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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

#91

Post by rsynnott »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #8
tomcam wrote: post #5

Appears to be more of a dagger, but you can't fault the ergonomics. Beautifully designed, and I would guess not just for ceremonial use.

> I would guess not just for ceremonial use. 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.

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.

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

#92

Post by samirillian »

lb1lf wrote: post #82

-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 o…

How big is this farm?

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

#93

Post by rsynnott »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #16
nl wrote: post #9

Given that it's a bronze sword it seems fairly clear it wasn't medieval. Surprising that this took so long.

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.

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

#94

Post by rsynnott »

Causality1 wrote: post #56

Fascinating that there's so much metal used in the handle rather than using a tang inside a wooden handle.

If it's a device for showing off rather than an actual weapon, as seems likely given the age, then more bronze equals more important king!

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

#95

Post by specialist »

tarheels100 wrote: post #22

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!

Uncovered? Refound?

I would like a better word, phrase for "sharing something that I just figured out, but didn't invent or create myself." Some thing like "News to me."

For instance, I'm currently "discovering" recipes for pumpkin pie. More of drunken sailor's walk thru an underspecified problem space.

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

#96

Post by lb1lf »

samirillian wrote: post #92
lb1lf wrote: post #82

-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 o…

How big is this farm?

-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.

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

#97

Post by lb1lf »

TSiege wrote: post #87
lb1lf wrote: post #82

-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 o…

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!

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

#98

Post by tptacek »

beaner wrote: post #47
tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't 2000 years ago basically the height of the Roman Empire?

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.

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

#99

Post by nkrisc »

tarheels100 wrote: post #22

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!

It was discovered because no one really knew what it was before this.

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

#100

Post by arminiusreturns »

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…

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.

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