Wow, this is very interesting and right up my alley. One of my many random hobbies is collecting images of artefacts and I have a huge dir dedicated just to ancient swords. Bronze tends to look very similar due to the casting methods but it's cool to see an older iteration and compare it to say the Scythian (my personal favorites), Mycenaean, Greek, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, etc.
Funny enough, the ones I have marked as oldest are called "The Swords of Arslantepe" [1] (which the article mentions in passing) from the same general region as this one, and are said to be also ~5k old, and of a very similar chemical composition. The weapons of the royal tombs of Ur [2] are right behind these in age.
What do you make of the myth that Scots came from Scythia - e.g. in the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath:
They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous.
Now I'm not say there is much chance of historicity of this myth - but I've been puzzled as to why anyone would pick on Scythia as a place to come from?
I think there might be more merit to it than previously thought, but not just for the Scots, much more broadly to the earlier Celtic progenitors of a few later more distinct groups. For example, I don't remember the tribes name, but I recently learned one of the southeasterly Germanic tribes who claimed to be the oldest of the Germanic tribes also said they came from Scythia!
I tend to think of the Yamna and Corded Ware a lot when considering this question.
While it used to be more controversial, this has also been why the reduction of cost of genetic sequencing has been showing more and more scientifically viable analysis of these types of questions because DNA is much easier to follow! So the Scythians are really just a much younger version of some common ancestors, with haplogroup R1a being one of the more dominant ones.
In short, I think overfocusing on the younger "Scythian hypothesis" is too specific and prone to error, but there are lots of great insights to be had in following the genetic maps that have been exploding the knowledge set of proto-indo-european archaeology since about 2010.
The way I see it, there are two factors for the origin myths:
The misidentification of various people. Practically every barbarian horde descending from euro-asian steppe into europe was called scythian as if it was one and the same. That was the case for huns, avars, magyars and others.
The desire to be associated with martial might/success. The desire to claim primacy (and therefore rights) over some territory.
History is rife with such myths of origin.
I wanted to answer to arethuza but you just provided a reference to the essence of what I was going to say: "The [...] Indo-Europeans, a nomadic culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, expanded in several waves during the 3rd millennium BC. Their expansion coincided with the taming of the horse." Basically, using horses as an overpowering advantage over others, the people living in the space that was later inhabited by Scytians spread all over, including westward. Not much room for "picking a place to come from", as I understand it.
I think that was a poor choice of phrase by me - what I meant was, how did the Scots (who definitely have historical roots in Ireland) get this idea from?
NB Scots in the sense of Dál Riata Scots, who eventually became the most powerful grouping in what became Scotland in the 9th century.
No, I'm not sure about copyright on most of them and how fair use would work for that. (I also have a map collection that is pretty awesome that suffers the same issue.)
That’s an interesting space. There should be a way to share just file hashes with a description and basic metadata for each of them, eg:
dea939...82f A scan of Newton’s personal notebook, page 13 (image from London Museum of History, 2013, 8000x6000 pixels)
That way people who like to build such collections would have ways to share and compare theirs, and see if they have anything missing from bigger datasets, etc. You could even imagine a wikimedia style commons to manage a repository of these hashes and associated metadata.
-One of my wife’s ancestors found a sword dating back some 1,300 years on the farm we currently live on, and it has caused lots of annoyances over the years.
The problem is that the national Norwegian archive of ancient artifact findings only register the property something is found on, not the exact location.
Hence, a hundred years after a sword was found in a mountainside a mile away from where we live, I have to obtain permission from an archaeologist every time I put a shovel in the ground, more or less...
The sword looks cool, though. (On display in a museum; no such thing as finder’s keepers for such old things - very rightly so!)
I’ll ask - I have to admit I’ve only seen it once - when at the museum, I asked kindly and a curator took mercy upon me, gave me a cup of coffee and proceeded to locate the sword from storage. I know a sizable part of the collection is being digitized - I’ll check!
-Not very big; approximately a square kilometer (.4 sqm) all told - most of which is forest and a mountainside. Some 30,000sqm arable land, all of which is maintained by neighbours who are active farmers -both my wife and I are engineers.
This seems to stretch the meaning of "discovered." Hey look, I just discovered a dinosaur at the natural history museum! It's older than they thought it was!
Certainly it is a significant contribution, but I have to admit that my mental image when reading someone dicovered an ancient sword is of someone digging it out of the ground.
Reminds me of the discovery of a 1,500 year old sword at the bottom of a lake thought to be King Arthur's legendary excalibur which was said to have been thrown in that same lake in Cornwall in England [0].
"Moistened bint" is still one of the most visceral phrases I've ever heard. Props to the Pythons for making archaic language offensive well beyond it's use by date.
"Strange women handing over swords is no basis for a system of government... You can't expect to wield Supreme Executive Power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!"
I wasn't even aware things were really made of metal before like 2,000 years ago. Crazy!
Is there a history of metal somewhere? Bronze, copper, tin, steal, gold, harvesting, forging, etc. It would be an interesting read of history, science, and discovery.
It's nearly impossible to grow up in Western culture (no experience with others) and not have some extremely basic Asterix-level understanding of what the Romans were and when they lived.
And that they basically copied large chunks of their own culture from Greece which invented democracy a few centuries earlier.
I mean, even Christian fundamentals have that context based on their lecture of the Christ saga.
It's all fundamentally what our own culture is based on in the West, just look at Washington DC and the buildings. Or Wall St. The Greco-Roman influence is permeating the West.
Sure this is true when you sit and explicitly consider all of it. My comment was more about the intuition of it all. A lot of people don't carry it in their head.
If you took a random sampling of American's and asked them "when did people start using metal," what do you think the average response would be? I'd expect the answers to range from one hundred years ago to a million years ago.
It's nearly impossible to grow up in Western culture and not have some extremely basic asterix-level understanding of geography, yet we have people who literally cannot name a single country on a map of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umpalMtQE50
But if you made them pause and consider the map, and you highlighted the US and asked pointedly, "This is the US, right?" Probably most of them would correctly say yes.
This is the difference between highlighting and consideration vs. not. Many people (most?) aren't going to have the thought of "when did humans start using metal?" It's a very specific question. Until they really consider it, for many it will be assumed to be within some ridiculous range.
Have you pointedly considered every historical question in the universe? If not, what wildly incorrect assumptions might you be making about history? If there are any (there are), then you shouldn't be so judgmental of others' assumptions about some things.
To me, when I think of metal I think of computers, cars, train rail, braces, buildings. When I think old, I think stone. When I think Roman, I think old, therefore stone. "Height of the roman empire" doesn't even work in changing this perception. How long did the roman empire exist? (The assumption for falls into the same wild range predicament.) I guess they had metal coins, but did they have them the whole time if it was an empire that existed for a long time? Metal I guess was used in the middle ages right? So like, maybe towards the far-late stage of the Roman empire, like 500 AD?
It's just an unhelpful comment and criticism that comes from the perspective of believing everyone's brain should act like the commenter's.
The article has words to the effect that swords were "first forged[] both as weapons and as symbols of authority".
Of course that can't possibly be true. They were weapons first. Without the use as weapons, there would be no reason to see them as symbols of authority.
In the Iliad (much more recent than this sword, but nonetheless informative in some ways), swords are symbolic of nothing. The text is very clear on what the symbol of royal authority is -- it's a club. ("Scepter")
I'd be pretty comfortable with the idea that clubs are no more recent than weapons in general.
Yes, even until the Hellenistic era, the weapon of virtue and honour was... the spear.
As exemplified by the poetic sense of a conqueror's demense: his spear-won land.
However, other peoples from deep antiquity held sword to higher regard. Like the Celts and Germans. Especially the Germanic tribes, who couldn't make their own swords and need to win them in trade or raid.
Also IIRC, samurai initially prized archery and the spear over using a sword as marks of their noble status - melee combat with a blade for a samurai was a sign of desperation born of ineptitude with "proper" weapons and tactics. It wasn't until the Edo period when the samurai were relegated to a bureaucracy that the cult around the katana was formed, and sort of retroactively applied to the popular interpretation of history.
I'm not sure that follows. If a sword was totally economically impractical for use as a weapon, to the extent that only the king gets one, but was clearly better than the contemporary weapons, it's not a weapon, it's a symbol of authority.
Good point. That must be why swords and plows are both equally effective symbols of authority.
Forges have always produced utilitarian items for the common man. If, hypothetically, the only thing you could make out of metal was useless, non-weapon swords... then once again there would be no reason to do it at all.
Just because you control what comes out of the forge doesn't mean you there is material scarcity. What doesn't scream authority like making a sharp and regal piece of metal for no other reason than to display it. It's like you've never heard of jewellery.
Blatantly mislabeled stuff being rediscovered in archives and dusty back shelves of museums is more the rule than the exception. It happens all the time. There's way more stuff collecting dust in museum archives than there are subject matter experts to review them.
I'm not a historian / archaeologist, so I can't really be sure here, but I would have assumed bronze would have been valued throughout history for-at least-it's appearance?
I also would have assumed the fun-factor has been a historical constant too? If you're wealthy enough, at any time since the bronze age, you might want a bronze version of [thing] for the same reasons people want a bronze [thing] now?
You raise an interesting point, and one that I have thought about quite often.
In archaeology, there seems to be an assumption that people in the past only ever did things for two reasons: Utility and religion. If an object doesn't seem to have an obvious usefulness, it's assumed that the artifact is of religious nature.
People have not changed much in the last few thousand years, and thins that we find interesting today must surely have been interesting in the past. In your example, why wouldn't a person 1000 years ago consider a replica "ancient thing" just as interesting as we do today?
Just imagine a future archaeologist looking at the modern work with the mindset of current archaeologists? What kind of religious symbolism would they ascribe to a picachu cosplay outfit?
> In archaeology, there seems to be an assumption that people in the past only ever did things for two reasons: Utility and religion. If an object doesn't seem to have an obvious usefulness, it's assumed that the artifact is of religious nature.
> I wonder if archeologists actually do believe everything was either utilitarian or religious, or if that’s just the way it gets reported?
This is definitely now how archaeologists think. Archaeology is a subfield of anthropology. Our goal is to understand how people live through the lens of material culture, i.e. how people inhabit a world made out of stuff. Of course it is common to consider the pragmatic aspects regarding why weird things might have been created or the purposes that they might serve in people's lives, but chocking the unexplainable up to ritual or religion is just dumb and amateurish. No archaeologist I know actually does this. Archaeologists generally feel comfortable acknowledging that we can't explain certain things from our current standpoint, saying that it's ritual without a basis for that claim is just plain dumb and is never taken seriously. It is an extremely outdated trope.
> People have not changed much in the last few thousand years, and thins that we find interesting today must surely have been interesting in the past. In your example, why wouldn't a person 1000 years ago consider a replica "ancient thing" just as interesting as we do today?
Note in my definition of archaeology I don't focus on the past? That's intentional, since archaeologists very commonly examine contemporary material culture.
> Just imagine a future archaeologist looking at the modern work with the mindset of current archaeologists? What kind of religious symbolism would they ascribe to a picachu cosplay outfit?
As an archaeologist, my understanding is that pikachu products exist to make money for the people who sell pikachu products.
You need to understand that archaeologists are never working in the dark. We reason through an abductive process, like adding brushstrokes to a never-quite-complete painting (also similar to medical diagnosis). We'll never actually understand how people lived in the past, since it is impossible to verify any such claim. But we can come up with a reasonable understanding by slotting different streams of complementary evidence together.
In archaeology, there seems to be an assumption that people in the past only ever did things for two reasons: Utility and religion. If an object doesn't seem to have an obvious usefulness, it's assumed that the artifact is of religious nature.
This isn't really true at all. For example, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri[1] is an ancient rubbish dump full of all kinds of random documents. One of the more amusing ones is "The contract of a wrestler agreeing to throw his next match for a fee".
You can, but they're not practical weapons, either, really. Once decent ironworking was available, bronze became largely impractical for edged weapon manufacture, to the extent that you'd be unlikely to find one.
This has some truth, but steel weapons were better than both.
High quality pattern welded[1] steel swords were available in Roman times from at least 150 BC[2], and by 600 AD were ubiquitous. They were later mostly replaced by easier steel production techniques.
MUCH cheaper, once the technological transition was complete. To the extent that making a bronze weapon as an actual weapon wouldn't make sense. They're available now as effectively decorative items, but I'm pretty sure that's a 20th century phenomenon.
I always laugh when stealing research data of ongoing work is an import plot point. Making sense of it can be hard for the person who wrote it, let alone a close colleague, but a stranger? Haha, good luck.
Fiction aside, funding makes a difference here. Give non military science funds comparable to hollywood movies and we'll likely go from 2 years to a few months.
How does one get better at noticing that something is "off" like this sword not matching its claimed origin? To me, it took more than student being an expert here. Experts often miss things like this in my experience if they're not paying attention for it. I'm assuming that the student was the a tour not in her capacity as a Bronze age weapons specialist, so if that's true then this wasn't necessarily something she would be paying attention for.
When I notice that something is off, it's usually a fleeting thought that quickly passes. Sometimes when I notice that something is off a second time, I'll realize that I didn't "catch" the thought the first time. I think I've been getting better at catching those thoughts and writing them down. I'm also confident that there are methods to increase the frequency by which one catches these things, though I'm not certain how.
I'm making a guess here, but mindfulness and being 'awake' (bit vague terms I know) would do it I think; I believe so many people walked past that sword without really paying much attention to it - oh it's an old sword in a display case (I think?), neat. In a place like that, and I get the same thing in historical museums, you get so much things coming at you that it's hard to take it all in - let alone think critically about it.
I'm guessing she took more than a quick glance at the sword and the blurb.
Well, in this case, I don't think it was a subtle "something is off." The sword matched a specific pattern that she was very familiar with from her studies. She recognised it.
It seems like in this case, there was a vague description that didn't align with her acute knowledge of a very specific/esoteric subject. Her father was an archival researcher at the monastery. So to get better at this, a good path would probably be to develop general critical observation skills, as well as a deep understanding of particular subjects that you'd be exposed to.
I think you may be misreading the term "father" in this context. It's not that the grad student's literal biological father is a researcher at the monastery. One of the priests/monks, who carry the honorific title Father[0], is an archival researcher in the monastery.
I know that this is more of an announcement of the recognition of the misattribution of an artifact in the museum’s collection, but I am more curious of it’s provenance; specifically, how it made its way into the museum’s collection. And what its original archaeological context was.
Funny enough, the ones I have marked as oldest are called "The Swords of Arslantepe" [1] (which the article mentions in passing) from the same general region as this one, and are said to be also ~5k old, and of a very similar chemical composition. The weapons of the royal tombs of Ur [2] are right behind these in age.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Swords+of+Arslantepe&iax=im...
[2] http://sumerianshakespeare.com/117701/118301.html
edit: From the article, a new one to me: "and the sword found in the Tokat Museum in Turkey", now I have a new something to search for!