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Nearly all professional cymbals are made from bronze, which gives a desirable balance of durability and timbre. Several types of bronze are used, commonly B20 bronze, which is roughly 20% tin, 80% copper, with traces of silver, or the tougher B8 bronze made from 8% tin and 92% copper. As the tin content in a bell or cymbal rises, the timbre drops.
Arsenical bronze objects appear first in the Middle East where arsenic is commonly found in association with copper ore, but the health risks were quickly realized and the quest for sources of the much less hazardous tin ores began early in the Bronze Age. [7]
The discovery and exploitation of the Bolivian tin belt in the 19th century made tin far cheaper, although forecasts for future supplies are less positive. There are as many as 400 different copper and copper alloy compositions loosely grouped into the categories: copper, high copper alloy, brasses, bronzes, cupronickel , copper–nickel–zinc ...
Copper was probably the first metal mined and crafted by humans. [8] It was originally obtained as a native metal and later from the smelting of ores. Earliest estimates of the discovery of copper suggest around 9000 BC in the Middle East. It was one of the most important materials to humans throughout the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages.
The largest cities of the Bronze Age Near East housed several tens of thousands of people. Memphis in the Early Bronze Age , with some 30,000 inhabitants, was the largest city of the time by far. Ebla is estimated to have had a population of 40,000 inhabitants in the Intermediate Bronze age . [ 1 ]
The "Early Bronze Age" in China is sometimes taken to be coterminous with the reign of the Shang dynasty (16th–11th centuries BC), [41] and the Later Bronze Age with the subsequent Zhou dynasty (11th–3rd centuries BC), from the 5th century, called Iron Age China although there is an argument to be made that the Bronze Age never properly ...
The Bronze Age (c. 3300–1200 BC) marks the emergence of the first complex state societies, and by the Middle Bronze Age (mid-3rd millennium BC) the first empires. This is a list of Bronze Age polities.
The three-age system has been used in many areas, referring to the prehistorical and historical periods identified by tool manufacture and use, of Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Since these ages are distinguished by the development of technology, it is natural that the dates to which these refer vary in different parts of the ...