Ancient Artifacts from the Bronze Age
Ancient Artifacts from the Bronze Age
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,…
For most of the twentieth century, anyone asking where the sword was born would have been pointed firmly at the Aegean. The Mycenaean Type A rapiers from Mallia and Arkalochori — those impossibly long, slender thrusting blades from around 1700…
The Burnt City phenomenon Beyond the well-trodden paths of Luristan and Elam, the Iranian plateau and its borderlands harboured metallurgical traditions that shaped the ancient world — yet remain almost unknown to collectors and the wider public today. When collectors…
Black Copper The Daggers That Should Not Rust Among the most deceptive objects in any collection of ancient metalwork are daggers that appear, at first glance, to be iron — or at least some awkward hybrid of iron and copper.…
Bronze Age Cultures of the Ancient World: BMAC, Andronovo, Luristan, Shang China and the Forgotten Civilisations of Metal From the copper mines of the Balkans to the ritual vessels of Shang China, bronze metallurgy arose independently — and sometimes interdependently…
Sharpness at hand. The dagger is where it all begins. Before the sword, before the spear received a metal head, before the axe was cast in bronze, the dagger was the first bladed metal object in human hands. It is…