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.
In September and October, I came across several projects in archaeology which help us understand early warfare. This week’s post will take us from China to Germany, Italy, and England and from the Bronze Age to the 18th century CE.
Figure 7 from Hermann et al. 2020 (see below). Left is a replica sword which has delivered a strike to the socket of a bronze spearhead, right is an original bronze sword
I will start with the Bronze Age (best age!) then move on to ages of other metals. A German-UK-Chinese team published the latest project trying to understand how Bronze Age swords were used. They examined damage to the edges of originals and then compared it to damage on replica swords by Neil Burridge after performing Andre Lignitzer’s six sword-and-buckler plays. I’d like to see more studies like this borrowing ideas from other martial arts like Shastar Vidiya to see which seem to work best with Bronze Age weapons from Europe. Fifteenth-century German fencing such as Andre Lignitzer’s plays has a lot of blade-on-blade contact and twisty actions while the blades are crossed, whereas other martial arts rely on the shield to defend or prefer simpler weapon-on-weapon actions. But I think that the evidence that swords from some periods often have marks characteristic of controlled parrying, whereas in other periods the edge damage is more random, is valuable. I am also glad that they experimented with common matchups like sword against spear, and not just the rare occasions when a sword was used against another warrior with a sword who was ready for the attack.
The Before Times were good for tests of bows or guns against low-tech armour. I just learned that Sylvia Leever’s tests against two 17th century breastplates is available on YouTube: Sylvia Leever, For Show or Safety? (2005, posted 3 August 2013) You can find more information about her project in: Leever, Sylvia (2005) “For Show... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Armour vs. Bullet Tests
In April I participated in a prehistoric bronze-casting workshop with Dr. Bastian Asmus at the open air museum at Heuneburg (near Herbertingen, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany). I believe that it is helpful for historians to understand the world of things and skills in which their subjects lived. Like any other art, imitating historical bronze-casting requires a range of skills and is best learned by practice.
