The beginnings of iron metallurgy on an industrial scale can be fixed at a period between 1200 and 1000 BCE, in the mountains of Armenia. From there the secret of smelting spread across the Near East, the Mediterranean, and central Europe, although, as I have noted, iron, whether of meteoric origin or from superficial deposits, was known in the third millennium in Mesopotamia, in Asia Minor, and probably also in Egypt (Forbes, 1950, p. 417; Eliade, 1978, pp. 23ff., 201ff.).
Mines: the Womb of Mother Earth
The discovery of furnaces had important religious consequences. Besides the celestial sacredness of the sky, immanent in meteorites, there was now the telluric sacredness of the earth, in which mines and ore share. Metals "grow" in the bosom of the earth. Caves and mines are assimilated to the womb of Mother Earth. The ores extracted from mines are in some sense "embryos." They grow slowly, as if obeying a temporal rhythm different from that of vegetable and animal organisms; nevertheless, they do grow, they "ripen" in the telluric darkness. Hence, their extraction from Mother Earth is an operation performed prematurely. If they had been given the time to develop (that is, if they were to come to term in geological time), ores would become ripe, "perfect" metals.
This is a free page. This page contains 192 words. This
article contains 2,648 words (approx. 9 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Metals and Metallurgy Access Pass.
