THE BRONZE AGE.
Although many implements of pure copper have been exhumed both in America and the Old World, that metal is too soft in its pure state ever to have been of much value as a material furnishing a cutting edge, and hence it added little to man's power over nature. When, however, copper is fused in au alloy with tin, forming bronze, or with zinc, forming brass, the product acquires a very firm texture and is well adapted for tools and weapons. Both these alloys were known in the Orient in the dawn of history, but bronze was that which came most extensively into use.
The Egyptians were well acquainted with the use of bronze at a period coeval with their earliest monuments. They manufactured it into weap ons of war and tools for various trades, and succeeded in devising processes to give it exceeding hardness. Their principal source for copper was among the mountains of the peninsula of Sinai, and the mines of Wady Magarali in that locality are thought to have been worked as early as the second dynasty, which was more than three thousand years before the Christian era. Where they obtained their tin has not yet been ascer tained.
The Assyrians and Babylonians of the earliest historic ages were also familiar with bronze, and it is probable that from them the Egyptians derived their knowledge of it through the Semitic merchants.
This is the remotest date to which we can trace the knowledge of the alloy. If we interrogate through linguistic analysis the condition of the Proto-Aryans, we find them wholly in the Stone Age at the time of their separation into European and Asiatic Aryans. They were, indeed, acquainted with native copper, and probably occasionally hammered it into ornaments or ceremonial weapons, as did the Indians around Lake Superior; but they were equally ignorant of smelting or alloying it. The terms for all the paraphernalia of the smithery and all working in metals are quite different in the great groups of Aryan languages, proving that these arts were developed independently after their up into vari ous nations (Schrader).
The Greeks in the days of the Homeric poems were already skilled workers in bronze, and so doubtless were the Trojans, although Schlie mann fomul the oldest remains on the hill at Ilissarlik to be entirely of the Stone Age. The Greeks did not claim to have discovered the alloy,
but acknowledged to have received it from those mysterious ancient nations of considerable culture in Asia Minor, the Lydians and Phryg ians. They could not assign a date to its introduction, but agreed that it was very remote. In Italy also, among the Etruscans, it was, at an indefinitely ancient date, the common material for cutting instruments.
From Greece and Italy the use of bronze extended northward along the great trading-lines. The oldest specimens in the remains of the Swiss lake-dwellings have been assigned by some an antiq uity of three thousand years before the Christian era, although generally not more than about two thousand are allowed for the commencement of the Bronze Age north of the Alps. In that period the extension of even such a useful art was slow, and it is quite consistent with this date that Mr. Evans does not consider the Bronze Age to have begun in Great Britain much anterior to 1400 B. c. The knowledge of the alloy may have come through the Carthaginians, who about that time began their trading voyages to the southern coast of England, the chief merchandise they were after being the tin of Cornwall, which they employed in the manufacture of bronze.
In America the Bronze Age was well represented in Mexico and Peru. The natives of both these countries were well aware of the hard alloy resulting from the admixture of copper and tin, and employed it largely for tools and weapons. In Mexico copper is abundant, and tin was obtained from the mines in the province of Tlachco, where that metal was so plentiful that it was employed as a circulating medium. Along the coast of Peru bronze agricultural implements are found in vast num bers, and have for generations been collected and sold to dealers in old metal " by the ton " (Squier). The alloy was run into thin but stiff plates, and the instruments cut from these and ground to a sharp edge. Bronze swords, daggers, knives, and lances are seen in collections from these localities. (See BRONZE AGE and illus. Vol. II.)