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Power of Symbols Or Symbols of Power? the “Long Sword” in the Near East and the Aegean in the Second Millennium BC

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Power of Symbols Or Symbols of Power? the “Long Sword” in the Near East and the Aegean in the Second Millennium BC doi: 10.2143/ANES.54.0.3206239 ANES 54 (2017) 143-182 Power of Symbols or Symbols of Power? The “Long Sword” in the Near East and the Aegean in the Second Millennium BC Vittoria DALL’ARMELLINA Abstract A new type of weapon, which would become one of the emblems of an emerging military aristocracy, appears in the cultural landscape of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean of the second millen- nium BC. This is the so-called long sword, an object with a strong symbolic value that accompanies the warriors even after their death; in fact, it is often part of the funerary equipment of sumptuous elite tombs from the Southern Caucasus to Greece. A corpus of about 200 swords originating from the Southern Caucasus, Anatolia, the Levant and the Aegean region, with descriptions previously dispersed in a large number of publications, is the basis upon which some considerations about the origins, development and diffusion of this new type of weapon are advanced here. Furthermore, the joint analysis of the contexts of discovery of the items, the iconographic and, when available, the written sources, makes it possible to advance some hypotheses about the symbolic values of the “long sword” and the aristocratic ideals which it embodied.* Introduction A new type of weapon, which would become one of the emblems of the emerging military aristocracy, appears in the cultural landscape of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean of the second millennium BC. This is the so-called long sword, an object with a strong symbolic value that accompanies the warriors even after their death; in fact, it is often part of the funerary equipment in sumptuous elite tombs from the Southern Caucasus to Greece. Its origins may be traced back to a network of connections which linked these different areas from at least the very beginning of the Bronze Age, and along which weapons and other classes of valuable objects were widely circulated. Between the mid-fourth and the beginning of the third millennium, some elite tombs with a strong warrior connotation appear in the Caucasus region — examples are the Royal Kurgans of the Majkop culture and the recently discovered kurgans of the Leilatepe culture in Azerbaijan, and in Anatolia, the Arslantepe Royal Tomb.1 The funeral gifts contained in these graves, mostly * I am very grateful to Prof. Elena Rova for her constant help and support during my research and to Prof. Filippo Maria Carinci for his precious and wise advices. Special thanks also to Dr. Arsen Bobokhyan and Prof. Hakob Simonyan for suggesting me some of interesting bibliography to develop my studies. Finally I would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewer for his/her helpful comments and constructive criticisms. 144 v. Dall’armellina weapons and jewellery, are not only precious objects, but also emblems of emerging elitist values belonging to a new-born military aristocracy. In the second half of the third millennium, rich funerary burrows are typical of the South Caucasian cultures (Martqopi and Bedeni) of the ‘Early Kurgan’ period, which show strong con- nections with the Royal Cemetery of Alacahöyük in Anatolia.2 Later on, at the end of the third millennium, with the advent of the Trialeti culture, monumental kurgan-type burials and their valuable funerary gifts extend over a wide territory, corresponding to large parts of today’s Georgia and Armenia.3 In the course of the second millennium, the ‘Royal Tombs’ phenomenon appears to propagate in a western direction, reaching the Aegean area as well. Here the best-known exam- ples are certainly the tombs of circles A and B of Mycenae.4 The diffusion of these elite graves is matched by that of some specific items, mostly metal objects, which appear to be connected with them. The so-called long sword is prominent in these particular contexts at least since the late third millennium. The aim of this article is to define the spread of the long sword as one of the various insignia dignitatis accompanying elite deceased buried in the Royal Tombs, and to suggest its meaning as a symbol of power. This is achieved by collecting and analysing a substantial corpus of examples previ- ously dispersed in many sectorial and heterogeneous publications.5 An important antecedent of this work can be found in two articles published by Nancy Sandars in the 1960s;6 in fact, this British scholar was the first to recognise the oriental origin of the Greek swords. Sandars saw the ancestors of the long Aegean swords in specimens from Alacahöyük, but unfortunately she completely bypassed the South Caucasian items. They have been the object, instead, of two recent articles by Mikheil Abramishvili,7 the first of which contains a catalogue of Caucasian swords.8 In the second contribu- tion the Georgian scholar, while addressing the issue of the origins of Caucasian metallurgy, draws attention to the close similarity between the ‘rapiers’ of the Caucasian Trialeti culture and Greek swords, in particular those of the Mycenaean age, and argues that the western specimens derive from the South Caucasian ones. He hypothesises that they spread along a route that crosses the Anatolian region before reaching Byblos (where one example of the sword was found), and then propagated over the Mediterranean Sea, first to Crete and then to mainland Greece.9 In spite of these existing contributions,10 a comprehensive analysis of long swords — including a complete collection of the items found in the Southern Caucasus, Anatolia, the Aegean area and the Levant, a general typology of the artefacts, and a study of their origin, diffusion and symbolic significance — has never been carried out before now. 1 Kohl 2007, pp. 78–86 (Majkop); Lyonnet et al. 2008 (Leilatepe); Palumbi 2004, pp. 116–121; Frangipane 2007– 2008, pp. 169–193 (Arslantepe). 2 Gürsan-Salzmann 1994. 3 Puturidze 2003. 4 Karo 1930; Mylonas 1973. 5 The research was carried out in the framework of the author’s unpublished MA thesis (Dall’Armellina 2016). 6 Sandars 1961, pp. 17–29; 1963, pp. 117–153. 7 Abramishvili 2001, 2010. 8 Abramishvili 2001, pp. 1–8. 9 Abramishvili 2010, p. 173. 10 The similarity between Caucasian ‘rapiers’ and Mycenaean swords also mentioned in different contributions to a conference held recently in Tbilisi, see Narimanishvili et al. 2016. POWer Of SYmbOls Or SYmbOls Of POWer? 145 Definition The long sword is a metal weapon with a thin blade with two cutting edges, often balanced by a midrib, which can be more or less marked. However, its most relevant feature is the length of the blade, which is generally over 60 cm and can reach up to 120 cm. While the length of the blade remains a constant feature, the conformation of the upper part of the blade is variable, and a midrib can be either present or absent. In fact, especially in the earlier periods, morphological variety is quite high; as a consequence, items which did not show all these three features have been included in our discussion. The shape of the shoulder, the tang and the handle can vary considerably, probably due to cultural trends, which tend to differentiate the shape of the weapon on a regional basis. Indeed, similarities can very often be observed between swords from the same geographical area, and inter- estingly enough, some of these common features can be also be seen on daggers from the same regions. The midrib is, on the other hand, a functional element: it allows a greater robustness of the weapon to counterbalance the especially long and thin blades, which might otherwise easily break. Materials and Methods Information was gathered on a total of 199 long swords (see appended catalogue). According to their geographical origin, they can be divided as follows: 15 come from the Southern Caucasus,11 16 from Anatolia, 10 from the Levant, 72 from Crete, 74 from continental Greece — 35 of those from Mycenae — and 12 from the Aegean Islands. Due to the abundance of items from the Aegean area, a more selective approach was applied in choosing materials from that region to be included in the study: only swords longer than 60 cm were taken into account. For the Near East and the Southern Caucasus, on the other hand, due the lower number of finds, it was decided to include swords shorter than 60 cm provided they had all other characteristics of the long sword. The time period on which this study focuses is the second millennium BC, but some older swords, which represent a kind of prototype of the standard type, are also included in the discus- sion — this is the case for two swords found at Alacahöyük and one found on the island of Lefkada,12 all dating back to the second half of the third millennium BC. The finds were divided into nine different types based on the variables mentioned above: the conformation of the upper part of the blade and the presence/absence of the midrib. This classification was deemed suitable to represent all the different morphologies attested so far. In order to have as complete an overview as possible of the long sword phenomenon, the spatial 11 Not included in the catalogue are one or more long swords that were recently discovered in the excavation of the Nerkin Naver cemetery in Armenia (Symonian and Manaseryan 2013), about which no precise information is presently available. For information about Nerkin Naver, also see Symonian and Manaseryan 2013. Also not included in the catalogue, but briefly discussed in the text, are a number of long swords from Azerbaijan and the Iranian Talysh, the chronology of which is still uncertain 12 Koşay 1944, pp.
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