EARLY BRONZE AGE DAGGERS IN CENTRAL ... - Bilkent University

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The beginning of the third millennium B.C. is one of the most eventful eras in
human history. Early Bronze Age is also the birth of “urbanization”, not just in
Anatolia but in whole of the Near East. The development of metal technologies might
have played a very important role in the events taking place in the Early Bronze Age
(Yalçın, 2008: 34). Therefore, the metallurgical studies have been one of the major
interests of scholars for over a century now (Heskel, 1983: 362). When metallurgy
developed beyond production of “trinkets”, the daggers came into the scene as one of
the earliest forms of what can be considered true “metallurgy” 1 . Daggers are one of the
oldest and commonest metal forms in Anatolia (Stronach, 1957: 89). The study of the
daggers and their distribution will not only enable us to track the development of
1 Production of “trinkets”, such as beads and awls, from the native copper sources is not considered to
be metallurgy. Only the application of extractive technologies can be considered as the birth of
metallurgy.
1