Читать книгу History Of Ancient Civilization - Charles Seignobos - Страница 9

Iron.—As iron was harder to smelt and work than bronze, it was later that men learned how to use it. As soon as it was appreciated that iron was harder and cut better than bronze, men preferred it in the manufacture of arms. In Homer's time iron is still a precious metal reserved for swords, bronze being retained for other purposes. It is for this reason that many tombs contain confused remains of utensils of bronze and weapons of iron.

Iron Weapons.—These arms are axes, swords, daggers, and bucklers. They are ordinarily found by the side of a skeleton in a coffin of stone or wood, for warriors had their arms buried with them. But they are found also scattered on ancient battle-fields or lost at the bottom of a marsh which later became a turf-pit. There were found in a turf-pit in Schleswig in one day 100 swords, 500 lances, 30 axes, 460 daggers, 80 knives, 40 stilettos—and all of iron. Not far from there in the bed of an ancient lake was discovered a great boat 66 feet long, fully equipped with axes, swords, lances, and knives.

It is impossible to enumerate the iron implements thus found. They have not been so well preserved as the bronze, as iron is rapidly eaten away by rust. At the first glance, therefore, they appear the older, but in reality are more recent.

Epoch of the Iron Age.—The inhabitants of northern Europe knew iron before the coming of the Romans, the first century before Christ. In an old cemetery near the salt mines of Hallstadt in Austria they have opened 980 tombs filled with instruments of iron and bronze without finding a single piece of Roman money. But the Iron Age continued under the Romans. Almost always iron objects are found accompanied by ornaments of gold and silver, by Roman pottery, funeral urns, inscriptions, and Roman coins bearing the effigy of the emperor. The warriors whom we find lying near their sword and their buckler lived for the most part in a period quite close to ours, many under the Merovingians, some even at the time of Charlemagne. The Iron Age is no longer a prehistoric age.