What were the advantages of the iron age?
Answers
Answer:
True to its name, the Iron Age's main characteristic involved iron. In most regions, the primary material for making tools was bronze, an alloy composed of copper and tin. It's likely bronze would have remained dominant in Western civilization if tin had not been so rare. Between 1800 BCE and 1700 BCE, sudden scarcity in tin caused a steep decline in bronze tool and weapon production. During this time, copper too began to run short. Pirates and raiders began attacking communities to steal any bronze they could find.
Explanation:
This shortage likely caused people to experiment with other metals. Iron was more common than copper and tin but it had a much higher melting point than bronze. This meant they couldn't cast tools with iron in the same way. By heating the iron, however, they could make it softer and use hammers to shape it. Over time, people developed ways to increase the temperature of furnaces by using bellows to pump in oxygen. This allowed people to cast objects out of iron and eventually carbon was added to produce steel. Additionally, they discovered that iron tools could be sharpened when they lost their edge rather than needing to recast the object
Answer:
The Iron Age was a period in human history that started between 1200 B.C. and 600 B.C., depending on the region, and followed the Stone Age and Bronze Age. During the Iron Age, people across much of Europe, Asia and parts of Africa began making tools and weapons from iron and steel. For some societies, including Ancient Greece, the start of the Iron Age was accompanied by a period of cultural decline.
Humans may have smelted iron sporadically throughout the Bronze Age, though they likely saw iron as an inferior metal. Iron tools and weapons weren’t as hard or durable as their bronze counterparts.
The use of iron became more widespread after people learned how to make steel, a much harder metal, by heating iron with carbon. The Hittites—who lived during the Bronze Age in what is now Turkey—may have been the first to make steel.