ANCIENT LURISTAN SHORT SWORD OF HAMMERED BRONZE WITH INTEGRAL HANDLE *LUR112

Product Description

Made of hammered bronze with a thick integral decorative handle, this ancient bronze short sword is from the Ancient Near Eastern / Luristan Bronze Age Culture.  It was hammered by a highly skilled bronze smith who started with a cast bar.  The handle body was left unhammered for a thicker and functional grip.  Even the pommel profile was hammered to a flared, elegant design.  A decorate outline for the hilt was also hammered to its shape.  What is amazing is that this entire short sword was made from a single bar of bronze and hammered to its elaborate form, a testament to the skill of the ancient bronze workers of this day, and the work that went into such a weapon making it much more expensive to an ancient warrior, over ordinary simple hammered blades.  The handle was likely wrapped in braided silk cord from the pommel to the flared hilt, similar to modern blades with integral handles wrapped in cord.  Outfitted this way, it surely must have been an immensely beautiful object of pride as the metal would have originally been highly polished and colored gold by the bronze!!

In every way, this is a ancient prestige weapon.  In the Bronze Age (of ALL cultures!), swords were the most prized and expensive weapon and very few soldiers owned or carried them because of their extreme cost in their day.  Swords were reserved for only the most noble, highest rank and wealthiest warriors.

The sheet bronze blade construction seems to have been less practical as a functional weapon, so this could have a ceremonial example, but the thin hammered sheet bronze would have also been much sharper on an bare-skinned enemy than a cast weapon, making this a possible functional and effective blade in slicing.  The entire sword is intact with an amazing mineralized encrusted patina, giving it a superb aesthetic!  This is the ONLY example of kind we have ever seen or offered. 

This artifact has  been professionally cleaned and conserved in our lab, being treated with a special sealer developed and formulated by us specifically for ancient metal preservation.  The patina shows beautiful traits only found in authentic ancient weapons.  It is a patina like this that the finest ancient bronzes are prized for and it is a patina like this that brings a premium in price and value of the specimen.  There is no active bronze disease. Bronze disease can develop on ancient bronze that is not properly cleaned and conserved.  It produces a corrosive powder that will literally eat away an artifact over time and destroy it.

WARNING:  There is a STAGGERING number of fake bronze weapons on the market.  Many being sold as "authentic" were never meant to deceive and were made as far back as 100 years ago as exact reproductions for museums to sell in their gift shops.  Other examples are modern fabrications specifically intended to fool unwitting buyers.  As fine quality intact, original specimens become more scarce, the techniques to fake these objects have become highly advanced.  We have personally handled numerous well-done fakes with extremely convincing patinas.  The degree to which the fakers have been able to replicate patina to disguise their work requires an expert examination by highly experienced individuals.  It is common to find very reasonably priced weapons that are made up of part original and part modern components or wholly modern pieces displaying elaborate artificial patinas.  All purchases should include a written guarantee of authenticity from the seller, with unconditional and lifetime return policies regarding such guarantee, such as we provide.

SEE MORE ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN LURISTAN ARTIFACTS

HISTORY

With origins dating back to prehistory, the empire of ancient Iran was one of the world's first superpower civilizations by the time it had taken form in the second millennium B.C..  The various cultures that can be included in the former ancient Iranian Empire stretched across an enormous geographical region extending beyond what is called the Iranian Plateau.  To gain insight as to just how large this area was, the Iranian Plateau alone, includes Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan and comprises approximately nearly 4 million square kilometers (almost 1.5 million square miles).  The area of ancient Iran included not only the massive Iranian plateau made up of the tribes of the Medes, Persians, Bactrians and Parthians, but also included groups as far west as the Scythians (an eastern Scythian tribe existed in parallel in Central Asia), Sarmartians, Cimmerians and Alans populating the steppes north of the Black Sea.  To the eastern boundary of the empire, the Saka tribes dominated, spreading as far as Xinjiang, China.  From a very early period, the ancient Iranian peoples have been historically documented to exist in two separate continuums - a western civilization (Persia) and an eastern civilization (Scythia).

The beginnings of ancient Iran trace back to an influx into the Iranian cultural region of bands of horse-mounted steppe nomads from Central Asia, speaking Indo-European languages.  Some settled in eastern Iran but other groups migrated deeper to the west settling in the Zagros Mountains.  These first people descended from the proto-Iranians, originating from the Central Asian Bronze age culture of what is called the Bactria-Margiana Complex (aka Oxus Civilization), dated 2200-1700 B.C..

This historical achievements  and the breadth of diverse cultures included of this once great empire are too vast to adequately credit in this brief synopsis.  The Islamic conquest of Persia in the middle of the 7th century A.D. and the collapse of the Sassanid Empire marked the end of once geographically expansive and culturally diverse ancient superpower.

The term LURISTAN references artifacts made by a society of semi-nomadic people that once lived in the mountainous region of Northwest Iran.  Little is known of this ancient culture but the most impressive traces are that of the bronze artifacts they left behind that can be found in parts of present-day Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan.  These include highly decorative equipment for their horses, ceremonial containers and numerous weapons ranging from simple utilitarian pieces on up to elaborate masterpieces of warfare. 

It is theorized that the Luristan bronzes were crafted by the earliest existence of the Median empire but this has never been proven as written records of the Medes have not survived.  The Medes were Indo-Iranian people originally from central Asia who settled in Northwest Iran in the 9th century BC and later defeated the Assyrian empire in 614 BC.  Their success is short-lived and their empire which once stretched from central Iran to the Persian Gulf and Anatolia was overrun in 550 BC by the Persians.