Page 31 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1808 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

beauty, out of flax in Egypt, wool in Mesopotamia and be poured into molds.As the deforestation of central and
Peru, silk in China, and cotton in India and the Americas. southern China proceeded, iron makers learned to heat
Potters made pots for storage and cooking. Smiths their furnaces with coal. By the late first millennium CE,
learned to smelt metals from ores, first copper and later China was mass-producing iron tools, weapons, and
bronze, an alloy of copper and arsenic or tin. Wheeled household objects such as pots, pans, knives, and bells.
carts were first used in Anatolia (now Turkey) and In the Middle East, meanwhile, blacksmiths learned to
Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium, and spread from make “damascene” blades (after Damascus in Syria) by
there to the rest of Eurasia. repeatedly heating a strip of iron in burning charcoal,
hammering it thin and folding it over, until the iron
Iron and Horses turned to steel, becoming hard, sharp, and flexible. Such
(1500 BCE–1500 CE) a process was extremely time-consuming and was used
The first civilizations were very conservative, yet they only for very costly swords.
could not prevent technological changes and the disrup- Horses were first tamed in the third millennium BCE,
tions they caused. Among the many innovations that but were of limited use until carpenters began building
spread throughout the Eastern Hemisphere in the second chariots with spoked wheels, pulled by two horses and
millennium BCE, we can single out the two that had carrying two men, one to drive the horses and the other
momentous consequences: the utilization of iron and the armed with a bow and arrows. Charioteers from the
domestication of horses. grasslands to the north invaded the agrarian civilizations
Iron, first smelted in Anatolia around 1500 BCE, of the Middle East, India, and China, causing great havoc
required much more labor and fuel to make than bronze, between 1700 and 1300 BCE. Chariots in turn were
but unlike copper and tin, its ores were found almost made obsolete around 1200 BCE when nomadic herds-
everywhere. Once blacksmiths learned to temper iron by men learned how to shoot arrows while riding a horse.
repeated heating and quenching in water, it became hard After about 1500 BCE, the agrarian states added cavalry
enough to cut bronze.The low cost of iron made it pos- and iron weapons to their infantry armies and established
sible to produce axes and saws for farmers and carpen- large empires of conquest. The Assyrians, Persians, and
ters and knives and pots for household use. Romans in turn dominated Southwest Asia and the
Iron spread to the Middle East around 1000 BCE, and Mediterranean, while the Qin and Han dynasties con-
from there to Africa and India. Iron tools gave a tremen- trolled China. These empires, extending over thousands
dous advantage to those peoples who used them at the of miles, were held together by efficient road networks
expense of nature and of people with less-developed tech- and postal services.The Romans were especially gifted at
nologies. Bantu-speaking people from the Nigeria- civil engineering; many of their roads, buildings, and
Cameroon region cleared wooded areas of central and aqueducts are still standing. However, nomadic herds-
southern Africa for agriculture and gradually pushed ear- men from the grasslands of Asia continued to increase in
lier inhabitants such as the Pygmies and San into forests numbers and in military might, and periodically attacked
and deserts not suitable for agriculture. In India, people the agrarian civilizations. For two thousand years, the his-
with axes spread into the Ganges valley and the Deccan tory of Eurasia consisted in large part of the struggle
plateau, turning forests into farmlands. between agrarian empires and nomadic herdsmen. For
The Chinese created the most advanced iron industry. centuries after they were domesticated, horses could not
Not only did they make iron by hammering and tem- be used in agriculture because the throat-and girth har-
pering, like the peoples of Eurasia and Africa, they also ness caused them to choke and rear up if they had to pull
invented bellows pumped by waterwheels that heated the a heavy load.The horse collar, which placed the load on
furnace to the point at which the iron melted and could their shoulders rather than their throats, first appeared in