Sunday, January 30, 2011

Timeline: The Iron Age

The Iron Age is a period that historians assign to human civilization following the development of iron, or more likely, low-carbon steel.  Erratic iron, found in meteorites, has been known since prehistory, but it was never a reliable resource to be harnessed, and its purity could vary considerably.  Each civilization enters its own Iron Age at its own pace, depending on local technology and resources.  This period began in Earth's history around 1200 BCE, when the supply of bronze was interrupted by warfare in Asia Minor.  Since ancient civilizations depended upon bronze for armies and conquest, a replacement metal was needed, and urgently.  It was the Hittites, in modern day Turkey, who first discovered iron mixed with carbon could be a durable metal much harder than bronze.

Even though we think of the Ancient Greeks as being a Bronze Age society, we're probably thinking of the proto-Greek culture called Mycenae; it was the Mycenaeans who probably sacked Knossos and destroyed the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans who similarly sacked Troy in about 1250 BCE.  Whether it was Mycenae, too, that disrupted trade and led the Hittites to seek a replacement for their missing bronze supply, the world will never know.  Few records survive from a time that historians call the Bronze Age Collapse, but we do know that nation-states from Syria to Egypt were under assault.  The Greeks of later years, the years of Homer, Democritus, Herodotus, and the Pelopennesian War, certainly would have known of iron.

The Iron Age also saw the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (invaded by the Babylonians), the decline of Egypt (invaded by Persia), and the demolition of the Phoenicians (invaded by Rome, who then sowed the earth with salt).  The Greeks and the Romans would each rise and fall in turn, giving to the West some of our most enduring names:  Pericles, Socrates, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Plato, Thucydides, Livy, Cicero, Cato, Pliny the Elder, and Ovid.  Battles would be fought in Marathon, Thermopylae, and Carthage.  Caesar would cast the die and cross the Rubicon with his army.  Philip of Macedon's favorite son, Alexander, would stretch his hand out east to take all Asia for himself.

The Iron Age was a busy time.  We've only just begun.
 
YearEvent
105,618Pharaoh Alvatheu takes a bride. Abbadar exodus from Sathad.
105,650The Abbadar settle at Matta.
105,704Trial of Dytoclanes.
105,730The Sathad warlord Jlando takes the tin mines of Joranne.
105,732Celestrones re-takes the island of Joranne.
105,733Celestrones begins his five-year conquest of the mainland.
105,739The Great Temple of Pharo is sacked. Celestrones builds the Courthouse.
105,743Celestrones prepares his eastern campaign.
105,748War between Zefari and Celestrian Empires. General Drurich attacks Haesonian colony of Veladis.
105,988Mazani raiders sack Usta.
106,072The Abbadar found a colony in Boladine.
106,129Founding of the Aquiline Republic in the Great Valley.
106,170The Kallko emerge from the caverns near Skeltern.
106,250Chamandra ascends to the afterlife.

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