Briefly to describe the Sword of the Early Bronze Age, during which, by the by, cremation became almost universal in Europe. The weapon is to a certain extent North European, and seems to have travelled up the valleys of great rivers: Denmark has yielded two hundred and fifty to six Italian bronze blades.[318] They are as a rule of fair length, averaging about seventy-five centimetres: the profile is either leaf-shaped, sub-leaf-shaped, or straight, ending in a bevelled point. The hilt is of two kinds: either tanged or untanged: the tang is broad, long, and pierced, with one or more holes for riveting; in this case the handle was of wood, bone, or horn. Many hefts, however, as will afterwards appear, are cast in a single piece with or without guard; and the latter often disappears in a hollow triangular base, a crescent or horse-shoe containing the shoulders with the concavity of the arch towards the point; this also served in many weapons to receive the rivets. The pommel is of various patterns, frequently a cone, oval, globe, or dome with steps or with melon-like ridges.[319] In others, especially amongst the old Kelts and Germans, it ended with a crutch or crescent whose cusps were, in the richer kinds, adorned with spirals.
CHAPTER VI.
THE PROTO-SIDERIC OR EARLY IRON AGE OF WEAPONS.
‘Of all metallurgical processes, the extraction of malleable iron may be regarded as amongst the most simple.’—Percy, Iron, &c. p. 573.
We now come to the King of Metals that ‘breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things’; the only ore friendly as well as fatal to the human form; the most useful and the most deadly in the hand of man[320]—Iron.[321]
According to the Parian Chronicle (Arundelian Marbles), followed by Thrasyllus (Clemens Alex. in ‘Strom.’), and by a host of writers, iron-working was discovered in b.c. 1432 or 248 years before the Trojan war. The latter, a crucial date, is, as will appear, wholly undetermined; the various authorities have made it range through nearly seven hundred years. But the life of Hellas is one great ‘appropriation clause’: the Greeks were doughty claimants, childish in their naïveté of conceit; they were burglars of others’ wits (convey, the wise it call), and they made themselves do all things. Their legends, for instance, accredit ‘Glaucus the Chian’ with having invented the art and mystery of steel-inlaying. De Goguet (a.d. 1761) tells us that the Phœnicians ranked amongst their oldest heroes two brothers who discovered iron-working; the Cretans referred it to the oldest period of their history,[322] and the Idæan Daktyls learnt it from the ‘mother of the gods.’ Prometheus (in Æschylus) boasts of having taught mankind to fabricate all metals: he also wears an iron ring supposed to be a chain not an ornament; and it possibly symbolises the union of fire and ore. The art of iron-working is referred, now to the Cyclopes, of Sicily, then to the Chalybes,[323] who extended from Colchis to Spain: Clemens (Alex.) refers the discovery of making malleable iron to the Noropes of Danubian Pannonia, who dwelt between Noricum (Styria) and Mæsia; and finally, to quote no more, Mr. J. Fergusson, a careful writer, tells us that ‘the Aryans (?) were those who introduced the use of iron, and with it dominated over and expelled (?) the older races.’
Modern discovery has proved that the invention, and indeed the general adoption, of ‘Mars’ (♂) dates from the very dawn of history; and that it is a mere theory to assume everywhere preceding millennia of bone and stone, copper and bronze. It is clear, for instance, in Central Africa, where copper and tin were unprocurable, that man must first have used iron.[324] A good authority, Mr. St. John V. Day[325] (C.E.), who was in charge of iron works in Southern India, claims for iron—cast as well as wrought, and even for its carburet, steel—the credit of being ‘unquestionably the earliest of substances with which man was acquainted.’ This writer, however, denies, contrary to all tradition, a ‘progressive rise in the quality of materials used by man’: that is, from the soft and yielding to the hard and refractory. He holds that Man, once master of metallurgy, ‘would be better able to deal with the much more easily manipulated bones, stones, or wood.’ He supposes all the metals, noble and ignoble, as well as gems and precious stones, to have become familiar amongst Eastern races, ‘whether they be Semitic, Aryan, Hamitic, Sporadic, or Allophyllian, by virtue of a civilisation due to a natural innate insight.’ Hence he declares Egypt an enigma to those who accept the dictum of ‘man’s gradual evolution from the condition of a savage, an ignoramus,’ and he opines that this grim being is simply a retrograde.[326]
These ideas trench upon old metallurgic superstitions and seem to run into extremes. We know nothing concerning the home of Proto-man, which is perhaps deep under the waters. Anthropologists, who locate him in Mesopotamia, ‘Aryaland’ (Central Asia), or Ethiopia, look only to the origin of the present species, and the historic cycle. Our studies, as far as they go, suggest that Man began in the Polar regions, and that in hoar antiquity each racial centre had its own material—wood and horn, bone and stone, copper, bronze, and iron.[327]
METAL IN EGYPT.
For our first lesson in iron we must go back as usual to Kahi-Ptah (the Ptah-region), that Nile Valley which is the motherland of all science, of all art. Here Bunsen[328] provides us with the following table: