no evidence other than some questions raised by the “Anitta text,” which dates
from ca. 1740 BC.
The beginning of swordsmanship
Apparently it was in the highlands south of the Caucasus that the true history of
the sword began, a continuum that stretched from ca. 2000 BCthrough the
European Renaissance. In central and eastern Anatolia swords had from time to
time been made already in the early third millennium BCif not the late fourth.^174
These were entirely display-pieces for kings and were not meant for battle. Nor
are they known to have launched a continuous tradition.^175 That distinction seems
to belong to rapiers that appeared south of the Caucasus at the end of the third
and beginning of the second millennium BC. These south Caucasian thrusting
swords were of dubious utility, and probably served mostly to advertise the status
of the wearer. They were, however, the first generation in a series of swords that
in Greece and in temperate Europe (but not in southern Caucasia) became
progressively more effective and reliable weapons, and that by the middle of the
second millennium BCwere in use as far away from their place of origin as
Scandinavia and northern Italy. The south Caucasian swords are Type A rapiers,
closely akin to those found on Crete and Aigina. Because they were given only
passing mention by Sandars, and were not included by Branigan, Kilian-Dirlmeier
and Molloy in their discussions of the origins of the Type A, the story of these
south Caucasian rapiers will here be given in some detail.
In the 1890s Henri and Jacques de Morgan, exploring along the southwestern
shore of the Caspian, found at least four rapiers under tumuli near Lankaran, in
the Talysh of Azerbaijan. The de Morgans “excavated” many kurgans there in a
very short time, and took much of what they found to the Musée des Antiquités
Nationales at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The de Morgans and Joseph Déchelette, an
eminent prehistorian, noticed how similar were the Lankaran rapiers to the Type
A rapiers that Schliemann had found in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, and they
concluded that Mycenaean influence had once extended to the shores of the
Caspian.^176 In 1948 Claude Schaeffer—who served 15 years as curator of the Saint-
Germain-en-Laye museum—included the Talysh rapiers in his Stratigraphie
comparée et chronologie de l’Asie occidentaleand likewise saw them as evidence
of Aegean influence in the Talysh.^177 In her fundamental study of early Aegean
swords Nancy Sandars noted the similarities of the Talysh rapiers to the rapiers
from the Aegean but commented,
The Talish dates still lack a solid foundation, and it is possible that links may
appear; but both may be independent developments of the type I dagger, an
early example of which was found in the “house-grave” at Tsarskaia, in the
Kuban region.^178Jan Bouzek also discussed the south Caucasian swords and observed their
similarities to the Type A Mycenaean and Romanian rapiers. So far as their date
92 Warfare in Western Eurasia