A while ago I stumbled upon a Russian scientific article by N.L Morgunova, M. A. Kulkova and A. M. Kulkov which discussed new findings related to the Yamnaya culture. The researchers analyzed some earlier discovered metal artefacts from the Boldyrevo I Kurgan in the Orenburg region of Russia, and the results confirmed the long-held suspicions of archaeologists that these objects were made of meteoric iron. If the name of that burial sounds familiar it might be because one of the more famous reconstructions of a Yamnaya male was based on the same individual buried in this grave:
This grave was roughly dated to 2873-2471 b.c, making these finds the oldest examples of meteoric iron found in both Europe and Asia, only beaten in antiquity by meteoric iron objects from Egypt which date to about 3200 b.c.
In total there were six iron objects found in the Boldyrevo I grave. One of these artefacts was an iron knife, with a blade of roughly 14 centimeters long, another was an adze and another was a chisel-like object. The other three objects were not able to be properly identified.
The article also mentions how these artefacts were purposely laid around a disc painted with ochre and ferrous powder, which may have acted as a solar symbol. Apparently the grave was also underneath a false burial chamber, probably to hide the burial from gravedigging bandits and/or archaeologists. There may have been some mummification involved and the positioning of the body as well as bird-wing like designs painted on the body into seem to suggest that the burial represented something akin to movement to the other world or a state of flight. One of a kind, as the authors put it.
Pretty cool huh? What I find more interesting though is that these metal objects were not an isolated incident. The article mentions that in addition to the Boldyrevo I grave, the Utevka I and Tamar-Utkul VII burials of the Yamnaya culture were sites reported to have meteoric iron objects as well, although these weren't included in their study. All of these were large burials with prestigious grave goods, and are thus connected to the elites of these societies.
In Ludmila Koryakova's 'The Urals and Western Siberia in the Bronze and Iron Ages' it is mentioned that there potentially are more than 64 iron objects shared between the Yamnaya, Catacomb and Afanasievo cultures.
According to David W. Anthony in 'The Horse, The Wheel and Language' there was an particular iron dagger attributed to the Catacomb culture, uncovered at a site in eastern Ukraine. But unlike these meteoric iron objects, this one was a bit different:
"A Catacomb-period grave at Gerasimovka on the Donets, probably dated around 2500 BCE, contained a knife with a handle made of arsenical bronze and a blade made of iron. The iron did not contain magnetite or nickel, as would be expected in meteoric iron, so it is thought to have been forged. Iron objects were rare, but they were part of the experiments conducted by steppe metalsmiths during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, long before iron began to be used in Hittite Anatolia or the Near East."
If this is true, that would be interesting because I know that the Kaman-Kalehöyük site in Anatolia around 2200-1900 b.c also had early signs of iron smelting. The oldest known evidence for steel also comes from this site. The Hittites were of course famous for their early development of iron smelting, and this site has been linked to early Hittites.
Some of the samples from this sites showed up with a degree of ancestry hailing from the Pontic-Caspian steppes from what I have seen. But you do not have to take my word for it. You can read more about the steppe ancestry in this post from the blog Eurogenes:
Hittite era Anatolians in qpAdm
Given the 2500 b.c date and the lack of evidence for iron smelting technology in the steppe archaeological record for more than a thousand years I have some skepticism. I'll have to check out the original article from which David W. Anthony derived those conclusions. If my skepticism is unwarranted, I think an area to explore would be contacts between the Indo-European people of the European steppes, and the Indo-European peoples of Anatolia.
From a linguistic point of view though, the general position is that there isn't a Proto-Indo-European term for iron specifically, although several Indo-European languages have words with a similar origin or semantic meaning, often related to either the colour red, or blood. Although I came across an article by Krzystof Witczak which stated this:
It is universally believed that Indo-European possessed no word for ‘iron’ (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984: 710; Mallory, Adams 1997: 313-314). Below, I would like to discuss the problem afresh in order to establish whether this opinion is correct or not. If a cognate term for ‘iron / steel’ is attested in Old Iranian and Old Persian (really in Pahlavi and Classical Persian), then we must take into account the possibility that iron (especially meteoritic iron) was known in the late Indo-Iranian age. It seems possible to adduce further linguistic facts and words which may go back to the late Indo-European epoch. Needless to say, the terms for ‘iron’ and especially for ‘steel’ frequently belong to the so-called “Wanderwörter”, for which reason I shall enhance this study with some additional notes on the origin and etymology of the bundle of words in question.Which given these findings might have some truth behind it. In the article the author further elaborates on these connections so be sure to check it out.
Sources:
- Н. Л. Моргунова, М. А. Кулькова, А. М. Кульков -МЕТЕОРИТНОЕ ЖЕЛЕЗО В ПРОИЗВОДСТВЕННОЙ И РИТУАЛЬНОЙ ПРАКТИКЕ ЯМНОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ ПРИУРАЛЬЯ (N. L. Morgunova, M. A. Kulkova, A. M. Kulkov -METEORITE IRON IN PRODUCTION AND RITUAL PRACTICE OF THE PIT CULTURE OF THE URALS)
- David W. Anthony - The Horse, the Wheel and Language, page 336
- Ludmila Koryakova - The Urals and Western Siberia in the Bronze and Iron Ages, page 189
- Krzysztof Tomasz Witczak - A WANDERING WORD FOR ‘HARDENED IRON, STEEL’ A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF CONCEPTS AND WORDS
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