The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age system of technology after the Copper Age and Bronze Age. It has also been considered as the final age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progressing to protohistory (before written history). In this usage, it is preceded by the Stone Age (subdivided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic) and Bronze Age. These concepts originated for describing Iron Age Europe and the ancient Near East.
In the archaeology of the Americas, a five-period system is conventionally used instead; indigenous cultures there did not develop an iron economy in the pre-Columbian era, though some did work copper and silver. Indigenous metalworking arrived in Australia with European contact. Although meteoric iron has been used for millennia in many regions, the beginning of the Iron Age is defined locally around the world by archaeological convention when the production of smelted iron (especially steel tools and weapons) replaces their bronze equivalents in common use. However, this notion is being challenged.
In Anatolia and the Caucasus, or Southeast Europe, the Iron Age began . In the ancient Near East, this transition occurred simultaneously with the Late Bronze Age collapse, during the 12th century BC. The technology soon spread throughout the Mediterranean basin region and to South Asia between the 12th and 11th centuries BC. Its further spread to Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe was somewhat delayed, and Northern Europe was not reached until c. the 5th century BC.
The Iron Age in India is stated as beginning with the ironworking Painted Grey Ware culture, dating from c. 1200 BC to the reign of Ashoka in the 3rd century BC. The term "Iron Age" in the archaeology of South, East, and Southeast Asia is more recent and less common than for western Eurasia. Africa did not have a universal "Bronze Age", and many areas transitioned directly from stone to iron. Some archaeologists believe that iron metallurgy was developed in sub-Saharan Africa independently from Eurasia and neighbouring parts of Northeast Africa as early as 2000 BC.
The concept of the Iron Age ending with the beginning of the written historiographical record has not generalized well, as written language and steel use have developed at different times in different areas across the archaeological record. For instance, in China, written history started before iron smelting began, so the term is used infrequently for the archaeology of China. In Mesopotamia, written history predates iron smelting by hundreds of years. For the ancient Near East, the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire is used traditionally and still usually as an end date; later dates are considered historical according to the record by Herodotus despite considerable written records now being known from well back into the Bronze Age. In Central and Western Europe, the conquests by the Roman Empire during the 1st century BC serve as marking the end of the Iron Age. The Germanic Iron Age of Scandinavia is considered to end , with the beginning of the Viking Age.
History of the concept
The three-age system of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages was first used for the archaeology of Europe during the first half of the 19th century; by the latter half of the 19th century, it had been extended to the archaeology of the ancient Near East. Its name harks back to the mythological "Ages of Man" of Hesiod. As an archaeological era, it was first introduced to Scandinavia by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen during the 1830s. By the 1860s, it was embraced as a useful division of the "earliest history of mankind" in general and began to be applied in Assyriology. The development of the now-conventional periodization in the archaeology of the ancient Near East was developed during the 1920s and 1930s.Oriental Institute Communications, Issues 13–19, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1922, p. 55.
Definition of "iron"
Meteoric iron, a natural iron–nickel alloy, was used by various ancient peoples thousands of years before the Iron Age. The earliest known meteoric iron artifacts are nine small beads dated to 3200 BC, which were found in burials at Gerzeh in Lower Egypt, and had been shaped by possibly the earliest smithing (i.e., hammering and annealing).
The characteristic of an Iron Age culture is the mass production of tools and weapons made not just of found iron, but from smelted steel alloys with an added carbon content. Only with the capability of the production of carbon steel does ferrous metallurgy result in tools or weapons that are harder and lighter than bronze.
Smelted iron appears sporadically in the archeological record from the middle Bronze Age. Whilst terrestrial iron is abundant naturally, temperatures above are required to smelt it, which was impractical to achieve with the technology available commonly until the end of the second millennium BC. In contrast, the components of bronze—tin with a melting point of and copper with a relatively moderate melting point of —were within the capabilities of Neolithic kilns, which date back to 6000 BC and were able to produce temperatures greater than .
In addition to specially designed furnaces, ancient iron production required the development of complex procedures for the removal of impurities, the regulation of the admixture of carbon, and the invention of hot-working to achieve a useful balance of hardness and strength in steel.
Chronological history
Earliest evidence
The earliest tentative evidence for iron-making is a small number of iron fragments with the appropriate amounts of carbon admixture found in the Proto-Hittite layers at Kaman-Kalehöyük in modern-day Turkey, dated to 2200–2000 BC. Akanuma (2008) concludes that "The combination of carbon dating, archaeological context, and archaeometallurgical examination indicates that it is likely that the use of ironware made of steel had already begun in the third millennium BC in Central Anatolia." Souckova-Siegolová (2001) shows that iron implements were made in Central Anatolia in very limited quantities about 1800 BC and were in general use by elites, though not by commoners, during the Neo-Hittite Empire ().
Similarly, recent archaeological remains of iron-working in the Ganges Valley in India have been dated tentatively to 1800 BC. Tewari (2003) concludes that "knowledge of iron smelting and manufacturing of iron artifacts was well known in the Eastern Vindhyas and iron had been in use in the Central Ganga Plain, at least from the early second millennium BC". (Recently reported claims of much earlier datings for iron smelting in Tamil Nadu's Sivagalai site are not yet published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and have been questioned by some scholars.) By the Middle Bronze Age increasing numbers of smelted iron objects (distinguishable from meteoric iron by the lack of nickel in the product) appeared in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and South Asia.
African sites are revealing dates as early as 2000–1200 BC. However, some recent studies date the inception of iron metallurgy in Africa between 3000 and 2500 BC, with evidence existing for early iron metallurgy in parts of Nigeria, Cameroon, and Central Africa, from as early as around 2000 BC. The Nok culture of Nigeria may have practiced iron smelting from as early as 1000 BC, while the nearby Djenné-Djenno culture of the Niger Valley in Mali shows evidence of iron production from c. 250 BC. Iron technology across much of sub-Saharan Africa has an African origin dating to before 2000 BC. These findings confirm the independent invention of iron smelting in sub-Saharan Africa.
Beginning
Although meteoric iron has been used for millennia in many regions, the beginning of the Iron Age is defined locally around the world by archaeological convention when the production of smelted iron (especially steel tools and weapons) replaces their bronze equivalents in common use.
Modern archaeological evidence identifies the start of large-scale global iron production about 1200 BC, marking the end of the Bronze Age. The Iron Age in Europe is often considered as a part of the Bronze Age collapse in the ancient Near East.
Anthony Snodgrass suggests that a shortage of tin and trade disruptions in the Mediterranean about 1300 BC forced metalworkers to seek an alternative to bronze. Many bronze implements were recycled into weapons during that time, and more widespread use of iron resulted in improved steel-making technology and lower costs. When tin became readily available again, iron was cheaper, stronger and lighter, and forged iron implements superseded cast bronze tools permanently.
In Central and Western Europe, the Iron Age lasted from to , beginning in pre-Roman Iron Age Northern Europe in , and reaching Northern Scandinavian Europe about .
The Iron Age in the ancient Near East is considered to last from (the Bronze Age collapse) to (or 539 BC), roughly the beginning of historiography with Herodotus, marking the end of the proto-historical period.
In China, because writing was developed first, there is no recognizable prehistoric period characterized by ironworking, and the Bronze Age China transitions almost directly into the Qin dynasty of imperial China. "Iron Age" in the context of China is used sometimes for the transitional period of to 100 BC during which ferrous metallurgy was present even if not dominant.
Ancient Near East The Iron Age in the ancient Near East is believed to have begun after the discovery of iron smelting and smithing techniques in Anatolia, the Caucasus or southeastern Europe . The earliest bloomery smelting of iron is found at Tell Hammeh, Jordan (determined from 14C dating).
The Early Iron Age in the Caucasus area is divided conventionally into two periods: Early Iron I (), and Early Iron II (10th–9th centuries BC). Many of the material culture traditions of the Late Bronze Age continued into the Early Iron Age. Thus, there is a sociocultural continuity during this transitional period.
In Iran, the earliest actual iron artifacts were unknown until the 9th century BC. For Iran, the best studied archaeological site during this time period is Teppe Hasanlu.
West Asia In the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, the initial use of iron dates to perhaps 3000 BC. One of the earliest smelted iron artifacts known is a dagger with an iron blade found in a Hattic tomb in Anatolia, dating from 2500 BC. The widespread use of iron weapons which replaced bronze weapons rapidly disseminated throughout the Near East by the beginning of the 1st millennium BC.
The development of iron smelting was once attributed to the Hittites of Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age. As part of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the Late Bronze Age collapse saw the slow, comparatively continuous spread of iron-working technology in the region. It was long believed that the success of the Hittite Empire during the Late Bronze Age had been based on the advantages entailed by the "monopoly" on ironworking at the time. Accordingly, the invading Sea Peoples would have been responsible for spreading the knowledge through that region. The idea of such a "Hittite monopoly" has been examined more thoroughly and no longer represents a scholarly consensus. While there are some iron objects from Bronze Age Anatolia, the number is comparable to iron objects found in Egypt and other places of the same time period; and only a small number of these objects are weapons.
+Early examples and distribution of non-precious metal finds Date Crete Aegean Greece Cyprus Sub-totals Anatolia Totals 1300–1200 BC5290163349 5290163349 1200–1100 BC1282637N/A37 1100–1000 BC133313380N/A80 1000–900 BC37+3011529211N/A211 Total Iron Age513516388328N/A328
Dates are approximate Prehistoric (or proto-historic) Iron Age Historic Iron Age
Egypt