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5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

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Re: 5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

#101

Post by cat199 »

arethuza wrote: post #76
arminiusreturns wrote: post #34

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…

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 pu…

> why anyone would pick on Scythia as a place to come from?

still a bit of a thing today

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans#Steppe_th...

Re: 5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

#103

Post by TSiege »

lb1lf wrote: post #97
TSiege wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to the piece in the collection? I'd love to see it.

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!

Thanks!

Re: 5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

#104

Post by jaratec »

arethuza wrote: post #76
arminiusreturns wrote: post #34

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…

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 pu…

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.

Re: 5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

#105

Post by cfmcdonald »

rsynnott wrote: post #93
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be clear? You can buy new bronze daggers today.

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.

My understanding is that iron weapons were not greatly superior to bronze, just cheaper/easier to make.

Re: 5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

#106

Post by rsynnott »

cfmcdonald wrote: post #105
rsynnott wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is that iron weapons were not greatly superior to bronze, just cheaper/easier to make.

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.

Re: 5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

#107

Post by beaner »

neuronic wrote: post #65
beaner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose so, but that doesn't tell me anything. Edit: Downvotes? I'm expressing my own naivety. Not everyone has intuition of the heights of empires and what that means for metal usage.

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…

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.

Re: 5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

#108

Post by beaner »

tptacek wrote: post #98
beaner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose so, but that doesn't tell me anything. Edit: Downvotes? I'm expressing my own naivety. Not everyone has intuition of the heights of empires and what that means for metal usage.

The subtext is that the Romans weren't beating on each other with clubs.

You're making the same mistake. What did they use, spears? Can't you make spears from wood and stone?

I guess you must mean swords, but I feel that the subtext of your comments is humble-bragging how obvious these things are to you.

See my comment to your sibling comment by neuronic.

Re: 5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

#109

Post by restalis »

cat199 wrote: post #101
arethuza wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pu…

> why anyone would pick on Scythia as a place to come from? still a bit of a thing today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans#Steppe_th...

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.

Re: 5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery

#110

Post by GuiA »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #75
serf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is your collection of images shared anywhere?

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.

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