was concerned, Bouzek commented that “Kuftin and some other Georgian and
Russian archaeologists date these swords to the 18th century B.C., but a date
corresponding to the Shaft Graves period (c. 1650–1500) now prevails in most
studies.”^179 Stefan Hiller also saw the similarities between the southern Caucasian
rapiers and those from the Shaft Graves, but opined that “since long swords are
exceptional in the Kaukasus region an ultimately Aegean ancestry is most
likely.”^180 As recently as 1997 Kushnareva supposed that, although the south
Caucasian rapiers must have been locally made, their strong resemblance to the
swords at Mycenae implies that the Type A rapier had originally been introduced
to the southern Caucasus from the Aegean.^181
It now appears, however, that either the swords or the influence must have gone
the other way. In the century following the de Morgans’ expedition seven more
Type A rapiers were found south of the Caucasus (the first of these was found in
1933), and they are more securely dated than the four discovered by the de Morgans.
The seven—four from eastern Georgia and three from Armenia, and all of tin
bronze—came from kurgans 300 miles to the northwest of Lankaran, and as close
to the Black Sea as to the Caspian. They have been studied and published by
Mikheil Abramishvili, curator of the Tbilisi Archaeological Museum.^182
All of the south Caucasian rapiers have a high midrib and are exceptionally
long, surely in the expectation that the longer the rapier the better a thrusting weapon
it would appear to be. The typical south Caucasian rapier measures 100 cm, and
the longest measures 115 cm. For so long a weapon, however, the hilting was
very inadequate. As in the four Talysh specimens, in the seven rapiers published
by Abramishvili a single rivet attached an organic hilt to a short tang projecting
from the blade. The shoulders of the blade on a south Caucasian rapier are
horizontal, while the blades of Aegean rapiers have rounded shoulders.
All of the Trialeti rapiers date early in the second millennium BCor late in the
third, three or four centuries earlier than the dates that Schaeffer proposed for
the similar specimens from the Talysh. Because the south Caucasian rapiers are
earlier than those from the Aegean and Byblos, the influence that Déchelette,
Schaeffer and others discussed must have gone from south of the Caucasus to the
Aegean, and not vice versa. Abramishvili has summarized the relative chronology:
The rapiers of South Caucasia come from the context of artifacts that belong
to the second phase of the Trialeti Middle Bronze Age Culture, thus predating
even the earliest (A-type) long swords that we know from the ruins of the
first palace of Mallia, thus ascribing them either to the end of Middle Minoan
II or to the beginning of Middle Minoan IIIb. Furthermore, South Caucasian
rapiers have their prototype in the first phase of the Trialeti Middle Bronze
Age Culture. The sword from Saduga Kurgan 2 in East Georgia has similar
morphological characteristics (except for its length) and is considered as a
prototype of South Caucasian rapiers.^183The “Saduga sword” to which Abramishvili refers is a stabbing weapon ca. 35
cm in length, and so is more a dirk than a sword. Its characteristics, however, are
94 Warfare in Western Eurasia