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CHAPTER VI.

THE PROTO-SIDERIC OR EARLY IRON AGE OF WEAPONS.

'Of all metallurgical processes, the extraction of malleable iron may be regarded as amongst the most simple.'-Percy, Iron, &c. p. 573.

WE now come to the King of Metals that 'breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things'; the only ore friendly as well as fatal to the human form; the most useful and the most deadly in the hand of man '—Iron.2

According to the Parian Chronicle (Arundelian Marbles), followed by Thrasyllus (Clemens Alex. in 'Strom.'), and by a host of writers, iron-working was discovered in B.C. 1432 or 248 years before the Trojan war. The latter, a crucial date, is, as will appear, wholly undetermined; the various authorities have made it range through nearly seven hundred years. But the life of Hellas is one great appropriation clause': the Greeks were doughty claimants, childish in their naïveté of conceit; they were burglars of others' wits (convey, the wise it call), and they made themselves do all things. Their legends, for instance, accredit 'Glaucus the Chian' with having invented the art and mystery of steel-inlaying. De Goguet (A.D. 1761) tells us that the Phoenicians ranked amongst their oldest heroes two brothers who discovered iron-working; the Cretans referred it to the oldest period of their history, and the Idæan Daktyls learnt it from the 'mother of the gods.' Prometheus (in Eschylus) boasts of having taught mankind to fabricate all metals: he also wears an iron ring supposed to be a chain not an ornament; and it possibly symbolises the union of fire and ore. The art of iron-working is referred, now to the Cyclopes, of Sicily, then to the Chalybes,' who extended from

Pliny, xxxiv. 39.

2 The word comes from the root which gave the Persian dhan; the Irish iaran or yarann; the Welsh hiarn; the Armorican uan; the Gothic eisarn; the Danish iern; the Swedish iarn; the Cimbric jara; the German Eisen, and the Latin ferrum, with the neo-Latin ferro, hierro (Span.), &c. From iaran also we derive Harnisch, harness.

The unfortunate Cretans gained the name of 'ever liars' (ael eûorai) for telling what was probably the truth. They showed in their island the grave of Jupiter, who must have been originally some hero or chief deified after his death-evidently one of the origins of worship. The evil report began with

H

Callimachus (Hymn. in Jov. 8); and was continued in the proverbial τρία κάππα κάκιστα (Krete, Kappadocia, and Kilikia). Hence the syllogistic puzzle of Eubulides: ‘Epimenides said that the Cretans are liars: Epimenides is a Cretan : ergo, Epimenides is a liar ergo, the Cretans are not liars: ergo, Epimenides is not a liar.'

Chap. iv. The Chalybs of Justin (xliv. 3) is a river between the Ana (Guadiana) and the Tagus; called by Ptolemy and Martianus, Káλious or Kairos. Eschylus alludes to the original Chalybes when he personifies the Sword as the 'Chalybian stranger,' and in the same tragedy (Seven against Thebes) he entitles it the hammer-wrought Scythian steel.'

Colchis to Spain: Clemens (Alex.) refers the discovery of making malleable iron to the Noropes of Danubian Pannonia, who dwelt between Noricum (Styria) and Mæsia; and finally, to quote no more, Mr. J. Fergusson, a careful writer, tells us that 'the Aryans (?) were those who introduced the use of iron, and with it dominated over and expelled (?) the older races.'

Modern discovery has proved that the invention, and indeed the general adoption, of 'Mars' () dates from the very dawn of history; and that it is a mere theory to assume everywhere preceding millennia of bone and stone, copper and bronze. It is clear, for instance, in Central Africa, where copper and tin were unprocurable, that man must first have used iron. A good authority, Mr. St. John V. Day' (C.E.), who was in charge of iron works in Southern India, claims for iron-cast as well as wrought, and even for its carburet, steel-the credit of being 'unquestionably the earliest of substances with which man was acquainted.' This writer, however, denies, contrary to all tradition, a 'progressive rise in the quality of materials used by man': that is, from the soft and yielding to the hard and refractory. He holds that Man, once master of metallurgy, 'would be better able to deal with the much more easily manipulated bones, stones, or wood.' He supposes all the metals, noble and ignoble, as well as gems and precious stones, to have become familiar amongst Eastern races, 'whether they be Semitic, Aryan, Hamitic, Sporadic, or Allophyllian, by virtue of a civilisation due to a natural innate insight.' Hence he declares Egypt an enigma to those who accept the dictum of man's gradual evolution from the condition of a savage, an ignoramus,' and he opines that this grim being is simply a retrograde.3

These ideas trench upon old metallurgic superstitions and seem to run into extremes. We know nothing concerning the home of Proto-man, which is perhaps deep under the waters. Anthropologists, who locate him in Mesopotamia, 'Aryaland' (Central Asia), or Ethiopia, look only to the origin of the present species, and the historic cycle. Our studies, as far as they go, suggest that Man began in the Polar regions, and that in hoar antiquity each racial centre had its own material-wood and horn, bone and stone, copper, bronze, and iron.

To the abundance of iron we may attribute the fact that the Africans appear to have passed direct from the stone implements, that are now found in the soil, to those of iron, without passing through the intermediate bronze period which, in Egypt and other countries, intervened between the ages of stone and iron.'-Anthropol. Coll. pp. 128–134.

2 The High Antiquity of Iron and Steel,' a valuable paper read before the Philos. Soc. Glasgow, printed in Iron (1875–76), and kindly sent to me by the editor, Mr. Nursey; also The Prehistoric Use of Iron and Steel (Trübner, London, 1877), from which Mr. Day has allowed me to make extracts.

The question is to be determined by facts, not theories. Hitherto we are justified in believing, from

the skeletons dug up at great depths, or found in caves associated with the mammals which they destroyed, that Man in prehistoric times was of a low physical, and therefore mental type. We shall believe the opposite view when we are shown ancient crania equal, if not superior, to those of the present day-relics that will revive the faded glories of 'Father Adam' and 'Mother Eve.' But, meanwhile, we cannot be expected to believe in ipse dixits, inspired or uninspired.

For instance, in North-Western Europe, the early iron age began about A. D. 250, according to Konrad Englehardt (Denmark in the early Iron Age, p. 4, London, 1866), quoted by Mr. Day.

For our first lesson in iron we must go back as usual to Kahi-Ptah (the Ptahregion), that Nile Valley which is the motherland of all science, of all art. Here Bunsen provides us with the following table:

4) is a constant in

Mr. Day (who has drawn it up) observes that 'BA' (14)

the phonetic values assigned to the uncertain hieroglyphs for iron, and feels disposed to believe it synonymous with xaλkós, base metal in general. He would translate the Saidic 'BENIIIE' and the Coptic ПIENIIIE' by 'stone (BE) of (NI) sky or heaven (IIE)'; in fact, 'sky-stone,' alluding to meteoric iron, probably the first utilised. Dr. Birch holds 'BA' to be a general term for metal made particular, as in Greece, by prefixed adjectives (white, black, yellow) denoting the quality of the ore. And hence the determinative of 'BA' (metal, stone, or hard wood) is the cube or parallelogrammic block which denotes building and building materials.

Native iron may be distributed into two great divisions, extra-terrestrial and terrestrial. The former is known as meteoric or nickeliferous. Mr. Day (pp. 22– 23) gives analyses of this form, and takes, from Chladni and others, a list of masses that fell in Siberia, Thuringia, and Dauphiné; in West African Liberia, and in American Sta. Fé de Bogotá, and Canaan, Connecticut. Though many trials have been made in working extra-terrestrial metal, all have hitherto failed; the phosphorus, nickel and its alter ego, cobalt, render the forgings, in our present state of technology, too brittle for use. Terrestrial or telluric iron is again divided into two classes-the nearly pure ore and the native steel. According to the schedule of Rosset :

Egypt's Place in Universal History, vol. v.; London, Longmans, 1867, with additions by Samuel Birch, LL.D.

* When Laplace made meteorolites ejections from

lunar volcanoes, Chladni suggested that they were masses of metallic matter, moving in irregular orbits through interplanetary, and possibly interstellar,

space.

That iron was common amongst the ancient Egyptians we may assume as proved. Mr. A. Henry Rhind, when opening the tomb of Sebau (nat. B.C. 68), noted on the massive doors 'iron hasps and nails,' as lustrous and as pliant as on the day they left the forge.' Belzoni, who died in 1823, found an iron sickle under the feet of one of the Karnak Sphinxes dating from B.C. 600. In June 1837, Mr. J. R. Hill, employed by Colonel Howard Vyse, when blasting and excavating the Jízeh Pyramid, came upon a piece of iron, apparently a cramp, near the channel-mouth of one of the air-passages: it had thus been preserved from rust, and its authenticity cannot be doubted. Some suggested that it was used for scraping and finishing; others for finally levelling the faces of dressed stone, but it tapers off from the middle to an edge on either side and it narrows at one end.2 This relic can hardly be of later date than B.C. 4000-3600, when Khufu (Cheops) built his burial-place and inscribed in it his hieroglyphic shield or cartouche Stowed away in the British Museum, it excited scant attention

(•ཅ-ཅ

till Dr. Lepsius at the Congress of Orientalists (London, 1874), suggested that it was of steel. A trial was made (Sept. 18); it yielded readily to a few turns of the drill, and the surfaces of the hole showed the whiteness and the brightness of newly-cut malleable iron. Since that discovery, sacrificial iron knives have been found in the Nile Valley, despite the ready oxidation of the metal in a climate of the hot-damp category. In the Bulák Museum (Salle de l'Est), with the wooden Swords, was a straight and double-edged iron blade that had two ribs running along its length. Another room showed a straight, double-edged, and round-pointed dagger of gilt iron. Of the latter weapon there are three fine specimens (Salle du Centre).

The literature of Egypt abounds in allusions to the use of iron. The Rev. Basil H. Cooper believes that Mibampes the 'Iron King,' sixth successor of

2 A full-sized drawing appeared in vol. vii. of Proceedings of the Phil. Soc. Glasgow; and was repeated by Mr. Day in his book, Pl. II. He also gives Belzoni's sickle, Pl. I.

When visiting the Tombs of the Soldans,' Cairo, I found a slab of blue basalt bearing the cartouche of Khufu, used as a threshold for one of the buildings. The characters had been partly erased; but the material was too hard for the barbarians who had misused it.

4 I have elsewhere noticed (chap. iv.) the colours

of metals in the painted tombs of Thebes, and the blue (cyanus-colour) of the butcher's steel. The history of this homely article is instructive. For hundreds of years it retained, in England and elsewhere, its original shape, an elongated cone. At last some 'cute citizen had the idea of breaking the surface into four edges, and of hardening it with nickel. The simple improvement now fits it for sharpening everything from a needle to a razor: it thus frees us from the needy knife-grinder,' who right well deserved to be needy, as he disadorned everything he touched.

5 Antiquity of the Use of Metals, especially Iron, among the Egyptians, p. 18 (London, 1868). Also Ueber die Priorität des Eisens oder der Bronze in Ostasien, by Dr. M. Müller (Trans. Vienna Anthrop. Soc. vol. ix.).

primæval Mena (circ. B.C. 4560),' bore on his cartouche the word 'Benipe'; and that no less than three records entitle him 'Lover of Iron' (i.e. the Sword); 'thus attesting, not only the extreme antiquity of the use of iron, but unfortunately (?) of that most dreadful evil of all which are the scourges of humanity-war (?).' And so we see the nineteenth century repeating the Herodotian half-truth, 'Iron has been discovered to the hurt of Man'; and looking only

3

at one side of the question, the evils of War, without which, I repeat, strong races could not supplant the weaker to the general benefit of mankind. The Epos of Pentaur, the jovial temple scribe 3 (circ. B.C. 1350), mentions iron' thrice; and Pharaoh Mene-Ptah II., whose 'Sword gave no quarter,' had vessels of iron. In later hieroglyphic literature the notices become too numerous to justify quotation.

FIG. 103.-EGYPTIAN SACRIFICIAL KNIVES (IRON).

The old Egyptians, according to Plutarch, held iron to be the oσTέov Tupŵvos, or bone of Set; whereas the σidnpitis Xídos, or magnet, was that of his foe-god Horus, degraded to Charon in Greece and Rome. This siderite was known to the Hellenes in its religious aspect as Ηράκλεια λίθος or Ηράκλειον, either from Heraclea-town or from Hercules (Pliny, xxxvi. 25). Siderite or load

I assume this date because it marks when the spring equinox (vernal colure) occurred in the Taurussign. The earliest of the six epochs proposed by Egyptologists is B.C. 5702 (Böckh), and the latest is B.C. 3623 (Bunsen); the mean being B.C. 4573, and the difference a matter of 2079 years (Brugsch, i. 30).

2 The Table of Sakkarah (Memphis), found about the end of 1864 by the late Mariette Pasha, dates from Ramses the Great (thirteenth century B.C.), and makes Mibampes the first of his fifty-six ancestors. No. 2 is the new tablet of Abydos, discovered, also in 1864, by Herr Dümmichen; it enabled scholars to supply the illegible name in No. 3, the priceless Turin Papyrus, the hieratic Canon of the Ptolemies. Mir

bampes, Mirbapen, or Mi-ba of the monuments is called in Manetho Micbides, son of Usarphædus' (Cory's Fragments, p. 112).

• Of Ramses II., who, with his father Seti, represents the Greek Sesostris, the Sesesu-Ra of the monuments. (Brugsch, Hist. ii. 53-62: see my chap. viii.) Prof. G. Ebers has made this Egyptian protoHomerid the hero of his romance, Uarda (i.e. Wardah, 'the Rose').

De Iside et Osiride. He quotes Manetho the Priest, who wrote during the reign of the first Ptolemy, and who told unpleasant truths concerning Moses, the Hebrews, and the Exodus.