11.1.3 The Luristan Iron Sword

The Enigma of the Luristan Iron Swords

Meet King Luri. Here is another one

Here are more Luristan swords

This is king Luri. He has been dead 3000 year or so but nevertheless challenges you to solve his riddle: (How was I made?). Luri is made from iron just as the rest of the very old Luristan iron mask sword he is part of. Nobody, as far as I can tell, knows for sure how he was made.

Yes, indeed: The beginning of the iron sword starts with a veritable puzzle, actually several puzlles in one: The mystery of the "Luristan iron sword". But before I go into this we must pay attention to our little game:



Who made the first iron swords,

when and where?





The first bronze swords (more like daggers, actually) were from around 3000 BC. Small iron objects (including King Tut's iron and gold dagger) were often, if not always, made from meteoritic iron and appeared well before the "official" beginning of the iron age in 1200 BC. But when did complex objects like swords that were made from bloomery iron make their debut?

You know the standard answer by now: Who knows? I have devoted a special module to that question and the tentative answer seems to be:



Complex iron objects like the Luristan

swords appeared around 800 BC





Luristan is definitely a major contender for first iron swords but early celtic swords also fit into that scenario. Not only are the well-known Luristan iron "mask" swords (or type 1 swords) from around 800 BC, there is also another (and possibly somewhat earlier) line of Luristan iron swords as shown below . I call these swords Luristan iron swords type 2 just for ease of writing.



Luristan iron sword of type 2

More pictures here, here, or here. Source: This sword has a trick history but is now kept in the Royal art and historx museum in Brussels, Belgium

What we need to know now is that the Luristan iron technology evolved from an older tradition of very skilled bronze work. Luristan is also not so far from the places where iron smelting was invented or at least practiced very early on.

Now I need to know that question you got desperate to ask: What the hell is Luristan?

Chances ar that you have never heard of Luristan before so the first .thing to do is to show it on a map. Here is Luristan:

Luristan and potent neighbors around 1000 BC Source: Internet

Luristan occupies a remote corner up in the high mountains of the Zagros. It is still a remote corner in present day Iran and has never amounted to much as far as empires, large cities or other "high culture" stuff is concerned.

As far as I can make out, Luristan was also of no particular importance 3000 years ago. Luristan had mighty neighbours, however, like the Elamites, Sumerian / Babylonians, Assyrian, Iranians and so on who controlled its mountainous region on and off.

Luristan is known now as the region from which enormous amounts of grave goods, mostly bronze objects made it into shady international markets around 1920. The Luristanis started to dig up the graves of their forebears and sold what they found via the basars in Teheran and elsewhere. Many thousands of high-qualtiy bronze objects were unearthed and are still biought and sold at antiquity auctions.

If the difgging was illegal is hard to tell. The Luristanis in 1920 were possibly not even aware of their menbershio in the state of Iran. That some unknown government should have more rights to the grave goods of their ancestors than the local people would probably have been an alien thought to them

However one looks at that issue, one fact remains: All these objects are without the scientific context that can only result from professional excavations. None of the objects can be dated, for example, because no organic residue amenable to a C14 analysis comes with them.

Lots of fakes and ancient objects from somewhere else but marked as "Luristan" also appeared and are still out there. Since nobody knows exactly where the "Luristan" objects came from and how they relate to other stuff from that time, their value for unraveling history is extremely limited.

However, some objects bear inscriptions of names that are known, some are similar to other stuff with know provenances, and some could be dated by modern methods. Moreover, real archaeologists have conducted excavations in the area and a lot was learned about the Luristan culture.

More to that in the "Luristan" (advanced) link Advanced Link



Luristan

Of interest to us here are the iron swords from Luristan since they seem to be among the "first" ones.. Once more, there are two kinds. The rather well konwn " mask swords " or type 1, the major topic here. About 100 mask swords are around, and all but one come from the illicit digging in the early 20th century. They are unlike any other sword ever fpound and have no obvious relation to older bronze swords (fo which there are thousands). The rather little known straight and long iron swords (type 2; see above)) with close similarities to bronze swords. Pictures of these swords ar shown here and here.

Here we only look at the type 1 Luristan iron mask swords since very little is known about type 2. There are about a hundred or so mask swords about, and they are remarkably similar. Swords of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could be recently dated to 1094 BC +/- 60 years by radiocarbon analysis. That result was a surprise to archaeologists and researchers, as the prevailing opinion until that point was that these daggers or swords came from ca. 800 BC  550 BC. One must bear in mind, however, that dating steel by dating the carbon contained in it is not easy, and results at present must be taken with a grain of salt.

I actually started a small project about dating and investigating Luristan mask swords and some of the results will be given in the "Luristan Special" link.

For now we just note: Advanced Link Hub



Luristan Special



C14 dating of Luristan swords is not reliable







As you know, Luristan iron swords have exercised me already quite a bit; in the links below you can find out why: The Luristan iron sword in the Metropolitan.

Muscarella's interpretation of the Luristan iron sword in the Metropolitan.

The following picture shows four of those swords, all of them owned by big respectable museums in the countries noted.

On a first glance these swords look rather like oversized daggers or dirks - and a bit weird. Certainly not awe-inspiring. So where is the enigma, the puzzles? Where they made from a high-quality steel, perhaps?

Certainly not. Let's get this out of the system right away: Around 1000 BC nobody knew about iron vs. steel. At best primitive bloomeries produced a mix of stuff ranging from wrought iron to hypereutectoid steel with plenty of slag and other dirt mixed in. As discussed at length before, we must expect the swords to consist of rather inhomogeneous iron - and that's exactly what has been found!

It's not the quality of the iron, it is the quality of the construction that produces the puzzles. Construction is the right word! While all these swords appear to have been made from one single piece of iron, they actually consist of about 10 or even more individual parts that were put together in such a way that even after 3000 years it is impossible to see the seams.

But the first and foremost question is: Illustration Link



More Luris

1.

How did the ancient smiths make the

figures on the pommel and at

the intersection hilt / blade?





I mean: look at the details - here or here or below. In the picture below you see one of the two lions a the intersection hilt / blade of the Metropolitan Museum, NYC Luristan sword; it's inlaid with carnelian stones. The head with the beard that is "hanging" down from the flat pommel mutates at its back to another lion as can be seen here. These ornaments look decidedly like casts - but that is impossible! Metallographic investigations1) - 4) of several swords proved beyond doubt that they do consist of iron or even steel, and nobody could cast that in 1000 BC. That is a generally accepted fact. Or is it? Lee Sauder has cast some doubt on this rather recently. He demonstrated the melting of iron in a contraption that people could have operated 3000 years ago. So, maybe, these thing were cast? I won't rule it out categorically but as far as our own investigation showed, nothing was cast. For the time being we stick to the old dogma: no casting of iron / steel before 1700 AD or so.

It they weren't cast, how were they made?

Top: Details of the Metropolitan Luri with carnelian ornaments

Bottom: The Ontario Museum Luri

Large pictures of different ones Source: Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum, NYC, 2011; Ontario Museum (with permission) .

One explanation offered is that they were manufactured by swaging or hammering heated metal into a mould. This is not very likely, however. First, I haven't read anything about the mould material. It needs to be pretty tough - like hardened steel - but that was not around in 1000 BC. Second, while these swords are quite similar, the ornaments are all slightly different. So no mass production with one or just a few moulds has taken place. Third, you simply cannot hammer a complex shape with concave areas like the head - lion piece into a mould and get it out again!

One remaining alternative is that some cunning smith sculpted all these things with a hammer and whatever other tools he had. I would tend to think that this is impossible. However, the ancient Luristanis could do quite tricky stuff with bronze.

Maybe the figures were "carved" like a sculpture? At least for the finer details this appears possible. It is certainyl easier to carve the iron directly then to carve a negative into a harder material as needed for swaging. Some other iron artifacts from Luristan tend to confirm this view..

Whichever way it was done, it took a lot of skill and probably also a lot of time. In other words: we are talking serious money here. Those swords must have been extremely precious.

Now the second puzzle:

2.

These swords were made from many

parts but assembled in a way

that it won't show

Why? And how?





I have provided a lot of sword pictures. Could you see that all these swords were made from many parts? Did you see any of the many seams where the parts were joined! Here is a picture that supposedly tells it all:

Luristan iron sword: X-ray image (right ) and cut (left)

Source Maxwell-Hyslop and Hodges

This looks rather complicated. Note that all these pieces are not "properly" hammer welded at high temperature but are held together by dowels, clamps and "crimping" (that's what holds the cap on your beer bottle). Those ancient sword makers were rather skilled, it seems.

Or were they? Swords clamped and crimped together will not hold up all that well in battle, one must assume. "To deal with the latter aspect first, we cannot agree with Joseph Ternbach when he says of the blacksmiths who produced this type of sword that 'highly developed skill and artistry had been achieved in working the metal.' The truth would seem to be quite otherwise. A competent blacksmith does not rely upon rivets and bands and burred edges to hold his work together; he uses, rather, a hammer weld carried out in the hot. To be blunt, seen in terms of black- smithing these swords are a mess, and any of them could have been better made by the barbarian smiths of central Europe, certainly by the eighth century BC" write Maxwell-Hyslop and Hodges in their review paper.

So why, oh why? Maybe they couldn't do better with the new material? Maybe, but making the ornaments in whatever way did need some skill. Maybe these swords were never intended as real weapons?

All and sundry assumed that all or most mask swords were builr like this. Surprise! They are not! The "many parts" scenario resulting from this early investigation is not the rule but the exception. Meanwhile a number of swords has been X-rayed or otherwiese investigated and they all were made in a much simpler (if still very skilled) way from less parts. More to that here, where you also will find details to the picture below:

Luristan iron mask sword cut in half and etched for structure revelation Source. Luristan project

You see a mask sword that was cut in half and then Nital etched. You see that the main body, including the complete blade, was forged from one piece of iron and that the "sculptures", the rings, and the top plate was crimped-on as described before. You also see a kind of stripy structure that is typical for "faggoting" (i.e. repeated folding and weldin) but that needs a more detailed discussion then I can give here. Use the link for detals.

The third puzzle is:

3.

Why Luristan? A rather remote corner

even then. Why switch to iron when

you were excellent at bronze?





Luristan is know because of its bronze artifacts. The iron swords cannot possibly be better than the bronze swords the Luris manufactured with great skill and in great numbers. One possible answer is that the "Luristan mask swords" are actually not from Luristan but from the large and mighty kingdoms around them that had mastered iron working very early: Elam, Babylonia or Assyria, for example.