Another interesting bit of trivia is that the Greeks came up with the terms "Bronze Age" and "Iron Age," knowing full well that iron (at least, the early poor-quality iron they knew) was an inferior metal. They had a bad case of "things were much better in the good old days, now the kids have no respect for our traditions and everything sucks." So some Greek historians posited that they had started out in a mythological "Golden Age" where people lived among the Gods and everything was great, then things descended through the "Silver Age" down to the "Bronze Age" where pious men waged war with the then-plentiful bronze. "Iron Age" was the derogatory term they used for their present day, where society had decayed and men were impious and immoral, symbolized by the rarity of bronze and the ubiquity of that inferior iron crap. Note the progression of metals, in order of decreasing rarity and value: Gold->Silver->Bronze->Iron, each new age was a step down.It wasn't until much later that more recent historians borrowed those terms, and used them to denote the worldwide progression from bronze to iron as if that was a good thing. Probably has to do with hindsight - now we know that working with iron would eventually lead to the superior steel, so the move to iron turned out to be beneficial in the long run. To the people actually experiencing the shift from bronze to iron, early iron was just a poor substitute for bronze.