Posts: 506 Location: South Bend, IN
Mon 29 Nov, 2004 7:28 am
I’ve been wanting to add to this topic for a few days now, but needed to wait until I was no longer on 24k dial up and had research materials available. I had been considering posting some of Sanz back a couple months, but wanted to read as much of it as I could first. At this point I have still only managed to translate a fraction of it, it is a massive text and very difficult at times. Hopefully I will be able to add some to the topic without adding anymore confusion.
First things I notice is people might be a bit overwhelmed with pictures and line drawings and might be having a hard time understanding things because of a lack of context. After all we have a pretty good range of weapons from an Egyptian axe to a Viking age single edged sword. *G* While Sanz focus is on Iberian weapons he does address the possible evolution of the falcata as well as non-native weapons found in the region. As well Sanz also is a great resource for Iberian antenna daggers, spears,
shields, etc. that is getting somewhat off subject for the moment though. In the illustrations there are three main sword types, the Greek
kopis, the Italian machaira, and the Iberian falcate. The machaira is the one which hasn’t been mentioned yet, but it is the one that most often features the “T” back and on average seems larger than the falcata.
These forward curving swords seem to be misunderstood at times and have some myths surrounding them. For one, they are all lumped together in a group and horribly oversimplified. The
kopis, machaira, falcata, kukris, yataghan, etc. all feature very different blade cross sections and varying amounts of
distal taper. Yet these are always treated as being heavy axe like swords. I’m not sure if it is around anymore, but I seem to remember that the old SFI article had an amendment by Craig Johnsson stating that example(s) he had seen of the falcate were not this way. My personal feeling was that the falcata probably wasn’t as axe like as previously though and was more the way Craig described, so I started digging for research and finally found Sanz. I was taken back a bit by the first couple thickness that I calculated, refigured several times, then figured up all of the blade base thickness in Sanz only to find that these are very thick blades starting out. Some of these are near 1cm thick at the base of the guard, however the key is the distal taper. There is well over 50% distal taper in the first half of the blade alone, then the second half continues to taper as well. Factoring in the cross section, distal taper, fullering, etc I feel these weapons are vastly different than people realize. These things will drastically lighten the front of the sword and put the center of mass back in the area expected on ancient swords. They don’t need the massive modern cast hilts to pull that back into place.
Sanz does site two studies done on Iberian fullers, one an a falcata and one on an antenna dagger , both concluded that they had been carved in place most likely before heat treating. It mentions the use of a chisel, however I personally wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t use something more akin to a scraper like we see with the Japanese blades. A scraper would work well on all but the fullers which don’t run parallel with the spine.
Also I don’t think that Sanz’s evolutionary progression there was showing it from the Celtic knife. For one, “O” and “P” represent the
kopis and machaira. Plus the caption on that one also mentions not Celtic, but the knife of the Adriatic region.
Personally I don’t feel your progression of design works Kirk. Some of the dates for the early Germanic war knives (saxes) in similar style to the one posted would be the same time period as the falcate. Even at Hjortspring we see the Germanic knife is well rooted and taking shape. I don’t want to single you out Kirk there are plenty of people out there doing it, but finding a nice clean linear progression isn’t always possible. I could take one of the drawings of a La Tene I knife and a few design decorations, show them to people and they would take one look and think that they are a tanto and Japanese mon designs. Might be able to convince some that there is a great Celtic and Japanese connection going on, but most of us know that it just isn’t there. Really we see the same thing with Celtic and Germanic decorations when compared to ethnographic items just a couple hundred years old. Often time we over look that some things might just be an independent development. Other times we might just not have enough of the puzzle yet.
It seems as though I'm forgetting a point or two I wanted to mention as well, but this is going to have to be it for now.
Shane