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The importance of metal and metalworking technologies to the development of complex urban societies is difficult to estimate in any objective manner. That said, there is no question that metal, particularly iron, was an integral part of the material culture of almost all complex and many other societies in antiquity. This fact is illustrated by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, who acknowledged and exploited the cultural importance of metals by using them as metaphors in his view of the human condition. In Works and Days, written in the early first millennium BCE, Hesiod described the ages of gods and men from the original paramount Age of Gold down through the Age of Silver and the Age of Bronze to the dark and dangerous Age of Iron of Hesiod's own time. Since before Hesiod's time the working of iron and the use of goods produced from iron has been a central element of the technology of many cultures and by extension of those cultures themselves.

In the ancient world perhaps no region experienced more profound changes during the period of the introduction of iron than the Near East. It is in this region that culture change and the genesis of large scale iron working appear to be the most closely linked. That is not to say that the emergence of iron working caused major socioeconomic or other shifts in the cultures of Early Iron Age in the Near East. At some level, however, culture change precipitated the emergence of the widespread use of iron for the production of utilitarian goods in the centuries following c. 1200 BC (McNutt 1990; Muhly 1992; Waldbaum 1980). These changes were ultimately responsible for the emergence of large-scale iron working. By the same token, large-scale iron working caused changes in the economics, politics and perhaps the ideology of Near Eastern cultures after c. 1200 BC.

The beginning of large-scale iron working in the Levant is linked to economic shifts which occurred as a consequence of cultural changes in the period following ca. 1200 BCE, but it cannot be solely attributed to economic upheaval. While it is important to consider such factors as supply and demand, cost of production, diffusion of metalworking knowledge and advances in metallurgical processes via experimentation and innovation, these factors alone cannot adequately explain the emergence of iron as the material of choice for utilitarian goods. There were apparently more factors at work than those which could reasonably be attributed to the economic sphere of culture. Furthermore, no single ethnic group or culture was responsible for the emergence of large-scale iron working in the Levant, even though some groups may have been able to produce more and better iron products than others at certain times in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. . .

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