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?
In: 2489
It’s called iron age, but really it’s age of ferrous metallurgy – most notably steelmaking. Iron cannot be so easily reduced as tin or copper, or well you can, but it results in alloy of so [high carbon content](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron) that it’s completely unusable. Modern metallurgy has [ways](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_oxygen_steelmaking) to work that to steel, but ancient metallurgy didn’t so they couldn’t start with that route.
Instead they used [bloomery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery) process, which reduces iron without ever truly melting it. It produces a porous impurity filled mass or iron and working it into usable steel billet takes a lot of effort and bit of skill, even then quality is poor. There is an [easy and low tech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel) way to do better, but to invent it you either need to be very lucky or have some basic understanding of metallurgy.
Ancients had no understanding of metallurgy, it was all trial and error and pure dumb luck, so hard way it was for most of the world right until modern times. Making minimally usable steel is much more complicated than making minimally usable bronze.
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