Out of the fiery furnace: the impact of metals on the history of mankind. Robert Raymond. 1984.

What were the discoveries that enabled mankind to leave the Stone Age and enter the Age of Metals? How did early man divine the existence of metals, locked up in the rocks? What was the first metal that he learned to use? Where and when did these momentous advances take place and how did metals change the way we lived?

Such questions embody one of the most extraordinary aspects of the rise of civilisation. The human race has existed as a species for perhaps two or three million years, but we have known about metals for only the last ten thousand years. In these pages, Robert Raymond follows the fascinating route from the earliest known metal smelting site, in the arid Sinai Desert of Israel, to the flood plains of the Yellow River in China, to discover the secrets of the exquisite Shang bronzes and to reveal newly iron-casting techniques which were 1500 years ahead of the West, to the stronghold of the Hittites in Anatolia, where the Iron Age may be said to have begun, to villages in India where metal-working techniques have hardly changed in 5000 years.