2 P. NEOGL
maintains that "the hardest tools in ancient Egypt, such as drills
for working the granite obelisks, were made of Indian iron" and it
was again from India, as will be shown later on, that the Persians
and afterwards the Arabs and the Europeans learnt the tempering
of steel, the best specimens of which were the famous Damascus
blades of the Middle Ages. Roscoe and Schorlemmer in their well-
known Treatise on Chemistry "have written it appears pro-
bable that iron was first obtained from its ores in India." They
further say "the word iron, which is identical with the Scandi-
navian iarn (instead of 'isarn') and German eisen' (adjective
'eisern') appears to be connected with the Sanskrit ayas' (Latin
"aes"), and this, according to Grimm, is an indication that bronze
was in use amongst the Germans at a much earlier date than
iron."
Ethnographists usually divide the age of using implements of warfare into principally three divisions, viz. stone age, bronze age and iron age. Such a division might be tenable in the case of European countries but hardly applicable in the case of India which was colonized by the Aryans possessing a very high order of civilization at a very early age. It is true that implements of the stone age are found scattered in Chota Nagpur, Central Provinces and other parts of India, but it seems that these stone implements were mostly used by the aboriginal, Paleolithic and Neolithic. people who inhabited India before the Aryan Conquest and whose descendants are the Kols, Bhils and other aboriginal tribes of modern India. In India the use of bronze as material for making arms was never extensive, and weapons made of bronze are scarcely to be found, though Vincent Smith is disposed to maintain that there was a copper age in India prior to the iron age.[1] Vincent Smith, however, places the limit of the copper age at 1000 B.C., which falls easily in the Vedic age when, as will be shown later on, the use of iron was well known.
There is even a considerable difference of opinion about the general question whether bronze really preceded iron. The well- known metallurgist Dr. John Percy in his well-known treatise entitled "Metallurgy of Iron and Steel" held, and I think very
- ↑ Vincent Smith, Indian Antiquary, 1905, Vol. xxxiv, p. 136.
