attenuated during the early part of the Dark Age. Still, contacts with other areas of the Mediterranean
were reduced rather than eliminated entirely, and the technology of smelting iron came gradually to be
introduced from the island of Cyprus to mainland Greece. Iron is much more plentiful in Greece than is
copper, but its potential could not be exploited until the inhabitants of Greece learned how to temper iron.
Once tempered, iron is harder than bronze and is a more satisfactory material for making tools and
weapons. This new technology, combined with the availability of iron in Greece, contributed to the
gradual recovery that eventually enabled the Greeks to emerge from the depths of the Dark Age.
“I wish I could have had nothing to do with this fifth generation of men, but instead had either died
beforehand or been born at a later time. For now it is the age of iron, nor will there ever be an end to
toils and suffering, and distress will be constant both day and night. For the gods will cause brutal
heartache.” (Hesiod, Works and Days 174–8)One of the effects of this recovery would be the re-establishment of contacts, in the form of trade and
commerce, between Greece and the wider world, allowing Greek metalworkers access once again to
supplies of the raw materials needed for making bronze. Iron did not replace bronze, which continued in
widespread use for a variety of purposes. But iron was now the preferred material for making weapons,
and its associations with death and destruction, combined with its dark appearance (particularly in
contrast to gleaming bronze), inspired the seventh-century poet Hesiod to make iron the emblem of the age
in which he lived. In his myth of the ages of humankind, Hesiod depicts a steady degeneration from an
original age of gold, through ages of silver and bronze, to his own age of iron, characterized by warfare,
injustice, and miserable living conditions. Influenced by this mythological schema, nineteenth-century
scholars, who by no means shared Hesiod’s pessimistic view of human development, divided European
prehistory after the Stone Age into a “Bronze Age” and a subsequent “Iron Age.” These names have
continued in use as convenient, if not accurately descriptive, terms, andit is now conventional to regard
the eleventh century BC as the end of the Bronze Age and the start of the Iron Age in Greece and the
Aegean.