I would have thought that with bronze being an alloy it would have been more difficult to work with than iron, so why was it the first to become widely used?
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Technology does not always get developed in the order you expect. The right genius with the right resources diligently working on solving a problem can result in amazing developments seemingly out of intuitive order.
As an example, consider the fact that humankind invented nuclear weapons (1940’s) before inventing compound bows (1966). This doesn’t make sense if all sophisticated tech necessarily has to be developed after simple tech. For that reason, bronze alloys being more difficult than iron alloys (if that is actually true) has no bearing on whether or not the simpler one gets developed first.
Imagine the ancient world’s equivalent of Nicola Tesla, some extremely prolific genius working in the highest tech of their day, metalurgy. If he happens to have access to copper or copper ore and tin, but not iron ore, given years of his hard work, experimentation, and tinkering, he might come up with sophisticated bronze alloys but not come up with anything based on iron simply because of lack of access to the right ore. And vice versa.
The Assyrians, for example, built their empire using iron weapons, but the Greeks who came after them were still largely bronze-based, if I remember correctly.
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