Ancient Artifacts from the Bronze Age
Ancient Artifacts from the Bronze Age
The Black Gold of the Alchemists: Corinthian Bronze, Hepatizon, and the Art of Intentional Patina There is a particular romance to a lost recipe. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, confessed that the formula for the most…
The Clasp of Civilisation: A Field Guide to Ancient Fibulae and Garment Hooks For the better part of three thousand years, the peoples of Europe and the Near East did not wear clothing in the sense we understand today. They…
The Sworn Blade: The Sky Father and the Weapons of the Oath There is a particular kind of object in this collection that I have never been able to file away as merely a weapon. A sword such as Lot…
The Steppe Archers: Scythian Bronze Arrowheads and the Technology of Mounted Warfare There is a particular kind of object in this collection that I find myself returning to far more often than its modest size would seem to justify. It…
We have to begin by unlearning a word. When we look at a small ancient bronze of a woman, a bird, an ibex, or a seated god, the modern eye reaches instinctively for the category “art” — a thing made…
9 parts copper 1 part tin Bronze has a secret, and the secret is tin. Copper is everywhere — it outcrops on five continents, and almost every early complex society had a usable source within reach. But bronze, the alloy…
Zagros Mountains of doubt There is a problem with Luristan bronzes that the field has spent the better part of a century politely not staring at directly. It is this: an enormous, technically dazzling, and bewilderingly varied body of ancient…
Reading the Hand of the Smith When I lift a Bronze Age spearhead from its tray and turn it under raking light, I am not simply admiring an object — I am reading a manuscript. Every facet, faint seam, each…
The Five-Thousand-Year Map: A Revised Timeline of Paleometallurgy and Metal Weapons From native copper hammered cold in a Neolithic village to iron-bladed cavalry sabres on the steppe — a multi-cultural rebuild of the timeline I had been working with before…
I have to begin this one with an admission. When I wrote on this site last year about the long history of the bronze sword, I treated the Arslantepe finds as a chronological footnote — the earliest known true swords,…