2561 AM · 1200 BCE · world history
The Beginning of the Iron Age
Iron replaces bronze, transforming farming, warfare and the shape of society.
Bronze required tin hauled across thousands of kilometres, so tools and weapons stayed a luxury. Iron ore is nearly everywhere. Once smiths mastered high temperatures and carburisation, ploughs, axes and swords reached ordinary households—cheaper farming, bigger harvests, and armies that no palace elite could monopolise.
Sources
Documents of the period
- Assyrian and Hittite inscriptions and monuments — the earliest mentions and finds of iron objects in Anatolia and the Levant
Scholarship
- archaeology of Anatolia and the Levant — the spread of iron smelting and the cheapening of tools by the start of the first millennium BCE
Basis: documents and evidence.