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begun to build larger and better log-houses, and that the chiefs probably fortified theirs with moats, earthworks, and wooden stockades. It is likely that many promontory and ring forts date back to the Bronze Age. The lake-dwellings, if not of the Bronze Age, were certainly occupied during it. Rock-carvings in Norway and Sweden show not only that the soil was cultivated, but that the horse was used for riding and driving, large ships for rowing were built, and picture-writing existed. Garments were mostly woven of wool and adorned with fringes of different colours. Many such have been found in Jutland in graves containing cists, or coffins, of hollowed oak. The men wore jackets and caps, carried swords sheathed in wood or leather by a leather strap over the shoulder, and, as we see from the number of bronze razors found, were in the habit of shaving. The women wore hair-nets, jackets, and long skirts. The poorer classes probably were clad in garments of skins. Ornaments were made of jet, bronze, and gold, and sometimes inlaid with resin and amber. Weapons were elaborate and splendid, and so abundant was gold in some centres that heavy ornaments of this metal were worn not only by chieftains but by their horses. Distinctions of rank had already put so much difference between a ruling warrior and a skin-clad man of the people.

GOLD BRACELETS

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CHAPTER XVI

THE IRON AGE

O the last of the prehistoric stages in the progress of man we give the name of the Early Iron Age. With the first bar of iron smelted a new era had begun. Immense advance, it is true, in the arts of life had been made during the transition from rude tools and weapons of unpolished stone to those, beautiful and elaborately wrought, of the Bronze Age. Yet man had to discover iron before he could go far in the conquest of his environment, and once discovered, so indispensable did iron prove that the civilized world is still in the Iron Age. Next to air and water there is probably no one material that we could not better do without. the most abundant of the heavy metals-iron-bearing stone is a main constituent of the hills themselves—it is the strongest, the most magnetic, the most varied in its properties. It can be made extremely hard by sudden cooling, or soft and pliable by slow cooling. It supplies the irreplaceable steel of our cutting tools, and magnetic iron is the basis of commercial electricity.

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So great was the advantage conferred by the possession of tools and weapons of the new metal that for long after its discovery a superstitious reverence was felt by ordinary men for the smiths who understood the working of it. Northern folklore made the first iron-smith, the forger of magic swords-Wayland Smith, as the English called him-half divine, just as the Greeks and Romans placed the metal-worker, Hephæstus or

Vulcan, among the gods. Yet in spite of the overwhelming merits of iron-or perhaps because of the mystery that seemed to attach to the workers—the new metal was looked at askance in some regions as something strange and uncanny. Some countries continued using the more beautiful bronze long after iron must have been known to them, and even when iron was in use for all everyday purposes bronze was retained for ornament, and for religious and ceremonial use. As when stone was supplanted by bronze, the metal that had passed out of common use acquired a sanctity from its association with ancient days.

The earliest objects made of iron imitated the forms of bronze, though the latter, being adapted to cast metal, were often unsuitable for manufacture in iron, which for a long period was always wrought, never cast. Iron articles which are most like bronze and therefore nearest to the Bronze Age stage of progress are foundchiefly in the interior of India, which was perhaps the centre from which a knowledge of iron radiated in various directions. Assyria, Judea, and other regions of Asia had it long before Europe, and inscriptions prove that iron was in use in Egypt more than two thousand years before the birth of Christ. From Egypt it spread south and west into the interior of Africa, which passed from her Stone Age to the Age of Iron without an intermediate Age of Bronze. At last it reached the south of Europe, and trade routes carried it from Macedonia and the Greek colonies of the Black Sea and Marseilles to South Russia, Hungary, Gaul, and the British Isles. It was this trade intercourse that about 200 B.C. introduced a coinage into South-eastern Britain which imitated that of Philip II of Macedon. It is possible, however, that the Britons, who during the Bronze Age

were accustomed to the use of the furnace in the extraction of tin and copper from the ore, discovered the art of iron-working for themselves. We have at any rate proof that iron was produced in Britain centuries before the Roman occupation.

Many myths arose to relate how it was discovered, but the most general belief was that lumps of iron fit for hammer and forge had been found after a great forest fire. The Homeric poems represent Greece as entering her Iron Age about twelve hundred years before the Christian era, and when they were written the art of tempering steel was so well understood that the poet compares the hissing of the stake with which Ulysses put out Polyphemus' eye to that of steel plunged into water, adding an allusion to the strengthening effect of this cooling on the steel. The notable warriors in the Trojan War had swords of bronze, while the common soldier's was of iron, the greater beauty of bronze probably causing it to remain the aristocratic metal.

[graphic]

ENAMELLED BRONZE SHIELD

We do not yet know the exact form of the earliest furnace. Comparison with the primitive iron-making still carried on in India, Burma, China, and Japan makes it likely that the ore was mixed with charcoal in a shallow hole in the ground, and a blast applied over the edge to obtain the necessary high temperature. Fine qualities of iron and steel can be thus produced. Later on a hollow for the furnace was scooped out in a bank facing the prevailing wind, a hole being made for the removal of the iron, and the blast introduced at the bottom of the furnace either through the same hole or

another. For blast the primitive smith would use his own breath or a fan, device after device improving on the preceding ones until at last the first crude bellows were evolved. The iron was never reduced to a liquid state, but obtained from the ore as a solid mass of malleable metal and hammered into shape.

That the population of Britain had undergone another change is shown by skulls from Iron Age burials.

[graphic]

BRONZE AND ENAMEL BRIDLE BIT

These bear witness that it was now predominantly longheaded, as it had been in the New Stone Age, the explanation perhaps being that the round-headed people of the round barrows had been absorbed in the course of the Bronze Age by the more numerous people they had subdued. The Druidical system which Cæsar describes prevailed, all power being in the hands of the Druids, who formed a priestly caste, and of the nobility, a warrior aristocracy. A Bronze Age warrior must have been a splendid sight with his weapons and armour of bronze and gold. These, however, though they added to the lustre of his appearance, did not increase his fighting value as did the war panoply of a knight

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