Research Items

Abstract

Origin of Iron in Antiquity IN Antiquity for March under the title “The Coming of Iron”, Mr. G. A. Wainwright reviews in some detail the recorded finds of early examples of iron, and on this evidence offers suggestions as to the source of this metal in antiquity. The most ancient pieces of iron known are the beads from Gerzah, some fifty miles south of Cairo, which were found by himself. These are dated at about 3500 B.C. Sir Leonard Woolley found some fragments of iron in the Royal Tombs at Ur, which are dated at 3000 B.C. but may possibly be so early as 3500 B.C. These two specimens of early iron contain 7.5 per cent. and 10.9 per cent. of nickel respectively and are, therefore, meteoric. All early iron was formerly held to be meteoric; but Desch's analysis of the fragment with a bronze dagger handle found by Frankfort at Tel Asmar in Mesopotamia showed that smelted iron was in use in 2800 B.C. The celestial origin of the rarely occurring iron in early Egypt is recognised by the addition of the epithet “from the sky” added after the fourteenth century B.C., when smelted iron had been introduced. Egypt actually was the last of the countries of the East to receive iron, and then only under the intensification of influences from the north. In Mesopotamia iron was as rare as in Egypt until 1100 B.C. In Asia Minor from the twentieth century onward iron was used regularly, and from the fifteenth century Asia Minor, northern Syria and north-west Mesopotamia exported iron objects; while it was clearly the wanderings of the Asianic tribes which brought iron to Palestine in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. By 1100 B.C. Assyria, Carchemish, Cyprus, Greece and the Egean were entering the iron age; while in the eighth century Sargon had in store one hundred and fifty tons of iron, of which the ingots resemble in their curious shape those which two hundred years later were entering Germany and France with the La Tene culture.