The 7 coolest ancient weapons discovered in recent times
The coolest ancient weapons discovered in recent times
Ancient swords, elaborate daggers, even early artillery — the few years turned up a number of intriguing ancient weapons that tell the story of the violence of the past. These discoveries cover hundreds of thousands of years of human history, ranging from the ice age to medieval times.
A very old sword
What was thought to be a medieval sword sitting in an obscure museum is actually one of the oldest swords ever discovered.
The simple weapon was spotted in the San Lazzaro degli Armeni monastery by then-student archaeologist Vittoria Dall'Armellina. Though the sword was labeled as only a few hundred years old, Dall'Armellina recognized that it looked far more like a weapon from the Bronze Age than a medieval artifact. She and her colleagues analyzed the sword and found that it is indeed a copper-arsenic alloy from the early Bronze Age, about 5,000 years ago. The sword hails from Anatolia, or what is now eastern Turkey, where swords were first invented.
A beautiful hilt
A mushroom hunter in the Czech Republic was out in the woods when he discovered far more than delectable fungi.
Sticking out of the soil was a piece of metal. Mushroom hunter Roman Novák kicked at it and realized it was the blade of a sword. He started digging and found not only the sword, but a bronze ax.
The hilt and pommel of the sword are decorated with delicate circular and crescent-shaped carvings. Archaeologists with the nearby Silesian Museum examined the artifacts and pegged them to the Bronze Age, some 3,300 years ago. It was not clear why the sword was out in the middle of the woods, though recent rain may have washed away enough soil to make it visible for the first time in thousands of years. Archaeologists plan to study the surrounding region further.
A grave discovery
Around 2,500 years ago in what is now Siberia, a man, two women and a baby were laid to rest. In the grave with them was a cache of treasures, including bronze daggers, knives and axes.
The people buried in the grave were part of the Tagar culture. The weapons lay alongside both the man and the younger woman. It wasn't unusual for Tagar women to be buried with weapons, though they usually possessed bows and arrows, not the ax found in this grave. The man and woman were probably in their 30s or 40s when they died. Curled at their feet was the body of a woman in her 60s. And scattered throughout the grave, archaeologists found the bones of an infant less than a month old, whose remains may have been disturbed by rodents after the burial.
Weapons of bone
A bone knife-handle discovered on the Isle of Man, near England, reveals the creativity of ancient peoples when it comes to weaponry. First unearthed in the 1970s, the bone pommel was finally analyzed in 2020, with a report in the journal Antiquity in October. The artifact was found in a grave holding the cremated bones of four individuals, including at least one teenager and one infant. Along with the partially burned bones, which had been collected in two urns, archaeologists found bone beads and a bone knife pommel, probably made from the bone of a cow or horse. The blade was gone, but the pommel would have held a knife about the size of a modern table knife, the researchers reported.
Perhaps even more intriguing than the weapon in this burial was a series of other artifacts: bones worked into rectangular shapes about an inch (30 millimeters) long, with rounded corners. Nothing like the bone rectangles has ever been found before, and it's not clear what they would have been used for.
A sword for the "mirror afterlife"
When archaeologists unearthed the 1,100-year-old grave of a Viking warrior in Norway, they weren't surprised to find a sword inside; Viking men were often buried with their weapons. But what made the grave strange was that the sword was on the warrior's left side; Viking swords are almost always found buried to the deceased's right.
In life, a right-handed warrior would wear a sword on the left to be able to draw it easily. The fact that Viking warriors are buried with their swords on the right suggests that they believed in a "mirror afterlife," in which everything was flip-flopped. The warrior buried in the Norwegian grave site may have been left-handed, his discoverers speculated, meaning he would have worn his sword on the right in life. Thus, his sword was placed to his left in preparation for the mirror afterlife.
A sword in a lake
Sometime in the 16th century, a medieval warrior's body settled to the bottom of a Lithuanian lake. It was found, alongside the soldier's weapons, late in 2020 during a bridge inspection.
It's not clear why the man ended up at the lake bottom; sediments had settled naturally over the body, burying him in silt 30 feet (9 meters) below the water's surface. Near the body were two knives with wooden handles and an iron sword, all in a surprisingly good state of preservation.
Early artillery
An artifact discovered in Croatia's Krka National Park looks, at first glance, like a particularly heavy-duty thermos — but it's actually a siege weapon dating back to the 17th or 18th century.
The device is a mačkula, a kind of mortar used when laying siege to a fortress or castle. According to Croatia Week, the bronze artifact was found near Nečven fortress, an archaeological ruin dating to the beginning of the 14th century. The mačkula was found within one of the fortress walls. It may have had both ceremonial and defensive value, according to park officials; bursts from a mačkula are traditionally used to celebrate winter festivals and victory in a traditional equestrian competition, the Sinjska alka, held every year in Sinj, Croatia.
Archaeologists have unearthed amazing swords, daggers and other weaponry