The Lord was with Judas, and he took possession of the mountain; but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had iron chariots.
(Judges 1:19)
The duel of the ancient Cretans of the Minoan era. Rice. Giuseppe Rava. A warrior with a sword, as you can see, inflicts a thrust, not a chopping blow, on his opponent.
The famous ancient Greek historian and philosopher Aristotle left a description of the technology for obtaining iron by the Calibs: “… the Calibs washed the river sand of their country several times, added some refractory substance to it and melted it in special furnaces; the metal thus obtained had a silvery color and was stainless."
Obviously, the Khalibs used magnetite sands as a raw material for iron smelting, the reserves of which are found in abundance along the entire coast of the Black Sea, consisting of a mixture of small grains of magnetite, titanomagnetite, ilmenite and some other rocks, so that the steel they smelted turned out to be alloyed and apparently had a very high quality.
At the end of the Bronze Age, such swords had already appeared, the blades of which were strengthened by forging and hardening, and with which it was already possible to cut and chop. (Archaeological Museum of Saint Raymond in Toulouse)
Sword hilt (large). (Archaeological Museum of Saint Raymond in Toulouse)
Bimetallic dagger from the transition from bronze to iron. (Archaeological Museum of Saint-Raymond in Toulouse)
Such a peculiar way of obtaining iron not from ore suggests that the Khalibs, rather, discovered iron as a technological material, but could not come up with a way to produce it everywhere on a large scale. However, this discovery of them undoubtedly served as an impetus for the further improvement of iron metallurgy, including its production from ores mined in swamps and mines.
In the II century A. D. NS. Clement of Alexandria, in his encyclopedic work "Stromata" in chapter 21, reports that, according to Greek legend, iron was not discovered anywhere, but on Mount Ida, located in a mountain range near the city of Troy (in the Iliad it is called Ida, and it is from its summit that Zeus the Thunderer is watching the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans).
Among the surrounding peoples, the Khalibs were reputed to be masters of blacksmithing and earned such great respect, so that their name was reflected in the Bible, where a certain Caleb (Caleb) from the tribe of Judah is mentioned - an active supporter and spy of Moses who participated in the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, and Syria was known for the large city of Aleppo (modern Aleppo), just built by the ancient Hittites.
Celtic War Chariot (Hallein Museum in Salzburg, Austria)
In the II century BC. NS. Apollonius of Rhodes, referring to other ancient authors, wrote: “… The Khalibs are the Scythian people behind Thermodont; they, having opened iron mines, are engaged in their development. They are named Halabs from the son of Khalib Ares. Mention them and Callimachus; "May the clan of the Khalibs perish, who discovered this evil creature rising from the earth."
The evidence seems to deserve the closest attention, but archeology cannot yet sufficiently confirm them. But the fact that the spread of iron in Greece coincides with the "era of Homer" (IX-VI centuries BC), no one from the scientist doubts for a long time. It is not for nothing that the Iliad contains only two mentions of this metal, but in the Odyssey, created later, it is already mentioned much more often, although everything is still also together with bronze.
Bimetallic Celtic dagger with anthropomorphic bronze hilt. (National Archaeological Museum Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris)
Iron comes to Europe …
Well, how then did iron get to Europe? In various ways from the east: through the Balkans or through Greece, and then Italy, or through the Caucasus, then into the steppes of southern Russia and from there to the Carpathians and beyond. The earliest finds of iron objects are concentrated mainly in the Western Balkans and the Lower Danube and date back to the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. (few) and up to the VIII century. BC.
Reconstruction of the Celtic iron sword. (Museum of the City of Hallein in Salzburg, Austria)
Celtic helmet IV century. From the tomb of the chieftain in Morstein (burial no. 44). (Museum of the City of Hallein in Salzburg, Austria)
In Central Europe, iron appears in the 7th century BC. By the V century. BC. it was mastered by the Celts, who not only supplied this metal to the Romans, but even taught them the art of processing it. Moreover, it was the Celts who learned to connect together soft iron and hard steel, and as a result of repeated forging, high-strength and very sharp blades of swords and daggers. In Scandinavia, bronze with iron competed until the beginning of our era, and in Britain until the 5th century. AD The Roman historian Tacitus, for example, wrote that the Germans used iron quite rarely, although they knew how to extract and process it.
"Antenna Daggers" from the "Tomb of the Chief" - a very rich Celtic burial, c. 530 BC NS. (discovered in 1977 near the village of Hochdorf an der Enz in the municipality of Eberdingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany) The sheath and hilt of the dagger are covered with gold foil on the right.
In Eastern Europe, in the burial mounds of the Yamnaya culture of the 3rd millennium BC. also found items of meteorite iron, made by cold forging. Slag, as well as iron ore, are sometimes found in the monuments of the Timber and Abashev cultures in the Don region, as well as in the burial complexes of the Catacomb culture in the Dnieper region.
Unique sword hilt from the collection of the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Found in some kind of burial on the territory of our country. The blade is broken off, which makes it impossible to determine its length, but its bronze handle is perfectly preserved!
Initially, iron products were simple: knives, chisels, adzes, needles, awls, but technologies such as forging and welding were also used for their manufacture. In the VIII century. BC. in Eastern Europe, iron finally displaces bronze. Complex bimetallic products appeared, for example, swords, whose blades were made of iron, and the handles were cast from bronze according to lost wax models. Moreover, the East European tribes, simultaneously with the manufacture of complex forged products, also mastered the processes of cementation and the production of steel. Moreover, bimetallic products were most likely made by a master who owned both technologies, that is, he knew how to work with both bronze and iron. By the way, this once again suggests that ferrous metallurgy did not arise by itself, but originated in the depths of non-ferrous metallurgy.
In Siberia, which had rich deposits of copper ore and tin, the introduction of iron metallurgy here was somewhat belated, and with what this is understandable. So, in Western Siberia, iron products appeared in the period of the VIII-V centuries. BC. However, only in the III century. BC. here the "real iron age" began, when iron began to prevail as a material for products. At about the same time, it spreads to Altai and the Minusinsk Basin. Well, in the forest belt of Western Siberia, acquaintance with iron began even later.
Bimetallic iron daggers. (Historical Museum of the City of Bern, Switzerland)
Umbon of the Shield of the Longobards (Municipal Archaeological Museum of Bergamo, Italy)
Umbon of the Longobard shield. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
The iron of ancient China and sultry Africa
In Southeast Asia, the technology for producing blast iron and products from it were already known in the middle of the 1st millennium BC, and in the second half of this millennium, iron was widely used in the economy. Moreover, here, as in many other places, bimetallic objects were at first popular, for example, daggers with an iron blade, but with a bronze handle. However, later they were replaced by purely iron ones.
Bronze celt ax and copper knife. Qijia culture 2400 - 1900 BC BC, (National Museum of China, Beijing)
A Chinese halberd from the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) and a Chinese iron sword. (Hanan Provincial Museum, China)
Bimetallic objects at the end of the 2nd millennium BC were known in China, and they were also made of meteorite iron. Well, the real production of iron products began around the middle of the 1st millennium BC. However, the Chinese, unlike the Europeans, very early learned how to obtain in their furnaces the high temperature necessary to smelt liquid metal - cast iron and began to cast products from it in molds, using their experience of bronze casting for this.
In Africa, it was steel that became the first product of metallurgy in general. And here a high cylindrical hearth was invented, built of massive stones, and even such an interesting technological novelty as heating the air entering it. Moreover, experts note that in other regions of the planet all this was still unknown at that time. Some researchers believe that iron production in Africa arose without any outside influence. According to others, the initial impetus for Africans was the acquaintance with the culture of the Egyptians, and then in Nubia, Sudan and Libya, the art of working with metal spread around the 6th century. BC. But in South Zaire, the processing of both copper and iron became known at the same time, and some tribes even switched to iron directly from the Stone Age. It is also interesting that in South Africa and in the Congo Basin, where there are richest deposits of copper, its production began later than the production of iron. And if iron was used to make weapons and tools, then copper was used exclusively for jewelry.
African iron throwing knives. (British Museum, London)
The English scientist Anthony Snodgrass considered that three stages should be distinguished in the development of iron metallurgy. On the first, iron, although it is found, is irregular and cannot still be considered a "working material". This is a cult, "heavenly", "divine metal". At the second stage, it is already used quite widely, but it does not completely replace bronze. At the third stage, iron is the dominant metal in economic activity, while bronze and copper, as structural materials, fade into the background.
African throwing knife. (Museum of the Tropics, Amsterdam)
Well, in the weapons and armor of the warriors of this time, the combined use of bronze and iron found their embodiment in the following division: armor - helmets, shells and shields (or their parts), as before, are made of copper and bronze, bronze (for example, in those the same Scythians) are still arrowheads. But for the manufacture of swords and daggers, iron is now used. At first, their blades have a bimetallic handle, but then they begin to make it from iron, using leather, wood and bone as covers.
