The Romans, a more cosmopolitan people than the Greeks, paid great attention to the mineral wealth of their conquests, and were careful to choose the best acies[366] for their weapons. Diodorus Siculus[367] describes the process by which the Celtiberians prepared their iron for Swords. Pliny, who was Procurator of Spain under Vespasian, may have studied iron-mining and ore-working in the country which still produces the Toledo blade. He characterises the metal generally as being universally used and occurring in every part of the world—especially in Ilva, now Elba, where there are mines of oligiste, specular iron or iron glance. His process of steel-making is that of the Greeks. ‘Fornacum maxima differentia est; in eis equidem nucleus ferri’ (the σίδηρος ἐργασμένος or worked iron of Aristotle) ‘excoquitur ad indurandum; aliter alioque modo ad densandas incudes, malleorumve rostra’ (xxxiv. 41). Hence it appears that the Romans had one way to make steel, and another to harden and temper tools, picks, and anvils. ‘Possibly,’ says Dr. Martin Lister, ‘the latter were boiled in “sow-metal,” as the term densare seems to suggest.’
Roman mining-operations were often conducted on a large scale. The Forest of Dean and the Wealds of Kent and Sussex, not to mention other parts of England, show heaps of old slag containing classical pottery and coins of Nero, Vespasian, and Diocletian. They obtained the regulus[368] by the direct process, and used charcoal in rude Catalan furnaces; the work was imperfect, and the scoriæ contain a large percentage of metal. Ancient adits and shafts in Shropshire[369] and elsewhere have preserved the rude implements with which they made the natives labour in corvée. The hill-sides of Carthagena on the seaboard of Murcia (South-Eastern Spain) had been explored for lead and silver by the earliest Carthaginian colonists; and the industry was at its height when Nova Carthago, under Roman rule, became (b.c. 200) a flourishing municipium, the centre of a large population. At this time as many as forty thousand hands were regularly employed. In our seventh century the Arab invasion ruined the mines, not only of this district, but of every province occupied by the ‘Moors.’ About the mid-fifteenth century a revival was attempted; but this was checked at the beginning of the sixteenth, when the mines of Spanish America were opened: the Emperor Charles V. also would not see the soil of his European dominions disturbed by digging. The miners emigrated in mass, and New Carthage was forgotten till within the last half-century. According to M. Alfred Massart,[370] the ancient masses of plumbiferous scoriæ were large enough to pay for re-working. A superficial area of eight square leagues yielded some eight hundred thousand tons of iron-ore, of which two-thirds were ferro-manganese, and twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand tons of lead containing thirty thousand kilogrammes of silver. As regards the use of iron for many purposes by the ancient Britons before the Roman conquest, we may fairly, without attaching importance to the legend of ‘Milesius,’ believe that the industry may also have migrated northwards from a Spanish centre. Hence, Mr. Hutton, the local historian of Birmingham, believes that Sword-blades were made there before the landing of Julius Cæsar.
IRON IN INDIA.
From Assyria the use of iron would extend through Persia to India, to Indo-China, and to China and Japan. Professor Max Müller, as Mr. Day justly observes, differs with himself when he states in one place[371] that ‘iron was not known previously to the breaking up of the Aryan family’; and in another passage,[372] where we are told, ‘Before the separation of the Aryan race ... there can be no doubt that iron was known and its value appreciated.’ Here, evidently, the Sanskritist had changed his first opinion, because he had noticed that ‘Ayas’ may also mean copper or bronze. The Rig Veda mentions mail-coats, hatchets, and weapons of iron; but so far from assigning to this work the age of b.c. 1300, we may fairly hold that its present shape was assumed in the early centuries following Christianity. We have trustworthy notices of the metal in India only at the beginning of authentic history, when the acumen of the Greeks was applied to the gross absurdities of Hindu fable.[373] The Malli and Oxydracæ presented to Alexander a hundred talents’ weight of Indian steel (ferrum candidum) in wrought bars, just as Homer’s Achilles (‘Il.’ xxiii. 826), nearly a thousand years before, offered at the funeral games of Patroclus, ‘a rudely-molten mass of iron’ (σόλον αὐτοχόωνον, self-melted?), which had been used for hurling at the foe by Eëtion, and which would supply the farm with metal for five years. The ‘bright iron’ of Ezekiel, named amongst the wares of Tyre (xxvii. 19) with cassia and calamus, was probably the same material. The Periplus mentions sideros indikos and stómoma (steel) as imports to the Abyssinian harbours. Daimachus and Pliny specify, amongst the dearest kinds of steel, the ferrum Indicum and the ferrum Sericum; and Salmasius refers to a Greek chemical treatise ‘On the Tempering (περὶ βαφῆς) of Indian Steel.’
The great iron-working age of India seems to have been in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, when the blacksmiths must have been skilful and commanded an unlimited supply of the best metal. The Lát or iron-pillar of Delhi, to mention no other, is a solid shaft, showing that the people were unable to make a core. This simple piece of wrought metal, calculated to weigh seventeen tons and to contain eighty cubic feet of metal, measures in diameter 16·4 inches tapering to 12·05. The height above ground is twenty-two feet, and excavations of twenty-six feet did not reach the base: the known length therefore is upwards of forty-eight feet.[374] The sundry inscriptions punched upon it are of very various dates: Prinsep[375] assigns our third or fourth century to the Nagari character in which Rajah Dhava thus ‘renowned it’:—
‘By him who, learning the warlike preparations and entrenchments of his enemies with their good soldiers and allies, a monument of fame engraved by his Sword on their limbs, who as master of the seven advantages,[376] crossing over (the Indus?), so subdued the Vahlikas of Sindhu [N.B.: they can hardly be the ‘people of Balkh’] that even at this day his disciplined force and defences on the south (of the river) are sacredly respected by them,’ &c. &c.
Metallurgists dispute as to the way in which this huge iron rod was wrought. One writer,[377] however, seems to have hit upon the solution of the problem: ‘The column may have been forged standing, by welding on, one over another, thin iron plates or dires, the fire being built round the column as it grew; and the ground raised in a mound to keep the top of the column on a level with the workplace.’ Pyramid-building has been explained in the same way—a causeway.
But the Lát is not the only marvel of Hindu metallurgy. Mr. James Fergusson found in the Temple of Kanaruc, or Black Pagoda of the Madras Presidency, beams of wrought iron about twenty-one feet in length and eight inches section, to strengthen the roof, which the Hindus, in their distrust of the arch, formed after their usual bracket-fashion. In the fane of Mahavellipore he discovered sockets for similar supports. He assigns to the Black Pagoda a date between a.d. 1236 and 1241; and to Mahavellipore any time between our tenth and fourteenth centuries.[378] Colonel Pearse, R.A. presented to the trustees of the British Museum a unique collection of archaic tools, iron and steel, gouges, spatulæ, ladles, and similar articles, dug out of tumuli at Wari Gaon, near Kampti. But there are no grounds whatever for dating them ‘about b.c. 1500, or the time of Moses.’
WOOTZ.
The ferrum Indicum[379] of the Classics may still be represented by the famous Wootz or Wutz,[380] the ‘natural Indian steel,’ still so much prized for Sword-blades in Persia and Afghanistan. The specimens first sent in 1795 to the Royal Society of London were analysed by Mr. Josiah M. Heath with the results given below.[381]