Great Aspirations of the Iron Age

James Romm

Renaissance philosophers, musing on European voyages to the New World, speculated that the dispersal of gold deposits throughout the globe was part of God’s plan to spur travel, exploration, and communication between continents. In antiquity, other metals had the same effect: tin and copper for smelting bronze, lead for leaching other metals out of ore and slag, and, most crucially in the late second and early first millennia BC, iron for making tools, armor and weapons. This “Iron Age,” as historians often term the seven or eight centuries preceding the start of the Greek classical period (circa 500 BC), saw trade and travel that not only linked the Mediterranean nations but moved goods between lands as far removed as modern Iran and western France. This is the focus of the vast and impressive exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age.” With objects grouped according to the cultures that produced them and also arranged loosely in a chronological sequence spanning nearly a millennium, this show presents a vast panorama of the Iron Age and an exploration of the commerce and connections between its major civilizations.......
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/12/16/great-aspirations-iron-age/