Period· The columns of time

Iron Age

1,175 BCE → 801 BCE

The Iron Age, from 3,200 to about 2,800 years ago, is the period when iron became the principal everyday metal.

Period defined by the use of iron as the principal utilitarian metal. Iron is harder to work than bronze and far more widespread, so that weaponry and tools cease to depend on controllable supply circuits.

What the evidence shows

The difference between the two metals is first geological. Iron is among the most abundant elements of the Earth's crust, present in ordinary rocks and even in the ferruginous deposits of marshland, where it can be collected at the surface; tin concentrates only in a few granitic districts, in Cornwall, the Erzgebirge and South-East Asia. The technical difficulty is real: iron requires higher temperatures than copper and cannot be cast under the conditions of ancient furnaces. A bloomery yields a pasty mass mixed with slag, called a bloom, which must be forged and reforged to extract the metal, hence a slow diffusion despite the abundance of ore. The military consequence, the equipping of large armies at low cost, is the most often noted; the political consequence lies in the disappearance of an instrument of control, the monopoly of the tin routes having made it possible to determine who could arm themselves. In the conventional chronology, the band covers about 400 years.

Bounds and conventions

The limits retained are the round dates of European and Near Eastern periodisations. The sequence they presuppose does not apply elsewhere: in sub-Saharan Africa, iron metallurgy appears with no preceding Bronze Age, and the Americas have no Iron Age. A band this brief and this conventional serves as a marker and not as a description.

West Eurasian convention; African iron metallurgy follows a different calendar.