and Egyptians.74 According to Theodore Wertime, the first deliberately smelted iron seems to have been produced when bronze products had reached perfection and where copper, lead and iron ores were in abundance: northern Anatolia along the shores of the Black Sea.75 In other words, the success of bronze, the rarity of tin and the abundance of iron induced the Hittites to experiment. The technique appears to have been a closely-guarded secret for several hundred years, with the craftsmen keeping the vital details within their families and charging a very high price for their wares. To begin with it was looked upon as a truly precious metal, more valuable than gold according to ancient records; only ornaments were made of it and the secrets of iron were probably not known outside the Hittite sphere of influence before 1400 BC.76 (It is likely that the iron dagger found in King Tutankhamun's tomb had been made under Hittite supervision.) By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, the Hittite confederation had encountered troubled times and, by 1200 BC, the cat was out of the bag, and full knowledge of iron-making spread to other parts of Asia.77 The Iron Age truly dates from when the metal ceased to be precious.78 Besides its other attractions, iron smelting was less complicated than copper production. Provided there were bellows sufficiently strong to provide a current of air, a single-tier furnace was enough, as compared with the elaborate two-tier, kiln-type furnace which was needed for copper ore to be reduced in crucibles. Furnaces of quite simple design were used during the first thousand years of iron smelting-therefore, once the secret was out, almost anyone could make iron, though naturally smelting tended to be conducted where the ores could easily be mined and where charcoal was readily available. Like tin, iron differs from copper and gold in never being found free in nature, except as the very rare meteorites that fall to earth. Like copper, none of its ores were found in the great river valleys, but in many nearby areas they were to be found in abundance. The most important mining and smelting enterprises of the later years of the second millennium were established in the neighbourhood of the Taurus and Caucasian mountains, and in Armenia. The crucial process in iron production-carburisation, by which iron is converted into steel-was probably developed in the two centuries after 1200 BC on the coastal areas of the eastern Mediterranean. To carburise iron, it is heated 'in intimate contact' with charcoal for a long period, a discovery that must have been accidental (uncarburised iron is not as strong as bronze).79 Mount Adir in north Israel is one site of early carburised iron, Taanach and Hazorea in Palestine are others.80 In the Odyssey , Homer shows some awareness that the quenching of carburised iron also enhances its hardness. Given its versatility, hardness, and low cost, one might have thought that the new metal would be rapidly adopted. Bowl-shaped ingots were certainly being traded in the late Bronze Age.81 Nevertheless, the earliest collection of iron tools that has been found in Egypt dates only from about 700 BC, a millennium and a half after its use by the Hittites.82 In Works and Days , Hesiod refers to the men of his own era as a 'race of iron'.83 Metallurgy was quite sophisticated from early on. Welding, nails and rivets were early inventions, in use from 3000 BC. Gold plating began as early as the third millennium, soon followed by the lost-wax technique, for making bronze sculptures.84 In terms of ideas, three uses to which metals were put seem to have been most profound. These were the dagger, as was mentioned earlier, the mirror, and coins. Mirrors were particularly popular among the Chinese, and the Romans excelled at making them, finding that an alloy of 23-28 per cent tin, 5-7 per cent lead, and the rest copper, served best. Reflections were later considered to be linked to man's soul.85 Money does not occur in nature, says the historian Jack Weatherford. Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French writer, put it another way: 'I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries.' The first forms of money were commodity money, ranging from salt to tobacco, coconuts to rice, reindeer to buffaloes. The English word 'salary' derives from the Latin salarius , meaning 'of salt'. (Roman soldiers were perhaps paid in salt, to flavour their otherwise bland food.86) The as , a Roman coin, represented the value of one hundredth of a cow. The English word 'cattle' is derived
from the same Latin root as the word 'capital'. As early as the third millennium BC, however, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia began using ingots of precious metals in exchange for goods. The ingots, of gold or silver and of uniform weight, were called minas or shekels or talents .87 The transition from proto-money to coins proper took place in Lydia, in what is now Turkey, some time between 640 and 630 BC. The very first coins were made of electrum, a naturally-occurring mixture of gold and silver, and they were about the size of a thumb nail, and almost as thick as a thumb, like a small ingot. They were stamped with a lion's head, to ensure their authenticity, and the stamping had the effect of flattening them, making them more like the coins that we use today.88 Whether the first coins were used exactly as we use money now is open to doubt. The first coins would have been so valuable they could never have been anything like 'change'. The main breakthrough, to commodification, probably came with the introduction of bimetallic coinages, gold and silver and/or copper. This may have been introduced in the third or second centuries BC, when they were used to pay people in Greece who had been selected for political office by ballot (see Chapter 6). But the eventual change in life that the invention of money brought about was momentous. It was in a Lydian city, Sardis, that the first retail market was introduced, when anyone could come to the market and sell, for money, whatever they had. In the archaeological record the oldest traded material is obsidian, a very fine, jet-black and shiny volcanic glass, which was mined at a single source in southern Turkey but was found all over the Middle East, where its transparent, reflective, super-cutting properties made it magical and much sought after.89 But all sorts of new activities were sparked by the invention of money. At Sardis, for instance, the first known brothels were built, and gambling was also born.90 More fundamentally, the advent of money enabled people to break out from their kin group. Money became the link between people, creating a nexus that had not been possible under the barter system. In the same way, money weakened traditional ties and that, in time, had profound political implications. Work and human labour became a commodity, with a coin-related value attached, and therefore time too could be measured in the same way. In Greece, near to Lydia, and therefore quickly influenced by this new development, money encouraged the democratisation of politics. Under Solon, the old privileges were abolished and eligibility for public office became based on (landed) wealth.91 Democracy arose in cities with market economies and strong currencies. Furthermore, the wealth generated by such commerce allowed for greater leisure time, out of which the Greek elite built its pre-eminence in philosophy, sport, the arts, in politics itself. Counting had existed before money, but the emergence of the market, and a money economy, encouraged rational and logical thinking, in particular the Greek advances in mathematics that we shall be exploring in a later chapter. The German economic historian Georg Simmel observed in his book The Philosophy of Money , 'the idea that life is essentially based on intellect, and that intellect is accepted in practical life as the most valuable of our mental energies, goes hand in hand with the growth of a money economy'.92 He added, 'those professional classes whose productivity lies outside the economy proper have emerged only in the money economy-those concerned with specific intellectual activity such as teachers and literary people, artists, physicians, scholars and state officials'. This is overstating the case somewhat (teachers and doctors existed before money), but the point has validity. Money also vastly promoted international trade. This, more than anything, helped the spread of ideas around the globe. After Sardis, the great urban centres of the world were as likely to be market towns as places of worship, or the homes of kings.