Sounds like a religion more than a science.

I suggest you start a thread about the historicity of this, if you're so confident in it. Link me if you do decide to start one.

? Yeah, because they were capped with gold and covered in limestone. They shined brilliantly as a result.

So it reflects sunlight, which can be used for power... but not in any useful or focused way.

Err... generating power from pyramids? I thought it sounded that style.

Pyramids are decent lightning rods, like anything tall and pointy (and massive)... but there's no way to gather that power. Mountains also "generate a lot of power," but there's no way to harness that to a useful purpose, either.

The pyramids were tombs.

A semi conductor tech? How does that work? Could you explain that, please?

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I expect neither Anatolia nor CA could've produced a lot of high quality iron/steel, or else the iron age would've started. Iron was also noted to be very expensive, sometimes worth more than gold, through that era.

Late Hittites were accepting iron as tribute in minas, so it was treated like a precious metal. Possibly a way they were getting iron was as a byproduct of the bronze/copper industry, collected semi-smelted iron nuggets that were a defect in the copper ore.

The Inca still had countless warriors, 80K of them directly with king Atahualpa (though he only had 5,000 unarmed men when he was captured). It took many years of fighting to subdue the Inca despite great providence. It certainly wasn't a boring war.

All the same, I do have some ideas for alternate history regarding disease.

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West Mexican art has been found with large amounts of tin in it, though as I said I'm not sure what the quality was like for a tool. If you make an art object, it's fine for it to have air-bubbles and defects you can smooth away at the surface level, but a tool is liable to break. I wouldn't expect availability to be the problem, since the Americas is one of the most abundant sources of copper on Earth. The Zapotec were well known for their copper deposits, and Mexico became one of the greatest producers of copper later on. Tin was also available.

Apparently, copper and bronze smelting was only coming into its own around the 15th century, just before Europeans arrived. If so, it may be that there just wasn't time to develop a bronze industry. It's also plausible the overly high tin, 23%, in that find may've been intentional, to reduce the necessary temperature.

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Apparently the Tarascan may've used bronze weapons, and even breastplates, against the Aztecs. Also, despite there being no iron forges, apparently some Aztec chiefs had daggers made of meteoric iron: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2844401

So I guess the Tarascan had gotten a healthy bronze age empire going, and were ahead of the others. Perhaps they had factors helping them get ahead.

u/19seventyfour Discussed it more with the guy. General opinion is semi-iron-smelting was in place since the early bronze age. Not hot enough to properly melt off all the oxides and contaminants from the iron, and not in a properly oxygen-free environment to prevent more scale building up, and not with a reliably good system for carbonizing the iron. Also note that it generally wasn't hot enough to alloy the carbon to the iron to create steel (need like 1,700C for that), so the carbon would mostly serve as just another contaminant making it brittle.

Still, they apparently did extract iron from sands and ores this way since early in the bronze age, creating blooms of random quality. They could pound most of the scale out of, and could make the iron thicker to make up for issues of brittleness. This was hard work with no promise of quality, but eventually these factors improved until a proper iron age industry started.

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This is actually related to meteorites, in that partial smelting is necessary to get rid of some of the contaminants, but it is a lot easier than working with terrestrial ores that are less rich in iron.

Honestly, it does sound close to a monopoly, at that rate.

AFAIK, the Mexica peoples had the same issue, only making a limited number of axes a bit before European contact, never working out a good bronze industry. Presumably because their fires weren't hot enough to reliably cast high quality bronze. Probably similar to the iron industry during the bronze age, where they were more like rare, magical weapons. Developing a proper bronze industry would likely make a big difference, being a huge economical advantage.

With the Mississippi, current estimate is they collapsed before Columbus even set foot on Cuba, so European diseases don't seem to be the cause. A bronze industry at some point in their history could probably turn that around. It could even be an inciting incident, causing them to resort to war with a material advantage, creating a riverine empire.

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It may not change things much in the grand scheme of things, but they may also put up a much tougher fight against European incursion and lead to an interesting story. Especially since I'm thinking of incorporating other alternate history elements.

Wondered if you'd be interested in discussing it further.

Though the sources seem to feel Hatti had an advantage? Monopoly is going a bit far.

Thanks for this great summary, War Hymn. Good to see you.

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Just as an aside to you, I've been pondering an idea for if the Hopewell culture developed bronze metallurgy, which is how I got into this subject. From what I understand, it's a similar issue for them, that they couldn't get the fires hot enough to make a proper bronze cast, despite having copper and tin, so their axes were used more as money than as weapons or tools (though they saw limited use in those roles, it seems).

Thought I'd mention, since you said you found worldbuilding interesting. Thanks again for clearing this up.