Iron objects, known from the Bronze Age…
1341 BCE to 1198 BCE
Iron objects, known from the Bronze Age across the Eastern Mediterranean, occur only sporadically and are statistically insignificant compared to the quantity of bronze objects during this time.
The early Hittites are known to have bartered iron for silver, at a rate of forty times the iron's weight, with Assyria.
Iron smelting—the extraction of usable metal from oxidized iron ores—is more difficult than tin and copper smelting.
While these metals and their alloys can be cold-worked or melted in relatively simple furnaces (such as the kilns used for pottery) and cast into molds, smelted iron requires hot-working and can be melted only in specially designed furnaces.
It is therefore not surprising that humans only mastered the technology of smelted iron after several millennia of bronze metallurgy.
The place and time for the discovery of iron smelting is not known, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing metal extracted from nickel-containing ores from hot-worked meteoritic iron.
The archaeological evidence seems to point to the Middle East area, during the Bronze Age in the third millennium BCE.
The Hittites, who appear to be the first to understand the production of iron from its ores and regard it highly in their society, begin sometime between 1500 and 1200 BCE to smelt native iron oxide together with charcoal at high temperatures to transform the resultant iron sponge, through repeated hammering, into wrought iron.
Sometime during this age, Anatolian metallurgists, probably under Hittite auspices, apparently discover that they can greatly harden the rather soft wrought iron by heating it in charcoal.
Wrought iron, which represents the "iron" that is referred to throughout western history, will soon replace bronze as the most useful known metal because of its greater hardness and wider availability.
However, iron artifacts remain a rarity until the twelfth century BCE.
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