How did ancient civilizations find iron ore for weapons?
Just like they do now: by mining. That is something man has done for at least 6,000 years. Iron has been mined for about half that time.
In rocks and minerals containing iron oxides; magnetite, heotite and others. It had to be extracted and fed into a blast furnace similar to today. This was nothing new to them, the neolithic stone age began 9,300 BCE followed by the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. There's an interesting documentary called Secrets of the Viking Sword that demonstrates the process and tries to recreate the techniques early people would have applied. You can watch it here: youtu.be/nXbLyVpWsVM
Iron ore can seen on the surface of the earth –?it has a distinctive rust-colour. Ancient civilisations could find it lying around, once the surface ore had been used the obvious solution was to dig for it. Another source was from meteorites – apparently the Inuit used a very large meteorite as their only source for metal (until Peary stole it and transported it to USA).
Just like they do now: by mining. That is something man has done for at least 6,000 years. Iron has been mined for about half that time.
In rocks and minerals containing iron oxides; magnetite, heotite and others. It had to be extracted and fed into a blast furnace similar to today. This was nothing new to them, the neolithic stone age began 9,300 BCE followed by the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. There's an interesting documentary called Secrets of the Viking Sword that demonstrates the process and tries to recreate the techniques early people would have applied. You can watch it here: youtu.be/nXbLyVpWsVM
Iron ore can seen on the surface of the earth –?it has a distinctive rust-colour. Ancient civilisations could find it lying around, once the surface ore had been used the obvious solution was to dig for it. Another source was from meteorites – apparently the Inuit used a very large meteorite as their only source for metal (until Peary stole it and transported it to USA).
