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Early iron metallurgy in Anatolia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Ünsal Yalçın
Ünsal Yalçın
Affiliation:
Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, Bochum
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Extract

The beginning of the Iron Age is generally dated to the last quarter of the second millennium BC in Anatolia and the Near East. The development of iron metallurgy allowed many tools and weapons to be produced in this period. The earliest iron finds, which are not more than a dozen, occur in the third millennium BC in Anatolia (Waldbaum 1980 discusses these early finds). Considering that pure iron occurs rarely in nature, the most important question is: what were these objects made of? Preliminary analyses of a few Bronze Age finds show that some of them contain nickel. Because of this it is generally accepted and frequently cited that these finds were made of meteoric iron.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anatolian Studies , Volume 49 , December 1999 , pp. 177 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute at Ankara 1999

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