Bronze Age sword

Bronze Age swords appear from around the 17th century BC, in the Black Sea region and the Aegean, as a further development of the dagger. They are replaced by the Iron Age sword during the early part of the 1st millennium BC.

From an early time the swords reach lengths in excess of 100 cm. The technology to produce blades of such lengths appears to have been developed in the Aegean, using alloys of copper and tin or arsenic, around 1700 BC. Typical Bronze Age swords had lengths of roughly between 60 and 80 cm, while weapons significantly shorter than 60 cm also continued to be made, but are variously categorized as "short swords" or as daggers. Before 1400 BC or so, swords remain mostly limited to the Aegean and southeastern Europe, but they become more widespread in the final centuries of the 2nd millennium, to Central Europe and Britain, to the Near East, Central Asia, Northern India and to China.

Before bronze, stone (flint, obsidian f.e.) was used as the primary material for edged cutting tools and weapons. Stone, however, is very fragile, and therefore not practical to be used for swords. With the introduction of copper, and subsequently bronze, daggers could be made longer, leading to the sword.

Thus, the development of the sword from the dagger was gradual, and in 2004 the first "swords" were claimed for the Early Bronze Age (c. 33rd to 31st centuries), based on finds at Arslantepe by Marcella Frangipane of Rome University. A cache of nine swords and daggers was found; they are composed of arsenic-copper alloy. Among them, three swords were beautifully inlaid with silver.

These are the weapons of a total length of 45 to 60 cm which could be described as either short swords or long daggers. Some other similar swords have been found in Turkey, and are described by Thomas Zimmermann.

The sword remained extremely rare for another millennium, and became more widespread only with the closing of the 3rd millennium. The "swords" of this later period can still readily be interpreted as daggers, as with the copper specimen from Naxos (dated roughly 2800 to 2300 BC), with a length of just below 36 cm, but individual specimens of the Cycladic "copper swords" of the period around 2300 reach a length up to 60 cm. The first weapons that can be classified as swords without any ambiguity are those found in Minoan Crete, dated to about 1700 BC, which reach lengths of more than 100 cm. These are the "type A" swords of the Aegean Bronze Age.

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