[Tomas Mihalyi]

well im no expert in medieval weaponry but this khopesh of yours looks more like a Turkish Yatagan to me....

I suppose the ancient egyptian khopesh looks more like this: http://www.heru-ur.org/mesenroom/warfare/khopesh3.jpg

[Gregory J. Liebau]

[Kurt Scholz]

[Fernando Q.]

Dear Kurt,

I'd suggest that you check carefully what I said on the origins of the falcata in the original source where all these ills. are taken from and hopelessly mixec, and check the original text, tables, maps and drawings there.

Details on the book in question and an AJA review here:
http://uam.academia.edu/FernandoQuesadaSanz/Books

(much more there on short Iron Age Swords in the Iberian Peninsula)

a summary here:
http://uam.academia.edu/FernandoQuesadaSanz/P...a_iberica_

could also be useful

http://uam.academia.edu/FernandoQuesadaSanz/P...n_Spanish_

cheers
Fernando

[Rafael O Ozambela]

Hello,

The lines of the falcata are beautiful to me. My ancestry is Cuban and the ancestors of those cubans are Asturian and Basque, so northern Spanish. My father regaled me with the ability of my great grand father with a machete against sugar cane and Spanish mausers. My father always said the family heritage had seen the falcata as the ancestor of their machetes. Living in the U.S. I have had such romantic dreams of the falcata and it's beauty that eventually I got motivated.

I acquired a bar of stainless steel from a scrap shop down the street from me, the proprietor informed me that it was from the blade edge of a snow plow and very hard steel. SO I turned a plow blade in to a sword, literally. He gave me a bar roughly 3.5' long by 3.5" wide and at least a half inch deep. This is what it looks like so far, I'm still working on it...

The hole in the blade and the grip are bolt holes where the steel was bolted to the truck shovel. My intention is to fill the hole in the blade with a bronze bolt that I finish off with an engraving of Lauburu a symbol on each side. The notch in the hilt will be filled with a brass ring and a wood grip.

[William P]

Manning imperial made a reproduction of a kopis from korfu, strangest of all is the blade design, manning imperial's repro had the kopis posessing a false edge which seems exceptiionally rare for such a weapon class

http://www.manningimperial.com/catalogue/arms...-kopis/623

[P. Emerson Humphrey]

[Joshua Bastian]

Hi guys Joshua here.

I am a great intusiast in the carthaginians and their allys so I asked myself this question: the romans and other sources say that the falcata style blade was very effective against helmets but what were its overall armor piercing abilitys? Was it best used against light infantry or was it designed to crack open armor and if so could it cut throw bronze or mail? Just some thoughts😀

[Luka Borscak]

There is no sources I know of saying falcata is effective against armour and when I saw a falcata in a museum it definitely didn't look like an anti armour weapon. It's a slasher made for cutting flesh and cloth. All talk about falcata's armour cutting ability come from one source, a mention in ceasar's writings how he met a soldier who had his head wounded through a helmet with a spanish sword. We don't even if know that spanish sword was a falcata. And the man lived so even though he was wounded, his helmet did the job and saved his life.

[Matthew Amt]

Exactly what Luka said. Ancient swords were never meant to go *through* armor, they were made to go *around* it. So they were light and fast. The kopis was no heavier than any other sword of the same general length.

Hey, I need to post a photo of my own new kopis! I finished it recently, ground down out of a rather crude 3-pound beast (Scorpion Arms, I think?). Finished weight is under 1-1/2 pounds. I was able to pretty much match the shape of a blade from Olympia, and based the bone hilt on one from Aigai in Macedonia.





Enjoy!

Matthew

[Joshua Bastian]

[Gregory J. Liebau]

Joshua,

Do you have any idea how much energy is necessary to stab through well-wrought mail? What kind of math or experience with original quality armament are you basing your conjecture on (hard to do, considering almost no orignal ancient mail armor even exists). In any case, compared to contemporary straight swords such as the xiphos and gladius, a bit of extra weight in a blade makes very little difference in a stabbing attack. In fact, I would almost certainly prefer to use a straight bladed weapon for almost any form of thrusting compared to one shaped like a kopis/falcata. The weapon's entire form - as well as many surviving Greek pottery depictions of the kopis in use, often in overhand swings - lends credibility to the idea of it being a slashing weapon rather than one for thrusting.

Having seen a couple of surviving Greek kopis blades in Greek museums, I can assure you those weapons were hardly any larger than a xiphos. In fact I've seen several xiphos from Macedonian tombs that were surprisingly large and definitely heftier weapons than either of the kopis blades that I viewed.

I have less to say about the later Spanish falcata, which is apparently a bit of a larger weapon, though its contemporaries the gladius and spatha were also substantially broader/longer than their Greek counterpart in the xiphos. Whether there was any serious difference in the way that a falcata performed due to its weight or the distribution of that weight along the blade is hard to say with any exactness. Its basic functions would have been the same as other mid-length blades, and perhaps even more limited to slashing rather than stabbing, due to the above mentioned restrictions of the blade shape.

-Gregory

[Timo Nieminen]

[Joshua Bastian]

Hi guys

Thanks for replying and the weights i have seen were 900-1300 gramms. I have never personally tried stabbing throw mail and I agree that the falcata was mainly a hacking weapon. Yet I have seen many documentarys and tests were a blade apparently thrusts throw mail with ease. You can see it in almost all documentarys about medieval and roman weapons.

Joshua😀😀

[Craig Peters]

Almost no one today makes historically accurate mail armour. Even modern riveted mail tends to be substantially flawed for a variety of reasons. The modern documentaries are highly unreliable, because their mail armour is much easier to defeat than mail made to historic standards.

See here: http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=19189

[Timo Nieminen]

[Craig Peters]

I don't know anything about the kopis/falcata beyond what I have read in this thread. What I am wondering is if there are any Greek kopises (kopi?) made from bronze (i.e. bronze age weapons). From what I have read in this thread so far, my impression is "no".

[Gregory J. Liebau]

Craig,

As far as I'm aware, the answer to your question regarding the existence of bronze kopises is a resounding "no." However, there were some interesting single-edge bronze weapons used in the LBA throughout Europe, though their form and size is not comparable to the kopis, so there is no reason to suspect any evolution between such weapons and those of the iron age. The earliest evidence we have of the kopis is roughly three hundred years after iron began to dominate the scene of Mediterranean blade technology. Cheers!

-Gregory

[Matthew Amt]

There are some bronze implements that are single-edged, with long round-section grips that end in a ring or loop. The whole thing is apparently cast in one piece, without anything that looks like a guard. I haven't seen any information on weights or thicknesses for these things, but I suspect they are cleavers meant for sacrificing animals. Ah, found a photo!

In any case, I don't *think* this could be a predecessor for the kopis. BUT there are some iron kopis-like blades that seem to be rather heavier, and have what seem to be thick rod tangs, or a thick square (diagonal) hilt/grip. Again, I'd call these "cleavers" and not swords. Some kind of cleaver, perhaps these exact things, are seen in vase paintings, being used to kill animals, not in combat.

Bottom line, although there might be some relation between the cleaver-tool and the kopis-weapon, it may only be superficial. And only the cleaver has a known Bronze Age ancestor.

Matthew

[William P]