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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Copper and tin both have lower melting points than iron. Bronze itself has a melting point some 500°C lower than wrought iron. This makes it much easier to cast and work than iron based alloys if you don’t have access to good quality furnaces.
Iron in it’s more useful forms is also technically a blend of iron and carbon. So you need to be able to produce large amounts of charcoal if you want to produce large amounts of strong iron and steel. This requires large amount of lumber, not something easily accessed without metal tools.
Iron, because of the aforementioned melting point and need for carbon additives, varied wildly in quality across the ancient world. In parts of the world that had access to comparitively low quality iron deposits or furnaces or even just limited lumber resources, like Japan, Scandinavia or the Middle East, we saw the development of forging techniques like “folding” to compensate for the impurities in the ore. Folding is a labour intensive process where one heats iron bars, hammers them out, folds them over, and hammers them out again. This folding strengthens the final iron bar and is useful for sword forging. Katanas are famously folded hundreds of times. Damascus Steel is another example. However, because of the labour and time involved, this is a highly specialized process that requires pretty hefty investment in tools and learning before it could become widespread.
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