WhatCausedTheIronAge.PDFVIP

What Caused The Iron Age? Clayton E. Cramer History 303 December 10, 1995 What Caused The Iron Age? This paper explores the proximate cause of the Iron Age. Why did nations of the Eastern Mediterranean switch from bronze to ferrous metals between 1200 and 1000 BC, while Egypt did not commonly use ferrous metals for utilitarian purposes until 600 BC? To answer that question, it is first necessary to define why 1200 to 1000 BC in the Near East is considered the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age. Paradoxically, it is not the smelting of iron that distinguishes the Bronze Age from the Iron Age. At least one Mesopotamian smelted iron artifact (distinguished from meteoric iron by its lack of nickel) dates from 5000 BC. Increasing numbers of smelted iron objects appear in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt between 3000 and 2000 BC, including a circa 2800 BC iron sword from Tell Asmar. But iron in the Early Bronze Age was rare and expensive. At the end of the third millennium, iron appears to have been five times as expensive as gold. The weapons and tools made of iron are ceremonial in nature, and the other uses of iron are ornamental.1 1 Jane C. Waldbaum, From Bronze to Iron: The Transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in the Eastern Mediterranean, (G?teborg, Sweden: Paul Astr?ms F?rlag, 1978), 15; Jane C. Waldbaum, “The First Archaeological Appearance of Iron,” in The Coming of the Age of Iron, ed. Theodore A. Wertime and James D. Mulhy, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 70-74; Herbert Maryon, “Early Near Eastern Steel Swords,” American Journal of Archaeology, 65:173. See R. J. Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1964), 9:253, for the value of iron at the end of the third millennium. 2 CLAYTON E. CRAMER From 2000 to 1600 BC, the Middle Bronze Age, references to iron appear in literature with some frequency, but it remained a ceremonial or ornamental metal. At least one Old Assyrian text records that iron was eight times mo