Iron Age
Dates
An Iron Age thatched roof, Butser Farm, Hampshire, United Kingdom
Classically, the Iron Age is taken to begin in the 12th century BC in the ancient Near East, ancient India (with the post-Rigvedic Vedic civilization), and ancient Greece (with the Greek Dark Ages). In other regions of Europe, it started much later. The Iron Age began in the 8th century BC in Central Europe and the 6th century BC in Northern Europe. Iron use, in smelting and forging for tools, appears in West Africa by 1200 BC, making it one of the first places for the birth of the Iron Age.
The Iron Age is usually said to end in the Mediterranean with the onset of historical tradition during Hellenism and the Roman Empire, to end in India with the onset of Buddhism and Jainism, to end in China with the onset of Confucianism, and to end in Northern Europe with the early Middle Ages.
The arrival of iron use in various areas is discussed in more detail below, broadly in chronological order. Because iron working was introduced directly to the Americas and Australasia by European colonization, there was never an Iron Age in either location.
Iron use in the Bronze Age
By the Middle Bronze Age, increasing numbers of smelted iron objects (distinguishable from meteoric iron by the lack of nickel in the product) appeared throughout Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Indian subcontinent, the Levant, the Mediterranean, and Egypt. In some places, their use appears to have been ceremonial, and during the Bronze Age iron was an expensive metal, more expensive than gold. Some sources suggest that iron was being created in some places then as a by-product of copper refining, as sponge iron, and was not reproducible by the metallurgy of the time.
The earliest systematic production and use of iron implements originates in Anatolia. West African production of iron began at around the same time, and seems to have been clearly an independent invention (see Stanley J. Alpern’s work in History in Africa, volume 2). Recent archaeological research at Ganges Valley, India showed early iron working by 1800 BC. By 1200 BC, iron was widely used in the Middle East but did not supplant the dominant use of bronze for some time.
The transition from bronze to iron
People made tools from bronze before they figured out how to make them from iron because iron’s melting point is higher than that of bronze or its components, which makes it more difficult to make tools from iron .
During the Iron Age, the best tools and weapons were made from steel, which is an alloy consisting mostly of iron, with a carbon content between 0.02% and 1.7% by weight. Steel weapons and tools were superior to bronze weapons and tools. But steel was difficult to produce with the methods available at the time, and most of the metal produced in the Iron Age was wrought iron. Wrought iron is weaker than bronze, but people switched anyway. Iron is much cheaper than bronze, since it is much more common than copper and tin, which are the ingredients of bronze. Additionally it is easier to resharpen an iron tool, whereas bronze needs reforging.
At around 1800 BC, for reasons as yet unascertained by archaeologists, tin became scarce in the Levant, leading to a crisis of bronze production. Copper itself seemed to be in short supply. Various “pirate” groups around the Mediterranean, from around 1800-1700 BC onward, began to attack fortified cities in search of bronze, to remelt into weaponry.
Bronze was much more abundant in the period before the 12th to 10th century and Snodgrass and other authors suggest a shortage of tin, as a result of trade disruptions in the Mediterranean at this time, forced peoples to seek an alternative to bronze. This is confirmed by the fact that for a period, bronze items were recycled from implements to weapons, just before the introduction of iron.
