DISCOVERERS OF THE ART OP 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 of 

 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 Workmanship, 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. In short, 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 



