III. THE TRANSITION TO HISTORY
1. The Coming of Metals
Copper—Bronze—Iron
When did the use of metals come to man, and how? Again we do not know; we merely surmise that it came by accident, and we presume, from the absence of earlier remains, that it began towards the end of the Neolithic Age. Dating this end about 4000 B.C., we have a perspective in which the Age of Metals (and of writing and civilization) is a mere six thousand years appended to an Age of Stone lasting at least forty thousand years, and an Age of Man lasting* a million years. So young is the subject of our history.
The oldest known metal to be adapted to human use was copper. We find it in a Lake-Dwelling at Robenhausen, Switzerland, ca. 6000 B.C.;49 in prehistoric Mesopotamia ca. 4500 B.C.; in the Badarian graves of Egypt towards 4000 B.C.; in the ruins of Ur ca. 3100B.C.; and in the relics of the North American Mound-Builders at an unknown age.50 The Age of Metals began not with their discovery, but with their transformation to human purpose by fire and working. Metallurgists believe that the first fusing of copper out of its stony ore came by haphazard when a primeval camp fire melted the copper lurking in the rocks that enclosed the flames; such an event has often been seen at primitive camp fires in our own day. Possibly this was the hint which, many times repeated, led early man, so long content with refractory stone, to seek in this malleable metal a substance more easily fashioned into durable weapons and tools.51 Presumably the metal was first used as it came from the profuse but careless hand of nature—sometimes nearly pure, most often grossly alloyed. Much later, doubtless—apparently about 3500 B.C. in the region around the Eastern Mediterranean—men discovered the art of smelting, of extracting metals from their ores. Then, towards 1500 B.C. (as we may judge from bas-reliefs on the tomb of Rekh-mara in Egypt), they proceeded to cast metal: dropping the molten copper into a clay or sand receptacle, they let it cool into Some desired form like a spear-head or an axe.52 That process, once discovered, was applied to a great variety of metals, and provided man with those doughty elements that were to build his greatest industries, and give him his conquest of the earth, the sea, and the air. Perhaps it was because the Eastern Mediterranean lands were rich in copper that vigorous new cultures arose, in the fourth millennium B.C., in Elam, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and spread thence in all directions to transform the world.53
But copper by itself was soft, admirably pliable for some purposes (what would our electrified age do without it?), but too weak for the heavier tasks of peace and war; an alloy was needed to harden it. Though nature suggested many, and often gave man copper already mixed and hardened with tin or zinc—forming, therefore, ready-made bronze or brass—he may have dallied for centuries before taking the next step: the deliberate fusing of metal with metal to make compounds more suited to his needs. The discovery is at least five thousand years old, for bronze is found in Cretan remains of 3000 B.C., in Egyptian remains of 2800 B.C., and in the second city of Troy 2000 B.C.54 We can no longer speak strictly of an “Age of Bronze,” for the metal came to different peoples at diverse epochs, and the term would therefore be without chronological meaning;55furthermore, some cultures—like those of Finland, northern Russia, Polynesia, central Africa, southern India, North America, Australia and Japan—passed over the Bronze Age directly from stone to iron;56 and in those cultures where bronze appears it seems to have had a subordinate place as a luxury of priests, aristocrats and kings, while commoners had still to be content with stone.57 Even the terms “Old Stone Age” and “New Stone Age” are precariously relative, and describe conditions rather than times; to this day many primitive peoples (e.g., the Eskimos and the Polynesian Islanders) remain in the Age of Stone, knowing iron only as a delicacy brought to them by explorers. Captain Cook bought several pigs for a sixpenny nail when he landed in New Zealand in 1778; and another traveler described the inhabitants of Dog Island as “covetous chiefly of iron, so as to want to take the nails out of the ship.”58
Bronze is strong and durable, but the copper and tin which were needed to make it were not available in such convenient quantities and locations as to provide man with the best material for industry and war. Sooner or later iron had to come; and it is one of the anomalies of history that, being so abundant, it did not appear at least as early as copper and bronze. Men may have begun the art by making weapons out of meteoric iron as the Mound-Builders seem to have done, and as some primitive peoples do to this day; then, perhaps, they melted it from the ore by fire, and hammered it into wrought iron. Fragments of apparently meteoric iron have been found in predynastic Egyptian tombs; and Babylonian inscriptions mention iron as a costly rarity in Hammurabi’s capital (2100 B.C.). An iron foundry perhaps four thousand years old has been discovered in Northern Rhodesia; mining in South Africa is no modern invention. The oldest wrought iron known is a group of knives found at Gerar, in Palestine, and dated by Petrie about 1350 B.C. A century later the metal appears in Egypt, in the reign of the great Rameses II; still another century and it is found in the Ægean. In Western Europe it turns up first at Hallstatt, Austria, ca. 900 B.C., and in the La Tène industry in Switzerland ca. 500B.C. It entered India with Alexander, America with Columbus, Oceania with Cook.59 In this leisurely way, century by century, iron has gone about its rough conquest of the earth.