This horseman carries two spears, one long and one medium-sized. The grave marker of Panaitios of the deme Hamaxanteia in Athens who died around 400 BCE. His longer spear is 1.62 times as long as he is tall, which would make it about 275 cm (9′) if he were an average ancient Greek man 170 cm tall. Athens Greece, National Archaeological Museum of Athens, accession number 884. Adapted from Wikimedia Commons
Because most of the participants in the old hoplite debate were English-speaking philologists not German-speaking archaeologists, English speakers have many misconceptions about the things Greek hoplites carried. Many people today believe that most Greek hoplites carried a long spear with an iron-clad or bronze-clad butt. I don’t know any basis for this in an ancient text, and in my experience much less than half of all warriors with round shields in Greek art have a spike (saurotēr) on the butt of their spear. But we can check this against archaeology. By the 6th century BCE it was not common to bury people with weapons in southern Greece, but it was common to dedicate arms and armour to the gods at sanctuaries. These were sometimes buried when there was no more room for them (as at Olympia) and sometimes buried when the site was destroyed by invaders (such as at Kalapodi in central Greece, which was probably destroyed by Xerxes’ troops in 480 BCE). Josho Brouwers summarized the weapons from these sites in his PhD thesis.
Isn’t it cool? And very La Tène 500 years before that archaeological culture. A bronze spear from Hampshire, England found in the 19th century: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number: 1998.540.1 Neil Burridge of Bronze Age Swords is teaching a spear casting workshop at Berrycroft Hub in Oxfordshire, England on 11 June 2022. I am... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Bronze Spear Workshop, England, 11 July
An intact spear and buckler from the famous excavations at La Tène, Switzerland. Planche II of P. Vouga, “La Tène: Quatrième Rapport, Foulles de 1910 et 1911,” Musée Neuchâtelois, XLIXme Année (1912) pp. 7-15 http://doc.rero.ch/record/12454
There are many great publications of Germanic, British, and Celtic spears. Are there any published spears from the imperium Romanum, especially the eastern half? Or from pre-imperial Italy? I’m curious about what woods were used, how the diameter varies from point to butt, and the overall length.
One of the polychrome brick reliefs from Achaemenid Susa, now in the Louvre, Paris.
In an earlier post, I talked about the guards in Persian reliefs from Susa who are 17 bricks tall and have spears 19 or 21 bricks tall. Artists often ‘improve’ human proportions according to different ideas of what the well-formed body looks like: these guards are 5 2/3 bearded faces tall (17/3), Cennino Cennini would have them 6 1/2 bearded faces tall (26/4).
When I visited the Louvre in July I had a chance to look at some of those reliefs for the first time since 2016 (a few are on display behind glass in Tehran). As you see, my hand and the hand of the sculpture are about the same size (and I am not particularly tall or short). My hand is slightly closer to the camera than the sculpture is, so it is slightly enlarged.
_at_the_National_Archaeological_Museum_of_Athens_on_4_June_2018.jpg){kind=link}