Back to the Iron Age calendar

Once again the change from one age to a new one was a gradual thing and, again, depended on the discovery and use of a new metal.

That metal was iron and it is even stronger than bronze. The way you get iron is by heating lumps of a special rock. If you heat the rock, most of it will disappear. Have you ever seen a coal fire? You burn the coal, it gives a lovely heat, but, in time, it disappears and you have to add more. Wood does the same.

But people discovered that there are some rocks, at first found in marshy areas, that you can heat in a charcoal fire and something is left behind. That something was a lump of pure iron. That heating process is called smelting. Once you have the iron a blacksmith or similar craftsman can reheat it and hammer it into whatever shape was wanted. Iron was far stronger than bronze. It was also a complete change from making bronze which you poured hot into a mould and it would cool and set whereas you could only make something from iron by hammering the hot metal.

People still used and made bronze because it was far easy to make it into the intricate shapes that made beautiful jewellery and was cheaper and easy to find than gold. It was probably another 400 years before iron was in widespread use.

Forward to 500BC