We tend to talk somewhat glibly about the Bronze Age and the Iron Age but what actually caused the latter. It is generally accepted that it started around 1200 BC but smelted iron objects appear in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Egypt Between 3000 BC and 2000 BC.

Indeed at the end of the third millenium, iron appears to have been five times as expensive as gold. Anyone know of any up to date papers on the subject? Or indeed have any pertinant observations. I only ask because the Bronze Age has been the subject of much research but the Iron Age seems a bit elusive.

As an aside, anyone got a quick cure for gout, my left big toe is giving me hell. :curse:

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As an aside, anyone got a quick cure for gout, my left big toe is giving me hell. :curse:

Aye... a sharp knife :lol:

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It's reaching that stage. :lol:

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As an aside, anyone got a quick cure for gout, my left big toe is giving me hell. :curse:

Allopurinol

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The way we are taught history, in neat little blocks with a definite begining and a nice neat end is a myth! I'm speaking as an 'old crinkly' so this isn't a diatribe on the modern teaching of the subject (don't get me started !). History is more like a fabric with interrelated weaves.
OK poetic imagery aside iron was worked in early civilisations alongside both bronze and indeed stone. The factors are a balance between the availability of resources, the utility of the end product and the availability of technology to work the material. So iron was a difficult metal to work largely due to it's high melting point, but its usefulness in weaponry (as ever the advance of technology is driven by the desire for better ways to subjugate your enemy) and in agriculture made the efforts worthwhile. It's likely that the early ironworkers would be regarded as magicians able to turn a rock into solid metal able to take a sharp edge and, more importantly hold that edge for longer than previous technologies. The high status of the local blacksmith even to relatively recent times is a reflection of this.
In essence then the thing that 'started' the iron age was the discovery of better ways to get charcoal hot, at first as a means of improving bronze working but, as techniques improved to utilise this new wonder metal iron. I suspect that this discovery was made independently in different civilisations but having made the discovery any iron working culture has a big lead over it's neighbours and will tend to dominate a regeon.

Oh and give up the port and stilton. 😮

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I would guess it was the availability of metal tools ( like bronze axes ) which made it possible to dig ore and cut timber for smelting?

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Started about the time meteoric iron was found. 😉

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_meteorite 

or perhaps a trifle later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age 

Or even later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Iron_Age 

The terminology has always been very bad and has resulted in many people thinking that the so called stone, bronze, and iron ages had definite starts and ends. If the convention had continued we would also have the water, steam, electricity, ...., plastic ages. Its fair enough to talk about when materials etc where first used but a huge mistake to give any impression of an end of use. The availability of iron did not reduce the usage of bronze it just supplanted some of its uses. The Romans had a very large bronze industry and many of their tools (e.g. surgical instruments, styluses etc) were 100% none ferrous. We are still living in the bronze, iron and other ages!

One could make a good case for the stone age still being with us in a limited form. For example we use large blocks of concrete as counter weights in cranes, go back a few years and these would be actual stones. These ages do not stop they fade.

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Iron is completely different from bronze and other copper alloys both in the way it's smelted and the way it's worked, and so it represents a major technological shift.

Firstly, when working at copper-smelting temperatures, although the iron will reduce from its ore it doesn't melt but instead forms a spongy mass called a bloom, which looks pretty grotty when brought out of the furnace. This then has to be re-heated and beaten to remove intermixed slag and consolidate it before you get to the point of being ready to turn it into something. You need to heat and shape the billet of metal into what you want, and its malleability decreases rapidly once it's below red heat. This is in complete contrast to a copper alloy, where you can put your ore in a crucible, smelt it and pour it straight into a mould, and in the case of a lot of copper alloys, doesn't respond very well to being beaten whilst hot

Joining is also completely different, iron needs to be heated to near-white heat and the pieces quickly hammered together to effect a weld, something you can't do with bronze. You can do this with pure gold at room temperature but that's a different story!

As for hardness, pure iron is actually softer than bronze, especially bronze that has been work-hardened (i.e. cold-hammered). Iron with up to about 1% of phosphorus in it can be work-hardened to gain a similar hardness to bronze, but realistically iron only gains an advantage over bronze when it a) contains between about 0.3 and 1.2% of carbon b) has been extremely rapidly cooled from red heat, and c) has been partly re-heated to within a fairly narrow temperature range. In other words, you need steel, and to know how to quench and temper it to gain a big advantage over bronze but once you have this technology, you have the means to produce tools and weapons that are both harder and more shock-resistant than any copper alloy.

We know that in antiquity people did manage to work all these things out, most likely in Anatolia roughly 3,500 years ago. Obviously, everything won't have happened all in one go, there would have been a few hundred years of trial and error before you get to the point where there is a viable iron industry, but we do know that the Hittite civilisation seems to have been the first one to get ironworking to the point where it gave them a big advantage over their neighbours.

Iron does have one really big advantage over all of the copper alloys, which ultimately put it in the dominant position and that's availability of the ore. Copper is relatively scarce and thus expensive, tin even more so, but iron ores are easily available. So, ironworking slowly made metal more available to ordinary populace as it was something that could be made from reasonably local resources, as opposed to expensive imported bronze.

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In conjunction with the intricate smelting problems the structure of society in the eastern Mediterranean probably played an important role and three stages of iron development can be identified.

In the first stage a society uses iron ornamental purposes, or for ceremonial tools and weapons. (could explain why it was considered so valuable). The second stage society uses iron for utilitarian purposes but bronze still predominates, In the third stage, the society uses iron more commonly than bronze as a working metal. The date 1200BC is the commonly accepted date for the start of the iron age but also for the discovery of carburization of iron, probably by the Hittites.(As mentioned by AR in his interesting post)

Another consideration is that maybe there was a shortage of bronze. There is a certain amount of evidence for this as existing items of bronze were remelted and reused. But that poses the question why would there be a shortage of bronze. True, tin ores were quite rare but there was plenty of copper around, Cyprus being the big producer. For this explanation to be plausible it would require a disruption of the Cypriot copper trade thus reducing the supply and raising the price of any that was available.

Of course it could have bee a shortage of tin. The source of tin in the eastern Mediterranean has long been a source of debate. The latest I’ve read (which isn’t that recent) is that it came via, but not from, Iran. Probably Afghanistan. This route could easily have been compromised around the same time.

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