Buchholz, _Homer. Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 335.
This was probably first reached in Mesopotamia. Some Chaldean graves have been found to contain immense quantities of iron, of the best quality, and wrought with the finest skill.[358] One, opened by Place at Khorsabad, was a veritable magazine of chains and implements, still recognisable, though of course partly devoured by rust. They dated from about the eighth century B.C.; but the metal had been in some degree available for ages previously. In Egypt, although _men_ (iron) may have been known under the early Memphite dynasties, the nature of the hieroglyph employed to denote it proves that copper had the precedence. Utensils of iron were enumerated among the spoils of Thothmes III., in the seventeenth century, B.C.;[359] _barzel_ has a place in the Books of Moses, and was wrought at Tyre in the days of king Hiram, and no doubt indefinitely earlier. The Latin _ferrum_, indeed (equivalent to the Semitic _barezum_) testifies, it is held, to the Phœnician introduction of the metal to Italy in the twelfth century, B.C.[360]
Perrot et Chipiez, _Hist. de l’Art dans l’Antiquité_, t. ii. p. 720.
Lepsius, _Les Métaux dans les Inscriptions Égyptiennes_, p. _missing page_ See this transcriber note.
Its still earlier diffusion through Greece is only, then, what might have been expected: and the complete acquaintance with it manifested in the Homeric poems conveys, in itself, no presumption of lateness in their origin. But there are archæological difficulties. Prehistoric iron is unaccountably scarce in the neighbourhood of the Ægean. True, it is of a perishable nature; but where not even a ferruginous stain survives, it is difficult to believe that objects made out of iron once existed. Until lately, iron was believed to be entirely absent from the ruins both at Hissarlik and Mycenæ, as well as from those of Orchomenos and Tiryns. But in 1890, Dr. Schliemann, in clearing the foundations of a building on the Trojan Pergamus, came upon two lumps of the missing substance; and some finger-rings composed of it are among the trophies of the recent excavations carried on in the lower city of Mycenæ, under the auspices of the Greek Archæological Society.[361] But the metal was then evidently very rare, although the ‘bee-hive tombs,’ where it was discovered, belong to a later stage of Mycenæan history than the ‘shaft-graves’ of the citadel. Still, the gap previously supposed to divide, at this point, the Homeric from the Mycenæan world, has to a certain extent been bridged; and other discrepancies may, in like manner, be qualified, if not removed, by further research.