Deniker, p. 315 of his Races of Man, says Italy had iron as early as 1200 B. C.
Montelius assigns 1100 for iron in Etruria.
129 : 19. Hallstatt iron culture. See Baron von Sacken, Das Grabfeld von Hallstatt; Dr. Moritz Hoernes, Die Hallstattperiode; Bertrand and Salomon Reinach, Les Celts dans les vallées du Pô et du Danube; and Ridgeway, The Early Age of Greece, pp. 407–480 and 594 seq. There is a brief summary by Ridgeway which it will serve to quote: “Everywhere else the change from iron weapons to bronze is immediate but at Hallstatt iron is seen gradually superseding bronze, first for ornament, then for edging cutting implements, then replacing fully the old bronze types and finally taking new forms of its own. There can be no doubt that the use of iron first developed in the Hallstatt area and that thence it spread southwards into Italy, Greece, the Ægean, Egypt and Asia, and northwards and westwards in Europe. At Noreia, which gave its name to Noricum, less than forty miles from Hallstatt, were the most famous iron mines of antiquity, which produced the Noric swords so prized and dreaded by the Romans. (See Pliny, Hist. Nat., XXXIV, 145; Horace, Epod., 17 : 71.) This iron needed no tempering and the Celts had found it ready smelted by nature just as the Eskimos had learned of themselves to use telluric iron embedded in basalt.... The Hallstatt culture is that of the Homeric Achæans (see Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, pp. 407 seq.), but as the brooch (along with iron, cremation of the dead, the round shield and the geometric ornament), passed down into Greece from central Europe, and as brooches are found in the lower town at Mycenæ, 1350 B. C., they must have been invented long before that date in central Europe. But as they are found here in the late bronze and early iron age, the early iron culture of Hallstatt must have originated long before 1350 B. C., a conclusion in accordance with the absence of silver at Hallstatt itself.”
Keller, p. 160, describes an iron sword modelled after the same pattern as those of bronze; Schenck, p. 341, mentions a copper axe exactly like those of stone, and another of bronze of very primitive pattern. These and numerous other examples show the gradual growth of each age.
The generally accepted date for Hallstatt is about 900 or 1000 B. C. Even Rice Holmes approves of this. (See 2, p. 9.) But if we believe that iron spread from Hallstatt, and it was in Etruria at 1200–1100 B. C., and in Greece, in the form of swords like those of Hallstatt, at 1400 B. C. (according to Ridgeway), together with pins and various other objects which originated in the Tyrol, it is certainly very conservative to place the appearance of iron in Austria at 1500 B. C. Iron weapons were found in the remains of Troy from the war of 1184 B. C. See Ridgeway, op. cit., and Lartiaux, p. 179.
We may quote from Hoernes as follows regarding the dates: “The temporal limits of the Hallstatt period are uncertain, according to the districts which one includes and the phenomena which one considers. It is now known that the Hallstatt relics for the most part belong to the first half of the last millennium B. C. But while some assign these relics as from the time of perhaps 1200 to perhaps 500, others are satisfied with the period from 900 to 400, or bring them even farther forward. It is certain that one must differentiate in these questions between the west and the east of the Hallstatt culture areas; in the one the particular Hallstatt forms would come nearer to the close than in the other. One or perhaps more centuries lie between the first appearance of the La Tène forms in Western Germany and in the eastern Alps. Also the beginning varies according to the locality and the criteria which one takes for a guide, that is to say, according to whether the phenomena of the time about 1000 B. C. are considered as belonging still in the pure Bronze Age, to a transition period, or indeed to the first Iron Age.”
129 : 26. Ridgeway, speaking of the Achæans, says: “They brought with them iron which they used for their long swords and cutting implements.... The culture of the Homeric Achæans” (these are dated about 1000 B. C., about the time of the Dorians, according to Bury, p. 57) “corresponds to a large extent with that of the early Iron Age of the Upper Danube (Hallstatt) and to the early Iron Age of Upper Italy (Villanova).”
Myres, Dawn of History, p. 175, says that there was a gradual introduction of iron, first for tools and then for weapons. It had been known as “precious metal” in the Ægean since the late Minoan third period, or even the late Minoan second period, which is usually dated with the XVIIIth Egyptian dynasty as about 1500–1350. Most other writers, however, including Bury, p. 57, Myers, Anc. Hist., p. 136, and Deniker, Races of Man, p. 315, ascribe the general use of iron to a much later invasion, namely that of the Dorians, about 1100 B. C.
129 : 29. Iron swords of the Nordics. Ridgeway, 1, pp. 407 seq.: “Their chief weapon was a long iron sword; with trenchant strokes delivered by these long swords the Celts had dealt destruction to their foes on many a field. They used not the thrust, as did the Greeks and Romans of the classical period. This is put beyond doubt by Polybius (II, 30) who in his account of the great defeat suffered by the combined tribes of Transalpine Gæsatæ, Insubres, Boii and Taurisci, when they invaded Italy in 225 B. C., tells us that the Romans had the advantage in arms ‘for the Gallic sword can only deliver a cut but cannot thrust.’ Again in his account of the great victory gained over the Insubres by the Romans in 223 B. C., the same historian tells us that the defeat of the Celts was due to the fact that their long iron swords easily bent, and could only give one downward cut with any effect, but that after this the edges got so turned and the blades so bent, that unless they had time to straighten them out with the foot against the ground, they could not deliver a second blow.
“‘When the Celts had rendered their swords useless by the first blows delivered on the spears the Romans closed with them and rendered them quite helpless by preventing them from raising their hands to strike with their swords, which is their peculiar and only stroke, because their blade has no point. The Romans, on the contrary, having excellent points to their swords, used them not to cut but to thrust; and by thus repeatedly smiting the breasts and faces of the enemy, they eventually killed the greater number of them.’ (II, 33 and III.)”