
The main difference between Gloranthan bronze and terrestrial bronze is that Gloranthan bronze can be mined directly, but terrestrial bronze required both copper and tin. It was exceptionally rare for copper and tin to be found together, so bronze was difficult to come by and required the maintenance of trade networks. That made bronze the province of elites - its not just the cost of labor to cast it, its the effort and alliance required to transport it.
Iron by contrast was ubiquitous, and you could dig it up fairly easily. It led to a distribution of the power of metal away from elites to far smaller groups. Iron Age social structures differ precisely because of the ubiquity of this resource.
In this sense, Gloranthan bronze, which can be mined from the bones of dead storm gods has the ubiquity of iron, and as such many Gloranthan societies are likely to exhibit the patterns of Iron Age cultures far more than bronze age ones (at least bronze age ones that did not have both tin and copper).
Personally I agree with David think its generally easier to think about the early iron age for this reason.
However, I also think that its not that easy to place Glorantha directly on the terrestrial timeline - some parts are still Neolithic, others bronze age, others iron age or late classical antiquity. Perhaps some sort of nebulous term like Ancient World is better.
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