The ancient Hittites, who occupied the area now covered by Turkey and Syria, seem to have worked out how to smelt iron and create steel weapons around 1400 bc, and over the following years the skills spread throughout much of Asia and Europe, kickstarting what anthropologists like to call the Iron Age. But it wasn’t until the fifth century bc that the Chinese developed the first blast furnaces, and it wasn’t until the medieval period that they spread to Europe. There were furnaces producing pig iron in Sussex around 1500 and here in South Wales not long afterwards.
