5,000-year-old sword discovered by archaeology student at a Venetian monastery
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Funny enough, the ones I have marked as oldest are called "The Swords of Arslantepe" [1] (which the article mentions in passing) from the same general region as this one, and are said to be also ~5k old, and of a very similar chemical composition. The weapons of the royal tombs of Ur [2] are right behind these in age.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Swords+of+Arslantepe&iax=im...
[2] http://sumerianshakespeare.com/117701/118301.html
edit: From the article, a new one to me: "and the sword found in the Tokat Museum in Turkey", now I have a new something to search for!
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.
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 puzzled as to why anyone would pick on Scythia as a place to come from?
https://www.historyfiles.co.uk/FeaturesBritain/Medieval_Text...
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.
still a bit of a thing today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans#Steppe_th...
NB Scots in the sense of Dál Riata Scots, who eventually became the most powerful grouping in what became Scotland in the 9th century.
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.
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 obtain permission from an archaeologist every time I put a shovel in the ground, more or less...
The sword looks cool, though. (On display in a museum; no such thing as finder’s keepers for such old things - very rightly so!)
If you "discovered a dinosaur" that was completely mislabeled and of the oldest dinosaurs known to man "hiding in plain sight" - you deserve it.
I mean, that actually happens, doesn't it? It's not that unusual for new species to be identified, misclassified in museums.
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.
𝔄𝔫𝔡 𝔰𝔬 𝔶𝔢 𝔩𝔢𝔤𝔢𝔫𝔡 𝔬𝔣 𝔈𝔵𝔠𝔞𝔩𝔦𝔟𝔲𝔯 𝔴𝔞𝔰 𝔱𝔯𝔲𝔢...
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/schoolgirl-e...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45753455
and
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/9lgdaf/girl_8_pu...
(the puns never really end...)
Why are so many young girls finding viking age swords in lakes?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!
Is there a history of metal somewhere? Bronze, copper, tin, steal, gold, harvesting, forging, etc. It would be an interesting read of history, science, and discovery.
Wikipedia tells me that the earliest artifacts of metal comes from 7000 years ago.
Edit: Downvotes? I'm expressing my own naivety. Not everyone has intuition of the heights of empires and what that means for metal usage.
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 fundamentally what our own culture is based on in the West, just look at Washington DC and the buildings. Or Wall St. The Greco-Roman influence is permeating the West.
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.
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.
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.
Although crowns are presumably abstracted from helmets.
I don't think anyone suggested weapons didn't exist before these swords either?
I'd be pretty comfortable with the idea that clubs are no more recent than weapons in general.
One of the oldest Egyptian royal motifs is the king smiting a bound captive or a group of bound captives with a mace.
However, other peoples from deep antiquity held sword to higher regard. Like the Celts and Germans. Especially the Germanic tribes, who couldn't make their own swords and need to win them in trade or raid.
Forges have always produced utilitarian items for the common man. If, hypothetically, the only thing you could make out of metal was useless, non-weapon swords... then once again there would be no reason to do it at all.
You can get one now because it's fun.
I also would have assumed the fun-factor has been a historical constant too? If you're wealthy enough, at any time since the bronze age, you might want a bronze version of [thing] for the same reasons people want a bronze [thing] now?
In archaeology, there seems to be an assumption that people in the past only ever did things for two reasons: Utility and religion. If an object doesn't seem to have an obvious usefulness, it's assumed that the artifact is of religious nature.
People have not changed much in the last few thousand years, and thins that we find interesting today must surely have been interesting in the past. In your example, why wouldn't a person 1000 years ago consider a replica "ancient thing" just as interesting as we do today?
Just imagine a future archaeologist looking at the modern work with the mindset of current archaeologists? What kind of religious symbolism would they ascribe to a picachu cosplay outfit?
I find it difficult to believe archaeologists, who are themselves students of the liberal arts and sciences, can’t see what we’re talking about here.
Having said that, it’s possible archeology suffers from some sort of view-narrowing where you either tow the line or get laughed out of the room?
> In archaeology, there seems to be an assumption that people in the past only ever did things for two reasons: Utility and religion. If an object doesn't seem to have an obvious usefulness, it's assumed that the artifact is of religious nature.
> I wonder if archeologists actually do believe everything was either utilitarian or religious, or if that’s just the way it gets reported?
This is definitely now how archaeologists think. Archaeology is a subfield of anthropology. Our goal is to understand how people live through the lens of material culture, i.e. how people inhabit a world made out of stuff. Of course it is common to consider the pragmatic aspects regarding why weird things might have been created or the purposes that they might serve in people's lives, but chocking the unexplainable up to ritual or religion is just dumb and amateurish. No archaeologist I know actually does this. Archaeologists generally feel comfortable acknowledging that we can't explain certain things from our current standpoint, saying that it's ritual without a basis for that claim is just plain dumb and is never taken seriously. It is an extremely outdated trope.
> People have not changed much in the last few thousand years, and thins that we find interesting today must surely have been interesting in the past. In your example, why wouldn't a person 1000 years ago consider a replica "ancient thing" just as interesting as we do today?
Note in my definition of archaeology I don't focus on the past? That's intentional, since archaeologists very commonly examine contemporary material culture.
> Just imagine a future archaeologist looking at the modern work with the mindset of current archaeologists? What kind of religious symbolism would they ascribe to a picachu cosplay outfit?
As an archaeologist, my understanding is that pikachu products exist to make money for the people who sell pikachu products.
You need to understand that archaeologists are never working in the dark. We reason through an abductive process, like adding brushstrokes to a never-quite-complete painting (also similar to medical diagnosis). We'll never actually understand how people lived in the past, since it is impossible to verify any such claim. But we can come up with a reasonable understanding by slotting different streams of complementary evidence together.
I think this is a typo and should be "definitely not how"
This isn't really true at all. For example, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri[1] is an ancient rubbish dump full of all kinds of random documents. One of the more amusing ones is "The contract of a wrestler agreeing to throw his next match for a fee".
High quality pattern welded[1] steel swords were available in Roman times from at least 150 BC[2], and by 600 AD were ubiquitous. They were later mostly replaced by easier steel production techniques.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_welding#Pattern_weldin...
[2] See the table of finds in https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_b/backbone/rb...
For instance: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/historians-find-long...
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/meet-the-new-s...: “Helgen notes that two out of three new mammal species are discovered in museum collection cabinets”
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190925120420.h...: “New species of crocodile discovered in museum collections”
- http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141230-the-new-species-hidi...: “Here are five extraordinary new species that have been discovered in museums in recent years”
Two years? But, I have seen Hollywood movies that they just need a magnifying glass and 5 minutes to get a conclusion.
There goes another myth. Science and history are complicated and require more effort and time that movies are willing to concede.
Actually getting permission to do the required testing also probably took a while.
When I notice that something is off, it's usually a fleeting thought that quickly passes. Sometimes when I notice that something is off a second time, I'll realize that I didn't "catch" the thought the first time. I think I've been getting better at catching those thoughts and writing them down. I'm also confident that there are methods to increase the frequency by which one catches these things, though I'm not certain how.
[0] https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/d003rpHowToAddre...
I'm guessing she took more than a quick glance at the sword and the blurb.
Either way, copper, the major component of bronze, is a product of exploding supernovas. That's cool enough.