Ancient swords, elaborate daggers, even early artillery – 2020 yielded some intriguing ancient weapons that tell the story of the violence of the past. These discoveries span hundreds of thousands of years of human history, ranging from the Ice Age to the Middle Ages.
A throwing stick from the Ice Age
The first stop in our weapons tour takes us to the Ice Age, where the now extinct human species Homo heidelbergensis used tools to hunt. At about 25 inches (64.5 centimeters) long, this throwing stick found in Germany was first reported in April in the magazine Natural Ecology and Evolution. Dating back as much as 300,000 years, it is said to have been used to injure or kill small prey such as rabbits, swans and ducks. University of Tübingen. Homo heidelbergensis also used spears and long lances for hunting. Most of these wooden weapons have long since disappeared, but exceptional examples of this ancient hunting tradition have been preserved at the German site of Schöningen.
A very old sword
What was considered a medieval sword sitting in an obscure museum actually is one of the oldest swords ever discovered.
The simple weapon was spotted in the monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni by the then student archaeologist Vittoria Dall’Armellina. Although the sword was labeled as only a few hundred years old, Dall’Armellina recognized that it looked much more like a Bronze Age weapon than a medieval artifact. She and her colleagues analyzed the sword and found that it is indeed an early Bronze Age copper-arsenic alloy about 5,000 years ago. The sword comes from Anatolia, or what is now Eastern Turkey, where swords were first invented.
A beautiful handle
A mushroom hunter in the Czech Republic was in the woods this spring when he discovered much more than delicious fungi.
A piece of metal was sticking out of the ground. Mushroom hunter Roman Novák kicked it and realized it was the blade of a sword. He started digging and found not only the sword, but also a bronze ax.
The handle and pommel of the sword are decorated with fine circular and crescent-shaped engravings. Archaeologists from the nearby Silesian Museum have examined the artifacts and linked them to the Bronze Age, some 3,300 years ago. It was not clear why the sword was in the middle of the forest, although the recent rain may have washed away enough soil to make it visible for the first time in thousands of years. Archaeologists plan to further study the surrounding region.
4. A serious discovery
About 2,500 years ago, a man, two women, and a baby were laid to rest in present-day Siberia. In the tomb with them was a store of treasures, including bronze daggers, knives and axes.
The people buried in the tomb were part of the Tagar culture. The weapons were next to the man and the younger woman. It was not uncommon for Tagar women to be buried with weapons, although they usually owned bows and arrows, not the ax found in this tomb. The husband and wife were probably in their thirties or forties when they died. At their feet was the body of a woman in her sixties curled. And scattered throughout the tomb, archaeologists found the bones of a baby less than a month old, whose remains may have been disrupted by rodents after burial.
Arms made of bone
A bone handle discovered on the Isle of Man near England reveals the creativity of ancient peoples when it comes to weapons. The bone pommel was first excavated in the 1970s and was finally analyzed this year with a report in the journal Antiquity in October. The artifact was found in a grave containing the cremated bones of four people, including at least one teenager and one baby. Along with the partially burned bones, collected in two urns, archaeologists found bone beads and a bone knife pommel, likely made from the bone of a cow or horse. The blade was gone, but the pommel would have held a knife the size of a modern table knife, the researchers reported.
Perhaps even more intriguing than the weapon in this burial was a series of other artifacts: bones set into rectangular shapes about an inch (30 millimeters) long, with rounded corners. Nothing like the bone rectangles has ever been found before, and it’s not clear what they would have been used for.
A richly decorated Roman dagger
It took nine months of cleaning and restoration to turn what looked like an unimpressive lump of metal into this richly decorated Roman dagger.
The dagger, which is about 35 cm long, was found in the tomb of a Roman soldier in Haltern, the site of a Roman military base between 27 BC. And AD 14. The dagger was found in the cemetery of the base and is one of the few weapons discovered at the site.
The blade of the dagger is made of iron and the handle is inlaid with silver. The scabbard was opulent, lined with lime wood and decorated with red glass and enamel, silver and niello (a black mixture, often of sulfur, copper, silver and lead). Romans were usually not buried with their weapons, so the presence of the dagger in the tomb is a bit of a mystery, archaeologist Bettina Tremmel told Live Science.
A sword for the “mirror afterlife”
When archaeologists excavated the 1,100-year-old grave of a Viking warrior in Norway, they were not surprised that it contained a sword; Viking men were often buried with their weapons. But what made the grave strange was that the sword was on the left side of the warrior; Viking swords are almost always found buried to the right of the deceased.
In life, a right-handed warrior would carry a sword on the left for easy drawing. The fact that Viking warriors are buried with their swords on the right side suggests that they believed in a ‘mirror afterlife’, in which everything was turned around. The warrior buried in the Norwegian grave site may have been left-handed, his discoverers speculated, which meant that he would have carried his sword on the right side in life. For example, his sword was placed on his left hand in preparation for the mirror of the afterlife.
A sword in a lake
Sometime in the 16th century, the body of a medieval warrior settled on the bottom of a Lithuanian lake. It was found along with the soldier’s weapons at the end of this year during a bridge inspection.
It is not clear why the man ended up at the bottom of the lake; sediments had naturally settled over the body and buried it in silt 30 feet below the surface of the water. With the body were two knives with wooden handles and an iron sword, all in surprisingly good condition.
Early artillery
An artifact discovered in Croatia’s Krka National Park might look like a particularly heavy thermos at first glance, but it’s actually a siege weapon dating back to the 17th or 18th century.
The device is a mačkula, a type of mortar used in the siege of a fortress or castle. According to Croatia Week, the bronze artifact was found near Nečven fortress, an archaeological ruin from the early 14th century. The mačkula was found within one of the fortress walls. It may have had both ceremonial and defensive value, according to park officials; eruptions of a mačkula are traditionally used to celebrate winter festivals and victory in a traditional equestrian competition, the Sinjska alka, held every year in Sinj, Croatia.
Originally published on Live Science.