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Metal production in the ancient Middle East. The metals of antiquity are the seven metals which humans had identified and found use for in prehistoric times in Africa, Europe and throughout Asia: [1] gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, and mercury.
While technology did advance to the point of creating surprisingly pure copper, most ancient metals are in fact alloys, the most important being bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. As metallurgical technology developed ( hammering , melting , smelting , roasting , cupellation , moulding , smithing , etc.), more metals were intentionally ...
In addition to specially designed furnaces, ancient iron production required the development of complex procedures for the removal of impurities, the regulation of the admixture of carbon, and the invention of hot-working to achieve a useful balance of hardness and strength in steel.
The ancient city of Wan from the Han period forward was a major center of the iron and steel industry. [43] Along with their original methods of forging steel, the Chinese had also adopted the production methods of creating Wootz steel, an idea imported from India to China by the 5th century AD.
In making crucible steel, the blister steel bars were broken into pieces and melted in small crucibles, each containing 20 kg or so. This produced higher quality metal, but increased the cost. The Bessemer process reduced the time needed to make lower-grade steel to about half an hour while requiring only enough coke needed to melt the pig iron.
One such furnace was found in Samanalawewa and archaeologists were able to produce steel as the ancients did. [45] [50] Crucible steel, formed by slowly heating and cooling pure iron and carbon (typically in the form of charcoal) in a crucible, was produced in Merv by the 9th to 10th century AD. [38]
The main source of ores for Japanese steel was iron sand, a sand-like substance which accumulated as an end product of the erosion of granite and andesite in mountainous regions of Japan. [13] Importantly, it was less labor-intensive to extract the ore from the sand than from hard rock.
Nearly all Han period weapons are made of wrought iron or steel, with the exception of axe-heads, of which many are made of cast iron. [ 39 ] The effectiveness of the Chinese human and horse powered blast furnaces was enhanced during this period by the engineer Du Shi (c. AD 31), who applied the power of waterwheels to piston - bellows in ...