22; Bjorkman, 1973, pp. 114ff.). For a long period the Egyptians too knew only meteoric iron, and the same is true of the Hittites: a text of the fourteenth century BCE states that the Hittite kings used "the black iron of the sky" (Rickard, 1932, vol. 1, p. 149). Iron, therefore, was scarce, and its use was principally ritual.
The Discovery of Smelting
It required the discovery of the smelting of ores to inaugurate a new stage in the history of mankind. Unlike the production of copper or bronze, the metallurgy of iron very soon became industrial. Once the secret of smelting magnetite and hematite was discovered, there was no longer any difficulty in obtaining large quantities of iron, for deposits were very rich and easy to exploit. But the handling of telluric ores differed from that of meteoric iron, as it did also from the smelting of copper and bronze. It was not until after the discovery of furnaces, and particularly after perfecting the technique for "hardening" metal brought to the point of white heat, that iron achieved its preeminent position. It was the metallurgy of terrestrial iron that made this metal fit for everyday use.
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