Prehistory gave its place to history, Father said, when bronze displaced stone tools and weapons. Once bronze became widespread after 4000 bc, powerful civilisations emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, Crete, Mycenae and elsewhere. But, still, history was counted in the millennia. To be counted in the centuries, we had to discover the magic of iron. Once the Iron Age got going, around the ninth century bc, three different and remarkable eras emerged in quick succession, within no more than seven centuries in total: the geometric period, the classical era and the Hellenistic
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