Truth is iron is a much more versatile metal. The pyramids were chiseled out with copper tools but imagine the delight they would have had if handed a chisel that didn’t blunt every blow or bend. Even the simple act of hammering something flat or nailing is hard work with copper or bronze requiring constant maintenance.Iron is a multi use and infinitely recyclable metal.
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The Egyptians used volcanic diorite and granite to chip the limestone blocks. Copper would have been used for finer finish.
What is bronz?
Bronze is an alloy of copper and other metals, usually tin.
More details here Bronze - Wikipedia
And this thread is three years old.
zombie or no
it is a short piece of an alloy of copper.
I know this is a zombie, but I should point out that Caesar didn’t know of any safe harbors in Cornwall. He sent a ship to scout potential landing sites for his first invasion but they only managed to cover most of Kent. Considering how much rougher the English Channel gets at its western end, and the capabilities of bi/triremes in rough seas, he probably would have lots half his invasion force trying to get directly to Cornwall.
He was also sailing from the far north of Gaul/France so it would have been a few hundred miles farther to Cornwall then to the area around Dover where he arrived.
Actually, it’s over twelve years old.
But so what? Interesting things keep being added to the thread.
Iron was initially bog iron. Vikings brought a smith on trips and smelting was done in simple setups. Slag was found at the Newfoundland site. They used it as a base for 10 years.
Maybe not 6000 years ago, but it’s well documented that the Roman Empire had tin mines in Britain, that was one of their main interests in those islands, in fact, and did indeed ship tin from there to Rome a couple thousand years ago.
The Romans had far more developed and sophisticated trade routes than the ancient Greeks or the early Mediterranean. So thats not really much of an example.
As I mentioned years ago, there was one interpretation of the Odyssey (every classical historian has a different one) that they had left to go a trade voyage to Ireland/Britain for tin after they failed to get any good payoff from the fall of Troy (which would be the dawn of the iron age 1000BC.) The descriptions seem to match Britain and Scandinavia, including details like extremely long summer days, frost in the summer at sea level (Odysseus had to hide in the bushes because of the cold). Then he would have returned to Greece via trade routes through Russia, up the river from the Baltic and down into the Black Sea. Both up the coast of France and the Russian rivers were apparently a well-established trade routes even in those days.
As a machinist I’ve worked with a lot of bronze. Gut feeling if I were a grunt I’d take a crappy piece of iron first. Just the ability to hold a sharper edge. First rule of swords is pointy edge out. I want a pointier edge that lasts at least one slash longer than the other guys.
Bronze is so ductile and soft. I can’t imagine trying to even shave twice or cut the crusts off my sandwiches let alone go all stabby with it for long.
Again no cite, just years of playing with it.
Julius Caesar complained bitterly (in his annals? Or via Tacitus?) that when he fought the Britons they kept on falling out of their battle line to hammer their iron swords straight again.
He thought they should have had better weapons so his victory would be more honourable.
Metallurgically this means they must have had a low carbon steel close to pure Iron. Given the production techniques back then this is quite remarkable as they must have figured out a way to remove carbon from their initial production lots of Iron.
Regarding trade, there is plenty of evidence the Phoenecians were trading with the British Isles perhaps as far as the Orkneys.
Bronze is harder than iron. Were you “playing with” wrought iron, or steel. They are very different metals.
I don’t think you understand the iron production techniques of that time. They only knew how to make wrought iron, not cast iron. Wrought iron is pretty much pure iron, unless it’s been worked enough for carbon to disolve into its outer layers to make it a steel. Obviously these guys were not spending much time to working their iron, so it was very low carbon steel. They could make more low quality weapons by doing this.
Cast iron is very high carbon, but it takes a much higher temperature to produce. It wasn’t produced in significant amounts until the Middle Ages. It has too much carbon to be a good steel (it’s too brittle for swords). I’m not even sure they knew how to reduce the carbon in it in the Middle Ages. They may have just used it for things like cooking pots and cannon balls.
At least going by the Old Testament, iron and bronze coexisted for some time.
Centuries after steel completely replaced bronze for edged weapons, the iron vs. bronze choice was revived in the manufacture of cannon: bronze could be cast into a high-quality cannon but was much more expensive. Cast iron was cheaper but difficult to make without flaws or cracks that could cause the gun to explode. In both cases cannon were valuable enough that capturing enemy cannon intact was a war prize.
I’ve done a bit of research into the history of metallurgy and the strengths of various materials.
The primary ore of tin in ancient times was Cassiterite. It’s found nearly exclusively in granite and has a very low yield by mass. In the ancient middle east the best known source of these rocks (as the first recorded tin ingot wasn’t produced until roughly the 6th century BCE) was in Afghanistan. These rocks would be taken back to the mediteranean through the desert, often at the mercy of bandits or anyone else who would want to get their hands on the valuable ore. The people themselves didn’t know why adding these rocks to the molten copper made it stronger, but they understood how to do it to achieve the right ratios in their bronze (roughly). At some point, likely coinciding with the collapse of most bronze-age civilizations in europe and western asia (circa 1200 BCE I believe) most trade networks collapsed and the already rare tin suddenly became very scarce. Iron ores at this time were known and had been used for centuries as pigments (such as hematite), but there is little record of iron use (although iron degrades rapidly in soil, so if it were used, there would be little record anyway). Regardless, while more difficult smelting iron ore became a good alternative to making bronze. Iron does pose some obstacles though. Copper has a melting temperature of 1084 C if I remember, and any alloying materials will lower that temperature. I believe historic bronze was roughly 10% tin and 90% copper and had a melting temperature somewhere in the range of 1000 C. The forges and fires used at this time could achieve these temperatures and so at least to begin with, many bronze items were cast into molds and then forged into shape for finer details. Iron on the other hand melts at 1538 C and it was impossible to achieve these temperatures at that time. Instead, iron ores would be smelted in bloomeries, which operate by mixing iron ore with charcoal in a sealed kiln and blowing air into it. Iron ore was primarily sourced from iron oxides which can be reduced into pure iron with the application of carbon (with a high purity) and heat. Coal could not be used for this process as the sulfides and other impurities would ruin the batch (although coal was known in antiquity). Instead, charcoal was produced in large kilns to fuel the process. Once complete, the bloomery is opened or broken to reveal a hardened mass of iron and slag called a bloom. Unlike previous smelting techniques, this process does not melt the metal. The iron bloom is heated in a forge and hammered and folded on an anvil to remove impurities from the metal and work it down to wrought iron (a carbon content close to 0%). Wrought iron is relatively soft. It rusts readily and is heavy, but is easy to make in large quantities. The ore and wood required can be found nearly everywhere and is much easier to forge on an anvil than bronze is as it is less prone to cracking.
I personally did a statistical comparison of the properties of various metals in tools such as copper, wrought iron, bronze, steel etc a while back. I’ll quickly link wikipedia pages with relevant information. I used a number of data points, but I’ll begin with yield strength. In short, yield strength is the pressure a material can withstand before it permanently deforms (ie bends or dents). Ultimate tensile strength - Wikipedia http://www.angelfire.com/my/welding/metal13.gif Wrought iron - Wikipedia across these pages, we can see that the yield strength of copper is 70 MPa, the yield strength of phosphor bronze is 193 MPa and the yield strength of wrought iron is 159 - 221 (although since this is low quality iron, we’ll tend towards the lower range). Next we can compare basic hardness of materials. Our table from earlier gives our bronze a brinell hardness of 148, our copper a value of 30 and our wrought iron a hardness of 100. It’s actually starting to look like bronze may be better than wrought iron. This brings us back to the issue: it was becoming very expensive to source the materials for bronze. Tin was rare and had a low yield, and it quickly became much easier to equip an army in cheap iron instead of expensive bronze. As steels were developed (once iron could be melted and blast furnaces were developed) iron alloys quickly surpassed bronzes. The same table shows high carbon steel (steel typically has a carbon content between 0.8 - 2%) as having a yield strength of 620 MPa and low carbon steel with 248 MPa, both outstripping bronze and wrought iron. The brinell hardness of these two steels is 201 and 310 respectively. Again, this surpasses both iron and bronze. It’s probably reasonable to assume that once steels were produced, they would probably fall somewhere in that range, or a little lower if you want to account for the purity of the alloy produced.
In conclusion, I think it’s reasonable to say that the initial switch from bronze to iron was fueled by necessity rather than superiority.
For reference, I work on a minecraft mod. When we were implementing a metal alloying system, we wanted to see if it would be possible to dynamically generate the properties of alloys from their components. Unfortunately this is impossible- most scholarly articles I could find agreed that all data is obtained experimentally. We additionally wanted to have a standard to set the strength and durability of our tools, and while developing our tech progression tree we investigated the history of metallurgy starting in the chalcolithic period and progressing through towards industrialization.
Replied to years ago, but here’s another bit of evidence. A neolithic jade hand axe was discovered in Britain dating from 2000-4000BC. Since it’s jade, they can locate the location of the original mine. It’s in Italy.
Stone age civilizations were capable of long distance trade. Blows my mind. Though considering the accomplishments of the early Americans perhaps it shouldn’t.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_prb/j/jadeite_axe-head.aspx
Not necessarily. It could be the case that a number of stone age civilizations were capable of short-distance trade, and a number of these civilizations were spread over a long distance.