Iron: The Origin Story

Word reaches your village slowly. Invaders are coming and they are armed with strange, deadly new weapons. Even worse, they outnumber your people. Their advanced technology allows them to maintain larger populations and reshape the world around them. These are not alien invaders. They’re humans, and they have learned to harness the most common metal on Earth: iron.

Early human history is usually studied in three periods: the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. Historians organize early human history in this way because tools made of hard materials like metal and stone are often the only artifacts from these ancient societies. It varies by region, but this organization into three time periods is most accurate when we are talking about Afro-Eurasia. Afro-Eurasia refers to the combined continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The Iron Age lasted roughly from 1500 BCE to 500 BCE. We’re used to iron now, but iron-making technology was a major innovation then, and it took thousands of years for people to figure it out. To make iron you need a furnace that can handle 1,538 degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit). Before the Iron Age, humans were creating bronze in pottery furnaces.

The timing of the first iron-smelting¹ technologies is significant. Several major states like Greece and Egypt began to collapse around 1200 BCE, the Late Bronze Age. Natural disasters and foreign invasions were some of the reasons for this collapse. The introduction of iron technology, combined with this collapse, rapidly changed the ancient world. Iron reshaped regional power dynamics, trade networks, natural environments, and human social orders all over Eurasia.

Swords into Ploughshares: Iron Reshapes Power Dynamics

We usually picture swords when we think of the Iron Age, but that’s not what made iron technology so powerful. Iron weapons are stronger than bronze, but the real advantage is that iron is easier to find and easier to make.

The copper and tin needed to make bronze are hard to find, and some states depended on trade to get copper or tin to make bronze weapons for their armies. When war or disaster disrupted trade, they couldn’t make weapons and tools. Meanwhile, societies that solved the high-temperature furnace problem were able to grow much stronger as the Iron Age began. Suddenly they could make more tools and weapons faster and cheaper.

More Ore: Iron Reshapes Trade Networks

Different parts of Eurasia were connected during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Armies and merchants brought bronze and iron technologies along trade networks over several centuries. Other parts of the world such as the Americas were left out of the Iron Age transformations. They did not use iron for another 3,ooo years, in the sixteenth century CE.

The earliest evidence of extensive iron smelting comes from the Hittites. From 1500 BCE to 1177 BCE, the Hittites ruled an empire in Anatolia, which is in present- day Turkey.

By around 1000 BCE, people all over Eurasia were using iron tools. In India and China, iron was used to make farming tools that allowed farmers to grow more food. This led to massive population increases in those areas.

There is evidence to suggest that iron-smelting technology was in Africa and Anatolia around the same time. Central African communities used iron to clear forests and spread their agricultural societies across a region larger than the United States.

Turning Trees into Swords: Iron Reshapes the Environment

Humans have always impacted the environment, but Iron Age societies reshaped the world around them in major ways. Iron smelting furnaces needed lots of wood, which was the most abundant and hottest-burning fuel at the time.

Iron Age societies had to plant more crops to feed their growing populations. So, they cut down more trees to make larger fields and produce more wood to fuel their furnaces. More wood meant they could smelt more iron and feed even more people. Even more people meant they needed more iron tools, which required more wood. Soon, forests started disappearing. Populations increased slowly for most of human history, but the Bronze and Iron Ages kicked off a population boom for ancient human communities.

Iron Forges Social Relationships

As iron helped populations grow, empires expanded their territories. These empires needed an efficient government and iron technology to support their large armies. Rulers created a new social order so that they could keep their diverse empires together.

Even after the Iron Age, iron smelting technologies continued to reshape relationships between people. The huge empires of Rome and Han China depended on iron tools to increase farmland and grow more food. This food helped support the states’ growing cities. To manage their large empires, rulers built new roads and other infrastructure.²

Iron was relatively cheap to make, which meant even poor farmers could afford iron tools.

Gender mattered when it came to iron work. The production of iron was done by men in most regions, even in places where women were using iron. As iron became more important to communities, men often held more power in those communities.

One Metal, Many Paths

The journey to iron technology took different routes. Historians Catherine Fourshey, Rhonda Gonzales and Christine Saidi explain the route of the Bantu³ people in Central Africa. The Bantu used termite mounds to make furnaces for melting iron.

When it came to metal working, Bantu society did not strictly separate “men’s work” from “women’s work.” It was far more complex. Evidence from the Bantu language confirms that Bantu speakers made connections linking termite mounds, iron smelting, and motherhood. The iron furnaces were associated with the idea of women giving birth, which was linked to matrilineal history. Matrilineal societies trace ancestry through mothers. This is just one example of the variety of relationships linking humans to iron working, their environment, and each other.

1 Smelting is the process of removing metal from ore by melting it. Ore is a kind of rock that has a lot of metal in it.
2 Infrastructure refers to the physical and organizational structures that allow a society to function. It can refer to physical structures like bridges, roads, and water supply. It can also refer to organizational structures like the education system.
3 Bantu refers to a group of languages spoken in Central and Southern Africa.