Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

228. First Use and Spread of Iron

Some of the earliest known cases of the use of iron were decorative: for jewelry, or as inlay upon bronze. Finds of this sort have been made in Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and the Caucasus. Once however the extraction of the new material had become known, its abundance was so great as to further its employment, which grew fairly rapidly, though held back by several factors. One of these retarding causes was the prevalence of the casting process, which had become definitely established for bronze and was carried on with great skill, whereas iron lends itself to ready casting only in a foundry and for objects of larger size than were in customary use among the ancients. They forged their iron, and this new art had to be gradually learned. At its best, it could not produce some of the finer results of casting; in ornaments and statuettes, for instance.

Wrought iron is comparatively soft. A bronze knife will cut or shave better than a forged iron one. It was not until it was discovered that the iron from certain ores could be converted into steel by tempering—plunging the heated implement into water—that the new metal became a tool material superior to bronze. The invention of tempering seems to have followed fairly soon after the discovery of iron. But some centuries elapsed before this art became at all general.

Finally, conservative fashion operated to delay the undisputed supremacy of iron. Bronze has an attractive goldenish color; it oxidizes slowly and superficially; it was anchored in ritual; and it tended to remain associated with state and splendor, with wealth and nobility, whereas iron crept into commonplace and humble usages. Nearly four centuries after iron became known in the Greek world, the Iliad mentions it but twenty-three times, bronze two hundred and seventy times. In the Odyssey, a more bourgeois epic, and a little later in authorship, the proportion of references to iron is higher: twenty-nine to eighty. The first four books of the Old Testament, the composition of whose older parts is usually placed synchronous with that of the Iliad—about 850 B.C.—but whose outlook is the conservative one of religion, mention iron still more rarely: four times as against eighty-three references to bronze—“brass” the Authorized Version calls it.

Which nation first made iron available to the world has not yet been ascertained. It was almost certainly some people in western Asia. The Hittites of Asia Minor, the Chalybes of Armenia, are prominent contenders for the honor. It could scarcely have been the most civilized people of the region, the Babylonians, because their alluvial country contains neither ore nor stone. The time was probably subsequent to 1500 B.C., but not long after. By the time of Rameses the Great, in the thirteenth century, the metal was known and somewhat used in Egypt, being imported from the Hittites. Contemporaneously, the early Greek invaders who overthrew the Ægean culture of Crete and Mycenæ and Troy were in the beginnings of the Iron Age. Italy learned the new material from the Etruscans about 1100 B.C. Babylonian and Assyrian records seem to refer to it some few centuries earlier. The Jews in the time of Saul, 1000 B.C., are said by the Bible to have had little iron and no steel, a fact that made possible their oppression by the Philistines of the coast. This people, apparently descendants of the Minoan Cretans, have recently been alleged as the discoverers of the art of steel making; though whether with reason, remains to be proved. In central Europe iron became fairly abundant about 900 B.C., and was soon mined and smelted locally. In northern Europe its first sporadic appearance is soon after, but its general prevalence, justifying the use of the term Iron Age, not anterior to 500 B.C.

In the Far East, the history of iron is little known. In India, where it is likely to have been derived from western Asia or Persia, its first mention is at the end of the Vedic period, whose close is variously estimated at 1400 B.C. and 1000 B.C. The metal must have been new then: it was called “dark blue bronze.” The Hindus later carried knowledge of iron and steel-working to the Malaysian East Indies.

When China got its first iron is not known, though it appears to have been comparatively late. By the early part of the seventh century before Christ, iron had become common enough to be taxed. But it was used for hoes, plowshares, hatchets, needles, and domestic purposes only. Not until the fifth century B.C. did steel-making become introduced into China, and bronze begin to be superseded for weapons. Even in the first century after Christ the natives of southernmost China were fighting with bronze weapons in their struggle against amalgamation with the empire. At any rate, the Chou dynasty, the period of the production of the literary classics, from the eleventh to the third century B.C., was still prevailingly a time of bronze, as attested both by native historical records and the evidences of archæology. This lateness of iron in the Far East raises a strong probability that the Chinese did not enter the iron stage through their own discovery but were led into it by the example of Mongol or Turkish peoples of north central Asia, who in turn leaned upon the western Asiatics.

Japan has a definite Iron Age, well known through excavations. It is thought to have begun about the fourth century B.C. This approximate contemporaneity with China, whereas in nearly all the remainder of its culture Japan borrowed from China and followed long behind it in time, suggests that the Japanese or neighboring Koreans may have learned of iron directly from the north Asiatic teachers of the Chinese.