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.
229. The Hallstadt and LaTène Periods
North of the Mediterranean lands, the prehistoric Iron Age of Europe is divided into two periods: that of Hallstadt, named after a site in Austria, and lasting from about 900 to 500 B.C.; and that of LaTène, designated from a famous discovery in Switzerland, which stretched from 500 B.C. until almost the birth of Christ. The Hallstadt period is better developed in middle than in western Europe: it was influenced from Greece, the Balkans, and Italy. It prevailed along the Adriatic and Danube as far as Bosnia and Hungary; over all but northern Germany; in Switzerland; and in eastern France. Its flow was northwestward. The LaTène culture was carried primarily by Kelts, falls into the period of their greatest extension and prosperity, and centers in France. Here it seems to have developed under the stimulus of Greek colonization at Marseilles, to have spread northward to the British Isles, and eastward into central Europe. Its general flow was northeastward.
Considerable iron and bronze work of some technical fineness was made during the Hallstadt and LaTène periods. Fibulas, jewelry, weapons, and cult apparatus were often elaborate. But the quality of the cultures remained homespun, backward, and barbaric as compared with the plasticity and polish which contemporary Greek civilization had attained.
The Hallstadt culture, for instance, was wholly without cities, stone architecture or bridges, paved roads, coins, writing of any sort, the potter’s wheel, or rotary millstone; nor was metal used for agricultural implements. It was a time of villages, small towns, and scattered homes; of sacred groves instead of temples; of boggy roads, of ox-carts and solid wooden wheels; of a heavy, barbaric, warlike population, half like European peasants, half like pioneers; self-content, yet always dimly conscious that in the southern distance there lay lands of wealth, refinement, and achievement.
The LaTène time showed many advances; but, relatively to the civilizations of Greece and Rome—it was the period of Phidias and Plato, of Archimedes and Cicero—the northern culture was as many milestones of progress behind as during the Hallstadt era. The coins in use were Greek, or local imitations of Greek money, their figures and legends often corrupted to complete meaninglessness. Writing was still absent. Some attempts at script began to be made toward the close of LaTène, but they resulted in nothing more than the awkward Ogham and Runic systems. Until perhaps a century or two before Cæsar, there were no cities or fortified towns in Gaul. When they arose, it was on heights, behind walls of mixed logs, earth, and stone, as against the masonry circumvallations which the Ægean peoples were erecting more than a thousand years before. Even these poor towns were built only by Kelts; the Germanic tribes remained shy of them for centuries longer. Society was still essentially proto-feudal and rustic. But there had filtered in from the Mediterranean, and were being wrought locally, holed axes, iron wagon wheels, the potter’s wheel and potter’s oven, rotary mills, dice, tongs, scissors, saws, and scythes—all new to these northern lands, and curiously modern in their fundamental types as compared with the essentially half-primitive, half-barbarian suggestion that Hallstadt manufactures carry.