The Iron Age begins

The story

A metal fallen from the sky

Iron was known long before it became important. The first iron objects archaeologists have found were not made by smelting ore, but by working pieces of meteoritic iron, that is, iron that fell from the sky with meteorites. It was very rare and so it was precious. A famous case is the iron dagger found in the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun: tests have shown that the metal came from a meteorite. To make tools and weapons in large quantities, however, people had to learn to extract iron from rocks.

Why iron is difficult

Iron is found in a great many places, far more than tin, which is needed together with copper to make bronze. But getting it out is more complicated. To separate it from the rock you have to heat the ore in a furnace to temperatures above 1,250 degrees, hard to reach for anyone without very good furnaces. Bronze, by contrast, melts at much lower temperatures. And the iron that comes out of the furnace cannot be poured into a mould: it stays a spongy mass full of slag, which the smith has to reheat and beat with a hammer to remove the impurities and shape the object.

In time smiths also discovered how to make steel, an iron with a little carbon, harder and suitable for tools and weapons. We do not know exactly when and where, and the techniques were improved little by little.

What “Iron Age” means

Archaeologists divide prehistory and antiquity into ages, according to the most important material: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. But these ages do not begin at the same moment everywhere. The Iron Age is said to begin when, in a place, iron, and in particular steel, becomes the common metal for tools and weapons in place of bronze. In the Near East it is generally placed around 1200 BC, and it lasts until about 550 BC, when the Persian empire of the Achaemenids was born. In Anatolia, the Caucasus and the Balkans the change begins a little earlier, around 1300 BC.

The Hittites and the secret of iron

For a long time people believed that the Hittites, the people of Anatolia, held a monopoly on iron and that this was the secret of their military strength. Today scholars no longer agree: in Anatolia iron objects of the Bronze Age have been found, but no more of them than have been found in Egypt and other countries. The idea of a secret guarded by the Hittites is no longer considered convincing.

Bronze runs into trouble

Why did people move from bronze to iron? One explanation, put forward by the historian Anthony Snodgrass, starts from the shortage of tin. In the centuries around 1300–1200 BC the trade of the eastern Mediterranean was thrown into chaos by wars, destruction and the fall of kingdoms: this is the crisis at the end of the Bronze Age. Without tin, bronze became hard to produce and the metal was recycled into weapons. To replace it, people began to make more iron, and with experience its working improved. Other scholars, such as Leonard Palmer, have thought that iron, being more abundant, allowed larger armies to be equipped. These are hypotheses, and probably several causes acted together.

The spread

Between the 12th and 11th centuries BC ironworking spread throughout the Mediterranean and reached southern Asia. In Greece the Iron Age is usually placed between about 1200 and 700 BC. In Europe iron arrived at the end of the 11th century BC, probably from the Caucasus, and in about five hundred years it spread north and west. In central Europe the Hallstatt culture, famous for its iron objects, is dated from about 800 BC. In Italy, iron is linked to the Villanovans, who introduced it to the peninsula (the dates differ from source to source, between the 11th and 9th centuries BC for the start of the culture).

Egypt, instead, stayed faithful to bronze for a long time: iron was scarce and considered partly impure, and things changed only after the Assyrian conquest of 671 BC.

What changed in everyday life

Iron was cheaper and easier to find than bronze, and this changed many things. A farmer could have a hoe, a sickle, a plough blade made of metal. A craftsman could have solid tools. A soldier could be armed with a sword. Metal was no longer a luxury for kings and warriors, but entered homes, fields and workshops.