Thus iron is abundant, but its uses are strangely restricted. All careful readers must perceive that Homer lives in an age of "overlap." Remains of such ages are common on European sites almost everywhere; the explorer finds in the overlap iron and bronze things together, iron comes gradually in: bronze, for weapons and tools, gradually disappears.
Thus at the great prehistoric cemetery of Hallstatt in the Austrian Alps, we find weapons of bronze fitted with iron edges, then swords with iron blades and hilts of bronze, then swords of iron, hilt and blade.[4]
In Crete was found a tholos tomb (a domed stone edifice) with a bronze spear-head, a set of iron tools including a double pick and an axe, and a sword of iron. This tomb was of the period when "geometric" ornament on vases had nearly supplanted the Aegean forms of decoration: in fact it was in the period to which we may assign Homer.[5] Other tholos tombs near the same site contained vessels Aegean in shape, with geometric ornament, and an iron dagger, and bronze fibulae and bracelets, objects for which iron was not used. In a tomb at Muliana in Crete,[6] were found bronze weapons with human remains that had been buried beside iron weapons with cremated bones.[7] The vases were partly of Aegean, partly of Dipylon geometric style.
Now Homer describes this period of gradual overlap of iron and bronze. But he adds the strange peculiarity that the weapons, but for a single arrow-head[8] and an iron mace, mentioned as the peculiar fancy of a warrior when Nestor was young,[9] are always of bronze, while the tools and the masses of metal out of which they are forged are usually of iron. This fact has often been the subject of comment.[10] Of the critics mentioned in the note below, Helbig and Cauer think that the steady mention by Homer of bronze for weapons is a mere tradition of the epic, maintained by poets in the Iron Age. It would be interesting to find any such tradition in any other literature of the early Iron Age. But we do not find it. Moreover, the lays of the Bronze Age, when they mentioned tools, must have said that they were of bronze, as Homer occasionally does; but we are not told why later poets maintained the bronze tradition for weapons, but spoke of tools as iron. As in the case of the arrow-head it is called "the iron," so in the case of tools, and of knives (not used in battle); the wheelwright is said to fell a tree "with the iron," though Odysseus trims the wood of his bed "with the bronze." Achilles, it is feared, will cut his own throat "with the iron" (knife); the cattle struggle when slain "with the iron"—the butcher's knife; and Odysseus shoots "through the iron," through the holes in the axes. But no man, in battle, strikes with or dies under "the iron." This distinction could not have been uniformly maintained throughout several centuries by poets living in an age of iron weapons.
Naber and Bérard, unlike Cauer and Helbig, give the obvious explanation that when iron came in, but its manufacture and the sharpening of it were ill understood, men would make heavy axes and other rural implements of iron, but would not trust their lives to iron weapons which were brittle or which "doubled up." This is the view which occurred to myself before I had read the works of Naber and Bérard; but I then knew no proof that a stage of iron tools and bronze weapons had ever existed.
As Monsieur Bérard puts the case, "I might almost say that iron is the popular metal ... the shepherd and ploughman can extract and work it without going to the town."[11] It is probable that the princes who had lands remote from towns kept each his own smithy for rough work, like Highland chiefs in 1680-1745, who had the rough iron work done on the estate, but always imported their sword blades from the Continent. The hilts were made at home, basket hilts.[12]
Knives, never said to be used in war, agricultural and pastoral implements, and axes, though occasionally of bronze, are usually of iron in the Epics.[13] No graves opened in Greek soil have as yet yielded iron tools accompanied by bronze weapons alone. Mr. Arthur Evans, however, who accepts the view that Homer describes an actual period of bronze for weapons, iron for tools, writes, "This corresponds with a distinct phase of archaeological evidence. Thus in the Cypro-Minoan tomb at Enkomi the weapons were of bronze, but small iron knives also occurred (Murray, Excavations in Cyprus, p. 25)."[14] The Homeric state of affairs is illustrated by Mr. MacAllister's diggings in a certain stratum of the ancient city of Gezer in Palestine. All weapons are of bronze, all implements are of iron. Gezer was in touch with Aegean art; a bronze sword-blade of the Cnossian "horned" type (the hilt turning up like two horns) was found there.[15] Gaza also had "her Minoan traditions and the cult of the Cretan Zeus." Jewellery of late Aegean taste has been found at Gezer; and the Philistines are suspected of being settlers from Crete, whether Aegean or Achaean.
In the present state of knowledge we can say safely that Homer, with his bronze weapons and iron tools, has not invented a state of culture that never existed. The relative uses of excellent bronze for spears and swords, and of dubious iron for implements, were perfectly natural. Homer probably saw this stage in actual life; nobody could invent it; but no Homeric cairn with buried weapons and tools has ever been discovered, and if any had been found, they would long ago have been plundered.