. THE EARLIEST USE OF IRON. 72S 
articles of iron have been found which are preserved by the New York Historical 
Society and are probably three thousand years old. Kenrick, in his Ancient 
Egypt under the Pharaohs, is authority for the statement that Thothmes the Firsts 
who reigned about seventeen centuries before Christ, is said, in a long inscription 
at Karnak, to have received from the chiefs, tributary kings, or allied sovereigns 
of Lower Egypt, presents of silver and gold, "bars of wrought metal, and ves- 
sels of copper, and of bronze, and of iron." From the region of Memphis he 
received wine, iron, lead, wrought metal, animals, etc. An expedition which 
the same king sent against Chadasha returned, bringing among the spoil "iron 
of the mountains, 40 cubes." Belzoni found an iron sickle under the feet of 
one of the sphinxes at Karnak, which is supposed to have been placed there at 
least six hundred years before Christ. A piece of iron was taken from an inner 
joint of the great pyramid at Gizeh in 1837. Both of these reHcs are in the 
British Museum. The reference to iron in Deuteronomy iv, 20, apparently indi- 
cates that in the time of Moses the Egyptians were engaged in its manufacture, 
and that the Israelites, if they did not make iron for their taskmasters, were at 
least familiar with the art of manufacturing it. "But the Lord hath taken you, 
and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt." This expres- 
sion is repeated in I. Kings, viii. 51. A small piece of very pure iron was found 
under the Egyptian obelisk which has recently been removed to New York. 
The use of iron and the art of manufacturing it were introduced into the 
southern and western portions of Arabia at a very early day, and this may have 
been done by the Egyptians ; it is at least established that some of their own 
works were located east of the Red Sea. In 1873 the ruins of extensive iron 
works of great antiquity and of undoubted Egyptian origin were discovered near 
the Wells of Moses, in the Sinaitic Peninsula, 
The country which lay to the south of Egypt is supposed to have produced 
iron in large quantities. Iron was also known to the Chaldeans, the Babylon- 
ians, and the Assyrians, who were cotemporaries of the early Egyptians. Some 
writers suppose that the Egyptians derived their supply of iron principally from 
these Asiatic neighbors and from the Arabians. Babylon was built about seven- 
teen centuries before Christ, and Nineveh was of about equal antiquity. Iron 
ornaments have been found in Chaldean ruins, and Chaldean inscriptions show 
that iron was known to the most ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia. In the 
ruins of Nineveh the antiquarian Layard found many articles of iron and inscrip- 
tions referring to its use. Among the articles discovered by him were iron scales 
of armor, from two to three inches in length. "Two or three baskets were 
filled with these relics." He also found " a perfect helmet of iron, inlaid with 
copper bands." In the British Museum there are preserved several tools of iron 
which were found at Nineveh by Layard, including a saw and a pick. The art 
of casting bronze over iron, which has only recently been introduced into modern 
metallurgy, was known to the Assyrians. At Babylon iron was used in the forti- 
fications of the city just prior to its capture by Cyrus, in the sixth century before 
Christ. In a celebrated inscription Nebuchadnezzar declares: "With pillars 
