DISCOVERERS OF THE ART OF IRON MANUFACTURE—BELCK. 509 
And in Judges i, 19, and iv, 3: 
And the Lord was with Judah; and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain: 
but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots = 
iron. 
And the children of Israel cried unto the Lord: for he had nine hundred chariots of 
iron; and twenty years he mightily oppressed the children of Israel. 
It affords me satisfaction to state that investigators generally have 
tacitly adopted my interpretation of these passages. 
But it should also be pointed out that there is hardly any prospect 
that older written evidence will be discovered, for the peoples who 
have left ample written monuments older than those of the Hebrew 
the Assyro-Babylonians and the Egyptians, are not to be considered 
in our problem. The former, because without question they became 
acquainted with iron at a much later period; the latter, because— 
even assuming that they had known wrought iron in earlier times— 
they never employed steel. But even if we must confine ourselves to 
Biblical passages and to accounts of the conquest of Palestine by the 
invading Habiri (Hebrews) hordes as resting on good tradition and 
therefore reliable, we obtain quite an early date, about the thirteenth 
pre-Christian century, for the first mention of steel. At the same 
time it should be borne in mind that we must postulate for that period 
a quite well advanced tvorkmanship, so that the ironsmiths were able 
to turn out scythes at least 1 meter long and correspondingly wide 
‘for the scythe chariots. It is self-evident that the making of such 
steel scythes was attempted only after long practice in making 
swords, daggers, arrows, and other weapons of steel. If these steel 
scythes were fixed to the axles and poles of war chariots, it may be 
assumed that in time of peace they were used for purposes of agricul- 
ture. Inshort, the reference to the scythe-chariots of the Canaanites 
introduces us at once into a period of a highly developed steel indus- 
try. In the face of this undeniable fact it appears the more strange 
and incomprehensible that the Egyptians as well as the Assyro- 
Babylonians, as also the Hittites and all the other great nations of 
western Asia, had no knowledge whatever of this steel industry which 
certainly must then have been several hundred years old. For even 
if the ancient armorers most carefully guarded and practiced their 
art as a secret, they could hardly have prevented its products from 
becoming generally known and used by neighboring nations. This 
condition can be accounted for only by assuming that the actual 
development of the steel industry, which must have required many 
years, did not take place in Palestine but elsewhere, and that it was 
introduced into Palestine shortly before the immigration of the 
Israelites. These data fully accord with our knowledge of the Phil- 
istines, who are assumed by scholars generally to have immigrated 
