Iron
Harder than bronze and everywhere, but for centuries almost nobody can work it.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 600 years
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
Meteoric iron is worked as a rarity for millennia — Tutankhamun was buried with a dagger made from it. Smelted iron appears in Anatolia and the Caucasus from around 1800 BCE, but iron melts at 1538 degrees, beyond Bronze Age furnaces, so it must be worked as a spongy bloom and repeatedly hammered. Early iron is not obviously better than bronze. Its advantage is that ore is common everywhere, which matters enormously once the tin routes collapse.