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Is there any technical reason why this is needed, or they just did it that way?
Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
151–160 of 194 posts
Re: Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool, what's your oldest sword and where does it come from? Do you display them or just collect them? I have a friend in Australia with a fairly significant knife (not sword) collection which will be for sale shortly (aged owner), let me know if interested.
I too have knives in my collection, and would be interested but generally shipping things from Australia is hecka expensive too. Generally, I add things, with interesting stories to my collection. My oldest sword is privileged information but my favorite is the first one I got. In 1990 I was visiting Edinburgh on business for Sun, and I wanted a Claymore in celebration of my Scottish ancestry. At the Haymarket, I met…
You could have both made a profit and let him make one, helping with his life after his injury. Your call though, of course.
Re: Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
#153The article is somewhat sensationalistic. Finding an octagonal type bronze sword ("Achtkantschwert" in German) from that period is rare, but we have quite a couple of them. Since bronze does not rust, the conditions of such swords are often quite good (and typically far better than that of medieval iron swords, for instance). Here is a map of the distribution of octagonal-hilted swords in Europe: https://www.research…
My knowledge of bronze vs iron comes purely from playing dwarf fortress. Are they fairly comparable in the damage they can cause?
Depends on the quality of the iron. Poor quality iron is often inferior, but of course actual steel is much better. Bronze can take a great edge but is a a bit softer and can get edge damage in battle/usage quicker. However bronze does have one big benefit over iron/steel, repairability. If a bronze item is damaged it can be cold worked and annealed repeatedly over a simple wood fire. With iron or steel you need a more proper forge and charcoal to repair it and it has to be worked while hot which requires more tools on hand to do properly. A "cheap" bronze sword can be smashed over dozens of heads until it is basically a bronze club, but then later with a campfire and some rocks or simple hammer can be reworked and sharpened into a sword again.
Re: Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such myths are likely based on classical Rome rather than bronze age discoveries. For several centuries after the Western empire fell apart, Europeans lacked the capability to build settlements or structures anywhere close to the size typical of classical Roman civilization. Populations were depressed by pestilence, social order had declined, and most Europeans were within a short distance from a former Roman settlem…
It goes further back than that. In 400BC, Xenophon, while retreating from a failed attempt at taking Babylon, came across the abandoned ruins of a bunch of Assyrian cities, like Nineveh and wrote about them. 200 years after being abandoned, they were far more impressive than anything Xenophon would have seen in his home country. For example, Athens at that point had a city wall(the Themistoclean wall) approximately 5…
Just a quick plug for the marvellous Landmark edition of Xenophon’s Anabasis:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Landmark-Xenophons-Anabasis-Shane-B...
Beautiful book with lots of maps and illustrations covering the journey mentioned above, if that’s anyone’s bag.
Re: Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
#155The article is somewhat sensationalistic. Finding an octagonal type bronze sword ("Achtkantschwert" in German) from that period is rare, but we have quite a couple of them. Since bronze does not rust, the conditions of such swords are often quite good (and typically far better than that of medieval iron swords, for instance). Here is a map of the distribution of octagonal-hilted swords in Europe: https://www.research…
My knowledge of bronze vs iron comes purely from playing dwarf fortress. Are they fairly comparable in the damage they can cause?
I think they are comparable. A blow from a bronze sword will kill you just as well as a blow from an iron sword. The most widespread weapon of all times prior to the American Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic wars were spears. A spear with a bronze tip and one with an iron tip will also kill you with equal probability. If you have a shield, the damage to the spear is much more likely to come from a broken shaft than from a cracked tip. The shield itself generally had a metallic part (a "boss") that could be made of bronze or iron. Both were equally effective.
Swords were generally not used in battle. But if used, a bronze sword was a bit more likely to crack than an iron sword. Bronze weapons were resistant to corrosion though. So that meant they did a better job in their secondary role: that of provider of status. A warrior with shiny armor, shield and sword is much more imposing and frightening than one with a rusty armor, shield and sword. Of course, in the bronze age, war was more ritualistic than war during the Roman empire, when war was much more like an industrial operation. For the purposes of the Roman empire, iron was probably doing a better job than bronze.
Re: Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too have knives in my collection, and would be interested but generally shipping things from Australia is hecka expensive too. Generally, I add things, with interesting stories to my collection. My oldest sword is privileged information but my favorite is the first one I got. In 1990 I was visiting Edinburgh on business for Sun, and I wanted a Claymore in celebration of my Scottish ancestry. At the Haymarket, I met…
You could have both made a profit and let him make one, helping with his life after his injury. Your call though, of course.
That's an interesting take on it. On the one hand, it wasn't presented as "this would help my recovery/treatment," rather it was presented as "I threw out my rotator cup so I'm not doing swords, but if you wanted to sell, I can connect you with someone who wants to buy one."
I am acutely aware that one never knows what is going on in the other person's head in a conversation, so I have to accept the possibility that he was hoping to generate another sale to me, but I feel pretty strongly that if that was what he was hoping for he would have mentioned it.
Re: Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, and the most popular religion in the world is basically cultural continuity with late western Roman culture and its largest most organized official form even uses the Latin language and maintains political institutions with continuous lineage back to Rome. I don't think there's a real timeline where Europeans were wandering around the ruins of the suddenly collapsed empire wondering who these people were. Th…
Knowing fully what happened to Rome, if it’s even possible, would have been limited to the educated class. Stories would still have come out of the peasant class, whose folk memory of Rome couldn’t match what the clergy had. Eventually we did remake the Pax Romana, but it took two utterly ruinous wars, humanism, and a working knowledge of free trade to recreate the system that Rome had managed to create almost by acc…
What has been created with modern global capitalism is extremely different from the Roman form of commerce and administration. Not just in technology but in complete ideological foundations. Not only was slavery fundamental to its whole foundation, its accepted and normal practices for doing business would today, in the west, be considered forms of absolute extreme corruption, and their justice system would absolutely horrify us.
I'd posit that today's world is what it is because it is partially on built enlightenment values that stepped away from the old Roman model, not back to it.
Re: Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
My knowledge of bronze vs iron comes purely from playing dwarf fortress. Are they fairly comparable in the damage they can cause?
I think they are comparable. A blow from a bronze sword will kill you just as well as a blow from an iron sword. The most widespread weapon of all times prior to the American Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic wars were spears. A spear with a bronze tip and one with an iron tip will also kill you with equal probability. If you have a shield, the damage to the spear is much more likely to come from a broken shaft th…
What were swords used for if not for battle?
Re: Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
#159A question for the metallurgists: how would a bronze sword compare to an iron sword, even if the iron is low quality (ie, impurities, not heat treated etc)?
Re: Archaeologists find 3000-year-old sword, exceptionally well preserved
#160This is mindblowing. Here we are, 3000 years in the future. But how many of us could make such a “primitive” thing?
We can do and learn things that require further intellectual ability though ;) How many "primitives" could pass a 8year olds Spelling Bee?
How many 8-year olds could pass a spelling bee of a 3,000-year old language, though?