Iron in Ancient India c4.4

c4.4

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, Palæolithic 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.