Despite iron being the most abundant metal on our planet, it was the last one to be discovered. We can say that since its discovery, we’ve never left the Iron Age because it is still the most used metal in the world today. It conforms to the most sought-after properties in metals – malleability, durability or hardness – so several alloys emerged, like carbon steel, stainless steel, etc. which have more diverse applications, the most important ones being in the automobile industry, shipbuilding and construction industry.
These developments took place in different regions of the world, but mainly in the Middle East, where the Western culture originated, comprising the countries of Mesopotamia, Israel, Assyria and Egypt. With metals, not only did a new activity appeared – metallurgy – but also all human tasks were made easier and became more productive – agriculture, farming, hunting and fishing – thus creating surpluses and giving rise to another new activity: trade. Trade led humans to create means of transporting merchandise and so the wheel, the horse as the driving force and the sail for boats were invented.
Unfortunately, not everything has been positive; metals have also made it possible to manufacture weapons that were used for the first time for purposes other than hunting animals, that is to say, they are now being used against other human beings. It was in the Metal Age that the first kings, the first nations and the first empires were formed out of wars between peoples; thus, another profession appeared, that of warriors. Mesopotamia and Egypt were the first civilizations to appear.
The Copper Age: 6500 B.C. to 2500 B.C.
It is also called the Chalcolithic Age when it is viewed as a transition from the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. Discovered probably by chance, copper rapidly replaced stone, bone and wood in the making of tools. Chalcolithic represents a qualitative leap in relation to the Stone Age, because wood and bones were readily available in nature, while metals are minerals that had to be melted down to be used.
Once copper was discovered, the path to the Bronze Age and from this to the Iron Age represented quantitative leaps. Man realized that the future was in metals and the search for harder and more resistant metals was what gave rise to the transition from copper to bronze and from bronze to iron.
At first, metals were worked with a hammer to be shaped. Later, they realized that it was better to melt it down to achieve more specific and perfect shapes. This is how metallurgy was discovered as a process for making metal objects and tools.
Copper is a very soft and malleable metal. The objects made of copper are not very resistant. It was also at this time that other metals as soft or even softer than copper were discovered: gold and silver. When copper was discovered, man replaced all his tools with this metal, but he quickly realized that, for certain tools, flint stone was more suitable because it was harder and far less malleable than copper. Therefore, rather than for tools or weapons, copper was used for pots and ornaments, and for funeral rituals.
The Bronze Age: 2500 B.C. to 1500 B.C.
In search of a harder metal, man began mixing minerals, until he invented bronze resulting from a mixture of two softer metals: copper and tin. Bronze is an alloy composed of 90% copper and 10% tin. Paradoxically, combining two soft metals produced a hard metal.
Since its discovery, this metal has been widely used throughout the known world; in search of the metal, the first routes leading to the mines were created. Thus, the wheel for land transport, and the boat and sail for sea transport were developed. The expansion of trade brought the Bronze Age to all of Europe and Asia, and to parts of North Africa. Copper came to be more sought after to make bronze than to be used on its own. Since bronze had no match in hardness and strength, all tools were soon made of bronze.
Replacing stone and copper tools and instruments with those of bronze increased the overall production (mainly in agriculture) and the durability of these tools because, as we’ve said, bronze is stronger and more wear-resistant than copper.
The weapons of combat were made of bronze, giving the people who dominated this process more power of conquest, domination and warlike superiority. Bronze was also used in the making of household artifacts (knives, axes, etc.), and hunting weapons, improving the quality of execution of certain services. Finally, it also had an artistic (masks, figurines, etc.) and adornment use (necklaces, bracelets, rings, etc.).
The Iron Age: 1 500 B.C.
It started in the southwestern Asia Minor, in what is today Turkey, and rapidly spread into the Middle East and the rest of Europe. The Hittites were the first people to work with iron and to use it mainly in weapons with which they quickly subjugated other peoples. The warrior using an iron sword broke the bronze sword of his opponent at the first strokes.
Iron, more abundant in nature than the previous two metals, required more metallurgical expertise because of its higher melting temperature. For this reason, it was necessary to first improve the production of furnaces in order to subsequently reach higher temperatures to work with iron.
The introduction of iron in the fabrication of the most diverse equipment, tools and weapons brought great changes in the lives of people of that time. Iron came to be used in the production of stronger and more resistant tools, which ended up prompting development in agriculture and facilitating the work of planting.
In as far as weapons are concerned, iron helped build swords and other types of stronger weapons. With the introduction of this material, the armies with the strongest weaponry ended up dominating other peoples more easily. Thus, the great empires arose and the emergence of increasingly more powerful kings and rulers.
According to historians, the discovery of writing marks the end of the Iron Age and Prehistory. However, from another point of view, as we mentioned before, we stayed in the Iron Age until the nineteenth century as this metal continued to be the most extensively used material. Just as the combination of copper and tin started the Bronze Age, so the combination of iron with carbon in the last century has ushered in the present Steel Age, as this is the most widely used metal on this planet.
Metal Age Inventions
The furnace – Its invention gave rise to metallurgy in the Metal Age. The improvement of the furnace made it possible to reach higher temperatures to melt iron and create other alloys. It is true that it was also used later in cookware to cook food like bread and meat, and to make ceramic utensils.
The wheel – It allowed the progress of surplus trade, making it possible to transport cargo in less time and with less effort.
The channels – They allowed the water of the rivers to be conveyed to lands far from them, thus obtaining more agricultural surpluses; they were also used to supply water to villages and, with the use of boats, also served as a means of transporting goods.
The boat – The first boats were small boats or rafts; the sail made it possible to build boats of greater draught to carry more people and more goods.
The sail – It served to boost the trade of surpluses created by an increasingly technical and diversified society. The sail was used on boats, but also in windmills; at first it was made of leather, then of more flexible fabric, so as to take better advantage of the driving force of wind.
The plow – Using working animals in combination with the plow made it possible to cultivate more land; it goes without saying that it was first made of copper, then of bronze and finally of iron, as it is still today. With ploughing, the cultivated area quadrupled and the agricultural surpluses caused further development in the previous trade.
The mill – The mill of water, wind and tide increased the production of flour for the making of bread. Before the mill, it was necessary to use the force of man and two stones to grind the grain; after the mill, the driving force of nature was used to generate a continuous movement that allowed large quantities of grain to be ground in a short time.
Weaving – Not yet with maximum strength, but man began to weave or interlace plants to form baskets. Afterwards, linen, cotton and wool were discovered, and threads appeared which, intertwined on the looms, gave rise to the first fabrics, which replaced the skins of animals in clothing.
Stone construction – It was in the Metal Age that walls began to be built around the cities, temples and fortresses. In was at this time that the world’s tallest building was built, at such a height that it was surpassed only 3,000 years later by the Lincoln Cathedral in England. This would be the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Pyramid of Cheops, built around the year 2560 B.C., at 146 meters in height, was surpassed in 1311 by Lincoln Cathedral with the Spire height of 160 meters.
Metal Age Professions
Bosses or kings -- They were distinguished by their leadership skills and physical strength.
Priests – They were in charge of rites and relations with the divinity, they interceded for the people and placated the gods with sacrifices.
Farmers – A profession that was born in the Stone Age that replaced hunting and fishing as a means of obtaining food, and their storage, allowing man a certain independence from land and nature.
Shepherds – It was the activity that replaced hunting; with the domestication of animals, man learned to reproduce them and thus to amass food. For primitive peoples, it was like having money in the bank, for when they sold an animal, they received the interest of a capital invested in the purchase of the animal when it was small.
Blacksmiths or metallurgists – They were the ones who specialized in this new art and craft of the metal era; they became responsible for the making of all the tools that man used.
Potters – They also used furnaces, although at lower temperatures, to bake the clay. It is a very old profession, because apart from baskets, clay was the material most used for all types of vessels, both for storing liquids like water, wine and olive oil, as well as for solids like cereals.
Bonders, weavers, bakers – These were other minor professions that appeared as society structured and organized itself, and diversified its functions and professions.
Merchants – They were born out of relations between the peoples, from agricultural or other surpluses, and from increasing specialization. They were the ones who took products that were plentiful in one place to be traded in another place where they were scarce, making exchanges possible.
The Matriarchy and the Concept of God
“Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.” Psalm 128:3
Anthropologists are confident that the first deity to be worshiped was a goddess and not a god. This deity was worshiped as the mother of all that lives; she was identified with the Earth, and with the soil. Therefore, in all languages where there is no neutral gender and everything is defined as either masculine or feminine, uppercase Earth as a planet and lowercase earth as soil are feminine words, and they are also referred to as mother Earth and mother nature, respectively.
Primitive men lived, as animals still do today, in symbiosis with nature, like a baby connected to its mother by the umbilical cord, not in opposition or against her in their thinking. On Earth they lived, and from the earth they drew the sustenance they needed to stay alive.
The same thing seems to happen in relation to themselves: from the woman, like a fruitful land, came the new life that populated the world. It is clear that the connection between the sexual act and the birth of the baby had not yet been established at the time. And why was that? Human intelligence was not yet sufficiently developed to establish the relationship between a cause and an effect, precisely because so much time separated the two (in this case nine months).
I like to take as an example the intelligence of other mammals, for example, mice. If I put a yellow poisonous powder on the ground, some mice will eat this powder and soon after they will die. The other mice immediately establish a sequence of cause and effect and, after a short time, no matter how much yellow powder I put out, no mouse will die because the cause and the effect occurred very close in time, and the mice now know that if they eat of the yellow powder they will die. There was a time when human intelligence was as simple as that of a mouse.
But let us suppose that we put as poison an anticoagulant like warfarin for the mice; the mice eat the poison at will and nothing happens to them, until one day in a fight with other mice or they get injured, they will bleed to death. Nowadays, this poison is the most used to control mice population, because it does not allow them to establish a cause and effect relationship.
The same was true of primitive human beings who did not establish a link between the cause (the sexual act) and the effect (the birth of the infant). For this reason, the woman was seen as the correspondent to Mother Nature, to the mother earth: just as the life of plants on which the animals depended appeared from the womb of the earth, so also the new life was born from the woman’s womb.
It is true that primitive men realized that they were physically stronger than women; but they did not dare to raise their hand against them, just as no man dares even today to raise his hand against his own mother – this is a taboo. We observe this in the mammals closest to us. In the evolution of the species, the breastfeeding females are very aggressive against the males and do not let them approach. Theoretically, these males would win the fight against the females, but they do not react but withdraw out of instinctive respect.
Since the connection between the birth of children and the sexual act had not yet been established, women were the ones who held the power; their fertility gave life to the individual and immortality to the tribe. Because a woman was the origin and source of life, God was conceived as woman, as mother.
Beyond the gift of reproduction and source of life, as still happens today with mammals, man was attracted to the woman who held the power of the sexual act that he craved, for the pleasure it gave him and for the release of the libido.
Self-Consciousness and Patriarchalism
God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it...’ Genesis 1:28
(...) To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’ And to the man he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it”, cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.’ Genesis 3:16-17
When the connection between the sexual act and the birth of a new life was established, the status of man began to rise. The human being has always formed his concept of God based on what he values and considers important, that is, his needs and the concept of himself. For a time, women still enjoyed some of her former status; in fact, god was then represented as matrimony.
The original goddess/mother/earth was complemented by a consort, a father of sky. The rain came down from the sky, it is the divine semen sent by the god-father to impregnate mother earth, so that life can emerge.
Machismo or patriarchalism arose with the outbreak of self-consciousness: when the umbilical cord between man and nature was cut, and he ceased to live in symbiosis with nature, and began to see himself as distinct from her, separate from her. Thus, a difference was established between man and his environment, nature, instinct and self-reflexive thought.
Once the human being was born as a person, survival became less a function of a woman’s reproductive capacity and more a function of a man’s capacity and ability to force nature to meet his needs. The subjugation of the earth corresponded to the subjugation of the woman, for it is the man who now holds the power of reproduction. While the ovum was not identified until 1928, it was thought that the woman was only the receptacle where the man, with his semen, placed the new being in the woman’s womb, the homunculus or very small human, as St. Thomas Aquinas called it.
The story of Abraham can be reinterpreted in this context. Abraham, a man, left his homeland, severing the ties that bound him to Ur of the Chaldean, around 1800 B.C. In an act of self-affirmation and overcoming the need for security, he thus responded to the call of a deity who was also not tied to any place, and he set out into the unknown, as if in search of himself and this deity. From the time of the story of Cain and Abel, it has been known how Yahweh favored the shepherds over the farmers, who are given the more feminine values of fertility.
Throughout human history, only Jesus treated women as equals. We don’t have the space to develop this theme here, but his disciples did not understand or accept this characteristic of the Master and soon returned to the machismo of their cultural environment.
Saint Thomas Aquinas even came to the conclusion that a woman was inferior in nature to a man, and therefore he decreed that the inferior should serve the superior. This attitude has not yet changed, not only in some places on earth, but also in some minds of today’s Western civilization. Therefore, when Pope John Paul I said in public that God was also a mother, he left many Catholics much scandalized. The pope who succeeded him took years to assimilate the same concept, until one day he too declared it in public.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
No comments:
Post a Comment