The Hittites ruled vast tracts of the Ancient Near East for over four hundred years (roughly 1650 BC - 1200 BC). Their army was feared far and wide. Their mighty infantry and thundering chariots were the dread of the battlefield. At times they could muster as many as fifty thousand men. They won many, many battles for their king and their gods. What was the secret of their success? Well, popular conception has it that the Hittites possessed an extra edge over their rivals... an edge of iron.
"Hold on...iron? Iron in the Bronze Age?"
Well, that's how the story goes: the Hittites were ahead of their time and bore 'superior' iron weapons. The Hittites' super-hard iron swords could chop through the soft-as-butter bronze swords of the Egyptians and Assyrians. They were effectively 'Bronze Age lightsabers', making the Hittites nigh-on invincible on the battlefield.
Okay, this is a bit silly, but I couldn't resist...
Wait a minute... invincible? The Hittites were good, but not that good. They won many battles and wars but they lost several too. And this notion that having iron weapons meant instant superiority over bronze-armoured foes doesn't quite sound right. Metallurgy isn't as black and white as that - good bronze is actually harder than many grades of iron. But back to the original question: did the Hittites have iron weapons or not? Oh, if only it was a yes or no answer :-) Steel yourself for what follows (including a few more terrible puns)...
The irony of the Iron Age
Firstly, we must dispense with the perception that the Bronze Age was a time when everyone was using bronze for everything because iron hadn't been discovered yet, and that on the day someone did discover it, everyone threw down their bronze tools and took up the superior iron ones instead. Indeed, while our modern classification of the Bronze Age (3300 BC - 1200 BC) and the Iron Age (1200 BC - 500 BC) as two distinct and contiguous epochs serves as a tidy way to organise history, it is a huge simplification. In fact, iron was ‘known’ to the world all throughout the Bronze Age - i.e. before, during and after the time of the Hittites - a fact underpinned by plenty of epigraphic evidence. For example, Prof. Klaas Veenhof's translations of Assyrian merchant texts from 1800 BC describe the existence of an ancient iron trade ongoing alongside that of copper and tin (the ingredients for bronze). Prof. Veenhof's work also allows us to infer that iron was rare - extremely so and, as a result, hugely expensive. Indeed, evidence suggests that iron commanded a price upwards of forty times that of silver!
The Iron of Heaven
Why was iron so expensive? Well, the only real source of pure iron was meteorites (well, almost-pure iron - meteorites are commonly composed of iron-nickel). To the Bronze Age kings, this was known as 'Iron of Heaven' because it fell from the skies in streaks of light. It must have seemed magical to the ancients - because of the way it descended from the skies and for its magnetic properties.
Bronze Age kings preferred their thrones to be decorated with this heavenly iron. Indeed, any objects crafted from this divine material were highly sought-after - as evidenced by this letter from the Hittite King Hattusilis III r. 1267 BC - 1237 BC (our hero Hattu in Empires of Bronze) in response to a plea from an Assyrian King seeking an iron gift:
"In the matter of the good iron about which you wrote, good iron is not at present available in my storehouse in Kizzuwadna. I have already told you that this is a bad time for producing iron. They will be producing good iron, but they won't have finished yet. I shall send it to you when they have finished. At present I am sending you an iron dagger-blade."
An interesting exchange, especially the part about iron daggers. From this we know that the blacksmiths of the Bronze Age - individuals revered and respected like high priests for their skills in this strange craft - were capable of working pure iron to fashion weapons. But given the scarcity of meteorites, a Bronze Age king would have been lucky to possess just a few such weapons - not quite enough to arm the fifty thousand Hittite soldiers! Also, as mentioned above, iron weapons are not automatically 'superior' to bronze ones. They can be, if produced well, but they can just as easily be softer than bronze or too brittle to use in combat - not at all the Bronze Age lightsabers of myth.
How can iron be rare? It's everywhere!
But hold on, how can iron be rare? Yes, meteorites are rare, but iron comes in another far more abundant form - ore. Iron ore is everywhere. Roughly 35% of the earth's mass is iron. You can walk through any field or dig any garden and find chunks of iron ore or ironstone. Many of our hills and mountains are lined with ore too.
And it was the same back in the Bronze Age: 99.99% of the Earth's surface iron was held captive inside rocky ore. Bronze Age texts don't use the word 'ore', but they sometimes talk of a 'White Iron' - looking at the photo, below, I can't help but wonder if this was their name for ore?
So why didn't the Hitittes use ore to furnish their armies with iron weapons and armour? Well, they very probaby did work or at least experiment with ore. Of the many tablets found in excavations of Hittite sites, a number detail the whereabouts of ore-rich hills near their cities, so they clearly considered it of value. But working with ore would have been tricky. The problem with ore is separating the pure iron from the rock and minerals. To extract the iron, it needs to be smelted out. This involves heating up the ore until the metal softens and the chemical compounds around it begin to break apart. So how might the Bronze Age blacksmiths have achieved this?
The charcoal bloomery
The dominant metallurgical device of the Bronze Age was the charcoal fire pit, or 'bloomery'. This consisted of a cupola-shaped pit, filled with charcoal and wood. Pits such as these were more than adequate for achieving temperatures high enough to fully smelt copper and tin - the components of bronze. But to smelt iron? Not so easy. A bloomery could only reach temperatures high enough to turn iron ore into 'bloom' - a porous, spongey chunk of slag (the waste matter of stone and other impurities) and iron. A skilful Bronze Age smith might well have worked out that by repeatedly reheating this bloom to gradually melt away the slag, and laboriously hammering the product in-between heatings in order to drive out the impurities, a close-to-pure iron known as 'wrought iron' could result - broadly comparable with bronze in terms of hardness, but again, not the 'lightsabers' of legend.
The melting points of metals vs the hardness of the resulting metal. Note the position of tin & copper vs iron. While a bloomery can produce a bubbling crucible of liquid bronze, an additional 400 degrees Celsius is needed to liquidise iron.
The starting point for producing higher quality iron, stronger than bronze, is to fully smelt the iron from the ore. To do this, much more heat is required...
The blast furnace
The 'blast' in 'blast furnace' refers to the combustion air being 'forced' or supplied above atmospheric pressure. At the dawn of iron-working, the earliest of these blast furnaces would have been unrecognisable compared to the modern-day behemoths, although the principles would have been the same: a blast furnace would have utilised bellows and chimneys to achieve much higher temperatures than charcoal bloomeries - hot enough to truly smelt iron and release it from ore.
Scholars are extremely doubtful that furnace technology was discovered during the time of the Hittites. The argument goes that if the secret of ore-smelting had been 'cracked' by the Hittites, why is there no artefactual evidence? No Bronze-Age era smelting furnace has been found in the ancient Near East (the oldest surviving iron-smelting furnace dates from around 500 BC and was found in the Austrian Alps) and there is an absence even of the indelible, tell-tale environmental markers which one would expect to find nearby any long-lost blast complex - such as slag heaps. But as the saying goes: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Why would the Hittites have taken the trouble to catalogue the location of the ore-rich hills near their cities if ore was not of some interest to them? And let's glance again at the ancient letter from the Hittite king:
"In the matter of the good iron about which you wrote, good iron is not at present available in my storehouse in Kizzuwadna. I have already told you that this is a bad time for producing iron. They will be producing good iron, but they won't have finished yet. I shall send it to you when they have finished. At present I am sending you an iron dagger-blade."
What was this 'Good Iron'? It sounds like it was of a higher standard than the interim-offered dagger blade, but in what respects? Well here's the theory: could this 'Good Iron' have been the earliest outputs of Iron Age technological breakthroughs? Ultra-pure iron properly smelted from plentiful ore? Worked to be harder than bronze yet not brittle? The very first instances of steel production, even?
So... Bronze Age lightsabers?
So can we answer the original question about the Hittites - did they have these 'Bronze Age lightsabers' or not? There is only one thing we can say with any certainty: the Hittites certainly never had an army equipped throughout with iron weapons that were of some magical strength. But the likelihood is that:
their blacksmiths painstakingly produced a very small amount of pure iron weapons from meteorites which were reserved for kings or men in high stations, but possibly only as decorative items.
And there is a possibility that:
they might just have unlocked the furnace technology required to fully smelt iron from ore, albeit most likely on a small and exploratory scale. They may even have experimented with hardening techniques such as quenching, carburisation and strip-welding - early steps on the road to the manufacturing of super-hard steel.
Even if they did achieve some form of proto-steel, it all happened too late to equip their regiments against the storm that was to come: a storm that blew the Hittite Empire and many other great powers into the dusts of history in a calamitous period known as the Bronze Age Collapse.
From the ashes - post 1200 BC - new civilisations gradually arose and iron-working with them. Were the Hittites responsible for triggering this shift before their demise? Well, just as many believe that the Renaissance was catalysed by the westwards flight of scholars from Constantinople (when they realised it was doomed to fall to the Ottoman Turks) in 1453, perhaps when the Hittite blacksmiths fled their old Anatolian cities during the death throes of the Bronze Age, they may just have taken the recently-discovered secrets of their craft with them into the wider world...
Hope you enjoyed the read! Let me know what you think - leave a comment below or get in touch, I'd be delighted to hear from you. And if you fancy a good read set in the Bronze Age, why not grab a copy of Empires of Bronze: Son of Ishtar?
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