The BRONZE AGE ceremonial SWORDS
British Museum Collection
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7m 23s
British Museum Curator Neil Wilkin spends a lot of his time thinking about metal – he’s Curator of the Bronze Age. Was seeing bronze for the first time like the internet or 3D printing? Does he secretly enact Game of Thrones with the objects?
Neil has been working with UCL and members of the public to create 3D models of Bronze Age dirks (large ceremonial swords). This will help us to understand how these weapons were created and, in some instances, destroyed.
Bronze Age swords appeared from around the 17th century BC, in the Black Sea and Aegean regions, as a further development of the dagger. They were replaced by iron swords during the early part of the 1st millennium BC. From an early time the swords reached 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. Bronze Age swords were typically not longer than 80 cm; weapons significantly shorter than 60 cm are variously categorized as short swords or daggers. Before about 1400 BC swords remained mostly limited to the Aegean and southeastern Europe, but they became more widespread in the final centuries of the 2nd millennium BC, to Central Europe and Britain, to the Near East, Central Asia, Northern India and to China.
Cast: Neil Wilkin (Curator)
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