Innovations and technological transfer in ancient metallurgy

Metallurgical production is a complex of interrelated technological operations, so innovations in it are also complex. In the Bronze Age, they arose only in the case of solving some socio-economic problems. The main impetus for these innovations was the growing demand for metal. However, most of them were not purposeful acts of invention at all. More often they were formed by random technological mutations, and if these mutations made it possible to solve some urgent problems, the new technological scheme was consolidated as an innovation. The transfer of technologies to other areas depended on their nature. In the period of dominance of arsenic alloys, alloying was closely related to the used ore, its smelting technologies, and subsequent foundry and forging operations. As a result, for the transfer of this entire complex, the coming of people, the bearers of this knowledge, was needed. With the invention of tin alloys, metalworking processes were separated from ore smelting. In these new conditions, even the coming of people with this new technology did not lead to its implementation. A prerequisite in this case was inclusion in the copper and tin trading system. However, despite the clear dependence of the development of technologies on social processes, their general direction in the development of ancient metallurgy was caused by universal physical and chemical laws, which provided a relatively similar picture of these innovations in different regions of Eurasia. The second reason for this similarity was that most of the major innovations came from the Near East.