Here is my favorite picture of a sword:
Posted on 11/13/2009 6:04:57 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A Norwegian man said experts told him the sword he found abandoned at a roadside four years ago dates back 3,000 years.
Ernst Skofteland said he asked a team of archaeologists digging on a farm near his home to look at the sword, which he discovered at the side of a lumber road in a forest area four years ago, and they told him it dates from around 1100-900 B.C., Aftenposten reported Friday.
"When they told me how old it was, I thought they were kidding me," Skofteland said. He said he turned the sword over to government authorities for study.
Experts said about 20 similar swords have been discovered in Norway.
(Excerpt) Read more at upi.com ...
You mean the eye on the pyramid on a dollar bill? Cause I have been inside the Great Pyramid and it was a little claustrophobic, but not creepy paranoid like someone was watching me. And other than that the all-seeing eye is all I know.
heck, this may not even be from north germanic/proto-norse-speaking peoples. I don’t think they were even in scandinavia that long ago (?).
Sword Ping!
3,000 years is a really, really old one.
Any idea what it looks like?
I didn’t find a picture, but my wifi connection was freaking out... but yes, I’m really interested to find out what it looked like. It’s curious that the article says that there’s something like 20 more of them of a similar vintage that’ve been found in Norway. I didn’t know there were that many examples of swords that are that old.
Even 1,000 years is a long time for a sword to survive in any sort of recognizable shape. Steel, of course, was great on the battlefield, but it doesn’t survive well through the ages. To be that old it almost has to be all bronze. I wonder.
Yeah, has to be bronze. I saw some old battering ram heads and they were bronze
So THAT'S where I left it. I've been looking all over for that thing.
Just FedEx it to me, Sven. I'll pay the shipping charges.
Are you sure you didn’t have it handed to you by some moistened wench?
You really shouldn’t have been putting those in your automatic dishwasher.
GM...TITSG.
My first instinct would have been to list it on eBay.
This sword is only from about the 14th century. It would've been mostly (if not all) steel construction, and it is obviously very seriously degraded by oxidation. Location is of course important. I understand that peat bogs tend to preserve things longer due to the relatively anoxic nature of the bog. But even so... steel will dissolve away in time. Bronze, however... doesn't oxidize. So curiously enough, there are often more quality examples of far older bronze age weapons remaining than there are of the more modern steel counterparts.
Bronze lost to steel on the battlefield, but won out in the test of the ages. Heh.
For no one - no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts.
"This you can trust."
What sword? There's a sword in that picture?
Should have gone south to Shiloh, I found lots things there as kid.
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women, Girly-man.
Today, we suffer so much abuse at the hands of others because we have forgotten the Answer to the Riddle...
Yah know... somehow I've finally gotten into the space where I can enjoy Tarantino's Kill Bill movie(s). But still it bugs me on a certain level... that somehow it perpetuates the myth that it's only the Japanese that mastered metallurgy... that the "Samurai" swords were somehow totally superior to European swordsmithing technology. I think this is just basically untrue. I think European metallurgy and swordsmithing was every bit as advanced (or more) and perhaps was so even hundreds of years earlier. There was some pretty advanced stuff going on in Europe with swordsmithing throughout the so-called "dark ages". It wasn't nearly so "dark" as the popular history might suggest. The same with the "art" of swordfighting. Masters like Johannes Lichtenauer, Fiore de Liberi, or George Silver... didn't just appear out of a vacuum. They were the product of generations of refinement of technique.
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