© Malatya
Many archaeologists believed that the earliest swords only dated to around 1600 or 1500 BCE before the discovery of a cache of swords at the archaeological site of Arslantepe in Turkey.
The nine swords from the archaeological site of Arslantepe (Melid) attest to the use of this weapon for the first time in the world - at least a millennium before the already-known examples. They date back to the Early Bronze Age (c. 33rd to 31st centuries).
In the 1980s, Marcella Frangipane's team at Rome University discovered a cache of nine swords and daggers dating all the way back to 3300 BCE. Frangipane declared the swords of Arslantepe the world's oldest and first swords ever discovered.
They are made of an alloy of arsenic and copper. Three of the swords were exquisitely inlaid with silver. These weapons have a total length of 45 to 60 cm, which points to either a short sword or a long dagger classification.
© Uni-KielThe first swords of the world.
Arslantepe Mound, which is on the UNESCO World Heritage List, was partially damaged after the Feb. 6 twin earthquakes in the country's southern region.
With no damage to the permanent roof of the museum, the temporary roof suffered partial collapse but it did not cause harm to its archaeological texture.
Reader Comments
Arsenical bronze is an alloy in which arsenic, as opposed to or in addition to tin or other constituent metals, is combined with copper to make bronze. The use of arsenic with copper, either as the secondary constituent or with another component such as tin, results in a stronger final product and better casting behavior. Copper ore is often naturally contaminated with arsenic; hence, the term "arsenical bronze" when used in archaeology is typically only applied to alloys with an arsenic content higher than 1% by weight, in order to distinguish it from potentially accidental additions of arsenic. Bronze was heavy & maleable compared to tempered carbon steel steel.
The history of steel production and implementation can be traced back almost 4,000 years to the start of the iron age. The earliest archeological excavation of early examples are dated around 1800 BC; since then it has weathered the ages, weaving its way through the antiquity of the Roman Empire, the Spartans, Chinese dynasties, all way the way to countless modern applications. So far looks like
Metal Technologies of the Indus ValleyTradition in Pakistan and Western India [Link]
There is a lot more to the story than what’s elucidated here. Metalworkers (Rome called that deity “Vulcan”) were held in very high regard. Warrior Priests held the knowledge of Alchemy of metals that was coveted & secret who worked with the metal smiths/blacksmiths in the Indus Valley steppes. It represented knowledge = power & that translated to winning wars, territorial gains, wealth, woman were captured & breed, killing other competing empires (Egypt/Greece which Rome sacked & stole the knowledge & resources from the spoils of war) nomadic tribes/hordes/cadres etc.
The original story of civilization Caste System went like this. Warrior Priests (MAGI) who had knowledge of metallurgy alchemy made a deal with the metal smiths in Indus Valley steepes to build weapons vs. Farm implements (similar to the Japanese story of Okinawa Bushido Farm tools used as weapons vs. plow, spade, shovel, yoke) to use on or intimidate the farmers (story of Cain & Able metaphor).
„Nine swords”? On the photos above I can see seven daggers/knives and eight spear blades.
Actually the sword is medieval invention; even Roman Gladius is hardly a sword; kind of „bajonett” rather.
60cm (24") is the long end of available machete lengths (on amazon.com), and 45cm (18") is about the shortest length I would consider effective (also available on amazon).
As to their composition (Arsenic + Copper, aka "Arsenical Bronze"), this matches the Arsenic+Copper that Ötzi the Iceman used in his axe-head at approximately the same time (between 3350 and 3105 BC).
I presume it took them longer to discover Tin sources, smelting, and Tin+Copper "real Bronze".
Additionally I'm impressed that they had "full-tang" designs (tang is integral to the blade and runs the full length of the handle/grip). Most early Bronze-Age bronze-swords have a separate blade riveted to a handle - a really weak design.
These would likely have been cast (as true-bronze swords were). The maximum hardness would have been pretty pathetic by Iron Age standards: harder than copper, because of the added Arsenic, but the remaining hardening process (if they knew it) would have been limited to work-hardening by repeated hammer-tapping. Still far superior (as a weapon) to the micro-lith sickles common at this time.
The location of the site is a few miles from the Euphrates River in central Turkiye: well within the cultural sphere of the nascent fertile crescent cultures of the time. 1600km (1000mi) north of Sumer, and much less than that north of the intervening Semetic Akkadian regions of what now northern Iraq (downstream by raft, upstream by donkey). Plenty of material (charcoal) to carbon date in those river valleys.
The two-handed-sword and the long-sword (intended for use from horseback) are indeed medieval inventions. The shorter gladius was designed for mass (Roman) infantry melee conditions. Re-read your Homer (700BC regarding 1200BC events): μαχαιρα (makhaira) translates as "sword, dagger, long-knife". I doubt quibbling over exact terminology would have been the most pressing concern of someone just perforated by one of these, and/or who had some favorite piece of anatomy lopped. These definitely qualify as "hand-wielded stabby choppy things", sufficient to spoil anyone's day.
Lost-wax casting was in use during this period, so the craftsmen could have carved any shape they wished in wax. (Then cover in clay or clayey-sand, then fire the clay lump to melt the wax out (wax-lost). Then pour in molten metal. Let cool. Break mold to retrieve casting.)
All the machetes that I've used have an "L"-shaped "hook" at the pommel-end of the handle. Without this "hook" (which rides on your little-finger), when your hand gets sweaty and you swing the machete, centrifugal forces around the pivots of your elbow and wrist make the machete want to fly "forward" out of your hand (very undesireable if someone were chopping back at you). With a nice big "L" hook, you can relax your grip during impact -- literally swinging the whole machete around your little-finger. Against woody honeysuckle (1"-3" diameter), the jarring impact can really abuse your hand across hours of brush-clearing.
In the designs we see here, the bulge at the pommel has three purposes I can see. (1) The extra mass at the pommel counterbalances the extended mass of the blade, giving you a "balanced" weapon (one which doesn't dip at the tip just by gravity). (2) The extra mass at the pommel lets you pound on someone in close quarters: just another option for how to abuse your opponent. (3) By concaving the grip inwards, you can better hang onto this weapon by pinching thumb to middle finger (ie; this helps you stop the centrifugal tendency without relying purely on friction).
Strange that most Roman and Saxon gold coins are found by amature metal detectors and have to divulge their finds....these sly beggars never seem advertise the same.....yet they have radar, geophysics, manuscripts and maps and historical clues as to where stuff is likely to be found....
So what now....
How does owning some rusty shit change the wind? Plenty of burned out cars my end if you need some beer money.....how much are these swords daggers etc worth.....break even on the funding? ....come on spill the beans...
Archaeology & Tourism are a BIG source of revenue for better known Egypt. Turkiye is actually sitting on top of a much bigger "gold-mine" and is doing something about it.
Check out this page [Link] for a turkish-government-run portal to a bunch of their museums that have 3D virtual tours. The specifics differ at each different museum, but these kind of let you walk around the museums in a Google-Street-View fashion. Here's another page with link to Turkish virtual tours: [Link]
like earthquake relief.....or even prevention.
But yeah I see where you are coming from...."show me the money"
If the Turkish value the swords as priceless, they will be living by the sword...
Just saying
This is all very nice, but if somebody could explain to me how do you by accident, not knowing what you are searching for, discover a metal (copper), for witch you do not have any idea what is or what it can be used for, and then decide that you should mix it with an other metal, for that you do not have any use of - tin , but you do somehow "know" that you will get something very useful !
The fact that these two metals come from two distant places, helps you very much, naturally.
Of course the purification process for these metals is something you know by instinct, and you know how to make a perfect mix of the two metals !
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
(... by the way, there are some other minor problems with achieving a high enough temperature ... - but that is trivial ... )
I'm afraid that the problem with metallurgy is a bit bigger than it seems.
First of all, we are looking at it from our perspective ( with knowledge of metallurgy in advance, we know what we want to make - metals )
and not from the perspective of a person that does not know that metals exist much less what to do with them or how to make them.
Smelting requires a very high temperature that you can NOT have with a simple camp fire.
You simply can not stumble upon metallurgy by pure accident, so the story that we learned it on our own has to be false.
The question is - who gave us that knowledge (Prometheus ???).
A fire temple, Agiary, Atashkadeh (Persian: آتشکده), Atashgah (آتشگاه) or Dar-e Mehr (در مهر) is the place of worship for the followers of Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Iran (Persia). In the Zoroastrian religion, fire (see atar), together with clean water (see aban), are agents of ritual purity.
Magi, singular Magus, also called “Wise Men”. Magi (/ˈmeɪdʒaɪ/; singular magus /ˈmeɪɡəs/; from Latin magus, cf. Persian: مغpronounced [moɣ]) were priests in Zoroastrianism and the earlier religions of the western Iranians. The earliest known use of the word magi is in the trilingual inscription written by Darius the Great, known as the Behistun Inscription. Old Persian texts, predating the Hellenistic period, refer to a magus as a Zurvanic, and presumably Zoroastrian, priest.
In Greek mythology, Prometheus (/prəˈmiːθiəs/; Ancient Greek: Προμηθεύς, [promɛːtʰéu̯s], possibly meaning "forethought")[1] is a Titan god of fire. Prometheus is best known for defying the gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge, and more generally, civilization.
It has also been theorised that it derives from the Proto-Indo-European root that also produces the Vedic pra math, "to steal", hence pramathyu-s, "thief", cognate with "Prometheus", the thief of fire. The Vedic myth of fire's theft by Mātariśvan is an analogue to the Greek account . Pramant was the fire-drill, the tool used to create fire. The suggestion that Prometheus was in origin the human "inventor of the fire-sticks, from which fire is kindled" goes back to Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC. The reference is again to the "fire-drill", a worldwide primitive method of fire making using a vertical and a horizontal piece of wood to produce fire by friction.
Magi, the ancient Zoroastrian hereditary Priesthood, and Haplogroups I M170, I P215, and Haplogroup T1a2
Magi (Avestan magá, Old Persian magûs) were the designated terms for the ancient Zoroastrian hereditary priesthood. According to Herodotus (1.101), Magi were one of six Median tribes and formed the priestly clan of the Zoroastrians. He adds that Magi were scholars, tutors, skilled dream interpreters, and gave very accurate prophecies of the future events. An integral part of the wisdom of the Magi was connected with heavenly lights/stars, and white magic (hence the Greek term mageía “magic”; see Rose, p. 22.) Classical authors such as Herodotus, Strabo, Pompeius Trogus, Apuleius, and Ammianus Marcellinus have provided significant information on the ancient Magi. According to them, the Magi were disciples and followers of seer/prophet of the ancient Aryans , Zarathustra.
Émile Benveniste believed that Avestan term magá– signified a priestly or shamanic-warrior clan among the ancient Aryans/Iranians, renowned for their “wisdom, abilities, and skills,” (Benveniste, 1938, pp. 13, 18-20.) The term according to Benveniste preserved such a meaning also in the Avesta according to whom the Magi became the hereditary priestly class in Zoroastrianism.
With its farming citadels, steppe-derived metallurgy, amazing water canals dug from the mountain glaciers to fertile oases, and most intricate art & ceramics; Raphael Pumpelly hypothesized that “the fundamentals of European civilization—organized village life, agriculture, domestication of animals, weaving, etc.—were originated on the oases of Oxus Culture long before the time of Babylon.
The acquisition of tin in Bronze Age southwest Asia [Link]
Fundamental to understanding the transmission of tin bronze metallurgy across Eurasia is the evidence for known tin sources that may have been available to metalworking populations in Bronze Age Southwest Asia. The Anatolian evidence from the tin-mining complex of Kestel-Göltepe and that from the Erciyes Dağ stratovolcano sites is discussed first. New research on the 2nd millennium BC Old Assyrian tin trade into central Anatolia to Kültepe/Kanesh follows with an emphasis on the southern Mesopotamian end of the trade and its potential links to neighboring Elam. Next, the tin-mining complex at Deh Hosein, on the northern periphery of Elam and its potential as a tin source for many bronze-producing sites in the ancient Near East is examined. Finally, recent fieldwork in Afghanistan documenting its remarkable mineral reserves (e.g., tin, gold, lapis) in relation to its wealth of archaeological sites is reviewed. Here the Oxus Civilization/Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) enters the discussion with its proximity to major ancient tin mines as well as its potential as a source of tin bronze metallurgy for the Iranian plateau . Whether or not Afghanistan’s and neighboring Central Asia’s tin sources were supplying their mineral wealth to urban elite consumers to the West remains a question for debate. The Elamites’ potential role as tin-trading middlemen moving tin westward from nearby sources or from as far afield as Afghanistan closes the discussion.
Shiny bronze in glassy matter: an inconspicuous piece of slag from the Bronze Age mining site of Mušiston (Tajikistan) and its significance for the development of tin metallurgy in Central Asia [Link]
This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the beginnings of tin and bronze metallurgy in Central Asia by investigating a hitherto unique piece of a bronze slag . The object was originally discovered as a stray find only 4 km away from the large copper-tin deposit of Mušiston in Tajikistan . It contains many prills of bronze and copper as well as small charcoal particles (carbon is “6” & sign of man). Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal places the slag in a period between 1900 and 1400 BCE and thus in the Late Bronze Age of the region. This date coincides with radiocarbon dates of relics from underground galleries of the Mušiston deposit. Chemical and microscopic examination demonstrated the slag to be a relic of a co-smelting process, in which a natural assemblage of tin and copper minerals was smelted simultaneously. Both the chemical and the tin and copper isotope compositions clearly link the slag to the nearby polymetallic ores from Mušiston , of which an extensive dataset is presented. The artefact’s lead isotope ratios and increased iron concentration in turn indicate intentional fluxing of the original ore charge with iron-dominated ores. These results are the first tangible evidence of a smelting process of tin ores in the entire region and therefore add a new dimension to the findings from previous mining archaeological investigations. At the same time, the results give significant information about the smelting process of secondary polymetallic ores from Mušiston and help in assessing the scientific data of Bronze Age bronze artefacts from Central Asia.
History of Metallurgy [Link]
The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment, including fire and metals , to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of fire and metals enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. Fire and metals have particular properties and human knowledge of those properties increases over time in a particular order. Increasing human knowledge of how to create higher and higher temperatures enables the smelting and melting of a wider range of ores and metals. Those ores and metals that could be smelted and melted at lower temperatures were used before the ores and metals which had higher smelting and melting points. This meant that copper, and its alloy bronze, were used before iron and its alloy steel. Pure metals, like copper and iron, were used before alloys such as, bronze and steel, as the manufacture of alloys is more complicated than the manufacture of pure metals. The simplest knowledge is acquired first and more complex knowledge is acquired later. The order of discovery determines the course of human social and cultural history, as knowledge of new and more efficient means of smelting ores and melting metals, results in new technology, which contributes to the development of new social and ideological systems. This means human social and cultural history, had to follow a particular course, a course that was determined by the properties of the materials in the human environment.
But my question still remains. Where did our initial knowledge about metal working come from. I is highly unlikely that a person that has only tools made of wood bone and stone gets the idea that it is possible to make tools out of metal ( that is by the way much softer then stone and therefore of no use as a tool ) with the usage of fire ( you need a high temperature fire ) and purifiers.
Metallurgy is far too complex and complicated and it is impossible to stumble upon it by accident.
The second problem that I have with our history is the use of bronze. For spear tips and arrow tips ok. But for swords - no way. Bronze is far to brittle to withstand the first clash of two swords. One or even both swords will break with the first strike.
So the first useful material for swords is Steel.
And that is much too complex.
The information I provided articulate precisely how it was done. The roots of your question were held by MAGI & metal workers who listened to the MAGI & continually experimented on a traceable chronological timeline with different elements/components using fire/heat to drawout/temper/amalgamate/crucible in a cauldrons using fire/heat. As knowledge grew & was acquired the process got refined & this eventually needed to be cataloged & what was metallurgy evolved & became Alchemy.
This is why you & countless others here & elsewhere who won’t/don’t read but always complain. You are the root cause of your own ignorance, which fuels your frustration & comments. Several others here do the same behavior. Frankly, I gave you the knowledge for free. Don’t even know you. You failed to read first opposed to continue to investigate the links that provide with specificity the knowledge you seek. I already know how it works & how to do it myself. I was taught by men who deemed me worthy & provided me the tools to answer my questions. If you would read the data first then follow up with questions pertaining & relevant to subject matter knowledge flows much better in that progression. You’re not going to get your specific answers without doing the work. Real life doesn’t work like that. You should reflect on this as a mirror image of yourself who fails to understand this. Less ego more open mind. No man will empty his cup of knowledge if you’re a jerk about receiving the knowledge. Pride is the fall of men for a reason.
No one is going to give you an education worthy to overthrow them & their system of rule or secrets of domination.
There are men who already dug the well. Honor them by researching & reading vs. whining about shit.
Get off your lazy ass & do it. If you can’t accept that it’s still your problem & you learned nothing from the experience or wisdom/knowledge provided. If you comment back without grasping this fundamental concept of truth, I will close the door & not help you. I ignore a few on here b/c of their pride/ego & inability to be intellectually honest about the process of learning & how it works. I have plenty of other people who know me & appreciate me. I have helped/taught thousands of students in multiple disciplines. I see the same patterns over & over. Yours is the same root cause of why the human condition will never be plumbed. Most create their own suffering b/c of laziness & lack of genuine sincerity.
“BUSHI NO ME”
I have other’s I seek knowledge from who understand the process & help me to continually learn.
This is the Ouroboros & fire of the spirit.
You can be an Eagle or a Pigeon ….Wisdom is given to no man until he asks for it.
Manly P. Hall