Subject:
The Earth and its Peoples -Chapter 3 Spice Chart Social Political Intellectual Cultural Economic While elite groups shared similar values and enjoyed a relatively high standard of living the peasants who constituted the majority of the population may have seen some improvement in their standard of living, but far less than the wealthy elite. In the seventeenth century B.C.E. both Mesopotamia and Egypt succumbed to outside invaders. This allowed many smaller states to prosper. Most societies of the Eastern Hemisphere entered the Iron Age by the early first millennium B.C.E. Iron offered many advantages over bronze such being more readily available and forming harder, sharper edges. The Hittites were the first to use iron.
