they lose big time. i outnumber them even tho there are more of them. and bronze is better than iron.
the sword in the stone, excalibur was bronze.
watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CZQO8q9DYU
battle of kadesh 1274 b.c. 20,000 egyptians vs. 23,000 to 50,000 hittites. rameses won on points. at least a draw. great slaughter on both sides. mostly slaughtered hittites tho. hittites sued for peace.
intereseting video :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4qLhq5V2-o
'nother:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFTAdzHbp2I
these were made by my local bronze smith noted earlier.
excerpt from a metallurgists dissertation
Quote:
1.4 WHY CHANGE FROM GOOD BRONZE TO BAD IRON?
To return to the question with which I began this chapter, there are a number of
competing theories, and I have described some of them in previous editions of these
notes. However, in keeping with Occam's razor, the most probable reason is also the
simplest. They changed to iron because it was cheap.
In this the British were not unique. They were, in fact, repeating history from the
cradle of civilization in the Middle East more than a millennium earlier. Every society,
from the Hittites forward, changed to iron weaponry as soon as they learned how to make
it, despite the fact that the iron they could make was everywhere inferior to good bronze.
(When Goliath met David, in the biblical account, he was carried iron weapons but
wearing bronze armor. His choices give a pretty good indication of which metal he
thought would do the better job of protecting him.)
Early iron was inferior to good bronze, but it wasn't that bad. And it was plentiful
and cheap. Given a choice between a thousand soldiers armed with iron and half that
number armed with bronze, the wise king invested in iron. In many societies of the
period soldiers were expected to provide their own weaponry. Given that he could afford
fifty arrows tipped with iron or twenty tipped with bronze, the smart soldier made up his
mind very quickly.
Iron is, arguably, the most versatile metal in the periodic table, and metallurgists
gradually learned to make tools and weapons of iron that were far superior to any that
preceded them. But that came much later. In the early days iron dominated the market
because it was available and it was cheap.
If this is the case, can we, in Churchill's words, "plainly recognize across the vanished
millenniums a fellow-being?" Most of us will have little trouble doing that. In
fact, steel's place in the world market today is largely due to the fact that it is relatively
cheap. One can make a better automobile out of more exotic materials, and the owners of grand prix race cars do that. But most of us will continue to buy cars made primarily of
steel and bank the difference in price. A surprisingly large fraction of the materials used
in industry are chosen on the simple basis of cost and availability.
J. W. Morris, Jr.
A Survey of Materials Science
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
University of California, Berkeley
Fall 2008
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