Tamil steel

I had to dump all the planned poasts yesterday; to handle this one, last: Times of India on the Tamil Iron-Age... 3345 BC. That dating makes little sense. I call shenanigans. At the very least I want linkers like Archaeology.org to interrogate their sources.

Why wasn't anything iron exported? Where's the Bharati iron at Oman or Qatar, even Sumer or the Red Sea? There's bronze all over the place, and when the Near East found an iron-nickel meteor the Pharaohs treasured the steel they wrought from it. Millennia later the Arabs will sing of "Hindi" steel, so everyone agreed the stuff was worthy of export in their time. But not BC?

These artifacts include knives, arrowheads, rings, chisels, axes, and swords. Some may be prestige items, like King Tut's knife. But axes are for farmers. That means the smelting was done not from space but from South Indian ores; as assumed in Times.

Tamil Nadu's chief minister, a man with the delightful name Muthuvel Karunanidhi Сталин, is touting this to prove his state's superiority over the Indus. Which is signalling a selfinterest.

STEELMAN 2/1: Boats are hard, as early retirees often tell us at the Gulf Of Twitter. I'm also pondering the Wisconsin experience of entering the Chalcolithic just to retvrn to the Neolithic. To salvage the Stalin Thesis: suppose the iron simply couldn't be exported in the 3000s BC. Then shipping improved; in this brave new age of bronze, international bronze could compete with Indian iron as well as with skymetal. By then nobody wanted the iron even at home. So the manufacturers quit making it, and forgot how to make it.