Bronze vs iron in ancient arms and armor.

[Old_Scratch]

I was under the impression that bronze was superior to non-carbonized iron in weapons and especially armor. The Roman legionaries used bronze helmets throughout the republic and to a more limited degree until maybe the 3rd century AD. They used it later as well, but that was more for nostalgic reasons than practicality. Iron helmets were available, but I think that this shows that bronze makes better armor vs the iron they had available at the time.

The only advantage I can find for early iron was widespread availability. Copper, and especially tin from what I gather was more difficult to obtain.

So, is bronze better than pre-steel iron for weapons and armor? If so, why does its use seem to extend for a very long time in armor, but is almost entirely replaced by iron in swords and spear points? Could it not be made as sharp or was there a weight issue or something?

[CobraStallone]

I once read somewhere than in fact early iron weapons and armor were of inferiror quality than bronze ones, also they rusted unlike bronze so I suppose that indeed that classical civilizations started using them because they ran out of copper or tin. Could be other reasons though, perhaps iron is easier to handle and make, so they would recur to it when it came to making vast amounts of arms and armor, maybe it was just cheaper. Who knows really? And about the use in armor or weapons I guess I would rather have a rusty sword than a rusted armor.

[hellheaven1987]

Bronze is harder than Iron, problem solves.

[Bovril]

The problem with badly made Iron is that it is very brittle. So despite the fact it is always harder than bronze, it will also shatter of snap very easily. Hardness is obviously very desireable in weapons in order to achieve piercing and cutting effectiveness. However, in armor, one wants absorbtion. To give a modern example, the hardness of Kevlar is pretty low, but its absorbs shock excellently. Bronze is more flexible than iron. It will dent to absorb shock rather than simply break absorbing some shock, but allowing the blow through.
On the point of availability of tin, it depends where and when, but in the first few centuries BC in southern Europe you're right it was harder to come by than Iron.

[Ringeck]

Gaaugrgh....have...to...answer...so...many...uninformed....responses....

The answer is: yes and no

The earliest wrought iron is a quite soft, untempered and unqueched affair. The carbon content depends on source - entirely carbon-free iron is very unusual from history because the sources typically had at least some carbon in it...as well as lots and lots of impurities. However, steel - intentionally carburized iron that also goes through heat treatment - is another thing entirely.

Here is a short article:
http://www.archaeometry.dk/Jern/Cram...Iron%20Age.pdf

Read it.

The article explains the use of iron/steel/bronze in weapons. Steel is superior to bronze when it comes to holding an edge in the long run. When it comes to armour, bronze is quite decent for a number of reasons. It might not be superior to the irons and steels used in, say, helmets, but it is not inferior, either - nobody is going to cut through your bronze helmet with his steel sword (indeed, he would rather not hit it at all, as it will wreck his edge), same applies for your iron helmet. Bronze can be cast into interesting shapes and is easier to work for decorative purposes. You cannot take out your shaping tools and reshape iron to the same level as you can bronzes. Cold working iron will, if you do it too much, severely weaken it.

Iron has often been describes as "the democratic metal". Tin bronzes - real "bronze", other copper alloys tend to have other names - requires at least two metal components, both of which are rarer than iron and sometimes geographically situated in remote places - thus far more expensive.

In the long run, bronze falls out of regular use for armour. Iron and steel can do the same job cheaper and in some cases better (depending on what you want your armour to do). Copper alloy details abound, though.

Overall use of tin bronze drops sharply from the 2nd century AD from a complete dominance for the last 1000 years or so, as the romans start to use more latten (and some brass) alloys. The medieval era sees tin bronze peak a bit again because it is good in church bells, as well as an increase in the use of brass. From around 1500 tin bronzes become wildly popular as everybody totally flips out over 1) copying roman-era statuary 2) Medieval attempts to make iron and steel cannon are abandoned and everybody goes over to cannon bronze. 3) Churchbell production continues and indeed increases as techniques improve over time. Of course, people start using tin bronzes for other details as well - it was more of it around. This trend then falls back to the high-late medieval division of alloys from around 1700 or so. This is just the ratio of different copper alloys, not copper alloys to iron.

[War&Politics]

Well, some ancient cultures evidently thought of iron as some kind of ancient era super weapon! Just look at this:
Judges 1:19 (King James Version)


19And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.


(Even with the help of god, Judah could not defeat the iron chariots!)

[Old_Scratch]

Interesting article Ringneck, I wasn't aware that carburized iron dated back so far. So, why are there so many examples of bronze helmets if they just provided the same protection as iron ones? I would think that the legionaries of the roman Republic and classical Greek hoplites would just use iron for their helmets, like their weapons.

[Ringeck]

People often imagine that there is an "evolution" in armour and weapons design where things continually get better and better and that in the long run, the entirety of human military history has been like the weapons races seen in the first and second world wars.

This might be applicable on some levels, but often it leads to a dangerous fallacy where the pursuit of this evolution obscures all other factors. The roman army did not, as far as we know, have a Weapons Testing Division where trained metallurgists were performing ballistic and impact tests with a variety of weapons and formulating development plans for future roman equipment development (although I am quite sure some looney historian have proposed the idea at some point). Neither did anyone else, until very, very recently. Even now, other factors get in the way of military doctrine changes. Look how long it took for battleships to be phased out of modern navies.

They were used to copper alloy helmets. They worked. They were likely expensive, but a one-time investment that could be passed down to the next generation or sold to others without the value diminishing all that much. Why change all at once? If nobody was making lots of iron helmets and selling them off, where would you get hold of them? Sometimes and places, copper alloys could be cheap enough.

Eventually, iron ended up dominating. But it took time, as these things always do.

[conon394]

Interesting article Ringneck, I wasn't aware that carburized iron dated back so far. So, why are there so many examples of bronze helmets if they just provided the same protection as iron ones? I would think that the legionaries of the roman Republic and classical Greek hoplites would just use iron for their helmets, like their weapons.

Iron was not necessarily as uncommon for helmets as you think at first.

From A Helmet of the Sixth Century B. C. from Sardis by Greenewalt and Haywood (Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 285)

"Before Roman times, iron helmets are relatively uncommon in the archaeological record of Greece and the Near East (the majority of surviving Greek and Near Eastern helmets are bronze). That uncommonness to some extent probably reflects the instability of iron and neglect by excavators and custodians of its visually unimpressive remains; iron helmets are cited in written documents of Greece and the Near East, and the approximately 20 examples that have been reported were recovered from almost as many sites in Greece, the Near East, and North Africa."

However Iron helmets do seem to have been more common in Asia before the 4th century and they were likely more common in Greece during the 4th century than the record indicates. edit: One more thing the same article also points out that non bronze/non metallic helmets are also likely understated in the record as well - being even more susceptible to decay than iron vs bronze.

edit:

Ringeck - although rapid evolution could happen. I seem to recall PH Byth looked at Corinthian helmets and found a fairly consistent pattern of harder, more brittle, but far lighter helmets between the late 7th century and the early 5th century BC. Add the addition of improved visibility and a raised dome (presumably for a padded cap) and it does appear like a fairly definite effort to change the helmets toward some goal of lighter but as protective. The increasing hardness might also explanation the relative lack of iron helmets - until the 4th century there may simply not have been enough skill craftsmen to produce a similar helmet with regularity.

Anyway I think you are spot on in general there is a tendency to ignore other factors that might drive the choice of Armour or Weapons rather than just pure better (even if that is/was correctly understood).

Weapons Testing Division where trained metallurgists were performing ballistic and impact tests with a variety of weapons and formulating development plans for future roman equipment development (although I am quite sure some looney historian have proposed the idea at some point). Neither did anyone else, until very, very recently.

Although it would be interesting to have say the full records from the arsenal at Hellenistic Rhodes to know what they did when not playing with the repeating catapult.

[Ringeck]

Arne Jouttijärvii has an excellent archaeometry site...in danish:
http://www.archaeometry.dk/

However, he also has some english article links on the web:

http://www.archaeometry.dk/papers.htm

...not all of these are all that scientific, though - the Evian Blackthorn article is...something else. I've seen it before, it is part of the big SCA combat archer debate and I strongly suspect the author of having reached his conclusion before he wrote his article. One should not speak ill of the dead, but one can still criticize their work, I hope.

Unless excavators are really careless (which, sadly, many of them are) the corrosion products of iron and steel can also be easily identified and excavated even if there is no real iron core left in iron artifacts. This is, in fact, pretty common. Scandinavian archaeologists, at least, have been well aware of this for a long time.

There are a great many historical sites and places where being a fly on the wall would have been interesting, and likely often devastating to our current perception of many periods and places However, we have to work with what we have, and accept that in many cases, archaeology and historical records have very strict limits.

Archaeometallurgical analysis can often provide some real pitfalls. I've seen articles claiming they can see "development" within a sample set so small it in reality can't be much more than very rough guide to the artifacts that were originally made and used. Amusingly, archaeometallurgists that are amazingly careful and include a great many ifs, buts and what if's in their metallurgical work sometimes don't seem to think they need to apply the same care when making historical/archaeological conclusions from the same material...and sometimes, in shared euphoria over the certainty of "objective" natural scientific analysis, they spiral into an endless circle of jumping to conclusions

[Watchman]

One of the acute headaches iron gave armourers and weaponsmiths was the sheer difficulty of working the stuff into a reasonably metallurgically homogenous whole. Between the uncooperative character of the raw material produced by the rather primitive early ore-refining methods ("bloomeries"), the headache that was slag concentrations and God knows what else, making any larger piece metallurgically sound was a somewhat challenging prospect - and the direct reason long swords were so much more expensive than short ones, and why solid steel cuirasses didn't turn up before the High Middle Ages (when iron-production methods improved meaningfully).

For smaller objects like spear- and axeheads the issue wasn't a great one, and moreover the small quantities of hard steel in the raw "bloom" could be used to "forge-weld" a hard cutting edge relatively easily. Swords were naturally a whole different level of complexity, and the longer ones exponentially so, and forging a good one-piece helmet bowl at the very least challenging. (Spangenhelms, though not as strong as one-piece bowls, were far easier to construct due to being built up from numerous smaller pieces, the metallurgical qualities of each of which the smith had that much easier time controlling, and hence very popular in the period of limited infrastructure and economic resources stretching from late Roman times to the dawn of the Middle Ages proper.)

Bronze, conversely, could simply be cast into shape and then cold-hammered to improve hardness (and further tweak the shape), and metalworkers had lenghty experience with the stuff. Though the raw material was relatively expensive for reasons other have already discussed, it was in many ways much easier to work with and pretty much the sole option if you wanted to make large single-piece items like monolith breastplates.

[conon394]

Unless excavators are really careless (which, sadly, many of them are) the corrosion products of iron and steel can also be easily identified and excavated even if there is no real iron core left in iron artifacts. This is, in fact, pretty common. Scandinavian archaeologists, at least, have been well aware of this for a long time.

I agree however I believe the comment was likely aimed at earlier excavations (think perhaps Schleeman a man who bulldoze anything in the way of his goal or the kind of thinking that gets the Elgin marbles bleached to be more 'Classical') and also just stuff shunted aside in collection archives and not cataloged or published so it becomes more less non existent.

Archaeometallurgical analysis can often provide some real pitfalls. I've seen articles claiming they can see "development" within a sample set so small it in reality can't be much more than very rough guide to the artifacts that were originally made and used. Amusingly, archaeometallurgists that are amazingly careful and include a great many ifs, buts and what if's in their metallurgica work sometimes don't think they need to apply the same care when making conclusions from their material...and sometimes, in shared euphoria over the certainty of "objective" natural scientific analysis, they spiral into an endless circle of jumping to conclusions

Again I don't disagree; in this case however the helmet sample set was the pool of helmets excavated from Olympia so the sample set is large and the development trend seems sold. Of course the mechanism as you say was unlikely to be centrally directed (at least not until the benefit if any became obvious and than only in places like Sparta or Athens that had ability and structure to consider such moves). I would like to see someone revisit the issue with say greaves or breastplates as well. But the ideal is also supported by the disappearance of a lot of secondary amour - vambraces, foot guards etc.

[conon394]

(Spangenhelms, though not as strong as one-piece bowls, were far easier to construct due to being built up from numerous smaller pieces, the metallurgical qualities of each of which the smith had that much easier time controlling, and hence very popular in the period of limited infrastructure and economic resources stretching from late Roman times to the dawn of the Middle Ages proper.)

Actually even earlier the helmet that is the basis for the article I cited is virtually identical and that is from the 6th century BC - it hard not to think the iron helmets Herodotus mentions in Xerxes army are not similar.

[Watchman]

Wholly possible, though ancient Iranian armour isn't my strong suit (other than I know they used scale, like pretty much every tosser in the region). Admittedly I was referring mostly to its usage in Europe, where it arrived comparatively late.

[Old_Scratch]

Interesting stuff, it's a lot more complicated than I thought.

[DaLeGiOnArY]

bronze made sexy conrinthian (300 helmets, just rounder holes) helmets so i guess ti goes to bronze!

[Old_Scratch]

I always thought bronze looked better than steel. It's a bit of a fantasy question, but could bronze full plate be feasible? Could an armorer with the renaissance knowledge of armor and yet the experience of a classical Greek bronze worker make full bronze plate? Would it be similar to steel plate or would it be entirely impractical.

[removeduser_487563287433]

The only advantage I can find for early iron was widespread availability.

Well, for early iron the opposite is true. The earliest iron artifacts and weapons are made from iron gathered from meteorites. Once iron smelting develops it actually spreads across the Near East very slowly.

Copper, and especially tin from what I gather was more difficult to obtain.

Yes. It is thought that one of the reasons for iron replacing bronze is the fact that the Bronze Age collapse made it much more difficult to operate the ancient trade routes.

So, is bronze better than pre-steel iron for weapons and armor? If so, why does its use seem to extend for a very long time in armor, but is almost entirely replaced by iron in swords and spear points? Could it not be made as sharp or was there a weight issue or something?

Bronze is stronger than wrought iron. But its easier to find and easier to produce, especially in the chaos of the Bronze to Iron Age transition.

[War&Politics]

If bronze is superior to iron in terms of strength, why do the Hewbrews seem so impressed in that Bible verse I quoted (which is after all source material)?
"19And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron."
The first time I read this passage I assumed that it was because their enemy used iron which was superior to bronze, the iron chariots obviously impressed the authors of this passage...but if bronze is actually stronger than iron? Can somebody offer a possible explanation behind this passage for me (from a historical context please, I don't need to hear that Jesus loves me).

[removeduser_487563287433]

If bronze is superior to iron in terms of strength, why do the Hewbrews seem so impressed in that Bible verse I quoted (which is after all source material)?
"19And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron."
The first time I read this passage I assumed that it was because their enemy used iron which was superior to bronze, the iron chariots obviously impressed the authors of this passage...but if bronze is actually stronger than iron? Can somebody offer a possible explanation behind this passage for me (from a historical context please, I don't need to hear that Jesus loves me).

Consider that chariots would usually be wooden.