for beehives. This was subsistence level farming.

Pottery was given symmetry when formed with use of a wheel and
heated in increasingly hot kilns. From kilns used for pottery, it
was noticed that lumps of gold or copper ore within would melt and
assume the shape of what they had been resting on. These were the
first metals, and could be beaten into various shapes, such as
ornaments. Then the liquid ore was poured into moulds carved out
of stones to make axes and daggers, which were reheated and
hammered to become strong. Copper-tipped drills, chisels, punches
and awls were also made.

The bodies of deceased were buried far away from any village in
wood coffins, except for kings, who were placed in large stone
coffins after being wrapped in linen. Buried with them were a few
personal items, such as copper daggers, flat copper axes, and awls
[small pointed tool for piercing holes in leather, wood, or other
soft materials.]. The deceased was buried in a coffin with a stone
on top deep in the earth to keep the spirit of the dead from
coming out to haunt the living.

It was learned that tin added to the copper made a stronger metal:
bronze. Stone hammers, and bronze and iron tools, were used to
make cooking pots, weapons, breast plates, and horse bits, which
were formed from moulds and/or forged by bronze smiths and
blacksmiths from iron extracted from iron ore heated in bowl-
shaped hearths. Typically one man operated the bellows to keep the
fire hot while another did the hammering. Bronze was made into
sickles for harvesting, razors for shaving, tweezers, straight
hair pins, safety pins for clothes, armlets, neck-rings, and
mirrors. Weapons included bows and arrows, flint and copper
daggers, bronze swords and spears, stone axes, and shields of wood
with bronze mountings. The bows and arrows probably evolved from
spear throwing rods. Kings in body armor fought with chariots
drawn by two horses. The horse harnesses had bronze fittings. The
chariots had wood wheels, later with iron rims. When bronze came
into use, there was a demand for its constituent parts: copper and
tin, which were traded by rafts on waterways and the sea. When
iron came into use, there were wrought iron axes, saws, adzes [ax
with curved blade used to dress wood], files, ploughshares,
harrows [set of spikes to break clods of earth on ploughed land and
also to cover seed when sewn], scythes, billhooks [thick knife
with hooked point used to prune shru