Iron replaces bronze
With the tin routes gone, smiths turn to an ore that is everywhere.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 300 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Iron working spreads rapidly across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East after 1200 BCE, not because iron is better than bronze — early wrought iron is often worse — but because the collapse destroyed the long-distance trade that bronze required. Iron ore is common almost everywhere, so metal stops being a strategic import controlled by palaces and becomes a local product. Tools and weapons become cheaper and more widely available, which changes who can be armed.