First, let’s not mix up things. There is the Bronze Age of mythologies, from which Frazetta painted beautiful pictures, and there is the scientists’ bronze age.
To anthropologists, it is referring to their three ages’ classification: the stone age (Paleolithic and Neolithic), the bronze age and the iron age. For mythologists, as for us, it refers to the greek myth of the Four Ages, or to its shivaite equivalent, the four yugas.
According to Daniélou, the Dwapara Yuga / Bronze Age lasted 8,000 years. It started around 10,000 before J.-C. That was the time of a supposed worldwide cataclysm: Noah‘s flood in the Bible, maybe the flood of Gilgamesh, or the one of Quetzalcoatl.
Many Memorable Floods
It is indeed hard to say if they refer to the same flood: between the 12th millenium and the 9th millenium before J.-C., the last ice age, called Wisconsin in America and Würm in Europe, came to an end. Ice melting from gigantic glaciers caused countless and memorable floods. But not only floods. All legends evoke an even more terrible shock: fire, worldwide blaze, blood rivers, seisms, volcanoes, gigantic tsunamis and other signs that weren’t caused by glaciers’ melting, were they as big as continents.
At the dawn of bronze age, something terrible really happened, a worldwide cataclysm, a major traumatism for men. Geologists still don’t find any mark of this, but that doesn’t prove anything. There are so many myths converging on it, so many stories validating the great cataclysm made it more than a hypothesis.
Here is a possible scenario: caused by attraction of a star that skimmed our planet, all oceans on Earth stood towards that star, irresistibly attracted by it. (source)Velikowski, Worlds in Collision
The Bible says: “The waters stood up forming a column of dark clouds by day, that were glowing by night.” That surely comes from an observation of the phenomenon. The water column seemed dark by day because it hid sun light a little. And it seemed glowing by night because it got so high in the sky that it harnessed light from the sun on the other side of Earth. According to other sources, “All the world’s waters rised up to the huge height of 3 miles.”
The Red Sea Crossing
The Bible mentionned it in a famous episode, the Red Sea crossing. Since water stood up to form this huge column, Moses could go through the Red Sea with all his people, dry and safe. The pharaon and the egyptian troops that chased them were less lucky: the giant tsunami felt back on them. Bad luck! Or was it luck at all? And when the flood backed down, the human race started breath-taking continuing fights. A world war spreaded around in this wild Bronze Age so well related by Tolkien.
Heroic Fantasy
We perfectly know the bronze age because we had seen many pictures of it. That’s the world of heroic fantasy, full of imps, dragons, and powerful wizards. It looks like the Middle Ages of Enchanter Merlin, though it happened long time before that: between 10,000 and 2,000 years before J.-C. It is the universe of The Lord of the Rings, of Dungeons and Dragons, of the Great Goddess, and of Tuatha De Danaan, of the People of the Sea, after the catastrophic melting of Würm‘s and Wisconsin’s glaciers.
Freed from the ice, man discovered a whole new world. He simply had to get rid of certain predatory parasites, like the Orcs, for example. The Bronze Age is just before our age, and it is not very different from it. Gods were almost gone home. They had left behind them giant descendants: a bunch of heroes, sumerian, egyptian, hebrew, greek and hindu ones… But also unscrupulous ogres. Those ones got most of their fathers’ divine powers.
Psychic techniques, added to a logical mind, gave them huge abilities. Their incredible achievements look like fables. That’s why mythologies look suspicious, and myths become synonymous with lies. Yet, these supermen have probably existed.
The Greek mythology called them half-gods, while the Hindu mythology called them devas. They had the strength of giants and controlled martial arts. They got rational and deductive mind as well as magical and intuitive spirit.
To them, comprehension and control of sciences went hand in hand with the use of magic. These supermen simply used the two hemispheres of their brain, whereas we presently use only our left hemisphere. This fact gave them tremendous powers so the other men called them heroes. The Bronze Age was an era of strong fighters, an age of armored warriors and of magic spells as well. Some powerful wizards inherited certain powers from the Silver Age’s half-gods.
The Shamanic Legacy
Having no consciousness, they often used them to exploit entire populations. Afterwards, they transmitted a little part of their powers to druids, medicine men and shamans. With time, these men became marginalized by the new religionChristianism in Europe. In Middle Ages, their last inheritants, called “Satan’s disciples”, will be fried on the Inquisition’s stakes. As priests thought that nothing but fire could purify the sinner men. And it is also fire that marked the end of the Bronze Age.
Around 2,000 BC the Iron Age replaced the Bronze Age. This one disappeared in a worldwide blaze, dated 2,000 BC by Velikovsky.
Other authors think it was previous, but datation of that kind of events is almost impossible. In general, all dating is questionable as we explained elsewhere. The giant blaze only spared the men hidden in caves. The exact contrary of the flood, where only mountain people had survived. Everyone in turn! Do you hear the laughing gods?
On the other side of Atlantic Ocean, the Aztecs divided our past in Five Suns, like Hesiode’s five ages. According to the aztec calendar, humankind began in 20,239 years before J.-C. with the first sun, and it will end at the end of the fifth one, on 21st December 2012. Is it doubtful? We all know that humankind did not start in 20,239 before J.-C., so the other date could well be wrong too. How to make sure that isn’t wild imaginings? The Maya do not share our concern about this. For them, this is a test more.