[Anton de Vries]

I work as a volunteer in the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Which is fully dedicated to archaeology.
As such I often wave access to very nice items - like these:
This supposedly is a Luristan find and as there is no documentation I think the finder just dug these up and sold them to the first interested person he met.
My rough guesstimate is that these are 2500-3000 years old.

As I'm interested in the sword thing I was curious to learn how they felt when held so...
Sadly I'm unable to find the sword-in-hand pictures in my chaotic multi-thousand pictures so this shot will have to do.May update later.
Bewcause of my involvement in HEMA I've held MANY swords so I kind of know what I'm talking about.

Top - iron - seemed very fragile so I did not touch it.
Second from top - iron - very disappointing. Boat anchor.
Third from top - bronze - this is more like it, an actual sword - not great or even good but I'd label it useful.
Fourth from top really surprised me - bronze - as the shape is so similar to the 2nd from top I had no expectations...Oh boy the thing seems ALIVE in hand - it's small-ish but feels super inviting -
THIS IS THE BEST SWORD I'VE EVER HELD
Obviously it was never used, it has not been sharpened.
Mind you as this is bronze it was cast, not forged.
How did the maker do this? I have absolutely no idea - I'm in awe of that man's skill.
Moving on to the dagger which is actually very nice.

I had trouble parting with the magic piece but it couldn't be helped.
Even if I could afford to own this I'd still consider it a museum piece, it doesn't belong in a private collection.

[Dan D'Silva]

Your age estimate is in line with what I understand about these weapons.

The second and fourth look like Gundlingen-type swords, although they may just be a similar-looking type. The Gundlingen swords were produced in the Hallstatt culture of Central Europe (Hallstatt C, to be specific, c. 2,800-2,620 years ago), which a lot of scholars believe was proto-Celtic. In any case, they're definitely not Luristan.

Luristan, BTW, has become depreciated as an archaeological label, since similar weapons were used in nearby regions. Dan Howard once said that the term really means illegally looted from somewhere in the Middle East. There are also a lot of Luristan fakes on the market. With no provenance, it's difficult to say anything about an archaeological find other than that it looks typical of a given time and region. Maybe chemical analysis would help?

Edit: Ahem. I had written "Mindelheim," but it turns out I have the Mindelheim and Gundlingen folders on my hard drive mislabeled (and must have for about 20 years). The Mindelheim type is a different but related Hallstatt-culture sword.