Iron in the early times is seemingly unknown, and when it first appears is wrought into ornaments for the person.

Knives of flint or chert [PLATE XIV., Fig.

3], stone hatchets, hammers, adzes, and nails, are common in the most ancient mounds, which contain also a number of clay models, the centres, as it is thought, of moulds into which molten bronze was run, and also occasionally the bronze instruments themselves, as (in addition to spear heads and arrow-heads) hammers, adzes, hatchets, knives, and sickles.

It will be seen by the engraved representations that these instruments are one and all of a rude and coarse character.

[PLATE XV.], [PLATE XVI.] The flint and stone knives, axes, and hammers, which abound in all the true Chaldaean mounds, are somewhat more advanced indeed than those very primitive implements which have been found in a drift; but they are of a workmanship at least as unskilled as that of the ordinary stone celts of Western and Northern Europe, which till the discoveries of M.Perthes were regarded as the most ancient human remains in our quarter of the globe.