Iron Age

“ Such a classification into different ages in no way implies any exact chronology, far less one that would be applicable to all the countries of Europe alike, but is rather to be regarded as significant only of a succession of different stages of civilization; for it is evident that at the time when, for instance, in a country such as Italy, the Iron Age may have commenced, some of the more northern countries of Europe may possibly have been in their Bronze Age, and others again still in their Stone Age. ”

“ With the discovery of iron as the ideal metal for cutting implements and weapons, we enter into the millennium before the Christian era; for roughly speaking, the development of the civilization associated with the gradual substitution of iron for bronze began about 1000 B.C. Again we Iron age.look towards the south-east of Europe for the earliest evidence of this great advance; from that quarter it gradually spread over the whole continent, reaching the more northern parts about five hundred years later. ”

“ In time, iron, too, reveals itself among their possessions, showing that they lived in their lake-villages from the later Stone Age into that third period of the early process of civilization which is named the Iron Age--when men first acquired the use of the most useful of all the metals. ”

“ The difference between the culture of the Neolithic and the Iron Age is great, but it is simply a development, the result of a gradual growth. Civilization and history have only hastened this growth. If we look around us to-day we can trace the elements of our civilization back through the eras of history, and though the faint beginning of some can be noticed, yet many of them come down to us from prehistoric times. We have treated of these early people in the three stages of culture known as the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages. ”

“ The Stone Age is that period in the history of mankind during which stone is habitually used as a material for weapons and tools. Antiquaries find it convenient to make the Stone Age cease whenever metal implements come into common use, and the Bronze Age, or the Iron Age, supervenes. ”

“ Iron Age continued its normal and unbroken evolution. The objects recovered from the old graves and kurgans in the present governments of Tver and Iaroslav, and especially at Ananyino on the Kama, centre of this culture, show that here took place the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age some 300 years before the new era, and here was developed a later Iron Age, whose forms are characteristic of the northern Finno-Ugrian lands. ”

“ THE IRON AGE. The three historic ages overlap each other—Division of the iron age by archæologists—Gradual development in the mode of burial during the three ages—Appearance of silver, lead, and glass—Greek and Roman objects—Cinerary deposits—Cremation—The Kannikegaard cemetery—Primitive kettle-shaped graves—Intentional destruction of weapons and armour in graves—Cinerary urns—Symbolic signs—Ornaments of the iron age.
In the iron age, when the knowledge of all the metals was known, and weapons were made of iron, bones were still sometimes used for arrow-heads ”

“ With these exceptions, there are no terramara mounds of the Iron Age, and the system is supposed to have flourished in the early Bronze Age and to have fallen completely into desuetude before the commencement of the Iron Age. ”

“ Axes that would cut wood as never axe cut before! Weapons which would not break nor grow blunt at the first blow! What treasures!
Every fragment of those heavy stones was brought to Umpleton. They dug deep into the hillside for them. They made so many tools that although both stone, copper and bronze ones were still in use yet they were used only by those who could not afford the better ones. And in some such way began what we now call the Iron Age ”

“ Archaeologists and ethnologists agree that before the dawn of datable history a milestone of progress was marked when our ancestors had, at enormous cost, won a pound or so of iron per capita and begun the iron age. The keen analyst of the present, seeing our railways, our ships, our cannon, our sky scrapers, has erected another milestone, and this he calls the Age of Steel. ”

“ Not the least misunderstood of these subjects has been the classification of the antiquities of Western Europe, first practically adopted by the Danish antiquaries, under periods known as the Iron, Bronze, and Stone Ages; the Iron Age, so far as Denmark is concerned, being supposed to go back to about the Christian era, the Bronze Age to embrace a period of one or two thousand years previous to that date, and the Stone Age all previous time of man's occupation of that part of the world. ”

“ This Neolithic Period itself, again, was immensely long as compared with the Bronze Age which followed, though short by comparison with the Palæolithic epoch which preceded it. Then the Bronze Age saw enormous changes come faster and faster, till the use of iron still further accelerated the rate of progress. For each new improvement becomes, in turn, the parent of yet newer triumphs, so that at last, as in the present day, a single century sees vaster changes in the world of man than whole ages before it have done in far longer intervals. ”

“ Altogether, if history is to count for anything, there can be no doubt that in Greece and Italy, the earliest civilized countries of Europe, the use of bronze preceded that of iron, and therefore that there was in each case a Bronze Age of greater or less duration preceding the Iron Age. ”

“ Bronze implements used for many centuries in Europe before the Iron Age.
Certain metallurgists, however, maintain that a Bronze Age, properly so called, may never have existed; and that iron may have been manufactured during and even before the period to which the bronze tools that are exhibited in museums belong. ”

“ WE had in the earlier ages of mankind a rough and a polished stone age, a bronze age, and an age of iron, each distinguished by the character of the material that was predominantly used by men for their weapons and tools, and have now added to those ages one of steel. In a similar manner we are now entering upon a revival of the bronze age, in which that substance in its varieties is to be put through stages of improvement like those that iron and steel have undergone. ”

“ The Age or Iron.—The nearer we approach the present, with its rapid growths and changes, the shorter become the several ages into which we divide the history of man as to his physical surroundings and peculiarities, and the successive grades of spiritual and social development through which he has passed. Last of the prehistoric eras is the Age of Iron, represented in some of the pile-dwellings and their contents, but best, and with least admixture from earlier and later times, in the station of La Têne on Lake Neuchâtel. ”

“ Iron may have been known as early as bronze or even earlier, but nevertheless there have been periods in the life of nations when bronze, not iron, has been the metal in use. Thus there is nothing to interfere with the facts resting on archæological evidence, that in such districts as Scandinavia or Switzerland a Stone age was at some ancient time followed by a Bronze age, and this again by an Iron age. ”

“ Still another age in this ancient history is the "Iron Age," when the tribes of Europe used iron weapons and implements, and had advanced from the nomadic condition to that of cultivators of the ground, though still gaining most of their livelihood from fishing and hunting. ”

“ The next age is that of bronze, when man had learned to smelt metals, and make moulds, showing a great advance—and, finally, the Iron Age, in which man had subdued the sterner metal to his will—and this age immediately precedes History. ”

“ I am at present concerned with the Stone Age, and if, as all agree, there was a time when the use of iron or of bronze, or of both together, first became known to the barbarous nations of the West of Europe, then it is evident that before that time they were unacquainted with the use of those metals, and were therefore in that stage of civilization which has been characterized as the Stone Age. ”

“ It is now generally recognised by archæologists that all people who have advanced to a certain degree of civilisation have passed through three periods of development, which according to the material of which their implements, weapons, and utensils were made, have been named the stone, the bronze, and the iron age. ”

“ Homer represents Greece as beginning her Iron Age twelve hundred years before our era. The knowledge of iron spread from the south to the north of Europe. In approaching the East from the north of Siberia or from the south of Greece and the Troad, the history of iron in each country eastward is relatively later; while a review of European countries from the north towards the south shows the latter becoming acquainted with the metal earlier than the former It is suggested that these facts support the theory that it is from Africa that iron first came into use. ”

“ At the battle of Marathon, arrow-heads and lances of stone were largely used. We can easily understand how, by one of a number of causes, some rude tribes, yet unacquainted with the use of metal, would come to occupy the site of some settlement, the inhabitants of which had been in the Bronze or Iron Age. This actually happened at ancient Troy, where the remains of a stone-using folk have been found above those of a people using metal. This, though an exception to the general rule, need give us no surprise.
Iron manufacture at the present day, is one of our great industries. ”

“ It shows a vast advance in intelligence, power of observation, and perseverance in making experiments. This advance gradually led them on to the discovery of the tougher qualities of iron, and how to "get at it", and to make use of it. Thus we reach the Iron Age. ”

“ The flint and steel may have come into use at any time after the beginning of the Iron age, but history fails to tell us the date of its introduction in Greece and Rome, China, and most other districts of the Old World. In modern times it has made its way with iron into many new places, though it has not always been able to supersede the fire-sticks at once ”

“ To the Stone Age succeeded the Age of Bronze, at which time cutting instruments, such as swords and knives and axes, began to be made of copper, and an alloy of that metal and tin. When in the course of time iron replaced bronze for cutting-instruments, the Bronze Age came to an end and the Iron Age supervened. ”

“ Northern archæologists divide the iron age in the North into the earlier, middle, and later iron age, in the same manner as they have divided the preceding stone and bronze ages; and it may safely be said that in all these ages the North surpasses other countries in the beauty and number of its objects. ”

“ The lake period was of long duration, and included the whole time in which man rose by successive steps from the primitive stages of civilization in which he was not yet acquainted with metals to the higher stages, when he became acquainted with bronze and then with iron. Whatever a certain German school may say about it, the existence of a bronze age intermediate between the stone age and the iron age is demonstrated. ”

“ This may have [280] been the real reason why the “bronze age” set in over a great part of Europe and Asia, and was only followed by the “iron age” when iron coming to be better worked, cheaper and more plentiful, and steel especially being improved, brought out that superiority to bronze for tools and weapons which to us seems a matter of course. The remains of the lake-dwellings of Switzerland show how central Europe was once inhabited by rude tribes using stone implements, how at a later period bronze hatchets and spears prevailed, and lastly iron came in. ”

“ Nations living in the bronze age are known to history, especially the Mexicans and Peruvians, whom the Spaniards at the conquest found working in bronze with some skill, but knowing nothing of iron; their state was like that of the Massagetæ of central Asia, described by Herodotus some two thousand years earlier. Most of Africa, on the other hand, seems to have had no bronze age, but to have passed directly from the stone age to the iron age. ”

“ Next followed the Bronze age, with its weapons and articles of that metal, and lastly the Iron age, with its gradual development and progress in the arts and manufactures. The successive stages through which man has advanced to civilization may also be classified in three divisions: Savage, Barbarous, and Civilized. ”

“ From what we have learned of the development of primitive society, it will not surprise us to learn that the first division of the age of stone comprises a vastly greater portion of time, and is far more ancient, than the second. We will give an outline showing the order of use of different materials; but it is here necessary to remark that Bronze was the first metal that man learned to use, and Iron the second. ”

“ Red men never learned to melt iron and make tools of it as we do, though there was plenty of iron in the mountains among which many tribes lived. The red men never got beyond the Stone Age and into the Iron Age as white men did. ”

“ Chronology of the Copper and Bronze Ages.
Of recent years great strides have been made towards the establishment of a definite chronology linking the historic with the prehistoric periods in the Aegean, in Egypt and in Babylonia, and as the estimates of various authorities differ sometimes by a thousand years or so, the subjoined table will be of use to indicate the chronological schemes most commonly followed; the dates are in all cases merely approximate.
The Iron Age.
It has often been pointed out that there is no reason why iron should not have been the earliest metal to be used by man. ”