Celtic smiths in the 1 st-millenium BCE were prolific with their experimentation in sword-making, and they pioneered ‘piling’: making a sword blade from multiple different types and grades of iron welded together softer iron for the core of the blade to give flex and resilience, with harder iron capable of keeping sharper on the edges. Blacksmithing with iron became an art, and gradually replaced cast-bronze, which produced brittle weaponry. Sword-making began to increase in complexity with the advent of iron forging in the Middle East – see for example, the akinakai created by the Scythians and later adopted by the Classical Greeks, which had an… ahem… ‘kidney shaped’ crossguard, like our old friend the medieval ballock dagger. Clearly, sword design had some way to go. However, there was no evidence of this found in situ, and reproductions (made from less toxic metals) have shown that they were pretty unwieldy and uncomfortable to use. The Melit swords are made from a single piece, of bronze, without any sign of a wooden hand grip there is some speculation that the swords might have had a simple leather hilt wrap. Several of them are gorgeously inlaid with silver – Zelda fans will notice the ‘Triforce’ symbol on the hilt, which was taken from Mesopotamian art. These swords are cast (as opposed to forged with a hammer and anvil) from arsenical bronze, a copper-arsenic alloy that would have been highly toxic to the metalworkers producing it. Although there is always dispute and debate around the topic, it is widely agreed that the ‘oldest’ swords yet discovered are the brace of 3rd-millenium BCE shortswords unearthed by the magnificently named Italian academic Marcella Frangipane in 1966 at the ancient Mesopotamian city of Arlsantepe (now Malatya, in modern-day Turkey). The Prehistory of Medieval Sword Swords begin to appear in the European context around the dawn of the Bronze Age, around 5,000 years ago. Real medieval swords were overlaid with all of these ideas simultaneously, and there is no better reason to browse the medieval swords for sale here and dive into the rich history of the medieval sword below. It is a complex symbol: the ultimate embodiment of knightly virtue, and a brutal symbol of cultural supremacy a tool to confer the divine right of kings, and the weapon of a rebellious Frisian peasant. The sword is a complex and hard-to-manufacture weapon, demanding the highest skills of a weaponsmith.
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