Iron Age

• 1. Introduction

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  Nine small beads, dated to 3200 BC, were found in burials at Gerzeh in Lower Egypt. They were not poured into a mold. They were shaped by careful hammering, and the iron in them came from a meteorite, a natural iron-nickel alloy that fell from the sky. The Iron Age, the period named for the metal, would not begin in earnest for another two thousand years. So how can iron predate the Iron Age by twenty centuries? The answer is that the age is not about iron found, but iron made. The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three Metal Ages, following the Copper Age and the Bronze Age. It is defined not by the presence of iron, but by a specific threshold: the moment smelted steel tools and weapons replace their bronze equivalents in common use. That threshold arrived at different times in different places, and in some places it never quite fits at all. What follows is the story of how a single archaeological label came to stretch across continents that never shared the same metal, the same calendar, or even the same idea of what counts as history.

• 2. A Scandinavian Invention

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  Christian Jürgensen Thomsen introduced the Iron Age to Scandinavia as an archaeological era during the 1830s. The three-age system of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages was first used for the archaeology of Europe during the first half of the 19th century. Its name reaches back further still, to the mythological Ages of Man described by the Greek poet Hesiod. By the latter half of the 19th century the system had been extended beyond Europe to the archaeology of the ancient Near East. By the 1860s it was embraced as a useful division of the earliest history of mankind in general, and began to be applied in Assyriology, the study of ancient Mesopotamia. The now-conventional periodization for the ancient Near East was not worked out until the 1920s and 1930s. The concept was built to describe Iron Age Europe and the ancient Near East, and that origin would shape, and limit, everywhere else it was later sent.

• 3. The Smelting Threshold

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  Temperatures above 1250 degrees Celsius are required to smelt terrestrial iron, a temperature impractical to reach with technology commonly available until the end of the second millennium BC. This is the hidden reason iron arrived so late. The raw material was abundant, but the heat was not. Bronze asked far less of its makers. Its two components were tin, with a melting point of 231.9 degrees Celsius, and copper, with a moderate melting point of 1,085 degrees Celsius. Neolithic kilns, which date back to 6000 BC, could already produce temperatures greater than 900 degrees Celsius, well within reach of bronze. Heat alone was not enough for iron. Ancient iron production also required complex procedures to remove impurities, to regulate the admixture of carbon, and the invention of hot-working to balance hardness and strength in steel. Only the capability to produce carbon steel makes ferrous metallurgy yield tools harder and lighter than bronze. The defining mark of an Iron Age culture is not a single object but mass production: tools and weapons made not from found iron, but from smelted steel alloys with added carbon.

• 4. Why Bronze Failed

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  Anthony Snodgrass offered an explanation for why iron displaced bronze when it did. A shortage of tin and trade disruptions across the Mediterranean about 1300 BC, he suggested, forced metalworkers to seek an alternative. Many bronze implements were recycled into weapons during that period of scarcity. As more people turned to iron out of necessity, steel-making technology improved and costs fell. When tin became readily available again, the contest was already decided. Iron was now cheaper, stronger, and lighter, and forged iron implements superseded cast bronze tools permanently. Modern archaeological evidence places the start of large-scale global iron production about 1200 BC, marking the end of the Bronze Age. In the ancient Near East this transition occurred simultaneously with the Late Bronze Age collapse, during the 12th century BC. The technology then spread through the Mediterranean basin and to South Asia between the 12th and 11th centuries BC, while Northern Europe was not reached until around the 5th century BC.

• 5. The Hittite Myth

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  The development of iron smelting was once attributed to the Hittites of Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age. The theory held that the Hittite Empire owed its success to a monopoly on ironworking, and that the invading Sea Peoples spread the knowledge once that empire fell. Closer examination has dismantled this picture. The idea of a Hittite monopoly has been scrutinized more thoroughly and no longer represents a scholarly consensus. The number of iron objects from Bronze Age Anatolia is comparable to those found in Egypt and elsewhere from the same period, and only a small number of them are weapons. Earlier still, a dagger with an iron blade was found in a Hattic tomb in Anatolia dating from 2500 BC, one of the earliest smelted iron artifacts known. The earliest tentative evidence for iron-making comes from iron fragments with the right carbon content found in Proto-Hittite layers at Kaman-Kalehöyük in modern Turkey, dated to 2200 to 2000 BC. Souckova-Siegolova showed that iron implements were made in Central Anatolia in very limited quantities about 1800 BC, used by elites but not commoners during the Neo-Hittite Empire of roughly 1400 to 1200 BC.

• 6. An Impure Metal

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  Iron was attributed to Seth, the spirit of evil who in Egyptian tradition governed the central deserts of Africa. This belief left a mark on the archaeological record of Egypt. Iron metal is singularly scarce in collections of Egyptian antiquities, and the explanation appears to be religious rather than technical. The surviving relics are mostly the paraphernalia of tombs, the funeral vessels and vases, and iron, considered an impure metal, was never used in their manufacture or for any religious purposes. In the Black Pyramid of Abusir, dating before 2000 BC, Gaston Maspero found some pieces of iron, and the metal is mentioned in the funeral text of Pepi I. Bronze remained the primary material in Egypt until the conquest by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 671 BC. A sword bearing the name of pharaoh Merneptah, along with a battle axe with an iron blade and a gold-decorated bronze shaft, were both found in the excavation of Ugarit. A dagger with an iron blade recovered from Tutankhamun's tomb, of the 13th century BC, was examined recently and found to be of meteoric origin.

• 7. Iron Without Bronze

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  Africa did not have a universal Bronze Age, and many areas passed directly from stone to iron. This single fact breaks the tidy three-age sequence the concept was built on. Some archaeologists believe iron metallurgy was developed in sub-Saharan Africa independently from Eurasia, as early as 2000 BC. Iron metallurgical development has been dated to 2631 to 2458 BC at Lejja in Nigeria, and to 2136 to 1921 BC at Obui in the Central African Republic. The Nok culture of central Nigeria practiced smelting in bloomery-type furnaces by about 550 BC, and possibly a few centuries earlier. The site of Gbabiri in the Central African Republic has yielded a reduction furnace and a blacksmith workshop, with earliest dates of 896 to 773 BC and 907 to 796 BC. Nubia, one of the few places in Africa with a sustained Bronze Age, became a major manufacturer and exporter of iron after the Assyrians expelled the Nubian dynasty from Egypt in the 7th century BC. Iron and copper working spread south and east with the Bantu expansion, from the Cameroon region to the African Great Lakes in the 3rd century BC, reaching the Cape around 400 AD.

• 8. Where The Label Breaks

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  In China, writing came first. Chinese bronze inscriptions appear around 1200 BC, before iron metallurgy, which was known by the 9th century BC. Because written history began before iron smelting, there is no recognizable prehistoric period defined by ironworking, and the term Iron Age is used infrequently for China. This exposes a deeper problem with the concept. The idea that the Iron Age ends when the written record begins has not generalized well, because writing and steel developed at different times in different places. In Mesopotamia, written history predates iron smelting by hundreds of years. For the ancient Near East, the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire around 550 BC is still traditionally used as an end date, roughly the beginning of historiography with Herodotus. In Central and Western Europe, the Roman conquests of the 1st century BC mark the close of the period. The Germanic Iron Age of Scandinavia, by contrast, is considered to end around AD 800, with the beginning of the Viking Age. One label, stretched across the world, ends in a different century almost everywhere it lands.