THE
BOOK OF THE SWORD

‘I wanted a book on the Sword, not a treatise on Carte and Tierce,’ said the Publisher, when, some years ago, my earliest manuscript was sent to him.

It struck me then and there that the Publisher was right. Consequently the volume was re-written after a more general and less professional fashion.

I have only one wish that reader and reviewer can grant: namely, a fair field and no favour for certain ‘advanced views’ of Egyptology. It is my conviction that this study, still in its infancy, will greatly modify almost all our preconceived views of archæological history.

RICHARD F. BURTON.

Trieste: November 20, 1883.

The history of the Sword is the history of humanity. The ‘White Arm’ means something more than the ‘oldest, the most universal, the most varied of weapons, the only one which has lived through all time.’

He, she, or it—for the gender of the Sword varies—has been worshipped with priestly sacrifices as a present god. Hebrew revelation represents the sharp and two-edged Sword going out of the mouth of the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. We read of a ‘Sword of God, a holy Sword,’ the ‘Sword of the Lord and of Gideon’; and ‘I came not to send peace but a Sword,’ meaning the warfare and martyrdom of man.

On a lower plane the Sword became the invention and the favourite arm of the gods and the demi-gods: a gift of magic, one of the treasures sent down from Heaven, which made Mulciber (‘Malik Kabír,’ the great king) divine, and Voelunder, Quida, Galant, or Wayland Smith a hero. It was consecrated to the deities, and was stored in the Temple and in the Church. It was the ‘key of heaven and hell’: the saying is, ‘If there were no Sword, there would be no law of Mohammed’; and the Moslem brave’s highest title was ‘Sayf Ullah’—Sword of Allah.

Uniformly and persistently personal, the Sword became no longer an abstraction but a Personage, endowed with human as well as superhuman qualities. He was a sentient being who spoke, and sang, and joyed, and grieved. Identified with his wearer he was an object of affection, and was pompously named as a well-beloved son and heir. To surrender the Sword was submission; to break the Sword was degradation. To kiss the Sword was, and in places still is, the highest form of oath and homage.

says King Richard II. So Walther of Aquitaine:—

The Sword killed and cured; the hero when hopeless fell upon his Sword; and the heroine, like Lucretia and Calphurnia, used the blade standing. The Swordxii cut the Gordian knot of every difficulty. The Sword was the symbol of justice and of martyrdom, and accompanied the wearer to the tomb as well as to the feast and the fight. ‘Lay on my coffin a Sword,’ said dying Heinrich Heine, ‘for I have warred doughtily to win freedom for mankind.’

From days immemorial the Queen of Weapons, a creator as well as a destroyer, ‘carved out history, formed the nations, and shaped the world.’ She decided the Alexandrine and the Cæsarian victories which opened new prospects to human ken. She diffused everywhere the bright lights and splendid benefits of war and conquest, whose functions are all important in the formative and progressive processes. It is no paradox to assert La guerre a enfanté le droit: without War there would be no Right. The cost of life, says Emerson, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Law reconstructing and uplifting society; it breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider view.

War, again, benefits society by raising its tone above the ineffable littleness and meanness which characterise the every-day life of the many. In the presence of the Great Destroyer, petty feuds and miserable envy, hatred, and malice stand hushed and awe-struck. Very hollow in these days sounds Voltaire’s banter on War when he says that a king picks up a parcel of men who have nothing to do, dresses them in blue cloth at two shillings a yard, binds their hats with coarse white worsted, turns them to the right and left, and marches them away to glory.

The Sword and only the Sword raised the worthier race to power upon the ruins of impotent savagery; and she carried in her train, from time immemorial, throughout the civilised world, Asiatic Africa, Asia, and Europe, the arts and the sciences which humanise mankind. In fact, whatever apparent evil the Sword may have done, she worked for the highest ultimate good. With the Arabs the Sword was a type of individuality. Thus Shanfara, the fleet-foot, sings in his Lamiyyah, (L-poem):—

Zayd bin Ali boasts, like El-Mutanabbi:—

And Ziyád El-Ajam thus writes the epitaph of El-Mughayrah: ‘So died he, after having sought death between the spear-point and the Sword-edge.’

This ‘Pundonor’ presently extended westward. During the knightly ages the ‘good Sword’ of the Paladin and the Chevalier embodied a new faith—the Religion of Honour, the first step towards the religion of humanity. These men once morexiii taught the sublime truth, the splendid doctrine known to the Stoics and the Pharisees, but unaccountably neglected in later creeds:—

Their recklessness of all consequences soared worlds-high above the various egotistic systems which bribe man to do good for a personal and private consideration, to win the world, or to save his soul. Hence Aristotle blamed his contemporaries, the Spartans: ‘They are indeed good men, but they have not the supreme consummate excellence of loving all things worthy, decent and laudable, purely as such and for their own sakes; nor of practising virtue for no other motive but the sole love of her own innate beauty.’ The ‘everlasting Law of Honour binding on all and peculiar to each,’ would have thoroughly satisfied the Stagirite’s highest aspirations.

In knightly hands the Sword acknowledged no Fate but that of freedom and free-will; and it bred the very spirit of chivalry, a keen personal sentiment of self-respect, of dignity, and of loyalty, with the noble desire to protect weakness against the abuse of strength. The knightly Sword was ever the representative idea, the present and eternal symbol of all that man most prized—courage and freedom. The names describe her quality: she is Joyeuse, and La Tisona; he is Zú ’l-Fikár (sire of splitting) and Quersteinbeis, biter of the mill-stone. The weapon was everywhere held to be the best friend of bravery, and the worst foe of perfidy; the companion of authority, and the token of commandment; the outward and visible sign of force and fidelity, of conquest and dominion, of all that Humanity wants to have and wants to be.

The Sword was carried by and before kings; and the brand, not the sceptre, noted their seals of state. As the firm friend of the crown and of the ermine robe, it became the second fountain of honour. Amongst the ancient Germans even the judges sat armed on the judgment-seat; and at marriages it represented the bridegroom in his absence. Noble and ennobling, its touch upon the shoulder conferred the prize of knighthood. As ‘bakhshish’ it was, and still is, the highest testimony to the soldier’s character; a proof that he is ‘brave as his sword-blade.’ Its presence was a moral lesson; unlike the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hebrews, Western and Southern Europe, during its chivalrous ages, appeared nowhere and on no occasion without the Sword. It was ever ready to leap from its sheath in the cause of weakness and at the call of Honour. Hence, with its arrogant individuality, the Sword still remained the ‘all-sufficient type and token of the higher sentiments and the higher tendencies of human nature.’

In society the position of the Sword was remarkable. ‘Its aspect was brilliant; its manners were courtly; its habits were punctilious, and its connections were patrician.’ Its very vices were glittering; for most of them were the abuses which xiv could not but accompany its uses. It bore itself haughtily as a victor, an arbitrator; and necessarily there were times when its superlative qualities showed corresponding defects. Handled by the vile it too often became, in the ‘syllogism of violence,’ an incubus, a blusterer, a bully, a tyrant, a murderer, an assassin, in fact ‘death’s stamp’; and under such conditions it was a ‘corruption of the best.’ But its lapses were individual and transient; its benefits to Humanity were general and ever-enduring.

The highest period of the Sword was the early sixteenth century, that mighty landmark separating the dark Past from the brilliant Present of Europe. The sudden awaking and excitement of man’s mind, produced by the revival of learning and the marriage-union of the West with the East; by the discovering of a new hemisphere, the doubling of the world; by the so-called Reformation, a northern protest against the slavery of the soul; by the wide spread of the printing-press, which meant knowledge; and, simultaneously, by the illumination of that electric spark generated from the contact of human thought, suddenly changed the status of the Sword. It was no longer an assailant, a slaughterer: it became a defender, a preserver. It learned to be shield as well as Sword. And now arose swordsmanship proper, when the ‘Art of Arms’ meant, amongst the old masters, the Art of Fence. The sixteenth century was its Golden Age.

At this time the Sword was not only the Queen of Weapons, but the weapon paramount between man and man. Then, advancing by slow, stealthy, and stumbling steps, the age of gunpowder, of ‘villanous saltpetre,’ appeared upon the scene of life. Gradually the bayonet, a modern modification of the pike, which again derives from the savage spear, one of the earliest forms of the arme blanche, ousted the Sword amongst infantry because the former could be combined with the fire-piece. A century afterwards cavalrymen learned, in the Federal-Confederate war, to prefer the revolver and repeater, the breech-loader and the reservoir-gun, to the sabre of past generations. It became an axiom that in a cavalry charge the spur, not the Sword, gains the day. By no means a unique, nor even a singular process of progress, is this return towards the past, this falling back upon the instincts of primitive invention, this recurrence to childhood: when the science of war reverted to ballistics it practically revived the practice of the first ages, and the characteristic attack of the savage and the barbarian who, as a rule, throw their weapons. The cannon is the ballista, and the arblast, the mangonel, and the trebuchet, worked not by muscular but by chemical forces. The torpedo is still the old, old petard; the spur of the ironclad is the long-disused embolon, rostrum, or beak; and steam-power is a rough, cheap substitute for man-power, for the banks of oarsmen, whose work had a delicacy of manipulation unknown to machinery, however ingenious. The armed nations, which in Europe are again becoming the substitutes for standingxv armies, represent the savage and barbarous stages of society, the proto-historic races, amongst which every man between the ages of fifteen and fifty is a man-at-arms. It is the same in moral matters; the general spread of the revolutionary spirit, of republicanism, of democratic ideas, of communistic, socialistic, and nihilistic rights and claims now acting so powerfully upon society and upon the brotherhood of nations, is a re-dawning of that early day when the peoples ruled themselves, and were not yet governed by priestly and soldier kings. It is the same even in the ‘immaterials.’ The Swedenborgian school, popularly known by the trivial name Spiritualism, has revived magic, and this ‘new motor force,’ for such I call it, has resurrected the Ghost, which many a wise head supposed to have been laid for ever.

The death-song of the Sword has been sung, and we are told that ‘Steel has ceased to be a gentleman.’[1] Not so! and by no means so. These are mere insular and insulated views, and England, though a grand figure, the mother of nations, the modern Rome, is yet but a fraction of the world. The Englishman and, for that matter, the German and the Scandinavian, adopted with a protest, and right unwillingly, swordsmanship proper—that is, rapier and point, the peculiar and especial weapon, offensive and defensive, of Southern Europe, Spain, Italy, and France. During the most flourishing age of the Sword it is rare to find a blade bearing the name of an English maker, and English inscriptions seldom date earlier than the eighteenth century. The reason is evident. The Northerners hacked with hangers, they hewed with hatchets, and they cut with cutlasses because the arm suited their bulk and stature, weight and strength. But such weapons are the brutality of the Sword. In England swordsmanship is, and ever was, an exotic; like the sentiment, as opposed to the knowledge, of Art, it is the property of the few, not of the many; and, being rare, it is somewhat ‘un-English.’

But the case is different on the continent of Europe. Probably at no period during the last four centuries has the Sword been so ardently studied as it is now by the Latin race in France and Italy. At no time have the schools been so distinguished for intellectual as well as for moral proficiency. The use of the foil ‘bated’ and ‘unbated’ has once more become quasi-universal. A duello, in the most approved fashion of our ancestors, was lately proposed (September 1882) by ten journalists of a Parisian paper, to as many on the staff of a rival publication. Even the softer sex in France and Italy has become cunning of fence; and women are among the most prosperous pupils of the salles d’armes. Witness, for instance, the ill-fated Mdlle. Feyghine of the Théâtre Français, so celebrated for her skill in ‘the carte and the tierce and the reason demonstrative.’

Nor is the cause of this wider diffusion far to seek. In the presence of arms of xviprecision, the Sword, as a means of offence and defence, may practically fall for a time into disuse. It may no longer be the arm paramount or represent an idea. It may have come down from its high estate as tutor to the noble and the great. Yet not the less it has, and will ever have, its work to do. The Ex-Queen now appears as instructress-general in the art of arms. As the mathematic is the basis of all exact science, so Sword-play teaches the soldier to handle every other weapon. This is well known to Continental armies, in which each regiment has its own fencing establishment and its salle d’armes.

Again, men of thought cannot ignore the intrinsic value of the Sword for stimulating physical qualities. Ce n’est pas assez de roidir l’âme, il faut aussi roidir les muscles, says Montaigne, who also remarks of fencing that it is the only exercise wherein l’esprit s’en exerce. The best of callisthenics, this energetic educator teaches the man to carry himself like a soldier. A compendium of gymnastics, it increases strength and activity, dexterity and rapidity of movement. Professors calculate that one hour of hard fencing wastes forty ounces by perspiration and respiration. The foil is still the best training tool for the consensus of eye and hand; for the judgment of distance and opportunity; and, in fact, for the practice of combat. And thus swordsmanship engenders moral confidence and self-reliance while it stimulates a habit of resource; and it is not without suggesting, even in the schools, that ‘curious, fantastic, very noble generosity proper to itself alone.’

And now when the vain glory of violence has passed away from the Sword with the customs of a past age, we can hardly ignore the fact that the manners of nations have changed, not for the best. As soon as the Sword ceased to be worn in France, a Frenchman said of his compatriots that the ‘politest people in Europe had suddenly become the rudest.’ That gallant and courteous bearing, which in England during the early nineteenth century so charmed the ‘fiery and fastidious Alfieri’ lingers only amongst a few. True the swash-buckler, the professional duellist, has disappeared. But courtesy and punctiliousness, the politeness of man to man, and respect and deference of man to woman—that Frauencultus, the very conception of the knightly character—have to a great extent been ‘improved off.’ The latter condition of society, indeed, seems to survive only in the most cultivated classes of Europe; and, popularly, amongst the citizens of the United States, a curious oasis of chivalry in a waste of bald utilitarianism—preserved not by the Sword but by the revolver. Our England has abolished the duello without substituting aught better for it: she has stopped the effect and left the cause.

So far I have written concerning the Sword simply to show that my work does not come out ‘a day after the fair’; and that there is still a powerful vitality in the heroic Weapon. The details of such general statements will be establishedxvii and developed in the following pages. It is now advisable to introduce this volume to the reader.

During the ‘seventies’ I began, with a light heart, my Book of the Sword, expecting to finish it within a few months. It has occupied me as many years. Not only study and thought, but travel and inspection, were found indispensable; a monograph on the Sword and its literature involved visiting almost all the great armouries of continental Europe, and a journey to India in 1875–6. The short period of months served only to show that a memoir of the Sword embraces the annals of the world. The long term of years has convinced me that to treat the subject in its totality is impossible within reasonable limits.

It will hardly be said that a monograph of the Sword is not wanted. Students who would learn her origin, genealogy, and history, find no single publication ready to hand. They must ransack catalogues and books on ‘arms and armour’ that are numbered by the score. They must hunt up fugitive pamphlets; papers consigned to the literary store-rooms called magazines; and stray notices deep buried in the ponderous tomes of Recueils and general works on Hoplology. They must wade through volume after volume of histories and travels, to pick up a few stray sentences. And they will too often find that the index of an English book which gives copious references to glass or sugar utterly ignores the Sword. At times they must labour in the dark, for men who write seem wholly unconscious of the subject’s importance. For instance, much has been said about art in Japan; but our knowledge of her metallurgy especially of her iron and steel works, is elementary, while that of her peculiar and admirable cutlery is strangely superficial. And travellers and collectors treat the Sword much as they do objects of natural history. They regard only the rare, the forms which they ignore, or which strike the eye, and the unique specimens which may have no comparative value. Thus they neglect articles of far more interest and of higher importance to the student, and they bring home, often at great expense, mere lumber for curiosity shops.

The difficulty of treating the Sword is enhanced by the peculiar individuality which characterises it, evidenced by an immense variety of physique, and resulting as much from unconscious selection as from deep design. One of the characteristics of indigenous art is that no two articles, especially no two weapons, are exactly alike; and yet they vary only within narrow and measurable limits. The minute differentiæ of the Sword are endless. Even in the present day, swordsmen will order some shape, size, or weight which they hold—often unwisely enough—to be improvements on the general. One man, wishing to strengthen his arm, devises a weapon fit for a Titan and finds it worse than useless. A tale is told of a Sheffield cutler who, having received from Maroccan Mogador a wooden model to be copied in steel, made several hundred blades on the same pattern and failed to find axviii single purchaser. Their general resemblance to the prevailing type was marred by peculiarities which unsuited them for general use; they were adapted only to individual requirement, each man priding himself upon his own pattern having some almost imperceptible difference. Such variations are intelligible enough in the Sword, which must be modified for every personality, because it becomes to the swordsman a prolongation of his own person, a lengthening of the arm. The natural results are the protean shapes of the weapon and the difficulty of reducing these shapes to orderly description. I cannot, therefore, agree with a President of the Anthropological Institute (‘Journal,’ October 1876) when he states: ‘Certainly the same forms of Sword might be found in different countries, but not of so peculiar a nature (as the Gaboon weapon) unless the form had been communicated.’ Shapes apparently identical start up spontaneously, because types are limited and man’s preferences easily traverse the whole range of his invention.

Thus the stumbling-block which met me on the threshold was to introduce sequence, system, and lucid order into a chaos of details. It was necessary to discover some unity, some starting-place for evolution and development, without which all treatment would be vague and inconsequent. But where find the clue which makes straight the labyrinthine paths; the point de mire which enables us to command the whole prospect; the coign of vantage which displays the disposition of details, together with the nexus, the intercommunication, and the progress of the parts and the whole?

Two different systems of that ‘classification, which defines the margin of our ignorance,’ are adopted by museums; and, consequently, by the catalogues describing them. I shall here quote only English collections, leaving to the Continental reader the task of applying the two main principles locally and generally. These are, first, the Topical or Geographical (e.g. Christy collection), which, as the words denote, examines the article itself mainly with reference to its media, nature and culture, place and date; and which considers man and his works as the expression of the soil that bears him. The second is the Material and purely Formal (General A. Pitt-Rivers’ collection), which regards only the objects or specimens themselves, without respect to their makers or their media; and which, by investigating the rival laws of continuity and of incessant variation, aims at extending our knowledge of mankind. Both plans have their merits and their demerits. The Topical is the more strictly anthropologico-ethnological, because it makes the general racial culture its prominent feature; but it fails to illustrate, by juxtaposition, the origin, the life, and the death of a special article. The Formal proposes to itself the study of specific ideas; it describes their transmissions and their migrations; and it displays their connection and sequence, their development and degradation. It exemplifies the law of unconscious selection, as opposed to premeditation andxix design. Thus it claims superior sociological interest, while it somewhat separates and isolates the article from its surroundings—mankind.

Again, it would be unadvisable to neglect the chronological and synchronological order (Demmin’s). This assists us in tracing with a surer hand the origin and derivation; the annals, the adventures, and the accidents of an almost universal weapon, whose marvellously chequered career excels in dignity, in poetry, and in romance, anything and everything the world has yet seen. And here I have not been unmindful of Dr. Arthur Mitchell’s sensible warning that ‘the rude form of an implement may follow as well as precede the more finished forms.’[2] Due regard to dates enables us to avoid the scandalous confusion of the vulgar museum. Demmin found a large number of swords catalogued as dating with the time of Charles the Bold, when the shapes proved that they belonged to the late sixteenth and even to the early seventeenth centuries. I was shown, in the museum of Aquileja, a ‘Roman sword’ which was a basket-hilted Venetian, hardly two hundred years old. It is only an exact chronology, made to frame the Geographical and the Formal pictures of the weapon, that can secure scientific distribution.

In dealing with a subject which, like the Sword, ranges through the world-history, and which concerns the human race in general, it would, I venture to opine, be unwise to adopt a single system. As clearness can be obtained only by methodical distribution of matter, all the several processes must be combined with what art the artificer may. The Formal, which includes the Material, as well as the shape of the weapon, affords one fair basis for classification. The substance, for instance, ranges from wood to steel, and the profile from the straight line to the segment of a circle. The Topical, beginning (as far as we know) in the Nile Valley, and thence in ancient days overspreading Africa, Asia, Europe, and America, determines the distribution and shows the general continuity of the noble arm. It also readily associates itself with the chronologico-historical order, which begins ab initio, furnishes a proof of general progress, interrupted only by fitful stages of retrogression, and, finally, dwells upon the epochs of the highest interest.

After not a little study I resolved to distribute the ‘Book of the Sword’ into three parts.

Part I. treats of the birth, parentage, and early career of the Sword. It begins with the very beginning, in prehistoric times and amongst proto-historic peoples; and it ends with the full growth of the Sword at the epoch of the early Roman Empire.

Part II. treats of the Sword fully grown. It opens with the rising civilisation xxof the Northern Barbarians and with the decline of Rome under Constantine (a.d. 313–324), who combined Christianity with Mithraism; when the world-capital was transferred to Byzantium, and when an imitation of Orientalism, specially of ‘Persic apparatus,’ led to the art decay which we denote by the term ‘Lower Empire.’ It proceeds to the rise of El-Islam; the origin of ordered chivalry and knighthood; the succession of the Crusades and the wars of arms and armour before the gunpowder age, when the general use of ballistics by means of explosives became the marking feature of battle. This was the palmy period of the Sword. It became a beautiful work of art; and the highest genius did not disdain to chase and gem the handle and sheath. And its career culminates with the early sixteenth century, when the weapon of offence assumed its defensive phase and rose to a height of splendour that prognosticated downfall, as surely as the bursting of a rocket precedes its extinction.

Part III. continues the memoirs of the Sword, which, after long declining, revives once more in our day. This portion embraces descriptions of the modern blade, notices of collections, public and private, notes on manufactures; and, lastly, the bibliography and the literature connected with the Heroic Weapon.

Part I., contained in this volume, numbers thirteen chapters, of which a bird’s-eye view is given by the List of Contents. The first seven are formally and chronologically arranged. Thus we have the Origin of Weapons (Chapter I.) showing that while the arm is common to man and beast, the weapon, as a rule, belongs to our kind. Chapter II. treats of the first weapon proper, the Stone, which gave rise to ballistics as well as to implements of percussion. Follows (Chapter III.) the blade of base materials, wood, stone and bone, materials still used by races which can procure nothing better. From this point a step leads to the metal blade, in its origin evidently a copy of preceding types. The first, (Chapter IV.) is of pure copper, in our translations generally rendered by ‘brass’ or ‘bronze.’ The intermediate substances (Chapter V.) are represented by alloys, a variety of mixed metals; and they naturally end with the so-called ‘age’ of early iron, which prevailed throughout Europe at a time when the valleys of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates wrought blades of the finest steel. This division concludes with a formal and technical Chapter (VII.) on the shape of the Sword and a description of its several parts. Here the subject does not readily lend itself to lively description; but, if I have been compelled to be dull, I have done my best to avoid being tedious.

The arrangement then becomes geographical and chronological. My next five chapters are devoted to the Sword in its topical distribution and connection. The first (No. VIII.) begins with the various blade-forms in ancient Egypt, which extended throughout the then civilised world; it ends with showing that the Nilexxi valley gave their present shapes to the ‘white arm’ of the Dark Continent even in its modern day, and applied to the Sword the name which it still bears in Europe. The second (No. IX.) passes to Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, lands which manifestly borrowed the weapon from the Egyptians, and handed it on to Assyria, Persia, and India. The arms and armour of the ‘great Interamnian Plain’ afford material for a third (Chapter X.). Thence, retracing our steps and passing further westwards, we find manifest derivation and immense improvement of the Egyptian weapon in Greece (Chapter XI.), from which Mycenæ has lately supplied bronze rapiers perfectly formed as the steels of Bilboa and Toledo. The fifth Chapter (No. XII.) continues the ancient history of the Sword by describing the various blades of progressive Rome, whose wise choice and change of arms enabled her to gain the greatest battles with the least amount of loss. To this I have appended, for geographical and chronological symmetry, in a sixth and last chapter (No. XIII.), a sketch of the Sword among the contemporary Barbarians of the Roman Empire, Dacians, Italians, Iberians, Gauls, Germans, and the British Islands. This portion of the Sword history, however, especially the Scandinavian and the Irish, will be treated at full length in Part II.

Here, then, ends the First Part, which Messrs. Chatto and Windus have kindly consented to publish, whilst my large collection of notes, the labour of years, is being ordered and digested for the other two. I may fairly hope, if all go well, to see both in print before the end of 1884.

In the following pages I have confined myself, as much as was possible, to the Sword; a theme which, indeed, offers an embarras de richesses. But weapons cannot be wholly isolated, especially when discussing origins: one naturally derives from and connects with the other; and these relations may hardly be passed over without notice. I have, therefore, indulged in an occasional divagation, especially concerning the axe and the spear; but the main line has never been deserted.

Nor need I offer an excuse for the amount of philological discussion which the nomenclature of the Sword has rendered necessary. If I have opposed the Past Masters of the art, my opposition has been honest, and I am ever open to refutation. Travellers refuse to believe that ‘Aryanism’ was born on the bald, bleak highlands of Central Asia, or that ‘Semitism’ derives from the dreary, fiery deserts of Arabia. We do not believe India to be ‘the country which even more than Greece or Rome was the cradle of grammar and philology.’ I cannot but hold that England has, of late years, been greatly misled by the ‘Aryan heresy’; and I look forward to the study being set upon a sounder base.

The illustrations, numbering 293, have been entrusted to the artistic hands of Mr. Joseph Grego, who has taken a friendly interest in the work. But too much must not be expected from them in a book which intends to be popular, andxxii which is, therefore, limited in the matter of expense. Hence they are fewer than I should have desired. The libraries of Europe contain many catalogues of weapons printed in folio with highly finished and coloured plates which here would be out of place. That such a work upon the subject of the Sword will presently appear I have no doubt; and my only hope is that this volume will prove an efficient introduction.

To conclude. I return grateful thanks to the many mitwerkers who have assisted me in preparing this monograph; no more need be said, as all names will be mentioned in the course of the work. A journey to the Gold Coast and its results, in two volumes, which describe its wealth, must plead my excuse for the delay in bringing out the book. The manuscript was sent home from Lisbon in December 1881, but the ‘tyranny of circumstance’ has withheld it for nearly two years.

Postscript. An afterthought suggests that it is only fair, both for readers and for myself, to own that sundry quotations have been borrowed at second-hand and that the work of verification, so rightly enjoined upon writers, has not always been possible. These blemishes are hardly to be avoided in a first edition. At Trieste, and other places distant from the great seats of civilisation, libraries of reference are unknown; and it is vain to seek for the original source. Indeed, Mr. James Fergusson once wrote to me that it was an overbold thing to undertake a History of the Sword under such circumstances. However, I made the best use of sundry visits to London and Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and other capitals, and did what I could to remedy defects. Lastly, the illustrations have not always, as they ought, been drawn to scale, they were borrowed from a number of volumes which paid scant attention to this requisite.

xxiii

Man’s civilisation began with Fire—how to light it and how to keep it lit. Before he had taken this step, our primal ancestor (or ancestors) evidently led the life of the lower animals. The legend of ‘Iapetus’ bold son’ Prometheus, like many others invented by the Greeks, or rather borrowed from Egypt, contained under the form of fable a deep Truth, a fact, a lesson valuable even in these days. ‘Forethought,’ the elder brother of ‘Afterthought,’ brought down the semina flammæ in a hollow tube from Heaven, or stole it from the chariot of the Sun. Here we have the personification of the Great Unknown, who, finding a cane-brake or a jungle tree fired by lightning or flamed by wind-friction, conceived the idea of feeding the σπέρμα πυρὸς with fuel. Thus Hermes or Mercury was ‘Pteropédilos’ or ‘Alipes;’ and his ankles were fitted with ‘Pedila’ or ‘Talaria,’ winged sandals, to show that the soldier fights with his legs as well as with his arms.[3]

I will not enlarge upon the imperious interest of Hoplology: the history of arms and armour, their connection and their transitions, plays the most important part in the annals of the world.

The first effort of human technology was probably weapon-making. History 2and travel tell us of no race so rude as to lack artificial means of offence and defence.[4] To these, indeed, man’s ingenuity and artistic efforts must, in his simple youthtide, have been confined. I do not allude to the complete man, created full-grown in body and mind by the priestly castes of Egypt, Phœnicia, Judæa, Assyria, Persia, and India. The Homo sapiens whom we have to consider is the ‘Adam Kadmon,’[5] not of the Cabbalist, but of the anthropologist, as soon as he raised himself above the beasts of the field by superiority of brains and hands.

The lower animals are born armed, but not weaponed. The arm, indeed, is rather bestial than human: the weapon is, speaking generally, human, not bestial. Naturalists have doubted, and still doubt, whether in the so-called natural state the lower animals use weapons properly so termed. Colonel A. Lane Fox, a diligent student of primitive warfare, and a distinguished anthropologist,[6] distinctly holds the hand-stone to be the prehistoric weapon. He quotes (Cat. pp. 156–59) the ape using the hand-stone to crack nutshells; the gorillas defending themselves against the Carthaginians of Hanno; and Pedro de Cieza (Cieça) de Leon[7] telling us that ‘when the Spaniards [in Peru] pass under the trees where the monkeys are, these creatures break off branches and throw them down, making faces all the time.’ Even in the days of Strabo (xv. 1) it was asserted that Indian monkeys climb precipices, and roll down stones upon their pursuers—a favourite tactic with savages. Nor, indeed, is it hard to believe that the Simiads, whose quasi-human hand has prehensile powers, bombard their assailants with cocoa-nuts and other missiles. Major Denham (1821–24), a trustworthy traveller, when exploring about Lake Chad, says of the quadrumans of the Yeou country: ‘The monkeys, or, as the Arabs say, men enchanted (Beny Adam meshood),[8] were so numerous that I saw upwards of a hundred and fifty assembled at one place in the evening. They did not appear at all inclined to give up their ground, but, perched on the top of a bank some twenty feet high, made a terrible noise, and, rather gently than otherwise, pelted us as we approached within a certain distance.’ Herr Holub,[9] also, was ‘designedly aimed at by a herd of African 3baboons perched among the trees;’ and on another occasion he and his men had to beat an ignominious retreat from ‘our cousins.’ ‘Hence,’ suggests Colonel A. Lane Fox, ‘our “poor relation” conserves, even when bred abroad and in captivity, the habit of violently shaking the branch by jumping upon it with all its weight, in order that the detached fruit may fall upon the assailant’s head.’ In Egypt, as we see from the tomb-pictures, monkeys (baboons or cynocephali) were taught to assist in gathering fruit, and in acting as torch-bearers. While doing this last duty, their innate petulance caused many a merry scene.[10]

I never witnessed this bombardment by monkeys. But when my regiment was stationed at Baroda in Gujarát, several of my brother officers and myself saw an elephant use a weapon. The intelligent animal, which the natives call Háthi (‘the handed’[11]), was chained to a post during the dangerous season of the wet forehead, and was swaying itself in ill-temper from side to side. Probably offended by the sudden appearance of white faces, it seized with its trunk a heavy billet, and threw it at our heads with a force and a good will that proved the worst intention.

According to Captain Hall—who, however, derived the tale from the Eskimos,[12] the sole living representatives of the palæolithic age in Europe—the polar bear, traditionally reported to throw stones, rolls down, with its quasi-human forepaws, rocks and boulders upon the walrus when found sleeping at the foot of some overhanging cliff. ‘Meister Petz’ aims at the head, and finally brains the stunned prey with the same weapon. Perhaps the account belongs to the category of the ostrich throwing stones, told by many naturalists, including Pliny (x. 1), when, as Father Lobo explained in his ‘Abyssinia,’ the bird only kicks them up during its scouring flight. Similar, too, is the exploded shooting-out of the porcupine’s quills, whereby, according to mediæval ‘Shoe-tyes’[13] men have been badly hurt4 and even killed. On the other hand, the Emu kicks like an Onager[14] and will drive a man from one side of a quarter-deck to the other.

But though Man’s first work was to weapon himself, we must not believe with the Cynics and the Humanitarians that his late appearance in creation, or rather on the stage of life, initiated an unvarying and monotonous course of destructiveness. The great tertiary mammals which preceded him, the hoplotherium, the deinotherium, and other -theria, made earth a vast scene of bloodshed to which his feeble powers could add only a few poor horrors. And even in our day the predatory fishes, that have learned absolutely nothing from man’s inhumanity to man, habitually display as much ferocity as ever disgraced savage human nature.

Primitive man—the post-tertiary animal—was doomed by the very conditions of his being and his media to a life of warfare; a course of offence to obtain his food, and of defence to retain his life. Ulysses[15] says pathetically:

The same sentiment occurs in the ‘Iliad’; and Pliny, the pessimist, writes—‘the only tearful animal, Man.’

The career of these wretches, who had neither ‘minds’ nor ‘souls,’ was one long campaign against ravenous beasts and their ‘brother’ man-brutes. Peace was never anything to them but a fitful interval of repose. The golden age of the poets was a dream; as Videlou remarked, ‘Peace means death for all barbarian races.’ The existence of our earliest ancestors was literally the Battle of Life. Then, as now, the Great Gaster was the first Master of Arts, and War was the natural condition of humanity upon which depends the greater part of its progress, its rising from the lower to the higher grade. Hobbism, after all, is partly right: ‘Men were by nature equal, and their only social relation was a state of war.’ Like the children of our modern day, helpless and speechless, primæval Homo possessed, in common with his fellow-creatures, only the instincts necessary for self-support under conditions the most facile. Uncultivated thought is not rich in the productive faculty; the brain does not create ideas: it only combines them and evolves the novelty of deduction, and the development of what is found existing. Similarly in language, onomatopœia, the imitation of natural sounds, the speech of Man’s babyhood, still endures; and to it we owe our more picturesque and life-like expressions. But, despite their feeble powers, compulsory instruction, the Instructor being Need, was continually urging the Savage and the Barbarian to evolve safety out of danger, comfort out of its contrary.

For man, compelled by necessity of his nature to weapon himself, bears within 5him the two great principles of Imitation and Progress. Both are, after a fashion, his peculiar attributes, being rudimentary amongst the lower animals, though by no means wholly wanting. His capacity of language, together with secular development of letters and literature, enabled him to accumulate for himself, and to transmit to others, a store of experience acquired through the medium of the senses; and this, once gained, was never wholly lost. By degrees immeasurably slower than among civilised societies, the Savage digested and applied to the Present and to the Future the hoarded wisdom of the Past. The imitative faculty, a preponderating advantage of the featherless biped over the quadruped, taught the former, even in his infancy, to borrow ad libitum, while he lent little or nothing. As a quasi-solitary Hunter[16] he was doomed to fray and foray, to destroying others in order to preserve himself and his family: a condition so constant and universal as to include all others. Become a Shepherd, he fought man and beast to preserve and increase his flocks and herds; and rising to an Agriculturist, he was ever urged to break the peace by greed of gain, by ambition, and by the instinctive longing for excitement.[17]

But there was no absolute point of separation, as far as the material universe is concerned, to mark the dawn of a new ‘creative period’; and the Homo Darwiniensis made by the Aristotle of our age, the greatest of English naturalists, is directly connected with the Homo sapiens. There are hosts of imitative animals, birds as well as beasts; but the copying-power is essentially limited. Moreover, it is ‘instinctive,’ the work of the undeveloped, as opposed to ‘reasoning,’ the process of the highly-developed brain and nervous system. Whilst man has taught himself to articulate, to converse, the dog, which only howled and whined, has learned nothing except to bark. Man, again, is capable of a development whose bounds we are unable to determine; whereas the beast, incapable of self-culture, progresses, under the most favourable circumstances, automatically and within comparatively narrow bounds.

Upon the imitative faculty and its exercise I must dwell at greater length. It is regretable that the delicious wisdom of Pope neglected to point out the great lesson of the animal-world in suggesting and supplying the arts of offence and defence:—

Man, especially in the tropical and sub-tropical zones—his early, if not his earliest, home, long ago whelmed beneath the ocean waves—would derive many a useful hint from the dreadful armoury of equinoctial vegetation; the poison-trees, the large strong spines of the Acacia and the Mimosa, e.g. the Wait-a-bit (Acacia detinens), the Gleditschia, the Socotrine Aloe, the American Agave, and the piercing thorns of the Caryota urens, and certain palms. The aboriginal races would be further instructed in offensive and defensive arts by the powerful and destructive feræ of the sunny river-plains, where the Savage was first induced to build permanent abodes.

Before noting the means of attack and protection which Nature suggested, we may distribute Hoplology, the science of arms and weapons of offence and defence, human and bestial, into two great orders, of which the latter can be subdivided into four species:—

Colonel A. Lane Fox (‘Prim. Warfare,’ p. 11) thus classifies the weapons of ‘Animals and Savages’:—

My list is less comprehensive, and it bears only upon the origin of the Arme blanche.

I. As has been said, the missile, the βέλος, is probably the first form of weapon, and is still the favourite with savage Man. It favours the natural self-preservative instinct. El-Khauf maksúm—‘fear is distributed,’—say the Arabs. ‘The shorter the weapon the braver the wielder’ has become a well-established fact. The savage Hunter, whose time is his own, would prefer the missile; but the Agriculturist, compelled to be at home for seed-time and harvest, would choose the hand-to-hand 7weapon which shortens action. We may hold, without undue credulity, that the throwing-arm is common to beasts, after a fashion, and to man. Among the so-called ‘missile fishes’[19] the Toxotes,[20] or Archer, unerringly brings down insects with a drop of water when three or four feet high in the air. The Chætodon, or archer fish of Japan, is kept in a glass vase, and fed by holding flies at the end of a rod a few inches above the surface: it strikes them with an infallible aim. This process is repeated, among the mammalia, by the Llama, the Guanaco and their congeners, who propel their acrid and fetid saliva for some distance and with excellent aim.[21] And stone-throwing held its own for many an age, as we read in the fifteenth century:—

II. The stroke or blow which led to the cut would be seen exemplified in the felidæ, by the terrible buffet of the lion, by the clawing of the tiger and the bear, and by the swing of the trunk of the ‘half-reasoner with the hand.’ Man also would observe that the zebra and the quagga (so called from its cry, wag-ga, wag-ga[23]), the horse and the ass, the camel, the giraffe, and even the cow, defend themselves with the kick or hoof-blow; while the ostrich, the swan, and the larger birds of prey assault with a flirt or stroke of the wing. The aries or sea-ram (Delphinus orca) charges with a butt. The common whale raises the head with such force that it has been held capable of sinking a whaler: moreover, this mammal uses the huge caudal fin or tail in battle with man and beast; for instance, when engaged with the fox-shark or thresher (Carcharias vulpes).[24] These, combined with the force of man’s doubled fist, would suggest the ‘noble art’ of boxing: it dates from remote antiquity; witness the cestus or knuckle-duster of the classics, Greeks, Romans, and Lusitanians. So far from being confined to Great or Greater Britain, as some suppose, it is still a favourite not only with the Russian peasants, but also with the 8Hausas, Moslem negroids who did such good service in the Ashanti war. A curious survival of the feline armature is the Hindu’s Wágh-nakh. Following Demmin, Colonel A. Lane Fox[25] was in error when he described this ‘tiger’s-claw’ as ‘an Indian weapon of treachery belonging to a secret society, and invented about a.d. 1659.’ Demmin[26] as erroneously attributes the Wágh-nakh to Sívají, the Prince of Maráthá-land in Western India, who traitorously used it upon Afzal Khan, the Moslem General of Aurangzeb, sent (a.d. 1659) to put down his rebellion.[27] A meeting of the chiefs was agreed upon, and the Moslem, quitting his army, advanced with a single servant; he wore a thin robe, and carried only a straight sword. Sívají, descending from the fort, assumed a timid and hesitating air, and to all appearance was unarmed. But he wore mail under his flimsy white cotton coat, and besides a concealed dagger, he carried his ‘tiger’s-claw.’ The Khan looked with contempt at the crouching and diminutive ‘mountain rat,’ whom the Moslems threatened to bring back in cages; but, at the moment of embracing, the Maráthá struck his Wágh-nakh into his adversary’s bowels and despatched him with his dagger. The Wágh-nakh in question is still kept as a relic, I am told, by the Bhonslá family.[28] Outside the hand you see nothing but two solid gold rings encircling the index and the minimus; these two are joined inside by a steel bar, which serves as a connecting base to three or four sharp claws, thin enough to fit between and to be hidden by the fingers of a half-closed hand. The attack is by 9ripping open the belly: and I have heard of a poisoned Wágh-nakh which may have been suggested by certain poison rings in ancient and mediæval Europe.[29] The date of invention is absolutely unknown, and a curious and instructive modification of it was made by those Indians-in-Europe, the Gypsies.

III. The thrust would be suggested by the combats of the goat, the stag, and black cattle, including the buffalo and the wild bull, all of which charge at speed with the head downwards, and drive the horns into the enemy’s body. The gnu (Catoblepas G.) and other African antelopes, when pressed by the hunter, keep him at bay with the point. In Europe ‘hurt of hart,’ a ripping and tearing thrust, has brought many a man to the grave. The hippopotamus, a dangerous animal unduly despised, dives under the canoe, like the walrus, rises suddenly, and with its lower tusks, of the hardest ivory, drills two holes in the offending bottom. The black rhinoceros, fiercest and most irritable of African fauna, though graminivorous, has one or two horns of wood-like fibre-bundles resting upon the strongly-arched nasal bones, and attached by an extensive apparatus of muscles and tendons. This armature, loose when the beast is at peace, becomes erect and immovable in rage, thus proving in a special manner its only use—that of war. It is a formidable dagger that tears open the elephant and passes through the saddle and its padding into the ribs of a horse. The extinct sabre-toothed tiger (Machairodus latidens), with one incisor and five canines, also killed with a thrust. So, amongst birds, the bittern, the peacock, and the American white crane peck or stab at the eye; the last-named has been known to drive its long sharp mandibles deep into the pursuer’s bowels, and has been caught by presenting to it a gun-muzzle; the bird, mistaking the hole, strikes at it and is caught by the beak.[30] The hern defends herself during flight by presenting the sharp long beak to the falcon. The pheasant and partridge, the domestic cock and quail, to mention no others, use their spurs with a poniard’s thrust; the Argus-pheasant of India, the American Jacaná (Parra), the horned screamer (Palamedea), the wing-wader of Australia (Gregory), and the plover of Central Africa (Denham and Claperton), carry weapons upon their wings.

According to Pliny (viii. 38) the dolphins which enter the Nile are armed with a knife-edged spur on the back to protect themselves from the crocodiles. Cuvier refers this allusion to the Squalus centrina or Spinax of Linnæus. The European ‘file-fish’ (Balistes capriscus), found in a fossil state, and still existing, though rare in British waters, remarkably shows the efficiency, beauty, and variety of that order’s armature. It pierces its enemy from beneath by a strong erectile and cirrated spine on the first anterior dorsal; the base of the spear is expanded and perforated, and a bolt from the supporting plate passes freely through it. 10When the spine is raised, a hollow at the back receives a prominence from the next bony ray, which fixes the point in an erect position. Like the hammer of a fire-piece at full cock, the spear cannot be forced down till the prominence is withdrawn, as by pulling the trigger. This mechanism, says the learned and experienced Professor Owen,[31] may be compared with the fixing and unfixing of a bayonet: when the spine is bent down it is received into a groove in the supporting plate, and thus it offers no impediment to swimming.

The pugnacious and voracious little ‘stickleback’ (Gasterosteus) is similarly provided. The ‘bull-head’ (Cottus diceraus, Pallas[32]) bears a multibarbed horn on its dorsum, exactly resembling the spears of the Eskimos and the savages of South America and Australia. The yellow-bellied ‘surgeon’ or lancet-fish (Acanthurus) is armed, in either ocean, with a long spine on each side of the tail; with this lance it defends itself dexterously against its many enemies. The Naseus fronticornis (Lacépède) bears, besides the horn-muzzle, trenchant spear-formed blades in the 11pointed and serrated tail. The sting-fish or adder-pike (Trachinus vipera) has necessitated amputation of the wounded limb: the dorsals, as well as the opercular spines, have deep double grooves in which the venomous mucous secretion is lodged—a hint to dagger-makers. The sting-rays (Raia trygon and R. histrix[33]) twist the long slender tail round the object of attack and cut the surface with the strong notched and spiny edge, inflicting a wound not easily healed. The sting, besides being poisonous, has the especial merit of breaking off in the wound: it is extensively used by the savages of the Fiji, the Gambier, and the Pellew Islands, of Tahiti, Samoa, and many of the Low Islands.[34] These properties would suggest poisoned weapons which cannot be extracted. Such are the arrows of the Bushman, the Shoshoni, and the Macoinchi of Guiana, culminating in the highly-civilised stiletto of hollow glass.

The sword-fish (Xiphias), although a vegetable feeder, is mentioned by Pliny (xxxii. 6) as able to sink a ship. It is recorded to have killed a man when bathing in the Severn near Worcester. It attacks the whale, and it has been known to transfix a vessel’s side with its terrible weapon. The narwhal or sea-unicorn (Monodon monoceros) carries a formidable tusk, a Sword-blade of the same kind similarly used.[35]

Here may be offered a single proof how Man, living among, and dependent for food upon, the lower animals, borrowed from their habits and experience his earliest practice of offence and defence. The illustration represents a ‘Singhauta,’[36] ‘Mádu’ or ‘Máru’ (double dagger), made from the horns of the common Indian antelope, connected by crossbars. In its rude state, and also tipped with metal, it is still used as a weapon by 12the wild Bhíls, and as a crutch and dagger by the Jogis (Hindús) and Fakirs (Hindís or Moslems), both orders of religious mendicants who are professionally forbidden to carry secular arms. It also served for defence, like the parrying-stick of Africa and Australia, till it was fitted with a hand-guard, and the latter presently expanded into a circular targe of metal. This ancient instrument, with its graceful curves, shows four distinct stages of development: first, the natural, and, secondly, the early artificial, with metal caps to make it a better thrusting weapon. The third process was to forge the whole of metal; and the fourth and final provided it with a straight, broad blade, springing at right angles from the central grip. This was the ‘Adaga’[37] of mediæval writers.

IV. The first idea of a trenchant or cutting instrument would be suggested by various reeds and grasses; their silicious leaves at certain angles cleave to the bone, as experience has taught most men who have passed through a jungle of wild sugar-cane. When full-grown the plants stand higher than a man’s head, and the flint-edged leaves disposed in all directions suggest a labyrinth of sword-blades. Thus the Mawingo-wingo (Pennisetum Benthami), like the horse-tail or ‘shave-grass’ of Spain, was used as knives by the executioners of Kings Sunna and Mtesa of Uganda, when cutting the human victims to pieces.[38] Of the same kind are the ‘sword-grass’ and the ‘bamboo-grass.’ Many races, especially the Andamanese and the Polynesian Islanders, make useful blades of the split and sharpened bamboo: they are fashioned from the green plant, and are dried and charred to sharpen the edge. Turning to the animal world, the cassowary tears with a forward cut, and the wounded coot scratches like a cat. The ‘old man kangaroo,’ with the long nail of the powerful hind leg, has opened the stomach of many a staunch hound. The wild boar attacks with a thrust, followed by a rip, cutting scientifically from below upwards. This, as will appear, is precisely the plan adopted by certain ancient forms of sabre, Greek and barbarian, the cutting edges being inside, not outside, the curve. I may add that the old attack is one of our latest improvements in broadsword exercise.[39]

13

The offensive weapon of the sting-ray, and of various insects, as well as the teeth of all animals, man included, furnish models for serrated or saw-edged instruments. Hence Colonel A. Lane Fox observes:[40] ‘It is not surprising that the first efforts of mankind in the construction of trenchant instruments should so universally consist of teeth, or flint-flakes, arranged along the edge of staves.’ But evidently the knife preceded the saw, which is nothing but a knife-blade jagged. Other familiar instances would be the multibarb stings of insects, especially that of the common bee. Again, we have the mantis, an orthopter of the Temperates and the Tropics, whose fights, enjoyed by the Chinese, are compared with the duels of sabrers. For the rasping blow and parry they use the forearm, which carries rows of strong sharp spines; and a happy stroke beheads or bisects the antagonist. To this category belongs the armature of the saw-fish (Pristis), a shark widely 14distributed and haunting the arctic, temperate, and tropical seas. Its mode of offence is to spring high from the water and to fall upon the foe, not with the point, but with either edge of its formidable arm: the row of strong and trenchant barbs, set like teeth, cuts deeply into the whale’s flesh. Hence, in New Guinea, the serrated blade becomes a favourite Sword, the base of the snout being cut and rounded so as to form a handle.

Thus man, essentially a tool-making animal, and compelled by the conditions of his being to one long battle with the brute creation, was furnished by his enemies, not only with models of implements and instruments, and with instructions to use them, from witnessing the combats of brutes, but actually with their arms, which he converted to his own purposes. Hence the weapon and the tool were, as a rule, identical in the hands of primæval man; and this forms, perhaps, the chief test of a primitive invention. The earliest drift-flints ‘were probably used as weapons both of war and the chase, to grub roots, to cut down trees, and to scoop out canoes.’[41] The Watúsi of Eastern Africa make their baskets with their sharpened spear-heads; and the so-called Káfirs (Amazulu, &c.) still shave themselves with the assegai. Hence, too, as like conditions engender like results, the arms and implements of different races resemble one another so closely as to suggest a common origin and actual imitation, even where copying was, so to speak, impossible.

Let us take as an instance two of the most widespread of weapons. The blow-pipe’s progressive form has been independently developed upon a similar plan, with distinctly marked steps, in places the most remote.[42] Another instance is the chevaux-de-frise, the spikes of metal familiar to the classics.[43] They survive in the caltrops or bamboo splints planted in the ground by the barefooted Mpangwe (Fans) of Gaboon-land and by the Rangos of Malacca.

15

In the early days of anthropological study we read complaints that ‘it is impossible to establish, amongst the implements of modern savages, a perfectly true sequence,’ although truth may be arrived at in points of detail; and that ‘in regard to the primary order of development, much must still be left open to conjecture.’ But longer labour and larger collections have lately added many a link to the broken chain of continuity. We can now trace with reasonable certainty the tardy progress of evolution which, during a long succession of ages, led to the systematised art of war. The conditions of the latter presently allowed society periods of rest, or rather of recovery; and more leisure for the practice which, in weapons as in other things, ‘maketh perfect.’[44] And man has no idea of finality: he will stop short of nothing less than the absolutely perfect. He will labour at the ironclad as he did the canoe; at the fish-torpedo as he did the petard.[45]

From the use of arms, also, arose the rudimentary arts of savage man. Music began when he expressed his joy and his sorrow by cries of emotion—the voice being the earliest, as it is still the best, of music-makers. It was followed by its imitations, which pass through three several stages, and even now we know nothing more in the way of development.[46] When the savage clapped together two clubs he produced the first or drum-type; when he hissed or whistled he originated the pipe-type (syrinx, organ, bagpipe, &c.); and the twanging of his bow suggested the lyre-type, which we still find—‘tickling the dried guts of a mewing cat.’[47] Painting and sculpture were the few simple lines drawn and cut upon the tomahawk or other rude weapon-tool. ‘As men think and live so they build,’ said Herder; and architecture, which presently came to embrace all the other arts, dawned when the Savage attempted to defend and to adorn his roost among the tree branches or the entrance to his cave-den.[48]

After this preamble, which has been longer than I expected, we pass to the first or rudest forms of the Weapons Proper used by Savage Man.

What, then, was Man’s first weapon? He was born speechless and helpless, inferior to the beasts of the field. He grew up armed, but badly armed. His muscles may have been stronger than they are now; his poor uneducated fisticuff, however, could not have compared with the kick of an ass. As we see from the prognathous jaw, he could bite, and his teeth were doubtless excellent[49]; still, the size and shape of the maxilla rendered it an arm inferior to the hyæna’s and even to the dog’s. He scratched and tore, as women still do; but his nails could hardly have been more dangerous than the claws of the minor felines.

He had, however, the hand, the most perfect of all prehensile contrivances, and Necessity compelled him to use it. The stone, his first ‘weapon,’ properly so called, would serve him in two ways—as a missile, and as a percussive instrument. Our savage progenitor, who in days long before the dawn of history, contracted the extensor and relaxed the flexor muscles of his arm when flinging into air what he picked up from the ground, was unconsciously lengthening his reach and taking the first step in the art and science of ballistics. His descendants would acquire extraordinary skill in stone-throwing, and universal practice would again make perfect. Diodorus of Sicily (b.c. 44),[50] who so admirably copied Herodotus, says that the Libyans ‘use neither Swords, spears, nor other weapons; but only three darts and stones in certain leather budgets, wherewith they fight in pursuing and retreating.’ The Wánshi (Guanches) Libyan or Berber peoples of the Canarian Archipelago, according to Cà da Mosto (a.d. 1505), confirmed by many, including George Glas,[51] were expert stone-throwers. They fought their duels ‘in the public 17place, where the combatants mounted upon two stones placed at the opposite sides of it, each stone being flat at top and about half a yard in diameter. On these they stood fast without moving their feet, till each had thrown three round stones at his antagonist. Though they were good marksmen, yet they generally avoided those missive weapons by the agile writhing of their bodies. Then arming themselves with sharp flints (obsidian?) in their left hands, and cudgels or clubs in their right, they fell on, beating and cutting each other till they were tired.’ An instance is mentioned in which a Guanche brought down with a single throw a large palm-frond, whose mid-rib was capable of resisting the stroke of an axe. Kolben, who wrote about a century and a half ago, gives the following account of the ape-like gestures of the Khoi-Khoi or Hottentots[52]:—‘The most surprising strokes of their dexterity are seen in their throwing of a stone. They hit a mark to a miracle of exactness, though it be a hundred paces distant and no bigger than a halfpenny. I have beheld them at this exercise with the highest pleasure and astonishment, and was never weary of the spectacle. I still expected after repeated successes, that the stone would err; but I expected in vain. Still went the stone right to the mark, and my pleasure and astonishment were redoubled. You could imagine that the stone was not destined to err, or that you were not destined to see it. But a Hottentot’s unerring hand in this exercise is not the only wonder of the scene; you would be equally struck perhaps with the manner in which he takes his aim. He stands, not still with a lift-up arm and a steady staring eye upon the mark, as we do; but is in constant motion, skipping from one side to another, suddenly stooping, suddenly rising; now bending on this side, now on that; his eyes, hands, and feet are in constant action, and you would think that he was playing the fool, and minding anything else than his aim; when on a sudden, away goes the stone with a fury, right to the heart of the mark, as if some invisible power had directed it.’

Nearer home the modern Syrians still preserve their old dexterity: I have often heard the tale, and have no reason to doubt its truth, of a brown bear (Ursus syriacus) being killed in the Libanus by a blow between the eyes.[53] When the Arab Bedawin are on the raid and do not wish to use their matchlocks, they attack at night, and ‘rain stones’ upon the victim. The latter vainly discharges 18his ammunition against the shadows flitting ghost-like among the rocks; and, when his fire is drawn, the murderers rush in and finish their work. The use of the stone amongst the wild tribes of Asia, Africa, and America is almost universal. In Europe, the practice is confined to schoolboys; but the wild Irish, by beginning early, become adepts in it when adults. As a rule, the shepherd is everywhere a skilful stone-thrower.

Turner makes the ‘Kawas’ of Tanna, New Hebrides, a stone as long as, and twice as thick as, an ordinary counting-house ruler: it is thrown with great precision for a distance of twenty yards. The same author mentions stones rounded like a cannon-ball, among the people of Savage Island and Eromanga. Commander Byron notices the stones made into missiles by the Disappointment Islanders. Beechey, whose party was attacked by the Easter Islanders, says that the weapons, cast with force and accuracy, knocked several of the seamen under the boat-thwarts. Crantz tells us that Eskimo children are taught stone-throwing at a mark as soon as they can use their hands. The late Sir R. Schomburg describes a singular custom amongst the Demarara Indians. When a child enters boyhood he is given a hard round stone which he is to hand-rub till it becomes smooth, and he often reaches manhood before the task is done. Observers have suggested that the only use of the practice is a ‘lesson in perseverance, which quality, in the opinion of many people, is best inculcated by engaging the minds of youths in matters that are devoid of any other incentive in the way of practical utility or interest.’

In more civilised times the knife, as a missile, would take the place of the stone. We find that the ancient Egyptians[54] practised at a wooden block, and the German Helden (champions), seated on settles, duelled by casting three knives each, to be parried with the shield. The modern Spaniards begin to learn when children the art of throwing the facon[55], cuchillo or clasp-knife. The reapers 19of the Roman Campagna, mere barbarians once civilised, also ‘chuck’ the sickle with a surprising precision.

The habit of stone-throwing would presently lead to the invention of the sling, which Meyrick considers,[56] strange to say, the ‘earliest and simplest weapon of antiquity.’ The rudest form of this pastoral weapon used only on open plains, a ball and cord, was followed by the various complications of string- or thong-sling, cup-sling, and stick-sling. The latter, a split stick which held the stone till the moment of discharge, may have been the primitive arm: Lepsius shows an Egyptian using such a sling and provided with a reserve heap of pebbles. Nilsson suggests that David was thus weaponed when Goliath addressed him, ‘Am I a dog that thou comest to me with staves?’—that is, with the shepherd’s staff turned into a sling. And this form survived longest in the Roman ‘fustibulus,’ which the moderns corrupted to ‘fustibale’[57]: the latter, with its wooden handle, was used in Europe during the twelfth century, and was employed in delivering hand-grenades till the sixteenth. The primitive ball-and-cord, known to the ancient Egyptians, is still preserved in the Bolas of the South American Gaucho. A simultaneously invented missile would be the hurling or throwing-stick and its modification, the Boomerang, of which I have still to speak. The application of elasticity and resilience being now well known, would suggest the rudest form of the bow[58] and arrow. This invention, next in importance (though longo intervallo) to fire-making and fire-feeding, is the first crucial evidence of the distinction between the human weapon and the bestial arm. Nilsson and many others hold the invention to have been instinctive and common to all peoples; and we cannot wonder that it was made the invention of demi-gods—Nimrod, Scythes[59] the son of Jupiter, or Perses son of Perseus.[60] The missile arm at once showed man and beast separated by an extensive difference of degree, if not of kind, and it has played the most notable part, perhaps, of all weapons in the annals of humanity or inhumanity. It led to the Greek gastrapheta, the Roman arcubalista (crossbow[61]); to the palintonon or balista, and the arblast (an enlarged species of the arcus, intended for throwing darts of giant size); to the Belagerungs-balister, a fixed form; to the catapult, enthytonon, tormentum, scorpion or onager,[62] 20 and to other formidable forms of classical artillery which preceded the ‘cheap and nasty’ invention of chemical explosives.

So much for the Hand-stone as the forefather of missiles and of ballistic science. Held in the fist it would give momentum, weight and velocity, force and bruising power, to the blow. Thus it was the forerunner of the club, straight and curved; the flail, the bâton ferré, the ‘morning star,’ the ‘holy-water sprinkler,’ and a host of similar weapons[63] that added another and a harder joint to man’s arm. Clubs—which in practice are aimed at the head, whereas the spear is mostly directed at the body[64]—would be easily made by pulling up a straight young tree, or by tearing down a branch from the parent trunk and stripping it of twigs and leaves. The club of Australia, a continent to which we look for original forms, has the branching rootlets trimmed to serve as spikes; moreover, the terminal bulge has been developed in order to stop or parry the assailant’s weapon. In fact the swell, ball, lozenge, or mushroom-head was the first germ of the Australasian shield. The next step would be to fashion the ragged staff with fire, with friction, and with flint knives, shells or other scrapers, into a cutting as well as a crushing instrument; and here we have one of the many origins of the Sword and of its diminutives, the dagger and the knife. Pointed at the end, it would become the lance and spear, the spud, spade, and palstave, the pilum, the dart, the javelin, and the assagai.

Not a few authorities contend that the earliest weapons, the most constant in all ages and continuous in all countries, were the spear and the axe. The first would be a development of the pointed hand-celt[65]; the latter of the leaf-formed or almond-shaped tool. But firstly, these would be mostly confined to countries with a well-developed Stone Age[66]; and secondly, the conversion of the hand-stone21 into an arme d’hast would assuredly be later than the club and the sharpened stick or stake.

Herodotus, the father of ancient history in its modern form, a travelled student and a great genius, whose prose poem—for such it is—has proved incomparably more useful to us than any works of his successors, when describing a rock-sculpture of Sesostris-Ramses (ii. 106) makes him carry in his right hand a spear (Egyptian), and in his left a bow (Lybian or Ethiopian). Hence some writers on Hoplology have held that he considered these to be the oldest of weapons. But the ancients did not study prehistoric man beyond confounding human bones with those of extinct mammals. Augustus Cæsar was an early collector, according to Suetonius (in ‘August.’ c. xxii.). ‘Sua vero ... excoluit rebusque vetustate ac raritate notabilibus; qualia sunt Capræis immanum belluarum ferarumque membra prægrandia, quæ dicuntur gigantum ossa et arma heroum.’[67] The Emperor (whom the late Louis Napoleon so much resembled, even in the matter of wearing hidden armour[68]) preferred these curiosities to statues and pictures. The ancients also, like 22Marco Polo and too many of the moderns, spoke of the world generally after studying a very small part in particular. The Halicarnassian here evidently alludes to an epoch which had made notable advances upon the Quaternary Congener of the Simiads. We must return to a much earlier age. Lucretius, whose penetrating genius had a peculiar introvision, wrote like a modern scientist:—

Gentleman Horace is almost equally correct:—

How refreshing is the excellent anthropology of these pagans after the marvel-myths of man’s Creation propounded by the so-called ‘revealed’ religions.

For the better distribution of the subject I shall here retain the obsolete and otherwise inadmissible, because misleading, terms—Age of Stone, Age of Bronze, Age of Iron.[71] From the earliest times all the metals were employed, without distinction, for weapons offensive and defensive: besides which, the three epochs intermingle in all countries, and overlap one another; they are, in fact, mostly simultaneous rather than successive. As a modern writer says, like the three principal colours of the rainbow, these three stages of civilisation shade off the one 23into the other; and yet their succession, as far as Western Europe[72] is concerned, appears to be equally well defined with that of the prismatic colours, though the proportion of the spectrum may vary in different countries. And, as a confusion of ideas would be created, especially when treating of the North European Sword, by neglecting this superficial method of classification, I shall retain it while proceeding to consider the development of the White Arm under their highly conventional limits.

I must, moreover, remark that the ternary division, besides having no absolute chronological signification, and refusing to furnish any but comparative dates, is insufficient. Concomitant with, and possibly anterior to, the so-called Stone Age, wood, bone, teeth, and horn were extensively used; and the use has continued deep into the metal ages. Throughout the lower valley of the River of the Amazons, where stone is totally wanting, primitive peoples must have armed themselves with another material. The hard and heavy trees, both of the Temperates and the Tropics, supplied a valuable material which could be treated simply by the use of fire, and without metal or even stone. Ramusio speaks of a sago-wood (Nibong or Caryota urens) made into short lances by the Sumatrans: ‘One end is sharpened and charred in the fire, and when thus prepared it will pierce any armour much better than iron would do.’[73] The weapon would be fashioned by the patient labour of days and weeks, by burying in hot ashes, by steaming and smoking, by charring and friction, by scraping with shells and the teeth of rodents, and by polishing with a variety of materials: for instance, with the rasping and shagreen-like skin of many fishes, notably the ray; with rough-coated grasses, and with the leaves of the various ‘sandpaper-trees’ which are hispid as a cat’s tongue. And the first step in advance would be dressing with silex, obsidian, and other cutting stones, and finishing with pumice or with the mushroom-shaped corallines. I shall reserve for the next chapter a description of the sabre de bois, unjustly associated in the popular saying with the pistolet de paille.

Bone, which includes teeth, presented to savage man a hard and durable material for improving his coarse wooden weapons. Teledamus or Telegonus, son of Circe and founder of Tusculum[74] and Præneste, according to tradition slew his father, Ulysses, with a lance-head of fish bone—aculeum marinæ belluæ. The teeth of the Squalus and other gigantum ossa or megatherian remains supplied points for the earliest projectiles, and added piercing power to the blow of the club. That a Bone Age may be traced throughout the world,[75] and that the phrase a ‘bone- and stone-using people’ is correct, was proved by the Weltausstellung of Vienna (1873), whose 24splendid collection found an able describer in Prof. A. Woldrich.[76] The caves of venerable Moustier (Département Dordogne), of Belgium, and of Lherm (Département Arriège) contributed many jawbones of the cave bear (Ursus spelæus); the ascending ramus of the inferior maxilla had been cut away to make a convenient grip, and the strong corner-teeth formed an implement or an instrument, a tool or a weapon. The caves of Peggau in Steiermark (Styria), of Palkau in Moravia, and the Pfahlbauten[77] or Pile-villages of Olmütz, produced a number of bone articles and remnants of the cave bear. These rude implements remind us of the weapon used to such good effect by the Biblical Samson, the Hebrew type of Hercules, the strong man, the slayer of monsters, and the Sun-god (Shamsún).[78]

The wilder tribes of Cambodia convert the bony horn of the sword-fish into a spear head, with which they confidently attack the rhinoceros.[79] At Kotzebue Sound Captain Beechey found lances made of a wooden staff ending in a walrus-tooth; and this defence was also adapted to a tomahawk-point. The New Guinea tribes tip their arrows with the teeth of the saw-fish and the spines of the globe-fish (Diodon and Triodon). The horny style of the Malaccan king-crab (Limulus), a 25Crustacean sometimes reaching two feet in length, is also made into an arrow-pile.[80] The Australians of King George’s Sound arm their spears with the acute barbules of fishes; and the natives of S. Salvador, when discovered by Columbus, pointed their lances with fish-teeth. The Greenlander’s ‘nuguit’ (fig. 23) is mentioned by Crantz as armed with the narwhal’s horn, and the wooden handle is carved in relief with two human figures. By its side is another spear (fig. 24) with a beam in narwhal-shape, the foreshaft being composed of a similar ivory, inserted into the snout so as to represent the natural defence. Here we see the association in the maker’s mind between the animal from which the weapon is derived and the purpose of destruction for which it is chiefly used. It also illustrates the well-nigh universal practice amongst savages of making their weapons to imitate animate forms. The reason may be a superstition which still remains to be explained.

Foreshafts and heads of bone are still applied to the arrows of the South African Bushmans. They alternate with wood, chert, and metal throughout the North American continent, from Eskimo-land to California. A notable resemblance has been traced between the bone-club of the Nootka Sound ‘Indians,’ and 26the jade Pattu-Pattu or Meri of New Zealand. Hence it has been suspected that this short, flat weapon, oval or leaf-shaped, and made to hold in the hand, as if it were a stone celt, was originally an imitation of the os humeri. Like the celt, also, is the stone club found by Colonel A. Lane Fox in the bed of the Bawn river, north Ireland.[81]

The long bones of animals, with the walls of marrow-holes obliquely cut and exposing the hollow, were fastened upon sticks and poles, forming formidable darts and spears. The shape thus suggests the bamboo arrow-heads of the North Americans, whose cavity also served to carry poison.[82] They would, moreover, easily be fashioned by fracture, and by friction upon a hard and rough-grained substance, into Swords and daggers. The Fenni, or Finns, of Tacitus (‘Germ.’ c. 46), having no iron, used bone-pointed arrows. The Innuits, or Eskimos, of Greenland and other parts of the outer north, form with the ribs of whales their shuttles as well as their Swords. In ‘Flint Chips’ we find that the ancient Mexicans had bone-daggers. Wilde[83] gives a unique specimen of such a weapon found in the bed of the River Boyne ‘in hard blue clay, four feet under sand, along with some stone spear-heads.’ Formed out of the leg-bone of one of the large ruminants, it measures ten and a sixth inches long, the rough handle being only two and a half inches[84]; the blade is smooth, and wrought to a very fine point. This skeyne (the 27Irish ‘scjan’[85]) looks like a little model of a metal cut-and-thrust blade (fig. 27). Equally interesting is the knife-blade (fig. 29) found with many other specimens of manufactured bone in the Ballinderry ‘Crannog’[86] (county Westmeath): the total length is eight inches, and the handle is highly decorated. Other bone knives are mentioned in the ‘Catalogue’ (pp. 262–63). Bone prepared for making handles, and even ferules, for Swords and daggers is also referred to (p. 267): the material, being easily worked and tolerably durable, has, indeed, never fallen into disuse. In the shape of ivory,[87] walrus-tusk, and hippopotamus-tooth it is an article of luxury extensively used in the present day for the hafts of weapons and domestic implements. Lastly, bone served as a base to carry mere trenchant substances. The museum of Professor Sven Nilsson[88] shows (fig. 31) a smooth, sharp-pointed splinter, some six inches long, grooved in each side to about a quarter of an inch deep. In each of these grooves, fixed by means of cement, was a row of sharp-edged and slightly curved bits of flint. A similar implement (fig. 30) is represented in the illustrated catalogue of the Museum of Copenhagen. Of this contrivance I shall speak at length when treating of the wooden Sword.[89]

While bone was extensively used by primitive Man, horn was the succedaneum in places where it was plentiful. The Swiss lake-dwellings have yielded stag’s horn and wooden hafts or helves, with bored holes and sockets; borers, awls or drills; mullers, rubbers, and various other instruments. The caverns of the Reindeer period in the south of France are not less rich. Stag-horn axes are common in Scandinavia, and one preserved by the Stockholm Museum bears the spirited outline of a deer. Beads, buttons, and other ornaments are found in England. This material, when taken from the old stag, is of greater density than osseous matter and of almost stony hardness, as the cancellated structure contains carbonate of lime; moreover it was easily worked by fire and steam.

Diodorus (iii. cap. 15) describes the Ichthyophagi as using antelopes’ horns in their fishing, ‘for need teacheth all things.’ The earliest mention of a horn-arm is by Homer (‘Iliad,’ ii. 827, and iv. 105), who describes Pandarus, the Lycian, son of Lycaon, using a bow made of the six-spans-long[90] spoils of the ‘nimble 28mountain-goat.’ The weapon may have retained the original form. The early Greek types were either simple or composite. The Persians[91] preferred, and till lately used, wood and horn, stained, varnished, and adorned as much as possible. Duarte Barbosa[92] describes the Turkish bow at Hormuz Island as ‘made of buffalo-horn and stiff wood painted with gold and very pretty colours.’ The ‘Hornboge’ occurs in the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ and the Hungarians appeared in Europe with horn-bows and poisoned arrows.

The bows of the Sioux and Yutahs are of horn, backed with a strip of raw hide to increase the spring. The Blackfoot bow is made from the horn of the mountain-sheep (Catlin), and the Shoshone of the Rocky Mountains shape it by heating and wetting the horn, which is combined with wood (Schoolcraft). The Eskimos of Polar America, where nothing but drift-timber is procurable, are compelled to build their weapons with several bits of wood, horn, and bone, bent into form by smoking or steaming.

Admirable bows of buffalo-horn—small, but throwing far, and strong—are still made in the Indus-valley about Multan. For this use the horns are cut, scraped, thinned to increase elasticity; joined at the bases by wooden splints, pegs, or nails, and made to adhere by glue and sinews. Man would soon learn to sharpen his wooden shafts with horn-points, the spoils of his prey. Hence the ancient Egyptians applied horn to their light arrows of reed.[93] The Christy collection contains an arrow from South America (?) armed with a pile of deer-horn. The Melville Peninsula, being scant of materials, uses as arrow-piles the horns of a musk-ox (ovibos, more ovis than bos), and the thinned defences of the reindeer strengthened by sinews. Antelope-horns are still used as lance-points by the Nubians, the Shilluks, and the Denkas of the Upper Nile; by the Jibbus of Central Africa, and by the tribes of the southern continent.[94] The ‘Bantu’ or Kafir races, Zulus and others, make their kiri (kerry) either of wood or of rhinoceros-horn. It varies from a foot to a yard long, and is capped by a knob as large as a hen’s egg or a man’s fist: hence it is called ‘knob-stick’ or ‘throw-stick.’ The Ga-ne-u-ga-o-dus-ha (deer-horn war-club) of the Iroquois ended in a point of about four inches long; since the people had intercourse with Europeans they have learned to substitute metal. The form suggests that the martel-de-fer of Persia and India, used by Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was derived from a weapon of this kind: suitable points for arming it have been found in England and Ireland. The Dublin Museum (case 21, Petrie) contains an antler of the red deer converted into a thrusting weapon. The Jumbiyah (crooked 29dagger) of the Arabs, the Khanjar[95] of Persia and India, whence the Iberian Alfânge (El-Khanjar) and our silly ‘hanger,’ shows by form and point that it was originally the half of a buffalo-horn split longitudinally. The modern weapon, with metal blade and ivory handle, has one side of the latter flat, betraying its origin by retaining a peculiarity no longer required. The same is the case when the whole Jumbiyah is, as often happens, made of metal[96] (fig. 6, p. 10).

The sufficiency of horn for the slender wants of uncivilised communities was admirably illustrated by the discovery of a Pfahlbau, or crannog, some three miles south of Laibach, the capital of Carniola, and a little north of the Brunnsdorf village. The site is a low mountain-girt basin, formerly a lake or broad of the Lai-cum-Sava river, and still flooded after heavy rains. Surface-finds were picked up in 1854–55, and regular explorations began in July 1875.[97] During that year two hundred articles were dug up. The material was chiefly stag-horn, tines, and beams, the latter often cut at the burr or antler-crown. The chief objects—many of them artistic as those of the French ‘Reindeer epoch’—were hatchets, hammers, needles, spindles, and punches of horn and split bone; fish-hooks, pincers, and skin-scrapers of hog’s tusks; with ornaments set in bone, and teeth bored for stringing. Many of these articles showed signs of the saw-kerf or notch which had probably been cut with sanded fibre acting like a file. There were harpoon-heads of peculiar shape, supposed to be unpierced whistles, the hole not having been bored through[98]: evidently they were made to ‘unship’ when striking the Welsen (Siluri) of the old lake, some of which must have been 30six feet long. The wooden foreshaft, joined by a string to its head, acted as float, and betrayed the position of the prey. This is the third stage of the harpoon: the first would be merely a heavy, pointed stick, and the second a spear with barbs. There were six horn Dolche (daggers), and one peculiar article, an edge of polished stone set in a horn-handle: the latter shows at once the abundance of game, and the value and rarity of the mineral, which probably belonged only to the rich. The eight stone implements were of palæolithic type; the few metal articles—a leaf-shaped sword-blade, a rude knife, lance-heads, arrow-piles, needles, and bodkins—were chiefly copper, five only being bronze; and the pottery corresponds with that of the neolithic period in the museums of Copenhagen and Stockholm. Thus the find, like several in Switzerland, showed a great preponderance of horns, bones, and teeth during a transitional age when the rest of Europe was using polished stone and metal.[99]

Prehistoric finds are still common in the Laibacher moorground (1882). Lauerza, a hamlet on the edge of the swamp, supplied (Nov. 7) a large stone-axe (Steinbeil), pierced and polished, of the quartzose conglomerate common in the adjacent highlands. This article was exceptional, most of the stone implements being palæolithic. At Aussergoritz appeared remnants of pottery and Roman tiles, a broken hairpin of bronze, a spear of Roman type, and a ‘palstab,’[100] also of bronze: the latter is the normal chisel-shaped hatchet with the flanges turned over for fitting to the handle; it measures 16·5 cent. long by 3·5 of diameter at the lower part. The sands of Grosscup also yielded sundry fine bronze armlets of Etruscan make found upon embedded skeletons. All the finds have been deposited in the Provincial Museum at Laibach.

The use of horn, like that of bone, has survived to the present day, and still appears in the handles of knives, daggers, and swords. It is of many varieties, and it fetches different prices according to the texture, the markings, and other mînutiæ known to the trade.[101]

The ‘Age of Wood’ began early, lasted long, and ended late. As the practice of savages shows, the spear was originally a pointed stick hardened in the fire; and arrows, the diminutives of the spear, as daggers are of the Sword, were tipped with splinters of bamboo, whose Tabáshir or silicious bark acted like stone. The Peruvians, even after they could beat out plates of gold and silver, fought with pikes having no iron tips, but with the points hardened in the fire.[102] The same was the case with the Australians,[103] who, according to Mr. Howard Spensley,[104] also fashioned Swords of very hard wood: the Arabs of the Tihámat or Lowlands of Hazramaut (the Biblical Hazramaveth) are still compelled by poverty to use spears without metal. I pass over the general use of this world-wide material to the epoch when it afforded a true Sword.

The wooden Sword, as we see from its wide dispersion, must have arisen spontaneously among the peoples who had reached that stage of civilisation where it became necessary.[105] These weapons were found in the hands of the Indians of Virginia by the well-known Captain John Smith. Writing in 1606, Oldfield describes swords of heavy black wood in the Sandwich Islands, and Captain Owen Stansley in New Guinea. Mr. Consul Hutchinson notes the wooden swords used by the South American Itonanamas, a sub-tribe of the Maxos. Those preserved in Ireland and others brought from the Samoa Islands will be noticed in a future32 page. They may mostly be characterised as flat clubs sharpened at the edge, and used like our steel blades.

The shape of the wooden sword greatly varies, and so does its origin. Mr. Tylor fell into the mistake, so common in these classifying, generalising, and simplifying days, of deriving the sabre, because it is a cutting tool, from the axe, and the tuck or rapier from the spear because it thrusts. Wooden sword-blades alone have three prototypes, viz.:—

I. The Bulak Museum (Cairo)[106] shows two good specimens of the ancient ‘Lisán’ (‘tongue’-weapon) club or curved stick. The first battles, says Pliny (vii. 57), were fought by the Africans against the Egyptians with clubs which they called phalangæ. The shorter club-sword (1 ft. 11 in.) has a handle ribbed with eighteen fine raised rings. The longer or falchion-shaped weapon (2 ft. 5 in.) is hatched at the grip with a cross pattern. Both are of hard wood blackened by age, and both have the distinct cutting edge. The ancient war-club was tipped with metal and whipped with thongs round the handle for firmer grasp, like the Roman fasces. The modern Lisán-club, made of tough mimosa-wood and about 2½ ft. long, is still used in close combat by the Negroid tribes of the Upper Nile. To the Bishárins and Amri the Lisán supplies, at dances and on festal occasions, the place of the sword. In Abyssinia there is a lighter variety (1 ft. 6 in.) banded alternately with red, blue, and green cloth, and protected by a network of brass wire. The Ababdeh (modern Æthiopians), content with this, the spear, and its pendant the shield, fear not to encounter tribes whose arms are the matchlock and a ‘formidable looking, but really inoffensive sword with a wondrous huge straight blade.’ These pastoral Nomads are of a peculiar and interesting type. The short stature and the well-curved and delicate limbs,33 whose action is quick, lithe, and graceful as the leopard’s, connect them with the Bedawin of Arabia; while the knotted and spiral locks standing on end, and resembling when tallowed a huge cauliflower, affiliate them to the African Somal. Their arms are more extensive than their dress, a mere waist cloth, the primitive attire of tropical man; and they live by hiring their camels to caravans.

The Dublin Museum[107] also shows the transitional forms between the club and the Sword. The weapon (a) numbered 143 is some twenty-five inches long: the second (b) is labelled ‘No. 144, wooden club-shaped implement, twenty-seven inches long.’

The club of the Savage developed itself in other directions to the shepherd’s staff, the bishop’s crozier, and the king’s sceptre; hence, too, the useless bâton of the field-marshal, and the maces of Mr. Speaker and My Lord Mayor. Here we may answer the question why the field-marshal should carry a stick instead of a Sword. The unwarlike little instrument is simply the symbol of high authority:[108] it is the rod, not of the Lictor, but of the Centurion, whose badge of office was a vine-sapling wherewith to enforce authority. Hence Lucan (vi. 146) says of gallant Captain Cassius Scæva who, after many wounds, beat off two swordsmen:—

This use was continued by the drill-sergeant of Europe from England to Russia. The club again survives in the constable’s staff and the policeman’s truncheon.

The form of throwing-stick, which we have taught ourselves to call by an Australian name ‘boomerang,’[109] thereby unduly localising an almost universal weapon from Eskimo-land to Australia, was evidently a precursor of the wooden Sword. It was well known to the ancient Egyptians. Wilkinson shows (vol. i. chap. 4) that it was of heavy wood, cut flat, and thus offering the least resistance, measuring 1 ft. 3 in. to 2 ft. long by 1½ in. broad. The shape, however, is not the usual segment of a circle, but a shallow S-curve inverted (Ƨ), more bent at the upper end, and straighter in the handle. One weapon (p. 236) seems to bear the familiar asp-head.[110] The British Museum contains a boomerang brought from Thebes by the 34Rev. Greville Chester, and a facsimile was exhibited by General Pitt-Rivers.[111] The end is much curved; the blade has four parallel grooves, and it bears the cartouche of Ramses the Great. In no instance have we found the round shape and the returning flight of its Australian congener. Three illustrations[112] show a large sportsman (the master) bringing down birds which rise from a papyrus-swamp, while a smaller figure (the slave) in the same canoe holds another weapon at arm’s length.

Strabo[113] describes the (Belgian) Gauls as hunting with a piece of wood resembling a pilum, which is hand-thrown, and which flies to a distance farther than an arrow. He calls it the Γροσφὸς, which is also described as a pilum, dart, or javelin by Polybius;[114] but evidently this Grosphus means the throw-stick, usually termed by the Greeks ἀγκύλη (Ancyle). Silius Italicus arms in the ‘Punica’ one of the 35Libyan tribes which accompanied Hannibal with a bent or crossed cateia: the latter is identified with the throw-stick by Doctor (now Sir) Samuel Ferguson, poet and antiquary.[115] The encyclopædia of Bishop Isidore (a.d. 600–636) explicitly defines the cateia to be ‘a species of bat which, when thrown, flies not far by reason of its weight; but where it strikes it breaks through with extreme impetus, and if it be thrown with a skilful hand it returns to him who threw it:—rursum redit ad eum qui misit.’ Virgil also notices it:—

Jähn (p. 410)[116] remembers the Miölner, or hammer of Thor, which flew back to the hand.

It has been noted that this peculiarity of reversion or back-flight is not generic, even in the true boomerang, but appertains only to specific forms. Doubtless it was produced by accident, and, when found useful for bringing down birds over rivers or marshes, it was retained by choosing branches with a suitable bend. The shapes greatly differ in weight and thickness, in curvature and section. Some are of the same breadth throughout; others bulge in the centre; while others are flat on one side and convex on the other. In most specimens the fore part of the lath is slightly ‘dished’: hence the bias causes it to rise in the air on the principle of a screw-propeller. The thin edge of the weapon is always opposed to the wind, meeting the least resistance. The axis of rotation, when parallel to itself, makes the missile 36ascend as long as the forward movement lasts, by the action of the atmosphere on the lower side. When the impulse ceases it falls by the line of least resistance, that is, in the direction of the edge which lies obliquely towards the thrower. In fact, it acts like a kite with a suddenly broken string, dropping for a short distance. But as long as the boomerang gyrates, which it does after the forward movement ends, it continues to revolve on the same inclined plane by which it ascended until it returns to whence it came. This action would also depend upon weight; the heavy weapons could not rise high in the air, and must drop by mere gravity before coming back to the thrower.

From Egypt the weapon spread into the heart of Africa. The Abyssinian ‘Trombash’ is of hard wood, acute-edged, and about two feet long; the end turns sharply at an angle of 30°, but the weapon does not whirl back.[117] The boomerang 37of the Nyam-Nyams is called kulbeda. Direct derivation is also shown by the curved iron projectile of the Mundo tribe on the Upper Nile, a weapon of the same form being represented on the old Egyptian monuments. The ‘hunga-munga’ of the negros south of Lake Chad, and the adjoining peoples, shows a further development of spikes or teeth disposed at different angles, enabling the missile to cut on both sides. The varieties of this form, with a profusion of quaint ornaments, including lateral blades which answer the purpose of wings, and which deal a severer wound, are infinite. Denham and Clapperton give an illustration of a Central African weapon forming the head and neck of a stork. So the Mpangwe negros[118] of the Gaboon River, West Africa, shape their missiles in the form of a bird’s head, the triangular aperture (fig. 40, No. 5) representing the eye.

38

The throwing-stick has been found in Assyrian monuments: Nemrúd strangling the lion holds a boomerang in his right hand. Thence the weapon travelled East; and the Sanskrit Ástara, or Scatterer, was extensively used by the pre-Aryan tribes of India. The Kolis, oldest known inhabitants of Gujarát, call it ‘Katuriyeh,’ a term probably derived from ‘Cateia’; the Dravidians of the Madras Presidency know it as ‘Collery,’ and the Tamulian Kallar and Marawar (of Madura), who use it in deer-hunting, term it ‘Valai Tadi’ (bent stick). The Pudukota Rajah always kept a stock in arsenal. The length greatly varies, the difference amounting to a cubit or more; and three feet by a hand-breadth may be the average. The middle is bent to the extent of a cubit; the flat surface with a sharp edge is one hand broad. ‘Its three actions are whirling, pulling, and breaking, and39 it is a good weapon for charioteers and foot soldiers.’ Prof Oppert, writing ‘On the Weapons, &c. of the ancient Hindus’ (1880), tells us that the Museum of the Madras Government has two ivory throw-sticks from Tanjore and a common wooden one from Pudukota; his own collection contains four of black wood and one of iron. All these instruments return, as do the true boomerangs, to the thrower. The specimens in the old India-House Museum conform with the natural curvature of the wood, like the Australian; but, being thicker and heavier, they fall without back-flight. Not a few of the boomerangs cut with the inner edge, the shapes of the blade and of the grip making them unhandy in the extreme.

From the throw-stick would naturally arise the Chakrá, the steel wheel or war-quoit, which the Akális—a stricter order of Sikhs—carried in their long hair, and launched after twirling round the forefinger.[119] The boomerang-shape is also perpetuated in the dreaded Kukkri or Gurkha Sword-knife, now used, however, only for hand-to-hand fighting. I have mentioned the Cuchillo or Spanish clasp-knife- and the Italian sickle-throwing. The Australian weapon was unknown, like the shield, to Tasmania, whose only missile was the Waddy or throw-stick.

As the Australian club, swelling at the end, developed itself in one direction, to the Malga (war-pick) and hatchet, so on the other line it became, by being narrowed, flattened, and curved, the boomerang and the boomerang-sword. Finally, the immense variety of curves—some of them bending at a right angle—were straightened and made somewhat long-oval and leaf-shaped for momentum and impetus.

The direct descent of the curved wooden Sword of Egypt from the boomerang is shown in many specimens. The blade becomes narrow, flat, and more curved; 40the handle proves that it is no longer a mere missile, and the grip is scored with scratches to secure a firmer grasp.[120] The best specimen known to me is in the Bulak Museum.[121] It is a light weapon of sycomore wood, measuring in length 1 mètre 30 cent. (4 ft. 3 in.), in breadth nearly 15 cent. (6 in.), and in thickness 0·2 cent. (0·78 in.), while the depth of the perpendicular connecting the arc with the chord is 10 cent. But what makes it remarkable is that the Sword bears at one side the so-called ‘Cartouche’[122] of King Ta-a-a (17th dynasty), and at the other end of the same side in a parallelogram the name and titles of Prince ‘Touaou, the servant of his master in his expeditions.’ This fine specimen was found with the mummy and other articles at the Drah Abu’l-Neggah, the Theban cemetery.

The paddle or original oar, mostly used by savages with the face to the bow,[123] is of two kinds. The long, pointed spear-like implement serves, as a rule, for deeper, and the broad-headed for shallower, waters. Both show clearly the transitional state beginning with the club and ending with the Sword.

Mr. J. E. Calder,[124] describing the Catamaran of the swamp tea-tree (Melaleuca, sp.) on the southern and western coasts of Tasmania, says (p. 23): ‘The mode of its propulsion would shock the professional or amateur waterman. Common sticks, with points instead of blades, are all that were used to urge it with its living freight through the water, and yet I am assured that its progress is not so very slow.’ Spears were employed in parts of Australia to paddle the light bark canoes,[125] and the Nicobar Islanders have an implement combining spear and paddle: it is of iron-wood, and of pointed-lozenge shape, about five feet in length.[126]

The African paddles, usually employed upon lagoons and inland waters, are broad-headed, either rounded off or furnished with one or more short points at the 41end. Every tribe has its own peculiarities, and a practised eye easily knows the people by their paddles. A broad blade, almost rounded and very slightly pointed, is also made in the Austral Isles, in the Kingsmill Islands, and in the Marquesas.

42

The passage of the paddle into the Sword is well shown amongst the wilder ‘Indians’ of the Brazil. The Tupis still employ the Tacapé, Tangapé, or Iverapema, which is written ‘Iwarapema’ by Hans Stade, of Hesse, in the charmingly naïve account of his travels and captivity.[127] It was a single piece of the hard, heavy, and gummy wood which characterises these hot-damp regions,[128] and of different shapes with and without handles.[129] The most characteristic implement is a long and rounded shaft with a tabular, oval, and slightly-pointed blade: it was slung by a lanyard round the neck and hung on either side. With a weapon of this kind the cannibal natives slaughtered Pero Fernandes Sardinha, first Bishop of Bahia, and all his suite; the ‘martyrs’ had been wrecked on the shoals of Dom Rodrigo off the mouth of the Coruripe River. The scene is illustrated in the ‘History’ of the late M. de Varnhagen (p. 321).

A similar Brazilian instrument was the Macaná, still used on the Rio das Amazonas, and there called Tamarana. It retains the form of the original paddle, while for offensive purposes the pointed oval head is sharpened all round. In parts of the Brazil the Macaná was a rounded club; and the sharpened paddle used as a Sword was called Pagaye.[130] The Peruvian Macaná and the Callua—the latter compared with a short Turkish blade—were made of chonta-wood (Guilielma speciosa and Martinezia ciliata) which was hard enough to turn copper tools.[131] Mr. W. Bollaert[132] tells us that the ‘Macaná was said by some to be shaped 43like a long Sword, by others like a club.’ It was both. The Tapuyas set these broad-headed weapons with teeth and pointed bones.

Ojeda, during his famous voyage to Carthagena, found the warlike Caribs wielding great Swords of palm wood, and the women ‘throwing a species of lance44 called Azagay.’ General Pitt-Rivers’ collection has a fine flat Club-Sword, five feet two inches long, straight and oval pointed, from Endeavour River, Queensland, and a smaller article, about three feet, with a longer handle, from Australia. Barrow River, Queensland, has supplied him with a half-curved wooden blade five feet long.

The fine Ethnological Museum of Herr Cesar Godeffroy[133] of Hamburg and Samoa, illustrating the ethnology of the Pacific Islands, contains many specimens of the knob-stick bevelled on one side of the head to an edge and gradually passing into the Sword. On the right-hand entrance-wall are, or were, two fine sabres (fig. 53) of Eucalyptus-wood, labelled ‘Schwert von Bowen (Queensland).’ The Sandwich Islanders, we see, still wield the Sword-club with sharp-cutting edges, like their neighbours of New Ireland. The savage Solomon Archipelago has supplied a two-handed sabre of light and bright-yellow wood; its longitudinal mid-rib shows direct derivation from the paddle-club. There is also a lozenge-shaped hand-club, which may readily have given a model to metal-workers. It is of hard, dark, and polished wood, and the handle is whipped round with coir (Tafel xx. p. 97): the length is seventy cent. by four of maximum breadth. The Swords are unfortunately not figured in the catalogue; but there is a fine wooden knife 45forty-nine cent. long by six cent. broad, with open handle and highly-worked grip (Tafel xxi. p. 135). It comes from Vanna Lava, Banks Group, New Hebrides, Polynesia (fig. 55).[134]

The wooden Sword extended deep into the Age of Metal. Articles of the kind have been brought from New Zealand, which are evident copies of modern European weapons. Wilde (p. 452) gives the wooden Sword, found five feet deep in Ballykilmunary near High Park, county Wicklow, with some bog-butter, but he finds no indications of its age. The length is twenty inches (fig. 56). Upon the side of the blade, and of a piece with it, stands a projection whose purpose is unknown: it is evidently inconvenient for a toy; but if the relic be a model for a sand-mould, the excrescence would have left an aperture by which to pour in the metal. This view is supported by the shape of the handle, which resembles the grips of the single-piece bronze Swords found in different parts of Europe. The Dublin Museum also contains[135] a blade apparently intended for thrusting, and labelled ‘Wooden Sword-shaped Object.’ The material is oak, blackened by burial in bog-earth: it has a mid-rib, a bevelled point, and no appearance of being a model (fig. 57).

Whilst wood was extensively used for Swords, the Age of Stone supplied few. The broad and leaf-shaped silex-flakes, dignified by the name of Swords, are only daggers and long knives. The fracture of flint is uncertain, even when freshly quarried.[136] The workmen would easily chip and flake it to form scrapers, 46axes, spear-heads, and arrow-piles; but after a certain length, from eight to nine inches, the splinters would be heavy, brittle, and unwieldy. Obsidian, like silex, would make daggers rather than swords. Such are the stone dirk and cutlass in the Kensington Museum. Several European museums preserve these flat, leaf-shaped knives of the dark cherty flint found in Egypt. The British Museum contains a polished stone knife broken at the handle, which bears upon it in hieroglyphics the name of ‘Ptahmes (Ptah-son), an officer.’ There is also an Egyptian dagger, of flint from the Hay Collection, still mounted in its original wooden handle apparently by a central tang, and with remains of its skin sheath.[137] The Jews, who borrowed circumcision from the Egyptians, used stone knives (τὰς μαχαίρας τὰς πετρίνας). Atys, says Ovid, mutilated himself with a sharp stone,—

and the Romans sacrificed pigs with flints. Several undated poniards in our collections are remarkable: for instance, the English daggers of black and white flint, rare in Scotland and unknown in Ireland; (a) the Iberian or Spanish blade in the Christy Collection, five and a half inches long, and found at Gibraltar; the Tizcuco blade of chalcedony, eight inches long (ibid.); (b) the Danish dagger in the Copenhagen Museum, thirteen and a half inches long (the rounded handle makes it a ‘marvel of workmanship’); and (c) the flint hatchet-sabre of the same 47collection, fifteen and a half inches in length. It is a mystery how the minute and delicate ornamentation, the even fluting like ripple marks, on these Danish flint-daggers was produced.

A better substance than flint was found in the compact sandstone and in granitic serpentine, so called because that rock resembles a snake’s skin. It is easily worked, while it is harder than the common serpentine. A dagger or knife found beside a stone cist in Perthshire is described as a natural formation of mica-schiste.

The Stone Age produced nothing more remarkable than the Pattu-Pattu or Meri of New Zealand, which an arrested development prevented becoming a Sword. Its shape, that of an animal’s blade-bone, suggests its primitive material; and New Guinea has an almost similar form, with corresponding ornamentation in wood. What assimilates it to the Sword is that it is sharp-edged at the top as well as at the side. It is used for ‘prodding’ as well as for striking, and the place usually chosen for the blow is the head, above the ear, where the skull is weakest. Some specimens are of the finest green jade or nephrite,[138] a refractory stone which must have been most troublesome to fashion.

Wood, however hard and heavy, made a sorry cutting weapon, and stone a sorrier Sword; but the union of the two improved both. Hence we may divide wooden Swords into the plain and the toothed blades, the latter—

An obvious advance would be to furnish the cutting part with the incisors of animals and stone-splinters. In Europe these would be agate, chalcedony, and rock-crystal; quartz and quartzite; flint, chert, Lydian stone, horn-stone, basalt, lava, and greenstone (or diorite); hæmatite, chlorite, gabbro (a tough bluish-green stone), true jade (nephrite), jadite, and fibrolite, found in Auvergne. Pinna and other shells have been extensively used—for instance, by the Andamanese—as arrow-heads and adze-blades.[139]

Tenerife, and the so-called New World, preferred the easily-cleft green-black obsidian,[140] of which the Ynkas also made their knives. The Polynesian Islands show two distinct systems of attachment. In the first the fragments, inserted into the grooved side, are either tied or made fast by gum or cement. In the second they are set in a row between two small slats or strips of wood, which, lastly, are lashed to the weapon with fibres. The points are ingeniously arranged in the 48opposite direction, so as to give severe cuts both in drawing and withdrawing. The Eskimos secure the teeth by pegs of wood and bone. The Pacho of the South Sea Islanders is a club studded on the inner side with shark’s teeth made fast in the same manner. The Brazilian Tapuyas armed a broad-headed club with teeth and bones sharpened at the point.[141] In ‘Flint Chips’ we find that a North American tribe used for thrusting a wooden Sword, three feet long, tipped with mussel-shell. Throughout Australia the natives provide their spears with sharp pieces of obsidian or crystal: of late years they have applied common glass,[142] a new use for waste and broken bottles (fig. 70). The fragments are arranged in a row along one side near the point, and are firmly cemented. There is no evidence of this flint-setting in Ireland: but the frequent recurrence of silex implements adapted for such purpose has suggested, as in the Iroquois graves, that the wood which held 49them together may have perished. We read in ‘Flint Chips’ that the Selden Manuscript shows a flake of obsidian mounted in a cleft wooden handle, the latter serving as a central support, with a mid-rib running nearly the whole length. The sole use of the weapon was for thrusting.[143]

The people of Copan (Yucatan) opposed Hernandez de Chaves with slings, bows, and ‘wooden Swords having stone edges.’[144] In the account of the expedition sent out (1584) by Raleigh to relieve the colony of Virginia, we read of ‘flat, edged truncheons of wood,’ about a yard long. In these were inserted points of stag-horn, much in the same manner as is now practised, except that European lance-heads have taken their place. Knives, Swords, and glaives, edged with sharks’ teeth,[145] are found in the Marquesas; in Tahiti, Depeyster’s Island, Byron’s Isles, the Kingsmill Group, Redact Island,[146] the Sandwich Islands, and New Guinea. Captain Graah notices a staff edged with shark’s teeth on the cast coast of Greenland, and the same is mentioned amongst the Eskimos by the late Dr. King.[147]

In the tumuli of Western North America, Mr. Lewis Morgan, the ‘historian of the Iroquois,’ mentions that, when opening the ‘burial mounds’ of the Far West, rows of flint-flakes occurred lying side by side in regular order; they had probably been fastened into sticks or swords like the Mexican. Hernandez[148] describes the ‘Mahquahuitl’ or Aztec war-club as armed on both sides with razor-like teeth of ‘Itzli’ (obsidian), stuck into holes along the edge, and fastened with a kind of gum. Mr. P. T. Stevens (‘Flint Chips,’ p. 297) says that this Mexican broadsword had six or more teeth on either side of the blade. Herrera, the historian, mentions, in his ‘Decads,’ ‘Swords made of wood having a gutter in the fore part, in which the sharp-edged flints were strongly fixed with a sort of bitumen and thread.’[149] In 1530, according to contemporary Spanish 50historians, Copan was defended by 30,000 warmen, armed with these and other weapons,[150] especially with fire-hardened spears. The same have been represented in the sculptures of Yucatan, which imitated the Aztecs. Lord Kingsborough’s ruinous work on Mexican antiquities, mostly borrowed from Dupaix, shows a similar contrivance (b and c). A Sword having six pieces of obsidian in each side of the blade, is to be seen in a museum in Mexico.[151] A Mexican Sword of the fifteenth century is of iron-wood, twenty-five inches long, and armed with ten flakes of black obsidian; and the same is the make of another Mexican Sword nearly four feet long.[152]

The next step would be to use metal for bone and stone. So the Eskimos of 51Davis Strait and some of the Greenlanders show an advance in art by jagging the edge with a row of chips of meteoric iron.[153] This would lead to providing the whole wooden blade with an edge of metal, when the latter was still too rare and too expensive for the whole weapon. This economy might easily have overlapped not only the Bronze, but the Iron Epoch.

The tooth-shaped edge was perpetuated in the Middle Ages, as we see by serrated and pierced blades of Italian daggers. That it is not yet extinct the absurd saw-bayonet of later years proves.

We now reach the time when Man, no longer contented with the baser materials—bone and teeth, horn and wood—learned the use of metals, possibly from an accidental fire, when

The discovery of ore-smelting and metal-working, following that of fire-feeding, would enable Man to apply himself, with notably increased success, to the improvement of his weapons. But many races here stopped short. The Australian, who never invented a bow, contenting himself with the boomerang, could not advance beyond the curved and ensiform club before he was visited by the sailors of the West. His simplicity in the arts has constituted him, with some anthropologists, the living example of the primitive and prehistoric genus homo.[154] The native of 52New Guinea, another focus of arrested civilisation, was found equally ignorant of the metal blade. The American aborigines never taught themselves to forge either cutting or thrusting Swords; and they entertained a quasi-superstitious horror of the ‘long knife’ in the hands of the pale-faced conqueror. This is apparently the case with all the lower families of mankind, to whom the metal Sword is clean unknown. If the history of arms be the history of our kind, and if the missile be the favourite weapon of the Savage and the Barbarian, the metal Sword eminently characterises the semi-civilised, and the use of gunpowder civilised, man.

A chief named Shongo, of Nemuro, in Japan, assured Mr. John Milne[155] that, ‘in old times, when there were no cutting tools of metal, the people made them of Aji, a kind of black stone, or of a hard material called ironstone. Even now implements of this material are employed by men who dwell far in the interior.’ Here, then, is another instance of the stone and the metal ‘Ages’ overlapping, even where the latter has produced the perfection of steel-work.

I will begin by noticing that the present age has settled a question which caused much debate, and which puzzled Grote (ii. 142) and a host of others half a century ago, before phosphor-bronze was invented. This was the art of hardening (not tempering) copper and its alloys. All knew that these metals had been used, in cutting the most refractory substances,[156] granite, syenite, porphyry, basalt, and perhaps diorite,[157] by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Trojans, and Peruvians. But none knew the process, and some cut the knot by questioning its reality. When you cannot explain, deny—is a rule with many scientists. The difficulty was removed by the Uchatius-gun,[158] long reported to be of ‘steel-bronze,’[159] but simply of common bronze hardened by compression. At the Anthropological Congress of Laibach[160] (July 27–29, 1878), Gundaker Graf Wurmbrandt, of Pettau, exhibited sundry castings, two spear-heads and a leaf-shaped blade of bright bronze (Dowris copper) adorned with spirals to imitate the old weapons. They were so indurated by compression that they cut the common metal.

Again, at the Anthropological Congress of Salzburg (August 8, 1881), Dr. Otto Tischler, of Prussian Königsberg, repeated the old experiment, showing how soft copper and bronze could be hardened by the opus mallei (simple hammering). Moreover his metal thus compressed could cut and work the common soft 54kinds without the aid of iron or steel. He exhibited two bronze plates in which various patterns had been punched by bronze dies. The hammering, rolling, beating, and pressing of copper for the purpose of hardening are well known to modern, and doubtless were to ancient workmen. The degree of compression applied is the feature of the discovery, or rather re-discovery.[161]

It may be doubted whether old Egypt and Peru knew our actual process of hydraulic pressure, whose simplest form is the waterfall. But they applied the force in its most efficient form. The hardest stones were grooved to make obelisks; the cuts were filled with wedges of kiln-dried wood, generally sycomore; and the latter, when saturated with water, split the stone by their expansion. And we can hardly deny that a people who could transport masses weighing 887 tons[162] over a broken country, from El-Suwan (Assouan) to Thebes, a distance of 130 miles, would also be capable of effecting mechanical compression to a high degree.

Buffon (‘Hist. Nat.’ article ‘Cuivre’) believed in the ‘lost art.’ Rossignol[163] (pp. 237–242) has treated of the trempe (διά τινος βαφῆς) que les anciens donnèrent au cuivre; and relates that the chemist Geoffrey, employed by the Comte de Caylus, succeeded in hardening copper and in giving it the finest edge; but the secret was not divulged. Mongez, the Academician, held that copper was indurated by immersion and by gradual air-cooling, but that la trempe would soften it.[164] In 1862 David Wilson, following Proclus and Tzetzes, declares the process of hardening and tempering copper so as to give it the edge of iron or steel, a ‘lost art.’ Markham[165] supposes that the old Peruvians hardened their copper with tin or silica; and he erroneously believes that tin is scarcely found in that section of South America.

Modern archæological discovery has suggested that in many parts of the world we must intercalate an age of virgin Copper between the so-called Stone and Bronze Periods. The first metal, as far as we know, was the stream-gold, washed by the Egyptians; and, as Champollion proved, the hieroglyphic sign for Núb (gold) is a bowl with a straining-cloth dripping water.[166] The fable of glass-discovery by the Sidonians on the sands of the Belus,[167] a tale which has le charme 55des origines, explains, I have said, how a bit of metalliferous stone, accidentally thrown upon the fire in a savage hut, would suggest one of the most progressive of the arts. And soon the ‘featherless biped,’ like the Mulciber and the Mammon of Milton—

The greater antiquity of copper in Southern Europe was distinctly affirmed, as has been seen, by the Ancients. The use of sheeting, or plating, on wood or stone was known as long ago as the days of Hesiod (b.c. 880–850?):

Copper sheets[169] were also used for flooring, as we learn from the χάλκεος οὐδός (Copper threshold) of Sophocles (‘Œdip. Col.’); and the treasury-room of Delphi, as opposed to the λάϊνος οὐδός (stone threshold). So in the Palace of Alcinous (‘Odys.’ vii. 75) the walls and threshold were copper, the pillars and lintels were silver, and the doors and dogs of gold.

The same practice was continued in the Bronze Period, as Dr. Schliemann proved when exploring the Thalamos attached to the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenus. Nebuchadnezzar, in the ‘Standard Inscription,’ declares that he plated with copper the folding-doors and the pillars of the Babylon rampart, and it is suspected that gold and silver sheeted the fourth and seventh stages of the Temple of Belus, vulgò the Tower of Babel.

Lucretius[170] is explicit upon the priority of copper—[171]

56

He justly determines its relation to gold—

And he ends with the normal sneer at his own age—

Virgil, a learned archæologist, is equally explicit concerning the heroes of the Æneid and the old Italian tribes—

And similarly Ennius—

Even during her most luxurious days Rome, like Hetruria, retained in memoriam the use of copper (or bronze?) for the sclepista or sacrificial knife. When founding a city they ploughed the pomœrium with a share of æs. The Pontifex Maximus and priests of Jupiter used hair-shears of the same material, even as the Sabine priests cut their locks with knives of æs. The Ancile or sacred shield was also of æs.

Pope, and other writers of his time, translated copper and bronze by ‘brass’ (copper and zinc); and in older English ‘native brass’ was opposed to ‘yellow copper’ (cuivre jaune). The same occurs in the A. V. Tubal Cain (the seventh in descent from Adam) is ‘an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron’[173] (Gen. iv. 22). Moses is commanded to ‘cast five sockets of brass for pillars’[174] (Exod. xxvi. 37). Bezaleel and Aholiab, ‘artists of the tabernacle,’ work in brass (Exod. xxxi. 4). We read of a ‘land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass’ (Deut. viii. 9). Job tells us, ‘Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone.’[175] Hiram of Tyre was ‘cunning to work all works in brass’ (casting and hammer-wrought), for Solomon’s Temple, which dates from about two centuries after the time of the Trojan war (b.c. 1200). In Ezra (viii. 27) the text mentions ‘two vessels of fine copper, precious as gold;’ and the margin reads ‘yellow or shining brass.’ Nor is the old word quite forgotten: we still speak of a ‘brass gun.’

‘In the Brazen Age,’ unphilosophically says Schlegel (‘Phil. of Hist.’ sect. ii.), ‘crime and disorder reached their height: violence was the characteristic of the rude and gigantic Titans. Their arms were of copper, and their implements and 57utensils brass or bronze.’ I should generally translate, with Dr. Schliemann and Mr. Gladstone, the Homeric χαλκός, ‘copper,’ not bronze, chiefly because the former is malleable and is bright, two qualities certainly not possessed by the alloy. There are alloys which are malleable,[176] and others (Dowris copper) which shine; but this is not the case with common bronze, and no poet would note its brilliancy as a characteristic.

Pure copper, however, would generally be used only in lands where tin for bronze, and zinc for brass, were unprocurable: isolated specimens may point only to a temporary dearth. Thus, the Copper Age must have had distinct areas. M. de Pulsky and M. Cartenhac (‘Matériaux,’ &c.) held to a distinct Copper Age between the Neolithic and the Bronze. Dr. John Evans considers the fabrication due to want of tin or to preference of copper for especial purposes. But the types of copper tools, &c., are not transitional.

The native ore was used in many districts of North America. Celts of various shapes from Mhow, Central India, were analysed by Dr. Percy, who found no tin in them. Tel Sifr in Southern Babylonia and the island of Thermia in the Greek Archipelago supplied similar articles. They are also discovered exceptionally in Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and Hungary, France, Italy, and Switzerland. I have noticed the use of the unmixed metal in the Crannogs of Styria. It seems to have prevailed in Istria: at Reppen-Tabor near Trieste, the supposed field of battle with the Romans that decided the fate of the Peninsula (b.c. 178), was found a fine lance-head of pure copper eight and a half inches long: it is now in the Museo Civico. The same was the case with Dalmatia; at Spalato and elsewhere I saw axe-heads of unmixed metal. And we have lately obtained evidence that old Lusitania, like Ireland,[177] was in similar conditions.

Thus the Age of Copper would be simply provisional in certain localities, separating the periods of horn and bone, teeth and wood, from that of alloys; even as the latter led, in the due line of development, to the general adoption of iron and steel for Swords and other weapons. But we have no need for dividing the epochs with the perverse subtilties of certain naturalists, who use and abuse every pretext for creating new species. If there be any sequence, it would be copper, bronze, and brass. In most places, however, the ages were synchronous, and some races would retain the use of the pure metal, even when tin and zinc lay at their doors.

The Venus (♀) of alchemy was called in the Semitic tongues nhs or nhsh, in Arab nahás, and in Hebrew nechosheth (נחשת). The term is popularly derived from a triliteral root signifying a snake, the crooked reptile, the serpent that is in the sea (Job xvi. 13; Is. xxvii. 1; Amos ix. 3, &c.); either because the metal is poisonous, like the Ophidæ, or from its brightness of burnish. Similarly, dhahab 58(זהב), gold, was named from its splendour; and silver, also meaning money (argentum, argent), was kasaf (כסף), the pale metal, the ‘white gold’ of Egypt. Both nechosheth and nahás apply equally to copper, bronze, and brass; hence we must probably read ‘copper Serpent’ for ‘brazen Serpent,’ and ‘City of Copper’ for ‘City of Brass.’

There is the same ambiguity in the Greek and the Roman terms. The word χαλκός (chalcus) is popularly derived from χαλάειν, ‘to loose,’ because easily melted: I should prefer Khal or Khar, ‘Phœnicia,’ whose sons introduced it into Greece. The Hellenes dug it in Eubœa, where Chalcis-town[178] gave rise to the ‘stone’ χαλκῖτις (chalcitis, Pliny, xxxiv. 2). They also knew the ore as ἡ κύπρος; and when the Romans, who annexed Cyprus in b.c. 57, worked the mines, their produce, says Josephus, was called χαλκὸς κύπριος. Chalcos is essentially ambiguous unless qualified by some epithet, as ἔρυθρος (red), μέλας (black), αἴθιοψ (Ethiopian colour = ruddy brown), πόλιος (iron-grey), and so forth. In fact, like æs, it is a generic term for the so-called ‘base metals’ (iron,[179] copper, tin, lead, and zinc), as opposed to the ‘noble metals’—gold and silver, to which we should add platinum.

Worse still, χαλκεύς (khalkefs), a copper-smith, was applied to the blacksmith,[180] and even to the chrysochoös, or gold-caster, at the court of Nestor (‘Od.’ iii. 420, 432); and to χαλκεῖα or χαλκήϊα, smithies in general. The Roman æs, opposed to the cyprium or æs cyprium[181] of Pliny (xxxiv. 2, 9), and smaragdus cyprius or malachite, is equally misleading unless we render it ‘base metal.’ We know not how to translate Varro[182] when he speaks of the cymbals at the feast of Rhea: ‘Cymbalorum sonitus, ferramentorum jactandorum vi manuum, et ejus rei crepitus in colendo agro qui fit, significant quod ferramenta ea ideo erant ære’ (copper, bronze, brass?), ‘quod antiqui illum colebant ære antequam ferrum esset inventum.’ Here he wisely limits the dictum to Greece and Rome.

According to S. P. Festus (sub voce), ‘ærosam appellaverunt antiqui insulam Cuprum,[183] quod in eâ plurimum æris nascitur.’ We now derive the Sacred Island 59from ‘Guib’ (pine-tree), ‘er’ (great), and ‘is’ (island); ‘Guiberis,’ alluding to its staple growth. General Palma (di Cesnola[184]) prefers the Semitic ‘kopher’ (Lawsonia inermis), the henna-shrub, even as Rhodes took its name from the rose or malvacea; and he finds in Stephanus Byzantinus[185] that the plant was then abundant. The diggings are alluded to by all the great geographers of antiquity, Aristotle (‘de Anim.’ v. 17[186]), Dioscorides (v. 89), Strabo (xvi. 6), and Pliny (xii. 60, xxxiv. 20). In Ezekiel (xxvii. 13) the trade in copper vessels is attributed to Javan (Ionia), Tubal, and Meshech; the latter are the Moschi of Herodotus (vii. 78), a Caucasian people who may have originated the ‘Moscows’ or Russians. Agapenor and his Arcadians were credited with having introduced copper-mining into Neo-Paphos; yet there is no doubt that the Phœnicians had worked metal there before the Greek colonisation. Menelaus (‘Od.’ iv. 83–4) visits Cyprus for copper; and Athene-Mentor fetches it, as well as ‘shining iron’ (steel?), from Temése (Τεμέση, ‘Od.’ i. 154).[187] These diggings, together with those of Hamath (Amathus, Palæo-Limassol), Soli, Curium, and Crommyon, are mentioned by Palma, who also alludes to an ‘unlimited wealth of copper.’ Yet, despite this and the general assertion that copper was the most important production of Cyprus, we have found only the poorest mines at Soli in the Mesaoria-plain, the counterslope of the Pedia. The island, it is true, has been wasted and spoiled by three centuries of the ‘unspeakable Turk.’ But the researches of late travellers and collectors—and these have been exhaustive since the British occupation—have hitherto failed to find extensive traces of mining. The rarity, together with the poverty of the matrix, would suggest the following explanation.

Cyprus was probably not so much a centre of production as a depôt of trade which collected the contributions of adjacent places—e.g. the isle of Siphanos (Sifanto), where copper has been found with iron and lead. Such was the general history of islands and archipelagos outlying barbarous and dangerous coasts on the direct lines of commerce, various sections of the world’s great mercantile zone and highway of transit and traffic. The Cassiterides, also, served as storehouses for the stream-tin and the chalcopyrite (copper pyrites) of Cornwall and of Devonshire, whilst they enjoyed the fame of producing it. During the Middle Ages, Hormuz or Ormuz (Armuza), in the Persian Gulf, served, and Zanzibar still serves, as a centre of import, export, and exchange, as a magazine and as a shipping station for its mainland.

One of the ores which occurs in the greatest number of places[188] and in the 60largest quantities; having a specific gravity ranging from 8·830 to 8·958; harder and more elastic than silver; the most tenacious of metals after iron and platinum; malleable when cold as well as when hot, so as not to require the furnace; melting at a temperature between the fusion points of silver and gold (1196° F.); and readily cast in sand-beds and moulds, Copper must have been used in the earliest ages, and has continued to our day, when the art of smelting it—at Swansea, for instance, in South Wales—is perhaps more advanced than that of any other ore. When the stone-and-bone weaponed peoples began their rude metallurgy, they would retain, with similar habits of thought, the same principles of design. The old Celtis, Celt, or chisel of serpentine or silex, would be copied in the newly-introduced and gradually-adopted weapon-tool of metal; and the transition would be so gradual that we trace without difficulty the process of development. The first metal blade was probably a dagger of copper, preserving the older shape of wood, horn, and stone: possibly it resembled the copper knife found at Memphis in 1851 by Hekekyan Bey; and this afterwards would grow to a Sword. Wood, stone, copper, and bronze, iron and steel, must long have been used simultaneously, slowly making way for one another, as the musket took the place of the matchlock, the rifle of the musket.

According to Pliny (vii. 57), ‘Aristotle supposes that Scythes, the Lydian, was the first to fuse and temper copper; while Theophrastus,[189] in Aristotle’s day, ascribes the art to Delas, the Phrygian. Some give the origin to the Chalybes, others to the Cyclopes.’ Achilles, the pupil of Chiron (ibid. v. 20), is represented in pictures as scraping the ærugo[190] or verdigris off a spear into the wound of Telephus, the effect of which diacetate would soon be followed by the discovery of blue-stone (sulphate of copper, blue copperas) or blue vitriol, still a favourite in the East. Pausanias (‘Æliaca’) further informs us that Spanish copper, or copper from Tartessus, was the first used. The classics agree that Cadmus (not ‘the foreigner,’ but the ‘old man,’ El-Kadim, or the ‘Eastern man,’ El-Kadmi) introduced metallurgy into Greece.

We have ample evidence of extensive working and use of copper, called ‘Khomet,’ by the peoples of the Nile Valley. The ore occurs in the Wady Hammámát, the Egyptian Desert, and the so-called ‘Sinaitic’ Peninsula. As the Pyramids are the oldest of buildings, so the works in Wady Magharah (Valley of Caves) are perhaps the most ancient mines in the world.[191] They were first opened (circ. b.c. 3700–3600) 61by the eighth king of the Third Dynasty, the Sephouris of Manetho, the Senoferu (‘he that makes good’) of the inscriptions, who lies buried in the pyramid of Mi-tum (Maydúm).[192] A rock-tablet of this Pharaoh, the ‘great god, the subduer, conqueror of countries,’ shows him holding a foreigner by the hair and smiting the captive with a mace. Above his head are carved a graver (pick?) and a mallet. Soris, first Pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, ‘Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, ever 62living,’ also strikes down an enemy and shows the same symbols. They again appear in the tablet of Souphis, the Shufu or Khufu of the Tables of Abydos and Sakkara,[193] and the Cheops of the Great Pyramid, whilst they are wanting in that of his brother Nu-Shufu (Souphis II.) or Khafra (Cephren) of the Pyramid.

The diggings were not abandoned till the days of Amenemhat, of the Twelfth Dynasty, when the labourers were removed to Sarábit-el-Khádim, the ‘Men-hirs’ (not heights) of the Servant in the Wady Nasb or Valley of Sacrificial Stone. Here gangs of miners, guarded by a strong force, extracted (as the slag-heaps show) Mafka or Mefka[194] (copper? malachite?[195] turquoise?), ‘black metal’ (copper), ‘green stones’ (malachite?), manganese, and iron. Supt and Athor or Hathor (Venus), the Isis of pure light, who presided over the Mafka-land, and who was the ‘goddess of copper,’ are mentioned in a tablet. Other hieroglyphs contain the names and titles of the rulers, and fragments of vases bear the name of Mene-Pthah,[196] one of the supposed Pharaohs of the Exodus. The ‘hands’ left their marks by graffiti or scribblings, and there are extensive remains of slave-quarters, of deep cuts, and of rock-sunk moulds for running the metal 63into ingots, Sarábit-el-Khádim continued working until Ramses IV. (Twentieth Dynasty), the last royal name there found: his date in round numbers would be b.c. 1150. Agatharchides (b.c. 100) reports that chisels of chalcos (λατομίδες χαλκαῖ) were found buried in the ancient gold mines of Egypt, and hence he deduces that the use of iron was unknown.

From Kemi or Χημία, ‘black-earth land,’ alias Egypt, the art of metallurgy doubtless extended southwards into the heart of Africa. Hence travellers wonder when they see admirable and artistic blacksmiths amongst races whose sole idea of a house is a round hut of wattle and dab. The only coppers in South Africa with which I am familiar are those of Katanga in the Cazembe’s country,[197] where the Portuguese have long traded. Captain Cameron[198] was shown a calabash full of nuggets found when clearing a water-hole. In Uguhha he procured a ‘Handa’ from Urua, a Saint Andrew’s cross with central ribs to the arms, measuring diagonally fifteen to sixteen inches by two inches wide and half an inch thick: the weight was two and a half to three pounds. The people prefer this ‘red copper’ to the ‘white copper,’ as they call gold. In the Pantheon of Yoruban Abeokuta, ‘Ogun,’ the local Vulcan and Wayland Smith, god of metal-workers and armourers, is symbolised by a dwarf spear of copper or iron, and human sacrifices are, or were, made to it. Barth (vol. iii.) notes the copper (ja-n-Karfi) in El-Hofrah (‘the Diggings’) of Waday, south of Dar-For; and in the Kano, the Runga, and the Bute countries. Copper wire is worn by the women of the hill-lands of Gurma, but it is supposed to be brought from Ashanti (?). Africa, however, is as yet unexplored as regards its mineral wealth, and we are only beginning to work our old-world California—the Gold Coast. Farther south the highly-important copper-mines of Pemba, now Bemba, and other parts of the inner Congo and Benguella regions, were discovered by the Capitão-Mór, Balthazar Rebello de Aragão, in 1621–23.[199] Still more to the south, Namaqua-land supplies chalcitic ores, a native carbonate, reduced with cow-chips.

In Asia mines were worked by the ancient Assyrians for copper as well as lead and iron, and the former was applied to their weapons, tools, and ornaments.[200] The Kurds and Chaldæans still extract from the Tiyari heights about Lizan and the valley of Berwari various minerals—copper, lead, and iron; silver, and perhaps gold. Upon the Steppes of Tartary, and in the wildest parts of Siberia, the remains of old copper-furnaces, small and of rude construction, are met with. The Digaru Mishmís of Assam have copper-headed arrows.

The Chinese declare that in olden times men used the metal for arms, which in the days of the Thsin (b.c. 300) began to be made of iron. Sir John Davis (i. 230) 64confirms the fact that the Chinese Sword and backsword, both wretched weapons, were originally of copper, long ago changed to iron. Dr. Pfizmaier tells us that about b.c. 475 the King of U sent a steel blade to his minister, U-tse-tsui, wherewith to behead himself. According to Pliny, the Seres exported iron to Europe together with their tissues and their skins. The Chinese distinguish between Thse-thung (purple copper) and Thing-sung (green copper) or bronze. They prefer the ‘Tze-lae,’ or natural ore, gathered in the torrent-beds of Kwei-chow and Yun-nan, and the latter exclusively produces the famous Pe-tung,[201] or white copper, which takes a fine polish like silver. They made copper the base of their coinage as well as their weapons. Amongst their many charms and talismans are the ‘money-swords,’ a number of ancient copper coins pierced with a square central hole, and connected by a metal bar shaped like a cross-hilted Sword. These are suspended over the testerns of beds and sleeping-couches, that the guardianship of the kings in whose reigns the money was issued may keep away ghosts and spirits.

The Japanese copper[202] is of the finest quality, and is used as a standard of comparison. The superiority of the metal, which contains a percentage of gold, enabled the self-taught native workmen to produce those castings which are the admiration and the despair of the European artist. The copper delivered at Nagasaki and Kwashi is from Beshki, Akita, and Nambu; other places produce the more ordinary kinds. The rich red surface is due to a thin and tenaciously adhering film of dioxide: this has been imitated in England. The famous Satzuma copper, held to be the best in the world, was prepared under Government officials, none being sold privately. The ore was roasted in kilns for ten to twenty days, smelted in large furnaces with charcoal, and cast in water to make the well-known Japanese ingots. These were bars measuring about half an inch on the side, by seven to nine inches in length, and weighing some ten taels, nearly equal to one pound. They were packed in boxes each weighing a picul (= 125 to 133⅓ lbs. avoir.), about the load of a man. The price of course greatly varied. The trade was at first wholly in the hands of the Hollanders, who made a good thing of their monopoly. There was also an old traffic in Japanese copper on the eastern coast of India, especially Coromandel. The opening of the empire has caused revolutionary changes.

Copper was abundantly produced in Europe, and the pure metal was used throughout the continent with the exception of Scandinavia, where specimens are exceedingly rare. The iron age of Denmark begins with the Christian era, and was preceded only by bronze and stone. We know nothing of the discovery of copper in Ireland. It is supposed in legend to have been introduced by the Fir-bolgs (bag-men, Belgæ?), or by the Tuatha (gens) de Danaan (the Danes?). 65These oft-quoted races, known to us only by name, have been affiliated with a host of continentals, even with the Greeks.[203] It would be mere guess-work to consider the Irish style of treating the ores—by spalling or breaking the stone, by wasting, fluxing, or smelting. We have, however, many specimens which explain the casting. The metal was called by the natives Uma or Umha, a Keltic word; also Dearg Umha, red copper, opposed to Ban[204] Umha (white copper) or tin; and this term afterwards became ‘stan,’ evidently from stannum (Gall. Estain). There are still traditions of copper mines having existed at an early period; and, among the wonders related by Nonnius (Archæol. Soc. Ireland), we find Loch Lein, now Killarney, surrounded by four circles of copper, tin, lead, and iron. Of late years ‘miners’ hammers,’ the native name for stone pounders, have been dug up in the neighbourhood of that lake, in Northern Antrim, at an ancient mine in Ballycastle, and in sundry parts of Southern Ireland.[205] The metal occurs in small quantities at Bonmahon (Waterford); copper and cobalt at Mucross, and grey copper ore in Cork, Kerry, Tipperary, and Galway. In 1855 some 1157 tons were shipped to Swansea.

The Greenlanders and Eskimos cut and hammer their pure native copper, without smelting, into nails, arrow-piles, and other tools and weapons. Mackenzie (second voyage) tells us that pure copper was common among the tribes on the borders of the Arctic Sea, whose arrow-heads and spear-heads were cold-wrought with the hammer. Columbus (fourth voyage), before touching the mainland of Honduras, saw at Guanaga Island a canoe from Yucatan[206] laden with goods, amongst which he specifics ‘copper hatchets, and other elaborate articles, cast and soldered; forges, and crucibles.’[207] At Hayti the great Admiral (first expedition) had mentioned masses of native copper weighing six arrobas (quarters).[208] When the Spaniards first entered the province of Tupan they mistook the bright copper axes for gold of low touch, and bought with beads some six hundred in two days:[209] Bernal Dias describes these articles as being very highly polished, with the handle curiously carved, as if to serve equally for an ornament and for the field of battle.

In North America there are two great copper regions which supplied the whole continent[210]—Lake Superior and the lower Rio Grande. The former shows the 66first transitional steps from stone to metal. The ore occurs in the igneous and trappean rocks that wall in the vast fresh-water sea, and is found in solid blocks: one, fifty feet long, six feet deep, and six feet in average thickness, was estimated to weigh eighty tons. At Copper Harbour, Kawunam Point, a single vein yielded forty thousand pounds. The largest mass in the Minnesota Mine (Feb. 1857) occupied Mr. Petherick and forty men for twelve months: it was forty-five feet long, thirty-two feet broad (max.), and eight feet thick; containing over forty per cent. ore, and weighing four hundred and twenty to five hundred tons. Malleable and ductile, representing an average of 3·10 per cent. native silver, and with a specific gravity of 8·78 to 8·96, it required no crucible but Nature’s; it wanted only beating into shape, and it needed nothing of the skilled labour necessary for the ores of Cornwall and Devon, which contributed so largely to the wealth of Tyre. The workings are supposed to belong to the race conveniently called ‘Mound-builders,’ and to date from our second century, when the Damnonians of Cornwall were in a similar state of civilisation. ‘Cliff Mine’ supplied fine specimens of weapons and tools, arrow-piles and spear-heads, knives and three-sided blades like the old bayonet. The socket was formed by hammering flat the lower end, and by turning it over partially (without overlapping) at each side, so as to make a flange. Professor James D. Butler (‘Prehistoric Wisconsin’) facsimiles twenty-four copper implements. The ‘Indians’ called the metal Miskopewalik (red iron), opposed to black iron. As is also proved by the Brockville relics, the people had the art of hardening copper.

The mines of the lower Rio Grande supplied Mexico with materials for arms and tools. According to Captain R. H. Bonnycastle,[211] the metal was found in New Mexico and in the volcanic rocks of Mechoacan (Valladolid, New Spain). Mexico, like Peru, used the crucible and added bronze to copper. The metals were under the god Quetzalcoatl, an Aztec Tubal Cain-ben-Lamech.

Another great centre of the Copper Age was the land ‘where men got gold as they do iron out of Biscay.’ The Peruvian army, a host of three hundred thousand levied from a total population of twenty millions, was armed with bows and arrows, clubs, pikes, javelins, war-axes (of stone and copper), and the paddle-sword;[212] while 67the people of Anahuac (Mexico) had bows and spears, clubs and axes, knives and Swords one-handed and two-handed, the Mahquahuitl set with obsidian teeth. In the former country the pre-Ynkarial Aymaras, who dug for gold and silver, copper and tin, and who employed alloys, almost ignored for their ‘Ayri’ (cutting implements) the use of iron and steel, which they called Quella (Khellay). The Andes range is popularly derived from the Quichua word Anta[213] (copper): the native ore occurred in the parts above the cultivation-line, and it abounded in the cupriferous sandstones of Bolivian Corocoro. The Huaunanchuco country (Rivero and Tschudi, p. 203),[214] conquered by the ninth Ynka, produced a fine collection of stone and copper axes, chisels, pins, and tweezers. Blas Valera, one of the earliest writers, still often quoted, tells us that ‘Anta’ served in place of iron, and that the people worked it more than other ores, preferring it to gold (Khori) and silver.[215] Of it were made their knives, carpenters’ tools, women’s dress-pins (Tupies), polished mirrors, and ‘all their rakes and hammers.’ Garcilasso de la Vega adds: ‘pikes, clubs, halberts, and pole-axes,[216] made of silver, copper, and some of gold, the “tears of the sun,” having sharp points, and some hardened by the fire’; also carpenters’ axes; adzes and hatchets; bill-hooks of copper, and blow-pipes of the same metal about a yard long applied to earthen or clay pots which they carried from place to place. A nugget or loose pebble acted as bell-clapper, and copper statuettes were coated or plated with precious metals. The ‘Royal Commentaries of the Yncas’ tells us 68that copper served in place of iron for making weapons of war: the people valued it highly because more useful than gold and silver; the demand was greater than for any other metal, and it paid tribute (vol. i. pp. 25, 43, 48). We find notices of copper hammers, bellows-nozzles, adzes, axes, and bill-hooks (i. p. 102). Cieza de Leon (chap. lxiii.) tells us that the Peruvians placed a piece of gold, silver, or copper in the corpse’s mouth. He mentions vases of copper and of stone (chap. civ.), and small furnaces of clay where they laid the charcoal and blew the fire with thin canes instead of bellows (ibid.). The Introduction (p. lii) notes the Peruvian use of copper-trowels for smoothing and polishing walls, and a ‘terrible weapon of copper in the shape of a star.’ According to Rivero and Tschudi (chap. ix.) the Peruvians could not work copper as well as gold or silver; yet they made idols, vases, solid staves a yard long with serpents inlaid, and sceptre-heads decorated with condor-like birds. The household vaisselle of the Ynkas consisted of gold and silver, copper and stone. Rivero, analysing Peruvian weapons and tools (hatchets and chisels), found from five to ten per cent. silica: he could not determine whether it was an artificial or an accidental impurity. Tschudi (1841) discovered copper arms in a tomb three leagues from Huaco, and established the fact that the Peruvians used the paddle-sword and the scymitar.[217] A copper axe, found in a Huaca (old grave) at the now well-known Arica, was associated with a thong-sling and with other primitive instruments.

The people of New Granada, according to the tale of Bollaert,[218] ‘gilt’ their copper by ‘rubbing the juice of a plant on it and then putting it into the fire, when it took the gold colour’—a process which reminds us of Pliny’s ox-gall varnish. Ecuador forged copper nippers for tweezers. The Chitchas, or Muiscas (i.e. men), of Bogota, who knew only gold and ignored copper, tin, lead, and iron, made their weapons and tools of hard wood and stone. Thomas Ewbank,[219] of New York, catalogues as breast-plates two laminæ of copper and one of bronze, the latter being notably the lighter. Out of sundry ‘bronzes’ from Peru he found four of pure copper. Chile had abundant mines of copper, and her metal is held to be the toughest: a bar three-eighths of an inch thick will bend backwards and forwards forty-eight times before breaking. Her chief centres are Copiapo (i.e. ‘turquoise’), Huasco, Coquimbo, Aconcágua and Caléo. The Couche range at Guatacondo, in sight of the desert of Atacama, which gave a name to Atacamite (submuriate of copper), is said to supply from the same vein gold, silver, copper, and coquimbite or white copperas called Pampua (packfong?).[220] Gillis (Plate viii. 12, 3) described, amongst the antiquities found near the great Ynkarial High-road, 69a cast copper axe, weighing about three and a quarter pounds: he doubts, however, that the ancient Chilians worked in that metal. The wild Araucanians called gold ‘copper’ (Bollaert, p. 184). According to Molina, the Puelche tribe extracted from the mines of Payen a copper containing half its weight (?) in gold; and the same natural alloy was found in the Curico mines.

Returning to the Old World, we see copper tools denoted in Egyptian hieroglyphs by a reddish-brown tint;[221] iron and steel, as in Assyria, being coloured, not grey, but water-blue.[222] With these yellow tools the old workmen are seen cutting stone blocks and fashioning colossal statues. Dr. John Forbes, of Edinburgh,[223] had a large chisel of pure copper, showing marks of use, found with a wooden mallet in an Egyptian tomb. A flat piece of copper, apparently a knife-blade, was turned up when boring thirteen feet below the surface where stands the statue of Ramses II. (b.c. 1400).[224] The Abbé Barthélemy proved, to the satisfaction of P. J. Rossignol, that the arms of the Greeks were first of copper; that iron was introduced about the date of the Trojan war (circ. b.c. 1200),[225] and that after this time ‘Athor-Venus’ was no more in use. Ulysses (‘Iliad,’ i. 4, 279) offers Achilles all the gold and copper he can collect, and Achilles will carry off all the gold, the red copper (χαλκὸν ἐρυθρόν), women, and iron or steel (σίδηρον), when Peleides returns that noble answer:

Numa ordered the priests to cut their hair with copper, not iron, scissors.[227] Copper vases and kettles as tomb-furniture were found by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ: the museum of the Warwakeion at Athens contains seven of these funeral urns. They have also been met with at Etruscan Corneto and Palestrina, and in Austrian Hallstatt,[228] a cemetery which dates from the days when iron was coming 70into use, and apparently belongs to a much later period than Mycenæ. The Hindús had a copper coinage, and that of the sub-Himalayan Gangetic provinces appears older than Greek art. There is a copper coin bearing on the reverse the rude figure of a horse, and on the obverse a man with legend in old Buddhist (Pali) letters Khatrapasa Pagámashasa.[229] The Jews, who, like the Etruscans, had a copper coinage, used the metal for offence and defence. As amongst the Philistines, Phœnicians, and Carthaginians, whose relics have been found in the Cannæ Plain, the metal was at first pure. The ‘bow of steel’ (Job xx. 24, Ps. xviii. 34) should be rendered ‘bow of copper,’ either copper-plated or (more probably) so tempered as to be elastic. Goliah of Gath (b.c. 1063), who measured nine feet six inches, carried a target, greaves, a spear with an iron head, and a scale-coat[230] of copper: the spear-head weighed six hundred and the armour five thousand shekels (each 320 grains Troy), or 33·33 and 277·77 lbs.[231] David was armed (1 Sam. xvii. 38) with a helmet of copper. Ishi-benob (b.c. 1018), who was ‘of the sons of the giant,’ carried a spear weighing three hundred shekels (about sixteen and a half pounds) of copper. Finally, Buffon believes that the arms of the ancient Asiatics were cuprine.

Mr. John Latham declares:[232] ‘Copper is a metal of which, in its unalloyed state, no relics have been found throughout England. Stone and bone first, then bronze or copper and tin combined, but no copper alone. I cannot get over this hiatus, cannot imagine a metallurgic industry beginning with the use of alloys.’ But this is a negative argument. The simple mineral would soon disappear to make bronze, and we have some pure specimens. Sir David Brewster[233] describes a large battle-axe of pure copper found on the blue clay, twenty feet deep below the Ratho Bog. Philips[234] gives the analysis of eight so-called ‘bronzes,’ including three Swords, one from the Thames and two from Ireland: the spear-head was of impure but unalloyed copper, 99·71 to 0·28 sulphur. Dr. Daniel Wilson[235] analysed 71in 1850 seven British ‘bronzes,’ and found one Scottish axe-head, rudely sand-cast, of almost pure copper, the natural alloy of gold and silver not reaching to one per cent. Moreover, the Romans certainly smelted copper in England, where lumps of pure metal, more or less rounded, have been found, but always in association with bronze articles. Pennant describes a relic discovered at Caerhun (or Caerhen), the old Conovium, near Conway and Llandudno, which still works copper: it was shaped like a cake of beeswax, measuring eleven inches by three and three-quarter inches in thickness; it weighed forty-two pounds, and the upper surface bore in deep impression, ‘Socio Romæ’ (to the partner at Rome). Obliquely across the legend ran in smaller letters, ‘Natsoc.’ It had evidently been smelted upon the spot. In later days our country imported her copper from Sweden and Hungary: this appears in the specification of patent to George Danby, Jan. 21, 1636. Calamine was shipped as ballast. Our great works began during the last century and culminated in Swansea.

Wilde (p. 490) expresses the general opinion when he asserts that ‘the use of copper invariably preceded that of bronze.’ He well explains by two reasons why so few antique implements of pure copper have been found in Ireland: either a very short period elapsed between the discovery of treating the pure ores and the introduction of bronze; or the articles, once common, were recast and converted into the more valuable mixed metal. The latter cause is made probable by the early intercourse with Cornwall, one of the great tin emporia. ‘Tin-stone’ (native peroxide of tin or stannic acid) is produced in small quantities by Ireland, and Dr. Charles Smith[237] declares that he collected it.

72

Wilde also notices, in the Royal Irish Academy, weapons, tools, and ornaments of red metal or pure copper. These are thirty celts of the greatest simplicity and the earliest pattern, rudely formed tools, a few fibulæ, a trumpet, two battle-axes, and several Sword-blades of the short, broad, and curved shape usually called scythes.

The pure copper celts, formed upon two or three types, are the oldest in the Dublin collection, and were probably the immediate successors of the stone implement. As a rule they have one side smoother than the other, as if they had been run into simple stone moulds; they are also thicker and of rougher surface than the bronze article. For the most part they are rude and unornamented wedges of cast metal: a few are lunette-shaped and semilunar blades. The cleansed specimens show a great variety of colour. When first found, the brown crust, peculiar to the oxidised metal, readily distinguishes them from the bronze patina, the beautiful varnish of æruginous or verdigris hue, artificial malachite resembling in colour the true native carbonate of copper.

The broad scythe-shaped Swords, numbering forty-one, are supposed to be ‘specially and peculiarly Irish.’ The straight blades are shown by their large burrs, holes, and rivets either to end in massive handles of metal, or to be attached to wooden staves, long or short. Of this kind some are curved. As many are of ‘red bronze’ (pure copper), darkened by oxidation, it is probable that they are of great antiquity, like the celts of that period. Although in some cases the points have been broken off, yet the edges are neither hacked, indented, nor worn; hence the conclusion that they were true stabbing Swords. Yet Mr. John Evans declares that he knows no such thing as a copper Sword. In this matter he partially follows Lévesque de la Ravalière, who declared copper arms unknown to the Greeks[238] and Romans, Gauls and Franks: this savant was refuted and charged with unfairly treating his authorities by the Comte de Caylus in a description of seven copper Swords dug up (1751) at Gensal in the Bourbonnais. The Abbé Barthélemy attributed seven copper blades to the Franks in the reign of Childeric.

We have ample evidence that ‘copper’ is ambiguously used by modern travellers. The modern discoverer of Troy[239] gives us, in his last and revised volume, a full account of exploring fifty-three feet deep of débris and laying bare the stratified ruins of seven cities, including that of the ‘ground floor’ and the Macedonian ruins. The two lowest bear witness to a copper age anterior to bronze, whilst they 73yielded the only gilded object, a copper knife, and the most advanced art in specimens of hand-made pottery.[240] The second from below was walled, and the third, the most important, was the Burnt City, the city of the golden treasures, identified with Ilios. The explorer claims to have reduced the Homeric Ilium to its true proportions. The grand characteristic in his finds is the paucity of iron, which appeared only in the shape of oxidised ‘sling-bullets’: tin is also absent. Both these metals, it is true, oxidise most readily; yet, had the objects been numerous, they would have left signs, in rust and stains. From ‘Troy’ we learn (p. 22) that ‘all the copper articles met with are of pure copper, without the admixture of any other metal’: the author also finds that ‘implements of pure copper were employed contemporaneously with enormous quantities of stone weapons and implements.’ He will not admit (‘Troy,’ p. 82) that he has reached the bronze period when he discovers in the ‘Trojan stratum,’ at a depth of thirty-three to forty-six and fifty-two feet, nails, knives, lances, and ‘elegantly-worked battle-axes of pure copper.’[241] And we can accept the copper, for much of it was analysed by Professor Landerer, of Athens, ‘a chemist well known through his discoveries and writings.’ He examined the fragments found in the ‘Treasury of Priam,’ and made all of them to consist of pure copper, without any admixture of tin or zinc (‘Troy,’ p. 340). When treating of the Bronze Age, I shall show that alloys were not wanting.

The use of copper, I have said, would be essentially transitional; and the discovery of smelting one kind of metal would lead immediately to that of others and to their commixture. Moreover, when casting and moulding began to be a general practice, unalloyed copper difficult to smelt, and when melted thick, sluggish, and pasty, would not readily run without some mixture into all the sinuosities of the mould. In this chapter I propose to notice the second chalcitic age—that of the earliest combinations of metals, their workers, and their application to weapons.

J. P. Rossignol, following the opinion of the symbolists and mysticists, as the Baron de Saint Croix,[243] Creuzer, Freret, and Lobechs,[244] assigns a Divine origin—after the fashion of the day—to metallurgy, making it resemble in this point Creation, articulate language,[245] and the discovery of corn and wine. So he understands the θεολογούμενα (subjects of a theological nature) alluded to by Strabo (x. 3, § 7). It is the old hypothesis of supernatural agency in purely natural matters, a kind of luxus-wonder, as the Germans call useless miracles, which had waxed stale, even in the days of Horace—‘parcus Deorum cultor et infrequens.’ He considers the Curetes and Corybantes, the Cabiri (Kabeiroi) of Lemnos and Imbros, and the Idæi Dactyli of Crete, the Telchines of Rhodes, and the Sinties, Sinti, or Saii of Thrace (Strabo, xii. 3, § 20) as metallurgic δαίμονες, or genii prisoned in human form, and typifying the successive steps of the art. In these days we hardly admit the intersit of a deity when human nature suffices to loose the knot; nor do we believe that our kind began by worshipping types. Man has always worshipped one thing, 75himself, and himself only, either in the flesh or in the ghost—that is, in the non-flesh or the objective nothing—till he arrived at the transcendental Man, the superlative, the ideal of Himself.

How little of fact is known about the mysterious tribes above mentioned becomes evident by a glance at the classics. All six are supposed to be Asiatics, worshippers of Rhea (the earth), the great mother of the gods and queen of the metal workers. Yet Strabo explains Curetes from Greek terms κόροι (boys), κόραι (girls), κουρά (tonsure), and κουροτροφεῖν (to bring up the Boy, i.e. Jupiter). Similarly their brethren, the nine Corybantes, were termed from their dancing gait and negro-like butting with the head, κορύπτοντας. They inhabited Samothrace (Samothracia alta): this venerable and holy island, in hoar antiquity a general rendezvous of freemasonry, or rather of free-smithery, forms a triangle with metallic Thasos and with volcanic Lemnos.

The three or four Cabiri[246] bear a Semitic name, Kabir = the great or the old. They seem at first to have represented Ptah-Sokar-Osiris,[247] and Herodotus (iii. 37) mentions their temple at Memphis. They became in Phœnicia the earliest boatmen or primordial shipbuilders, identified by some with the Sesennu or Egyptian Octonary; by others with the seven planets or the stars of Typho, our Great Bear;[248] and by others, again, with the seven Khnemu (gnomes) or pygmy-sons who waited upon their father Ptah-Vulcan. They inhabited Lemnos, where Hephæstus, when expelled, like Adam, from the lowest heaven, took refuge among the Pelasgi (Diod. Sic. lib. v.): hence the latter preserved their worship. Damascius (‘Life of Isidorus’) says: ‘The Asclepius of Berytus is neither Greek nor Egyptian, but of Phœnician origin; for (seven) sons were born to Sadyk, called Dioscuri and Cabiri, and the eighth of them was Esman (i.e. Octavius, No. 8), who is interpreted Asclepius.’[249]

The Idæan Dactyli (fingers or toes) who occupied ‘fountful Ide’[250] consisted of five brothers, representing the dextra or lucky hand (science, art), and five sisters for the sinistra or unlucky (witchcraft, ill omens). The names of these ‘hands’ (iron-workers) were Kelmis (fire or heat = the smelter), Damnameneus (the hammer, or who governs by strength, Thor), Hercules (force, animal or mental), and Akmon (the anvil or passive principle). Hence Pyracmon the Cyclop, one of the seven architect brothers who, according to Strabo (viii. 6), came from Lycia 76and built the ‘Cyclopean Wall’ in the Argolid. These Cyclopes[251] (monocular giants) worked metal, and under their magic hands,

By later writers, the Cyclopes, who

were held to be Sicilians.

The Telchines (fascinators, from θέλγειν, to charm) are mentioned as metallurgists by Stesichorus the Sicilian (nat. b.c. 632): they were the sons of Thalassa, i.e. they came from beyond the sea; they colonised Telchinis, and they made arms and statues of the gods like the Dædalides or artist families of later Athens. The Sinties (plunderers) from τὸ σίνεσθαι (to pill), who, according to Hellenicus of Lesbos (nat. b.c. 496), were pirates besides being coppersmiths (χαλκυές), and who were eventually murdered by their wives, represented the ancient Lemnians. So Homer (‘Od.’ viii. 290) speaks of the ‘barbarous Sintian men’ who received Vulcan when kicked out of Paradise. A modern school of Tsiganologues would identify them with prehistoric Gypsies, who have still a tribe called Sindi; but this theory would bring the arts from India westwards, whereas the current flowed the clean contrary way. Finally, Herodotus (i. 28), initiated in the mysteries, makes the Chalybes[252] or iron-workers, neighbours (and congeners?) of the Phrygians.

It is not difficult to see the general gist of such legends. All these tribes probably came (like Pelops, Tantalus, and Niobe) from the same place, Phrygia, the fertile plateau of Asia Minor, and its Katakekaumene or volcanic tract. It was, as far as we know, the first western centre which developed the ‘Aryan’ or non-Semitic element of the old Egyptian tongue. It also formed the point de départ of the European[253] (miscalled ‘Indo-European’) branch of the family that owned the Arya-land (Airyanem-vaejo), whose ethnic centre was the barbarous region about Ray, Heri, or Herat.[254] Hence, says Herodotus (iii. 2), the Egyptians owned the Phrygians 77to surpass them in antiquity. The emigrants would pass to the islands Samothrace, Lemnos, Thera,[255] the Cyclades and Crete; to Greece, Thessaly and Epirus, Attica, Argos, and the farthest south, where ‘Pelops the Phrygian,’ son of King Tantalus, colonised the Morea and founded the Pelopid race. Then they would find a home in Italy, Hetruria, and Iapygia (or Messapia), Peucetia and Daunia, and finally they would settle in Iberia, Spain, and Portugal, where the Briges or Brygi (Phrygians) have left their names in the Braganza of the present day.

These Proto-Phrygians and Phrygo-Europeans, of whom several tribes returned to Asia, were the prehistoric metal-workers. The smith (from smitan, to strike) was sacred in the dawn of history; and the Sword-maker was not inferior to him. Those who have witnessed the awe and reverence with which savages and barbarians regard a European mechanic at his forge will see exemplified the emotional feeling which led to the human becoming the superhuman.[256]

The first step in κρατέρωμα (hardening of metals) was, according to Hesychius, Μίξις χαλκοῦ καὶ κασσιτέρου (the mingling of copper and tin). The alloy was known generically as chalcos (base metal), specifically as χαλκὸς μέλαινος (black chalcos). The Latins persisted in terming it simply æs; e.g. æs inauratum (gilt bronze). Our word bronze derives from brunus (fuscous, sombre, brown); brunum æs. Hence the Low Latin (a.d. 805) brunea, brunia, or bronia, a lorica or thorax; and the Low Greek πόρτας μπρούτξινες (pronounce broutzines), ‘portals of bronze.’ The word is also derived from the Basque or Iberian bronsea.

Tin, one of the least durable of metals, at the same time readily fused and one of the easiest to treat metallurgically, was called by the Greeks κασσίτερος, and by the Latins cassiteron,[257] whence probably the Arab. قصدير, and the Sanskrit कस्तीर. The Hebrew name is בדיל (Badíl = a substitute, a separation, an alloy). Hut (white metal) in Egyptian includes silver and tin: in Coptic it is Thram, Thran, or Basensh. Kalaí (Linschoten’s ‘Calaem’) is the popular term for tin in India: the word is Arabic rather than Turkish. Tenekeh (tin-plate) in Arabic is an evident congener of the Assyrian ‘Anaker,’ and it remarkably resembles the Scandinavian Din, German Zinn, and our Tin. As we find ‘Teyne’ in Chaucer 78and old writers, ‘tin’ may come from its easy ‘thinning’ or beating out. The later Latins changed the plumbum album or white lead of Pliny (iv. 30) to stannum: whence our word derived through the neo-Latin. The origin of Kassiteron, Kasdír, Kastira, is disputed, and philologists remark that Cassi is a British (Keltic) prefix, as in Cassi-belanus. Tin was found in the Caucasus, in India, in Southern Persia (Drangæ Country); in Tuscany, in Iberia (Spain and Portugal),[258] in Sweden, Saxony, Bohemia, Hungary, and notably in England. There are still deposits near the modern Temeswar (Pannonia), and the granite hills of Gallicia and Zamora are not exhausted. It is now produced in Russia, Greenland, the Brazil, and the United States. Wilkinson would fetch the alloy of ancient Egypt from Spain, India, Malacca, or even from Banca,[259] between Sumatra and Borneo; the Banca tin-mines, long worked by the Chinese were first visited by the Portuguese in 1506. But compounds of tin and copper were common in Egypt at the time of the Sixth Dynasty (b.c. 3000). Tin is mentioned as early as b.c. 1452 in the Book of Numbers (xxxii. 22), with gold and silver, ‘brass’ (copper, especially pyrites), iron, and lead[260] (‘oferet’). In b.c. 760 the prophetic books, called from Isaiah (i. 25) and from Ezekiel (xxii. 18, 20), make tin an alloy of silver.

The Egyptians would derive their metals in the first place from Upper Egypt; and their first Kheft or mines of gold (khetem) and copper lay in the Thebaid. Secondly, they would resort to the land of Midian on the eastern flank, and running south of the long narrow gulf, El-Akabah: this grand range of Ghats or Coast Mountains was in those days a noted mining centre, and it has still a great industrial future. Thirdly, by means of the Phœnicians, who apparently taught the Greeks metallurgy which they learned in Egypt, they would import their tin from Southern France, Spain, and England.[261]

It is a disputed question whether the Phœnicians discovered the tin-stones and the stream-tin of the Cassiterides,[262] or whether the ore was worked by the ‘Welsh of the Horn’—the barbarians of Cornwall and Devonshire, who in those days were 79probably confined to small coast-clearings.[263] Herodotus, indeed, knows nothing (iii. 115) of ‘any islands called the Cassiterides (tin islands) whence the tin comes.’ These Silures or Scilly Islands were evidently mere depôts, not sites of production. The Phœnicians kept their secret well, and lost their ships rather than betray it; so says Strabo (iii. 5, § 11), whose Cassiterides appear to be the Azores.[264] The age when the trade was first opened is disputed; some place it b.c. 1500, others[265] reduce it to b.c. 400. Diodorus Siculus (v. 21–2) tells us that tin was found and run into pigs near the Belerium Promontory (Land’s End); thence it was carted to Ictis (Vectis, not the Isle of Wight, but Saint Michael’s Mount and Love Island);[266] and lastly horsed across Gaul to the Rhone. There is in the Truro Museum[267] a pig of tin, flat above and reniform below (the shape of the mould), two feet eleven inches by eleven inches broad, with a particular mark; it has been suggested that this is Phœnician. ‘Cassiter Street’ in Bodmin is supposed to retain the classical name. The second Thursday before Christmas Day is called in Cornwall (Kern-Walli, Cornu Galliæ) ‘Picrous Day,’ from the man who discovered the ‘streaming’ (or washing) of ‘stean’ or tin. Strabo gives a bad account of the people of the twelve Cassiterides and their Cornishmen, the latter ‘resembling the Furies we see in tragic representations.’ These pleasant persons would find stream-tin, almost fit for use, lying upon the surface by the side of copper pyrites—the latter harder than tin, but still comparatively soft and ductile. Both ores were easily fused, while iron was comparatively difficult and tedious to smelt; and the two (copper and tin) combined were not only more fusible, but they also continued longer in the fluid state, facilitating casting and moulding. Hence Worsäae believes that England was an ancient centre of bronze, whence the alloy was diffused throughout Europe. It is usually stated that the bronze-using period in England began between b.c. 1400 and 1200, and lasted eight to ten centuries, the invasion of Cæsar taking place during the early ‘Iron Age.’

The great bronze manufacture which we have first to consider is Egypt. The exact average proportion of the alloy is hard to ascertain,[268] the tin varying from ten to twenty per cent., and the copper from eighty to ninety per cent. A dagger analysed by Vauquelin gave copper eighty-five, tin fourteen, and iron one per cent. Wilkinson’s bronze chisel, nine and a quarter inches long, and weighing one pound twelve ounces, found in a quarry at Thebes, contained in one hundred parts 94·0 copper, 5·9 tin, 0·1 iron; consequently its edge is at once turned by hard stone. He repeatedly mentions bronze chisels (ii. ch. vii. &c.), and he seems to 80suspect that they were sheathed and pointed with steel. Of course, he was puzzled to explain how the ‘bronze or brass blades were given a certain degree of elasticity.’[269]

The result of Egyptian metallurgy is admirable, both in material and finish. At what period bronze was introduced we ignore; a cast cylinder, however, bearing the name of Pepi, dates from b.c. 3000 in the Sixth Dynasty of Middle Egypt, which includes Nitaker (Nitocris). Knives appear in the sculptures dating from before that time. A bronze dagger in the Berlin Museum, found by Sig. Passalacqua in a tomb at Thebes, retains a spring which might be of steel. My friend, Mr. W. P. Hayns, of the Alexandrian Harbour Works, showed me a specimen brought from Thebes by the late Mr. Harris, made of bronze still slightly elastic. The total length measures one foot, of which the blade is half; the latter, slightly leaf-shaped, has a minimum breadth of one inch and three-twelfths, and one inch at the shoulder. The tang, which is prolonged to the handle-end (four inches), has a minimum width of five-twelfths. The grip of two plates, hippopotamus hide (?), probably boiled, and not unlike wood, has twenty-six ridges for firmer hold, and there are bronze rivets at the sixth and the twenty-third ridges: it is without pommel, the end being simply rounded off.

It is held that mummies of the Eleventh Dynasty were buried with bronze sabres; and there is a bronze dagger of Thut-mes[270] III. (Eighteenth Dynasty), circa b.c. 1600. As late as Mene-ptah II. of the Nineteenth Dynasty (b.c. 1300–1266), we read in the list of his loot, after the Prosopis battle, of bronze-armour, Swords, and daggers. Among the Etruscans, before the foundation of Rome, bronze statues were known; and Romulus is said to have placed a statue of himself, crowned by Victory, in a bronze quadriga taken at Comertium. According to Pausanias (iii. 12, § 8), Theodorus of Samos invented casting in bronze (b.c. 800–700): this author discredits the Arcadian legend that Neptune dedicated a bronze statue to Poseidon (the Sidonian?) Hippios (Wilkinson, ii. chap. vii.). But the Samians cast a bronze vase in b.c. 630.

81

The importance of the Uchatius re-discovery, that is, of hardening bronze as well as copper by hydraulic pressure, not by phosphorus,[271] becomes evident by Wilkinson’s reflections. ‘We know of no means of tempering copper, under any form, or united with any alloys for such a purpose’ (as hollowing out hieroglyphics). He suggests that the old Egyptian letters, sometimes exceeding two inches in depth, and the alt-reliefs nine inches high, on granite coffins, may have been worked with wheel-drill and emery powder.[272] The Egyptians had also the secret of gilding bronze, as many of their remains prove; moreover, they produced by acids a rich patina of dark and light greens.

The Assyrians rivalled in metallurgy their ancient instructors the Egyptians: and the art passed eastwards to Persia, which inherited Assyrian and Babylonian civilisation. Diodorus Siculus, following Ctesias the oft-quoted contemporary of Xenophon, describes immense works of bronze decorating the gardens of Semiramis. In Assyria, again, the proportion of the alloy greatly varied. Layard[273] quotes the following assays of Assyrian bronze:

No. 1 shows the proportions found in a bronze dish from ‘Nimroud’; No. 4 in a bell; and the fore-leg of a bull[274] yielded 11·33 tin to 99·70 copper. The Mesopotamians were able to cast their bronze extremely thin, which is no small difficulty; they fashioned it into weapons, temple utensils, and domestic articles, and they skilfully ‘elaborated it by chasing and by curious ornamental tracery.’ They used it in their most sumptuous decorations, as the thrones prove; and the beautiful workmanship of their vases shows abnormal skill in the toreumatic treatment of bronze. Gilt specimens of bronze from Nineveh are in the British Museum.

Dr. Schliemann questions the popular assertion that the age of Hesiod and of Homer ignored alloys and fusion, knowing only plating, the plates being hammer-wrought 82(‘Od.’ iii. 425). This explorer found the strata of copper and lead scoriæ at the so-called Troy from twenty-eight to twenty-nine and a half feet deep. He notes also small crucibles and a mould of mica-schist (twenty-six feet deep), which was probably intended for bronze casting. He finds no iron; but copper and its alloy, bronze, are abundant. M. Damour of Lyon[275] analysed the drillings of two ‘copper’ battle-axes from ‘Ilium,’ in fact, from ‘Priam’s Treasury’; they contained 0·0864 and 0·0384 parts tin to 0·9067 and 0·9580 copper. Nearly the same proportion of alloy was found in a common two-edged axe dug at a depth of three and a quarter feet, and therefore in the remains attributed to a Greek colony. Dr. Percy analysed, with the following results, the handle of a bronze vase and a Sword:

The specific gravity (at 60° F.) was 8·858. The extreme proportions of the alloy in other articles were 10·28 tin to 89·69 copper (a usual ratio in ancient bronzes[276]), and 0·09 tin to 98·47 copper, the latter being almost pure.

Mongez, of the Institut, describing a bronze Sword found in France, gives the proportions as 87·47 per cent. of copper to 12·53 of tin. Analyses of Greek bronzes in the British Museum yielded 87·8 per cent. copper to 12·13 tin. A bronze knife has been found in the Palafittes (Pile-villages) of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.[277] Worsäae (‘Primæval Antiquities’) makes the Bronze Period in Denmark and Northern Europe begin about b.c. 500 to 600, and last some 1,100 years. It is not found among the Normans. But it was developed in Ireland and Scotland, in China and Japan, in Mexico and in Peru: Cieza de Leon notes the admirable bronze work of the Ynkarial empire.

A Peruvian chisel, analysed by M. Vauquelin, contained 0·94 copper to 0·06 tin. In other tools the proportion of the latter metal varied from two to four, six and even seven per cent. As a rule the people used only half the proper proportion of 83tin, which they called Chayantanka—a name suggesting the Old-World ‘Tanuk.’ Humboldt mentions a cutting tool found near Cuzco with ninety-four per cent. of copper and six of tin. Rivero (i. 201) notices in Peru brass (?) hammers and bellows-nozzles, axes, adzes, bill-hooks, and other tools, of bronze as well as copper. The Mexicans cast their tin ingots in T-shape. The Peruvians hardened copper also with silver for quarrying-tools and crow-bars. Velasco (ii. 70) tells us that when the Ynka Huasca was being led to prison by order of his brother, a woman secretly gave him a bar of metal, ‘silver with bronze, brass, or an alloy of silver, copper, and tin’ (Bollaert, p. 90); by means of this he cut through the jail wall during the night. Hutchison (ii. 330) mentions a buckler from Ipijapa in Ecuador, and Ewbank (p. 454) notices an old Peruvian bronze knife.[278]

The admirable bronzes of China and Japan are well known in the English market, and Raphael Pumpelly,[279] who studied direct from the native workmen, has printed interesting notes on the ornamental alloys, or Mokume, applied to Swords and other articles. Damask-work is produced by soldering alternately thirty to forty sheets of rose-copper, silver, shakdo (copper one to gold ten per cent.), and gui shi bu ichi (silver and copper). The mass is then cut into deep patterns with the reamer. An alloy of silver (thirty to fifty per cent. of copper) produces the favourite tint, a rich grey colour, and this becomes a bluish black like niello by being boiled after polishing in a solution of sulphate of copper, alum, and verdigris. Dr. Percy (p. 340) describes the liquation of argentiferous copper in Japan.[280]

We owe to Dr. George Pearson[281] sundry experiments in alloys, which first determined that the norm of the Old World and the best proportion for weapons and tools are one tin to nine copper.

Fusing the metals, he found:

1 tin : 20 copper (5 per cent.) produces a dark-coloured bronze with the red fracture of the pure metal.

1 tin : 15 (6½ per cent.) gives a stronger alloy and obliterates the colour.

1 tin : 12, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 gradually increases hardness and brittleness.

1 tin : 2 makes a mixture almost as brittle as glass.

The following table[282] shows the alloys now in common use, and the purposes to which they are applied:

The most popular alloy of copper, next to bronze, is brass, which is harder and wears better than the pure metal. Originally, as now, it was a mixture of copper and zinc, popularly called spelter (old speautre, speauter, spiauter, spialter).[285] The proportions greatly varied, one part of the latter to two of the former being the older ratio, and the density increasing with the amount of copper from 8·39 to 8·56.

Beckmann tells us, in his valuable ‘History of Inventions,’[286] ‘in the course of time an ore which must have been calamine (carbonate of zinc) or blende[287] (sulphuret of zinc), was added to copper, and gave it a yellow colour. The addition made it harder, more fusible and sonorous, easily subject to the lathe, more economical to work, and a worse conductor of heat than the pure metal.’ We have few specimens of old art-works in ‘brass’ proper, although zinc was discovered by analysis in an ancient Sword, chiefly copper.[288] Gibel assures us that zinc occurs only in Roman alloys, the bronze of the Greeks containing nothing beyond copper, tin, and lead. The Romans also could varnish or lacquer brass, but it is not known whence they derived the art. Percy notes (p. 521) that brass was produced ‘early in the Christian era, if not before its commencement.’ He quotes in proof a large coin of the Cassia Gens (b.c. 20) which contained copper 82·26 and zinc 17·31; a Vespasian (Rome, a.d. 71), an imperial Trajan (Caria, circ. a.d. 110), a Geta (Carian Mylasa, a.d. 189–212), a Greek Caracalla (a.d. 199), and many others. In modern times zinciferous ore was imported by the Portuguese from the East a century before it was common throughout Europe.[289] In the early seventeenth century the Dutch captured one of their craft laden with spelter, and the secret became known. Bishop Richard Watson says (1783) the cargo was calaem, which he connects with ‘calamine’: the latter, like the German Galmei, derives from cadmia.

Amongst the moderns æs gave rise to airain. The French leton, laton, latton, 85or laiton (cuivre jaune); the Italian lattone, lottone, and lastly ottone, and the Spanish lata and laton, German Latun, and English latten (thin sheet brass), the latoun of Chaucer (‘Pardoner’s Prologue,’ 64), are either from luteum, yellow (metal), or from the plant luteum (Reseda luteola), used to stain chrysocolla.[290] Our brass is probably the Scandinavian bras, cement; and the German Mosch, Meish, and Messing, from mischen = miscere.[291]

It may be advisable to notice the ὀρειχάλκον[292] of the Homerids and Hesiod, which Strabo also calls ψευδάργυρος (false silver), and aurichalcum, and which the perverse ingenuity of commentaries has made so mysterious.[293] In the poetic phase, which loves the vague, this ‘mountain-copper’ was a mythic natural metal, ranking between gold and silver, and chimerical as was the chalcolibanon[294] of the Apocalypse (i. 15, ii. 18). The name does not occur in Pindar or the Dramatists. Plato (the ‘Critias,’ § ix., treating of Atlantis,[295] America) makes oreichalc, ‘now known only by name,’ the most precious metal after gold. Pliny (xxxiv. 2) tells us truly enough that aurichalcum no longer exists.

The next application of the word was to ruby copper (?), a suboxide whose beautiful crystals are formed in the natural state. Pollux and Hesychius the grammarian (d.d. 380) define it as copper (χαλκός) resembling gold; and Cicero puts the question whether, if a person should offer a piece of gold for sale, thinking he was disposing of only a piece of orichalcum, an honest man ought to inform him 86that it was really gold, or might fairly buy for a penny what is worth a thousand times as much.[296] Buffon compares it with tombac, or Chinese copper containing gold.[297] Beckmann (s. v. ‘Tin’) notes aurichalcum or Corinthian brass in Plautus, ‘Auro contra carum.’ Festus speaks of ‘orichalcum (copper), stannum (zinc or pewter?), cassiterum (tin), and aurichalcum (brass).’ The same signification occurs in Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (fourth century); in Primasius, Bishop of African Adrumetum (sixth century), and in Isidore, Bishop of Seville (seventh century). Albertus Magnus (thirteenth century), the Dominican monk, in treating ‘De Natura et Commixtione Æris,’ describes how cuprum became aurichalcum.

Strabo is mysterious. In one place he tells us that the Cyprian copper alone produces the Cadmian stone, copperas-water, and oxide of copper. In another (lib. xiii.) he says, ‘There is a stone near Andeira which, being burnt, becomes iron. It is then put into a furnace, together with some kind of earth,[298] when it (the stone? the earth? or both?) drops or distils a ψευδάργυρος (mock silver, zinc?), which, with the addition of copper, produces what is called the mixture, and which some term oreichalcum.’ Pseudargyros, also found in the neighbourhood of Tmolus, would here seem to mean zinc or Cadmia fossilis (natural calamine or carbonate of zinc). Pliny (xxxiv. 22) confuses with cadmia, furnace calamine, and a particular ore of copper opposed to calchitis. When Dioscorides (v. cap. 84) seems to allude to artificial or furnace-calamine, an impure oxide of zinc, he may mean the more modern tutiya (Avicenna), toutia, thouthia,[299] cadmie des fourneaux, or tutty. Reduced to powder, and mixed with an equal quantity of wetted charcoal by way of fondant or flux, it is melted with copper to form brass. The Avocat de Launey (1780) and Bishop Watson both agree that Strabo’s orichalcum is brass.

Lastly, aurichalcum was made synonymous with electrum, natural or artificial. The word Ἤλεκτρος[300] is popularly derived from Helios, as rivalling the sun in 87sheen. According to Lepsius it is the ‘usem’-metal of Thut-mes III.; Brugsch (i. 345) understands by ‘usem’ brass, and thinks Asmara or Asmala equivalent to the Hebrew hasmal or hashmal = electrum. In Bunsen (v. 757) Kasabet and Kakhi are brass (aurichalcum), and Khesbet is a metal connected with Kassiteros = tin. The alloy was known to Hesiod (‘Scut.’ 142) and to the ‘Odyssey’[301] (iv. 73), not to the ‘Iliad.’ Sophocles (‘Antig.’ 1037) applied ‘Sardian electrum’ to gold, not to silver. Herodotus (iii. 115), in the historic age (b.c. 480–30), gives the name of the mythical metal to the ‘tears of the Heliades,’ which the Latins called succinum (succum), the Low-Latins ambrum, the Arabs anbar, and we Amber. Pliny (xxxiii. 23), repeated by Pausanias (v. 12, § 6), notes two kinds, natural (‘in all gold ore there is some silver’[302]) and artificial; in the latter the proportion of silver must not exceed one-fifth. The staters of Lydian Crœsus, held by the Greeks to be the most ancient of coins, were, according to Böckh, of electrum, three parts gold and one part silver. Lucian applies the term to glass (ὕαλος); and, lastly, it was taken for brass and confounded with aurichalcum.[303]

I would suggest that this aurichalcum might also be the ‘Dowris bronze’ of Ireland, so called because first observed at Dowris, near Parsonstown, King’s County. Wilde (p. 360) supposes with others that the gold-coloured alloy depended upon the admixture of a certain proportion of lead, and compares it with the Cyprus copper termed by the Romans Coronarium (used for theatrical crowns), which was coated with ox-gall.[304] Of this or molu there are many articles in the Dublin Museum, preserving their fine golden-yellow lustre: they had probably been lacquered or varnished like modern brasses; and the patina might be some gum-resin. When much tarnished, they were cleaned by holding over the fire, and then by dipping in a weak solution of acid, as is done with modern castings. Two specimens, a Sword and a dagger-blade, were analysed (pp. 470, 483), and proved to contain copper 87·67 to 90·72, tin 8·52 to 8·25, lead 3·87 to 0·87, with a trace of sulphur in the Sword.[305] The specific gravities were 8·819 to 8·675. In a spear-head (p. 512), besides copper, tin, and lead, iron 0·31 and cobalt 0·09 were found.

There were other alloys of which we read but know little; such were the æs ægineticum, demonnesium, and nigrum; the æs deliacum, whose secret was 88lost in Plutarch’s day, and the Ταρτήσσιος χαλκὸς[306] from Southern Spain, probably shipped at Gibraltar Bay. Ollaria or pot-copper (brass) contained three pounds of plumbum argentarium (equal parts of tin and lead) to one hundred pounds of copper. Æs caldarium could only be fused. Finally, græcanicum (Greek-colour) was mould or second-hand copper (formalis seu collectaneus) with ten per cent. of plumbum nigrum (lead) and five per cent. of silver lead (argentiferous galena?).

Metal, when first introduced, must have been rare and dear; the large modern Sword, axe, or mall would hardly have been imitated in copper, bronze, or iron. The earliest attempts at developing the celt[307] would have produced nothing more artful than a cutting and piercing wedge of the precious substance (fig. 85). As smelting and moulding improved, the pointed end would develop into the knife, the dagger, and the Sword; and the broad end would expand to the axe. This composite weapon, uniting the club with the celt or hand-hatchet, and appearing in Europe with the beginning of the Neolithic period, plays a remarkable part in history, 89ancient, mediæval, and even modern; whilst its connection with the Sword is made evident by the ‘glaive.’[308] The expansion of the edge and of the flanges developed two principal forms. For cutting wood the long-narrow was found most serviceable: where brute force was less required, the weapon became a broad blade with a long crescent-shaped edge.

The Akhu or war-axe was, as we might expect, known to ancient Egypt in early days, and became an objet de luxe. A gold hatchet and several of bronze were found buried as amulets in the coffin of Queen Askhept, the ancestress of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Again, a bronze weapon occurred with a mummied queen of the Seventeenth Dynasty (b.c. 1750). Useful in war, the implement, probably when in the stone period, rose to be a symbol of the Deity: hence, doubtless, the hâches votives of the later Bronze Age without edge to serve for work or weapons, and intended only for religious use. The two-headed weapon was that outward and visible sign of Labrandian Jove, so called from the λάβρα, which in the Lydian tongue was synonymous with πέλεκυς. The emblem appears on the medals of three Carian kings, the most notable being Mausolus (or Mausollus), dating from b.c. 353. According to Plutarch (De Pythiæ Oraculis) the Tenedians ‘took the axe from their crabs, ... because it appears that the crabs alone have the figure of the axe in their shells.’ Hence the double-headed weapon on the coins of Tenedos is 90a votive or sacrificial, rather than a warlike, symbol. The Tenedian Apollo also held the axe, which some regarded as the symbol of Tennes. Aristotle and others maintained that a certain King of Tenedos decreed that adulterers should be slain with the axe, and his carrying out the law upon his own son gave rise to the proverb, Τενέδιος πέλεκυς, denoting a rough-and-ready way of doing business.

Although the πέλεκυς is mentioned by Homer (‘Il.’ and ‘Od.’) as a weapon as well as a tool, the Greeks, like the Assyrians, did not much affect it. The Romans, who worshipped Quirinus in spear-shape, bound the securis in a bundle of rods (fasces), bore it as a badge of office, and placed it on consular coins. The weapon was lowered in the salute, and thus, perhaps, arose our practice of dropping the Sword-point, which is unknown to the East. The axe with expanded blade upon Trajan’s column is in the hands of a workman. Possibly the classics of Europe despised the weapon because it was proper to the securigeræ catervæ of the effeminate East. As early as the days of Herodotus (I. chap. i. 215) the σάγαρις, the Armenian sacr, and the Latin securis, made either of gold or chalcos, was the favourite weapon of the Amazon[309] and the Massagetæ[310] horseman. In Ireland the axe plays a part in the tales of Gobawn Saer: this goblin-builder completed the dangerous task of finishing off a royal roof of cutting wooden pegs, throwing them one by one into their places, and driving them in by flinging the magic weapon at each peg in due succession.

From Egypt the axe passed into the heart of Africa. Here it still serves, before and after use, as a medium of exchange; and this circulation from tribe to tribe explains the various forms that have overspread the Dark Continent. The Nile Valley again sent it eastward through Hittite-land and Assyria to Persia and India, where the crescent-shaped battle-axe has long been a favourite. The varieties of form and colour are noticed by Duarte Barbosa[311] when describing the ‘Moors’ of Hormuz Island. It was adopted by the Turkish horseman, who carried it at his saddle-bow. Klemm (‘Werkzeuge und Waffen’) notices that it was a favourite Scandinavian weapon slung by a strap to the back; and most of the deaths recounted in ‘Burnt Njal’ are the result of it. The Norman long-hefted axe is common on the Bayeux tapestries. A Scandinavian war-axe of the early seventeenth century was found on the battle-field of Norwegian Kringelen; the handle is recurved so as to fit the back socket. In Germany it was generally used during the fifteenth century; in England during the sixteenth; and in the seventeenth it became obsolete throughout Europe, except among the Slavs and the Magyars. 91The German processional axe shows its latest survival; blade and handle are of one piece of wood, ornamented with the guild-devices, and so modified that the original weapon can hardly be recognised. Similarly the Bergbarthe (mine-picks) of the German Bergmänner (miners) were used, according to Klemm, for the defence of cities, notably of Freiberg in 1643; and, made of brass as well as iron, they are still carried in State processions. The axe, like the spear, demarked boundaries. The charter given by Cnut (Canute) to Christ Church, Canterbury, grants the harbour and dues thereof on either side as far as a man standing on deck at flood-tide could cast a taper-axe, and the custom of throwing the tool to mark boundaries has been retained in some parts of the country to our day. It was with a battle-axe that the Bruce of Bannockburn clove the skull of an English champion to the chin. Monstrelet tells us that during the wars of Jeanne d’Arc (Patay fought in a.d. 1429) the English carried hatchets in their girdles.

The Axe[312] was adopted by the Franks, as well as by the Scandinavians and the Germans, especially the Saxons. Hence the two-edged axe when affixed to long staves, forming a spear, became the Icelandic Hall-bard[313] (hall-axe?), the Teutonic 92Alle-barde (‘all-cleaver’), and the ‘Pole-axe,’ called from Poland (= Polje, the plain-country). This modification was universal in Northern Europe during the first ages of Christianity. The earliest shape (middle fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries) was a broad and massive axe, mounted on a thick and solid spear; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the blade became more slender and hollow-edged, and the head longer and more taper. The Swiss introduced the Halbert to France in the middle fifteenth century: in the seventeenth century it was conventionalised, the axe resumed its original aspect, and the spear grew to leaf-shape. In this form it was retained by the subalterns and sergeants of the British army till abolished with the pig-tails of ‘Shaven England.’ It is not wholly forgotten on93 ceremonious occasions in certain European Courts, and during all its changes it has ever retained its cousinly likeness to the broadsword.

I have shown how the stone celt might become a metal knife, and thence develop into the straight Sword. By noting the modifications it is as easy to see that the axe might have produced the scymitar. The earliest form would be a broad lance-head inserted into a common club (a), as is still practised in many parts of Africa. The next improvement (c) would convert the tool into an arm by increasing the cutting surface; and another step (d) would make it lighter by reducing the blade to a triangle of mere barbs, ⊣. Then (e) we have the Khond or Circar battle-axe, and94 the Silepe of the South African Basutos who, virtually discovered by Dr. Livingstone, have become so troublesome of late years.[314] This T-shaped blade, perpetuated in the ‘Baïonette Gras,’ was used in Switzerland and in Venice till the sixteenth century, according to Meyrick and Demmin. Afterwards the straight back next to the staff would be formed into two small and graceful crescents (f); and the weapon became far better fitted for the requirements of cavalry. This shape is world-wide, and was used in England temp. Elizabeth. A congener of the glaive was the Francisque à lance ouverte, the broad-bladed ‘taper-axe,’ used for throwing as well as for striking. According to the Abbé Cochet, this weapon took its name from the Franks. The Francisque is termed a ‘defensive weapon’ in the illustrated treatise ‘Armes et Armures.’[315] The Saxons preferred to it the Sahs, Seax or Scramasax-knife, similarly used. The Francisque is rare in the Saxon graves compared with the spear and knife, but it is more common than the Sword.[316]

The Bill[317] (A.-S. byll, Irish biail, securis) was introduced into England temp. 95Henry VI. about the fifteenth century, when it was allied in form to the Halbard. Skinner considers it a securis rostrata (beaked axe). It was long a favourite in Scandinavia, and the illustration represents the weapon of Gunnar, the Icelandic champion, which sang before battle, as also did the Sword of Sigurd.

The glaive of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was followed by the Guisarme, Gisarme, or Bisarme. This long blade, with a slender spear-point projecting from the back, is still used by the Chinese; and the Despots of Dahome borrowed it, like other quaint arms and customs, from Europe. The Voulge, an intermediate form of the halbert and the glaive, and probably a descendant of the former, was a battle-axe much used by the Swiss in the fourteenth century. The war-scythe of the same period figured by Demmin, and the scythe-Sword—a formidable-looking, but unhandy weapon—were adopted by the Hungarian rebels as lately as in 1848. Allied with these mediæval forms is a vast variety of shapes known as the Spetum (Spiedo or Spit), the Ronçeur or Ranseur, and the military fork. They were probably known to the Ancients, and reintroduced into Europe by the peasantry who, compelled hastily to arm themselves, would use the handy flails, sickles, and scythes. A well-arranged and complete collection is still wanted to show the links connecting them with a common prototype.

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The interest of these weapons is chiefly connected with the various forms of curved broadsword. The leaf-shaped metal-blade for thrusting, which appears to be one of the earliest forms, and which is preserved by the Somal and other barbarians, is, I have said, evidently a spear-head fixed in a wooden handle.

Briefly to describe the Sword of the Early Bronze Age, during which, by the by, cremation became almost universal in Europe. The weapon is to a certain extent North European, and seems to have travelled up the valleys of great rivers: Denmark has yielded two hundred and fifty to six Italian bronze blades.[318] They are as a rule of fair length, averaging about seventy-five centimetres: the profile is either leaf-shaped, sub-leaf-shaped, or straight, ending in a bevelled point. The hilt is of two kinds: either tanged or untanged: the tang is broad, long, and pierced, with one or more holes for riveting; in this case the handle was of wood, bone, or horn. Many hefts, however, as will afterwards appear, are cast in a single piece with or without guard; and the latter often disappears in a hollow triangular base, a crescent or horse-shoe containing the shoulders with the concavity of the arch towards the point; this also served in many weapons to receive the rivets. The pommel is of various patterns, frequently a cone, oval, globe, or dome with steps or with melon-like ridges.[319] In others, especially amongst the old Kelts and Germans, it ended with a crutch or crescent whose cusps were, in the richer kinds, adorned with spirals.

We now come to the King of Metals that ‘breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things’; the only ore friendly as well as fatal to the human form; the most useful and the most deadly in the hand of man[320]—Iron.[321]

According to the Parian Chronicle (Arundelian Marbles), followed by Thrasyllus (Clemens Alex. in ‘Strom.’), and by a host of writers, iron-working was discovered in b.c. 1432 or 248 years before the Trojan war. The latter, a crucial date, is, as will appear, wholly undetermined; the various authorities have made it range through nearly seven hundred years. But the life of Hellas is one great ‘appropriation clause’: the Greeks were doughty claimants, childish in their naïveté of conceit; they were burglars of others’ wits (convey, the wise it call), and they made themselves do all things. Their legends, for instance, accredit ‘Glaucus the Chian’ with having invented the art and mystery of steel-inlaying. De Goguet (a.d. 1761) tells us that the Phœnicians ranked amongst their oldest heroes two brothers who discovered iron-working; the Cretans referred it to the oldest period of their history,[322] and the Idæan Daktyls learnt it from the ‘mother of the gods.’ Prometheus (in Æschylus) boasts of having taught mankind to fabricate all metals: he also wears an iron ring supposed to be a chain not an ornament; and it possibly symbolises the union of fire and ore. The art of iron-working is referred, now to the Cyclopes, of Sicily, then to the Chalybes,[323] who extended from 98Colchis to Spain: Clemens (Alex.) refers the discovery of making malleable iron to the Noropes of Danubian Pannonia, who dwelt between Noricum (Styria) and Mæsia; and finally, to quote no more, Mr. J. Fergusson, a careful writer, tells us that ‘the Aryans (?) were those who introduced the use of iron, and with it dominated over and expelled (?) the older races.’

Modern discovery has proved that the invention, and indeed the general adoption, of ‘Mars’ (♂) dates from the very dawn of history; and that it is a mere theory to assume everywhere preceding millennia of bone and stone, copper and bronze. It is clear, for instance, in Central Africa, where copper and tin were unprocurable, that man must first have used iron.[324] A good authority, Mr. St. John V. Day[325] (C.E.), who was in charge of iron works in Southern India, claims for iron—cast as well as wrought, and even for its carburet, steel—the credit of being ‘unquestionably the earliest of substances with which man was acquainted.’ This writer, however, denies, contrary to all tradition, a ‘progressive rise in the quality of materials used by man’: that is, from the soft and yielding to the hard and refractory. He holds that Man, once master of metallurgy, ‘would be better able to deal with the much more easily manipulated bones, stones, or wood.’ He supposes all the metals, noble and ignoble, as well as gems and precious stones, to have become familiar amongst Eastern races, ‘whether they be Semitic, Aryan, Hamitic, Sporadic, or Allophyllian, by virtue of a civilisation due to a natural innate insight.’ Hence he declares Egypt an enigma to those who accept the dictum of ‘man’s gradual evolution from the condition of a savage, an ignoramus,’ and he opines that this grim being is simply a retrograde.[326]

These ideas trench upon old metallurgic superstitions and seem to run into extremes. We know nothing concerning the home of Proto-man, which is perhaps deep under the waters. Anthropologists, who locate him in Mesopotamia, ‘Aryaland’ (Central Asia), or Ethiopia, look only to the origin of the present species, and the historic cycle. Our studies, as far as they go, suggest that Man began in the Polar regions, and that in hoar antiquity each racial centre had its own material—wood and horn, bone and stone, copper, bronze, and iron.[327]

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For our first lesson in iron we must go back as usual to Kahi-Ptah (the Ptah-region), that Nile Valley which is the motherland of all science, of all art. Here Bunsen[328] provides us with the following table:

Mr. Day (who has drawn it up) observes that ‘BA’ () is a constant in the phonetic values assigned to the uncertain hieroglyphs for iron, and feels disposed to believe it synonymous with χαλκός, base metal in general. He would translate the Saidic ‘ΒΕΝΙΠΕ’ and the Coptic ‘ΠΕΝΙΠΕ’ by ‘stone (ΒΕ) of (ΝΙ) sky or heaven (ΠΕ)’; in fact, ‘sky-stone,’ alluding to meteoric iron, probably the first utilised. Dr. Birch holds ‘BA’ to be a general term for metal made particular, as in Greece, by prefixed adjectives (white, black, yellow) denoting the quality of the ore. And hence the determinative of ‘BA’ (metal, stone, or hard wood) is the cube or parallelogrammic block which denotes building and building materials.

Native iron may be distributed into two great divisions, extra-terrestrial and terrestrial. The former is known as meteoric or nickeliferous. Mr. Day (pp. 22–23) gives analyses of this form, and takes, from Chladni[329] and others, a list of masses that fell in Siberia, Thuringia, and Dauphiné; in West African Liberia, and in American Sta. Fé de Bogotá, and Canaan, Connecticut. Though many trials have been made in working extra-terrestrial metal, all have hitherto failed; the phosphorus, nickel and its alter ego, cobalt, render the forgings, in our present state of technology, too brittle for use. Terrestrial or telluric iron is again divided into two classes—the nearly pure ore and the native steel. According to the schedule of Rosset:

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That iron was common amongst the ancient Egyptians we may assume as proved. Mr. A. Henry Rhind, when opening the tomb of Sebau (nat. b.c. 68), noted on the massive doors ‘iron hasps and nails,’ ‘as lustrous and as pliant as on the day they left the forge.’ Belzoni, who died in 1823, found an iron sickle under the feet of one of the Karnak Sphinxes dating from b.c. 600. In June 1837, Mr. J. R. Hill, employed by Colonel Howard Vyse, when blasting and excavating the Jízeh[330] Pyramid, came upon a piece of iron, apparently a cramp, near the channel-mouth of one of the air-passages: it had thus been preserved from rust, and its authenticity cannot be doubted. Some suggested that it was used for scraping and finishing; others for finally levelling the faces of dressed stone, but it tapers off from the middle to an edge on either side and it narrows at one end.[331] This relic can hardly be of later date than b.c. 4000–3600, when Khufu (Cheops) built his burial-place and inscribed in it his hieroglyphic shield[332] or cartouche . Stowed away in the British Museum, it excited scant attention till Dr. Lepsius at the Congress of Orientalists (London, 1874), suggested that it was of steel. A trial was made (Sept. 18); it yielded readily to a few turns of the drill, and the surfaces of the hole showed the whiteness and the brightness of newly-cut malleable iron. Since that discovery, sacrificial iron knives have been found in the Nile Valley, despite the ready oxidation of the metal in a climate of the hot-damp category. In the Bulák Museum (Salle de l’Est), with the wooden Swords, was a straight and double-edged iron blade that had two ribs running along its length. Another room showed a straight, double-edged, and round-pointed dagger of gilt iron. Of the latter weapon there are three fine specimens (Salle du Centre).

The literature of Egypt abounds in allusions to the use of iron.[333] The Rev. Basil H. Cooper[334] believes that Mibampes the ‘Iron King,’ sixth successor of 101primæval Mena (circ. b.c. 4560),[335] bore on his cartouche the word ‘Benipe’; and that no less than three records[336] entitle him ‘Lover of Iron’ (i.e. the Sword); ‘thus attesting, not only the extreme antiquity of the use of iron, but unfortunately (?) of that most dreadful evil of all which are the scourges of humanity—war (?).’ And so we see the nineteenth century repeating the Herodotian half-truth, ‘Iron has been discovered to the hurt of Man’; and looking only at one side of the question, the evils of War, without which, I repeat, strong races could not supplant the weaker to the general benefit of mankind. The Epos of Pentaur, the jovial temple scribe[337] (circ. b.c. 1350), mentions ‘iron’ thrice; and Pharaoh Mene-Ptah II., whose ‘Sword gave no quarter,’ had vessels of iron. In later hieroglyphic literature the notices become too numerous to justify quotation.

The old Egyptians, according to Plutarch,[338] held iron to be the ὀστέον Τυφῶνος, or bone of Set; whereas the σιδηρίτις λίθος, or magnet, was that of his foe-god Horus, degraded to Charon in Greece and Rome. This siderite was known to the Hellenes in its religious aspect as Ἡράκλεια λίθος or Ἡράκλειον, either from Heraclea-town or from Hercules (Pliny, xxxvi. 25). Siderite or loadstone, 102termed ‘Magnet’ from its supposed discoverer, was also entitled ‘live iron,’ and its wounds were supposed to be more deadly than those of the common ore.

The Nile-dwellers had not far to go for iron, which abounds in the well-known Wady Hammámát, one of the earliest centres of Egyptian mining; and, as Mr. Piazzi Smyth showed, it accumulates everywhere in the fissures of the flaky limestone:[339] it is produced in Ethiopia (the Sudan and Abyssinia); and in Midian, where the old Kemites opened the copper mines, it appears in the shape of black sand and large masses of titaniferous[340] and other ores. The monuments (Karnak Table, &c.) specify, amongst objects of tribute, iron from the lands of the Thuhi[341] (‘the fair people’), the Rutennu (Syrians and Assyrians), and the Asi (or rebels generally?); from these countries it was exported in the ore and in bricks and pigs. The tribute-tables of Thut-mes III. (b.c. 1600) mention:—

Mr. Francis Galton[342] first discovered in the ancient copper-diggings of the so-called ‘Sinaitic’ peninsula, a blackish mass, not unlike iron-slag, which he conjectured to date before Moses’ days. A score of years afterwards (early 1873), Mr. Hartland[343] examined the junction of the Wadys Kemeh, Mukattab, and Maghárah, and found the iron-ore imperfectly extracted: assays and analyses of the slags that lay in heaps about the ruined works produced fifty-three per cent. of metal. He determined that the mines at Serábit El-Khádim had been constructed on the principle of the Catalan (or rather the Corsican) forge;[344] and he discovered near them a temple and barracks for the soldier-guards.[345]

103

It is hard to believe with Mr. Proctor that Abraham, a wandering Chaldæan Shaykh, taught the Egyptians astronomy, astrology, and arithmetic; or with Mr. Piazzi Smyth, that Melchisedek, the petty chief of a village in Palestine, built the Pyramid. Yet it is only reasonable to suppose that the Israelites set out upon their exodus or exodi, for there were probably many, provided with some of the technological wisdom of the Egyptians. Joseph, according to Brugsch (‘Hist.’ I. chap. xii.), rose to the honour of Zaphnatpaneakh (Governor of the Sethroitic home), and Ro-hir or Procurator, under the Shepherd-kings or ‘Hyksos,’ a word which he renders Hek-Shasu,[346] lord of the Shasu (Arabs); he makes the Pharaoh of the Oppression, Ramses II. (b.c. 1333–1300), and Mene-Ptah II. the Pharaoh of the Exodus (b.c. 1300–1266). The Pentateuch, whatever be its date, well knew the use of Barzil (ברזל), the Chaldæan Parzil or Parzillu. According to Sir John Lubbock (‘Prehistoric Man’), ‘iron’ is four times mentioned, and ‘brass’ (copper, bronze?) thirty-eight times in ‘the Law.’[347] From other sources we gather that the metal was either עשות (ashúth, that is, ‘the worked,’ from the rad. ashah), or מוצק (muzak, ‘the melted,’ fused, cast; from the root zak). The Lord threatens that He will make ‘the skies as iron and the earth as copper’ (Levit. xxvi. 19). In Deuteronomy (iv. 20), Egypt is compared with an iron furnace; and mention is made of iron shoes (xxxiii. 25). Job includes among riches, cattle, silver, gold, brass (copper?), and iron; he tells us (xxviii. 2) that ‘iron is taken out of the earth and copper is molten out of the stone,’ and he speaks of lithic writing (xix. 24), ‘graven with an iron style and lead in the rock for ever.’ But commentators are not agreed about the age of this author, and in the hands of the Rabbis he seems gradually to be growing younger—more modern—with every generation.

The Hebrews found the Iron-age wherever they went. ‘Barzil’ was among the metals taken from the Midianites by Moses (Numb. xxxi. 22). The ‘bedstead,’ or rather divan, of Og, the King of Bashan, measuring nine cubits of man (each = sixteen inches) in length by four broad, was of iron (Deut. iii. 11). Joshua shows that the Canaanites owned ‘chariots of iron’ (xvii. 16). These tribes, displaced by the Jews, seem to have been accomplished workers in metal.[348] Traces of iron-smelting occur on the Libanus,[349] where I found copper-stone,[350] and where, during the present century, coal and asphalte have been mined. Many parts of the country, as Argob in ancient Bashan, produce an abundance of ironstone.[351] The old Phœnician Sanconiathon, a name which may denote a history or its historian, tells us through the Greek translator Philo of Byblus, that the 104people were famous for their Technites, artisans and blacksmiths. The warlike Hittites, as will appear, were also iron-workers.

From Egypt the use of iron would spread through Asia Minor[352] eastward to Naharayn,[353] the two-river-land, Mesopotamia. But the date is disputed. The excavations of the late Mr. George Smith yielded no iron articles older than b.c. 1000–800. Mr. Day remarks that ‘whilst Mesopotamia has not, up to the present time, produced any solid evidence in the form of material iron relics belonging to the oldest monarchies; nevertheless, the monuments of those earliest times are numerous, and they yield abundance of testimony to the acquaintance of the contemporary people with iron.’ In later ages he alludes to the rings and bangles of iron in the British Museum, which were possibly chain-links; and particularly to the ‘ombos of a shield,’ as the most exquisite piece of their hammered iron-work he has met with: he doubts if it can in some respects be surpassed by the productions of to-day. The cuneiforms speak of iron fetters, and the people of the great Interamnian plain knew the art of casting bronze over iron,[354] only lately introduced into our metallurgy.

According to Mr. G. Smith there is no pure Assyrian word for ‘iron.’[355] Its cuneiform symbol is , but the phonetic value or pronunciation has not yet been determined. ‘It must have been in use 2000 b.c.,’ and it is found in inscriptions of all ages. The word is supposed to belong to the ancient Turanian or Proto-Babylonian race (Akkadian[356] or Sumirian) that held the river-plains, and it has been grafted into the more recent Assyrian language. In the inscriptions, each god has his sign, and the symbol above given, accompanies, as his attribute, one of the deities of war and hunting: thus it is a parallel to that found in the cartouche of the Egyptian ‘Iron King.’

Canon Rawlinson,[357] on the other hand, assigns to the symbol the phonetic value of Hurud, which thus became the Chaldæan equivalent for ‘iron.’ In concert with his distinguished brother, he came to the conclusion: ‘There are two signs for metals in Assyria, with respect to which there is a doubt which is iron and which is brass (or bronze rather). These are and . Sir Henry Rawlinson, on the whole, inclines to regard the first as bronze and the second 105as iron, although the former is nowhere rendered phonetically. The latter is rendered in a syllabary as equivalent to Hurud in Akkadian and Eru in Assyrian. Mr. George Smith reverses the meanings of the two signs. The point is a very doubtful one.’

After the decay of the Proto-Babylonian or Chaldæan empire (b.c. 2300–1500), when the seat of Interamnian rule moved to the Tigris-Euphrates basin, and the three Assyrian periods flourished (b.c. 1500–555),[358] iron was largely used. It was produced, according to Layard (loc. cit.) in the Tiyari mountains, and it is still found in quantities on the slopes, three or four days’ journey from Mosul. The north-western palace of Nimrúd (Kalah) showed, amongst the rubbish-heaps, much rusty iron and a perfect helmet like that represented in the bas-reliefs. There were Swords and daggers, shields and shield-handles, rods, and the points of spears and arrows, which fell to pieces on exposure. Amongst the few specimens preserved were the head of a trident-like weapon, some Sword-handles, a large blunt spear-pile, the point of a pick, several objects resembling the heads of sledge-hammers, and a double-handed saw of iron or steel (?), about three feet eight inches long by four inches and five-eighths broad, for cross-cutting timber. The British Museum owns a fine collection of Assyrian sheet or plate iron-work; pieces of unfinished forgings; a rude triangular lump through which a round hole has been driven (by a heated punch?); several cylindrical bars, straight and curved; wall-cramps, nails, and door-hinges; a ladle; rings of sizes (one being three inches in diameter); a signet-ring containing a silver bezel or seal; and, lastly, a portion of what seems to have been a double-sided comb. In much later days the Assyrians of Xerxes’ army carried, according to Herodotus, shields, spears, daggers, and wooden clubs spiked with iron.

The Greeks learned their metallurgy, as they did all their arts, from Egypt; and, following in the footsteps of the Phœnicians, diffused them throughout the Western World. In Theseus’ time, according to Wilkinson—that is, b.c. 1235—‘iron is conjectured not to have been known, as he was found buried with a brass (copper, bronze?) Sword and spear.’ They did not use iron weapons, and probably had no iron during their first foreign campaign—the Trojan war. The Parian (Arundelian) Chronicle (dating its notices from Cecrops, b.c. 1582) and the Rhodian myths refer to a conflagration in the Cretan mountains which taught 106metallurgy to the Idæan Daktyls (Δάκτυλοι Ἰδαῖοι):[359] this would, however, be a comparatively late date when we regard Egypt.[360]

With respect to the metal in the Hissarlik remains, Dr. Schliemann remarks (i. 31): ‘The only objects of iron which I found were a key of curious shape and a few arrows and nails close to the surface.’ It is no proof that it was used because Homer some centuries afterwards spoke of the κύανος (cyanus), steel tempered blue, a word which even in antiquity was translated by χάλυψ (chalybs, steel). The explorer remarks: ‘Articles of steel may have existed: I believe positively that they did exist; but they have vanished without leaving a trace of their existence; for, as we know, iron and steel become decomposed much more readily than copper.’ Yet, so contradictory is the whole book, and so uncertain are its conclusions, we find,[361] ‘No. 4. Drillings of one of the Trojan sling-bullets, externally covered with verdigris, and internally the colour of iron’; while the assay shows that it consisted chiefly of copper and sulphur. Among the contemporary (?) finds of Mycenæ, which not a few authorities have pronounced to be Byzantine, and another observer Keltic,[362] Dr. Schliemann met with iron in the shape of knives and keys; but he holds these articles to be of comparatively late date, not older than the fifth century b.c.[363] At that time iron must have been general throughout Greece. In the fourth century, Aristotle (‘Meteorologica’) treats at length upon iron and its modifications. One passage runs: ‘Wrought iron may be so cast as to be made liquid and to reharden; and thus it is they are wont to make steel (τὸ στόμωμα); for the scoria of iron subsides and is purged off by the bottom, and when it is often defæcated and cleansed, this is steel. But this they do not often, because of the great waste, and because it loses much weight in refining; but iron is so much the more excellent the more recrement it has.’ Daimachus, Aristotle’s contemporary, says of steels (τῶν στομωμάτων), ‘There is the Chalybdic,[364] the Synopic, the Lydian, and the Lacedæmonian. The Chalybdic is best for carpenters’ tools; the Lacedæmonian for files, drills, gravers, and stone-chisels; the Lydian also is suited for files, and for knives, razors, and rasps.’ Avicenna (Abu Ali Siná), in his fifth book, ‘De Anima,’ according to Roger Bacon, has three species of the metal: (1) Iron, good for hammers and anvils, but not for cutting tools; (2) Steel,[365] which is purer and has more heat 107in it; it is therefore less malleable, but better able to take an edge; and (3) Andena, ductile and malleable under a low degree of heat, and intermediate between iron and steel. Apparently the latter is the Hindiah or Hindiyáneh, the Ferrum Indicum and the Ondanique of Marco Polo (i. 17).

The Romans, a more cosmopolitan people than the Greeks, paid great attention to the mineral wealth of their conquests, and were careful to choose the best acies[366] for their weapons. Diodorus Siculus[367] describes the process by which the Celtiberians prepared their iron for Swords. Pliny, who was Procurator of Spain under Vespasian, may have studied iron-mining and ore-working in the country which still produces the Toledo blade. He characterises the metal generally as being universally used and occurring in every part of the world—especially in Ilva, now Elba, where there are mines of oligiste, specular iron or iron glance. His process of steel-making is that of the Greeks. ‘Fornacum maxima differentia est; in eis equidem nucleus ferri’ (the σίδηρος ἐργασμένος or worked iron of Aristotle) ‘excoquitur ad indurandum; aliter alioque modo ad densandas incudes, malleorumve rostra’ (xxxiv. 41). Hence it appears that the Romans had one way to make steel, and another to harden and temper tools, picks, and anvils. ‘Possibly,’ says Dr. Martin Lister, ‘the latter were boiled in “sow-metal,” as the term densare seems to suggest.’

Roman mining-operations were often conducted on a large scale. The Forest of Dean and the Wealds of Kent and Sussex, not to mention other parts of England, show heaps of old slag containing classical pottery and coins of Nero, Vespasian, and Diocletian. They obtained the regulus[368] by the direct process, and used charcoal in rude Catalan furnaces; the work was imperfect, and the scoriæ contain a large percentage of metal. Ancient adits and shafts in Shropshire[369] and elsewhere have preserved the rude implements with which they made the natives labour in corvée. The hill-sides of Carthagena on the seaboard of Murcia (South-Eastern Spain) had been explored for lead and silver by the earliest Carthaginian colonists; and the industry was at its height when Nova Carthago, under Roman rule, became (b.c. 200) a flourishing municipium, the centre of a large population. At this time as many as forty thousand hands were regularly employed. In our seventh century the Arab invasion ruined the mines, not only of this district, but of every province occupied by the ‘Moors.’ About the mid-fifteenth century a revival was attempted; but this was checked at the beginning of the sixteenth, when the mines of Spanish America were opened: the Emperor 108Charles V. also would not see the soil of his European dominions disturbed by digging. The miners emigrated in mass, and New Carthage was forgotten till within the last half-century. According to M. Alfred Massart,[370] the ancient masses of plumbiferous scoriæ were large enough to pay for re-working. A superficial area of eight square leagues yielded some eight hundred thousand tons of iron-ore, of which two-thirds were ferro-manganese, and twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand tons of lead containing thirty thousand kilogrammes of silver. As regards the use of iron for many purposes by the ancient Britons before the Roman conquest, we may fairly, without attaching importance to the legend of ‘Milesius,’ believe that the industry may also have migrated northwards from a Spanish centre. Hence, Mr. Hutton, the local historian of Birmingham, believes that Sword-blades were made there before the landing of Julius Cæsar.

From Assyria the use of iron would extend through Persia to India, to Indo-China, and to China and Japan. Professor Max Müller, as Mr. Day justly observes, differs with himself when he states in one place[371] that ‘iron was not known previously to the breaking up of the Aryan family’; and in another passage,[372] where we are told, ‘Before the separation of the Aryan race ... there can be no doubt that iron was known and its value appreciated.’ Here, evidently, the Sanskritist had changed his first opinion, because he had noticed that ‘Ayas’ may also mean copper or bronze. The Rig Veda mentions mail-coats, hatchets, and weapons of iron; but so far from assigning to this work the age of b.c. 1300, we may fairly hold that its present shape was assumed in the early centuries following Christianity. We have trustworthy notices of the metal in India only at the beginning of authentic history, when the acumen of the Greeks was applied to the gross absurdities of Hindu fable.[373] The Malli and Oxydracæ presented to Alexander a hundred talents’ weight of Indian steel (ferrum candidum) in wrought bars, just as Homer’s Achilles (‘Il.’ xxiii. 826), nearly a thousand years before, offered at the funeral games of Patroclus, ‘a rudely-molten mass of iron’ (σόλον αὐτοχόωνον, self-melted?), which had been used for hurling at the foe by Eëtion, and which would supply the farm with metal for five years. The ‘bright iron’ of Ezekiel, named amongst the wares of Tyre (xxvii. 19) with cassia and calamus, was probably the same material. The Periplus mentions sideros indikos and 109stómoma (steel) as imports to the Abyssinian harbours. Daimachus and Pliny specify, amongst the dearest kinds of steel, the ferrum Indicum and the ferrum Sericum; and Salmasius refers to a Greek chemical treatise ‘On the Tempering (περὶ βαφῆς) of Indian Steel.’

The great iron-working age of India seems to have been in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, when the blacksmiths must have been skilful and commanded an unlimited supply of the best metal. The Lát or iron-pillar of Delhi, to mention no other, is a solid shaft, showing that the people were unable to make a core. This simple piece of wrought metal, calculated to weigh seventeen tons and to contain eighty cubic feet of metal, measures in diameter 16·4 inches tapering to 12·05. The height above ground is twenty-two feet, and excavations of twenty-six feet did not reach the base: the known length therefore is upwards of forty-eight feet.[374] The sundry inscriptions punched upon it are of very various dates: Prinsep[375] assigns our third or fourth century to the Nagari character in which Rajah Dhava thus ‘renowned it’:—

‘By him who, learning the warlike preparations and entrenchments of his enemies with their good soldiers and allies, a monument of fame engraved by his Sword on their limbs, who as master of the seven advantages,[376] crossing over (the Indus?), so subdued the Vahlikas of Sindhu [N.B.: they can hardly be the ‘people of Balkh’] that even at this day his disciplined force and defences on the south (of the river) are sacredly respected by them,’ &c. &c.

Metallurgists dispute as to the way in which this huge iron rod was wrought. One writer,[377] however, seems to have hit upon the solution of the problem: ‘The column may have been forged standing, by welding on, one over another, thin iron plates or dires, the fire being built round the column as it grew; and the ground raised in a mound to keep the top of the column on a level with the workplace.’ Pyramid-building has been explained in the same way—a causeway.

But the Lát is not the only marvel of Hindu metallurgy. Mr. James Fergusson found in the Temple of Kanaruc, or Black Pagoda of the Madras Presidency, beams of wrought iron about twenty-one feet in length and eight inches section, to strengthen the roof, which the Hindus, in their distrust of the arch, formed after their usual bracket-fashion. In the fane of Mahavellipore he discovered sockets for similar supports. He assigns to the Black Pagoda a date between a.d. 1236 and 1241; and to Mahavellipore any time between our tenth and fourteenth centuries.[378] Colonel Pearse, R.A. presented to the trustees of the 110British Museum a unique collection of archaic tools, iron and steel, gouges, spatulæ, ladles, and similar articles, dug out of tumuli at Wari Gaon, near Kampti. But there are no grounds whatever for dating them ‘about b.c. 1500, or the time of Moses.’

The ferrum Indicum[379] of the Classics may still be represented by the famous Wootz or Wutz,[380] the ‘natural Indian steel,’ still so much prized for Sword-blades in Persia and Afghanistan. The specimens first sent in 1795 to the Royal Society of London were analysed by Mr. Josiah M. Heath with the results given below.[381]

Colonel Yule remarks that the Wootz was, in part at least, the famous Indian steel, the σίδηρος Ἰνδικὸς καὶ στόμωμα of the ‘Periplus,’ the Hunduwání of the mediæval Persian traders; the Andanicum or Ondanique of Marco Polo and the Alkinde of the old Spanish. In the sixteenth century the exportation was chiefly from Baticala in Canara. The King of Portugal complains (in a.d. 1591) of the large quantities shipped from Chaul to be sold in the Red Sea to the Turks and on the African coast about Melinde.[382] And I would note that this industry by no means argues civilisation in India or elsewhere:[383] as Dr. Percy remarks, ‘The primitive method of extracting good malleable iron direct from the ore, which is still practised in India and in Africa, requires a degree of skill very inferior to that which is implied in the manufacture of bronze.’

The system of Wootz-making, especially at Salem and in parts of Mysore, has 111been described by many writers. About a pound weight of malleable iron, made from magnetic ore, is placed, minutely broken and moistened, in a crucible of refractory clay, together with finely chopped pieces of wood (Cassia auriculata). It is packed without flux. The open pots are then covered with the green leaves of the Asclepias gigantea or the Convolvulus lanifolius, and the tops are coated over with wet clay, which is sun-dried to hardness. ‘Charcoal will not do as a substitute for the green twigs.’ Some two dozen of these cupels[384] or crucibles are disposed archways at the bottom of a furnace, whose blast is managed with bellows of bullock’s hide. The fuel is composed mostly of charcoal and of sun-dried brattis or cow-chips. After two or three hours’ smelting the cooled crucibles are broken up, when the regulus appears in the shape and size of half an egg. According to Tavernier, the best buttons from about Golconda were as large as a halfpenny roll, and sufficed to make two Sword-blades (?). These ‘cops’ are converted into bars by exposure for several hours to a charcoal fire not hot enough to melt them: they are then turned over before the blast, and thus the too highly carburised steel is oxidised.[385]

According to Professor Oldham,[386] ‘Wootz’ is also worked in the Damudah Valley, at Birbhúm, Dyucha, Narayanpúr, Damrah, and Goanpúr. In 1852 some thirty furnaces at Dyucha reduced the ore to kachhá or pig-iron, small blooms from Catalan forges; as many more converted it to pakká (crude steel), prepared in furnaces of different kind. The work was done by different castes; the Hindís (Moslems) laboured at the rude metal, and the Hindús preferred the refining work. I have read that anciently a large quantity of Wootz found its way westward viâ Pesháwar.

When last visiting (April 19, 1876) the Mahabaleshwar Hills near Bombay, I had the pleasure to meet Mr. Joyner, C.E., and with his assistance made personal inquiries into the process. The whole of the Sayhádri range (Western Ghats), and especially the ‘great-Might-of-Shiva’ mountains, had for many ages supplied Persia with the best steel. Our Government, since 1866, forbade the industry, as it threatened the highlands with disforesting. The ore was worked by the Hill-tribes, of whom the principal are the Dhánwars, Dravidians now speaking Hindustani.[387] Only the brickwork of their many raised furnaces remained. For fuel 112they preferred the Jumbul-wood, and the Anjan or iron-wood. They packed the iron and fourteen pounds of charcoal in layers; and, after two hours of bellows-working, the metal flowed into the forms. The ‘Kurs’ (bloom), five inches in diameter by two and a half deep, was then beaten into Táwás or plates. The matrix resembled the Brazilian, a poor yellow-brown limonite striping the mud-coloured clay; and actual testing disproved the common idea that the ‘watering’ of the surface is found in the metal. The Jauhar (‘jewel’ or ribboning) of the so-called ‘Damascus’ blade was produced artificially, mostly by drawing out the steel into thin ribbons which were piled and welded by the hammer. My friend afterwards sent me from India an inkstand of Mahabaleshwar iron.[388]

I could not learn from Hindus that they bury iron in the earth till the ‘core’ is reached. But they are well acquainted with tempering by cold immersion, as noticed by Salmasius (‘Exercit. Plin.’ 763): they still believe with Pliny, Justin, and a host of others, in ‘a Sword, the icebrook’s temper,’ and all hold that the hardening of metal depends much upon the quality of the water. They quench delicate articles in oil, a method also alluded to by Pliny, but they ignore his statement (xxviii. 41) that rust produced by goat’s blood gives a better edge to iron than the file. I am not aware that they have ever used for quenching purposes quicksilver, the best conductor of heat.

In Burmah, as in India, the chief peculiarity of iron-smelting is the use of green-wood fuel.[389] Throughout the mighty ‘Hollander’ Archipelago of the Farther East, this metal, known in former days only by importation, is now everywhere common. Java received the Egyptian arts from India, which colonised her about the beginning of the Christian era: the now untravelled Hindú was then a voyager and an explorer. Dr. Percy describes the iron-smelting of Borneo,[390] which produces the Parangilang, a peculiar Sword-like weapon equally fit for felling trees and men.[391] At Tahiti (Otaheiti), on the other hand, Captain Cook was unable to make the natives appreciate the use of metal till his armourer wrought an iron adze in shape like the native.

The oldest, and indeed the only, Chinese word for iron is 鐵—tie, formerly pronounced tit. It is first mentioned among the tribute-articles of Yu in the Yu-Kung section of the Shoo-King,[392] and the latter has been estimated to date from b.c. 2200–2000. If this be fact, hieroglyphic tablet-writing flourished amongst the ‘Bak’ some five hundred years before the age popularly attributed to the Hebrew Scriptures, and when the Greeks had not begun to form a nation.[393] 113Either then the Sinologues, like the Sanskritists, have been deluded by the artful native into admitting the preposterous claims to antiquity of culture always advanced by semi-barbarous peoples; or, what is hardly likely, China formed a centre of Turanian civilisation wholly independent of Egypt and Chaldæa. Indeed, there appears to have been some contact of ideas in the matter of writing. The Kemite denoted ‘man’ and ‘eye’ by copying nature; and probably the Chinese did the same. But the Turanian symbols have lost, by the law of pictorial evanescence, the original forms: ‘man’ has become 人 = jin (No. 9),[394] a pair of legs; and ‘eye’ 目 = mŭh (No. 109), looks as if copied from a cat. The picture-origin of the Assyrian syllabary has also been satisfactorily established by the Rev. W. Haughton, but the later forms are as degraded as in the hieratic and demotic Egyptian.[395]

The passage above alluded to enumerates the articles of tribute as ‘musical gems-stones,’ iron, silver, steel, stones for arrow-heads, and sounding stones, with the skins of bears, great bears, foxes, jackals, and articles woven with their hair.’ Dr. Legge adds in a note: ‘By 鐵 = Tie, we are to understand “soft iron,” and by 鏤 = Low or Lowe, “hard iron” or “steel.” At the time of the Han dynasty, “iron-masters” (鐵宧) were appointed in the several districts of the old Leangchou, to superintend the iron-works. Tsa’e refers to two individuals mentioned in the “Historical Records”; one of the surname Ch’o, (卓氏), and the other of the surname Ch’ing (程), both of this part of the empire, who became so wealthy by their smelting that they were deemed equal to princes.’ According to the Rev. Dr. Edkins, ‘with the exception of this passage there is probably no distinct allusion to iron in writings older than b.c. 1000;’ and his statement seems to establish the date of Chinese technology and civilisation.

About b.c. 400 the celebrated author and philosopher Leih-Tze mentions steel, and describes the process of tempering it. In the ‘K’ang-hi-tse-tien’ (康熙字典), better known as ‘Kanghi’s Dictionary,’ published about a.d. 1710, the author represents the Serican contemporary of Aristotle as saying that ‘a red blade will cut Hu (jade or nephrite) as it would cut mud.’ Mr. Day makes this to mean a ‘reddish-coloured blade,’ red being one of the many tints which a clean surface of steel acquires in the process of tempering. It certainly cannot refer to red-hot 114steel, which would make no impression upon pietra dura. The description of steel-making in b.c. 400 is so far complete that it names and describes the several kinds. The first treatment produces ‘Twan-Kang’ or ball-steel, so called from the rounded bloom,[396] or ‘Kwan-Kang’ (sprinkled steel), because treated with cold affusion. There is also ‘Wei-Tie’ or false steel. The writer says: ‘When I was sent on official business to Tse-Chow and visited the foundries there, I understood this for the first time. Iron has steel within it, as meal contains vermicelli. Let it be subjected to fire a hundred times or more; it becomes lighter each time. If the firing be continued until the weight does not diminish, it is pure steel.’[397]

About the beginning of the Christian era a tax was levied upon iron by the State exchequer, showing that the manufacture had become important. According to the Pi-tan or Pencil-Talk, written probably under the Ming dynasty[398] (a.d. 1366–1644), steel is thus made: ‘Wrought iron is bent or twisted up; unwrought iron (i.e. iron-ore or cast-iron) is thrown into it; it is covered up with mud and subjected to the action of fire, and afterwards to the hammer.’ This is the old and well-known process of steeling practised by the Greeks. Wrought iron was either immersed into molten cast-iron as into a bath, or it was heated with iron-ore and layers of charcoal-fuel covered with alternate strata of clay to exclude atmospheric influence, a treatment somewhat similar to what is still called ‘cementation.’[399] The ore was thus deoxidised by contact with excess of carbon; and a molten carburet was the result. It is not a little curious, as Mr. Day observes, to find Aristotle and Lieh-Tze describing the same process about the same time. But I hesitate to conclude with that able writer that the fact has any bearing upon ‘the old doctrine of the original unity of the human race; each section of mankind carrying off with them that common stock of knowledge which the entire family possessed before separation.’ Mr. Day, I have said, systematically opposes the ‘High Antiquity Theory’ (p. 208); and, though he holds to Revelation and to Biblical chronology, he has a curious tendency towards the mystical etymology of the Jacob Bryant school, and the obsolete Phallic theories revived by the learned and able work of the late Dr. Inman.[400]

115

The Pent Saow, also attributed to the days of the Mings, speaks of three kinds of steel used for knives and Swords, a division which again reminds us of Daimachus. The first is made by adding unwrought to wrought iron, while the mass is subjected to the action of fire. The second is simply the result of repeated firings as practised in Africa. The third is native steel produced in the south-west at Hai-shan: ‘In appearance it resembles the stone called “Tsze-shih-ying” (purple stone efflorescence).’ It is understood that the process of manufacture is kept secret. The ‘Hankow-steel,’ which comes to Tien-tsin from the upper Yang-tse, is most prized; and commands much higher prices than the best imported English and Swedish; the Chinese, like the ‘Caffirs,’ look upon these as ‘rotten iron.’

China also had her ‘literary blacksmith,’ like Wieland Smith, the northern Dædalus. We read that Hoang-ta-tie of T’ancheu, who lived under the Sung, followed the craft of an ironsmith. Whenever he was at his work he used to call without intermission on the name of Amita Buddha. One day he handed to his neighbours the following verses of his own composing to be spread about:—

Thereupon he died. But his verses spread all over Honan, and many learned to call upon Buddha.

The oldest Chinese iron-works were at Shansi and Chilili in the Ho districts, where there are inexhaustible deposits of ore and coal, and where the metal is worked to the present day. In 1875 Commissioner Li-hung-Chang, raised from the Government-General of Chilili to be Minister of the young King, sent Mr. James Henderson to England with orders to bring out the most modern appliances and apparatus for metal-working. It was proposed to build the new works at Tsze-Chow, a town two hundred miles south-west of Tien-tsin, the head-quarters of the Governor-General. Mr. Henderson had visited (1874) the establishment near Yang-Ching, Shansi, which had before been described by Baron von Richtofen and Dr. Williamson.[401] The iron ore bought at Ping-ding-Chow was found at the Royal School of Mines, London, to contain fifty per cent. of iron, loose hæmatite with little or no sulphur.

M. Sévoz, an engineer of mines long resident in Japan, studied iron-working in the province of Ykouno.[402] He found the people using an imperfect Catalan 116method, but able to treat at once sixteen thousand kilogrammes of ore, and to produce blooms weighing one thousand three hundred kilogrammes. These huge rods were broken up under a hammer constructed in the style of a pile-driving ram, to which motion was given by a walking-wheel 11·5 mètres in diameter, mounted by men. The description does not promise much; but Japan, though holding to her ancient methods in districts unknown to Europeans, produces iron cheaper than the English. Of her marvellous Swords I shall treat in Part II.

The people of Madagascar worked iron,[403] but their name of the metal is Malayan; hence Mr. Crawford traced the art back to Malacca. Yet the Malay did not extend it far eastwards: according to Mr. E. B. Tylor,[404] ‘In New Zealand, where there is good iron-ore, there was no knowledge of iron previously to the arrival of Europeans.’ Passing over to the American continent, we find an immense industry of copper, but so little iron that, till late years, the indigenes were supposed not to have worked it. Ynka mines, however, have been discovered near Lake Titicaca; while excavations in the tumuli of the mysterious ‘Mound-builders,’ who may have attempted to reproduce the Egyptian Pyramid, yielded axes described to be of ‘hæmatite iron-ore,’ one of the easiest metals to smelt, and for that reason probably one of the first worked. Mr. Day, who figures one of these tool-weapons with the hammer-marks (p. 218), supposes it to have been ‘metallic iron,’ pronouncing hæmatite ‘extremely brittle and absolutely unforgeable.’[405] He quotes Mr. Charles C. Abbott,[406] who procured other specimens of aboriginal manufacture from the mounds. One hatchet was four and a half inches long by two broad, and nearly uniform in thickness, three-sixteenths of an inch; it had a well-defined edge, which from its slightly wavy outline and varied breadth, appeared to be hammered, not ground. According to Major Hotchkiss, who owned two other similar specimens, a series of four was found under an uprooted tree on an Indian trail in West Virginia.

Fragments of unworked hæmatite, small and irregular, were used instead of flint for arrow-heads.[407] Mr. Abbott also notices ‘a curious form of “relic,” known as a “plummet,” occasionally occurring and made of iron ore: one specimen[408] “is made of iron ore ground down until it is almost as smooth as glass.” As such “plummets” are found in the Western Mounds, as well as on the surface of the ground throughout the Atlantic coast States, and are always polished, it seems fair to presume that a cutting instrument of such hard material would undoubtedly be polished and ground, if at the time of its manufacture grinding was known or 117practised among the aborigines in fashioning their various weapons and instruments.’

But if the savages and barbarians of Oceania and the New World rarely worked iron, the contrary was the case with the equally uncivilised African races, negroid and negro, who, however, had the advantage of dwelling within importing and imitating distance of Egypt. I have elsewhere noticed the excellent assegai-blades of the Bantu (Kafirs); nor is this art confined to the southern regions.[409] Dr. Percy justly makes wrought iron the original form, which we see retained in the obscurer parts of Asia and Africa. The people always worked by the ‘direct process,’ the oldest style; which, however, is not wholly extinct in Europe. The art, quasi-stationary among wild men, treats small quantities at a time: the ‘voracious iron-works’ of which Evelyn first speaks, are beyond its wants. Moreover it can utilise only rich ores, unlike the ‘indirect process’ of producing cast-iron by the blast-furnace.[410] When the ore is nearly pure, a small addition of carbon would convert it into steel;[411] and the latter is so easily made, that the wild Hill-peoples of Africa and India produce, and have produced from time immemorial, an excellent article in the most primitive way. The proportion of charcoal is considerably increased, and the blast is applied more slowly than when wrought iron is required. The only apparatus wanted for the manufacture is a small clay furnace, four feet high by one to two broad, like that used by the South Africans; charcoal for fuel, and a skin with a pipe or twyers of refractory clay for the blast.[412] For the anvil a stone-slab suffices, and for the hammer a cube of stone with sides grooved for fibre-cords.

The ‘Dark Continent’ is emphatically an iron-land, and all explorers have noticed its abundance of ore. Mungo Park[413] mentions the surface ironstone of dull red tint with greyish spots used by his ‘Mandingos’: Barth confirms his assertion by describing magnetic metal about Kuka of the Mandengas, and at Jinninau in the Kel-owi or Tawareh country: Durham and Clapperton, when near Murzuk, found kidney-shaped lumps upon the surface; and about Bilma, 118capital of the Tibbús, nodules of iron-ore puddinged in the red sandstones—could this have been laterite or volcanic mud? It was the only metal seen in the hills of Mandara; but the Bornuese prefer to import their supply from the neighbouring Sudan. Mr. Warren Edwards, who had temporary charge of a Niger expedition, observed the natives supporting their cooking-pots over the fire with fragments of surface ironstone; and it often struck him (as it does most men) that by some such means the smelting-process suggested itself. The metal is abundant in the Gaboon country, where the Mpangwe or Fans,[414] the western outliers of the great race, mostly cannibal, holding the heart of Africa, are able workers. They have a kind of ‘fleam-money,’ small iron bars shaped somewhat like a large lancet. I 119came upon the metal everywhere in Unyamwezi, the ‘Mountains of the Moon,’ and to this universal presence of ironstone—not to damp and heat—the Portuguese attribute the marvellous displays of electricity throughout Central Africa. A whole night will pass during which the thunder is never silent; and the lightning enables one to read small print, like an electric light. Captain Grant, in his ‘Walk across Africa,’ tells us that the people pick up walnut-sized nuggets of iron covered with dusty rust, and in a short time produce a spear-head that glistens like steel. My fellow-traveller to the Gold Coast, Captain Cameron, when crossing Africa, in most places found iron and iron-smelting.[415] In Kordofan, Mr. Petherick saw a rich surface oxide containing from fifty-five to sixty per cent. of pure metal. Livingstone remarked iron in the eastern regions of Angola,[416] and traced it up the Zambeze-line from east to west. Mr. C. T. Anderson describes it as occurring in large quantities, either of ironstone or pure in a crystallised state. Finally, good old Kolben mentions large iron-flakes on the surface near The Cape.

But, as Colonel A. Lane Fox remarks:[417] ‘Simple heating is not sufficient for working iron: a continuous air-blast is required to keep the temperature at a certain height.’ It is interesting to see the means adopted by barbarians for procuring this necessary; and, having carefully studied it in various parts of Africa, I devote to it the remainder of this chapter. As Pliny repeats from Aristotle, ‘Libya always produces something new.’

According to Strabo, Anacharsis[418] the Scythian, who flourished in the days of Solon (b.c. 592), invented not only the anchor[419] and the potter’s wheel, but also the bellows. In Egypt, however, we find that these discoveries were already a thousand years old at least. The earliest appearance of the latter is the forge and bellows (in Egyptian ‘H’ati’), depicted on the walls of a tomb in the days of Thut-mes III., about b.c. 1500. The workman stands on two bags of skin, such as are still used to hold water, alternately weighing upon one and upon the other; he inflates them in turns by pulling up a cord which opens a valve, and then he closes the hole with his heel. The bellows have twyers, and the illustrations[420] show a crucible and a heap of ore: while the material of the H’ati is indicated by its determinative, a hide with a tail. This rude contrivance was adopted by the Greeks and Romans: hence the ‘taurini folles’ of Plautus: and Virgil’s—

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The wind-bag[421] would be made of ox-hide, of goat-skin, or of the spoils of smaller animals, according to the volume of draught required. And thus, also, would originate the bagpipe, an instrument common to almost all original peoples.

But in the Dark Continent we find still in use an older form than that known to Thut-mes, and the earliest of the four several varieties. The late Mr. Petherick describes this rude contrivance in Kordofan: ‘The blast is supplied by skin bags worked by hand; these bags are made of skins, which are flayed by two incisions from the tail down to the hocks; the skin, being drawn over the body, is cut off at the neck, which makes the mouth of the bag. After tanning, the hind legs are cut off, and each side of the skin sewn on to a straight piece of stick; loops are placed on the outside for the fingers of the operator to pass through. It can be opened and closed at pleasure; the neck is secured to a tube of baked clay, and four men or boys seated round the cupola, each with a bellows of this primitive description, produce a blast by opening the bags when drawing them towards them, and closing them quickly, push them forward; by which means the compressed bags discharge the air through the tubes into the furnace, quick alternate movements of the arms of the operator producing a blast, which throws out a flame about a foot high from the top of the furnace; and the slag with the metal is allowed to collect in a hole beneath it.’ Casalis similarly describes the Basuto bellows, and Mungo Park that of Mandenga-land; Browne saw it in Dár-For,[422] and Clapperton in Kuka and in the Highlands of Mandara, where the anvil was a coarse bloom of iron, and the hammers two lumps weighing about two pounds each. This is the bellows of Kathiawád[423] and of Kolapor in the Deccan, where Captain Graham notices that the mús or tubes for the blast are clay mixed with burnt and powdered flint. Mr. E. B. Tylor found it used by a travelling tinker at Pæstum.

The second and improved variety of African bellows was described by myself during a visit to Yoruban Abeokuta. It deserves attention because it is a notable step in progress, leading to a further development; the troughs are a rudimentary cylinder, and the handles form an incipient piston.[424] ‘The two bags of goat-skin are made fast in a frame cut out of a single piece of wood; the upper part of each follis has, by way of handle, a stick two feet long, so that it can be worked by one man either standing or sitting. The handles are raised alternately by the blower, so that when one receives the air, the other ejects it; the form is like that used on the Gold Coast; and there is a perpendicular screen of dried clay through which the nozzle of the bellows passes, supplying a regular blast.’

Evidently in this stage of the bellows, the lower halves of the leather bags are useless: the result would be the same if only the upper part of the wooden 121troughs were covered with skin, air-tight but loose enough to make play. This third step has been taken by the Djour (Júr) tribes of the Upper Nile, in north latitude 20°, and it is thus described by Mr. Petherick: ‘The blast-pipes are made as usual of burnt clay, and are attached to earthen vessels about eighteen inches in diameter and six inches in height, covered with a loose, dressed goat-skin, tied tightly round them and perforated with a few holes, in the centre of which is a loop to contain the fingers of the operator. A lad, sitting between two of these vessels, by a rapid alternate vertical motion drives a continuous current of air into the furnace.’

This brings us to the fourth and last stage of African blast-improvement (fig. 105). Here the rudely-hewn wooden tube becomes a double-barrelled forcing-pump. The two air-vessels with their loose skin-coverings are attached to each base of the two central pipes that join into one. Such is the shape used in Madagascar, the cylinders being of bamboo, five feet long by two inches in diameter, and the piston a stick ending in a bunch of feathers.

The bellows described by Dampier in Mindanao and elsewhere in the Malay Archipelago, is evidently borrowed from the Madagascar type; and into Borneo, Siam, and New Guinea a hollowed trunk takes the place of the bamboos. The sculptures in the Sukuh-temple of Java, attributed to the fifteenth century, represent smiths making Kríses (Creases), the bellows being worked by another man, who holds a piston upright in each hand. Colonel A. Lane Fox is of opinion that the sculptures ‘possibly point to a Hindu origin for this particular contrivance.’ I agree with him, but I would also trace the Asiatic article back to its old home in Africa—Egypt.

The nature of fuel was determined by the supply of the country. That of Egypt probably consisted of cattle-chips, a material still used by the Fellahs. A later allusion to this article is found in the legend of ‘Wieland Smith’: he mixes iron-filings with the meal eaten by his geese, carefully collects the droppings, and out of them forges a blade which cuts a wool-flock or cleaves a man to the belt without turning edge.

I conclude this chapter with the following table,[425] printed by Mr. Day at the end of his ‘High Antiquity of Iron and Steel.’ It gives at one view the languages, the characters, the phonetic values, the English equivalents, and the oldest known dates of the metals to which he refers. I differ from him in sundry points, and these I have taken the liberty to point out in italics.

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Having now reached the early Iron Age, which ends prehistoric annals, it is advisable to answer the question—‘What is a Sword?’

The word—a word which, strange to say, has no equivalent in French—is the Scandinavian Svärd (Icel. Sverð); the Danish Sværd; the Anglo-Saxon Sweord and Suerd; the Old German Svert, now Schwert, and the Old English and Scotch Swerd. The westward drift of the Egyptian Sf, Sefi, Sayf, Sfet, and Emsetf, gave Europe its generic term for the weapon.[427] The poetical is ‘brand’ or ‘bronde,’ from its brightness or burning; another name is ‘laufi,’ ‘laf,’ or ‘glaive,’ derived through French from the Latin gladius. Of especial modern forms there are the Espadon, the Flamberg, Flammberg, or Flamberge,[428] the Stoccado, and the Braquemart; the Rapier and the Claymore, the Skeyne and Tuck, the small-Sword and the fencing-foil, beside other varieties which will occur in the course of the following pages. ‘Sword’ includes ‘Sabre,’ which may also derive from the Egyptian through the Assyrian Sibirru and Akkadian Sibir, also written Sapara; our ‘Sabre’ is the Arabic Sayf with the Scandinavian terminative r (Sayf-r). Ménage would derive Sabre from the Armoric Sabrenn: Littré has the Spanish Sable, the Italian Sciabola, Sciabla, and in Venice Sabala, from the German Sable or Säbel, which again identifies with other languages, as the Serb Sablja and the Hungarian Száblya. The chief modern varieties of the curved blade are the Broadsword, the Backsword, the Hanger, and the Cutlass, the Scymitar and Düsack, the Yataghan and the Flissa. These several modifications will be considered in the order of their invention. Lastly the Egyptian ‘Sfet’ originated through Keltic the word Spata or Spatha[429] (Spatarius = a Swordsman) conserved to the present day in the neo-Latin names of the straight foining weapon—espada, espé, espée, épée.

Physically considered, the Sword is a metal blade intended for cutting, thrusting, or cut-and-thrust (fil et pointe). It is usually, but not always, composed of two 124parts. The first and principal is the blade proper (la lame, la lama, die Klinge). Its cutting surface is called the edge (le fil, il filo, die Schärfe),[430] and its thrusting end is the point (la pointe, la punta, die Spitze or der Ort, the latter mostly opposed to the Mund or sheath-mouth).

The second part, which adapts the weapon for readier use, is the hilt, hilts or heft (la manche, la manica, die Hilse or das Heft), whose several sections form a complicated and a prodigiously varied whole. The grip is the outer case of the tang, alias the tongue (la soie, la spina, or il codolo; der Stoss, die Angel, die Griffzunge or der Dorn), the thin spike which projects from the shoulders or thickening of the blade (le talon or l’épaulement, il talone, der Ansatz or die Schulter) at the end opposed to the point. Sometimes there are two short teeth or projections from the angles of the shoulders, and these are called ‘the ears’ in English, in German, and in the neo-Latin tongues.