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Page 32 - Best of STIL 2018 English
P. 32
Vorschaubild

 Historical depiction of a French iron and steel works with a steam hammer in the 19th century, published in 1867 in “Le Tour du Monde”, Paris
The engine of modernization
THow iron and steel is driving the development of our civilization forward
he first iron that humans shaped and put around 5,000 years ago, the men who extracted to good use was not from this world. It the metal from rock and used fire to craft tools, fell from the sky. Scientific analysis has jewelery and weapons with it attained a special revealed that the iron beads adorning status. For the ancient Greeks, blacksmiths were
a more than 5,000-year-old Egyptian grave was connected with the gods. In their mythology, Hep-
 Contemporary depiction of the Greek god Hephaestus. The God of fire and metalworking forged weapons and armor.
sourced from a meteorite. No wonder then that the pharaohs called iron “black copper from the heavens” and why the Sumerians
referred to it as “heavenly metal”.
This was also the reason why the Inuits had iron cutting tools despite living in the eternal ice – they slowly “mined” a 30-ton mete- orite over centuries.
For many years,
people viewed iron as
a gift from the gods.
It gave them strength,
status and power, but was
also shrouded in secrets and myths. When terrestrial iron was first mined and processed
haestus, the God of fire and metalworking, worked in a subterranean workshop. The Greeks believed
that he and his fellow god Prometheus were the driving force behind the
technical evolution of human civilization.
The use of metals was – and still is – the benchmark
of civilizational progress. The poets of Antiquity such as Homer and Ovid already wrote about “me- tallic ages”, which conclud-
ed with the use of iron fol- lowing periods of gold, silver
and bronze working. And even today, historians still cate- gorize the late period of the “post-
32 EXTRA
Photos: adobestock©ivan-96, Bibi Saint-Pol











































































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