Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Article

Bronze as an Alloy and an Age

Learn More
Bronze as an Alloy and an Age

Bronze is copper alloyed with tin, and the mixture is harder and easier to cast than either metal alone, which is why it gave its name to an entire span of human history. The Bronze Age runs from roughly 3300 BCE to 1200 BCE depending on the region, marked by the shift from stone tools to cast metal ones, and bronze remained the working metal of choice for tools, weapons and armor until iron smelting spread widely enough to replace it. Because it is a compound rather than one of the seven metals the old planetary system assigned to Sun, Moon and the five visible planets, bronze does not carry a planetary rulership of its own in most esoteric metal tables; its correspondences are usually read through its parents, copper's Venus and tin's Jupiter, blended rather than assigned fresh.

The proportions vary by era and purpose. Early bronzes ran anywhere from five to twenty percent tin, and bell bronze, prized for its ring, uses a higher tin content than tool bronze, which favors toughness over resonance. That practical range is part of why bronze reads, in metallurgical writing going back to Agricola's sixteenth-century De Re Metallica, as a worked craft rather than a single fixed recipe.

Sources De Re MetallicaGeorgius Agricola, translated by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (1912) with The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe

Connections

Article On

Bronze, Metals
Source Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
Sources
Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.