Which came first, the Bronze Age or the Iron Age?
We all know what the archaeologists would have us believe, but perhaps we shouldn't believe what we are told. Here is an extract, written about 1912, from the footnotes of De Re Metallica.

HISTORICAL NOTE ON IRON SMELTING

The archaeologists' division of the history of racial development into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, based upon objects found in tumuli, burial places, etc. would on the face of it indicate the prior discovery of copper metallurgy over iron, and it is generally so maintained by those scientists.

The metallurgists have not hesitated to protest that while this distinction of 'Ages' may serve the archaeologists, and no doubt represents the sequence in which the metal objects are found, yet it by no means follows that this was the order of their discovery or use, but that iron, by its rapidity of oxidation has simply not been preserved. The arguments which may be advanced from our side are in the main these. Iron ore is of more frequent occurrence than copper ores, and the necessary reduction of copper oxides (as most surface ores have been) to fluid metal requires a temperature very much higher than does the reduction of iron oxides to wrought iron blooms, which do not necessitate fusion.

The comparatively greater simplicity of iron metallurgy under primitive conditions is well exemplified by the hill tribes of Northern Nigeria, where in village forges they reduce iron sufficient for their needs, from hematite. Copper alone would not be a very serviceable metal to primitive man, and he early made the advance to bronze; this latter metal requires three metallurgical operations, and presents immeasurably greater difficulties than iron.

The arguments advanced by the archaeologists bear mostly on the fact that, had iron been known, its superiority would have caused the primitive races to adopt it, and we should not find such an abundance of bronze tools. As to this, it may be said that bronze weapons and tools are plentiful enough in Egyptian, Mycenaean, and early Greek remains, long after iron was demonstrably well known.

There has been a good deal pronounced by etymologists on the history of iron and copper but the amazing lack of metallurgical knowledge nullifies practically all their conclusions. The oldest Egyptian texts extant, dating 3500 B.C., refer to iron, and there is in the British Museum a piece of iron found in the Pyramid of Kephron (3700 B.C.) under condition indicating it's coincident origin. There is exhibited also a fragment of oxidised iron lately found by Professor Petrie and placed as of the VI Dynasty (B.C..3200) despite this evidence of an early knowledge of iron, there is an almost total absence of Egyptian iron objects for a long period subsequent to that time, which in a measure confirms the view of its disappearance rather than that of ignorance of it.

Many writers have assumed that the Ancients must have had some superior art of hardening copper or bronze, because the cutting of the gigantic stonework of the time could not have been done with the alloy as we know it; no such hardening appears among the bronze tools found, and it seems to us that the argument is stronger that the oldest Egyptian stoneworkers employed mostly iron tools, and that these have oxidised out of existence. The reasons for preferring copper alloys to iron for decorative objects were equally strong in ancient times as in the present day and accounts sufficiently for these articles, and, therefore iron would be devoted to more humble objects less likely to be preserved.