3.1.1 Some History

The first uses of iron date back thousands of years. Much of the iron found in prehistoric tools and weapons was probably taken from meteorites. That iron was quite strong and of excellent quality because it frequently contained hardness-imparting nickel. Native iron was so rare some 6000 years ago that it was made into jewelry by the Egyptians; it began to be used for weapons only millennia later. Tutankhamen's tomb, dated 1360 B.C., contained, among other treasures, an iron dagger.1 There are numerous references to iron tools and nails found in the Bible.

The Iron Age is commonly assumed to have begun at about 1000 B.C., and since that time the civilizations that mastered the use of iron have consistently won their struggles for survival. For example, in the famous Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) the Greeks demolished a vastly larger Persian army and defended their independence. They had one decisive advantage: An average Greek soldier wore 57 pounds of iron armor; an average Persian, none. The first iron production by the Greeks is traced to a large forest fire on Mount Ida in Troy (in present-day Turkey), which melted some iron ore near the surface into a primitive metal that could be fashioned into crude tools and weapons.2

The ancient technology relied on repeated heating and hammering of iron ore, because the furnaces then in use could not be heated to high enough temperatures to melt the iron. The semisolid iron...