Wednesday, September 16, 2009

An Elegant Weapon For A Less Civilised Age

I was recently in Dublin for a "War and Death" conference, and it reminded me that I still had videos of the bronze sword display from WAC-6 last year. I though people might be interested in seeing them, so here we go:



Dr. Alan Peatfield uses a bronze short sword on a melon.




Dr. Barry Molloy uses an Egyptian khephesh on rolled tatami mat, simulating a limb.



Drs. Peatfield and Molloy demonstrate the use of a khephesh against a shield. As far as I know, the man who breaks and runs on 0.19 is not doing so in fear of his life.


Sadly, I was not filming when a Very Eminent Scandinavian Prehistorian accidently almost opened up a woman's arm with a swing of a Bronze Age rapier - a near-miss that was not his fault, but still nearly took experimental archaeology onto a whole new level.

2 comments:

emily said...

weird.
why is it that shape?

Stephen said...

So that you can do the hooking-the-shield-down trick from the last video, and probably to enhance the cutting power.

Or, if you believe Robert Drews' "The End of the Bronze Age" (1993) - and you really shouldn't - its to make it easier to cut off the foreskins of dead opponents, which was the Egyptian method of counting casualties after a battle.