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A 5,000-year-old Hittite sword identified in an Armenian monastery in Venice. In 2017, an Italian student Vittoria Dall’Armellina was visiting the Mkhitarist monastery on San Lazzaro in Venice when she spotted a familiar looking sword. The sword was mistakenly labeled as a medieval artifact and was thought to be a few hundred years old. It turns out it’s one of the oldest known weapons in the world. Dall’Armellina, who was getting her doctorate in archaeology at Venice’s Ca’ Foscari University at the time, thought the object looked familiar to those she had studied for her master’s thesis on the early Bronze Age, when swords were believed to have been first invented. It turns out she was right: After more than two years of analysis, experts have dated the artifact back 5,000 years, according to an announcement from the university. The University contacted the Mekhitarist congregation at San Lazzaro degli Armeni to find out more details about the object. Father Serafino Jamourlian researched the archives and manage to find out its history. The sword was apparently sent in a donation of gifts from an Armenian art collector named Yervant Khorasandjian, to a monk named Ghevond Alishan, known as Father Leonzio, about 150 years ago. Alishan was a famous poet and writer who was a friend of the famed English art critic John Ruskin; Alishan died in 1901, and his belongings passed on to his monastery. According to a document that accompanied the donation, handwritten in Armenian and dating from the second half of the 19th century, the sword was found in historic Armenia minor, at Kavak, a settlement near Trabzon. A surprising detail is that the sword was made of arsenical copper, an alloy of copper and arsenic used about 5,000 years ago, before true bronze was invented by alloying copper and tin. The sword was crafted during the era of the Kura–Araxes culture at the sight where the tribe named Hayasa was later described by the Hittites. Archaeologists think swords were invented in that region, and the sword from San Lazzaro degli Armeni is now thought to be an early example — perhaps even the oldest. It is well known that ancient Armenia was one of the earliest metallurgical centers. Ca’ Foscari University archaeologist Elena Rova told Live Science: “It seems that in this area, between the northern Caucasus and Armenian Highlands, the sword was invented, and there were at least two typological variants,” At Metsamor (Armenia) for example a 6000 year old metal smelting foundry was discovered, considered the worlds oldest. The foundry is known to have extracted and processed gold, copper, and several types of manganese, zinc, strychnine, mercury, and iron. #archaeohistories

Doing a bunch of reading on the subject of knife fighting in WW1, the last time knives were used in hand to hand combat with any kind of regularity. An interesting picture emerges of basically two methods of employment. 1. Quietly killing sentries by sneaking up, stabbing him in the throat. There is a method to this, you didn't cut his throat by sawing in, you'd grab his head, stab into the neck, then push away from yourself to sever the windpipe and blood vessels. The goal was to cut his windpipe before he could alert anyone. 2. Holding the knife in an overhand ice pick grip, you'd jump down into a crowded trench and frantically stab at their faces. It was imperative to get down into the trench and on top of them asap, as remaining on the lip would get you shot. There was often no room to wield the knife any other way, and stabbing at their bodies would take too long to kill, so face/neck it was. What you didn't see much was men squaring off with knives in saber grips for a careful duel, movie style. It was all about nighttime ambushes, surprise attacks on unprepared enemies in cramped, muddy chaos. As the war went on this kind of thing went from improvised in the field to systematically taught technique. Remember, when the war started they were imagining infantry would be in hand to hand combat mostly when making gallant charges across fields with bayonets fixed, or when fending off cavalry charges like they were at Waterloo. The doctrine was to attack with speed and shock to overcome the dangers of long range rifle fire. Nobody important really thought they'd need to train their guys for widespread knife fighting in trenches, but that's exactly what wound up happening. Imagine the balls it took to do this sort of thing. You'd be preceded by a shower of grenades, followed by your boys with clubs/sharpened shovels/bayonets to finish off the wounded. Officers would have a pistol, but rarely time to reload, so they'd have six shots and then it was knife time. Trench raids were frantic, bloody, close combat unlike anything seen on that kind of scale since. It was downright medieval. WW2 saw desperate hand to hand combat, particularly in the Pacific, but nothing on the scale of WW1. On the western front this was happening regularly across the front, with so many raiding parties that sometimes they'd bumble into each other in no-man's-land and get into knife and grenade fights while tangled in the barbed wire and shell holes. Insane. One interesting thing I learned is that although the brass knuckle design looks badass, it mostly served not to punch people, but to keep the knife in hand while you crawled around obstacles, pulled the pin on grenades, or operated wire cutters. This is all spurred by my son having questions about Grandpa's trench knife, which he carried in WW2 and credited with keeping him alive. Son is fascinated by this. Grandpa didn't talk much about the war, or the knife, but it was his only souvenir and it's been sharpened a lot. One of the only stories he told me was that at one point he had to strip down to his shorts, pistol belt, and this knife, jumped in the ocean, and swam for his life between islands in the Philippines. The rest of his unit didn't make it, and he didn't want to talk about the details. As the eldest son of the eldest son, I inherited the knife, along with a few stories about it's importance in ensuring my existence. I'm probably one of few modern people who can hold a weapon on my hands knowing that this exact weapon was used by my ancestor to kill people in hand to hand combat so that I could live. A sobering reminder of the debt I owe the men who came before me.