Classical Greece

An Indian Kopis from Deepeeka

a short single-edged sword which is wider near the point than the hilt on a hollow white plastered shield on a black plastic table — The domed round shield from my Patreon! I will have updates on this and my other shields soon.

I now own an Indian copy of a Greek kopis “cleaver” (pl. kopides, from the verb koptein “to split, hew”), a type of forward-curved sword or long knife used all over the northern Mediterranean from the sixth century BCE to the second century BCE. It was distinguished from straight, two-edged swords like the Scythian akinakes and the Greek xiphos (pl. xiphe: this word has neutral gender and belongs to the third declension). Whereas the straight swords were descended from the last bronze swords, the cleavers developed out of large iron knives used to butcher fish and animals and probably for other tasks in the woods and in the fields. Knives with a blade that bends forward are very common around the world, such as the Roman sica and many Chinese bronze knives. Fighting knives that bend the same way are less common, but they were popular in South Asia in recent times, and known in the Ottoman Empire in the form of the yatagan. They reappeared in Europe and settler colonies as part of ‘barbarian chic’ in the 19th and 20th century.,

While there are whole vlogs devoted to reviewing copies of knightly swords and Japanese swords, there is nothing similar for copies of ancient European swords. This is because the market is smaller and information about the originals is less accessible. So this week, I present the first review of the Deepeeka kopis by someone who has actually studied the archaeological literature and viewed originals.

a terracotta model shield painted with a red crab on a white background — Crab! A Boeotian Greek model of a shield in the British Museum, museum number 1895,1026.5 under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Responses at the International Ancient Warfare Conference 2023 made me wonder whether something I take for granted is obvious to other people interested in ancient Greece.

Today our armies are parallel societies or total institutions. They take in individual recruits, separate them from their prior friends and relations, and teach them everything they will need while they are isolated from their civilian associates. They re-organize these recruits into a new hierarchy of units for both everyday and tactical purposes (people in the same platoon both live and fight together, at least in the field). Armies like the army of Classical Athens were nothing like this and yet they fought.