Matter is all around us. Everything we can see, and even things we can’t see, is made up of matter. Ancient people learned to work with matter, but they didn’t call it chemistry.
Around 2000 BCE, the Bronze Age began. Before the Bronze Age, tools and weapons were made out of stone. Copper had been used for small items such as beads and small ornaments, and some tools were made from copper, but the metal isn’t very strong.
At the beginning of the Bronze Age, people began combining copper and tin by heating them together. This created bronze, a much stronger metal. Bronze was later replaced by steel, an even stronger metal, during the Iron Age.
Steel is made by combining iron and carbon. Iron was also lighter and more readily available than bronze, so iron tools replaced many bronze tools. Iron hadn’t been used widely before the Iron Age because it is difficult to extract from rocks. The Hittites were the first people to discover a way to extract iron from rocks. This meant they had the strongest tools and weapons in the world. As a result, the Hittites controlled much of Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, for about 250 years. But by 1200 BCE, iron had spread to most cultures in the Middle East. The Hittites lost their advantage and were driven from power.
The Hittites occupied most of modern Turkey from about 1450 to 1200 BCE. The Hittites were often in
contact with Egypt. Egypt and the Hittites signed the world’s first peace treaty.
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