From the Illiad, bronze made tough weapons and shields while steel made good slicers (I liked the way Homer described everything down to slicing roast beef.)
That is interesting, but the article makes it clear that “bog iron” a form or iron ore. I am pretty sure that, except in relatively recent meteorites (and only a small proportion of meteorites, at that) metallic iron is not found naturally on Earth.
Iron in the Iliad! Really? Do you have a specific cite to that?
I would guess, anyway, that if there is a mention or iron, it is a late interpolation. As I understand it, the iron age had indeed arrived in Greece by the time the Iliad (and Odyssey) were written down, but the poems probably existed in oral for for centuries before that, and I do not think the Greeks had iron at the time of the events described.
Here’s an article from the Bulletin of Historical Chemistry describing all the references to iron in Homer, and what they tell us about the status when they were written..
OK, that s interesting. It argues that the iron references go back to before the poem was written down, but, so far as I can see, they still might well have been put in quite late in the period of oral transmission, still long after the actual events described. You have several centuries of “Greek dark age” there, during which Greece is transitioning from bronze to iron.
No, this is wrong. The first smelted iron was indeed bloomery iron, that required manual working to yield wrought iron. Casting came later - relatively early in China and much, much later in the West.
wow never heard of that. great link too..thanks
Yes from what i see Bloomery iron comes out as a craggy blob and is not flowed out of the furnace like latter iron. It must be hot worked to get it in any sort of useable form by hammering..
So if meteorites are the only form of naturally occurring iron, could they have had any impact on the development of smelting iron ore? Would magnetite, for instance, have seemed similar enough to meteorite iron to get someone thinking that iron could be formed from it?
I wonder if burning peat with a bellows as part of the bronze making process could have accidently produced some usable iron.
Personally, I favour the “pottery kiln mistake” hypothesis for the discovery of iron smelting, given that we’ve been using one form of iron ore as a decorative pigment about as long as we’ve been human (if not longer.)
I recall an article, Scientiifc American, I think, from about 20 or 30 years ago. It described the analysis of trace impurities to show that gold, silver and bronze were sourced all over europe and traded all over the mediterranean. Some bronze (tin) came from Britain and northern Russia, IIRC. The trading networks were incredibly long distances. But then again, we traded silk and spices half-way around the world by foot 1000 years ago.
One interpretation of the Odessy I saw suggested that Odessius decided to go on a trading trip to get some tin from Britain because the Trojan War turned out to be a dud profit-wise. (there’s a bit in the Odessy that in one location the daytime was twice as long, and that if he didn’t need sleep a man could do the work of two.)
IIRC the key to ironwork is that it requires bellows or something similar, a simple fire will not make the iron hot enough. I assume someone eventually figuredout the more they worked it, the better it got…?
Probably through recyling. You take a bunch of bent, broken or rusted doohickeys, melt and hammer then together and try to hammer out a new form. Hey wait, that made the iron so much stronger!
Thanks for the link. That’s just a wonderful piece of writing. Love the wordplay in the opening paragraph:
Interesting…the Vikings made bog iron in L’anse Au Meadow, ca. 1150 AD. The next attempt at smelting iron in the New World was the Saugus (MA) ironworks, ca. 1690 -apparently, it made more lawsuits than iron (CF Governor Bradford of MA).
What have the English got to do with it? At that time our forefathers were presumably wearing liederhosen, drinking lager and not practising penalty kicks…
That does sound likely. Someone may have mixed a clay with a lot or iron ore and something else that acts as a flux.
That’s a function meteorites may have served. They may have already known of this by the time iron could be smelted somehow.
An additional advantage of iron weapons which I don’t think anyone has touched on yet is maintenance. I remember seeing a test of a bronze sword vs. an iron sword and from a functional point of view there was really no difference but the way they took damage was very different. Bronze swords chip and actually lose material whereas iron swords tend to deform rather than chip. Now at the end of your battle you can have your black smith reforge your iron sword and make it pretty much as good as new. With the bronze sword your options are somewhat limited. You might be able to grind out chips but doing that you will be constantly weakening the sword.
So I would imagine overall you could keep iron weapons in operation for far longer than bronze weapons because they are far easier to repair.
Maintenance is probably just one factor among many though for the change to Iron as has already been covered in this thread.
Or another interesting possibility is that it could have been discovered by apprentices, who got better iron than their teachers, because they had to re-work the piece they were making due to repeated screw-ups.
I very much doubt it. Meteoric iron must always have been extremely rare. There is no way that knowledge derived from something only found, somewhere in the world, every few lifetimes (at best) would survive in a preliterate culture.
Anyway, how would they even know that it was the same stuff as what they were getting out of their smelters?
Actually, he points out that fear was probably the main element, along with lack of leadership. The Incas had never seen horses or heard guns firing. The killing power of the weapons alone would never have carried the day.
Oh crap, I got necroed.
Well actually I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out what was meant in something I read long ago about natural occurring iron being used before iron was smelted. Either I misinterpretted it, or it seems to have been wrong. If there’s no naturally occurring ore that doesn’t require smelting, and unless meteorites were more abundant than we know, it doesn’t make much sense. Meterorites apparently are a nickel-iron mix as well, which probably produces a shinier metal than smelted iron and may resemble steel in being more workable. It sounds like at best they could have offered someone the idea that there are other metals out there beside tin and copper.
As far as working iron, it seems likely that it wasn’t hard to figure out anyway. Iron would have been smelted initially, not melted for casting, which would produce a lot of irregular bits of metal or big spongy lumps that had be worked to get anything useful at all. It probably wasn’t that hard to figure out that more working produced better metal. More important than working would have been figuring out what ores to use and how to prepare the ores.
As I mentioned above, the accidental pottery kiln source sounds more likely than a lot of explanations.