Posted by speckx 4 days ago
Cause and effect are very difficult to differentiate, and combined with the fact that this a) produced a profound cultural change in the region (e.g. the rise of Judaism, the writing of the Iliad, the language shifts that occurred over the ensuing centuries) and b) distinguishing migrations from invasions from cultural trends in the archaeological record is nearly impossible, I highly recommend against such reductive narratives. Other possibly confounding variables include the spread of horse technology, trade technology (i.e. writing), climate and agricultural pressures, etc.
what prevents bronze from being "worked nearly everywhere by nearly everyone" or to put it another way what make iron easier to work?
If you had asked me I would have said the opposite. bronze is nice and easy to work while iron requires much hotter fires and harder implements.
But yeah, one can just cast bronze much more easily than one can cast iron. The melting point of bronze is about 200 to 300 C lower (and 500 C lower than cast steel.)
As I recall, both Drews and Cline go into this theory in more detail and dismiss it.
There could be additional contributing causes of course.
Missing evidence of iron weapons among the sea people is more of a concern. But we still don't know why people became "sea people", but as I understand it a common theory is that it was due to an economic collapse which had already happened. So, the hypothesis is that the economic collapse could be (at least partly) related to the emergence of iron and its impact on the bronze cartels. Whatever the cause, the bronze age collapse as well as the origin of the sea people is very interesting.
My intuition on the "Sea People" issue is that there was both push and pull. A people change their way of life when the old way becomes less attractive (the push) and a new way becomes more attractive (the pull). The first effect could be due to environmental conditions and failure of trade, the second could be due to exposed vulnerability of the existing order of things to exploitation (the Drews theory). Positive feedback could occur on both.
It may have also been a class/cultural thing. A man on horseback is actively riding the horse, a man in a 2+ person chariot is having someone else do the hard work.
If you don't have chariots and they do, just fight where the chariots can't.
yes, I know the stories of the amazing accuracy of horseback archers (mongol, native american, ...). Just saying that the 2-man thing may be more efficient than you give it credit for.
Kind of like how George Lucas made the empire look like the Nazis so you know who's good and who's bad in the first minute before you even know what else is going on or how in most artwork about the American revolution it's obvious which side is and isn't a professional army.
True. But wasn't the reality complicated (as usual)? There were French regulars on the American side and various militias fighting on the British side. And Indians fighting on both sides.
Yes.
Which further underlies the point that you shouldn't take the artistic depiction too literally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyria
> Tukulti-Ninurta I's assassination c. 1207 BC was followed by inter-dynastic conflict and a significant drop in Assyrian power.[62] Tukulti-Ninurta I's successors were unable to maintain Assyrian power and Assyria became increasingly restricted to just the Assyrian heartland,[62] a period of decline broadly coinciding with the Late Bronze Age collapse.[62] Though some kings in this period of decline, such as Ashur-dan I (r. c. 1178–1133 BC), Ashur-resh-ishi I (r. 1132–1115 BC) and Tiglath-Pileser I (r. 1114–1076 BC) worked to reverse the decline and made significant conquests,[63] their conquests were ephemeral and shaky, quickly lost again.[64] From the time of Eriba-Adad II (r. 1056–1054 BC) onward, Assyrian decline intensified.[65]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Assyrian_Empire
>Though Assyria was left largely unscathed by the direct effects of the Late Bronze Age collapse of the 12th century BC, the Middle Assyrian Empire began to experience a significant period of decline roughly at the same time. The assassination of Tukulti-Ninurta I c. 1207 BC led to inter-dynastic conflict and a significant drop in Assyrian power. Even during its period of decline, Middle Assyrian kings continued to be assertive geopolitically; both Ashur-dan I (r. c. 1178–1133 BC) and Ashur-resh-ishi I (r. 1132–1115 BC) campaigned against Babylonia. Under Ashur-resh-ishi I's son and successor Tiglath-Pileser I (r. 1114–1076 BC), the Middle Assyrian Empire experienced a period of resurgence, owing to wide-ranging campaigns and conquests.
While I have no doubts that these were luxury items for a sophisticated people, these were simpler swords that long preceded all ideas of sword dueling and even any practiced martial art in these regions by about 3000 years.
These were rare and simple weapons of opportunity. Most swords would be used against people who didn't have a sword, and maybe had never seen one. There would have been no more formalized training or thought into using one any more than you would hold a stun gun if handed one for the first time.
I'd be quite surprised if objects this precious didn't also have a mini industry of people talking about them, selling them and telling you how to use them properly, even in the bronze age.
The bronze age spanned thousands of years. We went from computers to agile consultants in much less time.
These peoples lives depended on their swords and their ability to wield them, particularly in the situations where the other person also had a sword and was familiar with them. In the bronze age swords were quite expensive, roughly equivalent to a car today - something most people could buy but a significant purchase for anyone who wasn't rich. Beyond being valuable tools, they were prized as works of art, often featuring elaborate engravings. In many societies swords would be passed on through generations, while in others they'd be among the most prominent treasures a person would be buried with. They undoubtedly put a great deal of thought into both their design and use.
Fencing grips were developed with the primary purpose of getting a long reach in a 1 on 1 duel with another swordsman in an era when both were ubiquitous.
Certainly a bronze-age sword was a state-of-the-art invention for it's time and commanded prestige. But I don't think it's safe to assume they would have adopted a 15th century sword technique. They would never have needed to! They had the best, easiest-to-use weapon around.
To your point, I don't think a great Lord of the era would commission one of these swords, with a handle so clearly designed to be held at a 45-degree angle, just to hold it in an awkward angle or direction with the mushroom pommel dangling uselessly.
> "The Metapontion necropolis ... revealed that the average height of adult males was between 162 and 165 cm (5'3.5" - 5'5"), that of females between 153 and 156 cm, and with a body weight of approximately 60-65 kg for males and 50-55 kg for females; in other words, the findings of earlier examinations were soundly confirmed in this respect."
> - Kagan, Donald, and Gregory F. Viggiano, eds. Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece. Princeton University Press, 2013.
The 2023 paper "Stature estimation in Ancient Greece: population-specific equations and secular trends from 9000 BC to 900 AD" also corroborates this -- it posits a mean in Classical Greece of 162cm (5'3.5"), and in Bronze Age Greece at 163.1cm (5'4"). The mean is approximately the same, by the way, even in Late Medieval British men. (162.1cm.)
This sort of thing often warps historical re-enactment. A katana designed for a 5'1" samurai is not going to be a proper fit for a 6' iaido practitioner in Iowa. A Naue II sword with a small grip may have simply been designed for a small man, who would have gripped it quite normally, and not in ways that seem exotic or unusual, e.g. index finger over guard.
Incidentally, the proper way to perform the analysis in OP is with anthropometric modeling in CAD programs. This can be informed (but not totally) by hands-on experimentation, and would give a statistically useful range of potential results.
>The Mystery of the Short Grips
> Many modern observers are puzzled by the small size of Bronze Age sword grips, to the extent that some researchers doubt their functionality in combat altogether.
> The first question that often arises is whether Bronze Age warriors had smaller hands due to shorter body height.
> While it is true that average body height was somewhat shorter, the difference is negligible.
> The remains of victims found in the Tollense Valley show an average height of around 1.70 m.
> This suggests that their hand bones might have been slightly smaller than those of modern men, but as prehistoric people engaged in various crafts and manual labour, their hands would have been far more muscular than those of most people living in Western civilisations today.
> The remains of victims found in the Tollense Valley show an average height of around 1.70 m.
The Tollense valley is in Germany, not Greece. In Greece, the average male height was (and still is!) a good deal shorter -- 162cm in the Bronze Age.
This puts the Ancient Greek mean height in the modern 2nd percentile, which has hugely significant implications for hand breadth. I've checked against a US Army database, which you can see here: https://ibb.co/LRhMbVW
Now imagine some of these swords were made for shorter-than-average men. A 3" grip would fit perfectly. It would not, however, fit in an average modern hand -- which could lead to very complex rationalizations as to how that short-gripped sword might have been used. Such rationalizations are ultimately misleading and unnecessary.
For there's also a great deal of Bronze Age art that shows swords gripped quite normally. And this directly contravenes that Patreon post. See:
https://periklisdeligiannis.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads...
https://www.thelanesarmoury.co.uk/photos/24766g.jpg
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4304/35874906211_62611c697c.jp...
https://thelanesarmoury.co.uk/photos/22103e.jpg
Edited to add: I've checked this further. It's true that there are bronze swords from Germany and elsewhere that have been uncovered, of similar size and shape to bronze swords from the Hellenic world.
Yet the average skeleton at Tollense appears to be 1.66m rather than 1.7m.
> Based on measurements on the most commonly represented skeletal element in the Tollense Valley material, the left femur, individuals at Weltzin 20 were on average 1.66 m tall (ranging from 1.60 m to 1.73 m; calculation after Pearson 1899), a value comparable to results obtained for other Bronze Age sites (Siegmund 2010).
(From "Warriorsʼ lives: the skeletal sample from the Bronze Age battlefield site in the Tollense Valley, north-eastern Germany" by Lidke et al.)
Ultimately, I don't think that this changes anything. There's no evidence to support any need for complex rationalizations; smaller men used smaller weapons with shorter grips.
If this was common enough, we should see evidence of regiments of child soldiers with smaller weapons and armor.
I'm sure historians consider this, but it's so unpleasant to think about that it slips most people's minds.
Most of the anecdotes that I remember seem to suggest that you kill the men and boys as a boy will grow up to be a man who remembers what you did to him.
But one way or another, polygyny must necessarily be linked with killing men. The birth ratio is practically fixed in the absence of sex-selective abortion.
yeah that's possible. I just meant to say if there is armor, it would be smaller
a fine example is ceiling height in colonial american homes: sure people were somewhat shorter then on average, but also and more importantly, smaller rooms are easier to heat, and the tall lumber is worth far too much to waste on stupid things like houses, so you suck it up and stoop when you’re indoors.
interpreting the dimensions of historical goods is tricky.
Yes, standards for comfort were different back then but you don't see things get built that are actively hard to use unless there is some very serious thing you get from the tradeoff (like the deck heights in ships) because things need to be used to produce results. In a world where stuff is expensive and labor is cheap things get build such that the ability to apply labor to them is not a bottleneck. For example a work station that can be effectively operated by larger people tends to permit smaller people to work really fast without conflicting as much if the situation demands it. Some tool that operates by human muscle power and is just the right balance of mechanical advantage vs speed for the smallest man in normal conditions can be worked by a woman or child in ideal circumstances or a normal may may be able to work it for extended hours under normal conditions. Whether the tradeoffs make sense depends on the application.
When we were house shopping, we saw a house whose basement ceiling was perfectly serviceable, albeit maybe a little cramped, for the family living there - none of whom appeared to be over 5'6" - but I would have to stoop the entire time I was in the (fully finished! as an entertainment/living room!) basement. I think the ceiling was something like 5'10".
Frank Lloyd Wright was not tall. We toured a home he had built somewhere in LA, and I think that anyone over about 6'3" would have wanted to avoid thick-soled sneakers. I said to the docent, Not a lot of Lakers receptions here? He agreed.
In Europe wood was much more expensive (they had been using it for 1000 years or so). The natives in America had different practices and so didn't typically use wood the way settlers did.
Square logs are not needed if you notch your round logs:
Westerns were generally filmed by people who had never lived in or seen a log cabin (or if they did the walls were covered with something else and so they didn't know what was inside) and so they are not a good guide to what was really done.
it absolutely was -- you sold it to the motherland for ship's masts and boards.
We take for granted all the advances in better nutrition and other things we just experienced in the 20th century. An unprecedented era in human history we don’t thank our lucky stars to have been born in enough.
Some good discussions with references here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ao9uhc/...
I noticed this in the records of the Royal Navy in the 19th century - after a few years of the Navy feeding them, a lot of those kids had just shot up.
So if you find a sword, it's a pretty safe bet the person who wielded it was taller than average for the time period.
> "John Lawrence Angel, who in 1945 examined skeletal remains exhumed in Attica, put the average height of the Greek male in antiquity at no more than 162.2 cm, and of the female at 153.3 cm. It should be pointed out, however, that these data accrue from a rather scanty sample material: 61 male and 43 female skeletons from Attica, as against a total of 225 datable males and 132 females in all of Greece proper.39 Similar results accrue from Angel’s 1944 analysis of all ancient Greek skeletal remains known at the time: here, the result is given as 162.19 cm for males, with a range between extremes of 148 and 175 cm. The result for females overall remains the same. Angel, whose interest was primarily “racial” analysis, lists crania from Attica, Boiotia, Corinthia, and Macedonia; but unfortunately he does not indicate the distribution of more complete skeletons, which may have formed the basis for the calculations. Nevertheless it must be assumed that the average measurements actually represent the average, geographically as well as chronologically."
> "The comparatively scanty material notwithstanding, we would be well advised to keep in mind that, in the words of Lin Foxhall and Hamish Forbes, “this sample may be biased in favour of higher socio-economic groups since it is the graves of the comparatively wealthy that are most likely to receive attention from archaeologists.” If this is accepted, it follows that the average Greek male was in fact likely less well nourished, and the skeletons examined by Angel may well belong in the absolute upper percentile."
I'm not aware of any evidence to suggest that the skeletal remains of hoplites were substantially larger than the stated average. There are a few mass graves, e.g. at Himera, but I can find no height data. Perhaps they were taller by a couple of centimeters, but it strains credulity that it would amount to any more than that. For, as a rule, hoplites were freeholders and yeomen -- military service was a matter of social class and social standing -- they were not conscripted and sorted as though they were 18th century Austrians or Prussians: "Tall men to the halberdiers, short men to the artillery, giants to the Potsdam Giants." That wasn't the way of the Hellenes, and they wouldn't stand for it. The historical record is very clear on this point.
There is a long and sad history of 'race scientists' cherry-picking data to get the results they want (usually that other 'races' are less intelligent), so I would be a bit dubious about any data or analysis they came up with.
The main point of criticism was that the ornate and well-kept tombs he investigated belonged to the upper classes, so might not have been representative of society at large. Too tall on average, perhaps.
In any case, there's nothing to suggest that hoplites were substantially taller than that stated average ~162cm.
Thanks. I'm not familiar with this particular person's work.
Angel's results are here:
> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.1330040109 ("Stature 162.19cm.")
> https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/uploads/media/hesperia/146687.pdf ("Mean male stature of 162.2 cm.")
In other words, Kron either made an honest mistake and misquoted or failed to find relevant data, or quite literally cherry-picked it himself! Could it be that he was unaware of this? Why not mention it?
Besides, if anything, Kron seems as though he worked backwards from his conclusion, because much of his paper laments how far early-modern man had fallen!
> The contrast with the early modem period is dramatic. The average height of Italian conscripts born in 1854 was a mere 162.64 cm, over 5 cm or 2 inches shorter than deceased Romans.
> ...clearly demonstrates that the standards of nutrition and health achieved by the Romans and, more importantly, by the Hellenistic Greeks are indeed credible for a pre-industrial society, and gives us some idea of the sort of heights which can be achieved by well-fed individuals without the benefit of modem health care, nutritional science, or informed precautions against bacteria and sources of infection, and with limited attention to pure drinking water and sanitation
Angel's data destroys many of the main points he was trying to make. Little wonder he had to hide/misquote it, if indeed that's what he did.
In any case, there are other more recent analyses, and none of them give an average height of 1.7m in Ancient Greece. All are somewhere between 1.6 and 1.675m, settling around 1.63 or 1.64m for an Iron Age population.
Here's one from 2023: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-023-01744-1
In any case, there's really no good reason to never mention the 1945 studies at all when they're still cited today. It's bad practice.
Its not standard practice to cite obsolete papers and 1945 is obsolete in almost any field of research. I have no idea why the chapter in "Men of Bronze" picked a paper from 1945 as its source of Truth about Ancient Heights but I suspect it was the first thing the author could find that seemed to support the predetermined conclusion. Remember that in 1945 statistics was pencil-and-paper!
Without any of that, how do you know that "Angel and colleagues decided that the first estimate had been too short"? Based on what? What did they say?
If you are correct, why didn't Angel publish a correction to his previous article?
Why is it that most of Angel's 1945 article's citations come after 1985 and indeed after 2005? (>20 citations since 2005, of 27 total on CrossRef.)
Ultimately, what you're saying doesn't make much sense. It's either bad science and bad publishing practices, or you are mistaken. (I'd argue that Kron is basically unethical, in any case. There's absolutely no reason not to mention the popular and much-cited 1945 work, even if only to highlight its errors and note that it has been superseded. He covered it up and is guilty of worse cherry-picking than you accused the book authors of.)
Also, that exhaustive 2023 review finds results which are much closer to Angel's 1945 paper -- and indeed cites that paper -- rather than to whatever you're claiming happened in 1985. So by your own argument Angel's 1985 study is now irrelevant and no longer matters.
It is possible that some person might have scanned the 1985 book and posted an unofficial copy but tracking things like that down is your job.
> It is possible that some person might have scanned the 1985 book and posted an unofficial copy but tracking things like that down is your job.
"Usually"? This is pure conjecture. I don't suppose you've even read the 1985 paper?
It could be different samples, from different locations, which date to different eras. I believe there's a Mycenean tomb with a few skeletons at an average of 170cm, though the sample size was very small. This sort of thing is much more likely than "oops, we made a measuring error and were off by almost 10cm!!" (Were this the case, Angel would have published a correction.)
There are lots of different possibilities. It could certainly be the case that the 1985 paper is being misquoted or misused. That Kron didn't even mention the 1945 paper, when building an argument that sought to contradict its findings, speaks volumes of his so-called ethics and must lead an unbiased observer to believe that something is amiss. That is, at the very least, a clear case of cherry-picking in the academic literature.
> Archaeology continued after 1945 and electronic computers became a thing!
Indeed, yet, as I've said, a very detailed 2023 review found results far closer to Angel's 1945 results. What are your thoughts on this?
Note 25 of the 1945 article says that its stature estimates are based on a total of 63 males from all periods, but when Angel returned to the problem in 1985 he cited 52 males from the classical period alone, so clearly he had acquired more data. There are many different ways of estimating stature by measuring bones and best practices may have changed from 1945 to 1985. Here is the table 4 from his 1985 article. https://www.bookandsword.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Scre...
Let's say we have 95% confidence for a range between 162-170cm through the entire Iron Age, continuing through the Classical period. I believe that could still plausibly make for a substantial enough difference in hand breadth -- plausibly >1cm -- such that grips that seem unusually small today would have seemed merely snug back then. It's also possible that certain relic swords were designed to fit users who were under the mean height of their era. (Even, in some cases where grips were smaller than 7cm in length, adolescents.)
So say a sword was made for a more or less average Greek, at 165cm, placing him in the modern Army's 5th percentile. His hand is 8.1cm wide, diagonally, at the knuckle. A 180cm man is in the modern 75th percentile, and his hand is 9.1cm wide. There's a 1cm or nearly 1/2" difference. My own hand is ~9.8cm wide at the knuckle (which means that shopping for gloves is a real pain,) and would be nearly 2cm wider than that average Greek's. A short Greek, say at around 160cm, might be under 7.7cm in hand breadth; there'd be more than 2cm between us.
So there can be quite a lot of variance. It doesn't appear to scale with height in a totally linear way.
In the context of sword grips, 1cm is a lot and 2cm is huge. Ian Peirce's book "Swords of the Viking Age" gives grip length data on a few dozen 8th-11th century swords, and the average is just 8.58cm. (With a couple as high as 11cm and one as low as 6.8cm, but almost all examples in a narrow range between 8 and 9.5cm.)
Swords of the Naue II type, made for men somewhat shorter than 10th century Norsemen, seem to cluster around 7-8cm of usable grip length. Perhaps this is just what we'd expect to see, if we operate under the assumption that, like those Norsemen, they liked their grips very snug and weren't in the habit of wearing gauntlets.
Anyway, this thread is buried and it's getting hard to keep up with. I'd be happy to discuss further via email. Mine is on my user id page. Maybe, between the two of us, we can solve this mystery.
Classics is not a rich field like physics or economics, so many older publications have not yet been digitized and released. Learning to obtain them is just part of the job.
Our Ancient Greek would be in the second percentile. This has serious implications for hand breadth and how they might use a sword with a grip not far from 3" long.
(From "2012 Anthropometric Survey of US Army Personnel")
Where is your research published I'm curious about this approach.
> https://2024.hci.international/dhm
There's a pretty good summary of the current state of the art here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978111963611...
This sort of modeling has become practically customary in many forms of product design.
See also, Timeline of Museum-related Digital Human Activity, from the Virtual Beings Group Archives.
“Oh no, they could never have held them like that, because [jargon]. See? [demonstrate]”
Modeling can be informed by real-world use, though, certainly.
People who didn't fight for a living (and even many that did) would use much less expensive and skill intensive weapons.
Bronze Age Battle Razors is a complicated explanation for such unwieldy items. The sharper blade of Occam indicates this narrative to be dull.
Very glad to have this mystery solved at last!