The Iron Age begins

The Iron Age began when the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East started to make their everyday tools and weapons of smelted iron instead of bronze. The change began around 1200 BCE and took about six centuries: by about 600 BCE iron was the common working metal from Anatolia and the Levant to Greece, Assyria and central Europe. Iron itself was not new. Egyptians hammered beads out of meteorite iron around 3300 BCE, and in 1925 Howard Carter found an iron dagger with a gold handle lying on the thigh of the boy king Tutankhamun, buried in the 14th century BCE; in 2016 its nickel content showed that this blade, too, came from a meteorite. Smiths in Anatolia were smelting small amounts of iron from ore soon after 2000 BCE, as finds at Kaman-Kalehöyük show, but for centuries iron stayed a rare treasure: Assyrian merchants of that time valued it at up to forty times its weight in silver. In the 13th century the Hittite king Hattusili III wrote to an Assyrian king that his store had no 'good iron' just then, and sent him a single iron blade. Historians once read such letters as proof of a Hittite iron monopoly; that idea has been given up.

Around 1200 BCE the palace world of the Late Bronze Age fell apart. The Hittite empire collapsed and its capital, Hattusa, was destroyed; Ugarit, a rich trading port on the Syrian coast, was burned and never lived in again; and in his eighth year, about 1177 BCE, the pharaoh Ramesses III fought off the 'Sea Peoples' and had the battle carved on his temple at Medinet Habu. Bronze is copper mixed with about a tenth of tin, and tin often came from far away, perhaps from as far as Central Asia. Scholars long thought that the collapse cut the tin routes and forced smiths to turn to iron, whose ore is found almost everywhere. Archaeology has not confirmed a tin shortage, since the bronzes of the time hold as much tin as before, so many now see iron as a metal that the small new states and their local smiths could make for themselves, at first alongside bronze and later instead of it.

Ancient smiths could not melt iron. They heated ore with charcoal in a small clay furnace, a bloomery, and got a spongy lump of iron and slag, the bloom, which they hammered while hot. Plain iron is no harder than good bronze; it becomes steel when it takes up carbon from the charcoal, and harder still when it is quenched in water, and early smiths sometimes managed both, though not reliably. Cyprus and the southern Levant led the way: a 12th-century dagger from Kition has an iron blade held by bronze rivets, and most of the 11th- and 10th-century Cypriot iron objects that have been tested contain carbon, which makes them a kind of steel. In Greece bronze grew scarce and iron spread between about 1025 and 950 BCE, and around 950 BCE a warrior at Lefkandi on Euboea was buried with his iron sword and spearhead. In the 10th and 9th centuries iron was smelted at Tell Hammeh in Jordan and worked at Philistine Gath; the Bible remembers a time when the Israelites had no smiths and had to go down to the Philistines to sharpen their ploughshares. The Phrygian citadel of Gordion, burned around 800 BCE, was full of iron tools, and the Assyrian kings stored iron in huge quantities at Sargon II's new capital, Khorsabad.

Sea trade, led by the Phoenicians, carried the new metal west across the Mediterranean. In central Europe a rich salt-mining community at Hallstatt in the Austrian Alps flourished from the 8th century BCE and gave its name to the early Iron Age of the region, about 800 to 450 BCE; its great cemetery was dug up by Johann Georg Ramsauer in the 19th century. Egypt, which had prized meteorite iron, took up smelted iron late, mostly after the Assyrian invasions of the 7th century. Iron-smelting reached China from the West through Central Asia by the 8th century BCE, and Chinese smiths then invented something new: by the early 5th century BCE they were casting iron in moulds. In West Africa, the Nok culture of central Nigeria smelted iron from about the middle of the first millennium BCE; whether it learnt the craft from the north or invented it is still debated. This entry stops around 600 BCE, when iron had become the everyday metal of the Near East, the Mediterranean and central Europe; its later spread across Africa and Asia is a story of its own.

Iron ore is everywhere, so once people knew how to smelt it, metal no longer depended on rare tin and long trade routes. Over the centuries iron became the metal of farming and of war, and some writers say it put weapons 'in the hands of the masses' for the first time, though archaeologists now stress how slowly and unevenly the change came. The steel of those first bloomeries is the ancestor of the metal of railways, ships and skyscrapers. And the name itself is modern: in 1836 the Danish scholar Christian Jürgensen Thomsen published his division of the past into a Stone Age, a Bronze Age and an Iron Age, a scheme archaeologists still use.