Blood and Iron: Political Fragmentation in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract This paper examines how the transition to iron metallurgy lowered the cost of organised violence and drove political fragmentation across the Eastern Mediterranean after 1200 BCE. Bronze required scarce inputs, concentrating coercive capacity among elites. Iron was widely abundant, redistributing access to weapons beyond the elite class and undermining centralised control. Using novel geospatial data of ancient polities, I exploit staggered iron adoption across 200 km × 200 km grid-cells in a Two-Way Fixed Effects framework. Iron adoption increases polities per cell by 1.356 to 1.521 units. The results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and competing explanations.