Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryant J. Williams III" <bjwvmw AT com-pair.net>]

Dear List,

See below.

Please note that this is still preliminary, but it is interesting that now two
separate steel items from the same area will cause some adjustments into the
dating of the Iron Age to an earlier time.

Rev. Bryant J. Williams III

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/001200903261611.htm
Ironware piece unearthed from Turkey found to be oldest steel
Tokyo (PTI): A piece of ironware excavated from a Turkish archaeological site 
is
about 4,000 years old, making it the world's oldest steel, Japanese
archaeologists said on Thursday.

Archaeologists from the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan excavated the
5-centimetre piece at the Kaman-Kalehoyuk archaeological site in Turkey, about
100 kilometers southeast of Ankara, in 2000. The ironware piece is believed to
be a part of a knife from a stratum about 4,000 years old, or 2100-1950 B.C.,
according to them.

An analysis at the Iwate Prefectural Museum in Morioka showed that the 
ironware
piece was about 200 years older than one that was excavated from the same site
in 1994 and was believed to be the oldest steel so far made in 20th-18th
centuries B.C.

The ironware is highly likely to have been produced near the Kaman-Kalehoyuk
site as a 2-cm-diameter slag and two iron-containing stones have also been
excavated, Kyodo news agency quoted the archaeologists as saying.

Hideo Akanuma, an archaeologist at the Iwate Prefectural Museum, said the 
fresh
finding led to a change in the history of iron and steel production, noting 
that
such production was earlier thought to have begun in the Hittite kingdom 
dating
in the 14th to 12th centuries B.C.