Long before the so-called “iron age” started, humans knew of iron. There are iron artifacts from the 4th millennium BCE. Humans were fascinated by these small pieces of iron, which were found in meteorites and cherished and valued them. However, usable iron was rare and extremely sought after to the extent that we know it was more valuable than gold or silver. How did humans invent the first technique to produce metallic Iron from ore?
The story of Iron starts with the production of Bronze. Bronze is an alloy of 90% copper. Depending on what constitutes the other 10% we get different types of bronze. The most common type which kick started the bronze age around 3500 BCE in western Asia is tin bronze. Unlike copper ore, tin is hard to find but a small amount of it can significantly improve the quality of copper and make it usable and strong. Ancient smelters produced bronze by melting the natural copper ore mixed with tin ore in simple kilns. The resulting bronze was the primary metal used in tools and arts for more than 2500 years.
Iron is a common impurity in copper ores. We also know that iron ore can, and was, used as a flux in the process of smelting copper. In simple terms, a flux agent is a chemical that attracts oxygen to itself and protects the primary product, which is copper, from oxidizing in high temperatures. Therefore, across the ancient world, bronze smelters had been encountering molten iron when they raised the kiln temperature high enough. However, they discarded the resulting metal because its copper impurity made it too soft and inferior to bronze.
Around 1,200 BCE the collapse of bronze age civilizations in the near east due to a “perfect storm” of drought, famine, disease, immigration and war affected trade routes that brought tin ore to the western Asia. During this time of bronze shortage some smelters seem to have resorted to using the lower quality iron for tool making. They had observed that adding carbon to iron makes it much harder but prone to breaking. We have evidence of iron tools built with layers of soft and hard iron to achieve desired outcomes. Over time iron smelters experimented with different amounts of carbon impurity and achieved desired levels of hardness and strength.
Some high-level observations about the story of Iron are helpful. First, Iron smelting was discovered independently in different parts of the world, but everywhere it was an evolution of the bronze smelting process. Second, the process took several centuries to evolve. The first iron pieces were considered bad bronze and discarded. When tin became rare the producers gradually increased the quality of the bad bronze. In all likelihood for centuries they did not recognize iron as a new metal but rather an improved “bad bronze” . The final notable observation of the story is who these inventors were. They were not the learned people of the ancient world. Rather they were artisans and laborers working in difficult conditions.
Fun article. I think that there is a lot of interesting information here that would help explain what we saw with the Bronze Age Collapse, though I would submit that this is just another of the multiple factors that led to the collapse. Maybe a drought occurs, folks turn to iron weapons, and then take over another town or village for their resources, and so on.
This could lead to supply chain collapses and such. Maybe just general destabilization and raids and such sort of collapsed the larger empires. But at the same time, those larger empires would also have had access to iron, so why couldn't they by matter of numerical superiority, access to greater resources, tactics and military organization, and more simply, overwhelm smaller armies or bands utilizing the same technology and restore order or at least defend themselves?
I just started reading Conrad Black's historical series and in the Egyptian chapter and also the Assyria/Babylonia chapter he references the historical accounts where time and time again Egyptian forces led by the pharaoh would march into the broader Middle East to restore order. Why couldn't they continue to do that?
It could be the Bronze Age empires were based on violence and coercion. When the small polities had the means to defend themselves, the empires fell apart.
Well all of civilization and society is based on violence and coercion to some extent. I'm not sure that small tribes polities were any less violent than larger empires, and I'd generally have a bias that larger empires were more peaceful per-capita because if you are the king war is tiresome and threatening. Better to be at peace.
I'm also not sure about your suggestion. Yes small polities had the means to defend themselves, but the pharaoh's army is much larger and you're definitely going to die if he shows up and you fight back. So why wouldn't the pharaoh have shown up to put down a rebellion? Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
I'm just not sure that this democratization of violence is the answer. Though it may be a key contributor. Curious about your thoughts or others. Incredibly fascinating topic.
Have you read about the Assyrians? Those early empires were nasty.
And yes, the common people might have been better off under larger empires than under smaller ones, but who has ever cared about the common people? The upper class were probably more "I'd rather be the king of a small kingdom than bend my knee to an emperor."
Bronze age empires were large -- if the pharaoh couldn't trust his subordinates he could only be in one place at a time.
>Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
And when all those rebellions cost the Pharaoh 3x what they used to to put down you're forced to be a lot more diplomatic. Less extraction under threat of violence means worse negotiating position for the next one. It's a cycle.
And for every full scale armies meeting in the field type rebellion there's a lot of "sir a second village has lynched the tax men" which compel you to dispense policing forces, etc, etc.
Just because you "can" do something in moderation doesn't mean it's a sustainable way to run your empire at scale.
You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes. And you can't just "supervise" them with your loyal people because this is pre-industrial and there do not exist sufficient surpluses to feed those nonproductive mouths.
Well, just hypothetically, let's say that there's enough iron to outfit a small group, but not a large one. That means that a small group could have a technological edge, and therefore that the losses become too much for the large group to want to initiate the confrontation with them.
Of course, that leads to questions like "Why does the small group wind up with the good weapons? Why doesn't the large group get them, even if there aren't enough for all of them?"
But maybe the iron smelting isn't happening in downtown Memphis. Maybe it's happening out in the hinterland somewhere, and so the locals have a chance to grab all the output.
Because pure iron, with no carbonization, is useless as a material for tools or weapons.
Carbonization was invented/discovered after the Bronze Age collapse, slowly over hundreds of years, exactly because they didn’t have access to bronze anymore.
Despite being "useless", almost all early iron age weapons were iron, not steel nor bronze. They generally knew about steel, but could not control the carbonization well enough to outfit the whole army with it. Steel did not become widespread until the Roman era.
I thought this was a cool fact about the Bronze Age: "According to a new study, it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites".[0]
Tin was far more scarce than iron. Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones, just easier to source and make. This guy makes a case that iron weapons caused the Bronze Age Collapse.
Don't confuse iron weapons with steel. Steel was much better than bronze, but they didn't know how to make steel and so examples were rare. (probably not unknown, making iron weapons does produce a small amount of steel and if you're careful you can separate that out and after a thousand or so iron swords you can make one steel sword. I've seen it suggested that this is where the stories of a legendary weapon comes from - probably not something we could ever know for sure.)
Your twitter link is a summary of the linked article - from the editor-in-chief - in case someone else sees "this guy" and assumes it would be a different take than the one in the featured article.
Bronze is harder and more corrosion resistant, but forged iron (and especially iron that has been reforged) has a higher yield strength and is lighter, allowing longer lighter weapons. Compare the profile of bronze age and iron age swords in any museum and you can see that the bronze blades are shorter and wider that the iron weapons, and they would be considerably heavier.
It's true that when iron was first smelted and the first steel was made, it was structurally different to the Bronze economy. Iron is abundant and local. It doesn't require the same trade network (of copper and tin).
I'm surprised this article doesn't mention the Uluburun shipwreck [1]. It's archeologically important because it provides primary evidence of how extensive Bronze age trade networks were.
At best the author is theorizing not why the Bronze age collapse happened but why the empires and trade networks of that era didn't come back. But that's a different question.
We also have direct primary evidence from this time of the Sea Peoples [2]. To this day nobody really knows where they came from or why. Many modern scholars believe they may have been refugees themselves, possibly from natural disasters or droughts.
The most likely explanation for all this is that there was no single factor. All of these things likely contributed. It's still unclear why the collapse was so extensive and relatively sudden. That's not really satisfying but we've had fragile systems before that have collapsed suddenly and violently. Look at the outbreak of World War One as one major example.
One of my favorite phrases here is Outside Context Problem [3], which originates from the Iain M. Banks Culture novel Excession (love this book). It pretty accurately describes the collapses that happened in the Americas in the colonial era.
Long before the so-called “iron age” started, humans knew of iron. There are iron artifacts from the 4th millennium BCE. Humans were fascinated by these small pieces of iron, which were found in meteorites and cherished and valued them. However, usable iron was rare and extremely sought after to the extent that we know it was more valuable than gold or silver. How did humans invent the first technique to produce metallic Iron from ore?
The story of Iron starts with the production of Bronze. Bronze is an alloy of 90% copper. Depending on what constitutes the other 10% we get different types of bronze. The most common type which kick started the bronze age around 3500 BCE in western Asia is tin bronze. Unlike copper ore, tin is hard to find but a small amount of it can significantly improve the quality of copper and make it usable and strong. Ancient smelters produced bronze by melting the natural copper ore mixed with tin ore in simple kilns. The resulting bronze was the primary metal used in tools and arts for more than 2500 years.
Iron is a common impurity in copper ores. We also know that iron ore can, and was, used as a flux in the process of smelting copper. In simple terms, a flux agent is a chemical that attracts oxygen to itself and protects the primary product, which is copper, from oxidizing in high temperatures. Therefore, across the ancient world, bronze smelters had been encountering molten iron when they raised the kiln temperature high enough. However, they discarded the resulting metal because its copper impurity made it too soft and inferior to bronze.
Around 1,200 BCE the collapse of bronze age civilizations in the near east due to a “perfect storm” of drought, famine, disease, immigration and war affected trade routes that brought tin ore to the western Asia. During this time of bronze shortage some smelters seem to have resorted to using the lower quality iron for tool making. They had observed that adding carbon to iron makes it much harder but prone to breaking. We have evidence of iron tools built with layers of soft and hard iron to achieve desired outcomes. Over time iron smelters experimented with different amounts of carbon impurity and achieved desired levels of hardness and strength.
Some high-level observations about the story of Iron are helpful. First, Iron smelting was discovered independently in different parts of the world, but everywhere it was an evolution of the bronze smelting process. Second, the process took several centuries to evolve. The first iron pieces were considered bad bronze and discarded. When tin became rare the producers gradually increased the quality of the bad bronze. In all likelihood for centuries they did not recognize iron as a new metal but rather an improved “bad bronze” . The final notable observation of the story is who these inventors were. They were not the learned people of the ancient world. Rather they were artisans and laborers working in difficult conditions.
Where do I like and subscribe
Reminds me of this awesome quote from Ramses III after driving back the Sea Peoples[1]
1: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxi2veZE2Uvm0VQUbAjGROCQoILO8...
Fun article. I think that there is a lot of interesting information here that would help explain what we saw with the Bronze Age Collapse, though I would submit that this is just another of the multiple factors that led to the collapse. Maybe a drought occurs, folks turn to iron weapons, and then take over another town or village for their resources, and so on.
This could lead to supply chain collapses and such. Maybe just general destabilization and raids and such sort of collapsed the larger empires. But at the same time, those larger empires would also have had access to iron, so why couldn't they by matter of numerical superiority, access to greater resources, tactics and military organization, and more simply, overwhelm smaller armies or bands utilizing the same technology and restore order or at least defend themselves?
I just started reading Conrad Black's historical series and in the Egyptian chapter and also the Assyria/Babylonia chapter he references the historical accounts where time and time again Egyptian forces led by the pharaoh would march into the broader Middle East to restore order. Why couldn't they continue to do that?
It could be the Bronze Age empires were based on violence and coercion. When the small polities had the means to defend themselves, the empires fell apart.
Well all of civilization and society is based on violence and coercion to some extent. I'm not sure that small tribes polities were any less violent than larger empires, and I'd generally have a bias that larger empires were more peaceful per-capita because if you are the king war is tiresome and threatening. Better to be at peace.
I'm also not sure about your suggestion. Yes small polities had the means to defend themselves, but the pharaoh's army is much larger and you're definitely going to die if he shows up and you fight back. So why wouldn't the pharaoh have shown up to put down a rebellion? Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
I'm just not sure that this democratization of violence is the answer. Though it may be a key contributor. Curious about your thoughts or others. Incredibly fascinating topic.
Have you read about the Assyrians? Those early empires were nasty.
And yes, the common people might have been better off under larger empires than under smaller ones, but who has ever cared about the common people? The upper class were probably more "I'd rather be the king of a small kingdom than bend my knee to an emperor."
Bronze age empires were large -- if the pharaoh couldn't trust his subordinates he could only be in one place at a time.
>Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.
And when all those rebellions cost the Pharaoh 3x what they used to to put down you're forced to be a lot more diplomatic. Less extraction under threat of violence means worse negotiating position for the next one. It's a cycle.
And for every full scale armies meeting in the field type rebellion there's a lot of "sir a second village has lynched the tax men" which compel you to dispense policing forces, etc, etc.
Just because you "can" do something in moderation doesn't mean it's a sustainable way to run your empire at scale.
You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes. And you can't just "supervise" them with your loyal people because this is pre-industrial and there do not exist sufficient surpluses to feed those nonproductive mouths.
Well, just hypothetically, let's say that there's enough iron to outfit a small group, but not a large one. That means that a small group could have a technological edge, and therefore that the losses become too much for the large group to want to initiate the confrontation with them.
Of course, that leads to questions like "Why does the small group wind up with the good weapons? Why doesn't the large group get them, even if there aren't enough for all of them?"
But maybe the iron smelting isn't happening in downtown Memphis. Maybe it's happening out in the hinterland somewhere, and so the locals have a chance to grab all the output.
Because pure iron, with no carbonization, is useless as a material for tools or weapons.
Carbonization was invented/discovered after the Bronze Age collapse, slowly over hundreds of years, exactly because they didn’t have access to bronze anymore.
Despite being "useless", almost all early iron age weapons were iron, not steel nor bronze. They generally knew about steel, but could not control the carbonization well enough to outfit the whole army with it. Steel did not become widespread until the Roman era.
Are you suggesting that you disagree with the author's thesis and that iron wasn't a contributing factor or the major one?
Yeah, the timeline just does not make sense. It makes more sense the other way round that the collapse made iron more appealing.
I thought this was a cool fact about the Bronze Age: "According to a new study, it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites".[0]
[0]: https://www.sciencealert.com/bronze-age-artefacts-have-meteo...
Interesting : "some also alluded to the idea that iron had democratized violence"
Tin was far more scarce than iron. Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones, just easier to source and make. This guy makes a case that iron weapons caused the Bronze Age Collapse.
https://x.com/s8mb/status/2103126253012226363
Don't confuse iron weapons with steel. Steel was much better than bronze, but they didn't know how to make steel and so examples were rare. (probably not unknown, making iron weapons does produce a small amount of steel and if you're careful you can separate that out and after a thousand or so iron swords you can make one steel sword. I've seen it suggested that this is where the stories of a legendary weapon comes from - probably not something we could ever know for sure.)
Your twitter link is a summary of the linked article - from the editor-in-chief - in case someone else sees "this guy" and assumes it would be a different take than the one in the featured article.
> Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones
Bronze is harder and more corrosion resistant, but forged iron (and especially iron that has been reforged) has a higher yield strength and is lighter, allowing longer lighter weapons. Compare the profile of bronze age and iron age swords in any museum and you can see that the bronze blades are shorter and wider that the iron weapons, and they would be considerably heavier.
>Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones
"Quantity has a quality all its own"
This is a thesis and it's not a new one.
It's true that when iron was first smelted and the first steel was made, it was structurally different to the Bronze economy. Iron is abundant and local. It doesn't require the same trade network (of copper and tin).
I'm surprised this article doesn't mention the Uluburun shipwreck [1]. It's archeologically important because it provides primary evidence of how extensive Bronze age trade networks were.
At best the author is theorizing not why the Bronze age collapse happened but why the empires and trade networks of that era didn't come back. But that's a different question.
We also have direct primary evidence from this time of the Sea Peoples [2]. To this day nobody really knows where they came from or why. Many modern scholars believe they may have been refugees themselves, possibly from natural disasters or droughts.
The most likely explanation for all this is that there was no single factor. All of these things likely contributed. It's still unclear why the collapse was so extensive and relatively sudden. That's not really satisfying but we've had fragile systems before that have collapsed suddenly and violently. Look at the outbreak of World War One as one major example.
One of my favorite phrases here is Outside Context Problem [3], which originates from the Iain M. Banks Culture novel Excession (love this book). It pretty accurately describes the collapses that happened in the Americas in the colonial era.
[1]: https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/case-studies/a9360-lost...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples
[3]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutsideContextPr...
The Uluburun is actually mentioned, but obliquely in passing:
”Tin with trace levels of indium, particular to the Cornish deposits, has been found in shipwrecks near Israel and southern France”
Thanks for the direct link though. It’s very interesting.
Reminds me of this classic from Historia Civilis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq4G-7v-_xI
Interesting fact, you only could come third in the Olympics during the bronze age
Gold has been used for 40,000+ years and silver started being smelted at about the same time as bronze.
woosh