Hugh Nibley
“A few years ago your loudest objection to the Jaredite history would most certainly have been its careless references to iron and even steel (Ether 7:9) in an age when iron and steel were supposedly undreamed of. Today the protest must be rather feeble…Let me refer you to Wainwright‘s recent study on ’The Coming of Iron.’ There you will learn that the use of iron is as primitive as that of any other metal: ’In using scraps of meteoric iron while still in the Chalcolithic Age the predynastic Egyptians were in no way unusual…it now transpires that…man was able at an extremely early date to smelt his own iron from its ores and manufacture it into weapons.’…Certainly there is no longer any reason for denying the Jaredites iron if they wanted it. A Mesopotamian knife blade ‘not of meteoric origin’ and set in a handle has been dated with certainty to the twenty-eighth century B.C.; iron from the Great Pyramid goes back to 2900 B.C. and ’might perhaps have been smelted from an ore.’…As early as 1925 B.C., a Hittite king had a throne of iron, and in Hittite temple inventories ’iron is the common metal, not the bronze to which one is accustomed in other lands of the Near East.’ If we move farther east, into the region in which the Jaredites took their rise, we find the manufacture of iron so far advanced by the Amarna period that the local monarch can send to the king of Egypt two splendid daggers ’whose blade is of khabalkinu,‘ the word being usually translated as ’steel.’ Though the translation is not absolutely certain, literary references to steel are very ancient…If we would trace the stuff back to its place and time of origin, we should in all probability find ourselves at home with the Jaredites, for theirs was the land of Tubal-cain, ’the far northwest corner of Mesopotamia,’ which, Wainwright observes in approving the account in Genesis 4:22, is ’the oldest land where we know stores of manufactured iron were kept and distributed to the world.’ It is to this region and not to Egypt that we must look for the earliest as well as the best types of ancient iron work, even though the Egyptians knew iron by 3500 B.C. at least.” (Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites, pp. 214-6)