Bronze Age

How to Grip Bronze Age Swords (Response to Dimicator and Matt Easton)

a two-edged bronze sword with a bronze hilt and a bronze 'sun-hat-shaped' pommel
An ordinary Late Bronze Age European sword of the so-called Naue type II. It has a bronze hilt of hollow scales riveted to the tang and has a longer blade and wider pommel than some swords but a shorter blade and smaller pommel than others. The long ridge down the centre of the blade both makes it stiffer and helps the bronze flow all the way to the end of the mould (contact with the surface of the mould cools out the metal, and a long flat blade has a lot of surface of mould to contact). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number 54.46.8

Over on his website and social media, Roland Warzecha has been talking about how to hold European swords of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the so-called Naue type II. These swords have a broad flat blade, a broad tang with scales riveted to the sides, and usually a mushroom-shaped pommel. If you are at all interested in swords, these are worth studying, because they are the earliest swords that we can understand really well. Iron tends to shrink or expand in the ground or water, and especially after it is excavated, so the remains of iron or steel swords tend to be ugly misshapen things. Bronze swords can emerge from the ground looking like they just left a cutler’s shop, and sometimes they have bronze grips and pommels so all parts of the sword are preserved. In the worst case the handle and the area where the handle joins the blade are usually preserved. In most of Bronze Age Europe it was not customary to make detailed images of human beings. Nor was it customary to write things down. But the swords, spears, and shields in museums speak to us and tell us how they want to be used if we can learn to hear them. They were carefully designed by sophisticated people for sophisticated people.

Read more

Dating Bronze Age Shields

the front of a round bronze centergrip shield with a boss and a decoration of alternate solid ribs and rings of embossed dots
A Yetholm type shield from Rhyd-y-Gorse, Wales. Currently dated 1200-900 BCE. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1873-0210-2

Most archaeologists focus on metal, stone, and ceramic objects which are common and easy to conserve, but this has problems! Back in 1962 John Coles studied European Bronze Age shields by beginning with complete bronze shields (or shield covers) from Cyprus, the Aegean, southern Germany, Czechia, Denmark, and the British Isles. Because the oldest finds in the Aegean could be dated to around 850 BCE, Coles created an elaborate theory that the surviving wooden and hide shields and shield moulds from Ireland were copies of Southwest Spanish copies of the shields from the Aegean and Cyprus. Because the shields from Ireland were found loose in bogs, there was no way to date them by the other objects they were found with. Then in 1991 specialists started to collect radiocarbon dates from the Irish shields and shield-moulds, and consistently got dates before 1000 BCE! Since most parts of Europe don’t have as many peat bogs as Ireland, and ancient wood and hide rarely survive outside of bogs, this sparked some rethinking!

Read more

A Bronze-Age Solution

I was recently in Prague on the way back from a visit to another city, and in their National Gallery I noticed this:

A cord-and-wax seal on a door in the National Gallery, Prague.  Photo by Sean Manning, August 2016.
A cord-and-wax seal on a door in the National Gallery, Prague. Photo by Sean Manning, August 2016.

Art galleries in big old buildings often need to keep people from going un-noticed into areas which are not on public display, without blocking the connection completely. I saw the same solution at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg:

A cord-and-wax seal in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg.  Photo by Sean Manning, September 2015.
A cord-and-wax seal in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Photo by Sean Manning, September 2015.

But I knew it of old, because when I was growing up I had a book on Tutankhamun’s tomb which showed the cord-and-wax seal to the door of the shrine around his sarcophagus. The mourners who sealed Tut’s tomb added a special knot in the cord which thieves might find difficult to forge, but he was Pharaoh after all.

Photo by Harry Burton (1922) courtesy of the National Geographic Society and rarehistoricalphotos.com

Read more

The Elamite Rock Relief at Kurangun

Ever since Darius’ inscription at Behistun was deciphered, scholars have puzzled why it is placed high on a cliff where nobody can read it and even the sculptures are difficult to see. Even the ledge on which the builders stood was chiselled away, so that visitors who wished to copy the inscription had to be lowered by ropes from above. A common answer is that he wrote it for the gods, but this does not really work. Darius specifically addresses future kings, and readers who might doubt his words, and includes the boilerplate blessing on those who preserve and proclaim his words and curse on those who alter or destroy them. He also says that after the inscription was composed copies were sent amongst the nations (paragraph 70 of the Old Persian version), and we have a copy in Aramaic from Elephantine on the Nile and a retelling by Herodotus which clearly draws on the official version of the story. Babylonian scholars often had copies of foundation inscriptions and other texts which were buried for posterity in their collections. While the copy at Behistun was placed where nobody could read it, the text which is preserved there clearly has specific mortal audiences which Darius was concerned about, and it influenced many people in the empire and beyond.

At another place in Fars there is a tongue of rock overlooking a river with a fertile plain. On this tongue there is also a large relief carved into the rock about a hundred meters above the plain below. It was there long before Darius, although it is not clear that he was familiar with it like he was with some other rock reliefs.

The Elamite rock relief and valley below at Kurangun in Iran.  Photo by Sean Manning, May 2016.
The Elamite rock relief and valley below at Kurangun in Iran. Photo by Sean Manning, May 2016.

Read more

A Monster-Headed Luristan Axe

As the chapter of my dissertation on war in the ancient near east before the Achaemenid period takes shape, I am reading books like Oscar White Musarella’s study of bronze and iron artifacts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I do so, it occurred to me that I have something to add to my earlier post about monster-headed axes.

The first axe belongs to the sad collection of artifacts known as Luristan bronzes. The ancient people there deposited many fine bronzes in their tombs, and in the 1920s the locals began to dig them up and sell them on a large scale. Once enterprising smiths began to cast their own “Luristan bronzes,” and dealers began to market objects looted from other regions under the “Luristan” label, a great deal of knowledge was lost forever. However, this axe resembles finds with inscriptions from the 12th century BCE or excavated from a temple built at at Tschogha Zanbil in the 13th (although there are others in contexts 400 years younger). Have a look at how the blade is attached to the socket.

An axehead with its blade emerging from the mouth of a duck attached to its socket
A bronze axehead from the Metropolitan Museum, NY, accession number 32.161.2; discussed in Muscarella, Iron and Bronze, p. 190 no. 304.



Second, take another look at the axe of an Achaemenid king as carved sometime around 500 BCE.

Read more

Some Thoughts on “Armour Never Wearies”

Timothy Dawson, Armour Never Wearies: Scale and Lamellar Armour from the Bronze Age to the 19th Century. Spellmount: Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0-7524-8862-2. Cover shows a cavalryman in scale armour riding over fallen enemies with a background of armour of steel scales laced to leather bands
Timothy Dawson, Armour Never Wearies: Scale and Lamellar Armour from the Bronze Age to the 19th Century. Spellmount: Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0-7524-8862-2. Cover shows a cavalryman in scale armour riding over fallen enemies with a background of armour of steel scales laced to leather bands

Timothy Dawson, Armour Never Wearies: Scale and Lamellar Armour from the Bronze Age to the 19th Century. Spellmount: Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0-7524-8862-2 Biblio
128 pages, GBP 14.99

Dr. Timothy Dawson has undertaken a difficult task: to understand armours of small plates laced or wired together, often known as scale or lamellar. Although these kinds of armour were once common, they tend to fall apart as the backing or lacing rots, so understanding how they were made is hard. Even worse, he is most interested in styles from the Greek Christian world which are only preserved as vague references in texts, stylized images of saints, and a few fragments of rusted iron. Moreover, arms and armour studies are not well supported by academe, so he has to do his work at his own expense and without the discipline of needing to submit his ideas to criticism by a group of peers. The resulting book is not very useful to me, but under the circumstances I can’t complain.

Read more
paypal logo
patreon logo