Etymology is almost always speculative but phonetic loans have to be considered separately from typographic history.
There are at least 2 different chinese characters for iron, and the one in common use, the one you mention, has a different old chinese pronunciation (from the turko-mongolic word). The radical for the popular version clues one in to the original non barbarian pronunciation. (Maybe it referred to something else.) The radical for the other one means “barbarian”
It is not uncommon for chinese characters to be written the same but pronounced differently (and meaning something else) throughout the ages. And for the meaning and pronunciations of different characters to mix or merge
Indeed according to historian David Wagner,
“ The evidence presented thus far suggests that iron-smelting techniques developed in the West had by the eighth century BC been brought by nomadic peoples of Central Asia all the way to the Pacific coast, and that these techniques diffused to the smiths of the Chinese states by way of various non-Chinese peoples of the northwest, in what is now Xinjiang. ”
Thanks for the link to the paper. 8th century BCE is earlier than long before the earliest meaningful contact between China and Central Asia previously known to me, in the form of the Silk Road. And that's two millennia before the Mongols started having written history!
Also wanted to mention that bronze metallurgy is often considered elitist compared to iron metallurgy because 1)tin ores are less abundant 2) techniques are more intricate. Iron tech is pretty much the first mass tech, if zeroth is fire/fermentation or if those were too easy to be considered tech.
Tin requires a supply chain[1], but bronze requires no special technology to create. Refining iron is much more difficult, which is why we had bronze first.
Pottery long predates ironworking. So does agriculture. I'm not sure how you're defining "mass technology", but ironworking isn't the first one.
[1] It's not just tin. Copper has to be sourced from specific locations too.
Bronze: yeah I should have clarified that for bronze i mean the whole bronze business, including making moulds and such. Iron and steel is like photography compared to painting you need less raw skill to be commercially viable once you can get past acquiring the stuff to get started
Mass technology: I was thinking of programming. You have a class of people distinguished by their skill. Sometimes you even have a representative in the pantheon (Wayland)
Trying to interpret individual radicals of a character as standalone components using their original meaning is enticing, but more often than not incorrect. For example, the character for maternal aunt uses the same radical. Phonetic-semantic compound characters are very, very, common. The standalone pronunciation of 夷 doesn't appear to have turkic/steppe origins either [1].
Moreover, we know Mongolian writing (because of the geopolitics of the time and its status as a younger written tradition) borrowed quite liberally from its southern neighbours. Including, but not limited to, China [2]. So while Wagner's point about proliferation of ironmaking techniques from outside the (nominal) Chinese state at the time makes sense, the whole phonetic angle doesn't.
As for the points about centralization and family name elitism, the first lasted less than 200 years, by which time many formerly aristocratic family names had become _so_ diluted so as to be almost meaningless. One of the main conceits of a major character in RoTK is that he's an average Joe who only gets a modicum of respect for having the same surname as the dynastic family. It also completely ignores the existence of profession-based surnames like 匠 ("artisan", notably 1/2 of 铁匠/blacksmith).
Notably? I would say “artisan” is too broad and “carpenter” is the usual meaning. the profession based surnames are far from being dominant either compared to smith, which almost always means blacksmith in the west.
While surnames are diluted this kind of “joke” about surnames still exists today, so there is at least some meaning
There are at least 2 different chinese characters for iron, and the one in common use, the one you mention, has a different old chinese pronunciation (from the turko-mongolic word). The radical for the popular version clues one in to the original non barbarian pronunciation. (Maybe it referred to something else.) The radical for the other one means “barbarian”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/銕#Chinese
It is not uncommon for chinese characters to be written the same but pronounced differently (and meaning something else) throughout the ages. And for the meaning and pronunciations of different characters to mix or merge
Indeed according to historian David Wagner, “ The evidence presented thus far suggests that iron-smelting techniques developed in the West had by the eighth century BC been brought by nomadic peoples of Central Asia all the way to the Pacific coast, and that these techniques diffused to the smiths of the Chinese states by way of various non-Chinese peoples of the northwest, in what is now Xinjiang. ”
http://donwagner.dk/EARFE/EARFE.html