Two pieces reunite to form rare Viking sword hilt

Medieval

Two pieces of a Viking sword hilt of exceptional quality and rarity have been reunited after 1200 years. The first piece was discovered last year by a metal detectorist in a field in Stavanger, southwestern Norway. It was a small irregular piece and the finder had no idea what it was, so he handed it in to the Stavanger Museum of Archaeology for further investigation. A year later, a friend of the finder returned to the field and found a large sections of an ornately decorated sword hilt. Museum conservators realized this was a match for the little fragment found the year before.

The hilt is from the most ornamented and heaviest Viking sword types, known as a D-sword. Only about 20 D-type sword pieces have been found in Norway, and they were either imported and/or copied meticulously by local smiths. The decorative style dates it to the early 9th century.

It is still difficult to see the details in the hilt, but the décor includes gilded elements of the typical animal styles found during the Iron and Viking Age, from ca 550-1050, according to the press release. The hilt also contains geometrical figures in silver, made with the so-called niello technique. This means that a metallic mixture of sorts was used to make black stripes in the silver.

Both ends of the crossguard are formed as animal heads.

“The technique is of a very high quality, and both the lavish and complicated decor and the special formation of the crossguard make this a truly unique find,” archaeologist Zanette Glørstad from the Museum of Archaeology, University of Stavanger, says in the press release.

The closest comparable example is a bronze sword hilt with silver gilt inlay and niello enamel discovered on the Isle of Eigg (now in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh ).

The hilt pieces were found in the Gausel area of Stavanger on a field adjacent to the farm where the richly-furnished tomb of a Viking woman was discovered in 1883. Dubbed the Gausel Queen, the elite woman was buried with 40 artifacts of exceptional quality — bronze, silver and gold jewelry, knives, drinking horns, a cooking pan, fittings from a reliquary box — including rare and expensive imports from Ireland.

The Queen was not alone. Other Viking graves have been found there, and many more are known to have been destroyed during agricultural work. Even with spotty old archaeological practices, accidental discoveries and looting marring the archaeological record, more and more varied Medieval Irish metalwork has been discovered in this area than in any other place in Europe. Archaeologists believe this part of the coast was one the major departure points for Viking ship voyages westward across the North Sea.

The hilt is now undergoing cleaning and conservation before it goes on permanent display at the museum.

Rusty 14th c. saber wielded by Turkish raiders or Greek defenders?

Medieval

A medieval curved sword from the early 14th century has been discovered in a ruined monastery on the northwest Aegean coast 40 miles southeast of Thessaloniki. It was unearthed in an excavation of the ruins of Agios Nicolaos Chrysokamaros, a small fortified dependency of the Saint George the Zograf Monastery on Mount Athos just across the bay.  Very few late Byzantine swords have been found in Greece, and this is the only one to have been unearthed by archaeologists in its original undisturbed archaeological context.

The 14th century was a turbulent time on the Chalcidice peninsula, primarily due to conflicts between the Latins and the Byzantine Empire. The Catalan Grand Company, Aragonese mercenaries initially engaged by the Byzantine emperor who would later double-cross them, spent a solid two years between 1307 and 1309 sacking the monasteries on Mount Athos. Incursions by Turkish pirates, Balkan potentates seeking to chip away at Byzantine territory and the growth of Ottoman power kept the Aegean coast in constant turmoil.  There were 300 monasteries on Mount Athos in 1300. By the end of the 1300s, there were only 35 still standing.

The sword is heavily corroded and incomplete with a surviving length of 18 inches. It has a single edge and is curved throughout its full length. It was bent and burned in the raid that destroyed the monastery outpost. Several of the metal rings from the scabbard fused to the blade. They are the only part of the scabbard to survive.

This type of saber was used by both Byzantine and Turkish soldiers, so it’s difficult to know who wielded this weapon before it was buried.

[Excavation leaders] Maniotis and Dogas have identified three military actions in the 14th century that could have led to the sword being used there: attacks along the coast by Turkish pirates, which included the kidnapping in 1344 of administrators from the Mount Athos monastery; the occupation of the region from 1345 until about 1371 by the forces of the Serbian king Stefan Dušan, who aspired to conquer Byzantine territories in the West; and the siege of Thessalonica by Ottoman troops from 1383 until 1387, when the Chalkidiki region was often raided for food.

Maniotis can’t say for sure, but he thinks the sword may be of Turkish origin, and that it was used in a pirate raid on the monastery.

The excavation has revealed that the monastic outpost was very well fortified indeed, encircled by a granite block wall more than six feet thick. The tower was used as a shelter for villagers during military attacks and pirate raids, and to keep important religious relics and food stores safe. Evidence of severe fire damage was found in the same archaeological layer as the curved sword, indicating the tower was set alight in a raid.

Largest cache of bronze statues found at Saqqara

Ancient

Archaeologists have discovered a cache of 150 bronze statuettes from the 5th century B.C. in the Saqquara Necropolis. This is the largest cache of bronze statues ever found at Saqqara and the first that dates to the Late Period. The figurines depict Egyptian deities like Anubis, Amun, Bastet and Osiris, as well as the ancient notables like the architect Imhotep.

The team from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities also unearthed multiple burial shafts containing a total of 250 painted wooden coffins in excellent condition, less than two years after 100 exceptional wooden coffins were discovered there. Preliminary examination suggests the mummies inside the sarcophagi are mostly well-preserved as well. One of them contains hieroglyphic text on papyrus. Archaeologists think it may be passages from the Book of the Dead. They will be conserved and translated in the laboratory of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Other artifacts found in the Late Period burials were a sistrum — a percussion instrument used in religious rituals — and a group of bronze bowls used in the worship of Isis.

The team also discovered objects from earlier burials, most remarkably a pair of vividly painted wooden statues of the goddesses Isis and Nephthyst. Made around 1500 B.C., the statues depict the goddesses as mourners: sitting on their knees, their right arms bent over their faces. Their faces are gilded, and much of the original bright paint and gold is intact.

The bronzes, statues and coffins will be moved to the  Grand Egyptian Museum for study and conservation. If possible, they will be placed on display when the new museum opens later this year.

Le Mans’ Roman walls are 50 years younger than realized

Ancient, Modern(ish), Museums

The city of Le Mans in northwestern France is probably best known for the 24-hour endurance sports car race that bears its name, but it has the far greater distinction of having the best preserved late Roman defensive walls surviving in France and in the top three best preserved Roman walls in the former Empire. The only other comparable ones are the walls of Rome itself and of Constantine’s second Rome (ie, Istanbul).

The Roman walls of Le Mans cover an area of 8.5 hectares. There were 40 towers originally; today 19 of them are preserved, looming 50 feet high. The walls between them were built in a typical Roman technique: parallel brick facings with mortar between them. They average more than 30 feet high and are 15 feet thick at the base. To build these monumental defenses, workers used 400,000 bricks, 140,000 tons of rubble, 60,000 tons of mortar and 50,000 square feet of reused foundation blocks.

The masonry and brickwork are uniquely decorated. Contrasting colors of terracotta bricks, pink mortar, red sandstone, light sandstone, white limestone were arranged to create chevrons, columns, X-shapes, flowers and more. Researchers have identified 14 different motifs. Roman enclosures elsewhere do not have this feature, while other ancient structures in the Le Mans area do, so it seems this was a local aesthetic carried forward through this monumental undertaking.

Historians have long believed that the walls were built around 280 A.D. in reaction to the Crisis of the Third Century. Before the Crisis, 25 Gallo-Roman cities had fortified defensive walls. More than 80 Gallo-Roman towns built new walls in the late third and early fourth centuries. They are easily distinguished from walls built in earlier times because they are much thicker, higher, have more towers and were made with recycled construction materials. The foundations of Le Mans’ walls were built with the stone from the city’s public baths, deliberately demolished to provide construction materials for the new fortifications.

In 2017, a new in-depth exploration of the walls was undertaken by city archaeologists and historians. Samples were taken from the bricks and mortar of the walls in the attempt to confirm its date. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), Carbon-14 analysis and archaeomagnetic dating of the samples all returned unexpected results. The wall was built in the 4th century, not the third, between 320 and 360 A.D. That means the massive fortifications were not built under pressure from barbarian raids and ineffectual imperial management, but rather during a period of comparative stability in the Late Empire.

The samples were only taken from one section of the wall. Archaeologists plan to analyze other sections as well to discover whether the fortifications were all built so late, or if some parts were begun in the third century and construction took place over many decades.

The Jean-Claude-Boulard-Carré Plantagenêt Museum in Le Mans is hosting the first major exhibition dedicated to the city’s exceptional Roman walls. The exhibition explores the wall’s meaning beyond its military application, its construction materials and methods, how it was altered between the 5th and 18th century, and its rediscovery in the 19th century.

Early Iron Age swords found in Bavaria

Ancient

Two extremely rare early Iron Age swords have been unearthed in Andechs, southern Germany. They were crafted in the Hallstatt period, the 8th century B.C., and are among the oldest iron swords ever discovered in southern Germany.

Well-preserved Early Iron Age sword, ca. 2,800 years old. Photo courtesy BLfD.

The swords were discovered in March during construction of a new firehouse in Andechs, Bavaria. Crews had only barely broken ground when they encountered two swords and fragments from three ceramic vessels less than 16 inches under the surface. The objects were grave goods, each sword buried in a separate grave with cinerary remains. The remains were concentrated in certain areas, suggesting they were originally placed in an organic container like a cloth bag that was then buried next to the weapons. Another six burials were found at the site, with grave goods including a bowl-head pin and bronze jewelry.

The swords straddle an important transitional stage from the use of bronze to the use of iron in weapons. They are both made of iron, but the earlier one was made in the shape and style of a bronze sword. The later one, made in the same century, had an adapted design to take advantage of the stronger, more stable metal.

The swords are 76 and 66 centimeters long and six centimeters wide. While the shorter one was probably mainly used as a stabbing weapon in man-to-man combat, the longer and heavier one was more suitable as a stabbing weapon that the fighter could wield from above – for example from horseback.

In the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Munich, a team of restorers cleaned the swords with micro-fine blasting technology and examined them more closely. The blades are partially heavily corroded, the handles are missing. However, the restorers were able to identify traces of horn on one of the so-called handle tongues, which suggests a handle made of this material. Two of the four rivets that held the horn plates on the grip tongue are still preserved on the handle. Because no such remains of attachment can be seen on the other sword, restorers and archaeologists assume that the hilt was attached with a resin adhesive. It is no longer possible to trace what material it was made of. […]

The remains of a multi-layer linen weave textile were also found on the two blades, as well as the remains of a cord that must have been wrapped around it in several places. The weapons were presumably wrapped in cloth and given to the dead.